Category: Uncategorized

Name is your blog name; e.g. My Fancy Blog.

URL is not the entire Blog URL, but the prefix of the URL: if your blog will be fancyblog.quora,com, you type fancyblog in the URL.

According to the metric I defined in Nick Nicholas’ answer to How long did it take you to become popular on Quora?, somewhere between 1000 and 1200 answers.

I’m going to go all contrarian like Evangelos Lolos did. Way too much antiquity here.

Special shoutout to John Salaris, who also went with two overtly modern names: Panagiota (Greek equivalent of Madonna), and Argyro “Silver”.

Those names ending in –o are particularly delicious. If they aren’t truncations of other names (Βαγγελιώ < Evangeline, Βαλάντω < Chrysovalantes, Δέσπω < Despina, Λενιώ < Helen), they are often names of precious substances or things, suffixed with an –o: Αστέρω “Star”, Διαμάντω “Diamond”, Κρυστάλλω “Crystal”, Ζαφείρω “Sapphire”, Ζαχάρω “Sugar”.

Greeks like to tell themselves they are a continuation of Ancient Greek names like Sappho. Hence spelling them with an omega. But if they were, they wouldn’t sound so decidedly hayseed, and be snobbed off by so many Greeks.

The likeliest derivation of that -o? No surprise there. Slavonic vocatives; cf. Bulgarian babo “grandmother (vocative)”, which has been borrowed into Greek as μπάμπω.

Yes, they’re a contrarian choice. But I still think they are charming.

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What happened when your friends found out about you being a famous Quoran?

Well, the prize for this goes to a friend of my wife’s, who took to saying “Oh My God, you’re, like, the Beyoncé of Quora”.

I mean, obviously.

Steve Theodore, https://www.quora.com/What-happe…

My response:

… Wow. Who knew that if you merged Beyoncé and Nick Nicholas, you got Porthos as portrayed by Oliver Platt:

To add to Scott Welch’s answer and Loretta B DeLoggio’s answer.

Not only do new Quorans not find out about Quora policies when they join; old Quorans don’t find out about Quora policy changes. Several Quora users a couple of months ago complained about a Quora insider (Bodnick I think) using an infographic in an answer. Quora policy used to be that you could not use a third party infographic, and insistence on doing so got Xu Beixi a six month edit block.

Quora’s answer to What is Quora’s policy on adding images and videos to answers?

Why no, infographics are not mentioned in the current policy. That aspect of the policy got quietly rescinded a few months ago, in time for Bodnick not to be in violation.

Quora using the question and answer format to publish its own policies was criticised at the start of Quora, and the criticism is right. With no use of blogs or even answer wikis to publish policy, users have no easy way to stay up to date.

My second BNBR violation. You’re gonna love this one.

It’s in a comment that’s been deleted, because that’s what happens when moderation dings a comment. Doesn’t even appear in the logs.

The context is the question:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to How well is the “new anonymity” policy on Quora working at filtering out bad content, as of March 20, 2017?

The trigger is the anonymous question (since deleted):

Why does Jack Fraser have pubes on his head? [Why does Jack Fraser have pubes on his head? Question details: “That’s not a hairstyle you dumbass. Those are fucking pubes!!!”]

My answer had featured an earlier instance of Jack Fraser being victimised by anonymous questions; I’d come across yet another instance, two weeks later, and saw fit to comment on the ongoing lack of vetting by quoting this new lapse:

Why does Jack Fraser have pubes on his head? [ Why does Jack Fraser have pubes on his head? ]

That’s not a hairstyle you dumbass. Those are fucking pubes!!!

How well is the “new anonymity” policy on Quora working at filtering out bad content, as of April 24, 2017?

Blockquotes in original.

That comment has been deleted as BNBR.

*golf clap*

Upcoming Changes to Anonymity on Quora by Riley Patterson on Quora Product Updates

All anonymous content will be reviewed for spam and harassment before receiving distribution.

Why yes. Good to know you’re on the case. Good to know that you’re continuing your track record of ignoring context, too.

I’ve appealed. Jennifer Edeburn, I know you’ll say here too that I should have provided more detail. Currently, I have to say, I don’t feel strongly motivated to.

As a complement to Dimitra Triantafyllidou’s answer and Niko Vasileas’ answer:

There was an undercurrent of resentment of the ancients and their pagan wisdom, but it remained an undercurrent.

There’s the renowned hymn on the Pentecost by Romanos the Melodist, dismissing ancient learning with puns on the pagan scholars—and alas, a favourite of the Greek nationalist blogosphere:

Οὐκοῦν εδόθη αὐτοῖς πάντων περιγενέσθαι
δι’ ὧν λαλοῦσι γλωσσῶν;
καὶ τί φιλονεικοῦσιν οἱ ἔξω ληροῦντες;
τί φυσῶσι καὶ βαμβεύουσιν οἱ Ἕλληνες;
Τί φαντάζονται πρὸς Ἄρατον τὸν τρισκατάρατον;
Τί πλανῶνται πρὸς Πλάτωνα;
Τί Δημοσθένην στέργουσι τὸν ἀσθενῆ;
Τί μὴ ὁρῶσιν Ὅμηρον ὄνειρον ἀργόν;
Τί Πυθαγόραν θρυλλοῦσι τὸν δικαίως φιμωθέντα;
Τί δὲ καὶ μὴ τρέχουσι και σέβουσιν οἷς ἐνεφανίσθη
τὸ Πανάγιον Πνεῦμα; (On the Pentecost XVII)

