Category: Uncategorized

The badges are gone from my profile. The MVW lists are gone from topics like Greek (language) that used to have them.

This was reported gone yesterday (McKayla Kennedy’s answer to As of April 2017, what should I do to view the list of “most viewed” writers in a topic?), but not for everyone. It’s gone for me today. Given how the feature had been crippled already, I have little incentive to think this is a bug as opposed to a feature (see Bug? or Feature?) Who knows: it might come back. The “Follows You” badge did. It might not.

Most Viewed Writers (Quora feature). Like all good, bad, and indifferent ideas on Quora design, it did not last.

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Designing an Offsite for Designers by Giselle Rahn on Quora Design

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

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EDIT: (cc Daniel Ross Jordan Yates Martha Lancaster Abdelrahman Hamdy)

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What do you think of the changes to the Most Viewed Writer system on Quora? (Feb 15 2017)

So… how will “writers who are most actively contributing and helping people within the topics they know and care about” be recognised now? [citing Most Viewed Writers by Jackson Mohsenin on The Quora Blog, 2015–08–14]

Well I guess the badges are still there. For now.

Yes. I called it.

What did I think, when I found out that anonymous answerers will not be able to comment or be notified on comments—followed immediately by this?

I thought of the Greek saying Θέλω ν’ αγιάσω μα δε μ’ αφήνουν.

“I’m trying to become a saint. But they won’t let me!”

… They really won’t.

EDIT: And today… they’re back.

Like I said in comments. The User Experience here is like a fricking game of Nomic.

The analyses given by Stephen McInerney and Miguel Paraz are… not implausible. But let me take self-interest as a Quora critic out of the equation, and give a facts and figures answer, using the exemplary Laura Hale’s answer to Who is the most followed/viewed/prolific Quoran that has never been awarded Top Writer? as source data. (She is dearly missed.) Answer written in June 2016, and I suspect the source data is rather more dated than that.

Let me also ignore all the celebrities in her answer who didn’t make TW, because when you *do* award Top Writer to celebrities, you get Tim Kaine and Hillary Clinton, and that was widely lambasted as seven different shades of dumb.

From Laura’s lists: not celebrities (defined as, don’t have a Verified User tick), not TWs in 2016 or 2017 so far:

(It gave me a lot of satisfaction to redact out all those Silicon Valley celebs with 20 answers and 50k followers that I’d never heard of.)

Of Laura’s list of 114 writers with 10k followers who were not top writers, 19 were not Verified User ticked: that means 95 of the 114 were celebrities. I think we can agree that we don’t need another 95 top writers with the level of contribution that Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine have made to the site.

A few more of them look to me to be celebrities, so I am taking those who don’t have at least 100 answers out of consideration:

• Vitaly Friedman (3 answers)
• Babak Nivi
• Hiten Shah
• Jean Yang
• Neha Jha

One more has become a Top Writer in 2017:

• Gaurav Munjal#

Of the remaining users, again excluding celebrities: asterisk is for those viewed more than 10M times as of Laura’s answer. Vo Nghi Nguyen (not in the list below) is the only non-top writer who had written more than 2500 questions (he has half of that now, and he has made Top Question Writer once the award was devised). 1000 answers at the time of Laura’s answer: daggered. Writing in more than 5 topics: hash.

(Users who have refused the Top Writer award: §)

• §Rory Young#
• Mohan Dev Sukumar
• Rohit Kapoor*†#
• Zehra Alvi
• Aditi Saini#
• Becky Lee†
• §Bhuvi Jain*#
• Dhakshitha Rao
• Seema Shah†#
• Ankur Warikoo
• Harsh Snehanshu
• Karan Bansal
• Deepak Shukla*† (Banned)

So. This list features people who are prolific and popular.

What do you notice in this list of 13 overlooked Quorans?

Here’s a fairly obvious thing to notice:

Two of the 13 are NOT Indian: Becky Lee (a celebrity blogger, from what I can tell), and Rory Young.

The Indian Quora is a more youthful, chatty place than the American Quora, we know; could it be that the 11 Indian Quorans are known to write “fluffy” content, which Quora does not prioritise? Let me cull those users who have Life and Living, Life Advice, and Dating and Relationships among their top 5 topics:

• §Rory Young
• Becky Lee
• Ankur Warikoo
• Harsh Snehanshu
• Karan Bansal

Ouch. I wish that didn’t cut out 8 of the 11 Indians. There are plenty of TWs who post in those areas, but we do know Quora looks at that component of the site askance.

Let me do better. Omit writers whose top 5 topics are restricted to: Life and Living, Life Advice, Dating and Relationships, India, Quora, Philosophy of Everyday Life, Psychology of Everyday Life, Social Advice, Human Behaviour, Friendship, Career Advice, Survey Question, Self-Improvement, Jobs and Careers (and I’m including Becky Lee, who has no topics at all):

• §Rory Young (Animals, Wildlife, Elephants, Africa, Nature)
• Aditi Saini (Indian Engineering Services, Indian Railways, Union Public Servicce Commission (India))
• §Bhuvi Jain (Politics of India)
• Dhakshitha Rao (Medicine and Healthcare)
• Ankur Warikoo (nearbuy, Groupon, E-Commerce, Startups, Indian School of Business)
• Harsh Snehanshu (Startup Founders and Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Visiting and Travel, Young India Fellowship Programme)
• Karan Bansal (Facebook, Programming languages, Computer Security, Linux)
• Deepak Shukla (Google (company))

4 of the 11 Indians still cut out, and I’m looking with some concern at whether Politics of India should keep Bhuvi Jain in.

