Category: Uncategorized

The idiomatic, as opposed to the literal translation of “fuck school” is να το χέσω το σχολείο “may I shit on it, school”. Topicalises school with a clitic pronoun, and uses “shitting on” to express contempt.

The most successful one has been Blissymbols; it was conceived of as an auxlang, but has it seen usage helping disabled children acquire language.

The sample phrase on Wikipedia is:

Person-1st Verb-feeling-fire Verb-legs house camera-move
“I want to go to the cinema”

I’m 45.

I would not like to go forward. It’s already started being downhill physically, and I’m happy to take the leisurely route towards senectitude.

Not back to 16. I wasn’t really socialised back then, even if I was at my most physically rigorous.

Not back to 20. Still not properly socialised, and pretty adrift in what I was going to do with myself and who I was.

(I’m still adrift about what I’m going to do when I grow up. Life really is this thing that just happens to you.)

I’d like to go back to 25. When I was starting my PhD, was forming friends for the first time. Before I realised that it was not going to get me a job; before I realised that life just happens to you; before I was compromised and jaded. Back when everything seemed to be opening up for me.

People Rank

What languages does Quora support?

You don’t need an invite any more for Spanish. You do need an invite for French, since it is still in Beta. https://fr.quora.com/join?code=0

This was answered by Laura Hale with the data available to her in 2015:

Laura Hale’s answer to Does Quora have any black employees? I read that tech firms in Silicon Valley face challenges in recruiting and retaining minority employees.

From what I can tell, the answer appears to be zero African American employees, while Asian employees represent 55% of Quora’s employees. This is an ethnically diverse group though, and includes people of Chinese, Iranian and Indian descent among others.

The reaction of Quorans to the question even being posed is… enlightening:

Adam Nyhan’s answer to Does Quora have any black employees? I read that tech firms in Silicon Valley face challenges in recruiting and retaining minority employees.

As of this writing, Quora supports English, Spanish, a beta for French has been announced, and there are plans for German and Italian.

Outside of the currently supported languages (English, Spanish, French in Beta):

If you ask D’Angelo, German and Italian: they’re next up in the plan. Launching a beta for Quora en français by Adam D’Angelo on The Quora Blog.

If you ask Clarissa Lohr: https://www.quora.com/What-are-t…

I think I would have chosen Hindi, Tamil and Russian next. Maybe Arabic.

If you ask me, LATIN! Praeclarum enim esset!!!¡!!!11!! Ond Englisc! Maciaþ Mierce grēat āġēan!

So. Let’s approach this a little more coldly.

Quora is not Wikimedia, and Quora is not a non-for-profit, and Quora is not out there to save the world. Would that it were so, but it’s not. Quora is a business. Or rather, Quora is trying to become a business. Which means Quora’s got to be all about the benjamins: the Venture Capitalists’ benjamins in the short term, the advertisers’ benjamins in the long term.

So its choices of languages have to be strategic.

What language choices are strategic?

• Languages that don’t already have a strong competitor website in place, and that aren’t likely to firewall Quora. As User has pointed out to me, that rules out China, which has Zhihu (Q&A website); and Taiwan and the Chinese diaspora aren’t enough to sustain a zh.quora.com on their own. It does not rule out French and German, where the localised equivalents have not done well: Séverine Godet’s answer to Why is Gozil (French version of Quora) not as popular as Quora?; What is the German equivalent of Quora?
• Languages spoken by lucrative demographics. That presumably rules out Hausa, for example.
• Languages whose lucrative demographics aren’t already comfortable using English Quora: the point is to grow market share, and to grow it in benjamins. That may (may) rule out Indian languages. But I’d have thought it also rules out German, if not Italian and French. I’ve seen a lot of French and German users here lukewarm about the prospect of Quora in their language.
• Languages that Silicon Valley VCs are likely to be wowed by. Here we get into identity politics, and Sam Morningstar, please don’t hit me. But permit me the idle speculation:
• A bunch of Silicon Valley VCs are likely to be wowed by Spanish, because it’s the default foreign language in California.
• A bunch of Silicon Valley VCs are likely to be wowed by French, German, and Italian, because those are the default prestige foreign languages in the Anglosphere (Britain, and those under British influence). I paused about including Italian; but music and art and the Renaissance have likely bought it a place at the table, rather than advertiser benjamins.
• A bunch of Silicon Valley VCs are likely not to be wowed by languages they have a cultural cringe against. This is irresponsible speculation, but: I have seen Indians on Quora beg for Indian language support, and I have seen Indians on Quora pooh-pooh Indian language support. Indians who have ended up as VCs in Cali, I suspect, are going to be among the latter: they loved English so much, they moved to the States. They may be biased against sending VC money back home, when being Indian on Quora in English is what they are all about. Same would go for any Chinese VCs in Cali.
• A bunch of Silicon Valley VCs are likely not to be wowed by languages seen to have been a bust for internationalisation in the past. Orkut did not fail because it was Big In Brazil and Immense In India; Orkut failed because of structural mismanagement. But “Big In Brazil” became a joke in Silicon Valley, so I can see Portuguese being demoted in the wow-factor list, among Valley VCs. Same goes for Indian languages.

