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I don’t know whether there are more answers to “how to” questions than others, and I think it is an artefact of your topics. I tend towards humanities topics in my feed rather than technical topics, and there’s not a whole lot of room for “how” there: there’s a lot more “why”. I also have a lot of Quora Socialising in my feed (such as Survey Questions and Quora itself), and they’re not “why” or “how”: they’re mostly “let’s swap anecdotes”.

I am interested to hear from others in tech topics whether OP’s impression is accurate.

I have some dimestore speculation for why tech topics would have more hows than whys:

• More how questions: The Stack Exchange model: I come to a Q&A site in response to an immediate practical need. I don’t need a why, and I don’t need an analysis, I need a fix to a problem or challenge I am currently facing. That’s not to denigrate the answers you’ll get: all of us who program are deeply grateful to Stack Exchange for getting us out of fixes. All of us also know that Stack Exchange is not where you go to for longterm prognostication of programming language trends.
• More how answers: It is easier to reproduce my praxis in an answer (this is how I go about a task), than it is to reason about the causes and motivations behind a phenomenon (this is why things are the way they are, this is why people are more interested in doing task A than B, this is why you’re coming to a Q&A site). That’s not to say that the people answering hows are dumber than the people answering whys; hopefully they substantially overlap! It is to say that a how answer is just easier to write than a why answer: you don’t have to go digging as deep, you just recount what you do.

See the Quora Knowledge Prize topic and https://www.quora.com/prizes/ . Such a prize already exists, and is funded by external sponsors. These are the current questions: https://www.quora.com/answer/prizes

The topic has a lot of questions about misgivings on the prize; and the prizes to date have been on just IT and US politics.

Strange things are afoot. Until those things are clarified, I’m holding back on saying anything about them.

But I have been thinking a lot about what my responsibility is in criticising Quora, and I have been challenged by a couple of people on what I should be doing.

I welcome these challenges. There’s no learning without challenge, there’s no maturing without challenge. And even if I do not agree with the challenges, it’s incumbent on me to articulate why, and to do so rationally. I owe that to those who challenge me in good faith.

Before the latest weirdness, I received a message 10 days ago from Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax. Abd Ul-Rahman will be known to some of you from the Quora Users Free Association, which welcomes banned users on its mailing list. With his permission, I’m posting his challenge here, and my response to it—which gave me the opportunity to introspect, on why I get so worked up about things I see wrong with Quora.

I’d like for this to be a dialogue, with him and others, and I welcome thoughts in comments.

Abd Ul-Rahman:

My suggestion. Lighten up on the loathing. So Quora Inc. is poorly managed. If I were a shareholder, I’d be screaming at them. However, that would stress my heart and I could fall over and die. Further, people rarely respond well to being loathed. Quora Inc. does not actually exist in reality, it’s a human concept and construct, but people who work for Quora may take it personally.

Nick:

So, on the scale of problems in the world, of course Quora Inc doesn’t even rate. And I don’t spend night and day plotting their demise, honest I don’t. Even if it sounds like it. I haven’t even had the heart to do any more memes about Quora, on The Memes of Production; I’d be seeking out things to protest, if I did, and I don’t want to do that.

Moreover, I’ve started to make a conscious effort to be constructive in my criticisms. Especially on Rage Against Quora (I will not piss on the welcome mat in Tatiana’s house), but even in general. Yes, the spikiness is still there in my criticisms back on my own turf; but I try not to seek it out, and honestly I wish I got less A2As on it. I didn’t join Quora to protest an admin team.

So what is it that gets me so annoyed? At a secondary remove, the apparent mismanagement, sure; and that’s been sharpened by conversation with Scott Welch, who after all has excellent insights in how to run an IT-based company. But that’s secondary.

And it’s not because I’ve been impacted all that much by misfires on Quora. I got no moderation notices my first 15 months here. Whatever UI misfeatures impact me, they’re just annoyances.

It’s because I have formed friendships here. And I am indignant on behalf of my friends, when they are mis-targeted, or put out, or frustrated.

And because I made a conscious decision. I am IRL a meek person. A conformist. Part of the problem, if you will. I decided that here, to maintain my self-respect, I would speak out more at what I see as unfair. Maybe because the stakes here are not all that high, ultimately. Maybe because online it’s easier.

Yes, it likely has backfired with the humans behind Quora Inc. I haven’t had outright snark from them yet, but I may yet. And yes, this may cost me the TW, although you know, the TW honestly isn’t that big a deal. Then again, if they curate a community, they have a responsibility to be aware of the problems the community has. I do try to speak more for them than for me.

And just as you put together the Quora Users Free Association (which I was aware of), I put together Necrologue. To serve the community where it was not being served, although in different ways.

But yes, you are entirely right. Be the change, don’t let any struggle consume you, and keep perspective. Thank you for pulling me up on this.

Ah. Let us now praise famous Quorans, and the mentors that begat us.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZvHgp_bKmGo

(And remember to listen through to the last verse, folks.)

The following followers of mine have more than 20k followers of their own.

• Alon Amit (40.5k)
• Stephanie Vardavas (33.9k)
• Sabrina Deep (28.5k)
• Paul Denlinger (27.1k)
• Anita Sanz (26.2k)
• Claire J. Vannette (21.6k)

May I prove worthy of their follows. May I prove worthy of all my followers, whether their follower count is 50k or 0.

Yeah, what the rest of you good people all said, Robert Todd and Amy Dakin and Humphry Smith. It’s correct; it’s dysfluent; and given the pedagogical context, it’s excusable.

That’s why I love podium-arts.com by our own Ioannis Stratakis. He doesn’t dwell on it and drag it out in his recitations, he just gets on with it. It was a real language, after all.

Myself, I think it really is that people expect everyone to be notified about their comments, when they are new to Quora.

Remember that, with no onboarding, it takes a little while for it to become apparent who gets notified of anything, to begin with. It took me a couple of weeks to realise that my comments three levels down would not be read by the original commenter.

I do it a fair bit. Sometimes to start a conversation, although that tends not to work that well. Sometimes because I’m having a discussion in comments, I’m asked a question, and I think it’s useful to get the answer out there. Less often, because I want to get some information out there of my own accord.

Quora policy says there’s nothing wrong with that, and I don’t think there is either. I own the answers, the community owns the questions. I might as well contribute to the community the questions that prompt good answers out of me.

As it turns out, I have read Christ Recrucified and Freedom and Death in Greek, and the Last Temptation and Zorba only in English, in Bien’s translation.

I have not read anyone else’s translation, so I can’t answer your A2A fully. The astonishing folksy stylistics of Kazantzakis are not going to come through in English. That’s actually just as well: an attempt to make them come through would be too distracting, as it is in translating Cavafy.

But from memory, Bien’s translation rang true to the spirit of the novels I had read in Greek. I recommend it.

I tested this on Necrologue. I checked a dozen recent bans, including people I knew had bios.

You are right.

I find this offensive.

Since Rage Against Quora has just been deleted, it will be difficult for this question to be answered.