https://www.quora.com/What-did-M…

Nicholas:

I’ll reiterate what I said under your cited answer here. It’s a truism that all online communities run out of steam. Including this one. Despite how much the UX does or doesn’t innovate.

When the company goes to war with its users as often as Quora does, that might limit the community’s shelf life whatever twiddling to the UX they do. But you’re betting on more new writers coming in than old ones flaming out, and so far, it’s worked.

Your answer claimed that Quora will do better than Wikipedia, because Quora keeps innovating in its UX. (Some of us naysayers have more colourful ways of describing what Quora keeps doing to its UX.) Well, Wikipedia predates Quora by a decade. Let’s talk about Quora in a decade, Marc.

Bodnick:

Seems like there is a handsome opportunity to create value. Want to make a wager?

Nicholas:

You’re on. 100 USD, 2027–08–09, that Quora will have less Alexa share then than now.

I will likely not be on Quora by then, but I am betting that Google still will, so: opoudjis at Gmail

Bet’s off if Quora is acquired. I win if Quora no longer exists. And I’ll pay up if I’m wrong.

Bodnick:

I’m in.

Nicholas:

I’m forwarding this exchange to The Insurgency, because I want witnesses.

EDIT: Current Alexa ranking of Quora: #112.

From René Alix, comment on my repost of Bodnick predicting demise of Wikipedia. Several insights I think deserve wider readership.

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https://insurgency.quora.com/May…

A lot of smart people I know feel the way I do, but aren’t willing to say so publicly.

I see; “lurkers support him in email” <scoff>; smart ones too, not idiots like the rest of us. You’d think Wikipedia had imposed a totalitarian state upon us all and Bodnick was leading the underground intelligentsia.

Pretty ridiculous notions about people not daring to say anything bad about Wikipedia, when a simple search shows exactly the opposite. Sure, there are apologists who will defend anything; Quora has plenty of those itself. But AFAIK various Wikipedia critique has pretty much been constant and wide spread, for years — and nobody I know is afraid to say anything. I am certainly not. Heck, Wikipedia has comprehensive pages about it: Criticism of Wikipedia. People have written papers on it, done academic studies. After all, what can Wikipedia do stop us; they have zero power over us.

IMO Wikipedia is somewhat better now than it was 10 years ago. I don’t see the degradation. It also has scale, which means editors who burn out are replaced by new ones (though it could certainly do even better at retaining editors; the rules are byzantine). And no, I am not an apologist; I find Wikipedia extremely useful (much more useful than Quora, which is IMO never going to be a replacement), but I am not at all blind to its shortcomings.

Innovation is great; most of my life I’ve worked at the cutting edge of it, in the service of creating better software for users who are themselves at the cutting edge of entertainment (in film and games). But innovation just so you can brag about being innovative, innovation for innovation’s sake? Not so desirable. Serious users don’t like that sort of thing in their UX. They do in fact resist it; hard. And if you develop software people pay a lot of money for, you notice that real quick. Quora seems to do too much innovation for innovation’s sake (excepting the AI aspects). I don’t see them doing much for the experience of their actual users at all, rather I see them ignoring most of the common complaints in order to futz around with aspects that nobody I’ve ever seen has requested any change on. If they actually had to make money from selling their product to their users, they’d be singing a different tune. The lack of communication with users in itself is pretty disastrous when it comes to innovation that is supposed to help the user. Quora doesn’t even obey the most basic rules. Keeping people perpetually off balance is not innovative.

But we already know who the real customers are — not the users — so it all makes sense. Razzle dazzle buzzwords draw investors and advertisers.

In fact one of the most successful aspects of user experience in recent years has been gamification. But Quora has removed some of its own and hasn’t replaced it with anything fun — the credit system is gone, and the only things left are the Quill (out of reach for most of us, for which the rules are arbitrary; never a good thing), upvotes/downvotes on individual answers (about which we are not fully informed and which are impossible to keep track of), and followers (this is probably the most “true” metric, but I can’t say it does much for me (might need to unpack why not some time)). All of Quora’s assessment that goes into how high our answers float is completely hidden.

I was just reminded of how ridiculously motivating it can be to gather points and levels/badges (if I understand exactly how I’ve earned them) when I started answering questions on TheQuestion and Fluther, both of which have reputation scores. I know how silly that is, and still it motivates me. Fluther also has levelling of sorts. All very cute, probably too cute for the more academic of Quora’s users, certainly a bit twee for me, but it makes me feel oddly cared for, particularly in contrast with Quora’s complete disregard for me as a person.

