Category: Uncategorized

I disagree with the insistence on Real Name, which people assume automatically makes people more accountable and civil. I think it’s wrongheaded, and fighting a symptom rather than a disease. But the question doesn’t ask about that; it asks about exceptions.

Tom Ramsay cited “Child discussing abusive parents who monitor their Internet usage. Quora has already removed their anon privileges.” Clarissa Lohr cited people who are “halfway through a gender transition.”

I’ll combine them: minors who are transgender, cannot legally drop their deadname yet, cannot initiate their transition, and are living with unsympathetic parents who will block any attempt to change their deadname—or worst still, from whom the minor is hiding their transgender status. In fact, I’m in touch with one now.

And Quora’s suggested remedy for such teens is what? To write only anonymously? And to stop writing under a name here at all? And that’s better? Well, if you think Quora is only about dry questions and answers, you might think that. I don’t.

I’ll add: women who get stalked here. The annals of Quora are thick with women who switch their surname to their middle name, to preempt or escape unwanted attention, only to be forced to switch back by moderation. I know of three cases of women I happen to follow in the past half year. They should just go anonymous on all their contributions as well?

There’s something incredibly… myopic about the insistence on Real Name. Myopic, and anti-social media. I think it does harm that people blind themselves to.

To corroborate David Williamson and refute Bill Ness, have some chapter and verse:

What is the guideline on the use of profanity on Quora?

Users should avoid unnecessary profanity.

There are some exceptions where it makes sense to use profanity. One example of this is when the only way to reference something that isn’t profane accurately is to use profanity. Example: What is the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory? The guideline on profanity on Quora is mostly about tone and common sense.

If you scroll down quickly from the answer by Bodnick from 2011, to the exchange between Dan Holliday and Gigi Wolf in 2013, you can get a chuckle.

If you dig, there are some answers saying that profane language will be sanctioned (Tracey Bryan’s answer to Why aren’t rules guiding the use of profanity enforced more on Quora? from 2012), and a lot more answers recently saying “fuck no, hahaha”.

My own impression is that any rules against profanity are currently enforced either selectively or infrequently. I have not seen the 2011 guideline explicitly rescinded however. And “unnecessary profanity” does not only refer to hostile profanity:

Tatiana Estévez’s answer to If one sees a clear BNBR contravention by one Quora user on another (but is not personally involved) should one report it?

Expecting complete strangers to understand when telling someone to ‘f-off’ is an insult or friendly banter doesn’t make sense on a site as big as this. Expecting moderators to read a long thread and try to judge the tone is not reasonable, judging sarcasm online is notoriously difficult without context.

I remember the phrase, I wish I remember where I saw the phrase, but it was very recent!

EDIT: It was Achilleas Vortselas’ answer to To what extent will the internationalization of Quora affect Quora in English?

The Indian community is large enough that it can engage on India-specific topics, without needing to explain itself to non-Indians routinely. Americans and Indians can do that; other national communities on Quora are small enough that they feel they have to provide context.

The now departed Laura Hale did extensive research on In what ways does the Indian Quora differ from the American Quora? One of the clear separations, if you scroll down, is that Indians tend to follow other Indians much more than they do non-Indians. Americans, again, also have that luxury; other national communities do not.

I can’t find where Laura coined the term “the Other Quora”, but it’s a reflection of this: there is a massive amount of activity in the Indian community of Quora, and because that activity tends to be seen only by other Indians (because the community is self-contained), non-Indian Quorans are largely unaware of it.

When Nick is not rabble-rousing with discontent about Quora, he is a Greek linguist.

The idea of the Necrologue came up to me as far back as July 2016, when I ran the idea past the now departed Laura Hale—though I only publicly announced it in October: The fight continues by Nick Nicholas on Opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr In Exile. (The whole block on speculation was her most welcome suggestion.)

Those who are banned are dead to Quora, and Necrologue is a kind of obituary column of the dead. As Konstantinos Konstantinides points out, it’s a Greek coinage meaning, variably: “Study of the dead” or “List of the dead” or “Word of the dead” or “Student of the dead”. I was going for “list of the dead”, which is the accepted meaning of NECROLOGUE; but apparently the more usual expression in English is NECROLOGY. And in Modern Greek, nekrologia is the word for obituary.

