Author: admin

Being a Greek linguist, my first thought would be to think of proti– as the Epic Greek equivalent of Attic pros– “towards”, as in prosthetic or proselytise or prosody, and to think: “Dude! you picked up the wrong Greek dictionary!”

Then I would notice the <f> of –forate, and realise that no, this has to be a Latin word, and it’s unlikely to be half Homeric Greek and half Ciceronian Latin.

And then I’d defer to Lotte Meester: Lotte Meester’s answer to What would you say the word “protiforate” means? And Lotte, you’re right: don’t put haplologies like that in any exams. 🙂

It’s a commonplace that the people (or bots) selecting answers for the Digest are not the same people (or bots) that moderate answers. Answers that appear in the Digest are routinely collapsed after the fact, because the two tasks are undertaken by two separate parties.

Of course, answers get collapsed if they are reported by someone, and moderators agree with the report assessment: Quora is not resourced to collapse all answers proactively. The more visible an answer, the more likely it will be reported by someone, because someone will notice it and not like it.

And answers that appear on Digest are more visible than others.

Read Scott Welch’s answer to When do you think Quora is going to end? Read it early, and read it often.

Quora is a business, and its business goal is to maximise the exchange of information—and the advertiser eyeballs that exchange attracts. That’s why they hated infographics: they’re not googleable, so they don’t raise the Google Page Rank of Quora pages, so they won’t attract viewers from Google (which is what advertisers want).

What would happen if Quora adds video upload? It would mean they’ve got a good deal going with a video host, and with Text-To-Speech transformation, so they can get more googleable text out of you. Presumably, they’d make the text googlable on the same page, otherwise there’s no Google benefit.

… I have to say, I think that means both Quora and Google would be very different businesses than they are now.

• Google prioritising hidden text for Page Rank? I don’t see it. Google putting the effort in to make audio on uploaded videos searchable? Text-To-Speech has gotten astonishingly good, but it’s a huge effort, for not clearly enough payoff.
• Quora embracing media hard to search with current tools—especially tools they don’t control, such as Google? Unless Quora is bought out by Google (which would not be such a terrible thing), I’m not seeing it.

If Quora pushes video answers, as opposing to tolerating videos accompanying text answers, then Quora will no longer be Quora as we know it: it will truly have embraced a social media role. And I gotta say, it’ll be a social media role even I wouldn’t be comfortable with.

It will, in fact, have become QuoraTube.

And I’d argue that, if you want a Tube site for social exchange, you already know where to find YouTube and FaceBook…

Latin script in Unicode – Wikipedia

As of version 9.0 of the Unicode Standard, 1,350 characters in the following blocks are classified as belonging to the Latin script

Let’s remove the uppercase letters; and that leaves us with your answer. From eyeballing:

26+30+128+104+14*8+12+12+67+26 = 517

That leaves 833.

If I’m wrong, I’m not wrong by much.

EDIT: Derek Zech’s answer to How many letters does Unicode currently include in the Latin script, no matter the language, but ignoring upper vs. lower case differences? leaves out more letters than I do, is more thorough, and he sounds more correct. Go upvote him: Vote #1 Derek Zech.

I will not be confused with an ethologist. But I do know that whenever I try to dance with my honey, and our dog is anywhere near, Jenny gets excited, wags her tail, and jumps on us to join in.

Fricking dog.

My understanding with what little I know of ethology is, Jenny does so because she understands dancing as equivalent to dogs’ play-fighting. That, she understands; that’s why she wants to join in. So I’d assume that’s the shortcircuit in her brain, rather than understanding dance on its own terms.

Dogs are also hypersensitive to changes in people’s gait. Jenny gets very agitated when she sees me on a swing; but that’s something I gathered from reading, rather than from Jenny. I think the freakout of dogs seeing the changed gait of dancers would overrule any recognition of controlled gait as communication.

None of the answers satisfy me, though Logan R. Kearsley’s is by far the closest to satisfying me.

EDIT: Uri Granta’s answer satisfies me more than mine. Go read that.

---

There is a colloquial register in English, in which the first person subject is omitted routinely. It predates social media; see, for example the Beatles’ A Day in the Life. The bits Lennon wrote use the pronoun; the middle section McCartney wrote skips it:

Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,
And looking up I noticed I was late.
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke,
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream

But contra Logan, I don’t think this is just spoken English. I think this is a particular narrative register of spoken English—it’s a conventionalised way of telling stories, in a punchy way. I don’t think you’ll find it in different kinds of speech, such as say persuasive speech or instructional speech.

MVW. RIP. (Unless that’s a bug, not a feature.)

• Day before yesterday, MVW badges were gone for McKayla, but not yesterday.
• Yesterday, MVW badges were gone for me.
• Today, MVW badges are back.

Let’s just pause a bit, shall we?

