Should people be banned from Quora?

Thanks for A2A, Stephen McInerney.

I run Necrologue, and the stream of banned users I keep posting, including users I have come to consider friends, has made me numb and disillusioned. The reflexive defending of current moderation practices, by beneficiaries of The tribunal of the marshals, has made me break communion with some of them, and block them—including one respondent to this thread.

It is also the case that the bans that get attention are the ones that should be controversial. The no-account no-follower spammers? The overt trolls and death threats and illiterates? Noone notices their passing, noone questions their banning, and noone laments them. The ban needs to be an option to Moderation.

It also needs to be an option wielded with discretion and judgement. Informed and sensitive judgement. Human judgment. The judgment, in fact, already afforded to a subset of users by the Tribunal of the Marshals, at least if the user exceeds some objective notability threshold. (The Quill is not an objective notability threshold.) It was thus before the Great Insourcing of Moderation. I do not have confidence that it is the case now.

I agree with Peter Flom’s answer; but where he says “It just needs to be done a bit better”, I’d say “a hell of a lot better.”

Not that it will.

A history lesson: Run-Over-Pedestrian-Gate

Srikar Vallabhaneni’s answer to What are some of the most controversial answers ever written on Quora?: an account of Run-Over-Pedestrian-Gate (Sep 2015).

That boycott threat that initiated Cordially Resistant? Look at the list of people who in fact did boycott Quora, for two weeks to a month, in the wake of Run-Over-Pedestrian-Gate:

Quora gossips will be amused by people boycotting Quora while distancing themselves from other people boycotting Quora.

One of the people doing the boycott started a career of Quora dissidence then. One of them was close to ending it, and was banned shortly afterwards. One of them was banned as a result of it. One of them is a good egg. One of them no longer posts here. One of them is as inner sanctum as it gets.

The upset against the instigator of Run-Over-Pedestrian-Gate was considerable, and the issue of personal intervention in Quora decision-making much more overt. This was a game played at much, much higher stakes than the bans of teen Quorans we have seen more recently.

Did anything come of that boycott?

https://allpurposeanswers.quora….

Eivind Kjørstad, Sep 20, 2015

I don’t know if it’ll matter to you. But I’d like to tell you that some very minor steps DID get taken towards rectifying 2 of these wrongs.

First, Marco Procopio’s block got reversed. Marc acknowledged that blocking him was wrong, apologized, and undid it.

Secondly, Feifeis identical question about USA has been reinstated, and is no longer deleted.

Personally, I’m still disappointed in the way this has been handled, it’s good that those 2 things has been fixed, but I’d like to see a unblocking of Feifei and Noel too.

Read on in the thread:

https://allpurposeanswers.quora….

Eivind Kjørstad Sep 20, 2015

I’m starting to think that it’s problematic to have the Top Brass for moderating the community be as active as he is in participating in it.

I mean, Tatiana looked at it, but you can’t really expect anyone to manage to neutrally decide on whether or not their own superior at work broke the rules.

Besides; even when the evaluation truly is fair; it will give the impression of not being; and impressions matter a whole lot in situations like this. If reasonable people reasonably get the IMPRESSION that Quora handles such things in a poor way, then that’s a problem no matter what the reality of it is.

And there’s one more thing; If you’re in position of authority like this, it’s really not enough that you stay a hairs breath inside the rules. You want to stay such a comfortable distance from the edge that nobody can even reasonably accuse you of having overstepped.

If you’re top brass at a anti-DUI-organization and you’re pulled over with a BAC of 0.075% then you’ve royally messed up; even if you’re in a state where the legal limit is 0.08%.

Instead, what I hear is: “I really think my behaviour was marginally on the right side of the limit, and employees of mine confirm this, so I don’t see a problem.”

And that’s a problem.

For better or worse, I don’t think we’ve had anything *that* blatant in the past two years. And there is an upside to the Quora staff not using their own product—at least, not as much as the particular former staff member did.

Eivind Kjørstad, btw. Once again, confirmed as a Good Egg.

Does the village of Lapi, presumably in the Messinia province of Greece, still exist?

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…

How old are you and what bodily pain do you have right now?

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.

Is it true that most of the Greeks in Anatolia and Thrace converted to Islam and became Turks during the Seljuk and Ottoman years?

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.

It’s really amazing how Greek-speaking Muslims in Turkey and Turkish-speaking Christians in Greece got assimilated. How long did it take?

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.


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 .

What are some similar sites like Quora? Does Quora face stiff competition from them?

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.

What are the best Greek Rebetika songs?

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

What is the most compelling, captivating, and impossible-to-put-down book you’ve ever read?

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.

What is your favourite Greek proverb and why?