Category: Uncategorized

It’s a commonplace that the people (or bots) selecting answers for the Digest are not the same people (or bots) that moderate answers. Answers that appear in the Digest are routinely collapsed after the fact, because the two tasks are undertaken by two separate parties.

Of course, answers get collapsed if they are reported by someone, and moderators agree with the report assessment: Quora is not resourced to collapse all answers proactively. The more visible an answer, the more likely it will be reported by someone, because someone will notice it and not like it.

And answers that appear on Digest are more visible than others.

This is a topic about a user who has been banned, and who has just deleted their account (and, I take it, their topic).

Perhaps… the user had some very negative followers.

Very negative:

Bug? Or… feature!

I will not be confused with an ethologist. But I do know that whenever I try to dance with my honey, and our dog is anywhere near, Jenny gets excited, wags her tail, and jumps on us to join in.

Fricking dog.

My understanding with what little I know of ethology is, Jenny does so because she understands dancing as equivalent to dogs’ play-fighting. That, she understands; that’s why she wants to join in. So I’d assume that’s the shortcircuit in her brain, rather than understanding dance on its own terms.

Dogs are also hypersensitive to changes in people’s gait. Jenny gets very agitated when she sees me on a swing; but that’s something I gathered from reading, rather than from Jenny. I think the freakout of dogs seeing the changed gait of dancers would overrule any recognition of controlled gait as communication.

Latin script in Unicode – Wikipedia

As of version 9.0 of the Unicode Standard, 1,350 characters in the following blocks are classified as belonging to the Latin script

Let’s remove the uppercase letters; and that leaves us with your answer. From eyeballing:

26+30+128+104+14*8+12+12+67+26 = 517

That leaves 833.

If I’m wrong, I’m not wrong by much.

EDIT: Derek Zech’s answer to How many letters does Unicode currently include in the Latin script, no matter the language, but ignoring upper vs. lower case differences? leaves out more letters than I do, is more thorough, and he sounds more correct. Go upvote him: Vote #1 Derek Zech.

None of the answers satisfy me, though Logan R. Kearsley’s is by far the closest to satisfying me.

EDIT: Uri Granta’s answer satisfies me more than mine. Go read that.

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There is a colloquial register in English, in which the first person subject is omitted routinely. It predates social media; see, for example the Beatles’ A Day in the Life. The bits Lennon wrote use the pronoun; the middle section McCartney wrote skips it:

Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup,
And looking up I noticed I was late.
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke,
Somebody spoke and I went into a dream

But contra Logan, I don’t think this is just spoken English. I think this is a particular narrative register of spoken English—it’s a conventionalised way of telling stories, in a punchy way. I don’t think you’ll find it in different kinds of speech, such as say persuasive speech or instructional speech.

Jimmy Chapel

He explains in his profile bio why he left. He was a social conservative and a conservative catholic, but he wasn’t trolling or abusive, so the reason for which he left are kinda sad.

MVW. RIP. (Unless that’s a bug, not a feature.)

• Day before yesterday, MVW badges were gone for McKayla, but not yesterday.
• Yesterday, MVW badges were gone for me.
• Today, MVW badges are back.

Let’s just pause a bit, shall we?

We are on a platform whose UX changes weekly. We have no idea whether changes on the UX are intentional or not. We surmise that certain features are not in favour by the designers, because of related changes. When features disappear from the UX, we are genuinely—genuinely—baffled as to whether they are bugs, deliberate features, or A/B trial balloons. We assume deliberate change, because we decide that certain features are under a cloud. And right now, I still don’t know whether the badges are back for good, or whether I’m in some A/B game of Nomic.

Guys?

Design Offsite: What Makes for a Good 2017? by Quora on Life at Quora

Yeah, you guys. Remember us? The users?

Do you think we’re being well served by this?

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David Cole’s answer to What is the role of a product designer at Quora? (David Cole, Director of Design at Quora; I think he’s the guy in red in the photo.)

Like all software product design teams, we are responsible for Quora’s user interface. We’re actively building out and unifying our design system, focusing heavily on typography and the core reading interactions. We primarily concern ourselves with clarity over cleverness, seeing UI innovation as a means to an end and not something to pursue for its own sake.

(Emphasis mine)

This has been an issue of contention between me and my wife. My wife would rather be in a traffic jam for 2 hours, than catch the train. I’ve been an annoyed passenger on such occasions.

None of the other reasons brought up by respondents applies. So long as you are heading to the CBD, Melbourne’s train service is excellent, although it is unpleasantly congested at peak time. It is more affordable than driving and parking. My wife’s work at the time was a fairly direct route, although she would have had to hop off the train and onto a tram.

The main reason, really, was cultural. I caught the train to school in high school, and I have been a train commuter for 30 years. My wife has never had to depend on public transport, and has not felt the need to.

As for incentives, price is a powerful motivator. When petrol prices went up a couple of years ago, train patronage went up 7%. It actually posed a challenge to the train network capacity.

This was originally a comment to Sophie Dockx: Quora Moderation is Under Attack : https://insurgency.quora.com/Sop… . Republishing here with permission from Dan Rosenthal. (See also my comment in the original place published.)

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I’d take any claims of unjust banning from controversial users such as Sophie with an enormous grain of salt. Look, I’ve worked in online community management for a long time, including administrating/moderating on social media outlets WAY bigger than Quora; I’ve also represented clients in consumer protection claims when they come to me wanting to sue a website for “wrongfully banning” them. 99% of the time when someone says they were banned unfairly, they are wrong. Sometimes it’s intentional attempts to deceive; other times it’s just human nature of an inability to admit one’s mistakes. But it’s very, very rare to actually see someone having been permanently banned by mistake. And even in the cases I’ve seen on Quora where a ban was unquestionably by mistake, they’ve been reversed within a day or two.

