A non-trivial one. The meaning needs to be captured, and the meaning is that “it is no more than what it already is; we are stuck with it.” Which means I’d rather render the second is as ‘become’, ‘end up’.
Est sicut factum est “it is as it has become” is a start.
Ut fit sic sit “as it becomes, so let it be” is catchier, though perhaps it goes in a different direction (“if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”).
Est id, quidquid fit “Whatever it is becoming, it’s that” is maybe a bit closer.
Quora raises $85 million to expand internationally and develop its ads business. Bérénice Magistretti wrote this piece.
Highlights:
Founded in 2009, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company has grown steadily over the years, unfazed by the enticing allure of startup stardom.
… I concede, this is true.
“There’s this media hype a lot of companies in Silicon Valley go for,” said D’Angelo. “I think it gets in the way of the mission and it’s not in our culture or values. We’re just really focused on making a good product.”
… with the proviso that Good Product does not mean “pleasant for its users”, but rather “effective at what D’Angelo wants to see happen”: (1) profits, (2) training bed for AI, (3) some notion of democratised knowledge, that I *still* don’t understand, even after reading Mills Baker’s answer to Why should designers work at Quora?.
And it seems users are responding, as the platform currently has 190 million monthly unique visitors, according to D’Angelo. The user base has nearly doubled since he last reported the metrics a year ago.
And remember: those are Googlers, not active Quora users. Which is where the advertising money is going to come from.
D’Angelo believes translating Quora helps democratize information online. “The English ecosystem on the internet is very strong, as there are various blogs and forums out there,” he said. “When you go into some of these other languages, however, there’s really not as much.”
… I like the untapped advertising market explanation better. And the “blogs and forums” quote has amused me when this was cited here two weeks ago, since that’s emphatically what Quora says it is not in English.
When asked about a Chinese version, D’Angelo answered: “It’s very hard for U.S. internet companies to make it in China.”
Zhihu (Q&A website): a Quora knockoff that beat Quora to the Chinese market.
Competition-wise, Quora is often compared to Wikipedia, even by our account. But D’Angelo doesn’t view the online encyclopedia as a direct competitor. “We’re trying to be a primary source of information, and they’re a secondary source,” he said. “And Quora is more about people’s opinions and analysis rather than factual information.”
There’s a lot of Quora users I’d love to wave that quote under. Including, I suspect, the 2010 version of D’Angelo.
Q for quality
… Wha?
Last year, D’Angelo answered a question about Quora’s user base, explaining that the company doesn’t focus much on these numbers because it usually optimizes for quality, which comes with a tradeoff against volume.
… OK…
Rather than burn cash and scale too quickly to show off inflated metrics, the company says it has been cautious when deploying new products.
… Cautious?
And the quality of the content shows.
… Wha?
In addition to implementing stricter rules to ban bad actors from the platform,
… Jack Fraser, how have those stricter rules been working out for Mike Cavedon? 😐
And why does Magistretti assume that copy pasting a press release on anonymity controls counts as journalism?
Quora has put in place a series of carefully curated editorial formats, which include “Writing Sessions.” World leaders such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former U.S. President Barack Obama, and more recently, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, have all been hosts and answered questions.
That is a highlight feature of Quora? Really?
I’ll admit to disappointment. But of course, the casual random surfing Google really is impressed by that kind of thing.
Investors in the Valley apparently believe Quora is a good bet and seem to trust D’Angelo’s steady leadership. Backers include Benchmark Capital, Peter Thiel, and Y Combinator (Quora is a YC alumnus from 2014). The company has raised a total of approximately $235 million to date.
I hate it when David S. Rose is right.
The fresh money will be used to expand the platform internationally, grow the business side,
Well, that had to happen, and it *is* a good thing.
and make new hires, especially machine learning engineers, to help personalize the content users see.
… Shit. More bots.
Today’s funding announcement begs the question of when Quora will file for an initial public offering (IPO). “Our goal is to be a long-term, independent company,” said D’Angelo. “We expect that we will go public at some point.”
Not surprised Magistretti misuses “beg the question”. She was impressed by Clinton’s interns hosting a writing session. 🙂
One indication of a gradual shift into exit mode is the implementation of a self-service advertising model on Quora. “I think ads is a very good way to be a sustainable business and become cashflow positive,” said D’Angelo. “And it’s very compatible with our mission to provide a free service to everyone in the world.”
Yup. Ads are going to be the way of the future. They’ve just gotten a smidgeon more obtrusive on the mobile version; there’s going to be a lot more of that. Emmanuel-Francis Nwaolisa Ogomegbunam, your theory on why there is so much blank space in the Quora margins is about to be tested.
Quora’s recent hires also suggest a future IPO. Shortly after its head of business and community, Marc Bodnick, left last year, the company went on a hiring spree.
… An interesting juxtaposition by Magistretti…
In the past six months, Quora has recruited a group of powerhouse women, including Kelly Battles — who is on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation — as Quora’s first chief financial officer (CFO), and tapped Karen Kramer to be the company’s first general counsel. Other hires include Helen Min, Quora’s first head of marketing (who joined from Dropbox), and Tami Rosen, who will be joining from Apple in May as vice president of people, responsible for HR and recruiting.
