Category: Uncategorized

As Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer says, you have to go digging to find out. I joined in August 2015, when the new dispensation of moderation was already in place; and by the time I started paying attention to moderation (after Jimmy Liu was banned in May 2016), Run-Over-Pedestrian-Gate had already been and gone.

I haven’t dug enough; but this is what I have pieced together. See also: Research:Online Community Conduct Policies/Quora

• The Oct 2010 Quoragate “Blake Ross” Farrago is the first instance when a user is banned. One has to dig deep to find out what had happened, but it involved a Facebook employee working on a Facebook product competing with Quora, and I *think* moderation back then was done by Quora staff—maybe even the Founders themselves.
• The Olden Days: In 2011, Moderation is set up based on Wikipedia’s administrator policies (Transparency and Moderation by Marc Bodnick on Bodnick Old Posts, Transparency and Moderation II by Marc Bodnick on Bodnick Old Posts). Moderation is done by community volunteers as administrators, who often came to decisions jointly, and were required to log rationales for their deletion and blocking actions. They are still visible here as Emeritus Moderators. Prominent members include Christopher VanLang, Achilleas Vortselas, Tracey Bryan, Marcus Geduld, Tatiana Estévez. A lower tier of users, reviewers, could insta-collapse and report answers.
• Inactive admins were retired, and new admins appointed, every six months. (How are new admins on Quora selected, and inactive moderators retired?)
• Quora policy is developed by Quora employees. The current head of policy is also the head of Quora ontology, Jay Wacker.
• Anecdotally, Community volunteers enforcing did not work closely with Quora staff developing policy. However, VanLang has an ongoing consultative relation with Wacker.
• January 2015: Moderation at Scale: Distributing Power to More People by Marc Bodnick on The Quora Blog. Moderation is insourced to Quora employees, and moderation privileges are removed from users. Scalability is cited as the reason why. One community volunteer, Tatiana Estévez, continues on as a Quora employee.
• In the same announcement, Trusted Reporting (Quora feature) is rolled out: trusted users (initially former admins) are given the ability to insta-collapse answers, succeeding to the former Reviewer function. Anecdotally, this capability has been rolled out to some 200 users.
• September 2015: Run-Over-Pedestrian-Gate: Srikar Vallabhaneni’s answer to What are some of the most controversial answers ever written on Quora? Possibly the most controversial moderation incident, involving Marc Bodnick and Feifei Wang. While employed at Quora, Bodnick played a prominent role both in announcing policy and in castigating users about policy; it is not clear to what extent he was actually involved in enforcing policy.
• January 2017: Tatiana Estévez deletes her Rage Against Quora blog: Why was the blog Rage Against Quora deleted (noticed on January 24, 2017)? Rage Against Quora was a blog started by Estévez, from before when she was a Quora employee, as a place where users could share gripes about Quora; it was a superset of the contemporary The Insurgency and Bug? or Feature? blogs, although mostly the latter rather than the former.
• Some component of Moderation has been automated, for reasons of scalability, though we do not know how much.
• Some component of Moderation is done by Quora employees, including Tatiana Estévez and Jonathan Brill. Again, we do not know how much.
• While Quora Moderation is quite opaque, two long-standing surmises about moderation implementation have been recently confirmed. At least some moderation functionality has been subcontracted out, namely moderation of Anonymous content (Anonymous Screening by Jack Fraser on The Insurgency). And Top Writers are subject to a different moderation regimen from other users (The tribunal of the marshals by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency).

A2A by Abigail (Abbey) Beach. See, Liana? I’m not ignoring your A2As; it just takes me a while to get through them.

By the time I met PROF Anne FREADMAN,

I was the departmental IT guy, setting up Macs, and misquoting Peirce to her, a Peirce specialist.

She certainly did not owe me any academic mentoring.

Yet bless her, she did. And one of the pieces of academic mentoring she offered me was how to get me motivated to write academic papers.

Just read what other people have written. You’re eventually going to be so annoyed with how bad everyone else’s work is, you’ll want to write your own.

…

No, esteemed fellow Quorans! I am not saying that if I answer a question you have already answered, it is because what you’ve written is crap!

…

… at least, not always. 🙂

But yes, realising that other people do not have the last word on something, realising that you have something to add to the conversation; being, in fact, part of a conversation. That is a powerful motivator.

That’s what you get here.