I don’t know much about these posters, so I’ll have to be enlightened as to what other commonalities I am missing. The omission of Rory Young is somewhat surprising, and Ankur Warikoo actually hosted a question session last year. Snehansu seems to be the kind of enterpreneur you’d think Quora would jump at.

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Bear in mind that the numbers are at least 9 months old, and Laura’s list was not exhaustive; I’m pretty sure there are writers with 10k followers 9 months ago who’ve never made TW that she’s missed. There’s plenty more now; Habib Fanny and Jordan Yates for example, who don’t match the patterns shown in the list above. Still, this list tells me something.

Common characteristics of very popular writers? Being a Quora critic is not, I believe, among them: that’s a characteristic of some moderately popular writers. I’m not seeing any Scott Welch’s or Stephen McInerney’s or Nick Nicholas’s in the list. “Single (Indian) Girl on the Internet”, which Stephen points out, is a real thing, but I don’t think it explains most of the omissions in this list either.

Common characteristics of very popular writers who have not made TW:

• Writing on populist rather than specialist topics.
• Indian.

EDIT: The omission of Rory is a puzzler, given the list, and Rory has offered an explanation: he asked to be removed from the list of Top Writers. Ditto Bhuvi. They are now marked with a section sign §.

Natural justice – Wikipedia:

In English law, natural justice is technical terminology for the rule against bias (nemo iudex in causa sua) and the right to a fair hearing (audi alteram partem). While the term natural justice is often retained as a general concept, it has largely been replaced and extended by the general “duty to act fairly”.

The basis for the rule against bias is the need to maintain public confidence in the legal system.

Nemo iudex in causa sua: “Noone should be a judge in their own case.” Community moderators were not. Quora Employees are.

Audi alteram partem: “Hear the other party.” Appeal is still possible, and bans do get reversed. They are however post-facto.

Quora does not have a business motivation to care about being seen to be equitable (as Michael Masiello’s answer to What do you hate about Quora as of March 2017? memorably put it). Users are fungible, and they can continue to put ads up against your content whether you are banned or not, until such time as you delete it:

• Why does Quora not care when users leave? Because content written by the Ian York’s of the world will be generating revenue forever. (Scott Welch’s answer to When do you think Quora is going to end?)

The question however, does not ask whether it is allowed; it asks whether it should be allowed.

From Quora’s perspective, as most here have argued, no: costs too much, little benefit to the company, and if you don’t like it, there’s plenty more users where you came from.

From the users’ perspective? A significant number of users are disgruntled, because they can’t see the justice—even if most of the time moderation is right. (Caesar’s Wife has not only to be above reproach, but to be seen to be above reproach.) A significant number of users are quite happy with how things are. The debates continue to play out here.

But boycotts aren’t going to achieve anything. The brouhaha about sexism on Quora publicised online in 2014 came and went. As the subtitle to The Insurgency says, Quora is a Wall.

Nevertheless, until such time as I hear differently from Quora, I am posting banees’ statements on Necrologue. Yes, the banees’ statements are only one side of the story, and as Quora moderators have said publicly, banees can distort the truth. And the moderators are constrained by their own policies not to refute such statements. (They also have deleted at least some banees’ profile bios.)

You should read the banee statements in that light: critically. But given the summary justice applied, I think I’m doing the right thing by giving banees a voice. Not because Quora needs to care about Natural Justice. But because I do.

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.

I have a bot icon for bans.

But the community has come up with a ban mascot:

https://necrologue.quora.com/201…

Jack Fraser came up with the “lol u banned m8”, Stephen McInerney came up with the idea of a ban-mascot, Melanie Knotter had the idea of the ban-ana and Stephen found the image of a ban-dana ban-ana on google. Lyonel Perabo added the text. Rob Lion suggested forwarding it here.

I’m going to give the linguistic meaning of meaning; certain (old school) philosophers would accept it as an answer, and Gottlob Frege, who came up with the crucial distinction, is considered a philosopher and not a linguist. (Back in the 1890s, linguists weren’t really doing semantics.)

Language is a code. A code is a system of signs. A sign is a mapping of an utterance (e.g. a word) to something in the world (e.g. a thing).

The meaning of a word is its mapping.

The naive understanding of meaning is its denotation: the set of all things in the world that a word maps to. So the denotation of apple is the set of all apples in the world (that were, or are, or ever will be). The denotation of Nick Nicholas is the set of these guys (among others):

Swift sent this up in Gulliver’s Travels, with the scholars of Laputa lugging sacks along of a bunch of stuff, which they could pull out and point to, to establish the denotation of what they were talking about. “Cat! You know! One of these! *pulls cat out of a bag*” “*Mrowwwww!*”

It gets a good deal messier with adjectives and verbs, but still not intractable. The denotation of yellow is the set of all yellow things in the world. The denotation of sleep is the set of all animals sleeping. The denotation of give is the set of all people giving things to someone.

