Comment by theodric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by theodric | Hacker News Reader

Somehow I ended up on Quora's spam list, and despite my many requests, they refuse to unsubscribe me. What I see come through as the subject of those daily e-mails is a constant trickle of inflammatory pseudo-questions, and not infrequently paedo-/incest-adjacent ragebait, intended to provoke engagement. Someone or some algo that someone owns is curating this crap and believes that it's OK that it goes out as the "face of the company" to whoever is on their spam list.

Examples:

- 3 Sept: "I caught my 13 year old daughter using pads for her period without my permission. What do I do now?"

- 24 August: "My 15-year-old son punched his pregnant baby sitter’s belly and she punched him back. She now has a miscarriage and my son has a bruise. Is she wrong for this?"

- 23 August: "My 15-year-old step daughter told me to wash her back in the shower. What should I do?"

- 21 August: "I caught my 14-year-old son and his friend’s 41 year old dad holding hands. Should I be concerned?"

This site is garbage, and some of its users clearly are, as well. Go ahead and cancel it, for all I care.

Those are all from the same person, or a small cadre using the same pattern. They brag about it to each other on a subreddit. Such questions get a huge amount of attention, and Quora's algorithm mistakes that for users wanting to see more of it.

There is nobody curating it. It's all automated.

But if the admins of the site cared more about integrity than pure profit, they'd put in a simple heuristic to filter this shit. So one way or another, they're culpable; and more so if this is a known phenomenon.

Oh, they're definitely culpable. But in some ways that jackass is the least of it. They know perfectly well that he'll tweak his pattern to evade any filter.

But they sure as hell could manually scan their emails. That's the really demoralizing part. They might lose a war of escalation but they don't even try in the most conspicuous places.

We need to stop accepting the "it's automated curation by an algorithm" excuse from companies. It isn't my problem that you outsourced your editorial responsibilities to a glorified paperclip optimizer. It's still your responsibility.

This applies not just to Quora, but every company with an "algorithm": Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, etc.

> inflammatory pseudo-questions, and not infrequently paedo-/incest-adjacent ragebait, intended to provoke engagement

This exactly

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