You know what is not a powerful motivator? Just having something to say, if it’s outside of a conversation. I wrote a fair few academic papers. They were pretty niche, the only people that might care to read them were in Greece, and I wasn’t over there.

There wasn’t really a conversation: I was shooting out papers, and never heard anything back. After a few years, I stopped writing papers.

tl;dr: Pre-modern communities took centuries to assimilate, either linguistically or religiously; some didn’t assimilate at all. Modern communities, under the pressure of state nationalism, assimilate within a generation.

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We don’t have good data on language in Turkey. We know that the religious assimilation of the existing population there seems to have taken something like three or four hundred years: Nick Nicholas’ answer to When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia?—from the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, through to the 16th century. According to this view, the substantial Greek-speaking Christian population of Western Anatolia in 1900 resulted from internal migration within the Ottoman Empire, from the Aegean.

Greek and Christianity remained in Northern Turkey (Pontus) and Central Turkey (Cappadocia) up until 1922.

• The easternmost edge of the Pontus (the Of Valley) converted to Islam in the 17th century, but remained Greek speaking. Some Greek is spoken there to this day.
• Substantial populations in Cappadocia spoke Turkish, but remained Christian. R.M. Dawkins recorded several settlements in which Greek became extinct in the 19th century; Cappadocian Greek itself was clearly heading towards language death; and Turkish was the everyday language in Southern Cappadocia and in other settlements like Sille where Greek was still spoken.

After 1922, the Treaty of Lausanne provided that Greek Christian populations would remain in the islands of Imbros and Tenedos (Gökçeada, Bozcaada), and in Istanbul. Most of the Greeks of Imbros and Tenedos have left; most of the Rum population of Istanbul left after the 1955 riots.

Greek-speaking Muslims arrived in Turkey in 1922 after the population exchanges; the best known such population was from Crete. There are reports that some of them still know Greek, but the majority of them have assimilated.

In Greece: under Ottoman rule, there was Turkish settlement in northern Greece (Macedonia and Thrace), and there were conversions of Greeks to Islam (Crete). The former spoke Balkan Turkish; the latter spoke Greek, though with substantial Ottoman Turkish vocabulary, particularly with regard to religion.

The Muslim population in Crete dropped from half in around 1800 to more like a third by the late 19th century, before community violence broke out and Muslim Cretans started fleeing Crete. This suggests that there was some conversion of Muslims back to Christianity (even though this was a capital offence), as the relative prosperity of the two communities shifted.

After 1922, the Christian refugees to Greece included a substantial number of Turkish-speakers. All indications are that Turkish did not survive more than a generation in Greece, although there are certainly anecdotal reports of it being used; PAOK, the refugee-based soccer team of Salonica, was known trilingually (Greek, Pontic Greek, Turkish) as O PAOK mas/Temeteron PAOK/Bizim PAOK “our PAOK”.

The Treaty of Lausanne provided that Turkish Muslim populations would remain in Western Thrace; the community has remained Turkish-speaking and Muslim, and is educated in Turkish. indeed there are indications that the Muslim Pomaks in the region, who speak Bulgarian, have shifted to Turkish because of the greater prestige of that language.

The Muslims of the Dodecanese were not subject to the population exchanges, as the Dodecanese was under Italian rule at the time. There is a small remaining Muslim population in Rhodes and Kos; I do not know if it is Turkish-speaking.

EDIT: Selim Kaymakoglu notes in comments:

Few years ago I was two months in Rhodes for fixing my boat , heard from people there was a small turkish community with 1000 people.I ve met some of them as one guy was working for the drydock where my boat was.They speak turkish with a heavy greek accent which is ofcourse natural. By the way I am turkish .

Refer What are other question-asking websites like Quora?

Branko Jovanovic’s answer cites Yahoo Answers and Reddit as the more informal alternatives; the more formal alternative is Stack Exchange. The Stack Exchange family of sites started with Stack Overflow, where it has the monopoly as a programming advice site (that Quora could never hope to displace), and is aggressively moving to other fields; its English Language site is well established in the googles too.

FWIW, Nikolay Starostin’s answer to Is Quora overtaking Stack Exchange? indicates that Quora has been ahead of Stack Exchange this past year, but not by an overwhelming margin; and Quora’s numbers are skewed by its high Indian population.

