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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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.

I don’t keep track of them. 🙂

I solicit PMs from people, to let me know who’s been banned or blocked.

Or deactivated. In fact, deactivations really do require me to keep track of people, because I try not to report deactivations immediately—usually people come back on Quora shortly afterwards. I fail to keep track of deactivations, and I ask people to get back to me if the user is still deactivated after a couple of days. (Hence me giving lots of people a fright, by reporting User’s deactivation as early as I did.)

More to the point, I’m amazed how the people who regularly report bans and blocks keep track of them. I add in reports when I notice them, but I don’t notice them nearly as often as my regular reporters do.

I also subscribe to the Quora Account Suspension and Bans topic, so I will get news of some “Why was X banned?” questions before they are deleted. But PMs are far and away the main source of information.

It will not in itself make me leave Quora.

But it adds to the things that make me think badly of Quora—along with the UX Russian Roulette, the Black Maria of moderation removing people in the middle of the night and the headscratchingly inexplicable decisions, the lack of a clear mission, yadda yadda yadda.

I will leave Quora, as I’ve answered before, when it stops being fun—or to be more precise, when it is unfun substantially more often than it is fun. Outage is frustrating; if I’m halfway through a response on a comment, intensely frustrating, as was the case a couple of days ago. So long as its impact is less than weekly, I’ll put up with it. But these things can have a drip drip drip, cumulative effect.

The most authoritative analysis of what markets Quora could most usefully move into is by Josephine Stefani: Josephine Stefani’s answer to What other languages should Quora support?

The upshot is, I’m guessing Quora picked German and Italian because it is probably easier to actually set up shop in these markets. But if it really wishes to adhere to its well-worn slogan of ‘sharing and growing the world’s knowledge’, I think it should have a look at other parts of the world that really need it: Arabic, Russian (maybe), Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian …

My own answer identified Arabic and Russian too, but Josephine did an awesome job of it.