Category: Uncategorized

Quora Users might. Quora does not. And once again, we need to get out of the pernicious habit of thinking that the needs of the two coincide, and that Quora has any interest in making life easier for its writers, at the expense of its own goals.

Yes, yes, Hanlon’s razor, but humour me. It’s an interesting intellectual exercise.

Quora believes questions on Quora need to be general and universal, and increasingly: evergreen.

It’s an interesting exercise, searching for the word evergreen on Quora. When writers use the word evergreen, they tend to use it negatively. To them, this is yet another instance of the same goddamn question, which they are bored of answering, and it’s dumb anyway.

Now Quora agrees that there shouldn’t be multiple instances of the same goddamn question. Which is why none of you have question details any more. Be careful what you wish for.

But Quora doesn’t care what its writers are bored of answering. Because people on Google aren’t bored of doing the same searches: there’s a lot more of them, they’re not as smart (on average) or as jaded as Quora writers, and there’s a lot more churn among them. And those eyeballs from people on Google, asking inane repetitions of the same question, are what bring in glorious, lovely, monetisable eyeballs for advertisers.

(Top Writers don’t get to watch ads. That doesn’t make them privileged stakeholders. That makes them loss-leaders.)

To Quora, evergreen isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. A feature that will make them a motza. A feature that they are already telling advertisers will make them a motza:

Why brands should be writing on Quora by Alecia Li Morgan on Quora for Business

SEO and Evergreen Content: Quora content is searchable through Google and usually ranks high on the search engine. Quora answers can reach millions of people who are searching for an answer to a particular question. And answers on Quora don’t disappear or lose momentum after a few minutes or days. They’re evergreen, continuing to garner views, upvotes, comments, and shares beyond the normal lifespan of a post on other platforms, and lasting years in the internet spotlight. When building a content strategy for your business or simply for yourself as a thought leader, Quora should be at the top of your list.

[Her emphasis, not mine.]

… And here you were, thinking you were helping democratise knowledge.

(Maybe you’re doing that too; humans can do doublethink.)

So. If you’re Quora UX, you are a bumbling nincompoop from the perspective of the writers. But we’ve seen that UX doesn’t need to make writers happy at all (and they couldn’t make them less happy if they tried), because they’re about the readers:

Designing Your Own Metrics by Jackson Mohsenin on Quora Design

if Bios weren’t accurately representing an author’s relationship to a question, and we just work on getting more and more of them, it could lead to readers seeing many unhelpful bios on Quora, lowering their overall trust in the product.

The fact that a bunch of writers have given up in frustration having credentials is immaterial to that goal.

So.

Does Quora want to see both a Created and a Last Modified date on Questions? Noooooo. Because that’s clutter that only a writer would find useful. UX must be Streamlined! And Clean! And Funky! And Endlessly Scrolling, Partying Like It’s 2010!

Does Quora want to see a date on a Question at all? Noooooo. Because that would demotivate people from writing clickbait answers to canonical answers, and their canonicity means that they have to be treated as evergreen. Out of time and space. Valid for the long tail of clickability.

Remember. Evergreen sells. Good for business. Putting dates on questions puts a mental expiry date on them. Bad for business. Good for writers, but screw them, they’re gonna keep writing anyway. And if they won’t, a bunch of new ones will.

Why yes, I am vituperative. I doubt that I am also wrong.

And what are we writers to do, confronted with this?

As a wise Nick 🙂 recently said:

We obviously aren’t going to convert Quora to our mindset. All we can do is use Quora for our own ends; we ignore Quora’s ends where they diverge from ours, and we resist, as much as we can, Quora getting in the way of our ends.

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PS. Wanna know what Quora Design think of long-time Quora writers? Here’s Mohsenin again.

As Quora grew, we relied on Bios more and thornier problems began to emerge. We saw topic experts in many fields either not use Bios at all or use them in a jokey fashion. While those jokes might be funny to seasoned Quora users, they’re unhelpful and confusing to readers, and create a bad norm for newer authors.

Does it sound to you like “seasoned Quora users” are the core constituency he cares about keeping happy?

Yeah, arguably he’s right about jokes. But no, they aren’t. And if more of them give up on having credentials at all, if they can’t or won’t work out how to provide a credential Quora likes? As far as Quora’s concerned, that’s a win.

The five answers given quote the facts, but I’m afraid they don’t understand the facts.

Nigh comes from the original Old English word for “near”.

Near comes from the Old Norse for “nearer”. It came to England with the Vikings.

They are not the same etymology. They are related (cognate) words, just as shirt from Old English and skirt from Old Norse are related: but the last time they constituted the selfsame word (ignoring that one is a comparative) was in proto-Germanic. In 800, when the Vikings came to England, English nēah and Norse nær were two separate words from two separate languages.

