Category: Uncategorized

I don’t have the wherewithal to judge where we don’t have good coverage, and I haven’t thought “I cannot get an answer about this topic on Quora”. Then again, I tend not to ask questions on Quora!

But to back up Joseph Heavner’s point and generalise it:

• More humanities and social sciences academics.

I have the utmost of contempt for Quora’s credentialism—what Silicon Valley thinks scholarship is about (to quote myself). But if you go diving into linguistics or sociology, you notice that there’s not a lot of regular users who are academics giving specialist advice. Lots of excellent linguists here, for example, not least of whom IS ME. But people whose day job is as a linguistic academic? Thomas Wier, and he doesn’t write often enough.

I have the distant impression that we’ve got plenty of Hard Science and Computer Science academics here, but I could be wrong.

Mycenaean Greece was a Greek culture, and it was literate at that, though we know none of its literature. The Homeric epics preserve bits and pieces of that culture orally.

But Greek civilisation as we understand it is based on written records, and those written records start with the invention of the alphabet: 8th century BC. Let’s make it 7th century BC for actual literature that wasn’t orally transmitted.

What was India doing in the 7th century BC?

History of India – Wikipedia

From a cursory glance at Wikipedia, India was moving on from Vedic culture to new religions (Śramaṇa) and new systematisations of the old religion (Upanishads), new political structures (Mahajanapada) and new settlements (Iron-Age: Brief Notes on the Second Urbanization in India). The modern tradition of writing in India seems to date from the 4th century BC, but the oral texts of the Vedas, Upanishads, and Epics seem to have been much more extensive than the Greek Epics.

I already substantially answered this on Nick Nicholas’ answer to How long did it take you to become popular on Quora?

As I’ve reported in that and other answers, it was a combination of two things:

• No longer paying attention to new followers.
• Having lots of chat with users outside my areas of core expertise.

The topic about me didn’t make as much of an impression on me as it seems to have to some. The attention the “Discord Teens” seem to be paying me has, admittedly, taken me aback.

There was no direct contact between Ancient Greeks and China. There were a couple of very limited trade missions between the Roman Empire and China, and from what I remember the information exchange was pretty mangled.

Lots of Chinese was translated into European languages once the Jesuits made contact, led by Matteo Ricci in the 17th century.

But you did not say European, you said Indo-European. The obvious place to look is India. There was clearly translation in the other direction of the Buddhist scriptures, to the extent of the Chinese theorising about translation practice: Chinese translation theory. But the earliest indication I’ve found of the reverse direction is in the 7th century AD:

Translation in China

The most important figure of the first peak of translation in China was the famous monk of the Tang dynasty—Xuan Zang (600-664), who was the main character in A Journey to the West. […]

Xuan Zang was also the first Chinese translator who translated out of Chinese. He translated some of Lao Zi’s (the father of Taoism) works into Sanskrit. He also attempted to translate some other classical Chinese literature for the people of India.

The next indication of translation activity into Indo-European I find is 14th century, under the Pax Mongolica, by Rashid-al-Din Hamadani: (see here). “Among Rashideddin’s other works are four volumes of translations from Chinese into Persian, works that he could not have produced by himself, as well as works on agriculture and medicine that incorporate either translations from Chinese or extensive information on Chinese practice derived from Chinese sources.”

Let me sidestep the substance of the question, which has been addressed well under:

• What’s your view regarding Quora’s new anonymity policy changes (March 2017)?
• How well is the “new anonymity” policy on Quora working at filtering out bad content, as of March 20, 2017?

And let me go to the underlying question: how can Quora make decisions that users disagree with?

Anonymity has been complained about for years.

• It has been complained about, with suggestions for improvement, on Quora, a forum which Quora staff as far as I can tell don’t accept any feedback from. (And please. Evidence to the contrary welcome. Being yelled at in comments by current or former leads does not count.)
• It has been complained about, with suggestions for improvement, on the Facebook and IRL top writer groups, some of which putatively Quora staff do accept feedback from.

What we get is… not necessarily addressing the core concerns around anonymity, such as being able to mute anonymous questions. In fact, I’d like to highlight this exchange:

https://insurgency.quora.com/Wel…

Robert Maxwell : My favorite part of all of this is how Quora’s solution to anonymity abuse was to make anonymous questions and answers even more anonymous.