Was it not granted to them [the apostles] to be superior, through the languages they spoke in? And what are the fools outside arguing about? What are the Hellenes [Pagans] bloviating and blabbing about? Why does their fancy go to Aratus the accursed [triskataraton]? Why are they deceived [planōntai] to follow Plato? Why do they care about Demosthenes the weakling [asthenē]? Why don’t they see that Homer is an idle dream [oneiron]? Why do they keep going on about Pythagoras, who was justly muzzled? Why won’t they run and pay respect to those to whom the Most Holy Spirit appeared?”

The fact that Romanos was Syrian is not relevant; so was Lucian. The fact that Romanos was writing in the 7th century is relevant: there were still pagans in the Empire, and Christianity was still trying to assert itself.

This was not the elite response to antiquity: the elite response, as Dimitra said, was to embrace antiquity, and the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus, pioneered the reconciliation of Christian and Pagan learning in the 4th century. But Romanos was not part of the elite.

I’ve elsewhere spoken of how Modern Greek peasants were in distant if suspicious awe of the ruins around them: Nick Nicholas’ answer to How do Greeks feel about references to Ancient Greece?

The unlettered peasants 300 years ago had a much more straightforward relationship with the Hellenes: they were this race of pagan giants, the folk who built all them ruins; and they died out because they fell over, and couldn’t get back up…

The Parastaseis syntomoi chronikai, a 9th century description of the sights of Constantinople, shows a similar confused apprehension of the highlights of the Ancient World that Constantinople was strewn with: little-understood receptacles of magic and fear. Like Romans, the commoners of Constantinople were ambivalent about their past.

And of course, there was the ongoing feeling of inferiority towards the ancients, memorably expressed by Theodore Metochites: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do many modern Greeks feel a sense of failure or perhaps inferiority when compared with their ancient Greek ancestors? The ancients have not left us anything to say, he laments—in the introduction to an 800-page collection of essays.

There is widespread confusion on this one.

There are three iterations of the comment feature:

• Original
• Featured/Other: Featured Comments by Kelvin Ho on Quora Product Updates
• Recommended/All: More Visibility for High-Quality Comments by Diana Gerr on Quora Product Updates

Different people have had different versions of the feature rolled out at different times. Right now (weekend of 22 April 2017), some people are being moved from Featured to Recommended, and some other people (including me) are being moved from Recommended back to Original.

Which makes me conclude that Featured comments are being removed, but that Recommended comments aren’t: the move back to Original is a temporary glitch (though one I am ecstatic about).

How do I feel?

• Featured and Recommended were overengineering the problem of how to manage adverse comments, and the extra click is moderately annoying.
• I don’t have a whole lot of adverse comments to scroll through. But I don’t trust Quora to identify and sequester adverse comments; there have been a lot of innocuous and positive comments sequestered.
• In response to users complaining that Featured was promoting anything they’d upvote, Quora decided to recommend comments ignoring what the user upvoted. (The criterion appears to be somehow tied up with Top Writer status or being followed by the user.)
• So users asking for more control over what gets promoted ended up with less.
• The lesson being: do not give Quora feedback.
• Clearly opinion is split on whether three-tier comments (promoted, not-promoted, collapsed) was a good thing. I think it was not a good thing: I much prefer eyeballing through a single list of comments.

Reading English is just flowing water to me. The information just snarfs up.

Reading Modern Greek, I’m hyper-aware of stylistic differences; every concession to Ancient Greek or opening up to dialect was a political act up until the 70s, and I learned my Greek in the aftermath of that. Journalistic rigid syntax dismays me; I can rejoice with good choice of words, to the point of forgetting what the prose is talking about. That can happen in English, but the threshold is far higher.

Reading Ancient Greek, which I’m really not comfortable with, is assembling a puzzle. With a sledgehammer. I know what the bits mean, although there’s a fair bit of running to the dictionary; I find it very hard to put the bits together.

Reading French, and reading German, is glimpsing a coastline through a fog. My understanding is foggy, but good enough that I can skim—especially if it’s scholarly writing, where the vocabulary is more familiar.

Reading Esperanto is surprisingly smooth; there’s less texture and shoals to get in the way. My eyebrow still arches if I see a stylistic choice I don’t like.

That one should take life lessons from an animated fictional character available as merchandise.

As only one example of this, see:

Disney: Say No to the Merida Makeover, Keep Our Hero Brave!

In an interview with Pixar Portal, “Brave” writer and co-director Brenda Chapman stated, “Because of marketing, little girls gravitate toward princess products, so my goal was to offer up a different kind of princess — a stronger princess that both mothers and daughters could relate to, so mothers wouldn’t be pulling their hair out when their little girls were trying to dress or act like this princess. Instead they’d be like, ‘Yeah, you go girl!’”

I don’t salute a world where Merida subverts Barbie, only to be Barbified herself. I can’t salute a world where you need to look to a Merida doll to begin with.