We are on a platform whose UX changes weekly. We have no idea whether changes on the UX are intentional or not. We surmise that certain features are not in favour by the designers, because of related changes. When features disappear from the UX, we are genuinely—genuinely—baffled as to whether they are bugs, deliberate features, or A/B trial balloons. We assume deliberate change, because we decide that certain features are under a cloud. And right now, I still don’t know whether the badges are back for good, or whether I’m in some A/B game of Nomic.

Guys?

Design Offsite: What Makes for a Good 2017? by Quora on Life at Quora

Yeah, you guys. Remember us? The users?

Do you think we’re being well served by this?

—-

David Cole’s answer to What is the role of a product designer at Quora? (David Cole, Director of Design at Quora; I think he’s the guy in red in the photo.)

Like all software product design teams, we are responsible for Quora’s user interface. We’re actively building out and unifying our design system, focusing heavily on typography and the core reading interactions. We primarily concern ourselves with clarity over cleverness, seeing UI innovation as a means to an end and not something to pursue for its own sake.

(Emphasis mine)

This has been an issue of contention between me and my wife. My wife would rather be in a traffic jam for 2 hours, than catch the train. I’ve been an annoyed passenger on such occasions.

None of the other reasons brought up by respondents applies. So long as you are heading to the CBD, Melbourne’s train service is excellent, although it is unpleasantly congested at peak time. It is more affordable than driving and parking. My wife’s work at the time was a fairly direct route, although she would have had to hop off the train and onto a tram.

The main reason, really, was cultural. I caught the train to school in high school, and I have been a train commuter for 30 years. My wife has never had to depend on public transport, and has not felt the need to.

As for incentives, price is a powerful motivator. When petrol prices went up a couple of years ago, train patronage went up 7%. It actually posed a challenge to the train network capacity.

The analyses given by Stephen McInerney and Miguel Paraz are… not implausible. But let me take self-interest as a Quora critic out of the equation, and give a facts and figures answer, using the exemplary Laura Hale’s answer to Who is the most followed/viewed/prolific Quoran that has never been awarded Top Writer? as source data. (She is dearly missed.) Answer written in June 2016, and I suspect the source data is rather more dated than that.

Let me also ignore all the celebrities in her answer who didn’t make TW, because when you *do* award Top Writer to celebrities, you get Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton, and that was widely lambasted as seven different shades of dumb.

From Laura’s lists: not celebrities (defined as, don’t have a Verified User tick), not TWs in 2016 or 2017 so far:

(It gave me a lot of satisfaction to redact out all those Silicon Valley celebs with 20 answers and 50k followers that I’d never heard of.)

Of Laura’s list of 114 writers with 10k followers who were not top writers, 19 were not Verified User ticked: that means 95 of the 114 were celebrities. I think we can agree that we don’t need another 95 top writers with the level of contribution that Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine have made to the site.

A few more of them look to me to be celebrities, so I am taking those who don’t have at least 100 answers out of consideration:

• Vitaly Friedman (3 answers)
• Babak Nivi
• Hiten Shah
• Jean Yang
• Neha Jha

One more has become a Top Writer in 2017:

• Gaurav Munjal#

Of the remaining users, again excluding celebrities: asterisk is for those viewed more than 10M times as of Laura’s answer. Vo Nghi Nguyen (not in the list below) is the only non-top writer who had written more than 2500 questions (he has half of that now, and he has made Top Question Writer once the award was devised). 1000 answers at the time of Laura’s answer: daggered. Writing in more than 5 topics: hash.

(Users who have refused the Top Writer award: §)

• §Rory Young#
• Mohan Dev Sukumar
• Rohit Kapoor*†#
• Zehra Alvi
• Aditi Saini#
• Becky Lee†
• §Bhuvi Jain*#
• Dhakshitha Rao
• Seema Shah†#
• Ankur Warikoo
• Harsh Snehanshu
• Karan Bansal
• Deepak Shukla*† (Banned)

So. This list features people who are prolific and popular.

What do you notice in this list of 13 overlooked Quorans?

Here’s a fairly obvious thing to notice:

Two of the 13 are NOT Indian: Becky Lee (a celebrity blogger, from what I can tell), and Rory Young.

The Indian Quora is a more youthful, chatty place than the American Quora, we know; could it be that the 11 Indian Quorans are known to write “fluffy” content, which Quora does not prioritise? Let me cull those users who have Life and Living, Life Advice, and Dating and Relationships among their top 5 topics:

• §Rory Young
• Becky Lee
• Ankur Warikoo
• Harsh Snehanshu
• Karan Bansal

Ouch. I wish that didn’t cut out 8 of the 11 Indians. There are plenty of TWs who post in those areas, but we do know Quora looks at that component of the site askance.