John Gragson : Supposedly it was to be balanced by more aggressive moderation (“pre-review”, they called it).

Viola Yee : All we really wanted was to block a particular anon.

So why would the changes to anonymity not meet our expectations as a community? And why would they have been delayed for five years?

Here’s some possible explanations, and I think they’re all in play:

Why did it take so long?

• There may be a leadership vacuum in Quora; it’s been rumoured here, and it’s hard to discern, with the secrecy Quora maintains about itself. (I’ve just started reading Sun Tzu; that’s one bit they seem to have learned from him.) I suspect that there is no advocate to push user concerns around anonymity to the forefront, and that there may not be a lot of strategic thinking going on anyway. In that case, anonymity instead degenerates into a technical puzzle, a computer engineering rather than a social engineering issue. Which would also account for the chasing-one’s-tail activity around Quora UX.
• And don’t get me started on ongoing inaction about the accessibility of Quora. Marc Bodnick: No, we haven’t (2011) by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency
• Quora has an on-going slowburn PR disaster on its hand with anon abuse, which it has publicly blithely dismissed until it couldn’t any more. The more users, the more abuse; Violet Blue had plenty to report on in 2014, and I’m sure it’s exponentially worse now, because there are exponentially more users now.
• Quora’s primary responsibility is not user well-being, but whatever its leadership deems a strategic or tactical priority. That is a good thing: Quora isn’t a non-profit that exists to make its users happy, it exists to turn a profit by commodifying its users. That is also a bad thing: it does not mean that Quora is immune from making bad decisions, just because its users think it’s making bad decisions.
  As a result, user discomfort around anonymous trolling has not been a priority to do something about until now.
• Remember that allowing users to disable comments on specific questions came in 2016, two years after the articles highlighting misogyny on Quora, and advocating for more effective blocking: Quora’s Misogyny Problem; Quora’s misogyny problem: A cautionary tale | ZDNet. Two years. What, implementing Google Voice has been more pressing?

Why don’t we like it?

• Quora has limited resources—understandably, as it’s still burning through venture capital six years after launch, and has only started to do something visible about monetisation (ads) within the past year. Anything it does will be on the cheap. Bots, and eliminating as much workflow as possible (hence blanket removal of comments). That maximises the scale of the solution, but of course not its quality.
• Which of course is why they should never have undertaken to review all anon questions before publishing them. And have a Quora staff member put his name to that statement. It was never going to happen, it hasn’t happened, and bots don’t count as review. Good to know we have the most well-spelled trolls in the business though. (I’d just found an answer saying that a troll question got through with QCR fixing a spelling mistake. No I can’t find it; I was convinced it was by Heather Jedrus, but that’s not turning up anything.)
• Mountain View, and Silicon Valley in general, seems prone to Not-Invented-Here, which lends them a certain arrogance and lack of consultation in dealing with these kinds of concern. I think it’s been compounded by the insistence that We-are-not-social-media (so we don’t need to learn from social media on how to do moderation), and Shiny Toys (bots will solve everything! And they’re cheap!)
• If anonymity leaks (and there’s been a few answers suggesting it): lack of QA, lack of real user engagement, reactive implementation, possibly distracted by Shiny Objects rather than security holes.
• I am privy to an security hole unrelated to anonymity that a friend discovered, which I am not publicising (and which has been reported). I am aghast at it. Things like it are getting through into production, and they should not be. That also points to failure in management: the buck does have to stop somewhere.
• I think Anonymous’ answer to What’s your view regarding Quora’s new anonymity policy changes (March 2017)? nails it. We have been utterly puzzled about the insistence on true untraceable anonymity, the Wikileaks or Bunker In Syria scenario, whereas overwhelmingly anonymity here is cultural (“don’t feel comfortable putting my real name to this” is a real cultural norm on the internet, and I wouldn’t be sneering about it if I was you). Anon delivers, and I think this theory makes much more sense, as something that would stir Quora leadership into action.