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My thanks to Syarif Fadhlurrahman for his clarification in comments.

Near comes from Old English with some influence from Old Norse. It’s not totally from Old Norse:

‘nigh’
ON: ná
OE: neah

‘nearer’
ON: nær
OE: near

‘nearest’
ON: ‘næst’
OE: ‘niehst’

Granted, Oxford assigns only the Old Norse etymology, but I don’t see why. Perhaps due to non-adjectival use? (Old Norse ‘naer’ can function as adverb and preposition)

I gather the question is about how I receive them rather than how I give them, given that this question is related to How important are gender presentation and different pronouns to you as a transgender person?

I’m a bloke. I don’t want to be told I’m not a bloke, and I’ll be rather surprised if someone thinks I’m not a bloke.

I present as a bloke. I’m quite happy to present as a bloke, and despite the occasional “no, I’m secure in my sexuality” joke, I haven’t particularly delved into gender ambiguity.

I have identities that are more pressing and conscious to me than masculinity; then again, masculinity is the kind of identity that fades into the all-encompassing background readily.

Like Kimberly Alexander’s answer says, cis people don’t particularly reflect on gender the way trans people are forced to. Ditto any privileged identity group: the privilege is in not being Othered.

(That’s why I call you Westerners beef-eaters on Quora all the time.)

I think half a dozen, and one of them on this thread.

Ouch.

It hasn’t been a mystery for any of them, though in one case the blocking seemed to me a massively disproportionate reaction to the offence. But that gets to be their call to make, not mine.

I’ve been blocked and unblocked once on the matters *I* regard as my core domain, the union of Greek and Language. Most of the blocks relate to the matters everyone else likely assumes are my core domain: assuming the mantle of being a Quora critic.

In my estimation, I’ve gained more from those I’ve come to associate through assuming that mantle than I’ve lost.

And that gets to be my call to make.

Oh, of course I’m going to give you an Insurgency-tinged answer, Martin!

If Quora Inc were a human, they’d be one of those infuriating people who eat seven meals a day and are still stick-thin, and that chain smoke but will still live to be a hundred. It keeps doing things that the normal laws of nature would have you predict would lead to them being quite sick, but they keep getting away with murder. (Where, for murder, read VC capital.)

I’m sceptical to what extent mathematics enters into any reasoning about human language (and Lojbanists actually highlight that language is not reducible to truth-conditional logic). But much of what you’re saying is the bet behind Natural semantic metalanguage, which tries to define every concept ever in a language that looks like English, but that has only an extremely small number of primitive words.

NSM was a thing of cruel, adamantine beauty back in the 70s and 80s, when it had just 14 primitives. It was also of course utterly unusable as a practical tool for eliciting meaning. It’s now up to 63.

A favourite party trick of Anna Wierzbicka’s undergrads, at least in my day, was to try to hold conversations in NSM. It can be done. It can’t be done efficiently enough to count as a real conversation; but it does meet a generous definition of “in real time”.

Clearly from other answers, Quora polices its Top Writer meetup at or near Quora Inc HQ zealously from non-invitees such as spouses or the unquilled.

But the question did not say Top Writer Meetup At Mountain View (2017). It just said Top Writer Meetup (2017).

Whereby I submit to you:

Tom Robinson’s answer to What was the 2017 New York Top Writer’s meetup like?

Tom Robinson, you are a mensch, but you already knew that.

This is something that used to work.

It now does not work, although the prompts are pretending that it does work.

Somehow, I think this reflects the inner workings of Quora UX’s Story Thought. Or whatever else the Quora Design team write on Quora, when they’re not introducing new and bold functionality into their product.

When someone submits a post to your blog, and they’re not an Author, you’re allowed to reject it.

Courtesy dictates that, if you do, you say why.

And the UI indicates so, too:

I’ve done so before.

This past few weeks, I’ve clicked “optional explanation”. Nothing happens; the hyperlink is to the page you’re already on. I’ve clicked Ignore Submission: no popup to say why, like there used to be, and certainly no notification to the author that you’ve rejected their submission.

Yes, I have reported this as a bug, two weeks ago. For all the good that seems to do.

No, I can’t show you a ticket number to confirm that. Because Quora.

But maybe I’m just not imaginative enough. Maybe this is actually a Feature.

A feature to illustrate the futility of all things in this Vale of Tears, perhaps, including blog submissions.

Or, maybe, I’m being trapped in Story Thinking, of how I just want to reject a blog submission politely, and Quora Design is trying to nudge me into System Thinking (i.e. seeing the big picture), that blogs are a deprecated part of the Quora Experience, and everyone should just stick to Q&A.

