Month: August 2017

Well have both Yiannis Papadopoulos’ answer and Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer put it. Upvote them.

Some further supplemental detail, expressed linguisticiously:

Salonica Standard Greek is pretty much Athens Standard Greek with a few shibboleths; it’s a situation comparable to Scottish Standard English (such as you’ll hear in Edinburgh)—you’ll hear wee a lot more, and you’ll hear construction like I’ve not seen it, but it is not really Scots.

Here’s a map of key isoglosses of Greek ca. 1900, from Wikipedia:

Salonica is in the purple zone, which means it is meant to drop all its unstressed /i, u/ and raise its unstressed /e, o/ to /i, u/: /skiˈli/ is meant to be pronounced [scʎi]. But it’s a northern version of Standard Greek, so it doesn’t.

The velar /l/ of Salonica is the main phonetic shibboleth, as Yannis pointed out.

Thessaloniki: The only city in the world that is spelled with two ‘s’ and pronounced with two ‘l’

• Standard Greek: θesaloˈnici
• Salonica Greek: θesaɫoˈnici
• Macedonian Greek: θisaɫuˈnic

The main grammatical shibboleth, which Kostas points out, is that indirect objects for pronouns (and nouns more rarely) are in the accusative in the north, and in the genitive in the south, because Greek doesn’t have a dative any more. The isogloss for that takes in Thessaly and Macedonia. (It also includes the Greek of Istanbul.)

The accusative is of course ambiguous between direct and indirect object; hence,

Mom, are you going to make me into meatballs today

Kostas has gone into some of the lexical peculiarities of Salonica. One further peculiarity is that Athens Standard Greek differentiates kato ‘down’ from xamo ~ xamu ‘on the ground’; Salonica refers to both as kato. As a result, Salonicans refer to Athenians (and Southerners in general) as xamudziðes, xamo-guys. They may actually thing they’re saying ‘Down [South] guys’. They would be wrong, because they can’t tell the difference between xamo and kato: they’re actually calling Athenians ‘crawling on the ground guys’.

On second thought, maybe they know exactly what they’re doing.

One of the denizens of SLANG.gr has just published a book of lexical differences between the two, Μπαγιάτηδες και χαμουτζήδες, ‘The mouldy [nickname for old Thessalonians] and the xamo-guys’: Μπαγιάτηδες και χαμουτζήδες. And the fact that SLANG.gr can produce something like this, and its English counterpart is… Urban Dictionary, tells you all you need to know about why the Greeks are a Great People.

Oh I mentioned Slang.gr. Contractual obligation: Hi Melinda! 🙂

Feature Releases by Rob Lion was about the silent release of the Ask Followup feature.

Quora as Eternal Recurrence: The history of the first iteration of Follow-Up Questions by Nick Nicholas was about how bizarre it was that a feature abandoned in 2010 was revived; there was a jest about how it was like a recently thawed mammoth.

I thank Dot McHale for joining the dots in https://bugorfeature.quora.com/B…

By removing details, and forcing us to ask only “canonical” questions, Quora is making it harder for querents to get questions that actually help them.

By enabling follow ups, I guess, Quora is trying to make it easier for those querents to refine the question first asked, so that they can get the information they want.

I don’t think for a second that’s actually going to work out, but it does make sense. And if that wasn’t what was going on in their heads, well, Quora UX does encourage a fair amount of paranoia…

There has been an unusually high amount of push back for the rollout of removing question details, even by Quora standards. The discussion about what has been going on has been wide-ranging, and it has crystallized something for me.

I have been frequently repeating a comment I made a few days ago:

We obviously aren’t going to convert Quora to our mindset. All we can do is use Quora for our own ends; we ignore Quora’s ends where they diverge from ours, and we resist, as much as we can, Quora getting in the way of our ends.

What is clear is that Quora is getting in the way of many of us meeting our ends. Deliberately. And this makes the experience of Quora quite atypical for online fora. Time and again, in aspect after aspect, Quora the company obtrudes into the user’s experience of Quora the forum. Time and again, it gets in the way. Time and again, Quora the company is in conflict with its users.