Hey! We can add these to that question about what Quora’s Org Chart looks like!
Oh wait. Quora already locked it.
And they didn’t even do so on the advice of counsel.
There’s no shortage of Chinese speakers here, and they’ll give better informed answers than me. But:
Mandarin Chinese is not Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese was a bit of a scholarly game, and writers relished the ambiguity of the homophones and the overall oracularity of it all. People in real life don’t, and Mandarin has dealt with homophony the way many languages do, by adding disambiguating words. Though people still have fun with Homophonic puns in Mandarin Chinese.
So the word for bat, fú 蝠, is homophonous with the word for good fortune, fú 福, and as a result bats commonly feature in Chinese art. But people who actually speak the language don’t call bats fú. They call them 蝙蝠 biānfú, combining two words for bat.
For another instance of ambiguity, look at Megan Cox’s answer to What are some homophones in Mandarin Chinese?. As Megan points out, there is homophony between bīng 冰 ‘ice’ and bìng 病 ‘illness, esp. mental illness’.
That’s not as homophonous as it gets; bīng 兵 (soldier) is a true homophone, and Wikipedia’s article on homophonic puns reports that in 1882, when there was fear of rebellions around Beijing, the sale of ice was banned as a result.
But even with that near homophony of bīng and bìng, Megan as a learner of Chinese may have been confused, yelling 你有病吗？ “Have you got a mental illness?” at the convenience store when she thought she was asking for ice. But the shop owner worked out what was going on, and he wouldn’t have been confused if she was fluent in Chinese. Ice as a noun is not bīng 冰 , but bīngkuài 冰块 ‘ice piece, ice cube’. So it would never be ambiguous with the noun bìng 病 ‘illness’.
Steven de Guzman, who was the main poster to the blog and spam detective, got banned three times. The third ban has stuck.
Quora does not like this blog, and in fact thinks that it is getting in the way of them doing their own job. See the arguments between Timothy Wingerter (Quora employee at the time) and Guzman in comments; e.g. https://spamdetectives.quora.com…, https://spamdetectives.quora.com…, and especially https://spamdetectives.quora.com….
(Do read that last comment, even if it is quite long. It’s very rare that we hear anything from Quora employees about what they’re doing, and Wingerter does make a cogent argument for why they don’t want their spam process usurped by users.)
Not to mention Is Spam Detectives at risk of being deleted? by Steven de Guzman on Spam detectives, and Incorrectly banned on @Quora for allegedly having sock puppet accounts (Part 2) —Steve’s second ban was rescinded on the condition that he did not continue to report spam, which he did not adhere to. (His return prompted Wingerter’s comment that he’d rather the blog did not exist.)
Read the blog and comments, talk to other posters there, and make your own assessment; but anecdotally, if you link to or repost too much spam, the bots and/or mods will mistake you for a spammer, or find that your efforts are getting in the way of their efforts, and take action against you.
Longer than 10 years; I’ve certainly seen forms like that, but they were routinely used in the 19th century. From the following, it wasn’t just one authority that made a single decision; it’s been incremental and exception-ridden, although (from footnotes) the big authorities like Fowler and Hart were influential in advocating against 19th century forms like Brahms’ and James’:
Many respected authorities recommend that practically all singular nouns, including those ending with a sibilant sound, have possessive forms with an extra s after the apostrophe so that the spelling reflects the underlying pronunciation. Examples include Oxford University Press, the Modern Language Association, the BBC and The Economist. Such authorities demand possessive singulars like these: Senator Jones’s umbrella; Tony Adams’s friend. Rules that modify or extend the standard principle have included the following:
- If the singular possessive is difficult or awkward to pronounce with an added sibilant, do not add an extra s; these exceptions are supported by The Guardian, Yahoo! Style Guide, and The American Heritage Book of English Usage. Such sources permit possessive singulars like these: Socrates’ later suggestion; or Achilles’ heel if that is how the pronunciation is intended.
- Classical, biblical, and similar names ending in a sibilant, especially if they are polysyllabic, do not take an added s in the possessive; among sources giving exceptions of this kind are The Times and The Elements of Style, which make general stipulations, and Vanderbilt University, which mentions only Moses and Jesus. As a particular case, Jesus’ is very commonly written instead of Jesus’s – even by people who would otherwise add ’s in, for example, James’s or Chris’s. Jesus’ is referred to as “an accepted liturgical archaism” in Hart’s Rules.
Although less common, some contemporary writers still follow the older practice of omitting the extra s in all cases ending with a sibilant, but usually not when written -x or -xe. Some contemporary authorities such as the Associated Press Stylebook recommend or allow the practice of omitting the extra “s” in all words ending with an “s”, but not in words ending with other sibilants (“z” and “x”). The 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style [2003] recommended the traditional practice, which included providing for several exceptions to accommodate spoken usage such as the omission of the extra s after a polysyllabic word ending in a sibilant, but the 16th edition [2010] no longer recommends omitting the extra “s”.
