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Some answers pooh-pooh the notion that Quora is social networking—as does Quora itself. To which I say, pooh-pooh right back atcha. If you want to use a Q&A site with no social networking frippery, you use Stack Exchange. And Quora is not Stack Exchange.

(Even though, ironically, Stack Exchange has much better gamification than Quora does.)

Some answers also point out that Quora is not immune to social media stupidity, which indeed it isn’t—though I don’t know that I long for the Elder Days of Quora, when you could get any question you wanted answered on Quora, as long as it was about venture capital. There is an Eternal September phenomenon on Quora, but I certainly don’t want to go back to the Internet of 1993.

So, Quora does indeed attract a higher proportion of smart people than other social networking sites do. Why is that?

I nominate three factors.

Early Hubris. Quora was founded with unsustainable hubris. It was going to be the go-to destination for anyone of woman born that ever had a question. It was going to have the best answer to any question. It was going to replace Wikipedia. It was eventually going to replace Google.

I’m not making this shit up. Look at some of the early stuff D’Angelo was writing.

That was nonsense, and it was nonsense that it took a long time for Quora management to walk back from. (It has, mercifully; D’Angelo now talks about the best-informed opinions, rather than the best facts.) But the mission that Quora set out for itself attracted smart people, because they were interested in giving those best answers. Even if at the very start Quora had a very narrow focus, it soon broadened enough that a critical mass of smart people were contributing to it.

And of course, even before that, the hype. Oh, the hype. The hype made it clear that Quora was where smart people would hang out and give smart answers. That perception of Quora has endured to this day; not without justification, although the other two factors are what have ensured that it remains justified. Jennifer Edeburn and I have independently defined Quora as Facebook For Smart People. (I think Jennifer’s daughter’s term was Geek Facebook?) The infamous article How to Get Thousands of Leads from Quora in Five Months defines Quora as “a question-and-answer site and community for intellectuals to voice their opinions—think Yahoo Answers but with actual good advice.”

Network Effects. Smart content begets smart content. Once a critical mass of smart content is there, smart people will notice it in their googlings (or however else they come to be aware of Quora), start reading what they find interesting, and eventually start contributing more of the same.

And the much-pooh-pooh’d social networking frippery is what keeps them here. Absent the gamification of Stack Exchange, or the professional reach Stack Overflow already has within that stable, social networking frippery was always going to be how it keeps them here. Even if D’Angelo allegedly wanted to do away with comments.

Then again, I’m not sure it matters what D’Angelo or Cheever (remember him?) originally had in mind. I’m happy that Quora exists alongside Stack Exchange, rather than as the more bombastic duplicate of it.

Good Content Curation. There is much about how Quora is run that I have little time for, as those who have been reading me know. Quora Design? Runs around in circles, and accidentally generates 20% of Quora content, through people asking how to do things now that the UX has changed. Quora Moderation? The unseen 90% of what it does makes this a better place. The seen 10% of what it does deserves all the vituperation it gets. Quora Community Curation? What Quora Community Curation? It takes a little more than a Patagonia Jacket to sustain a community, rather than having your best writers repeatedly feel fungible and flee.

But Content Curation: that the bots do well. Good answers really do float to the top of the answers to any given question. They do get exposure. The topic bot is stupid, but not so stupid or resistant to community topic gnoming that it doesn’t generate real value. (QCR is another matter.)

As a result, when you come to Quora, you see smart people’s smart content quickly, and you often have to hunt to see dumb people’s dumb content. (The multiple iterations of comment redesign have been an attempt at this as well, though a rather more brutish one.) That makes it obvious to newcomers that there is smart content to be had here, and if they happen to be smart, it motivates them to stay.

Erica Friedman’s answer to What distinguishes honest questions from sealioning?

Coda: Another version of this same question (ah, irony!) asked what made sealioning different from Socratic method. Socratic method – as Socrates executed it – is a completely different form of trolling, but do not doubt that it was trolling. Socratic method – as Socrates executed it – is meant to lead an unclear thinker to deny the position they initially took with slightly misleading questions. It is no more sincere than sealioning, but is a different form of being a jerk.

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…

I’m turning 46. Vague back pain, which I can mostly ignore. Occasional headaches and lightheadedness, apparently associated with adjusting to new medication, which I am finding it harder to ignore. And of course, the heartache of a middle-aged man’s disappointments.

The received wisdom in academia is yes, although several users here (Dimitris Almyrantis and Dimitra Triantafyllidou) have questioned how feasible this is. The argument made by Speros Vryonis Jr, and summarised in Nick Nicholas’ answer to When and how did modern Turkish become the majority in Anatolia?, is that any deurbanisation and mass migration happened in the first century after the Seljuk arrival, at the end of which Anatolia was still substantially Christian. The reduction of the Christian population accelerated in the 14th and 15th centuries, and was accompanied by extensive Islamic missionary activity. By the start of the 16th century, Western Anatolia (Anatolia Eyalet) was only 1.5% Christian.

Northern Anatolia (the Pontus) and Central Anatolia (Cappadocia) seem to have been exempt from this trend; Vryonis does not discuss these, but presumably the former is to be explained by the late conquest of the Empire of Trebizond, by which time the Millet system was established and gave Christians some degree of autonomy. The Christian population in Cappadocia was small, and substantially assimilated linguistically, and this may have been more an issue of inaccessibility.

Thrace is not covered in Vryonis’ work, and my impression is that a substantial Christian population remained in place.

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?