2017–08–31

Reducing Participation:

My point is around my ideal of Quora as collaborative solving problems with the community. My question writing process has been: Write a question with the title having a self-contained meaning, and not relying on the question details. Write details to support the question and not contradict it, while remaining optional. These would typically be an elaboration of what I’m looking for, or, links to other questions, or answers. I would have hoped Quora supported more semantic relationships such as “follow up to” (something you’ve touched on with Follow-up Questions, a feature I never noticed), or “related to”. I’ve been a big fan of linking to other answers and questions, even to the point of linking to other people’s answers to the same question, and not in the name, in the hope that the system would derive some meaning from it.

I think of the initial questions, then follow-up answers, and then the following questions, as an entire thread of conversation. In a more “loose” form, this is what’s happening in comments, where some real gems of knowledge/experience/opinion could be found. I’ve wanted comments to be first-class objects in the system, but that didn’t happen.

Now speaking of knowledge. The whole idea of community is letting people tell stories. I am a strong supporter of letting people tell stories by answering questions. (As are you – the only minor thing I don’t like about your answers is that you address the questioner by name, while I prefer to answer in the abstract and generally not address the questioner or even the generic “you”.)

I suspect that the top writers (not necessarily Quora Top Writers) who prefer to write “answers as articles” don’t believe in this as strongly, and for them, “questions as writing prompts” will suffice.

And then the mission of Quora as the source of knowledge. I see people who laugh at this idea because Quora is full of personal anecdotes and stories. I take the opposite view, and believe Quora has done very well by getting people to share stories. How are we readers to judge that these are not important? How much of our civilisation’s history has been written, not in the form of academic papers, but from personal correspondence, diaries, or even graffiti on the ancient cities’ walls?

And now Quora has rejected this. I would have been fine with stopping question details, but they have retroactively destroyed our work in setting up the questions They are reducing the whole process to a canonical question that is imposed by force (and not willingly by question writers/moderators/gnomes who write, edit and merge questions because they want to).

Finally, this new process needs skilled question writers and editors more than ever to create the correct question according to their new criteria. If Quora were consistent, and wanted to be the perfect ad-making machine (as in Scott’s post) then they would train users to write questions that would yield the best answers for them. But no, they still tempt the new user with the “Ask Question” button and the “What is your question box”. This to me reveals the chaos of Quora management and product design, a whole interesting story, but a distraction from my points here.

Posts on this blog will only point to the profile of users, and mention any reason for sanction given in edit profiles. Speculation about why people have been banned or blocked will not be entertained. BNBR applies in comments.

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Appeal Rejected

See: Appeal lodged

Charlie (Quora)

Aug 28, 4:21 PM PDT

Hello Nick,

Your content was in violation of our Be Nice, Be Respectful policy. This core Quora principle requires that people treat other people on the site with civility, respect, and consideration. To learn more about this policy, please visit: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Qu…. From the policy:

Attacks against other people are not allowed on Quora, nor are disrespectful or insulting attacks directed at other people’s content. People should be civil and respectful in disagreement with others and should not (1) make attacks or otherwise disparage other people, (2) refer to other people’s content with insulting or disrespectful language, (3) harass others on the site or (4) advocate self-harm, even in a joking manner.

Our decision is final, and your content will not be reinstated.

If you see content that is objectionable, we suggest you either report or downvote it. You can report questions, answers, comments, and messages by clicking on the “Report” link which is located underneath the content.

We appreciate your understanding.

Sincerely,

Charlie
User Operations
Quora

No, Charlie. You will have no understanding from me over this.

When I get a spare minute, I will migrate this blog somewhere safer. There are other consequences to this notice for my motivations and presence here, which I will need time to mull over.

At least this rejection came across in less than two months. I’ll give them that. In fact, it’s the first rejection I’ve seen. (And it isn’t even my benburr, it’s Zeibura’s.)

2017–08–29

Quit, deleting account:

I’ve deleted my Quora account.

I no longer permit the “nice and respectful people” who run that website to profit from my content. In 14 days it will be gone. I encourage others to do the same, because honestly, I’ve never known a site’s moderators to treat its volunteer content creators with such utter contempt, and this is the only thing that’s going to hit them where it hurts.

I got properly distracted by Quora about 3 years ago when my end goal of spending so much time scrolling through content was to get inspiration for my next book, a project which has barely moved on since, because Quora happened to be a lot of fun back then. It just isn’t remotely fun any more.

Now I feel like I am overcoming a harmful drug addiction, and I’m looking forward to life on the other side, spending more time in the studio and so on.

Anyone who’s interacted with me on Quora, please feel free to add me on Facebook and stay in touch, and thanks for the memories. I might start lurking on r/linguistics or stackexchange eventually. Lots of you are talking about Medium but it looks a bit too clickbaitish for my liking.

Posts on this blog will only point to the profile of users, and mention any reason for sanction given in edit profiles. Speculation about why people have been banned or blocked will not be entertained. BNBR applies in comments.

New to Quora? Check out Quora Base Camp

Appeal lodged

I’m back.

I note with concern that the blog Necrologue does not come up on autocorrect search in Quora (completion of @Necrologue); only the topic Necrologue does. This makes me surmise that this blog is under limdist interdict.

EDIT: False alarm: At-mention interdict of blogs by Nick Nicholas on Bug? or Feature?

EDIT 2: See comments there. Possibly not false alarm.

A note on moderation reports on the BNBR notice Zeibura received last week. The BNBR notice was not about comments made by any users to the post, it was about the post itself. I am concluding that the very existence of a blog reporting moderation actions is being considered to violate BNBR.

I have appealed the BNBR notice, and I am posting my appeal here.

2017–08–24, bis

A BNBR notice was sent to Zeibura S. Kathau regarding a post notifying that [redacted]’s ban from Quora had been rescinded, on the Necrologue blog.

The Necrologue blog is very careful to adhere to BNBR by limiting its posts to strict templates without editorialising. (We also obfuscate the names of users who have deleted their accounts, to respect their privacy.) I have asked Tatiana Estevez twice whether merely reporting moderator actions raises concerns to Quora, with no response.

At [redacted]’s request, Zeibura had deleted the post before the BNBR notice was issued. Both Zeibura and I have no problem honouring such requests, and have done so in the past.

The BNBR notice was issued against not user comments, but the strictly templated post (which is already deleted). It now seems that the very act of reporting that someone has been, not even banned, but unbanned, is considered a BNBR violation.

I require a response, in order to decide whether to continue with the blog.

2017–08–28

Deleted:

Posts on this blog will only point to the profile of users, and mention any reason for sanction given in edit profiles. Speculation about why people have been banned or blocked will not be entertained. BNBR applies in comments.

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A note on moderation

Hello readers,

I have been served a BNBR warning for a Necrologue post.

Without wanting to point the finger at anyone in particular, I would like to ask if we could pay a little more attention to the text in the footer. The reason being, it is not fair to excessively discuss why people have been blocked and banned, while they are unable to participate in the discussion.

I will now be moderating comments which speculate excessively.

Thanks

Posts on this blog will only point to the profile of users, and mention any reason for sanction given in edit profiles. Speculation about why people have been banned or blocked will not be entertained. BNBR applies in comments.

New to Quora? Check out Quora Base Camp