Category: Uncategorized

This is *somewhat* dangerous, what I’m about to do, but it does strike me as interesting.

I just posted Bodnick’s predictable answer to whether Quora Without Details was a good thing.

Few users like it, and even users I’ve personally blocked as being unreflexive Quora boosters have expressed dismay.

I’m interested in the profile of the people who answered the question saying they think it’s (at least on balance) a good idea. Not to say they are unreflexive Quora boosters; in fact, one of them, Konstantinos Konstantinides, wrote here on how badly it was implemented. But I think the profile tells us something.

Eliminating question details aligns Quora more closely with Quora’s vision of more generic, googleable questions, helping more people (on Google), and away from visibly many users’ vision of helping specific people (on Quora) with their individual questions.

This is not a new divergence; Yishan Wong’s answer to Why are my questions not answered on Quora? pinpointed it back in 2013.

What’s interesting to me is who is aligned with Quora’s vision of what Quora is for.

72 answers at this time; I count 8 pro the change.

6 of them Top Writers. (That’s not a sufficient condition; a lot more answerers are Top Writers contra.) 5 of them 3+ times Top Writers.

Two of them were community admins back in 2012. One of them a former employee.

I think people who have been on Quora since very early on, and who are on good personal terms with Quora staff (so they have been able to discuss Quora’s goals with them, especially face-to-face) are likelier to buy into and invest in Quora’s own mission, than others have been. Even then, it’s not a predictor: I’ve been surprised at the vehemence of pushback by users belonging those classes too (and that’s not counting Bad Hombre Bot).

But I do think buy-in to Quora’s Vision is less likely for more recent arrivals, those that came in not to help build a site with The Best Answer To Canonical Questions, but who liked helping individual people with their questions, or who just liked the forum as a place to write, or the caliber of writing by others.

Just an observation; like I say, the calibration is not terribly strong even among the class of user I’ve occasionally referred to as Old Planters. Discuss.

Having listened to 6 mins of Sheikh Imran N. Hosein’s lecture, and done some Googling:

There is a Hadith that predicts that, in the end times, the “Rum” and Islam will form a truce to fight a common enemy, before they fight each other in Armageddon. To cite the hadith:

Conquest of Constantinople

You will make a firm truce with the al-Rum until you and they wage a campaign against an enemy that is attacking them. You will be granted victory and great spoils. Then you will alight in a plain surrounded by hills. There, someone among the Christians shall say: ‘The Cross has overcome!’ whereupon someone among the Muslims shall say: ‘Nay, Allah has overcome!’ and shall go and break the cross. The Christians shall kill him, then the Muslims shall take up their arms and the two sides shall fall upon each other.

At issue is the identity of Rum in Islamic eschatology.

Rum in Muhammad’s time meant the Christian Empire that Arabs were familiar with, i.e. the (Eastern) Roman Empire.

The conventional interpretation is to identify Rum with Christendom. So Islamic eschatology – Wikipedia summarises this prophecy, among the minor signs of the End Times, as:

The truce and joint Christian-Muslim campaign against a common enemy, followed by al-Malhama al-Kubra (Armageddon), a Christian vs. Muslim war.[29]

Hosein advocates a narrower identification of Rum as Orthodox Christianity, being the continuation of the Constantinopolitan Christianity that Muhammad was familiar with; and since Rum has to be a state capable of waging war rather than a religious community (a concession he makes to modern-day political realities), he thinks it is the preeminent state of contemporary Orthodox Christianity, namely Russia. (When would the Muslims make and alliance with Rum, Is Rum the Rome in Italy?)

Predictably, there is much flaming online, with others insisting that the reference has to be to the religious entity based in Constantinople, the Eastern Orthodox Church. (Hadith : Muslims to form alliance with Rum.)

Now that we’ve worked out what Hosein is referring to: the question is, how do Greeks feel about this?

I enjoyed researching this; you may not enjoy reading the answer.

Non-Muslim Greeks don’t care, because they don’t believe that the hadith of Islam are prophetic of the end times. I mean, seriously. And to the extent that they are even aware of the hadith, they would be quite happy for Putin or Trump or any other putatively Christian state to have to deal with whoever this pre-Armageddon common foe is, rather than shoe-horn the Greek military into this mess. Sure we claim to be the inheritors of Byzantium, but that’s one context we won’t be eager to inherit.

Yes, that’s a flippant response; but please. Non-Muslim Greeks won’t care, any more than Muslims should have to care about Christian eschatology and who the Great Whore of Babylon is meant to represent.