Hanlon’s Razor dictates that this is likely not out of any malice, but rather mere neglect. The company just doesn’t care about its users, as they are product and not customers. And I’m not saying this as a protest any more; it’s merely an observation. In comparison with its peers, Quora is a presence obtruding over all components of our experience here.

Quora obtrudes in its Design. Its navigation is chronically counter-intuitive. It changes core functionality with startling rapidity, and with little explanation. This site is deluged with questions about how to use the site itself. Bug? or Feature? is not just a joke on this site: users are genuinely confused as to whether new functionality is intentional or not, and become paranoid about how to interpret it. Inasmuch as there is a discernible trend to the changes, it is to force the users to do what the company wants, rather than what the users prefer to do.

Quora obtrudes in its Engineering. Uses perpetually have to deal with refresh timeouts, perpetual scrolling, lost drafts, frequent downtime, and poor search. The gears and cranks are far more noticeable on this site than on its peers in recent memory: what other sites do you know of nowadays, that force you to do three refreshes a minute to get anything done?

Quora obtrudes in its Moderation. The policing of moderation is heavy handed, by common internet norms, and selective. The rules are vague and under-documented. Because of the studious lack of onboarding, users are always surprised on their first encounter with moderation, and they are almost always left at guessing as to what the nature of their infraction was. As a result, users are paranoid that they will be the next to be randomly picked out for sanction.

Quora obtrudes in its Incentivisation. The Top Writer program set up an arbitrary division between haves and have-nots, with no clarity about what it takes to move across. Many Top Writers perpetuate the notion that only they as a group are worth reading. (Two instances that I found particularily offensive occurred in comments to the details removal announcement.) Quora outreach, limited as it is, is restricted to Top Writers. Far from acting as an incentive, the Quill has been a source of resentment, and there are now a non-negligible number of users who have indicated they have no interest in pursuing it. (See responses to What do very popular non-Top Writers think they’d need to change in order to become Top Writers? I am far from the only one.)

Quora obtrudes in its Mission. Quora’s mission, it now seems, is to get clickbait answers to canonical questions. Its users’ sundry missions are to help querents, to share knowledge, and to form communities. Quora doesn’t tolerate this as an outgrowth of its mission; it actively hammers the UX to bring users back into line. And with its opaqueness and reluctance to communicate, Quora does little to encourage writers to buy in to its mission. (Short of the early adopters, I guess.)

The retort whenever anyone complains about Quora is, it’s a private company. Of course it is. No one put a gun to my head, to make me contribute my content, to the greater profit of Quora’s eventual shareholders. If I don’t like it, I can leave.

And eventually, I surmise, I will. I definitely will, if comments or blogs are taken away. And I’ll be taking my content with me: if I decide I can’t stay, I don’t see why my content should continue enriching Quora’s eventual shareholders. Mercifully, the Python Downloader more or less works still, nothwithstanding the constant tweaks in Quora HTML that frustrate it.

In the meanwhile, I seek to be aware of what’s happening, and to help others be aware. Not particularly to protest it, certainly not to change it, but because awareness is always a good thing. It’s why this blog exists, after all.

I have a question incidentally, which I would pose on the site, but the removal of Question Details has made me reluctant to. Are there other comparable sites, where the vision of the owners obtrudes as consistently on the user’s experience, as it does here?

Changes to further emphasize canonical questions by Sumi Kim on Quora Product Updates

We do want to preserve one aspect of question details that we believe offers critical context for the question: the ability to include a link. With this change, we are introducing question sources, which makes it easy to attach a link to a question:

https://insurgency.quora.com/Wha…

Ryan Q.Y. See: and, ironically, apparently linking that answer (the Mills Baker one: Mills Baker’s answer to Why should designers work at Quora?) shows up as an “invalid link” when putting it as a source as a question.

https://productupdates.quora.com…

Achilleas Vortselas: Hahahah, oh the irony, I am trying to link this post into a new question and it says that it isn’t a valid link.

