Author: admin

Scrolling past, and seeing everyone say “just take a break, coz we love you man”, and wondering “but is that best for Jeremy”…

… and I see Masiello say: if it’s no fun, then leave.

I was gonna say that. Damn you, Magister!

And then he says he’ll eventually bail too.

Damn you double!

Jeremy, we’re here because it’s fun. Yes it’s addictive too. But if it stops being fun, quitting is always an option. It has to be.

You also took an extended break a few months back because you wanted to focus more on your non-profit idea. If this is removing your focus from what you think is more important, then you’re entitled to quit on that account too.

Of course I’d prefer you stick around, and we keep *cough* collaborating on *cough* research projects. And of course, taking a break is the less drastic option. But it’s not my life, it’s yours. You get to weigh up the pros and cons.

Whatever you decide: we’re proud of you.

I know that this blog is the People’s Blog, and not my personal blog. But when I get a BNBR, it goes here.

Especially when it’s a ludicrous BNBR, meted out for paying people compliments. As they all have been.

---

Hello,

Yeah, whatevs, Quora Moderation.

We recently found some of your content (Your comment on What do very popular non-Top Writers think they’d need to change in order to become Top Writers?) that violates Quora’s Be Nice, Be Respectful policy (See What is Quora’s “Be Nice, Be Respectful” policy?).

Uhuh.

Please keep this policy in mind when interacting with other people on Quora. If you continue posting content that violates this policy, you may be banned from using Quora. For more information, see: How do I appeal a Quora Moderation decision?.

And believe me, I will be appealing.

If you think this is an error on our part, please submit a moderation appeal at https://www.quora.com/contact with a link to your content.

Thank you,
Quora Moderation

Full text of comment:

Oh this is gonna be good.

The context was:

Dimitris Almyrantis’ answer to What do very popular non-Top Writers think they’d need to change in order to become Top Writers?

In response to https://www.quora.com/What-do-ve…

I said:

“I really think you should be a TW.”

… No, actually. Given the mixed record of TWs, their indebtedness to Quora, and the crimps that it would put on Dimitris [ Dimitris Almyrantis ], the *last* thing I would want is for him to be a TW.

Λάμπε τρελό διαμάντι. 🙂

The Greek, btw, is: “Shine on you crazy diamond.”

So responding to an answer by Dimitris about why he isn’t getting the Quill, and agreeing with him that he shouldn’t compromise how he writes to get the Quill, IS INSULTING HIM?!!

It’s not Dimitris that I seek to insult. Believe me.

One appeal, coming up.

You can have an answer collapsed. (You are not notified of it unless it was for BNBR.)

You can get a BNBR warning on a comment or answer. If it’s on a comment, the comment gets deleted.

You can be edit-blocked. Initially for a week. For repeat offences, the period can be extended to a month, three months, or six months. Nick Nicholas’ answer to What does it mean to be edit-blocked or banned on Quora?

You can be banned.

Some of the time, your ban can be rescinded.

Some of the time, your ban can be reinstated.

My fourth BNBR, ladies and gentlemen. Just received for:

How to Get Thousands of Leads from Quora in Five Months!!!!

I now believe I am being targeted.

I’m going to absent myself for a while. Clearly Quora needs to be kept safe from the likes of me.

I’m sure I’ve seen variants of this question already.

I have not concluded that pictures matter; I use them sparingly, but they don’t seem to act as instant clickbait.

What I have concluded from upvotes—and these are fairly common conclusions—are:

• Anything mentioning anything Indian gets lots
• Anything mentioning American politics gets lots
• Survey questions get lots
• Fluffy banter-y answers get lots
• Scholarly specialist answers don’t get lots…
• … but they get more than you might think.

And:

• I’m not particularly fussed by which kinds of answers get the most upvotes. I’m not above gamification, but the upvote lotto is so random, it does not serve as an effective motivator for me.

Well, Kyle, you did A2A me. I think you must have had some idea what you were going to get in response.

Seems like most of these writers don’t actually care much about getting the designation.

Eeyup. And let me not launch into another jeremiad about The Quill. Let me instead link to someone else’s very good jeremiad about The Quill: Lance LaSalle’s answer to Are you disappointed in the March 2017 Top Writer announcements?

I know my worth, and so do the users I interact with. I don’t need a jacket or a buffet to tell me so. Especially a jacket or a buffet from as unresponsive and capricious an organisation as Quora has shown itself to be.

But if they were to engage in a bit of self-evaluation,

Oooh, them’s fighting words, Kyle. 🙂

what do they think they’d have to do differently in order for the selection team to include them?

I’ve heard a rumour that people who don’t get The Quill actually contact Quora staff to ask them that.

It’ll be a frosty day on the Acheron before I do so. (Assuming there even is a selection team, as opposed to an algorithm.) I don’t have to, mercifully; I have positive feedback from flesh and blood users, like Jennifer Edeburn, who has in fact helped me improve my writing through two suggestions: (a) provide more context and explanation; (b) tone down the venom.

Why yes, I have toned down the venom. You should have seen what I was writing a year ago.

What others have speculated about in this thread, which is already making me inch to use my block button?

