This blog does not get that much exposure. Oh well.

I’m going to tell you a story, those who do read this. At the end, whoever guesses correctly what happened next, gets a prize. And whoever comes up with the funniest incorrect guess as to what happened next, gets a prize. I’ll give it 24 hours. The prize will be either a sonnet in your praise, or a cartoon.

Carlos Matias La Borde, for reasons which will become obvious, you are not eligible to guess. Though there will probably be a cartoon of the incident anyway, featuring you.

And tomorrow, I’ll discuss what happened next, and what I think of it. Hint: whatever happened next had nothing to do with Carlos.

---

Once upon a time, there was a Quora user named ME, who was a gentle, irenic, supportive cuddle-bunny of a business analyst.

At the same time, there was another Quora user named Carlos. Carlos was a witty prankster of a poster, and his default bio said as much:

occasional shitposter and TW ’16

The term shitposter was new to me, but by analogy to shit-talker, its meaning was clear enough.

shitposter: Urban Dictionary

A person who regularly submits terrible or nonsensical posts to an internet forum.

Shitposting: Know Your Meme

“Shitposting” is an Internet slang term describing a range of user misbehaviors and rhetoric on forums and message boards that are intended to derail a conversation off-topic, including thread jacking, circlejerking and non-commercial spamming.

So, Carlos is admitting to writing disruptive posts to Quora on occasion. I’d noticed some good snark from Carlos, but admittedly nothing that quite merited that name.

Recently, I heard a recording of Carlos’ voice. As often happens, the poster’s voice was not what I expected it would be. Because he says he’s a prankster, swears a bit (as befits a pedagogue of programming), and is youngish, I assumed he’d have a high-pitched, Quentin Tarantino kind of voice. Instead, Carlos had a mellow, West Coast baritone.

I rushed to compliment Carlos:

… You don’t sound like a shitposter at all, Carlos! What Martin Silvertant [complimenting him] said. Even your “for fuck’s sake” was more subdued than I expected!

Carlos responded courteously:

That’s how I get away with doing it in real life so much.. I’m normally not flying off the handle at every turn, I just swear a lot, but do it in a normal fashion.

As to the shitposting, it’s not constantly, but I do it from time to time:

Carlos Matias La Borde’s answer to Is it considered rude not to update an answer with a “thank you” if it receives a lot of upvotes?

And yes, I trust you will agree that the said answer is a hilarious exemplar of the genre.

---

OK, men and women of Quora.

What happened next?

To my acute surprise, I have:

• 215 questions
• 1615 answers

I already talked about why I ask questions in Nick Nicholas’ answer to As a Quoran with a reputation for your answers, which of your questions do you wish attracted more answers?

There are people on Quora who seek information, but well… even if Quora says that’s a purpose of Quora, that’s not how I use it, and I suspect that’s not how a lot of voluminous writers use it.

The questions I ask are usually either followups of discussions I’ve had (in which case they’re targetted—sometimes at myself—and will likely get an answer); or they are questions that arise out of discussions or answers, that I throw out there just in case, but am not really hanging out for answers to.

My two hesitations:

• Latvia’s north of Lithuania, right?
• My, Bosnia is a lot bigger than I thought!

This is my worst of the suite. And in my own back yard. Shameful.

So what, if anything, did I get right?

• AU
• NZ
• PNG
• Solomons
• Fiji
• New Caledonia
• Vanuatu
• Tuvalu
• (some of) Kiribati (yes, I’m surprised too)
• French Polynesia
• Pitcairn

What did I miss?

• Tonga
• Guam
• Marianas
• Wake Is
• Cook Is
• Tokelau
• Niue
• Marshall

And what did I swap?

• Swapped Samoa and American Samoa
• Put Palau at Wake Is
• Put Federated States of Micronesia in Greater Kiribati

It’s a very little used word, but yes:

Cypriot nationalism – Wikipedia

Cypriot nationalism, also known as Cypriotism, refers to one of the nationalisms of Cyprus, a shared identity of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots highlighting shared economic, political and social rights. Cypriot nationalism supports the reunification of Cyprus under a federation and the end of foreign interference (by Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom).

If you’re asking whether Cypriot Nationalism has any potency as a force driving the reunification of Cyprus: my impression is, non-zero, but not much. But I don’t live there.

Quora, style guide? I so wouldn’t want it to impose one.

Quora is a US site, but its user base is international. The sensible rule for international writing in English is to allow either Commonwealth or US usage, but for any one piece of writing to be internally consistent.

So I don’t think it necessary that you should adjust to the US convention, just because all the astronomers use US usage. Commonwealth usage is fine.

But if you’re writing in English, conventions not used in the Anglosphere *are* unnecessarily confusing.