So you can’t put details on questions any more, but you can put a link—as long as that link is not on Quora itself.

https://productupdates.quora.com…

Konstantinos Konstantinides [in response to Achilleas Vortselas]: It seems the the Quora Question bot tries to add links to questions it edited and those links are wrong (loop back to the same question)

I know of three contenders; and having rebrowsed through one, I’m eliminating it from contention. I am, by the way, extending the definition back to 1000 AD.

The contender I have not read (yet) is the only contender from the past century: The Great Eastern, by Greek surrealist Andreas Embirikos. It’s an encyclopaedia of all kinds known of sexual activity, ranging from wet dreams to coprophagia, and from missionary to incest. It’s pretty much 120 Days of Sodom on a boat, except it’s supposed to be liberating and utopian instead of nasty and dystopian. And eccentrically for 20th century literature, it is in Puristic Greek, which is meant to give it a Cavafy-esque detachment. (The two tiny excerpts on Wikipedia, which are clean, make it sound more like a 19th century romance novel, but that’s not what I should be judging it from.)

The contender I’ve just re-read is the poetry of Stephanos Sachlikis, written ca 1370 in Crete. I’ve written a little on him already at Ooh! He Said ‘Fuck’! He must be a revolutionary! by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile. This question was inspired by the late editor Nikos Panagiotakis’ prefatory comment, that his poetry is the dirtiest work of Greek literature up until The Great Eastern.

… I don’t think Panagiotakis, God rest him, got out much. No. It isn’t. Sure, Sachlikis says “fuck” a lot, when talking about the prostitutes of Candia. That’s the extent of it. It’s not like he enumerates positions or perversions; “friar-fucked” (φραρογαμημένη) is as colourful as he gets.

Being misogynistic about prostitutes (but then again, Sachlikis hates everybody, including himself), blaming the widow Koutayotaina for his downfall, and conjuring up a fanciful jousting match between prostitutes competing for working space in Candia—these may count as historically and psychologically informative material, and it may be a rollicking good read. (Greeks are constantly astonished at how easily they understand Sachlikis, even if there are archaic and dialectal bits there.) But dirty? Maybe in Panagiotakis’ generation; not in mine.

The prize, as far as I’m concerned, still goes to the work that Panagiotakis knew full well about, and it was special pleading for him to pretend he didn’t when he lectured on Sachlikis. It’s Spanos, the Mass of the Beardless Man.

There’s a dearth of information online about Spanos, which is a shame. Spanos is a parody of the Greek Orthodox Mass, targeting a hapless, unnamed victim who is himself spanos. Spanos means “beardless”. The late lexicographer Tassos Karanastassis argued in his PhD that Spanos is a piece of millenarian panic, written about the arrival of the Jews from Spain (Hi-spanos) in 1492 (the year 7000 by Byzantine reckoning); I didn’t find his arguments overwhelmingly convincing, but he did tap into an underexplored current of folk culture when researching it.

Spanos is relentless. Spanos is filthy. Spanos heaps obscenity upon obscenity upon its victim, whatever his origin and provenance; beatings, excrement, impalement, nothing is too brutal for him. And it does it all with note-perfect parodies of the Orthodox liturgy—including several highlights of the Good Friday Mass. As its editor Hans Eideneier notes, the spontaneous reaction of Greek cantors confronted with it is (after recovering from the shock) to start chanting along. (Karanastassis unearthed evidence that bits of Spanos were still being chanted by cantors as entertainment centuries later, in the writings of Alexandros Papadiamantis.) In fact, Spanos is so relentless, it overflows the liturgical genre, and throws in Saint’s Lives, dowry contracts and medical remedies for good measure. Kind of like a scatological Ulysses (although Ulysses is already scatological).

And it includes the very first instance of Byzantine musical notation in print.