Originally Answered:

Why is the word ‘cunt’ so offensive in America?

Because in America, as distinct from the Commonwealth, cunt is a reductive description of women, when used as an epithet. In the Commonwealth, the epithet mainly refers to men. It is certainly strong, but it can and is used jocularly, and even as a coarse affectionate term (if qualified with an adjective: e.g. clever cunt).

So in the Commonwealth, the word violates one taboo, and a minor one at that nowadays: sex. In the US, it also violates the much more salient contemporary taboo of misogyny.

There are consistently changes in functionality without warning on Quora; the roll out of new anonymity was the only exception recently. Of course, if you don’t know about the blog Quora Product Updates, that doesn’t make much difference.

(There was warning about this change from German and Italian Quora, which had no question details from the beginning, but few would have been aware of it.)

There is always much push back against sudden feature changes. But this time was quite unusual, even before Bad Hombre Bot (as Viola Yee called it), the spurious attribution of question details to whoever last edited them. The pushback included a lot of high ranking users, including users that normally defend Quora. The Top Writer Facebook lounge was baying for blood, reportedly.

The severity of this time is less to do with the suddenness of the change, I believe, and more with how it impacts users’ aims for using the site. This was not just a UX tweak: this went to the core of what Quora is used for.

And remember: users use any website for their own purposes, not for D’Angelo’s. Hence me alluding in comments elsewhere to Die Lösung.

A lot of question askers needed details to make the answer useful to them, whether because of personal particulars, or because of of the specificity of the question.

Question details are not necessarily as salient to those writing an answer, particularly as many of us use questions as prompts for writing rather than as pleas for assistance. But clearly, a lot of users really do treat questions as the latter. So the change got in the way of them feeling they were able to be helpful.

Even those that weren’t as invested in those two aims were surprised at such a disruptive change. The Mantra of Reusable Questions was known, but many questions ignored it in practice, and most users didn’t mind it being ignored, given the two benefits I’ve mentioned. This change was not just an annoyance: it was a reduction in users’ freedom of action. Even if they weren’t going to make use of it, users aren’t going to like that.

The changeover was handled abysmally, and should be a classroom example about how not to do things. (Much of how Quora does UX is, as Leonid S. Knyshov once mused.) But it’s the nature of the change, not its implementation, that made the uproar truly generalised this time.

Dimitris Sotiropoulos reports in his answer that in some areas of Central Greece, this means “I will go to bed”. The normal meaning of the verb in modern Greek is “to look”, but the current accepted etymology of the verb is indeed from an ancient Greek verb for “to lie down”. This was not always the accepted etymology (it’s not terribly obvious, after all), which is why the verb used to be spelt as κυττάζω rather than κοιτάζω.

Dialects are often repositories of archaism, of course. In Cretan, “to lie down” is θέτω, a remodelling of ancient τίθημι “to set” — the meaning the verb was revived with in standard Greek.

OP’s expression will remind most Standard Greek speakers instead of the idiom να παίζει να κοιταχτείς, “you should go and get looked at”. Meaning “you’re crazy”. (The person who implicitly will do the looking at you is a psychiatrist.)

My answer to this is a historical anecdote, but the quite informative answers here do talk about what happened in the 1990s, as well as what’s happening now.

The reports now are that Albanians are on the top of the totem pole of immigrant privilege. They are of course still below Western Europeans, who are treated as a separate category entirely—though I’m not sure if Greek goes as far as English, to have a separate word like ‘expat’ for them. Albanians now are well-regarded, as householders (νοικοκύρηδες) and small-businesspeople, even if they are still often regarded as the hired help rather than equal members of society.

I’ll add an anecdote from 1995 that left me puzzled.

I was in Greece for six months, doing archival research for my PhD, and staying with relatives. At the end of the first three months, I had to go to the local immigrant processing centre, to renew my visa. (I am an Australian citizen.)

The courtyard of the centre was chock-a-block full of Albanians, waiting to be processed for the holidays. None of them was being processed, and noone was going inside. I am Australian, so I believe in queues; so I hung about for maybe an hour, trying to listen in on the Albanian all around me. (From linguistic research, I knew a bit, though certainly not enough for listening in to work.)

After a while, one of the Albanians turned to me and said (in flawless Greek):

—You’re not Albanian, are you.

—… No, actually, I’m not.

—Well what are you waiting with us for? Go to the front.