The interesting question is, what do *Muslim* Greeks make of the hadith. Muslim Greek citizens of course exist, but given the history of the Ottoman Empire and Balkan nationalism, the majority of those citizens who are not ethnic Greek are not going to be that interested in claiming the heritage of Rum either. Ethnic Turks or Pomaks in Greece may well reflexively think (Orthodox Christian) Greece when they think Rum, because Rum is the Ottoman term for (Orthodox Christian) Greeks. Still, ethnic Turks or Pomaks in Greece would be no more convinced than their Christian compatriots that the Greek army is plausibly going to play a major part in any prelude to Armageddon. The realities of the modern world would have convinced them that the Rum of Armageddon can’t be the people they think of by default as Rum.

That leaves the very small number of ethnic Greek converts to Islam. They do exist; I had the cognitive dissonance of meeting one at a colleague’s Muslim wedding. No, I am not proud of having had cognitive dissonance. And I hate to say, any ethnic Greek converts to Islam, having been brought up in the thought-world of Christian-aligned Greek nationalism, will have plenty of cognitive dissonance of their own to deal with. They wouldn’t seek to add to that, by reading their compatriots into that hadith.

There’s some bestial fools in Raqqa right now (I wonder if calling ISIS that counts as BNBR?), who think their infamy is justified because they’re hastening the End Times. Even they, I suspect, think Rum is either Putin or Trump, rather than Greece.

They seem to have forgotten that bit about allying against a common foe, too.

See: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is Nick Nicholas’ opinion on Quora’s most recent update regarding no more question details?

Mohammed Hakim, who A2A’d me this, has just been banned. The last straw seems to have been him creating a retaliatory question against someone who wrote a question badmouthing another teen.

Ah well. He was nuts, he was amusing, and he was not for this site. RIP.

I spent maybe four days posting comments on the announcement, writing posts about it at The Insurgency, writing posts and forwarding answers about the broader implications for the community, the proper nature of dissent, the limits and aims of dissent, and the past parallels of it.

Halfway through, I decided “fuck this”, and spent a day writing a translation of a Greek scatological parody of the Mass. That’s the kind of thing I actually joined Quora to do.

What do I think, now that the dust has settled?

• It makes life quite painful for question askers.
• I’m extremely disinclined to ask questions, but I think I’ll get over that: I’m just going to use comments on questions, while they still exist, and resort to other subterfuges such as writing my own answer more often, in order to give others a first look at what kind of answer I’m seeking. It will still be at times demotivating.
• But, just as with credentials, it doesn’t matter if you write fewer questions to meet your needs, as long as the questions remaining meet Quora’s needs. Cf Designing Your Own Metrics by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Design, on how successful Quora believe their credentials roll-out was.
• It doesn’t have as severe an impact on question answerers, who always felt licensed to ignore details (when the UX even showed them to them). But it does sever any notion that you’re addressing a specific querent when you answer a question. By design, of course.
• I’m somewhat disinclined to write. Not very, but somewhat. Quora is getting less enjoyable by steps for me; the grass keeps looking greener elsewhere. (What are some Quora alternatives?)
• It helped me crystallise a notion: that Quora often gets in the way of me doing what I want to do here, pushing me to do what Quora wants me to do instead, in a totality of ways that I really don’t think you see elsewhere (Quora Obtrudes by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency).
• I don’t care about canonical questions, except inasmuch as clearly redundant questions pollute the search space. I never held that much ire about the “snowflake” question. And even if details were often dumb, they were just as often helpful. Quora hates them; that’s Quora’s problem, which Quora has now seen fit to make my problem.
• One of the many witticisms accompanying the announcement: https://productupdates.quora.com… “I’m starting to believe that Quora’s core values include “don’t worry about the baby, getting rid of the bathwater is the important bit”.”
• I’m not angry. I could see it coming from the German Quora. Mostly, I’m pretty numb to the bans and UX merry-go-rounds and refreshes and all the rich tapestry that is Life On Quora.
• Things on Quora still get me angry, I’m bemused to note. For example, the deletion of the question Can you write a limerick about a Quoran?, not least because my answer to it was likely one of the saddest, bleakest limericks ever penned. (You can click that link: I’ve forwarded it to my blog.) I swore a fair bit when I was alerted of that. Alas, BNBR forbids me saying how angry I am.
• I have a lot of Schadenfreude at the Upper Middle Class of Quora Writers, who appear from their reactions to have suddenly discovered that Quora Obtrudes. The pitchforks being wielded at the Quora Facebook Lounges have a certain… appeal.
• It’s a malign appeal, it’s a nihilist appeal. It’s the “let it burn” I occasionally feel here, the Tear it down, Elias!. The “pass the popcorn.” The Portuguese expression I’m grateful to Alfredo Perozo for introducing me to (https://insurgency.quora.com/The…): watching the circus catch fire.
• Goes well with popcorn, I gather. To the sound of bouzouki singers, and bulldozers demolishing nightclubs.
• But not a reaction that can be sustained. As Alfredo agreed, mentioning his bout of it with Brazilian politics.