Greece’s poet laureate Giorgos Seferis was a pretty astute critic, and he said something very perceptive about Spanos once. He liked it, because it was one of the very few instances Greek has to show of nonsense poetry. Spanos is closer in spirit to the usual exemplar of the limerick than to Edward Lear’s gentle variants of the form. But it’s just as silly, for all its viciousness, and Greek literature doesn’t really do silly all that often.

The Mass of the Beardless Man by Nick Nicholas on Hellenica

Oh what a day it’s been. I’m overwhelmed with comments to answer in the wake of QuoraDetailsGate (Changes to further emphasize canonical questions by Sumi Kim on Quora Product Updates), and it isn’t letting up.

One of those comments provoked my latest thinking on what Quora is for, a topic that I’ve been in a lot of discussion about today. Forwarding for consideration:

https://www.quora.com/log/revisi…

I think the knowledge database doesn’t really make sense as a goal: with all the bots in the world, there’s too much human noise in the questions to extract The Right Answer through machine learning. Although bots can get a hell of a lot out of the answers anyway.

The Facebook For Smart People is real, and it’s happened, but I don’t think that matters to Quora.

The Peacock Den (Robert Maxwell: Maxwell’s Peacocks) is also real; Quora’s friendly to it, because it brings in Benjamins and Benjamins-enabling buzz. But the real money is still where David Rose identified it: in the ads. Scott Welch’s answer to When do you think Quora is going to end?(Rose is one of the VCs who advertises here, and he’s the guy who got the scales to drop from Welch’s eyes. He’s pro the latest change, btw 🙂

I think there’s some belief in the “democratising knowledge” thing up in Mountain View, although it’s confused; the most cogent presentation of current thinking on Quora’s Mission is Mills Baker’s answer to Why should designers work at Quora?, and I have real trouble following it.

But the advertising revenue must have been in D’Angelo’s mind from the beginning; as I was discussing with I think Nancy Jacobsen today, if D’Angelo was just doing this for philanthropic reasons, he would have joined Wikipedia. Quora was never going to be a not-for-profit.

So: lots of advertising revenue (the peacocks are the cherry on top); lots of machine learning tech which, if they have any sense, they’re commercialising; and some vague notion of Furthering Knowledge For The People, which can stay aspirational.

Originally comment on The Final Appeal, by René Alix:

https://insurgency.quora.com/The…

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I can’t say whether this seems like a fair judgment to me, and I won’t even say that it might be. I am not casting aspersions on the person making this judgment — it might well seem perfectly fair to them, and they might even be as unbiased as one could be. I might make the same decision in their position. I have myself worked as a moderator for contentious groups and realize very well what a demanding and thankless job this is, and how many people are jerks and try to abuse the system.

The problem for me is that the whole process is bunk because it starts out with bunk, because it lacks transparency in several critical areas.

• Quora does not properly onboard people, so their first violations are usually a complete surprise. There is no feedback to questions asked when appealing.
• Quora’s rules are also unusually strict and complex, particular compared to the internet at large, so they are not intuitively obvious (though “intuitively obvious” is from my experience also about as likely as “common sense” — one has to spell out things, and there will always, always be “rules lawyers” who live to find the loop holes). In any case, Quora’s rules are more opaque than what people are used to, and are less well spelled out.
• Quora does not tell a person what explicitly they did wrong, so it is difficult to discern what exactly one needs to avoid in the future. I am smarter than the average bear, I am unlikely to act like an arse in the first place, and it took me months to get a handle on BNBR — had it not been for Jennifer Edeburn I might still not have it. I can tell from reading this blog that most people are like I was, they don’t really get it yet.
• But Quora forces people who got a violation to acknowledge that they did wrong before allowing them to continue to use the service. Using that later as a reason for dismissing somebody’s final appeal is disingenuous.
• The appeals process is completely broken from the user’s point of view. Most people I know don’t even appeal at all anymore because they never got a response before. They might therefore have violations on record that were never examined by a human..
• The final appeal is, for most people, not an option because they don’t even know about it. You have to either be an insider, or an insurgent to know about it.
• There is no public accountability of Quora Moderation. There’s not even a hint of it. There are no official examples of what counts as a violation and why. Discussion of a banned person’s record is forbidden (for some legitimate reasons, but this increases insecurity).
• Policies are not applied across the board. Clear policy violations are on view widely, often perpetrated by Top Writers. How can the average user learn from that?
• It is difficult for a regular user to find help for dealing with Quora Moderation. There is no FAQ; another way in which Quora differs from the internet at large. There is no official help that is clearly advertised — Quora’s “evergreen” questions ensure that long-outdated information from official Quora accounts sticks around, and Quora search is not very smart. Sure, there are the Collapse Detectives, a community initiative, not supported by Quora, but how many people find them at all, never mind easily? How many don’t realize that they get just one appeal, and come seek help too late?

