Category: Uncategorized

• They don’t hate robots at all, and in fact they for one welcome our new robot overlords. They admit that AI is not there yet, but think that AI + humans will do a better job than humans alone. Adam D’Angelo’s answer to Do you worry that AGI (artificial general intelligence) will obviate the need for a structured knowledge repository?
• They’re right…
• … but AI is even less there than they admit, as demonstrated by the daily fails of Quora bots.
• They’re cheap. Quora is after all a business, and one that still hasn’t returned profit (although it will: Scott Welch’s answer to When do you think Quora is going to end?.) A combination of bots and subcontractors is indeed cheaper than professionals, and more scalable than volunteer admins.
• Scalable is not the same as effective, of course…
• The Terminator is on track to becoming real, but I think climate change will get us first.
• In fact, I’ve already speculated that the Quora bots are there to give us a false sense of security about how little progress AI has made. 🙂

From OED, the dialectal survivals like Yorkshire thaa reflect unstressed variants of thou (which were short); thou is a long vowel that has gone through the Great English Vowel Shift—just as house has an /aʊ/ vowel, and is still pronounced huːs in Scots.

The irregularity is you, and apparently the yow pronunciation was around in the 17th century and survives in dialect. OED has a somewhat convoluted account, but the bit of it I find convincing is ēow > you patterning with new, as a /iuː/ instance exempt from the Vowel Shift:

In early Middle English the initial palatal absorbed the first element of the diphthong /iu/ (the regular reflex of Old English ēo plus w ), resulting, after the shift of stress from a falling to a rising diphthong, in /juː/; a stage already reached (in some speech) by the early 13th cent. (compare the form ȝuw in the Ormulum). Middle English long ū thus produced was subject to regular diphthongization to /aʊ/ by the operation of the Great Vowel Shift, as is attested by some 16th- and 17th-cent. orthoepists, who also provide evidence that by the second half of the 17th cent. this pronunciation had come to be regarded as a vulgarism; it survives in a number of modern regional English varieties. The modern standard pronunciation derives partly from a Middle English unstressed variant with short ŭ , subsequently restressed and lengthened, and partly from a form which preserved the falling diphthong /iu/ and subsequently shared the development of other words with this sound (e.g. new adj., true adj.) in which the shift of stress to /juː/did not take place until later; see further E. J. Dobson Eng. Pronunc. 1500–1700 (ed. 2, 1968) II. §§4, 178.

(The unstressed variant of you with short ŭ would be pronounced yuh; it is of course the form usually spelled ya.)

The criterion for a deactivation appearing in Necrologue is that it is accompanied by another action indicating either sanction from Quora, or user dissatisfaction with Quora: Category definitions by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue.

People deactivate all the time, and users did not want Necrologue to be filled up with random reports of other users taking time out for exams; at user request, Argologue was set up separately, for users who are just taking time out of Quora for Real Life-related reasons.

Jordan has not indicated why she’s deactivated, or how long she’s deactivated for; so I have not reported her for either.

It has been alleged that several Quora accounts have been hacked in June 2017, with spurious deletion requests issued by the hackers, and promptly honoured by Quora. The team of users investigating the breach have identified a couple of vulnerabilities related to Cloudbleed as the likely culprit, possibly via Zendesk (used to manage email communications between users and Quora). Read recent posts on The Insurgency and Cordially Resistant for more.

(The group’s own blog has just been deleted, possibly as a reaction to Top Writer complaints, and the group lead has deactivated his account.)

At least one user impacted reports that he is in conversation with Quora to get his account restored, and the claim has been brought to Quora’s attention via intermediaries on the Top Writer Facebook lounge.

So Quora may be helping those whose accounts have been hacked.

To my knowledge, Quora has not to date communicated about whether the claims are true or not, nor what precautions users should take. (The Quorableed group recommend changing both your Zendesk password and your Quora password.)

The reticence of Quora to communicate to its user base on Quora is longstanding. I am A2A’ing Tatiana Estevez and Jonathan Brill.

EDIT: Update on Account Deletion Processes by Paula Griffin on The Quora Moderation Blog

The in-universe explanation (to treat Greek mythology like fantasy fiction, and that’s not that absurd really) is

He was renamed Heracles [“glory of Hera”] in an unsuccessful attempt to mollify Hera. (Heracles – Wikipedia)

Stepping behind the curtain, in his monograph on Greek religion (p. 322), Walter Burkert says the name might be a coincidence; but he thinks it likelier that Heracles being subject to Eurysthenes and his protector goddess Hera, and the multiple instances where Heracles cross-dressed, point to a hero whose very point was that he could fall from being the son of Zeus to being disempowered (oppressed by a female goddess, cross-dressing like a woman).

Edward Conway has assembled the following list of Quora blogs, some of which were new to me. Some of these have not been updated in years; some of these are where we get the latest skinny from. All of these, we submit to your attention. Thank you, Edward!