• Run-ins with Moderation. No. Two BNBRs in two years, both of them nonsensical tone-policing. There are in fact TWs who have been outright banned and unbanned before making The Quill. So it ain’t that.
• I’d be violating BNBR if I named the respondent in this thread I’m now blocking, for his answer about it being all about moderation. Manifestly not the case.
• Niche. Oh, I got niche, and an academic niche at at that. It doesn’t get more niche than Greek linguistics.
• Community mindedness. Third parties have said how I go out of my way to make people feel welcome here. I topic gnome now and then; I even hit the Report button on occasion.
• Write less on the humanities, and more IT. No. If Quora don’t value humanities stuff, that’s their problem. See also Sean Kernan’s answer.
• Stop being critical of Quora, where such criticism is deserved. Is this a deal-breaker for The Quill? Apparently not: John Gragson has found himself with one. Will I stop being critical of Quora? No. John hasn’t, after all.

I don’t see what I need to change to get The Quill. Or at least, what I need to change, that I’d be prepared to change.

I’m not a fan of Feifei Wang’s writing, but there are times I find she truly hits the nail on the head; she did so with her answer here. (And even more so with her retort in comments. Seriously. Read it, and savour it.)

So did Jeremy Markeith Thompson. So did Jordan Yates. So did Gigi J Wolf. So did Michael Masiello.

So did Lance LaSalle:

I thought to myself, I thought: damn, if I have to change my writing style, (include less humor, for example, or make it a bit drier and more direct, and include some footnotes) than I really don’t want it. I got people to meet. Decisions to make. Cakes to bake, etc.

Quill-bearers, I’m happy for you. And I’ve congratulated all my friends who got a quill this year.

But I feel no envy towards you. I don’t feel that I’m missing out on anything. If it comes to self-evaluation, I’ll take Jennifer’s advice on how to write better, over a black box’s. And if it comes to having a drink with friends (with better quality nibbles than Quora appears to fork out for), just let me know when any of you come to Melbourne.

Any of you I haven’t blocked, that is… 🙂

16th century, though they were aware of the Arabic system from the 14th century. It was preceded by Milesian numerals, which were universal by the 1st century AD; before that, they used variants of Attic numerals.

See Nick Nicholas’ answer to Did ancient Greek scholars ever adapt Roman numerals? for more detail of Arabic numeral adoption.

I didn’t get to know my paternal grandparents well; I met my grandfather only once, my grandmother twice. My grandmother was somewhat vague by the time I met her, and I had real trouble with her dialect. My grandfather was vaguely feared, but I couldn’t particularly see why at eight years of age; I hadn’t been brought up in his hardscrabble household, after all.

My maternal grandparents, I got to know well. My grandfather was proud, unsmiling, stern. He was the village beadle, and a denizen of good standing in the community. He was descended from Sfakia, the southwest of the island, where people pursue vendettas and dress in permanent black, and think dancing beneath them. He was slightly out of place in the village in easternmost Crete, where people are relaxed and docile, and do not shoot firearms into the air at weddings. He ran a cafe in the upper village, before my time; I could not understand how—the kafedzis is supposed to be the life of the party.

He wasn’t cold, as such, although perhaps more affectionate to infants than to children. But critical, and very concerned with public perception. When I’d goof off as a teenager, he’d scowl Λίγη σοβαρότης δε βλάφτει. “A bit of seriousness wouldn’t do you any harm.”

He often said that if he was ever debilitated, they should give him rat poison: he was too proud a man to want to go without command of his faculties. He was felled by two strokes, and lived out his final days with no faculties, and no rat poison. He deserved a better end than that.

My grandmother was—is—as cheerful as my grandfather was stern, and as kindly as he was critical. She’d laugh a lot, with a gentle chuckle, and often without much obvious cause. She’d still get annoyed about things, often including me goofing off. But her annoyance never lasted long.

She’s still going at 94, although not quite there as much as she was. Then again, she’s more there than her children allow. When my wife and I visited her, she asked my wife’s name, and when she was trying to pronounce “Tamar”, my uncle jumped in and hollered “Maria! Her name’s Maria!” (A generation of Albanian migrants can testify to Greeks refusing to learn foreign names.) My grandmother chuckled, “Well, I guess I’ll call you Maria then.” In fact, here’s the footage:

That vague and interstitial domain known as Cultural Studies.

It’s an area I have very little formal training in, and have lots of opinions about. Because I have little formal training, I am forced to think hard about whether my speculations stand up to scrutiny, and I put extra effort into structuring an argument. That, I find very enjoyable.

I enjoy writing about stuff I am actually trained in, as well. But that’s not nearly as challenging.

(of course there could be a option to select)

Quora design philosophy, such as it is, is antithetical to any notion of user options. So you can discount that.

Quora has a follower network. Answers show up in people’s feeds, from writers they like (for whatever reason), divorced from the context of other answers to the same question; and people are usually not strongly enough motivated to open up a tab and see what anyone else had to say. If people like a writer, they will upvote their stuff. If people like a writer because of their personality and style, and aren’t extremely interested in the question itself, they won’t look at other answers and weigh them up.

I mean, *I* do. But I might do it once every 20 or 30 items in my feed. How often do you?

So yes, Quora has cultivated a culture of popular writers, because (despite its embarrassment over it) it does have a social network underlying it. And without the social network, it wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near the level of engagement, or free feedback and tagging, that it does. It’s a price to be paid.

It could make it slightly easier to access alternate answers to the same question, I guess, as some sort of preview in the feed. But then again, how many people would click through to those alternates?