… I guiltily skulked to the front. The doorman said:

—You’re not Albanian, are you.

—… No, actually, I’m not.

—Well what are you waiting with them for? Go inside.

Thinking back, it may well have been that there was no queue, and there was a designated Albanian processing time. Still, the fact that Albanians themselves pushed me to the front of the queue was something I found chilling.

As Konstantinos Konstantinides says, no, both come, likely independently, from words for Portugal:

Orange (fruit) – Wikipedia

As Portuguese merchants were presumably the first to introduce the sweet orange to some regions of Europe, in several modern Indo-European languages the fruit has been named after them. Some examples are Albanian portokall, Bulgarian портокал (portokal), Greek πορτοκάλι (portokali), Macedonian portokal, Persian پرتقال (porteghal), Turkish portakal and Romanian portocală. Related names can be found in other languages, such as Arabic البرتقال (bourtouqal), Georgian ფორთოხალი (p’ort’oxali), Turkish portakal and Amharic birtukan. Also, in some of the Italian regional languages (e.g. Neapolitan), an orange is portogallo or purtuallo, literally “(the) Portuguese (one)”, in contrast to the Italian arancia.

This is *somewhat* dangerous, what I’m about to do, but it does strike me as interesting.

I just posted Bodnick’s predictable answer to whether Quora Without Details was a good thing.

Few users like it, and even users I’ve personally blocked as being unreflexive Quora boosters have expressed dismay.

I’m interested in the profile of the people who answered the question saying they think it’s (at least on balance) a good idea. Not to say they are unreflexive Quora boosters; in fact, one of them, Konstantinos Konstantinides, wrote here on how badly it was implemented. But I think the profile tells us something.

Eliminating question details aligns Quora more closely with Quora’s vision of more generic, googleable questions, helping more people (on Google), and away from visibly many users’ vision of helping specific people (on Quora) with their individual questions.

This is not a new divergence; Yishan Wong’s answer to Why are my questions not answered on Quora? pinpointed it back in 2013.

What’s interesting to me is who is aligned with Quora’s vision of what Quora is for.

72 answers at this time; I count 8 pro the change.

6 of them Top Writers. (That’s not a sufficient condition; a lot more answerers are Top Writers contra.) 5 of them 3+ times Top Writers.

Two of them were community admins back in 2012. One of them a former employee.

I think people who have been on Quora since very early on, and who are on good personal terms with Quora staff (so they have been able to discuss Quora’s goals with them, especially face-to-face) are likelier to buy into and invest in Quora’s own mission, than others have been. Even then, it’s not a predictor: I’ve been surprised at the vehemence of pushback by users belonging those classes too (and that’s not counting Bad Hombre Bot).

But I do think buy-in to Quora’s Vision is less likely for more recent arrivals, those that came in not to help build a site with The Best Answer To Canonical Questions, but who liked helping individual people with their questions, or who just liked the forum as a place to write, or the caliber of writing by others.

Just an observation; like I say, the calibration is not terribly strong even among the class of user I’ve occasionally referred to as Old Planters. Discuss.

Konstantinos has suggested the following in regard to the previous post:

You should look at the the number of Edits in the users’ profiles and the ratio of “Answers vs Questions.” I bet you that people who don’t tend to post questions and may also have lots of edits love the simplified Questions. It may also be related to what Topics each user follows.

I’m comparing the 8 pro writers with the top 9 writers currently (minus the 8th writer who is pro).

I have already speculated that tech vs humanities is a reason why Tikhon Jelvis thinks this change makes Quora become more like Medium, and I think it becomes more like Stack Exchange. FWIW, of the 8 pro writers, 4 write on tech topics, but 6 have tech day jobs.

(I’ll list them, notwithstanding the fear of BNBR, because I am not saying any of this to insult them: Michael Vogel, Katherine Rossiter, Marc Bodnick, Konstantinos Konstantinides, Travis Addair, Tikhon Jelvis, Marcus Geduld, Stefan Heaton.)

For the top contra writers (Robert Walker, Scott Danzig, Todd Allen, Kim Aaron, Mike Prinke, Garry Taylor, Rob Fletcher, Joseph Haynes Kyle): 5 write on tech topics, 7 have tech day jobs.

I think that’s a wash.

As to stats:

Of the pro writers, Bodnick and you, Kosta, have an overwhelming number of edits: 287k and 124k. The most prolific of the top 8 contra is Scott Danzig at 26k; and Vogel and Geduld among the pro writers exceed him. Of course there are prolific contra writers down the list (Peter Flom at 44k, for example); but you may be onto something there.

