Nick on Quora

Originally comment by Robert Maxwell at https://insurgency.quora.com/Xia… (Xianhang Zhang: Community Management issues on Quora, posted 2010)

Jumping off from John Gragson and his wonderful point [that the identified issues were the same 6 years ago], I find the continued existence of these issues to be insane.

I’m not old enough to have broken my boots in on the old pre-Eternal September Usenet boards, but I’m old enough to remember scores of IRC chatrooms, forums, and discussion sites that appeared, rose, fell, and vanish over the years – many because they exhibited the exact same community issues discussed here. A number of those sites developed, out of necessity, a veritable art of effective community management that could include things as simple as effective onboarding and basic transparency to impressively complicated governance mechanisms.

Yet Quora still faces many of those same problems. Even more, Quora seems unwilling to deal effectively with them, much less pull from past experience.

There’s a pattern I’ve seen a lot of these days. A sort of appeal to novelty seems prevalent in Silicon Valley and its outposts – the new need not pay heed to the old. You see this on Quora in the form of some veiled special pleading: Quora is new and unlike that which came before, so old experience does not apply. Quora (and many other new community sites) find themselves reinventing the wheel over and over again, trying not only to find answers to already-answered questions, but to do it on their own – when it comes to things like onboarding, transparency, and moderator interaction, Quora seems to hover between nonchalance and stumbling attempts at naive self-correction. It’s hard to believe that the people in charge of Quora’s community governance ever witnessed or experienced the forum implosions or scandals of not too long ago, because they seem to operate without reference to the lessons learned therein.

It all comes back to Quora’s scaling issue, for me. The site’s governing apparatus smacks of a small-community moderation team that got overwhelmed with a sudden influx of visitors – except they’ve been overwhelmed for six years. Meanwhile, supports like community moderators have been done away with, resources seem allocated to unnecessary UX tweaks, and Quora expects (or even needs) bots to pick up the slack. New users are mostly expected to be acculturated by the community – the site’s basic rules, patterns, and elaborations thereof are buried with every other question, shrouded by a poor search apparatus. In such a system, you can forego exhaustive explanations or documentation, because assimilation will take care of it.

Even its basic rule, BNBR, seems more fitting for a smaller community. I’m perhaps the only person I know that hates BNBR, but I feel my reason is solid: I don’t dislike the rule because I feel people ought not to be nice or respectful – the motte part of the motte-and-bailey argument often deployed in its favor – but because it simply doesn’t fit Quora. It fits a small community where the culture and social context can fill in the blanks of what, precisely, is considered nice or respectful in discourse. It does not fit a large community where that context and those shared mores don’t exist. In such a situation, it comes out as a black box – an answer or comment is fed into it and it may, or may not, depending on the arcana used, be registered as a violation. It’s a general rule that, as communities grow, its rules must accommodate that loss of shared social context by becoming clearer and less ambiguous, and Quora has grown beyond that. Despite the protestations of Quorans who see BNBR as a breath of fresh air, the rule to me is a deja vu of newbie forum admins who’d try and set “simple rules,” and end up overwhelmed. Perhaps this is partially why Quora is so keen to cultivate its Top Writer community: it’s a group small enough and acculturated enough for their system of governance to actually approach effectiveness.

That, for me, is what Quora Administration (and the upper management that influences it) is: newbie forum admins that have refused to learn precisely why things were done the way they were done or consider precisely how the people who came before them might have gotten things right. I recall a certain individual saying that D’Angelo quite possibly suffers from the “Silicon Valley Disease,” where one goes “I can code extremely well, so I should be able to run a business well, too.” That’s a viewpoint that, I suspect, pervades Quora.

To me, the community management style is like “naive art” – untrained and uninformed by what came before, they can do good work in their own milieu and, in their particular technique, may indeed be skilled. But having Quora Moderation as it exists now police the community of today is like having Grandma Moses or Henri Rousseau paint the Sistine Chapel: they’re simply not equipped for it.

See Michael Moszczynski’s answer to How did the alphabet get its order? Who came up with the order of the alphabet? The first such language was Ugaritic, several centuries before Phoenecian. As Michael Moszczynski points out, two alphabetical orderings of Ugaritic survive, one via Phoenecian, and one via Ge’ez into Amharic. He concludes that, while the cause for those particular orderings is unrecoverable, we can tell from their independent survival that they were conventional.

And once the convention was invented, it stuck, and it stuck hard. Abecedaries, inscriptions copying out the alphabet in order, are very common in archaic Greece. And it took the Greeks centuries to work out that the Phoenician alphabet had letters redundant for Greek.

