Category: Uncategorized

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.

I don’t wear glasses much any more; just for driving or concerts, really, and I don’t do much of either. In fact, I had to go back one and a half years to find any photos of me with glasses at all.

So,

Now, I’m been led astray from a romantic notion of Turkmenistan as the homeland of Turkdom, and from the religious content of the video, which is clearly triggering some sort of heightened rhetorical register.

But this sounded like… a hyperauthentic Turkish. A Turkish that ululates, proudly, what it is. Stern and guttural, with no mumbling.

Ancient Greek made a distinction between thieves and robbers: kleptēs vs lēistēs or harpax. Both kleptēs and lēistēs are used in the New Testament; the men crucified with Jesus were lēistai.

The Modern Greek vernacular had lost the word lēistēs, and had kept the word kleptēs (as kleftis) to refer to both thieves and robbers.

Brigands are robbers are thieves. Brigands were also celebrated in folksong as indomitable rebels, and formed the backbone of the Greek War of Independence. So brigands, as Klephts, were much feted in the newly independent Greece:

Klephts (Greek κλέφτης, kléftis, pl. κλέφτες, kléftes, which means “thief” and perhaps originally meant just “brigand”) were highwaymen turned self-appointed armatoloi, anti-Ottoman insurgents, and warlike mountain-folk who lived in the countryside when Greece was a part of the Ottoman Empire. They were the descendants of Greeks who retreated into the mountains during the 15th century in order to avoid Ottoman rule. They carried on a continuous war against Ottoman rule and remained active as brigands until the 19th century.

The catch is that Klephts were really just brigands. As folk songs make clear, they would rob rich Christian and rich Muslim alike. They fought the good fight during the War of Independence—and after the War of Independence, they went back to robbing the citizens of the new Greek State. Which was more than a little embarrassing if the new Greek State is using them as part of its foundation story.

The Greek State had a means to deal with this embarrassment: the introduction of Puristic Greek, as a move back towards Classical Greek. The indomitable heroes of the revolution could go on being called klephts. The current scoundrels holding up Greek nationals in mountain passes may well have been the exact same people; but they were not going to be called the same heroic name. They were listis (lēistēs): the ancient and Biblical word was brought back, to castigate them. (Those folk songs featuring the brigands robbing Christians were judiciously ignored, too.)

As a result, Modern Greek now has a word for robber, listis, a word for thief, kleftis, and a cognitive dissonance about the fact that kleftis is also a heroic indomitable hero type.

Stoyan Shentov’s answer that Greeks ultimately came from the Proto–Indo-European homeland is not unreasonable; but we can answer the question more proximately, as what the likely homeland of the Proto-Greek speakers were. (And of course, the Proto-Greek speakers did not come into terra nullius: they intermarried with the Pelasgians or whatever they were who were already living there.)

See Greeks – Wikipedia and Proto-Greek language – Wikipedia. It has long been agreed that the proto-Greeks came from north of Greece, and that the Dorians were a subsequent wave of migration.

The Proto-Greeks probably arrived at the area now called Greece, in the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. The sequence of migrations into the Greek mainland during the 2nd millennium BC has to be reconstructed on the basis of the ancient Greek dialects, as they presented themselves centuries later and are therefore subject to some uncertainties. There were at least two migrations, the first being the Ionians and Aeolians, which resulted in Mycenaean Greece by the 16th century BC, and the second, the Dorian invasion, around the 11th century BC, displacing the Arcadocypriot dialects, which descended from the Mycenaean period. Both migrations occur at incisive periods, the Mycenaean at the transition to the Late Bronze Age and the Doric at the Bronze Age collapse.

An alternative hypothesis has been put forth by linguist Vladimir Georgiev, who places Proto-Greek speakers in northwestern Greece by the Early Helladic period (3rd millennium BC), i.e. towards the end of the European Neolithic.

Survey question, and I’m looking forward to someone bringing up the Amharic sarcasm mark.

Greek punctuation functionally corresponds to English punctuation—mostly.

• Upper dot <·> corresponds to semicolon.
• In Ancient Greek typography, the upper dot is usually also used in the function of the English colon. Modern Greek typography uses the colon.
• Ancient punctuation had a middle dot as well as an upper dot, for different length pauses. Modern typography does not differentiate a middle dot from the upper dot.
• The Greek interrogative is identical to the Latin semicolon <;>.
• Quotation marks in Modern Greek typography have traditionally been the French guillemets <« »>. Through English influence, you will now see more English double quotes.
• Like French, Greek uses the quotation dash <―>.
• There is a native counterpart to the ampersand, the kai ligature <ϗ>, but it is no longer in wide use.
• Abbreviations are occasionally marked with double prime <″>, although that is quite old fashioned. The only instance anyone living is likely to have seen is Χ″ as an abbreviation of the surname prefix Χατζη- “Hatzi-”; e.g. Χ″μάρκου “Hatzimarkou”. Much more common now is the solidus </>; e.g. παν/μειο = πανεπιστήμειο “university”, Κων/πολη = Κωνσταντινούπολη “Constantinople”.