This reminds me of the Apple iPhone case. These new anonymity changes are basically Quora’s way of distancing itself from the responsibility if any law enforcement agency asks about it.

At minimum, other users on Quora, per the letter of the policy.

Quora’s answer to What is Quora’s “Be Nice, Be Respectful” policy?

Increasingly, it appears from Moderation decisions, also public figures who are not already users on Quora:

Habib Fanny: BNBR against public figures not on Quora by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency

See in particular the comments to that report.

See also Quora Moderation — Election Season PSA by Marc Bodnick on The Quora Moderation Blog—which first announced that not being nice and respectful to political candidates was unacceptable. The rationale for this being that abusive criticism of political leaders makes Quora an unwelcoming space for those leaders’ supporters.

It certainly is not regarded by most language teachers as important. Latin and Greek prose composition, which required students to produce original text (even if as a pastiche of Thucydides or Caesar) was huge a century ago, and I get the impression is extinct now. There are some ancient Greek text books that trying to teach the language like any modern language, immersively and with students conversing in the language before reading it. But they are in the minority.

Is the contemporary avoidance of production correct? My hunch is, you have a slightly better understanding of the nuances underlying syntactic or lexical choices in passages, if you yourself have had to go through them in language production.

But it is only a slight advantage, and most people learning classical languages now probably don’t need that level of nuanced understanding anyway. After all, they can always read one of the many translations around if that’s what they’re really after.

Blogs not already mentioned that I’m subscribed to:

• The Insurgency: “A critique of Quora, and a critique of critiques of Quora.” Blog hosting various criticisms of Quora, which exposes those criticisms to scrutiny.
• Bug? or Feature? “In which we discuss and analyze ambiguous and elusive Quora ux specimens.” Successor to at least one major aspect of the late Rage Against Quora: UI features that make one say ¿Que?
• The Still-Alive Poets Society. “This is a blog where Quorans can share their original poems. Both poems written for answers and original posts are accepted, but only original work.”
• Dispatches from the Other Language Quoras. “A blog to discuss peculiarities, differences, and experiences in Quoras other than English.”

As Joe Devney said, depends on the study, but I have a fair guess.

That would be gender, presumably, as in grammatical gender, in those languages that have them. The wording would then presumably be something more like how does assignment of entities to particular genders vary from one dialect to another within the same language.

Dialects are linguistics’ natural laboratory: you have a common starting point for the dialects that’s quite well understood, even by laypeople—they can work out how the dialects relate to each other and to the common core of the language without much trouble. So the variation in how different dialects treat the same phenomenon can be mapped out straightforwardly. Because the dialects have diverged recently enough, those changes can usually be made sense of easily, compared to changes between different languages.

So the variation in gender assignment within a language, between different dialects, will have a common starting point—in Modern Greek dialect, say, Ancient Greek; and you can make sense of the variation between dialects, because there’s much less variation to trace than, say, the variation between French and Russian.

The purposes of such a research study would be the same as the purposes for any research study on how entities are assigned to gender; the results would just be much more tractable.

I received this in email today and am passing it on, anonymously.

---

I am a moderator of that subreddit r/indianpeoplequora.

With reference to your blog post: How Reddit trolls have infiltrated Quora:

I have removed all those posts where the users show they have asked troll questions on Quora. I have even updated the rules of the subreddit to not allow such things in the future.

https://www.reddit.com/r/indianp…

I’ve created that subreddit a long time ago just for posting funny Quora question/answers written by Indians. Here’s an example of one of the earlier posts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/indianp…

I didn’t know all this would have happened.

Regarding trolls, I’ve seen a few on Quora before the subreddit even existed. I’ve seen one vandalize content and ask harassing/creepy questions. I’ve reported them to the Quora admins and had them banned.

The ones you have pointed out:

• Hardick Chopra seems to have been banned by Quora moderation. https://www.quora.com/profile/Ha…
• Raden Smith has apologized for trolling and said he will never do it again. https://www.quora.com/Where-can-…

Regarding the Reddit accounts,

The Reddit account of Raden Smith has deleted his 1-yr old account, and the other has been banned from r/indianpeoplequora.

I am not that active on either Reddit or Quora these days, so I have added more moderators to keep things under control.

Cheers!