I’m not strong on cognitive linguistics, but it’s an intriguing A2A.

What does it take for a word to become a conceptual metaphor? The meaning it expresses needs to be transferred to an analogous conceptual domain from its normal meaning; as a result of this, some of its meaning is preserved (the meaning that survives the transfer), some does not.

Now, function words clearly have meaning, though they do not always have denotation (they don’t always point to things in the world). But can their meaning always be transferred into an analogous domain?

That’s routinely true for prepositions. Prepositions historically tend to start off as spatial relations, and those relations are used as metaphors for other things all the time. If I say you’re on drugs, I’m not saying that you’re lying on top of some ecstasy pills. I’m saying that the dependency between you and drugs is analogous to the spatial proximity of something on top of something else—drawing on metaphors of closeness, coverage, foundations, and so on.

Conjunctions? They tend not to be spatial but conceptual already; but they’re no less subject to analogy. Transferring causation from the locutionary domain (causes for things happening in the world and described through speech acts) to the illocutionary domain (causes for speech acts themselves), for example: I’m late because there was a traffic jam (this happened because…) vs I’ll be there, because I’m a man of my word (I say this because…)

Pronouns and articles are trickier, but still doable. 1st and 2nd Personal pronouns presuppose personhood, but they can be metaphorically used of anything that can be individuated or in a collective. If I say “we spoons are dumped at the bottom of the pantry”, there’s a metaphor of personhood being imbued to spoons, alright; but the only place that metaphor resides linguistically is in the pronoun. Every other word is literally true.

https://www.quora.com/profile/Hu… issued a challenge on indefinite articles. Indefinite articles have a meaning: they indicate that the referent of noun phrase is not previously defined in the discourse, or is generic.

What’s going on when some boxer, say, says I’m not just *AN* athlete: I’m the best athlete there has ever been?

Well, the sentential stress on an should be telling you immediately that something unusual is going on: the whole point of the indefinite article is that it’s not something you emphasise, even contrastively. And the phrase cannot be literally true: a boxer is an athlete. An here is being used metaphorically: it’s being transferred from the conceptual domain of “generic” (which “an athlete” is: it’s a type) to the metaphorical use of “generic”: “uninteresting, ordinary” (which is not intrinsic to an: Usain Bolt is an athlete is true, and that does not imply he is uninteresting or ordinary).

The claim at first glance looks overwrought, but all words have some meaning, all meaning has at least a default semantic domain, and all meaning can be transferred to an analogous semantic domain, shedding some of its sense and retaining some of its sense. The only way that would be impossible is if a meaning were both atomic (and I’ll concede there are some semantic atoms), and not in a semantic network with other meanings and presuppositions (which is clearly not true, as we saw with we).

So… yeah. All words (including function words) can indeed be used in a metaphorical manner.

I’m pretty much agreeing with Dmitriy Genzel’s answer: Dmitriy Genzel’s answer to How long would it take for English from anglophone countries to become separate languages?.

If you look at my related answer to How long would it take an isolated group of people to develop what would be considered their own language?, you’ll see that historically, it could take something like 500 or 1000 years for languages to diverge. Universal literacy has a profoundly conservative effect on language, however, and those effects look to be intensifying, as English-speakers from different parts of the world are now becoming more in contact, not less.

This does not mean that their dialects are actually converging. Linguists have argued that vowels are currently off doing their own thing in different parts of the US, and there is no evidence that the subdialects of US English are converging—the opposite is happening. There are several clear grammatical differences that are entrenched between different variants of US or British English.

But my guess is that there are enough conservative forces in the current Anglophone culture, to slow down any divergence of national variants English significantly, compared to the historical norm.

Whether those conservative forces remain in place—that is to say, whether Western Civilisation or Globalisation survives—is an entirely different question.

This is a question linguists don’t want to answer, because it raises the spectre of glottochronology.

Glottochronology is an assumption made in the fifties, that a core 100 or 200 words of vocabulary in all languages would be lost at a constant rate. The figures that a study came up with was 86% retention per millennium for a core 100 words, and 81% per millennium for a core 200 words.

Glottochronology is derived from lexicostatistics, which uses the same core vocabulary to classify languages. The rule of thumb that field linguists apply is that two languages are separate if they share only 80% of the core 100 words. Joining the two together, you get maybe 1300 years to separate two languages.

Lexicostatistics is still used in poorly attested language families, when you have no other choice. It gets a lot of use in Papua New Guinea. 80% seems to me to be on the low side, though.