So, to the question at hand: I would avoid the decimal comma as not being compatible with the Anglosphere: US, UK, AU all use decimal point. I note in your link that Canada uses the decimal comma, but Decimal mark explains that is only Canadian French, not Canadian English.

When writing English, use the style conventions of an English-speaking country, in my opinion.

Originally Answered:

Who are the Quora users with the most followers from each country?

I’m using Nick Nicholas’ answer to Can you name a few famous/representable Quorans from each country? as a starting point, but I’d like for us to keep updating this in the Answer wiki.

There are definitely users more popular from their countries than the ones towards the end; please contribute!

• US: Jimmy Wales, 270.6k, Adam D’Angelo, 239.8k
• India: Balaji Viswanathan, 246.9k
• UK: Oliver Emberton, 98.3k
• Australia: Xu Beixi, 38.1k
• China (incl. Hong Kong): Kaiser Kuo, 28.9k
• Mali: Rory Young, 27.9k
• Spain: Sabrina Deep, 26.0k
• Israel: Noam Kaiser, 24.1k
• Thailand: Andy Lee Chaisiri, 22.9k
• Canada: Alex Tabarrok, 22.7k
• Sweden: Mattias Petter Johansson, 20.6k
• Germany: Mikka Luster, 20.1k
• Romania: Diana Crețu, 19.1k
• Norway: Eivind Kjørstad, 15.5k
• Pakistan: Faisal Khan, 16.6k
• Netherlands: Julien Vaché, 7.6k
• Malaysia: Ryan Chew, 7.2k
• Singapore: Visakan Veerasamy, 7.1k
• Japan: Mikhail Kotykhov, 6.3k
• Serbia: Lara Novakov, 6.1k
• Iran: Pegah Esmaili, 4.8k
• Switzerland: Natalia Nezvanova, 2.7k
• Georgia: Thomas Wier, 2.7k
• France: Akli Baitiche, 2.6k
• Brazil: Jose Geraldo Gouvea, 1.1k
• Greece Dimitra Triantafyllidou, 560
• Qatar: Sven Williams, 504
• South Africa: Riaan Engelbrecht, 485
• Finland: Joonas Vakkilainen, 481
• Belgium: Sophie Dockx, 383
• Albania: Athanasios Canko, 351
• Poland: Karol Emil Thornton-Remiszewski, 321
• Italy: User, 248
• Turkey: Ayse Temmuz, 244
• Kosovo: Aziz Dida, 177
• Croatia: Tomislav Patarčić, 139
• Cyprus: Eutychius Kaimakkamis, 46

I’ve already pondered the question:

• Nick Nicholas’ answer to How many ‘ask to answer’ requests do you typically receive on Quora?
• Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you feel differently about A2A questions, compared to questions you find on your own?

I think I’m more enthusiastic about questions that catch my interest, but I am more diligent about reducing my in-queue of A2A questions, which make me panic.

Looking at my last 100 answers (and thank God I have not been cursed yet with the lightbox):

• A2As: 68
• Not A2As:32

So 70%.

I’ve just READ: Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

It’ll be interesting to read the companion short story Youth by Conrad, which I presume will have the same style, but more derring-do and less existentialism—and see if it has the same impact on me.

Oh, this was good.

I was in the strange position of having watched the film (SEEN: Apocalypse Now Redux) before the novella. So instead of finding the references from the film to the book, I was going the other way: “Oh! So the Russian is the Photo-Journalist! And the essay is the MA thesis!”

But, yes, this was good. I am all about style in prose, and this had style. This had good style, not caught up in its own cleverness, not self-conscious, but advancing the mood and the narrative, and innovative and unconventional where it needed to be. Striking images, varied tone, good use of 10 dollar words where they would be most effective.

And yet, it wasn’t just style. It was a narrative, breath-taking in its scope and philosophy—all the greater because there wasn’t that much “action”. (And the action was amazing when it happened.) By the end, I wasn’t even noticing the style, the narrative was so well oiled.

Just as Apocalypse Now was only incidentally about ’Nam, Heart of Darkness was in some ways only incidentally about King Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo. It was about much bigger, much more global themes. Many of them, I’d have thought, well in advance of their time: there was more than a little existentialism about “The Horror! The Horror!”

In some other ways, of course, Heart of Darkness is very much about King Leopold’s exploitation of the Congo. And yes, the blacks in the story are not individuated, and are caricatured, and are incomprehensible stand-ins for the Darkness. But the “pilgrims” are not less caricatured, and hardly any more individuated. And the narrator knows quite well how corrupt his enterprise is—and Kurtz recants on his own pious cant, horribly.

Sometimes, I hear a piece of music, which isn’t in my favourite style, but is in the style that I think should have prevailed. I’ve gotten that feeling about Reger, for example. (Don’t ask.)

Well, this is what prose should always have been like.