If you look more closely, the usual suffix for “list” is –logy: cf. anthology (“collection of flowers”). The usual sense of –logue is instead “word, writing”: epilogue “afterword”, prologue “foreword”. However catalogue (“down word”) is a pervasive word for lists, and it has influenced the formation in English of necrologue: catalogue of the dead.

So, necrology would have been the normal Greek-based word for an obituary, or even a collection of obituaries. I went with necrologue, because it sounds like catalogue, emphasising that it’s just a listing; and the blog was always intended to be a bare listing.

But Konstantinos is right. –logue is a useful suffix, because of its broad meanings. I am myself something of a necrologue (as in ideologue): a nekrológos rather than nekrólogos in Greek. (The –lógos suffix in Greek corresponds to –logist in English; so I guess I’m something of a necrologist.)

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or

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I echo the ire of OP Martin Silvertant, which Jennifer Edeburn gave voice to so much more judiciously then either of us, in her own answer.

Go read that answer. Jennifer Edeburn’s answer to What is Quora’s policy on the use of links?

And until people actually start getting reported for bad formatting, because they use inline links instead of endnotes, I’m going to keep using inline links. Like almost all answers I see.

While there is no policy against too many links per se, the spam bot can also be triggered by too many links. In fact, that results in the instant deletion of an answer. I successfully appealed the deletion when it happened to me, after removing all the hyperlinks.

The blog Το λακωνίζειν εστί φιλοσοφεῖν features pithy answers, and is a great place to find acerbic one liners, if that’s what you’re into. Chad Turner was the inspiration for the blog, and you can see why.

Well, this is what the Googles gets me (with a peek at the OED):

• http://www.yorkshiredialect.com/…

Owt and Nowt are shibboleths for Yorkshire: they are very common dialect words. The historical pronunciation seems to be something like /ou/. They are indeed derived from aught and naught; the spelling with an au is from Early Modern Southern English, and Middle English usually spelled them as ought and nought. Brought in Yorkshire rhymes with owt. (Remember that in Middle English, the <gh> was a kh sound.)

On the other hand, the <ou> diphthong which normally rhymes with <ow> in English is either -ah-, in the West Riding (e.g. Sheffield), or -oo- in the North and East Riding: abaht, aboot.

Hence Nathan Morris’ answer to Could someone tell of “owt” or “nowt” regarding Yorkshire?

A can tell thee owt tha wants to know abart.

[I can tell thee aught thou wants to know about]

---

EDIT:

Joseph Boyle asks whether the aboot of East Yorkshire is related to the aboot of Canada and the US South Highlands.

The Yorkshire and Scots aboot really is pronounced aboot. It is a an archaism, representing the pronunciation of <ou> before the Great English Vowel Shift. (Middle English used the French pronunciation of <ou>.) Notice that Yorkshire keeps <ou> and <ow> separate.

The Great English Vowel Shift changed iː to əi to ai. It’s why reconstructed Shakespearean pronunciation sounds like a pirate: West Country English, on which Hollywood pirate talk is based, has kept the older əi pronunciation.

What happened to Middle English i: also happened to uː : uː > əu > au.

• uː is the original Middle English pronunciation, preserved in East Yorkshire.
• au is the usual Modern pronunciation.
• aː is a further development from au, found in West Yorkshire.
• əu is the missing link between uː and au. It is how Shakespeare would have pronounced about. It is also how Canadians and Southern Virginians pronounce about: Canadian raising – Wikipedia, [əbəut].

So Shakespeare would in fact have sounded like a Canadian pirate.

The chain of development is East Yorkshire aboot > Canadian and Southern Virginian əbəut > standard English about > West Yorkshire abaht. Logically, that tells you that the missing link pronunciation used to occur in West Yorkshire as well, and eventually gave rise to abaht via about. But there is no reason to think that there is anything Yorkshire about Canadian raising. It appears to be a general archaism, although not one that Wikipedia has much history on.