There is not one community. Something anticipated as far back as 2010: Seb Paquet’s answer to Does Quora actually need a community? There are clear splits in the community, enabled by the fact that different Quora users see very different feeds, determined by the topics and people they follow.

quora numbers by the departed Laura Hale demonstrated this with what statistics she could glean, and it is corroborated in all your experience. American Quora users notoriously know very little of what happens in the Indian Quora, and their demographics and interests are vastly different. Most Quora users have no idea who the Discord teens are, or who the Insurgents are. I certainly know very little of the Venture Capital old core of Quora.

Whenever I see too many people agreeing on something in their own interest here, I grow contrarian. It brings out the inner Michaelis Maus in me; there are uses to nihilism.

Others have spoken well, and to applause, about the anti-intellectualism and bias of the Urban Dictionary definitions. Michael Masiello has conceded in comments that there is plenty of vapidity on Quora, but that the anti-intellectualism of the Urban Dictionary definitions is the greater enemy.

I’ve given up on anti-intellectualism as something I can have any engagement with. Fight with the dullards of Urban Dictionary? Why bother? As we say in Greek, “from the miller’s wife’s arse, one expects no orthography.” But I do expect better of the vapid than of the stupid, and I’m going to be contrarian about this.

I’ll do my own close reading of the infamous first definition, and I’ll ignore its stylistic infelicities:

The internet’s self-conscious act of intellectual validity and authority.

Well, https://www.quora.com/about:

Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge. […] We want to connect the people who have knowledge to the people who need it, to bring together people with different perspectives so they can understand each other better, and to empower everyone to share their knowledge for the benefit of the rest of the world.

Quora Inc claims authority, and markets itself as such—whatever its actual users are doing. There’s a fair bit of hubris in that mission, and in those aligning to that mission—particularly in the notion (naive in so many fields) that there is a best or right answer to a question, and that that answer is to be had here.

Unsurprisingly primarily self-centered and authoritarian instead of rational.

This could be the response of a disgruntled libertarian, but the same Quora Inc would tell you that the Quora users had no business making the libertarian feel like that to begin with, because users should be made to feel welcome regardless of their ideology: hence Bodnick saying that BNBR applied to Trump during the election campaign.

Appeal to authority, to self-interest, or to one’s own righteousness in political debate are certainly nothing to take pride in—even if right wingers’ construct of “rationality” is often blinkered.

Some of the more objective or positive entries might at first make one assume that most people there are not just as insufferable as anywhere else and like any community on the internet,

Hold on to that concession. Have we not all felt that Quora is better than other fora, because of the elevated level of discourse, the relative civility, the conscious exercise of scholarship and objectivity?

albeit maybe at the same time with an even more all-encompassing entitlement and smug self-satisfaction.

… and have we then not all been disappointed to see that some popular writers here are still smug, self-righteous, know-it-alls speaking outside their domains of knowledge, and hostile to any questioning of their premises?

Surely it isn’t just me.

And assume that the triviality of most of the questions would be self-aware and not lost on most of the people.

The bizarre use of “self-aware” notwithstanding, have users not been complaining about the quality of questions, and political questions particularly, for years?

Highly restrictive, not only in the artificial question and answer format,

Is the Q & A format not restrictive? Quora is not Medium; that’s why blogs on Quora exist. That’s why plenty of users use the questions as springboards rather than as requests for information. And let’s not even get started on Survey Questions, solicitations of anecdote rather than answers to questions—which are so contrary to what Quora thought it was about, they were on limdist for the first few years of the site.

You can retort that if you came to write on Quora, you came to answer questions, and if you want Medium, you know where to find it; yet there is clear evidence here of people wiggling against those constraints.

but also the ultra-strict length limitations

Hands up who has come up against the length limits on questions or question details. Even if you accept the rationale for them, they are restrictive, and Quora users feel those restrictions.

and rampant auto-correct functions, Content Review and straightforward censorship.

I’ve seen answers decrying the protest against censorship, as being democratic or in the cause of moderation decency. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone praising Quora’s auto-correct, topic bot, and certainly not Quora Content Review. And radicals of both left and right will tell you how tone policing and sanctions on speech is a repressive instrument that quashes dissent and advocacy of change.

I think BNBR is overall a useful thing too, sure; but do not pretend BNBR is politically neutral, or that Silicon Valley corporations are, just because they aren’t an arm of the US Government.

Moderation is more concerned with keeping up appearances than with moral tasks, consistency and transparency.

I’m actually not convinced Moderation is particularly concerned with appearances either, although I can see why a right-winger taken to task for the vehemence of their opinions might think so. And I certainly would not entrust morality policing to Quora moderators or mod bots, just as Quora itself is reluctant to.

But complaints about Moderation consistency are legion, and have been for years; and Moderation is notoriously not transparent by design.

Sanctimonious, arrogant, prejudiced and irrational and with a cult-like devotion to their brand and policy taken literally and subjectively.

I’ve seen all of this here. Again: haven’t you?

Actual psychopaths, either self-proclaimed in order to effectively show off or those whose practices are harboured there, are the hipsters of the place.

… Yeah, ok, that last bit made no sense. 🙂

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And what would I offer to Urban Dictionary?

To its users, Quora is a site where people who think they are clever write essays answering questions. Often in dot points, sometimes good. Quora is smarter than Yahoo Answers, more unfocussed than Stack Exchange, and less free-flowing than Reddit.

To its owners, Quora is a Google Trap that is going to make them gajillions of bucks in perpetuity.