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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.

This is (a) very old and (b) profane. Hope it’s what you’re looking for, Vangeli. Whether or not it’s what you’re looking for, it’s what you’re getting from me.

The Greeks got hold of the alphabet in the early 8th century BC. If you’re studying the history of the Greek alphabet, as I’ve done, you will inevitably come across the graffiti found in 1898, near the Thera gymnasium. Dating from the late 8th century BC, they use a version of the Greek alphabet so archaic, it lacks not only an omega, but even a phi: the /pʰ/ sound was written out just as it was by the Romans, as a pi followed by a Heta.

This particular metrical inscription captured my interest (Inscriptiones Graecae xii 3.537 = Iambica Adespota 29Aa):

ΝΑΙΤΟΝΔΕΛΠΗΙΝΙΟΝΕΚΡΙΜΟ
ΝΤΕΔΕΟΙΠΗΕΠΑΙΔΑΒΑΘΥΚΛΕΟΣΑΔΕΛΠΗΕΟ

If you clean it up, introduce word spaces, and guess which vowels were meant to be long, you get:

ναι τον Δελπ⊢ινιον ε̣ Κριμο̄ν
τε̄δε ο̄ιπ⊢ε παιδα, Βαθυκλεος αδελπ⊢εο[ν]

And if you use conventional Greek orthography:

ναὶ <μὰ> τὸν Δελφίνιον,
ἦ Κρίμων τῆδε ᾦφε παῖδα Βαθυκλέος, ἀδελφεόν.

“Truly, by the Delphic Apollo, here have I, Crimon, something the son of Bathycles, brother of…”

So, what was written down as oiphe, with a <p> and an <h>, is indeed ɔ́ːipʰe… Ok, so what’s the something?

At the time I read this, I had just got hold of the source code of the Perseus Project’s morphological analyser, Morpheus. I typed the word in…

… and got bupkis. I got bupkis, even though the verb ᾦφε belongs to was included in the Morpheus lexical database. The catch is that the verb is on the obscure side with regard to the Classical canon; so it had not been entered manually: it had been automatically extracted from LSJ. And the extraction (at the time) was so poor, that list of verbs was just ignored when the source code was compiled.

That discovery set me on the path to improving Morpheus over the next 12 years, for use in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, until my contract was not renewed last year; on which see The Decalogue of Nick #2.

But… I’m getting off the topic. That ᾦφε verb, it turns out, is the past tense of οἴφω. And what does οἴφω mean?

If you look it up in the Victorian-era LSJ dictionary, you will get a Victorian-era definition:

οἴφω, Dor. = ὀχεύω I, but only of human beings, τὰν Χελιδονίδα Plu.Pyrrh.28, cf. IG12(3).536 (Thera, vii B. C.), Leg.Gort.2.3; οἰφεῖ, as if from οἰφέω, in prov. ἄριστα χωλὸς οἰ., Mimn.15 Diehl, Com.Adesp.36, Diogenian.2.2. (LSJ)

And… what is this cross-referenced ὀχεύω?

of male animals, cover.

So, oiphō is the Doric for “to cover”, referring to male animals, only oiphō refers specifically to human beings.

There is, of course, a more direct way of glossing the old Doric verb:

“Truly, by the Delphic Apollo, here have I, Crimon, fucked the son of Bathycles, brother of…”

One can debate how obscene the verb actually was. Greek Homosexuality argues that since the word was also used in the Law Code of Gortyn (“oiphō by force” = “rape”), it isn’t meant to be coarse; but it isn’t meant to be as delicate as “cover”, either. (Then again, did profanity work in the same way in Ancient Greek society?) There’s also been fertile debate (see Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece) about whether this situated pederasty in a religious context (invoking the god), or just as commonplace bragging.

But whatever the social interpretation, this is indeed an interesting example of Ancient Greek vernacular.

Read Scott Welch’s answer to When do you think Quora is going to end? Read it early, and read it often.

Quora is a business, and its business goal is to maximise the exchange of information—and the advertiser eyeballs that exchange attracts. That’s why they hated infographics: they’re not googleable, so they don’t raise the Google Page Rank of Quora pages, so they won’t attract viewers from Google (which is what advertisers want).

What would happen if Quora adds video upload? It would mean they’ve got a good deal going with a video host, and with Text-To-Speech transformation, so they can get more googleable text out of you. Presumably, they’d make the text googlable on the same page, otherwise there’s no Google benefit.

… I have to say, I think that means both Quora and Google would be very different businesses than they are now.

• Google prioritising hidden text for Page Rank? I don’t see it. Google putting the effort in to make audio on uploaded videos searchable? Text-To-Speech has gotten astonishingly good, but it’s a huge effort, for not clearly enough payoff.
• Quora embracing media hard to search with current tools—especially tools they don’t control, such as Google? Unless Quora is bought out by Google (which would not be such a terrible thing), I’m not seeing it.

If Quora pushes video answers, as opposing to tolerating videos accompanying text answers, then Quora will no longer be Quora as we know it: it will truly have embraced a social media role. And I gotta say, it’ll be a social media role even I wouldn’t be comfortable with.

It will, in fact, have become QuoraTube.

And I’d argue that, if you want a Tube site for social exchange, you already know where to find YouTube and FaceBook…

Being a Greek linguist, my first thought would be to think of proti– as the Epic Greek equivalent of Attic pros– “towards”, as in prosthetic or proselytise or prosody, and to think: “Dude! you picked up the wrong Greek dictionary!”

Then I would notice the <f> of –forate, and realise that no, this has to be a Latin word, and it’s unlikely to be half Homeric Greek and half Ciceronian Latin.

And then I’d defer to Lotte Meester: Lotte Meester’s answer to What would you say the word “protiforate” means? And Lotte, you’re right: don’t put haplologies like that in any exams. 🙂

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.

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!