Now, this is not to say things are lovely in Quora Moderation land. Quora Moderation is all kinds of broken and insufficient; but I have to laugh at the concept that it’s because they’re banning *too many* people.

Fake names are a problem, but on their own — absent any other bad behavior — the only impact they have is making it more difficult to assess a user’s credibility.

The real problem is that fake names are highly correlated w/ malicious users intent solely (or largely) on bad behavior. And Quora’s small moderation team is not doing a good enough job of identifying potential trouble users and flagging them in such a way that they can be quickly moderated. Instead, almost all users — good and bad — appear to be treated as part of the same pool, causing moderator overload.

Put it this way — when triaging an accident scene, do you think the doctor should start w/ the people showing no outward signs of injury, or the people bleeding profusely?

There are plenty of ways this can be done. Machine Learning is something Quora keeps harping on about, to the point of writing public articles about it. Yet Quora’s ML for moderation is, frankly, trash. A proper, robust system, would be self-correcting from analyzing the patterns of manually-banned users and increasingly flagging similar accounts as potential threat vectors. A proper, robust system, would keep this pool segregated from the general population of Quora users, so they can be monitored and their interactions can be vetted. We see the first halting steps at this with the anonymity review period, for instance; but it could be so much more.

Meanwhile, there is no parallel process to handle direct reporting of actual confirmed problem users post-incident, from trusted users, because frankly even those of us with access to moderation resources aren’t getting responses from said resources. I’ve personally made Quora moderation staff aware of a well known user, with evidence of that person openly admitting to using multiple sockpuppet accounts to harass me, combined with contextual evidence analyzed from their writing. Despite personally directing a moderator’s attention to that, not only has no action been taking, it didn’t even merit a response.

So no, I don’t think the problem is that Quora is banning the wrong people. I think the problem is that Quora is not banning nearly enough people, and as a result errors are visibly magnified because they’re not being measured against any noticeable progress.

Yiannis Papadopoulos has done the right homework, OP, of finding Greek Wedding 1879 Melbourne, mentioning your ancestor.

For those confused by that: A Constance Ocass of Cerigo (= Cythera) got married in Melbourne in 1879. Tahlia O’Cass (the OP) is his descendant, and posted in that thread. The surname is clearly mangled from something Hellenic, and another descendent, Rita Kocass, posted that her family’s information was that the surname was Kokakarsas, and that he was from Skorpios near Ithaca.

1879 is extremely early, and both Ithaca and Cythera are completely plausible for migration from Greece that early (the only other place Constance might have come from was Kastellorizo).

Yiannis Papadopoulos is right that Kokakarsas does not sound Greek, and Google reports no such surname; given the penetration of the Web by now, including historical archives, I’m reasonably confident there wasn’t ever such a surname, and that something got mangled in the Kocass family tradition.

Given User-13249930999434776143’s answer that Kokakarsas is a bunch of Albanian vulgarities, it’s not impossible that an Albanian trolled the Kocass family about their surname, but I think it’s demographically unlikely. Neither Cythera nor Ithaca are Arvanitika territory, so I don’t think indigenous swearwords are the pathway for the surname either.

There’s a book on Cythera surnames (Καλλίγερος, Εμμανουήλ Π.: Κυθηραϊκά Επώνυμα. Εταιρεία Κυθηραϊκών Μελετών. First edition: 2002, Second edition: 2006), and Untitled Document lists the 258 surnames discussed in that book. None of them look like –(k)okas–. Kalie Zervos in that genealogy thread guessed that it might be “Cassimaty or Castrissios” , and Κασιμάτης and Καστρίσιος from the book’s list are indeed the only matches to Kas-. Karatzas isn’t much closer. Maybe Γεωργάς Georgás? But surely that would have just ended up as George.

There’s a monograph on Ithacan surnames from 1959 (Τοπωνυμικόν της νήσου Ιθάκης και επώνυμα Ιθακησίων / Σπύρου Ν. Μουσούρη (Φώτου Γιοφύλλη).), which is not online. There is a huge list of Cephallonian surnames (Ithaca being the island next door), compiled by Miliarakis in 1890: Anemi – Digital Library of Modern Greek Studies – Γεωγραφία πολιτική νέα και αρχαία του νομού Κεφαλληνίας υπό Αντωνίου Μηλιαράκη., digitised list at the end of Ιστορικές διαδρομές. From that list of some 1200 surnames, I get a few more possible matches, but they’re still distant: Oktoratos, Orkoulas, Kokkolatos, Kokkosis, Kaskanis, Kassandrinos.

The Melbourne Greek Orthodox Community has put up images of its minutes from 1897 to 1916: Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria. (Btw, that is *not* how you publish archival images. A simple PDF would have been a lot better.) Nothing jumped out as matching O’Cass there either, and Constance Ocass died in 1896. At any rate, he became Anglican, so his progeny wouldn’t have shown up in the Orthodox church’s logs—though as the genealogy thread says, one of his sons may have married in the Orthodox Church in Sydney.

I don’t think I’ve helped you, Tahlia. If you have more patience than me, you can pore over the 1897–1916 ledger, but I suspect your ancestors won’t show up there. If you *do* get somewhere, please let us know!