Let me do better. Omit writers whose top 5 topics are restricted to: Life and Living, Life Advice, Dating and Relationships, India, Quora, Philosophy of Everyday Life, Psychology of Everyday Life, Social Advice, Human Behaviour, Friendship, Career Advice, Survey Question, Self-Improvement, Jobs and Careers (and I’m including Becky Lee, who has no topics at all):

• §Rory Young (Animals, Wildlife, Elephants, Africa, Nature)
• Aditi Saini (Indian Engineering Services, Indian Railways, Union Public Servicce Commission (India))
• §Bhuvi Jain (Politics of India)
• Dhakshitha Rao (Medicine and Healthcare)
• Ankur Warikoo (nearbuy, Groupon, E-Commerce, Startups, Indian School of Business)
• Harsh Snehanshu (Startup Founders and Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Visiting and Travel, Young India Fellowship Programme)
• Karan Bansal (Facebook, Programming languages, Computer Security, Linux)
• Deepak Shukla (Google (company))

4 of the 11 Indians still cut out, and I’m looking with some concern at whether Politics of India should keep Bhuvi Jain in.

I don’t know much about these posters, so I’ll have to be enlightened as to what other commonalities I am missing. The omission of Rory Young is somewhat surprising, and Ankur Warikoo actually hosted a question session last year. Snehansu seems to be the kind of enterpreneur you’d think Quora would jump at.

---

Bear in mind that the numbers are at least 9 months old, and Laura’s list was not exhaustive; I’m pretty sure there are writers with 10k followers 9 months ago who’ve never made TW that she’s missed. There’s plenty more now; Habib Fanny and Jordan Yates for example, who don’t match the patterns shown in the list above. Still, this list tells me something.

Common characteristics of very popular writers? Being a Quora critic is not, I believe, among them: that’s a characteristic of some moderately popular writers. I’m not seeing any Scott Welch’s or Stephen McInerney’s or Nick Nicholas’s in the list. “Single (Indian) Girl on the Internet”, which Stephen points out, is a real thing, but I don’t think it explains most of the omissions in this list either.

Common characteristics of very popular writers who have not made TW:

• Writing on populist rather than specialist topics.
• Indian.

EDIT: The omission of Rory is a puzzler, given the list, and Rory has offered an explanation: he asked to be removed from the list of Top Writers. Ditto Bhuvi. They are now marked with a section sign §.

This was originally a comment to Sophie Dockx: Quora Moderation is Under Attack : https://insurgency.quora.com/Sop… . Republishing here with permission from Dan Rosenthal. (See also my comment in the original place published.)

---

I’d take any claims of unjust banning from controversial users such as Sophie with an enormous grain of salt. Look, I’ve worked in online community management for a long time, including administrating/moderating on social media outlets WAY bigger than Quora; I’ve also represented clients in consumer protection claims when they come to me wanting to sue a website for “wrongfully banning” them. 99% of the time when someone says they were banned unfairly, they are wrong. Sometimes it’s intentional attempts to deceive; other times it’s just human nature of an inability to admit one’s mistakes. But it’s very, very rare to actually see someone having been permanently banned by mistake. And even in the cases I’ve seen on Quora where a ban was unquestionably by mistake, they’ve been reversed within a day or two.

Now, this is not to say things are lovely in Quora Moderation land. Quora Moderation is all kinds of broken and insufficient; but I have to laugh at the concept that it’s because they’re banning *too many* people.

Fake names are a problem, but on their own — absent any other bad behavior — the only impact they have is making it more difficult to assess a user’s credibility.

The real problem is that fake names are highly correlated w/ malicious users intent solely (or largely) on bad behavior. And Quora’s small moderation team is not doing a good enough job of identifying potential trouble users and flagging them in such a way that they can be quickly moderated. Instead, almost all users — good and bad — appear to be treated as part of the same pool, causing moderator overload.

Put it this way — when triaging an accident scene, do you think the doctor should start w/ the people showing no outward signs of injury, or the people bleeding profusely?

There are plenty of ways this can be done. Machine Learning is something Quora keeps harping on about, to the point of writing public articles about it. Yet Quora’s ML for moderation is, frankly, trash. A proper, robust system, would be self-correcting from analyzing the patterns of manually-banned users and increasingly flagging similar accounts as potential threat vectors. A proper, robust system, would keep this pool segregated from the general population of Quora users, so they can be monitored and their interactions can be vetted. We see the first halting steps at this with the anonymity review period, for instance; but it could be so much more.

Meanwhile, there is no parallel process to handle direct reporting of actual confirmed problem users post-incident, from trusted users, because frankly even those of us with access to moderation resources aren’t getting responses from said resources. I’ve personally made Quora moderation staff aware of a well known user, with evidence of that person openly admitting to using multiple sockpuppet accounts to harass me, combined with contextual evidence analyzed from their writing. Despite personally directing a moderator’s attention to that, not only has no action been taking, it didn’t even merit a response.

So no, I don’t think the problem is that Quora is banning the wrong people. I think the problem is that Quora is not banning nearly enough people, and as a result errors are visibly magnified because they’re not being measured against any noticeable progress.