And yes, all my information is from Wikipedia.

The problem with Quora’s policies is that they are fairly high level and vague, and they require the equivalent of judges to interpret them. Christopher VanLang and other former volunteer mods have expertise in the tradition of interpretation they formed, and they would be better placed than me to answer this.

In my opinion alone, a sincere question about a conspiracy theory should not be against BNBR. Hate speech is against BNBR. Advocacy of a conspiracy theory is close to hate speech, but it’s even more close to irrational speech (and I’ve been quite unimpressed by the instances OP has pointed to.)

Discussion of the conspiracy theory however is permitted: there is no block on irrational speech, and there is the expectation that it can be refuted rationally, and the requirement that it be conducted respectfully. Hence Bodnick, with his… curiously double edged wording:

Marc Bodnick’s answer to Should discussion of conspiracy theories be banned on Quora? As a community, are we valuing niceness over debating the truth?

Discussion of conspiracy theories is totally welcome and is consistent with Quora’s mission.

As Joshua Engel’s answer to Should discussion of conspiracy theories be banned on Quora? As a community, are we valuing niceness over debating the truth? points out, conspiracy theorists will tend to violate BNBR overtly anyway:

I suppose it’s interesting to consider the notion that conspiracy theorists are far more likely to violate those policies. After all, a conspiracy theory (more or less by definition) involves the belief that people are out to hide the truth from you, and so anybody who disagrees is either lying or stupid. It will be difficult to discuss that without violating the policies. And conversely, everybody disagreeing is nearly certain to think that the theorist is, themselves, either lying or stupid, and it will be difficult to avoid bringing that up. This is what makes “conspiracy theories” different from other matters of mere disagreement.

Add to that of course the fact that the conspiracy theory in question is based on religious antagonism, which makes hate speech even likelier to arise.

One can counter that the promotion of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories makes Quora unfriendly to Muslims, and one might investigate whether antisemitic and anti-Muslim conspiracy theories are prosecuted with the same fervour. I don’t know; The Protocols of the Elders of Zion exists as a topic, though the questions are pretty neutral, and the Love Jihad questions are not.

Those questions would probably fall afoul not in principle of the policy of BNBR, as Hate Speech, but of the guidelines for neutrally phrased questions (see Should questions on Quora be phrased neutrally? Why, or why not?); in particular: Quora’s answer to What are the main policies and guidelines for questions on Quora?

• Questions are stronger if they are phrased neutrally, ask for information and ask why
• Questions are stronger if they are phrased neutrally and minimise presuppositions.
• Questions are stronger if they do not contain assumptions. In particular, they should not imply false information.

For me, the words are very meaningful, and I do care if a person is feminine or masculine.

But then, noone would confuse me with anyone who’s answered the opposite.

I am also very much aware of the contingency and cultural specificity of femininity and masculinity as constructs. I am aware that there are plenty of people who have difficulty or malaise aligning to them. I am aware that they can lead to toxic consequences unchecked, and that there is a consensus in flux about how they are negotiated and defined and externalised and internalised.

Vote #1 Victoria Weaver of course: Victoria Weaver’s answer to For you, what are femininity and masculinity? I’m talking about the sociological sense here.

Are they real? As real as fashion sense or race or music. They’re all in the head. That doesn’t mean they’re not real. That doesn’t mean they can’t be a source of good in the world—they’re constructs that it is up to us to harness. And they don’t disappear in a puff of smoke, just because we’ve identified their downsides.

To talk of the psychological sense: I’m not going to apologise for finding femininity attractive, or for feeling good about certain aspects of masculinity. I have a socially conditioned sexuality, and having a sexuality is a good thing. In itself, having a straight sexuality doesn’t make me (to pull out some representative examples) biphobic, transphobic, squicked by agender or bigender people, or whatever else. For me; others will see it differently, I expect.

I do not believe that having a sexuality, informed by constructs of masculinity and femininity, automatically makes you a pig; I also have a superego, after all. And the norms that inform that superego, and that determine the sociological nature of gender constructs, are being remoulded and renegotiated. As well they should.