I’m still here. I owe Kat a positive post, on what good there is that keeps me here. I didn’t sign up to join this site, just so I can protest every bumble of its staff.

But I keep saying it, and it keeps being true:

Θέλω ν’ αγιάσω μα δεν μ’ αφήνουν. I’m trying to be a saint; but they won’t let me.

In fact, ironically enough, the feature of Follow-Up questions was removed in 2010, and is now (2017) reported to be in A/B testing:

• Quora as Eternal Recurrence: The history of the first iteration of Follow-Up Questions by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency
• The mammoth was revived for a reason by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency

The irony is, I suspect this question is being asked in the context of the recent removal of Question Details (Changes to further emphasize canonical questions by Sumi Kim on Quora Product Updates). The reintroduction of Follow-Up questions after 7 years is plausibly connected to the removal of Question Details, as the second linked post speculates (based on a connection made by Dot McHale).

Reposted from https://insurgency.quora.com/Pow…

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One thing is that just withholding answers doesn’t matter to Quora because your value to Quora is your already existing answers. These answers will get views as long as Quora exists and provide them a neverending stream of income. They don’t care if you leave.

That means that the only way you have power over them is if you delete all your answers, and maybe then they could still reinstate them. Though I’m not sure if that would be legal. If you wanted to make it harder for them, you could also edit all your answers and turn them into Lorem Ipsum filler text or other word salad.

But still then, a single user or even a largish group of users isn’t a real loss for them. Even if several thousands did that, they would be dispensable. The number of people who would need to join forces in order to make Quora really vulnerable is just too high, it’s never going to happen.

A lot of people who have contributed to Quora are emotionally invested in this and attached to it. No matter how upset they are, they aren’t going to leave.

This recent episode was probably the most outrageous thing Quora ever did, it angered even the people who normally defend Quora, and I don’t see large masses of people leaving it. I don’t know what Quora would have to do to really shoo people away large-scale, and I hope I’m never going to find out.

And really, what matters is not so much what users could realistically achieve, but what threats users could make against Quora. If there was a way to make Quora believe the users can hurt them, we’d all be in a more powerful position.

On the other hand, I’m glad users aren’t a hive-mind that make unified decisions but a group of individuals. Such a hive-mind would be a bit creepy.

Depending on what you are trying to do:

Question and Answer (English Language):

• Yahoo Answers
• Stack Exchange
• TheQuestion

Informative Writing:

• www.reddit.com
• Medium

Creative Writing:

• Patreon
• narrative.ly

Troll-Free Online Community:

….?

This is excerpted from Scott Welch’s answer to When will Quora be removing our names from the comments they created based on the question details we edited before deprecated in August 2017? The comments should have been authored by a Quora bot, not by innocent users. I want this post to focus not on BadHombreBot-Gate (Viola Yee’s term for the spurious attribution of erstwhile Question Details), but the corporate communications aspect:

Quora’s answer to When will Quora be removing our names from the comments they created based on the question details we edited before deprecated in August 2017? The comments should have been authored by a Quora bot, not by innocent users.

This has already been fixed; this was a mistake and we’re very sorry. Migrated question details are no longer attributed to users and are not visible in user profile edit logs.

Scott Welch’s answer:

Quora has now responded to this question. I’m going to list the elements that would constitute a professional communication piece. I’ve lifted them from my initial response above. I invite you to see how Quora did.

1. The information should be communicated clearly (that means including full details of what happened and a commitment to chance the process which lead to the problem)
2. effectively (that means using a combination of media to reach all users)
3. and promptly (that means being proactive, not reactive)
4. by Product Management (that means a real human with a real name)
5. in close cooperation with MarCom (that means reading like it was written by somebody who actually cares)
6. and with full support from the C-suite (that means a quote from at least one C-suite denizen, taking responsibility)

By my calculation, Quora scored zero out six.

