I received this a week ago from Sophie Dockx, and am passing it on. The bug report Sophie mentions is a security hole I am electing not to publicise; Quora has been notified of it.
I saw your graphs on the necro. Such over 45° upward slopes are indicative of a lot more than management or policy changes within Quora. This is the signature of a management being flooded with complaints until past saturation point, and that is now collapsing under the work pressure.
Q-mod and Q-admin are not responsible for the bans. They have been flooded and overworked. That is why they don’t check each report properly anymore, because they can’t. They have (almost literally) opened the emergency pressure valve in the hope the report bombings stop. They have banned the targets, not the targeters. They don’t realise that this only makes it worse for them. Incomprehensible bans lead to voluntary quits, as by my friend Prof. Walter Lewin. That is why the Quora community needs to know.
People are leaving Quora for the wrong reasons. They are not a bunch of incompetents or of totalitarians. They have been under attack from an organised mob, but don’t seem to realise that they have. Discuss this with your friends, please, Nick. Don’t take my word for it. Quora has been criticised wrongly by most of its critics. It is not Quora, it is a group of users doing this.
Send my bug report to your friends. Call me conspiracy nutter if you have to. Mock me, have a laugh on my expense I don’t care. What is happening to Quora at the moment is the work of conspiracy nutters. They can’t make such shit work in the real world, but they can on the web.
Sites have been switching to Real Name policy without taking into account why it had been abandoned in the nineties. Real names add credibility to the content, but at the same time warrant a much tighter vetting and background checking procedure. Like the one applied by LinkedIn. Quora has been overambitious. They are slow at detecting fake names, because they rely on reporting by the community for that. That explains also why many people have been banned for using their real names that have been flagged by numerous users as fake names. It happened to me in October.