From Is Jesus’ or Jesus’s the Possessive Jesus?, Jesus’s has been advocated in non-liturgical use at least as far back as the original Hart’s Rules in 1904.
Because to the Greeks, the people who spoke about him the most, and whose historical accounts influenced the West’s understanding of Alexander the most, saying he was Greek wouldn’t mean anything: they were Greek themselves, after all. But saying he was from Macedon meant a lot to Greeks: Macedon had a marginal presence in Classical antiquity, then all of a sudden conquered the world. (That’s not taking a side on how Greek the Ancient Macedonians were, btw.) And Macedon was the state he was the king of, not Greece.
If you want some parallels, try George W Bush: to Americans, and indeed to the Anglosphere, the fact that he was (or rather, proclaimed himself to be) Texan was noteworthy; the fact that he was American was taken as given. And Franz-Joseph was the emperor of Austria–Hungary; we don’t refer to him as Austrian.
I was hoping to find instances of the people he conquered calling him Alexander the Greek, but it doesn’t look like it. Hebrew per Wikipedia (אלכסנדר הגדול – ויקיפדיה) uses Alexander the Great אלכסנדר הגדול or Alexander of Macedon אלכסנדר מוקדון. Ditto Arabic per Wikipedia (الإسكندر الأكبر – ويكيبيديا، الموسوعة الحرة): Alexander the Great (الإسكندر الأكبر، والإسكندر الكبير) or Alexander of Macedon (الإسكندر المقدوني), or Alexander the Two-Horned (الإسكندر ذو القرنين)—though per Alexander the Great in the Quran – Wikipedia, the earliest identification of the Two-Horned One of the Quran with Alexander, in the 9th century, referred to him as Greek:
Dhu al-Qarnain is Alexander the Greek, the king of Persia and Greece, or the king of the east and the west, for because of this he was called Dhul-Qarnayn [meaning, ‘the two-horned one’]
I’ve been A2A’d this question, which strikes me as odd. I am pretty urban, and as a friend once said, I’m ok with fauna as long as it stays the hell the other side of the car window.
So the following recommendation is made more on character and writing, than on my capacity to judge his expertise.
Rory writes less than he used to, and never was voluminous. But Rory is a Mensch fighting the good fight, and is well worth your time.
Quora?
The site which has socially hacked its editor so that almost all users are convinced they can’t use emojis at all ([math]unicode{x1F61D}[/math]), and almost all of those users are patting themselves on the back at how wonderful it is that no emoji shall sully their path? ([math]unicode{x1F644}[/math])
That Quora?
Quora does not have emojis that it has advocated for the creation of in Unicode, no. But are there any emojis proper to Quora, and characteristic of it—that we might term, Quora’s own emojis?
Well, to research this question, I perused Quora’s Instagram account: Quora (@quora) • Instagram photos and videos, which seems to be using all the emojis saved up from Quora itself. The most common emoji there was the globe, which accompanies all mentions of internationalisation. ([math]unicode{x1F30E}[/math])
And yes, that’s the version of the globe emoji showing the Americas. Never forget that Quora is in Mountain View, CA; they certainly don’t.
I tried to repeat the experiment on Quora’s Twitter feed, Quora (@Quora) | Twitter; but I was quickly overwhelmed by the Shutterstock photos, and the overrepresentation of answers by Quora employees.
*shudder*
So. If Quora were to claim an emoji as its own, what emoji would it be?
I give you: the Thinking Face emoji!
[math]huge{unicode{x1F914}}[/math]
It is an emoji which can convey multiple perspectives simultaneously.
I’m not going to speak to the details of the question, but to the general question: how to help instill your ethnic identity abroad, in a child whose identity you have some say in. (If you don’t have a direct say in it, Andrew Crawford’s answer applies: be a good role model.)
The way to instill your ethnic identity is to build fond associations of family and rootedness and affect in the child with that identity. And even so, being Greek in Melbourne in the 1980s was not the same as being Greek in Athens in the 1980s. Being Greek in Melbourne in the 2010s, even less so. It’s a losing battle. But by being positive and warm about it, you can make the loss more gradual, and more reluctant.
Guidelines for this blog by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue
I solicit personal messages from users, to let me know who’s been banned or blocked: How does Nick Nicholas keep track of all those Quora users who are banned, edit blocked, deactivated, etc?
- This blog will publish notifications as they come to the editor’s attention.
- This information must be independently verifiable (big red banner on their profile; posting by the user indicating that they are leaving Quora; notice of edit blocking in user log).
- Posts on this blog will only name the users in question. Speculation about why people have been banned or blocked will not be entertained. If I find what could be construed as speculation or BNBR violations, I will invite commenters to delete their comments.
- No value judgement about why people have been banned will be entertained. Some people may well have deserved it. Maybe even most. Some may not. But the purpose of this blog is to raise visibility of moderator actions; not to protest it.
- BNBR applies in comments.
See also Category definitions by Nick Nicholas on Necrologue for the kinds of user status tracked. As of April,
- Deactivation notices will not be published by default to Necrologue. The community is invited to submit such notices to Argologue instead.