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Some of these are tangential…and unfortunately Paul Stockley’s answer to In April 2017, how do you find out which blogs you follow in Quora? means compiling a list is by memory and recent Notifications, as Following a Blog is not listed the way Following a Quoran is…

Official Word of Quora:

• Media Spotlight – everything published in authorized media republishers of Quora content, each week, by publisher
• Sessions on Quora (upcoming Sessions, basically for Quora Sessions what Media Spotlight is for republishing)
• The Quora Moderation Blog
• Quora Design – Design and technical posts from Quora employees about Quora
• Engineering at Quora – Similar to the above
• Data @ Quora
• https://building-quora.quora.com/
• Quora Product Updates – Where Quora Employees announce new features and changes.
• The Quora Blog – similar to the above
• Quora Boards Updates – older, but has some interesting historical content
• Quora & the World – ditto

Not labeled as official, but often posted to by officials and useful in getting official rulings:

• Topic Gnomery (asking questions and discussing Topic architecture)
• Quora Topic Ontology Blog (official announcements about Topic architecture)
• Moderation FAQs (thanks to Amanda Harris )
• Life at Quora – living as a Quora employee
• Publish This: Quora’s Publishing Nominations Blog (blog is official, and is a useful nominating place for content to be later republished and highlighted in Media Spotlight above, however individual posts are not official)
• Redirect Hell (asking questions about question merging)

Not official, but used to discuss and share ideas for improving Quora:

• Quora Feature Requests Notepad

Not official, but frequently triggers official comments, discussion, and input:

• Quora Topic Bot Humor (arguably worth pairing with Topic Gnomery, given how often the “QTB did something silly -> people comment -> QTB staff comments and discusses solutions” scenario plays out there)

Uncertain status:

• Quora Bug Reports
• Quora Help Desk – has some useful links Quora needs to add to a FAQ
• Quora Question Patterns

Swearwords in general, no. See Nick Nicholas’ answer to Does Quora frown upon cussing in one’s answers?

Swearwords that violate current societal taboos about race, as opposed to older taboos about sex: yes. See for example BNBR violation against myself. by Habib Fanny on Sophokagathia

Swearwords that violate current societal taboos about sexuality: depends, but I would encourage you to err on the side of caution.

Quora’s answer to What is Quora’s “Be Nice, Be Respectful” policy? bans:

• Racial, sexual, homophobic, ageist, religious, political, ethnic, or other epithets directed against another contributor.

It also bans:

content or […] a tone that would be interpreted by a reasonable observer as a form of hate speech, particularly toward a race, gender, religion, nationality, ethnicity, political group, sexual orientation or another similar characteristic.

On the other hand, it has a more draconian policy about racial invective:

Using any of the words on Wikipedia’s list of ethnic slurs is not allowed in questions, answers, or comments, unless the purpose is to ask a sincere question about the usage/background of the word.

So saying that a zebra called you a nigger would, per policy, be an automatic benburr. Saying that a zebra called you a faggot may not, and it would be less likely if (a) you are in fact gay, and (b) the moderator is not feeling robotic today. But context is going to matter in such a judgement call, and as Bodnick famously said, Moderation does not do content, let alone context.

Fuck is safe from BNBR sanction. Nigger is unsafe. Faggot from my reading of the policy could be either, but if the context is not clearly pro-gay (reasonable observer), it is likely unsafe.

I’m doubtful by the way that censor-asterisks would make much of a difference, but there’s no explicit policy formulation about that.

Quora, once again, is contradictory about this. Jay Wacker, consider this feedback.

• Quora’s answer to Does content on Quora need to be written in English?

Quora requires that content on English Quora (quora.com) be written in English.

Content includes blogs.

• Quora’s answer to Does Quora enforce its moderation policies on blog content and comments?

Blogs that have content primarily in a language other than English should not attach English topics to the blog.

This presupposes that blogs can be in languages other than English.

The former answer is newer, so I presume it takes priority; the latter answer hasn’t been updated in three years.

Xianhang Zhang’s answer to What are some of the basic “Community Management 101” mistakes that Quora has made? (written 2010, updated 2013):

• Inadequate information architecture of the existing documented procedures. Dogfooding is all well and good but Quora deciding to put its charter documents in the same Q&A system as everything else means that they’re fragmented and may as well not exist for new users.

And, I’ll add, difficult to keep up to date and consistent. As Elliot Mason can attest (Beware of the Leopard).

Nicole Livingstone: Nicole Dawn Livingstone, OAM (born 24 June 1971) is an Australian former competitive swimmer, Olympic silver medallist, and a television sports commentator and radio presenter. Livingstone competed for Australia in three summer Olympics – 1988, 1992, and 1996 – winning both individual and team medals.

NICOLE LIVINGSTONE O.A.M.

Nicole Livingstone, or, as we imaginatively call her at the time, “Dead Rock”, was in my class for a year when I was 13. Outside of the rarefied circles of Quora and Klingon linguistics, she is more famous than me.

Booooo…

Oh, what was my impression of her? Let’s just say, the onset of puberty is not a time that brings out the best in anyone. And in the unlikely event she remembers me, she’d say the same about me.

Quora is not as clear about this as it should be (of course), but:

• What is Quora’s “Be Nice, Be Respectful” policy? indicates that BNBR applies to answers, comments, and messages.
• Quora’s answer to Does Quora enforce its moderation policies on blog content and comments? indicates that a more *diluted* version of BNBR applies to blogs:

Blogs on Quora are generally unmoderated. Most policies that apply to question-and-answer pages do not apply to blogs.

That includes the policy against memes.

1. Blogs whose primary purpose is to attack, insult, and/or derogatorily label people are not allowed.

• In assessing whether a blog violates this rule, we will evaluate the blog’s content (if the blog is public), photo, title, and description. We may also take into account how much other value there is on the blog.

[…]

2. Blogs which aren’t aimed at attacking people but still have a purpose of attacking content will no longer generate notifications or repost trackbacks.

If the memes target content rather than people, Quora can limdist them, but they won’t necessarily ban them. Presumably that applies to blogs such as Why, Booty?, which do in fact primarily exist to “attack” (make fun of) content (questions), and thus would normally violate BNBR.