Few writers post questions, proportionately. The only writer who wrote more questions than answers is Bodnick. You may well be onto something there too: Pro writers, Answer:Question ratio: 3. Contra writers: 23. Then again, maybe not: removing Bodnick (who may well have regarded seeding questions of the type Quora wanted as part of his day job), Pro writers Answer:Question ratio becomes 68.

The average Answer:Question ratio for pro writers is 183, and for contra writers is 372. Discounting Bodnick, the average is 209.

This is not good stats. But… maybe.

Mohammed Hakim, who A2A’d me this, has just been banned. The last straw seems to have been him creating a retaliatory question against someone who wrote a question badmouthing another teen.

Ah well. He was nuts, he was amusing, and he was not for this site. RIP.

I spent maybe four days posting comments on the announcement, writing posts about it at The Insurgency, writing posts and forwarding answers about the broader implications for the community, the proper nature of dissent, the limits and aims of dissent, and the past parallels of it.

Halfway through, I decided “fuck this”, and spent a day writing a translation of a Greek scatological parody of the Mass. That’s the kind of thing I actually joined Quora to do.

What do I think, now that the dust has settled?

• It makes life quite painful for question askers.
• I’m extremely disinclined to ask questions, but I think I’ll get over that: I’m just going to use comments on questions, while they still exist, and resort to other subterfuges such as writing my own answer more often, in order to give others a first look at what kind of answer I’m seeking. It will still be at times demotivating.
• But, just as with credentials, it doesn’t matter if you write fewer questions to meet your needs, as long as the questions remaining meet Quora’s needs. Cf Designing Your Own Metrics by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Design, on how successful Quora believe their credentials roll-out was.
• It doesn’t have as severe an impact on question answerers, who always felt licensed to ignore details (when the UX even showed them to them). But it does sever any notion that you’re addressing a specific querent when you answer a question. By design, of course.
• I’m somewhat disinclined to write. Not very, but somewhat. Quora is getting less enjoyable by steps for me; the grass keeps looking greener elsewhere. (What are some Quora alternatives?)
• It helped me crystallise a notion: that Quora often gets in the way of me doing what I want to do here, pushing me to do what Quora wants me to do instead, in a totality of ways that I really don’t think you see elsewhere (Quora Obtrudes by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency).
• I don’t care about canonical questions, except inasmuch as clearly redundant questions pollute the search space. I never held that much ire about the “snowflake” question. And even if details were often dumb, they were just as often helpful. Quora hates them; that’s Quora’s problem, which Quora has now seen fit to make my problem.
• One of the many witticisms accompanying the announcement: https://productupdates.quora.com… “I’m starting to believe that Quora’s core values include “don’t worry about the baby, getting rid of the bathwater is the important bit”.”
• I’m not angry. I could see it coming from the German Quora. Mostly, I’m pretty numb to the bans and UX merry-go-rounds and refreshes and all the rich tapestry that is Life On Quora.
• Things on Quora still get me angry, I’m bemused to note. For example, the deletion of the question Can you write a limerick about a Quoran?, not least because my answer to it was likely one of the saddest, bleakest limericks ever penned. (You can click that link: I’ve forwarded it to my blog.) I swore a fair bit when I was alerted of that. Alas, BNBR forbids me saying how angry I am.
• I have a lot of Schadenfreude at the Upper Middle Class of Quora Writers, who appear from their reactions to have suddenly discovered that Quora Obtrudes. The pitchforks being wielded at the Quora Facebook Lounges have a certain… appeal.
• It’s a malign appeal, it’s a nihilist appeal. It’s the “let it burn” I occasionally feel here, the Tear it down, Elias!. The “pass the popcorn.” The Portuguese expression I’m grateful to Alfredo Perozo for introducing me to (https://insurgency.quora.com/The…): watching the circus catch fire.
• Goes well with popcorn, I gather. To the sound of bouzouki singers, and bulldozers demolishing nightclubs.
• But not a reaction that can be sustained. As Alfredo agreed, mentioning his bout of it with Brazilian politics.

I’m still here. I owe Kat a positive post, on what good there is that keeps me here. I didn’t sign up to join this site, just so I can protest every bumble of its staff.

But I keep saying it, and it keeps being true:

Θέλω ν’ αγιάσω μα δεν μ’ αφήνουν. I’m trying to be a saint; but they won’t let me.