Day: April 24, 2017

There is widespread confusion on this one.

There are three iterations of the comment feature:

• Original
• Featured/Other: Featured Comments by Kelvin Ho on Quora Product Updates
• Recommended/All: More Visibility for High-Quality Comments by Diana Gerr on Quora Product Updates

Different people have had different versions of the feature rolled out at different times. Right now (weekend of 22 April 2017), some people are being moved from Featured to Recommended, and some other people (including me) are being moved from Recommended back to Original.

Which makes me conclude that Featured comments are being removed, but that Recommended comments aren’t: the move back to Original is a temporary glitch (though one I am ecstatic about).

How do I feel?

• Featured and Recommended were overengineering the problem of how to manage adverse comments, and the extra click is moderately annoying.
• I don’t have a whole lot of adverse comments to scroll through. But I don’t trust Quora to identify and sequester adverse comments; there have been a lot of innocuous and positive comments sequestered.
• In response to users complaining that Featured was promoting anything they’d upvote, Quora decided to recommend comments ignoring what the user upvoted. (The criterion appears to be somehow tied up with Top Writer status or being followed by the user.)
• So users asking for more control over what gets promoted ended up with less.
• The lesson being: do not give Quora feedback.
• Clearly opinion is split on whether three-tier comments (promoted, not-promoted, collapsed) was a good thing. I think it was not a good thing: I much prefer eyeballing through a single list of comments.

As a complement to Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer and Niko Vasileas’ answer:

There was an undercurrent of resentment of the ancients and their pagan wisdom, but it remained an undercurrent.

There’s the renowned hymn on the Pentecost by Romanos the Melodist, dismissing ancient learning with puns on the pagan scholars—and alas, a favourite of the Greek nationalist blogosphere:

Οὐκοῦν εδόθη αὐτοῖς πάντων περιγενέσθαι
δι’ ὧν λαλοῦσι γλωσσῶν;
καὶ τί φιλονεικοῦσιν οἱ ἔξω ληροῦντες;
τί φυσῶσι καὶ βαμβεύουσιν οἱ Ἕλληνες;
Τί φαντάζονται πρὸς Ἄρατον τὸν τρισκατάρατον;
Τί πλανῶνται πρὸς Πλάτωνα;
Τί Δημοσθένην στέργουσι τὸν ἀσθενῆ;
Τί μὴ ὁρῶσιν Ὅμηρον ὄνειρον ἀργόν;
Τί Πυθαγόραν θρυλλοῦσι τὸν δικαίως φιμωθέντα;
Τί δὲ καὶ μὴ τρέχουσι και σέβουσιν οἷς ἐνεφανίσθη
τὸ Πανάγιον Πνεῦμα; (On the Pentecost XVII)

Was it not granted to them [the apostles] to be superior, through the languages they spoke in? And what are the fools outside arguing about? What are the Hellenes [Pagans] bloviating and blabbing about? Why does their fancy go to Aratus the accursed [triskataraton]? Why are they deceived [planōntai] to follow Plato? Why do they care about Demosthenes the weakling [asthenē]? Why don’t they see that Homer is an idle dream [oneiron]? Why do they keep going on about Pythagoras, who was justly muzzled? Why won’t they run and pay respect to those to whom the Most Holy Spirit appeared?”

The fact that Romanos was Syrian is not relevant; so was Lucian. The fact that Romanos was writing in the 7th century is relevant: there were still pagans in the Empire, and Christianity was still trying to assert itself.

This was not the elite response to antiquity: the elite response, as Dimitra said, was to embrace antiquity, and the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus, pioneered the reconciliation of Christian and Pagan learning in the 4th century. But Romanos was not part of the elite.

I’ve elsewhere spoken of how Modern Greek peasants were in distant if suspicious awe of the ruins around them: Nick Nicholas’ answer to How do Greeks feel about references to Ancient Greece?

The unlettered peasants 300 years ago had a much more straightforward relationship with the Hellenes: they were this race of pagan giants, the folk who built all them ruins; and they died out because they fell over, and couldn’t get back up…

The Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai, a 9th century description of the sights of Constantinople, shows a similar confused apprehension of the highlights of the Ancient World that Constantinople was strewn with: little-understood receptacles of magic and fear. Like Romans, the commoners of Constantinople were ambivalent about their past.

And of course, there was the ongoing feeling of inferiority towards the ancients, memorably expressed by Theodore Metochites: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do many modern Greeks feel a sense of failure or perhaps inferiority when compared with their ancient Greek ancestors? The ancients have not left us anything to say, he laments—in the introduction to an 800-page collection of essays.

To add to Scott Welch’s answer and Loretta B DeLoggio’s answer.

Not only do new Quorans not find out about Quora policies when they join; old Quorans don’t find out about Quora policy changes. Several Quora users a couple of months ago complained about a Quora insider (Bodnick I think) using an infographic in an answer. Quora policy used to be that you could not use a third party infographic, and insistence on doing so got Xu Beixi a six month edit block.

Quora’s answer to What is Quora’s policy on adding images and videos to answers?

Why no, infographics are not mentioned in the current policy. That aspect of the policy got quietly rescinded a few months ago, in time for Bodnick not to be in violation.

Quora using the question and answer format to publish its own policies was criticised at the start of Quora, and the criticism is right. With no use of blogs or even answer wikis to publish policy, users have no easy way to stay up to date.