I’m not gonna throw legal terms around because I am not a lawyer and Quora Moderation is not a court of law. But I am unwilling to grant them the high road when they do so little to educate people on what it would take to avoid future violations. Yes, no doubt there are “bad apple” users. But most I encounter who are frustrated with Quora Moderation are nothing of the kind.

Screenshot provided by Viola Yee

Welp, that didn’t take long…

Viktor T. Toth is a well-regarded contributor to Quora, who happens to have disabled comments.

Which is his right, and let’s not reprosecute that debate.

Viktor is one of the myriads to have commented negatively on Changes to further emphasize canonical questions by Sumi Kim on Quora Product Updates.

And I noticed something surprising:

https://productupdates.quora.com…

(I’m just surprised I can comment on you in a blog, but not in an answer. Don’t know if that’s a bug or a feature…)

… I can comment in a blog, on a user who blocks comments.

It’s not hard to work out why that’s happened; but still…

It’s important to keep in mind that, as has often been said, we writers are not the audience, we are the product. The audience is the advertisers and the Machine Learning bots.

It’s also important to note that customer satisfaction does not factor in to Quora’s metrics about changes. As is made clear in this discussion of how Credentials were rolled out:

Designing Your Own Metrics by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Design

A whole bunch of users deleted their bios in disgust; but the remaining bios met Quora’s idea of what counted for a good credential better. Argal, Step 3: Profit! The annoyance of those users is immaterial.

What Quora think we’re gaining has been outlined in the announcement: Changes to further emphasize canonical questions by Sumi Kim on Quora Product Updates. Rather than cite the announcement, I’m going to cite Nancy Jacobsen’s summary of the rationales, with her refutations.

https://productupdates.quora.com…

Although I seriously doubt that this change will actually accomplish your stated goals, I certainly hope you broadcast this post to all users—not just followers of this blog—because we’re about to be inundated with hundreds of questions about this change and we users have to carry the brunt of user support.

Some specifics:

Prevents answers that appear irrelevant if the writer didn’t read the question details. — This most often happens because the interface doesn’t show the question details, for instance in Requests. And, if you answer a request in-line rather than in the question window, you never know that there were details. So, this problem is not a result of details per se, but of interface issues.

Prevents answers that respond specifically to the question details but appear irrelevant to the main question.—This is true, but if the details were adequately displayed (see above), this wouldn’t happen. It also happens because questions get posted before the OP can add details.

Increases the likelihood that answers to a question will receive upvotes because those answers are more widely relevant.—Doubt it.

Makes it easier to search and find your question.—Doubt it. This is more a function of the Search feature.

Makes it easier to know if a question already exists and to decide whether to ask a new question.—Probably not. The related questions are already displayed when asking a question and people don’t look at them anyway.

Decreases the likelihood of duplicate questions.—No, see above.

Prevents questions from becoming overly detailed and personalized, and thus less canonical.—And at the same time, less useful for the person actually asking.

Makes it clearer whether it makes sense to merge questions.—Doubt it. As it is questions that appear to make sense to merge are constantly being unmerged, details or not.