Author: admin

Feature Releases by Rob Lion on The Insurgency

This really illustrates everything that’s wrong with Quora’s feature-release process. This new feature capability hasn’t been “rolled out” to me yet (maybe tomorrow? or next week? or six months from now?), but I’m exposed to it, because Quora users ask questions about Quora features on Quora. But, the extent of that exposure that I get is relatively wild speculation from other users who are nearly as uninformed as I am about fairly fundamental things about this feature such as:

• In what contexts is this feature available?
• Where in the Quora UI (web, mobile app) can this feature be accessed?
• What are the appropriate circumstances in which to apply this feature?
• What are the circumstances in which it is not appropriate to apply this feature?
• What are the steps in the sequence of using this feature, and what information do I need to input to it?
• What were Quora’s design goals in developing this feature?
• What benefits did Quora’s design team expect this feature to offer to the user, and/or to Quora?
• How did this feature’s designers intend for this feature to be applied by users?

Meanwhile, the Quora Product Updates blog hasn’t seen an update in more than two months, not that even that announcement mechanism does any good to anyone except the tiny fraction of users (2.4k, out of how many millions?) who actually follow that blog.

Let me reiterate:

But, the extent of that exposure that I get is relatively wild speculation from other users who are nearly as uninformed as I am about fairly fundamental things about this feature

I haven’t had this feature rolled out to me; this question is all I know about it. But so far, I disagree with everything in Mrinal Bhattacharya’s answer. From “is intuitive” right through to “Please don’t exploit the feature unnecessarily”. (How on earth are we to know when this feature is necessary?)

Oh, and:

Answered Jan 11, 2011, by Yishan Wong, Quora’s #1 fan!

Originally Answered: Why did Quora remove the “Add Follow-Up Question” feature?

See What, if anything, is to be done about sarcastic/rhetorical follow-up questions on Quora?

So we’re getting a feature reintroduced that was last seen 6 years ago.

Why?

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EDIT: some research on Iteration #1 of this functionality: Quora as Eternal Recurrence: The history of the first iteration of Follow-Up Questions by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency

Asked, 26 July, 2017:

What do you think of the new ‘Ask Follow-Up’ feature?

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Answered Jan 11, 2011, by Yishan Wong, Quora’s #1 fan!

Originally Answered: Why did Quora remove the “Add Follow-Up Question” feature?

See What, if anything, is to be done about sarcastic/rhetorical follow-up questions on Quora?

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We have had Quora be an Existentialist Parable. We have had Quora be a Buddhist Parable. And now we’re getting Quora as a Nietzschean Parable, with the notion of eternal recurrence, as applied to UX.

Why did Quora remove the “Add Follow-Up Question” feature?

We don’t know; there’s only one sarcastic response, and someone has already merged that question with Why did Quora remove the ability to add question details when you add the question (or any other time)? (asked August 2014)

Charlie Cheever’s answer to What were “follow-up questions” on Quora, and how did they work? (2010, with preface in 2012)

Hah! Charlie! The Olde Foundere! Remember him?

Follow up questions were a feature on Quora that existed from the early days of the site until some time in January 2010. Below is a description of how the feature worked. You’ll still sometimes see in question details “This is a follow up question to [some other linked question]” which is a remnant of this feature.

And I wonder how much of the following will be preserved in the new iteration of the feature?

Follow-up questions are the same as any other question on Quora except that, when a follow up question is added to the site, a few things happen to make it more convenient to add a similar question.

These are:

• The topics from the original question are suggesed for the follow-up question.
• The question details of the follow-up question start off with the text “This is a follow-up question to <link-to-the-original-question>.”
• The original question is added as a related question to the follow-up question.
• Followers of the original question are notified that a new follow-up question has been added.

Once a follow up question is created, it is just the same as any other question on the site.
This means it should be able to stand on its own as a question and, as much as possible, make sense and be clear outside of the context of the original question.
A follow-up question is not a request for clarification on the original question; i.e. “What do you mean by ‘derivative works?'” or similar would not make a good follow-up question since it doesn’t make any sense outside of the context of the original question. The best place for requests for clarification on the original question is in the comments on the original question.

So, some workflowing, but not really follow-ups so much as “this also occurred to me”, since they are meant to be consumed independently of the original.