Discussion on whether this is a reasonable expectation or not is welcome.

Those of you who are new to Quora will not be exposed to the privilege and the gift that was Masiello, The Magister, as I chose to call him: a professor of literature of rare and universal erudition, of piercing insight, and of Rabelaisian wit; of deep humanity, befitting a scholar of the humanities.

He’s still lurking, but he’s had a gutful of the place.

He left behind him a blog dissecting the obscure words he peppered his writings with: Masiello’s Mega Words. Mary C. Gignilliat set that blog up. She’s been banned.

He left behind him a blog of his trenchant dismissal of people asking homework questions about Shakespeare, rather than reading the damn play: Magister Masiello’s Belligerent Bardolatry. They were not answers in the spirit of Quora, which sees nothing wrong with homework questions, and everything wrong with answers saying you should just read the damn play.

He left an oeuvre that made you feel better just to share the planet with him. Answers that have now faded out of people’s feeds, and will not be renewed and topped up. If you’re in New Jersey, find where he’ll be lecturing; that’s where your feed will get refreshed now.

I did imitate him once or twice; he had (well, has) a distinctive voice, with well-placed use of the right recondite word. I went to look for the answer I remembered, where I imitated him for a game of Guess The Quoran, by writing anonymously in the style of someone prominent. The question was deleted by Quora, because it violated anonymity (Zis is Kvora! Ve don’t make jokes about anonymität here! by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile). An eponymous variant of the game has surfaced since, and that’s great; but I don’t feel like playing.

Why did I like impersonating Masiello, the one or two times I did? Because I appreciate the distinctive voice. The voice that pierces over the noise and the run-of-the-mill. The voice that resounds like a friend you’ve always known, and you feel you can imitate in fun, right to its face. And the camaraderie that enabled it. Just like John Walton used to be able to Michaelis Maus, say: see John Walton’s answer to Which Quorans should I follow if I want to read writing like that of Michaelis Maus? (Oh, Michaelis has been banned too.)

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Why yes, there is a recurring theme in this answer.

There are those on Quora who won’t think that imitating each other is a proper use of the platform, a platform meant to be about “sharing and growing the world’s knowledge”, and not banter between friends.

I have an account on Stack Exchange; I am proud of what I have contributed there to date, and I will be contributing more.

And if I wanted my experience on Quora to be Stack Exchange, I would be using Stack Exchange right now.

Given the amount of Greek songs that I’ve written about over at Hellenica, of course Greece has produced amazing music. The notion that it hasn’t, which Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer gives, is to me as strange as the question itself seems to be to him.

Of course, there’s a catch with the presumption behind this question. All cultures produce amazing music, because all cultures are cultures born of the human spirit, and the human spirit is capable of amazing things. All cultures’ musics have resonances and histories and tropes and subtleties and transcendence. It’s just that any given observer will have more familiarity with one culture’s inventory than others, and accordingly will find it easier or harder to read another culture’s music.

There are specific circumstances which make the Greek musical tradition rich, but I don’t enumerate them to say it is superior in any way to its neighbours, or to yours. Just that they are part of what makes it distinctive.

• A cross-roads of major musical traditions. Most places are, of course. Specifically, the complex of Byzantine, Arabic, Turkish and Persian music, and the complex of Western musics. This has resulted in several waves of fusion; rebetiko has proven to be the most fertile, siring its own range of musics.
• A wide range of folk music practice, reflecting the interaction of major musical traditions, different geographical and historical influences, and separate local developments. The folk music of Macedonia sounds nothing like the folk music of Cyprus. The folk music of Cretan Christians sounds different from the folk music of Cretan Muslims (although similar enough that Christians could appropriate the music of the departing Muslims.)
• Strong extra-musical associations for Greek music, with political or historical movements and events. Particularly in the 60s and 70s, there was much ideological investment in music. (Of course Greece is hardly unique in that.)
• Perhaps more controversially: in some strands of modern popular music, ongoing belief in the transcendental power of song, and in the distinct vocation of the lyricist. (Separate lyricists and composers remains the norm.) There always has been disposable Greek pop music, but for every lyric that reaches Leonard Cohen levels of art in English, there are 10 in Greek: not because Greeks are inherently more poetic, bus because there is a much greater cultural expectation for that kind of thing. Arguably, Better Poetry in lyrics inspires Better Music. Certainly, better poetry in lyrics leaves audiences with the impression that the music is better.