Glottochronology on the other hand was discredited very early. The statistical study was heavily flawed: the languages were almost exclusively European, and Latin ended up counted 5 times. A study done in 1962 found that Icelandic (universal literacy) had lost just one word out of 100 in a thousand years, whereas Inuit (taboo substitution of words) had lost close to half in the same period.

So there is no constant rate at which languages separate.

But we have plenty of instances in history where people migrated away, and the language slowly diverged. The instances I can first think of, such as early modern resettlement within Europe, or colonialism in the New World, show that 300 years is clearly not enough. A ballpark figure is going to be closer to between 500 and 1000 years. With all the provisos already given.

I have a medium-large circle of acquaintances here, that I’m happy to hear from periodically. I have a core of maybe half a dozen people here, who are as close to me as any friend at this stage of my life.

In refutation of all those who think this site is not social media (including respondents to this question):

If you are prepared to use this site as social media, then your relation with other users will graduate to the kind of relationship that people cultivate on social media. Ipso facto.

If you think friendships can only exist in meatspace, well, go back and read any number of epistolary romances from 500 years ago. And I’ll just get the hell off your lawn.

If you think Q&A sites preclude personal engagement, then you’re following the Precepts of the Founders, who have bafflingly never wanted this site to be social (and who for the past 7 years have banished “Quora Community” discussions from the feeds of non-subscribers).

Your loss, if you do. The fact that users do form friendships here is testament to the human spirit, which leaps over any hurdle the suits of Quora UX can fashion.

I will make a concession: I have admired writers from comments and answers, but I have only progressed to friendship with other Quora users through messaging. And Quora’s messaging UX is such that eventually, I’ve had to migrate my conversations out of Quora, to keep my sanity.

So I guess Quora UX won there, after all.

I’ve looked at the answers to this question. They are making me go all Michaelis Maus contrarian. So no one has pursued fame outside of Quora? And most of you are embarrassed at the notion of a mass audience? Really? Wow…

Right now, Quora is my major outlet, and I possibly gotten the most eyeballs here. By follower count, for what that metric is worth, I’m in the “popular” Villines tier.

But the blog I used to have on Greek linguistics didn’t do that badly on eyeballs either. Some Australian linguists will recognise my name, and several linguist working on Greek and Byzantinists know who I am. I was a big thing in my time in conlangs. And some of those past renowns have had echoes.

If that answers your question, OP.

On a scale of one to ten, what’s your favourite colour in the alphabet?

It’s doubtful the Greek population of Melbourne ever exceeded 300k; and the more Greeks assimilate, the harder that is to count. I think it could be argued that Chicago had a larger Greek population at least at one point. Thessalonica has a population over a million, so Melbourne was never the largest Greek city outside of Athens.

There was the occasional random Greek in Australia as far back as the 1820s. A discernible community in Melbourne dates from the 1890s (about 150 strong), and the first Greek church in Melbourne, the Church of the Annunciation, opened in 1901. Back then, the community was from a small number of Greek islands—Kalymnos, Ithaca, Kastellorizo, with one family member bringing another. Kalymnos and Kastellorizo were sponge diver islands, and diving was an initial source of employment for Greeks in Australia. (Hence the pearling houses of Paspaley and Kailis in Broome.)

The upsurge of the Greek population in Melbourne, and the rest of Australia for that matter, dates from 1950–1975, and was the result of mass migration of Greeks from impoverished post-war Greece (and in lesser numbers, Cyprus, Turkey and Egypt), to work in the factories and then small businesses of Australia. In my family, the earliest family member, my uncle George, came out to work as a carpenter in Sale in 1947; the latest family member was my uncle Andrew, who joined my father working in the fish ’n’ chip shop business in 1970.

Unlike the Italians, Greeks avoided becoming farmers in Australia, and stuck to the cities; for that reason, there was a healthy presence of Italians in rural Queensland, but the Greek population was heavily concentrated in the capital cities of each state. By far most Greeks ended up in Sydney and Melbourne; as of the 2011 census (Greek Australians), 30,000 people in NSW were born in Greece, and 50,000 in Victoria.

Melbourne was at the time the industrial powerhouse of Australia, and it needed factory fodder; that was one drawcard for early migrants, and I assume is what gave it the edge over Sydney. As with many other diasporas (and as indeed with the earlier Greek migration wave), family members brought other family members, and critical mass of the diaspora encouraged other Greeks to join it, as familiar territory. (The current Greek Financial Crisis wave of migration is conspicuous in Oakleigh, the current Melbourne Greektown, for both reasons.)

The Latin plural is specimina. specimina – Wiktionary reports it as an alternative to specimens, but I have never seen it used. The examples it gives are from a 1949 textbook on colour perception.