Also, Achilleas Vortselas’ answer to What is a follow-up question on Quora? (2011)

Follow-Up Questions were a feature of Quora which was removed at some point (see Why did Quora remove the “Add Follow-Up Question” feature? ). You could use a link (similar to the ones that appear below the question details) to add a follow-up question, which automatically included a backlink to the original question. People who liked using that feature are still adding the backlinks to the details section when they ask a follow-up question. It must be also noted that, while nowadays it is easy to create a new question right as you’re typing inside any comment section, by typing @, that functionality was not originally there.

Follow-up questions need to link back to the original question to give the reader some necessary context.

Ahah. So there was more of a point to them back then, because links were harder. (Although I just search paste the link to a question, myself, at-mentions are awkward for questions.)

And what are some unintended and ludicrous potential side-effects of this functionality?

I’m glad you asked:

June Lin’s answer to What is the longest chain of follow-up questions on Quora? (2010)

What does it feel like to be attractive and desired by many?

1. Why do some people have a deluded sense of their own attractiveness?
2. What does it feel like to be constantly deceived by your peers?
3. What does it feel like to be unattractive and desired by none? -> What does it feel like to be stupid? , What does it feel like to be found attractive only by people whom you find terribly unattractive? , Are extremely attractive women flattered or annoyed by the fact that they get stared at all the time?
4. What does it feel like to be moderately attractive and madly desired by some?
5. What does it feel like to kill a moose? -> What does a moose burger taste like?
6. What does it feel like to have multiple personalities?
7. What does it feel like to be sexually attracted to no one at all? -> What does it feel like to be attracted to no one in particular?
8. What does it feel like to be attracted to many people at once?
9. If Sean Kingston and Justin Bieber (musician) were to fight over the same girl, who would win?

There are probably more.

Not to mention:

Neeraj Agrawal’s answer to How do I view the list of follow-up questions of a question that is followed-up? (2011)

… Wha?

Follow up questions are no longer supported as a product feature. See: Why did Quora remove the “Add Follow-Up Question” feature?

The text in question details stating “This is a follow-up question to ….” can be added by any user and is not treated differently than any other text.

So, there is no easy way to view list of follow-up questions of a question.

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EDIT: From Comments:

Nancy Jacobsen:

I’m glad to see you’re following up on this!

The jokes, they really do write themselves…

It’s quite possible that this feature is in fact a reincarnation of the old feature that simply showed up because their code got mixed up again. And, you know how features come and go (repeat) according to some unimaginable schedule, perhaps this feature was programmed to reappear now and someone forgot to cancel it.

Nick Nicholas

Hee. So what’s worse:

• A code feature burbles back up to the surface from 6 years ago, much like a mastodon from beneath the thawing Siberian permafrost, unleashing who knows what extinct germs from the Pliocene back into the ecology.
• Cheever has planted a time bomb or two into the Quora code, that randomly unleash obsolete features to keep his successors on their toes.
• The Quora design staff, some of whom may still have been in primary school in 2010, have accidentally reinvented this feature.

Who knows; but if the new Ask Follow-Up questions are meant to be like the old Ask Follow-Up questions from 7 years ago, the answer is no:

Charlie Cheever’s answer to What were “follow-up questions” on Quora, and how did they work? (2010)

Once a follow up question is created, it is just the same as any other question on the site.
This means it should be able to stand on its own as a question and, as much as possible, make sense and be clear outside of the context of the original question.
A follow-up question is not a request for clarification on the original question; i.e. “What do you mean by ‘derivative works?'” or similar would not make a good follow-up question since it doesn’t make any sense outside of the context of the original question. The best place for requests for clarification on the original question is in the comments on the original question.

I miss missing him.

I bonded tight with the Magister when I first alighted on this site, and so did he. (I named him that, after all.) He was my confrere and I his. We challenged each other, and we learned from each other, and we fought in the same trenches.

And then, I guess, Robert Maxwell’s peacocks fell on both of us. (Nick Nicholas’ answer to What revelations about fellow Quorans did you discover which surprised you?) He reacted with venom, I reacted with rabble-rousing. And as first the peacocks roused him, and then the Greater Jihad of activism, and then the Greatest Jihads, of helpmate and child and teaching once more—I watched as he gradually, wearily, proudly sloughed off this place, and looked to higher things than this. And I, meanwhile, have stuck with the Lesser Jihad; to admire a well-turned phrase, while the barbarians and the peacocks lay siege.