Outside of English, Zhihu may be a Chinese knockoff of Quora, but it guarantees that Quora won’t even bother to step into the Chinese space; Mainland Chinese are well known for not venturing outside the Great Firewall. TheQuestion may ending doing the same thing with Runet. OTOH, it does not seem that the French and German existing alternatives to Quora pose a serious challenge.

Hm.

I’m bypassing the obvious answer, Frangosyriani, because that’s a song that in a sense ended the Classic Rebetika period, and marked the start of the taming of the tradition that brought about laika music.

Songs that I have a lot of time for myself include:

Πέντε Χρόνια Δικασμένος (1934). Music & Lyrics: Vangelis Papazoglou.

stixoi.info: Πέντε χρόνια δικασμένος ( Γεντί κουλέ )

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

Been condemned for five years
to Yedi Kule jail.
Had the blues so bad,
I started smoking the bong.

Blow, suck, drag it in.
Step on it and light it up.
Keep a look out for the hillbillies,
them jailers.

Five more years forgotten
by you, my dear.
The guys would light me up
the bong, to cheer me up.

Now I’m out
of Yedi Kule jail.
Fill up that bong
so we can have a smoke,

Blow, suck, drag it in.
Step on it and light it up.
Keep a look out for the alley,
here come two schmolicemen.

Κάν’ τονε Σταύρο, κάν’ τονε (1935). Music & Lyrics: Markos Vamvakaris

stixoi.info: Κάν΄ τονε Σταύρο, κάν΄ τονε

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

Set it up, Stavros, set it up,
light a fire and burn it up.

Give a puff to Mad George,
craftsman and woodworker.

Have a drag, John the carter,
you sly den-dweller.

Give it to our dear Nick,
so he can satisfy his yearning.

Give a drag to our Batis,
the thug and lady-killer.

Έφοδος στον τεκέ (1933). Lyrics: Giorgos Kamvysis. Music: Petros Kyriakos

Why yes, the animation on the video *is* by one Nick Nicholas.

stixoi.info: Έφοδος στον τεκέ

A raid on the hashish den

I started reading this book early in the evening:

Bare-faced Messiah

I did not put it down until 10 am the following morning. I did not sleep; I just kept reading and reading. The narrative it presented, of L Ron sinking into his own mythos on board a Sea Org cruise ship meandering through the Mediterranean, was devastatingly enthralling.

I’m afraid I’ve already exhausted my store of proverbial wisdom in previous answers:

• See: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What are some weird expressions?
• See: Nick Nicholas’ answer to What is your favorite proverb from your culture or country? What country is it from?

For starters, in the West, Greek affixes were used in scholarship, where it was felt they were more nuanced than what Latin had to offer. Suffixes to express ethnicity were felt to be a less rarefied domain, and English and Latin between them had it covered.

For seconds, Greek differentiated between suffixes denoting ethnicity, and adjectival suffixes. –ikos was only the latter. So a vase might be Athēnaïkos, but Thucydides could only ever be Athēnaios. Just as he was a Hellene, and not a Hellenic.

That’s why when the –ic suffix is used against countries, as OP noted, it is used as a scholarly specialist term, rather than as an ethnic term, and it is used as a convenient way to differentiate a major language from its superfamily. Germanic vs German, Turkic vs Turkish.

This is terribly inconvenient for Greek, in which Germanikos and Tourkikos are merely the adjectives for German, Turkish. The former is accordingly rendered as Teutonikos instead, but such synonyms are not usually available. The only real solution for the latter is to call them Tourkogeneis Glosses, Turkogenous languages — that is, languages that originated from (small-t) Turks.

Some of us complain about how Quora now does not let you customise anything, ever, at all, about your user experience. This is clearly an ideological thing for Quora Design.

Well, lookie here at what user config used to look like on Quora in 2010:

What can we learn from Quora?

That pendulum has swung the other way, hard; and it sure looks like it’s had a long way to swing…

A quote in this StackExchange thread applies to both 2010 Quora and current Quora:

There are two ways of constructing a software design: one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies; the other is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. — C. A. R. Hoare – abel Jan 12 ’11 at 13:58

Ριζοχώρι – Μεσσηνία | Terrabook

The village name was Lapi, which was believed to refer to the Lab tribe of Albanians (normally rendered in Greek as Liapis, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a folk etymology).

As inevitably happened with most foreign-looking village names, the village was renamed to Rizochori in 1940. The link reports that its current population is 60.

https://www.google.com.au/maps/p…