You may have started seeing the problems with this approach for verbs. But Frege identified it more straightforwardly with nouns. His example was the Morning Star and the Evening Star. In class, I used Clark Kent and Superman.

You and I know that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person. So “Clark Kent” and “Superman” have the same denotation. But Jimmy Olsen doesn’t know that. And in fact, even if we do know that, Clark Kent and Superman don’t mean the same thing. Clark Kent means “some geeky guy with glasses who works as a journalist at The Daily Planet”. Superman means “some musclebound himbo who wears his underpants on the outside and leaps tall buildings in a single bound”. (That’s leaps, not flies.)

Frege’s example is along the same lines: we know that the Morning Star and the Evening Star have the same denotation, {Venus}. But the ancient didn’t, and even now, they don’t have the same meaning. The Morning Star means “the really bright star you see in the morning”, and the Evening Star means “the really bright star you see in the evening”. The fact that we have now established they are the same thing does not mean those definitions are identical.

Frege identified sense as distinct from denotation. Sense is not the set of all things that the word means. Sense is the criteria you use, to work out whether something belongs to the set of all things that the word means. Those definitions I gave of Clark Kent and Superman are different, even if their denotations are the same: they are different senses.

Denotation naively assumes there is one objective meaning in the world for any noun, that you can point to. Sense walks it back: meaning is a set of instructions to working out what a noun points to. And notice that those instructions are themselves language. It was the start of realising, increasingly, how subjective meaning is, and how divorced it can be from the outside world: how meaning is trapped within language.

In fact, that realisation was earlier than Frege. Remember the definition of sign I gave above? “A sign is a mapping of an utterance to something in the world”, and the mapping is the meaning? That’s Saussure’s simplified model. The Semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce, decades before Frege, adds a third element to a sign: the interpretant sign. It’s not the person interpreting the sign: it’s the interpretation of the sign—which is itself a sign. Turtles all the way down.

Michael Masiello’s answer to Was God a person?

No, but it is refreshing to see someone flirt with euhemerism on Quora.

Euhemerism – Wikipedia

Euhemerism is an approach to the interpretation of mythology in which mythological accounts are presumed to have originated from real historical events or personages. Euhemerism supposes that historical accounts become myths as they are exaggerated in the retelling, accumulating elaborations and alterations that reflect cultural mores. It was named for the Greek mythographer Euhemerus, who lived in the late 4th century BC. In the more recent literature of myth, such as Bulfinch’s Mythology, euhemerism is termed the “historical theory” of mythology.

We already have. Where do you think motherfucking comes from?

Allusion to incest. For when fornication just won’t cut it any more.

This is an old finding. 150 years ago, damn could not appear in print unredacted.

The true and honest and equitable answer is the Magister’s: Michael Masiello’s answer to Is it veridical to state that esoteric verbosity culminates in communicative ennui? Vote #1 Michael Masiello. Vote early and vote often.

The petty and cavilling answer is mine. Others have gone part of the way there, but I’ll finish the task.

No, it is not veridical to state that esoteric verbosity culminates in communicative ennui. Because those are not synonyms of “is it true to say that using obscure words ends up in people getting bored with how you talk”. Big words have nuance. Big words have subtlety. Big words are there for a reason. That’s why you’re supposed to use them sparingly.

• Veridical does not mean “true”. It means “truth-telling”. It refers to a commitment to reflecting the world accurately, it’s not something you can accidentally blurt out or stumble upon. And there’s a good reason the word is mostly used in psychology and philosophy, domains that are concerned with people’s commitment to truth.
• Esoteric does not just mean “obscure”, it means understood only by very few select people, who are initiated into knowledge. The Greek means “insider”. It’s not the kind of thing that any fool can pick up a dictionary and learn; it’s supposed to be secret, and there’s a reason its connotation is one of cults and guilds.
• Culminates refers to something that builds up gradually to a climax or achievement of some kind. You don’t culminate into a passive state, such as ennui. That’s your classic parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. (Or anticlimax, if you prefer.)
• Ennui is not just boredom. It might be just boredom in French, but that’s not how the word is used in English. In English, it refers to the kind of existential, weary, discontented boredom that makes you give up on life itself. A misplaced hyperbolic reaction to being bored by someone’s big words.
• And communicative ennui does not sound like ennui about the communications you hear. It sounds like ennui about the communications you make. Like you’re questioning whether it’s worth continuing to live, as you’re stuck making inane smalltalk.
• Or belittling people’s vocabulary.

The only source of demographics on Quora there has been is the departed Laura Hale’s blog quora numbers, gathered manually and laboriously. For this question, via Facebook. See:

National breakdowns of by age participation on Quora by Laura Hale on quora numbers

75% of US users. 42% of Indian users.