I’ve farewelled Michael a few times, and I think I’ll be farewelling him a few times yet. This place is not just an Existentialist Parable, it’s also a Buddhist parable, on the impermanence of all things, and the severing of all attachments.

I’ve missed him, il miglior fabbro. I’ve missed his superior discernment, his wider erudition, his wiser soul. And then, I’ve gone back my way; and by the time I posted his quietus, I frowned to myself that he was already long gone. Gone to more fulfilling things, yes, dropping this distraction like a bad habit. Dropped like smoking, his helpmate tells us. We’re the poorer, not him; he’s just fine.

But long gone, really. Months before that quietus was made official.

I miss missing him.

Are there any Crimean Gothic loanwords in Pontic Greek?

Actually, OP, you mean Mariupolitan Greek. The answer is, I’ve read a fair bit on Mariupolitan, and I haven’t seen any mention of it anywhere.

That’s the answer. Now the background.

The Goths of various vintages are an important part of the history of Europe, and Gothic is an important part of the history of Germanic. What we have of Gothic is some of the Bible translation and a little bit of theological commentary, and a tiny amount of inscriptions. Gothic pretty much died out by the 8th century AD…

… except, bizarrely, for Crimean Gothic, a version of the language that survived, nowhere near where the other Goths were. There are scattered mentions of Gothic spoken in the Crimea from the 9th through to the 18th century; our records of Crimean Gothic are a word list gathered in 1562, and (this was news to me) some stone plates dating from around 900, and deciphered in 2015.

Crimean Gothic was already dying out in 1562; of the two people that the word list came from, “one was a Greek speaker who knew Crimean Gothic as a second language, and the other was a Goth who had abandoned his native language in favour of Greek.”

The Greek spoken in the Crimea, then, would be the Greek in which one might expect to see survivals of Crimean Gothic.

The Greek spoken in Crimea is just about dead now; but it isn’t spoken in Crimea any more. Catherine the Great invited the Greek Orthodox population of the Crimea to move to a new town in the Ukraine, Mariupol. (Mariupol is under Ukrainian control—just, but is right next door to the Donetsk People’s Republic, and has been shelled.) The variant of Greek spoken in the villages surrounding Mariupol is called Mariupol Greek. Noone has reported any Gothic in it. A whole lot of Russian, sure, and some Pontic (one of those villages was actually settled from the Pontus in 1826). And a whole lot of Urum, including possessors preceding their nouns.

Urum (“Roman”) is the version of the Crimean Tatar language spoken by ethnic Greeks. It was traditionally regarded as a “bazaar” (urban) language by the Mariupol Greeks, and the Urums settled in Mariupol proper. Just as Mariupolitan Greek seems to have been a successor language of Crimean Gothic, Urum was a successor language of Mariupolitan Greek: Urum-speaking Greeks remained Christian, but adopted the Turkic language of the Crimean Khanate.

Given that the Tatars moved into the Crimea in the early 1400s, and Tatar was widely spoken in the Crimea, it makes sense that Crimean Tatar would also be a successor language of Crimean Gothic.

And it’s in Crimean Tatar, Wikipedia tells me, that the one possible lexical survival of Crimean Gothic is to be found: the Gothic word razn ‘house’ may be reflected in the Crimean Tatar word for ‘roof lath’. (Hunting down the reference, I don’t know that I’m convinced.)

EDIT: from Crimean gothic : it turns out that some guy heard from some guy in 1928 that Biblical Gothic razn has survived in Tatar. Dunno as what, and it’s a semantically somewhat distant loan. Tatar has been studied since 1928, and I’d hope that there was some progress in investigating the word since.

• Highlighting Connections Across Quora by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Product Updates (April 26, 2017)
• What do you think of Quora’s elimination of the timeline for answers? (July 25, 2017)

One might argue that the phonological inventory of Gothic is a spectacularly bad match for that of Modern English. But then again, so was the phonological inventory of Latin.

I think you can, so long as you hold your nose and write vowels as a one to one match with Modern English; you’re not really going to get anything sensible otherwise.