My own more considered opinion: definitely Russian, as the monopoly of VK (social network) in Russia shows, and probably Arabic. There’s Benjamins to be had there. Unless…

• Languages that Silicon Valley VCs are likely to have politically-motivated distaste for, which outweighs the benjamins to be had.

I have no idea whether VCs in the Valley are so impractical as to let their cultural and political predilections outweigh their nose for money. But you gotta admit. If they are, that would explain French, German and Italian. Which I, as a cultural European, am fricking STOKED to see announced; but which I don’t think are where the benjamins are at.

I’m so the wrong person to be asking this, Asher.

Perspective is a brand new machine learning project, to spot flames (“toxic comments”) online.

We are on a site which uses a lot of bots (bots trained through machine learning) to do things like assign topics, detect grammar mistakes in questions, and detect near duplicate questions.

Are they useful? Yes.

Are they a replacement for human intervention? As anyone who’s spent more than 5 minutes on here knows, no. They are still quite fallible, because these are AI-hard questions.

Now. Moderation is a hugely controversial topic in Quora. People are very unhappy with moderation outcomes, and protest it to the skies.

Will people be more happy if it is substantially done by bot (if it isn’t already)? No. They will completely lose their shit. You know it, I know it. If Quora is already doing it, there’s an excellent reason why they’re keeping shtum about it.

Will they be right to? We know that in some domains, robots do better than humans. Grading essays, for example. (And boy, is there a shitstorm about that in the letters pages of newspapers.)

But note that moderation is something that needs sensitivity and judgement. Note how unhappy people are with the crude decision-making of bots now on Quora—bots actually are helpful, but only to get you 80% of the way there, and people complain endlessly (and rightly) about the 20% crap that’s left over.

At best, bots would be a backup of what happens now in moderation, with community reporting. They could find more potential infractions. They would find a hell of a lot more false alarms. They would either make for much more work for human mods (because there’ll be more crap to wade through), or else they will actually replace human mods—and if you think people are unhappy now, wait till the bots start unilaterally banning people. The revolt that would trigger really would impact Quora’s bottom line, because it wouldn’t be just the odd false positive, it’d be a bot bloodbath.

You should also bear in mind that Perspective is barely out of the Google research lab; it would take a lot of tweaking to become reliable at enterprise scale. Quora is likely prone to Not Invented Here syndrome, like many a startup is. But I wouldn’t blame them in this case: if Quora know what they are doing, they have their own research lab going, looking into developing their own bot smarts. Both because they know their own problem space better (one hopes), and because that kind of research capital—and the training data we all volunteer for it—is the kind of asset they really can monetise.

• Monetisation
• Maintaining quality of contributions

Not placating those who think moderation or the UX sucks. Quora has gotten away with not prioritising that, because there’s always more users queuing up to join, and people (particularly more passive users, or more invested power users) are prepared to put up with a lot.

But online communities do tend to run out of steam after a while, and you have to find ways to keep contributors motivated and challenged. People do burn out, and people do leave in a huff, and you might want to check whether the outflow does start exceeding the inflow, either in numbers or in quality.

You also want to ensure that the contributors are still challenged to write content people feel like reading. A lot of people here decry the increase in stupid questions or gossipy content. That’s valid, and an unavoidable consequence of growth. But I for one have no desire to go back to the Quora of 2010, and I’m glad I wasn’t around for it: a site where there were no Survey Questions, no Humanities, every question was about Startups, and every user was from Silicon Valley? Pass. The growth in participation, subject matter, and yes, sociability has been a good thing. It has brought eyeballs. Quora has an ongoing challenge to keep eyeballs…

… Because Quora has to monetise; it can’t stay a Facebook alum vanity project forever. The VCs will go for the next shiny object; Quora has to find a way to keep advertisers’ interest. That means eyeballs. And yes, that means a certain amount of clickbait (which we have already), but it also means a certain amount of good authoritative content, which keeps the lucrative demographics around; and yes, it means acquiescing to the social use of Quora, which for advertisers is a feature not a bug.

Sell out, I hear you say? Suits me. A Quora pure to what it was started out as in 2010 is not a Quora I’d have invested in. It’s grown, in occasionally unexpected directions. That’s a good thing. Sometimes the market does produce good outcomes, after all.

The push this year looks to be internationalisation, if Quora is queuing up fr.quora, de.quora, and it.quora. (No hi.quora or zh.quora, I see. Hm.) I just hope internationalisation is married up to monetisation somewhere in the plan…