And then again, maybe regression testing is just another thing that gets in the way of Quora Design DEPLOYING EVERYTHING ON THEIR DRIVE TO PRODUCTION IN 8 MINUTES!!!!!111!!11!!!!!eleven!!!

But remember, boys and girls:

Marc Bodnick’s answer to Do you think Quora removing the question details feature was a good idea?

You want your favorite consumer technology companies taking risks and making big changes! This is how things get better.

Indeed.

That kind of snide remark is also how Scott Welch gets blocked by everyone at Quora, for that matter. (I’ve already been blocked by one staff member, yay me.) But, as the Greek proverb goes—

—all together now, you’ve heard me say it often enough:

Θέλω ν’ αγιάσω μα δε μ’ αφήνουν. I’m trying to be a saint, but they won’t let me!

(A) Because Quora in Spanish, French, German, and Italian already exist by now. There may even be more in the future. Maybe.

(B) Because Chris Tou’s answer to Does content on Quora need to be written in English?, from 2011, still holds:

However, there are probably still several good reasons to promote the use of one standardized on a site such as this. For example, using only one language allows everyone to be able to communicate and share. You won’t have someone giving an answer in, say, Chinese, and then have worry about translating it to another language for others to understand.

Another possible reason is that it’s hard to moderate posts in languages you do not understand. Quora relies on a form self-regulated community. Having separate languages promotes segregation and becomes hard for the community to self-regulate unless they spoke that specific language. On a forum where there are more members, that could work, as each specific language community would monitor itself, but Quora is not yet there, I think.

Not using English on Quora does exclude people that don’t speak that language; speaking English is one of the few prereqs to joining here.

So Questions and Answers not in English are verboten on Quora in English. It’s not as clear whether blogs can be not in English (Can I write a Quora blog in a language other than English?); reportedly they used to be explicitly allowed, with provisos of English topics and titles, and the blog जय महाराष्ट्र | Jay Maharashtra is still going strong. See discussion at https://www.quora.com/Can-I-writ…

I have seen comment chat between people in languages other than English, but very infrequently. I have occasionally tried to initiate that, in German and Greek; sometimes, it’s worked.

Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream!
My spirit not awakening, till the beam
Of an Eternity should bring the morrow.
Yes! tho’ that long dream were of hopeless sorrow,
’Twere better than the cold reality
Of waking life, to him whose heart must be,
And hath been still, upon the lovely earth,
A chaos of deep passion, from his birth.

I make of it something different than you make of it, Magister. I make of it the bitter refrain of the middle-aged, in song and in lyric: that the vigour and felicity of youth are not cherished when we’re in the midst of them, and are lamented by us when they’re gone. The wish that the grudging disappointments of middle age, and the aches of senectitude, could be effaced; that we could transition directly from youth to the hereafter, without the gift of youth being tarnished within our very frames.

“Hope I die before I get old”—How old’s the guy who sang that now? 72?

And clicking through to the question details that the shmucks here in Quora Product Design still permit us—Dreams: yes. The imagined, the fleed-to, the dreamed, the recollection with rose-coloured glasses, is always better than what we live in cold reality. In fact—and you and I both know this, mi senex—the youth that was once cold reality was no match for the youth of middle-aged dreams. I didn’t enjoy being young. I didn’t get to have much fun, and I thought my long dream was of hopeless sorrow at the time—because I knew no true sorrow. I didn’t enjoy my vigour, because I knew no decrepitude. I didn’t think things lovely, because I knew no ugliness.

We Greeks, we have a saying for that too. Κάθε πέρσι και καλύτερα. Each “last year” is better than the next.

I recognise the sentiment, mi senex. I recognise that sentiment which colours all of what I do. My last year was better than this too, for having had your voice in it.

(And for having had question details.)

And yet, that’s easy. It’s easy to regret what’s gone; it’s hard to rejoice in what follows. It’s easy to regret vigour; it’s hard to rejoice in wisdom. It’s easy to lament in friends gone; it’s hard to rejoice in friends gained.

It’s easy to have missed your voice. It’s hard to know that mine, too, is a voice that will one day be missed.

Zhou Enlai was old too, in 1972. Alice Goodman, on the other hand, was just 29 when she put these words in his mouth. But she knew what words she did put in his mouth:

I am old and I cannot sleep
forever, like the young, nor hope
that death will be a novelty
but endless wakefulness when I
put down my work and go to bed.
How much of what we did was good?
Everything seems to move beyond
our remedy. Come, heal this wound.
At this hour nothing can be done.
Just before dawn the birds begin,
the warblers who prefer the dark,
the cage-birds answering. To work!
Outside this room the chill of grace
lies heavy on the morning grass.