• /f/ and /v/ aren’t differentiated, and they weren’t differentiated in Old English either; we could write <v> as <f>, or <u> or <w> or as <90> (which is a spare letter).
• No <tʃ> (our <ch>), and not much of a soft <c> either. We can press the <x> character into service for one or both.
• No /dʒ/ (our <j>; the Gothic <j> is our <y>). We could give up and make <j> ambiguous between /dʒ/ and /j/, or we could write /w/ as <ƕ> (wh), reuse <w/y> for /j/, and move <j> to /dʒ/. Yuck.
• No /ð/, but that’s ok, <th> is already ambiguous within English.
• No /ʃ/, just as there isn’t one as a letter in English (<sh>). I guess we won’t avoid h-digraphs after all.

… So, yeah, you *could* write English with the Gothic alphabet, but it would be quite awkward in places, and it would not do English justice. Where there’s a will there’s a way, I guess, but it would certainly not be child’s play. Every sentence would have some lack.

Or, to put that last paragraph in Gothic:

… so, jeah, jou kould write english wiþ þe goþik alfabet, but it would be qite awqard in plases, and it would not do english jhustise. ƕere þeres a will þeres a waj, i guess, but it would sertainli not be xilds plaj. eweri sentense would hawe some lakk.

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Clearly so. For example:

Do Want / Do Not Want

Inspired by the last post, I thought I’d go through the last year’s worth of posts on Quora Product Updates, and check on their longevity.

• A New Answer Tab by Sherwin Wu on Quora Product Updates (2016–07–28). Still there.
• Improving the Reporting Experience by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2016–07–30). Since retracted.
• Elimination of Topic-Based Moderation by Jay Wacker on Quora Product Updates (2016–08–20). Retraction.
• Testing Changes to Adding Questions Anonymously by Riley Patterson on Quora Product Updates (2016–08–27). Test announcement.
• Answer Footer Policy Announcement by Jay Wacker on Quora Product Updates (2016–08–31). Policy announcement. Still applies, we think.
• Easier access to ‘Edit Answer’ and ‘Suggest Edits’ by Michael Ran Chen on Quora Product Updates (2016–09–08). Still there, although it briefly went missing.
• Announcing the New Policy on Question Topics by Jay Wacker on Quora Product Updates (2016–09–17). Policy announcement. Still applies, we think.
• New Comment Controls for Writers by Vanessa Tan on Quora Product Updates (2016–09–21). Still there.
• A New Way to See Answers from People You Follow by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2016–09–29). Since retracted.
• Removing Endorsements by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates (2016–10–29). Retraction.
• Improving Reading and Writing from Feeds by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2016–11–22). Some of this I think has been retracted, i.e. the greying out.
• Show your expertise with credentials by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Product Updates (2016–12–06). Still there.
• Improving Anonymity at Quora by Riley Patterson on Quora Product Updates (2017–01–14). Announcement.
• Official Quora Chrome Extension Update: Ask Questions Easily by Sumi Kim on Quora Product Updates (2017–01–24). Presumably still there.
• Improving Bug Reporting on Mobile by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2017–01–27). I assume still there.
• Featured Comments by Kelvin Ho on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–02). Superseded two months later (with several months of random alternation).
• Upcoming Changes to Anonymity on Quora by Riley Patterson on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–10). Still there.
• Change to Most Viewed Writer by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–14). Retraction.
• Changes to Trending Topics by Abhinav Sharma on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–18). Retraction.
• Helping Writers Get the Perfect Question by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates (2017–02–28). Still there.
• Introducing Embedded Tweets by Elynn Lee on Quora Product Updates (2017–03–03). Still there.
• More Visibility for High-Quality Comments by Diana Gerr on Quora Product Updates (2017–03–31). Still there.
• Highlighting Connections Across Quora by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Product Updates (2017–04–26). Since retracted.
• Removing Knowledge Prizes by Joel Lewenstein on Quora Product Updates (2017–04–28). Retraction.
• New Question Asking Experience on Mobile by Henry Modisett on Quora Product Updates (2017–05–03). Still there.
• Video on Quora by Tommy MacWilliam on Quora Product Updates (2017–05–16). Still there, I assume.

So: in one year,

• 26 posts.
• 4 are announcements.
• 12 are for features that are still in place.
• 6 are withdrawals of features.
• 4 are features that were since withdrawn, or superseded. (None reported explicitly.)