Quora's "India Problem"
quora.com
quora.com
The downfall of Quora was when generalists ("polymath" being the popular self-style on Quora...) would wikipedia some shit to write an authoritative-seeming answer, and ended up being promoted above topic experts. And, when they gave up and allowed pointless survey questions. And, when people with big external audiences (Robert Scoble being the star example) arrived on Quora and brought a bunch of upvoters with them. Instead of pushing back against these trends, Quora doubled down on them -- with a "credit" system which rewarded gaming voting, etc.
The influx of Indians was more a sign that the site itself had already died.
1. "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse": Rarely is the person actually capable of eating a horse.
2. "I'd die if he found out": Rarely would the person actually die. They'd probably be mortified (ah ha, nice pun there, eh?).
3. "Everyone's a critic": Nope, not everyone. Some people are not critics.
I've seen people bitch about Brazilians on Orkut, Chinese on WoW, Blacks on MySpace/Twitter, Indians on Quora and Android users on Instagram.
For all its potential as a connector, the Internet is full of homogeneous echo chambers. There's some threshold for these places where integration suddenly becomes a "problem".
I've occasionally wondered if the future of recommendation engines are systems which feed us a steady stream of what we want to hear and filter out everything and everyone else.
That's the point of the internet. To be able to seek out more people who think like you and have the exact same interests so you don't have to deal so much with all the heterogenous people in the real world.
And that's crazy.
at least white nationalists have the balls to just come out and say what they mean.
coward.
There are two main reasons why most people find it not too irritating to have a Silicon Valley dominated social network. First is that most social networks are initially dominated by Silicon Valley, so in general, people are used to Silicon Valley content. The second, and more important reason is that many people in other countries are interested in keeping tabs on what's going on in Silicon Valley because they feel that the same thing will reach their country in an year or two. So, too much Silicon Valley content is usually not a problem for most people."
This pretty much invalidates the argument... Do they really want silicon valley content or is it just the authors bias?
There's a product, there is a population, and a good fit. How exactly is it a problem? If you don't like indian content, just don't read it. No one is forcing you.
What if most of the content on facebook was suddently in spanish? Would you stop using it or ask for a anti-hispanic filter??
It you feel like "these people are really overtaking my place", maybe the problem is not with them, but with you.
There are many websites, and one may want to cater to a WASP-only audience. But maybe it won't be as successful.
The problem is that Quora is based on an entirely different premise and wouldn't really work too well based on existing social circles. What it does need is circles based on topics and areas of interest - of course it is a real problem if you cannot easily filter the content for topics that actually interest you. Geographical distance is one dimension in the complex function that measures how interesting a certain topic is to you.
He doesn't want to see lots of Indian local politics/culture topics, because they don't interest him. This implies no dislike of or prejudice against India, merely disinterest.
He doesn't in any way shape or form say that the people posting about such topics shouldn't be on the site, and his proposed rememedy - being able to block such topics, is clearly intended to allow him to co-exist on a site containing many such people and to still interact with those people about topics that do interest him.
Not all discrimination is born of prejudice.
EDIT: I thought you were talking about guylhem... my mistake.
I know I wouldn't.
I do not believe it's about racism, are they really against people from India? Or is it just that they aren't interested in reading India-specific content?
Content of any type has it's target group, a flood of a specific type content on something like a front page will only be accepted by the target group, and the rest will feel like the site is all about that topic.
Anyway, your point about "no one is forcing you" is explicitly addressed in TFA. Apparently it's genuinely hard to get away from. If you have a counter-argument, let's see it. Otherwise, don't just rehash dead points and hope people will believe you the second time.
But you're absolutely right to point out the racism of the phrase "India problem." The problem is with Quora, not the users or their countries of origin.
> What if most of the content on facebook was suddently in spanish? Would you stop using it or ask for a anti-hispanic filter??
Absolutely, if Facebook insisted on showing me Spanish-languge content no matter what I did. The relevant metric is not "majority of content on the site" but "majority of the content presented to me."
When I last used Quora, you could follow different topics and people. Presumably, if you aren't interested in Perl coding, you don't follow that topic, and you don't get exposed to Perl content.
In what way is India-centric content 'forced' on Quora users in a way that (e.g.) Perl-centric content is not?
Is Quora attracting English-speaking Indians as users in disproportionate numbers compared to users not from India?
I don't really know how this is different, I just since left reading HN on a regular basis.
They did invade places.
When I joined Orkut, I found many famous game developers, befriended them, and joined their communities, and had cool hacking discussions with fellow hackers.
Then brazillians joined those communities, wrote in portuguese even when moderators politely asked them to not to, and wrote in wrong portuguese even, it pissed off even other brazillians, I remember that in about 5 months after the initial "invasions" all my foreign hacker friends had quit, and communities were dead (yes, after the foreigners quit, brazillians stopped posting too...).
Brazillians DO like to troll around, there is plenty evidence of that.
anyway, in retrospect (and assuming they still don't support multiple languages) it seems like the quora reflex - to prefer "ban it" over "understand and adapt" - has come home to roost. instead of providing tools to support multiple communities / languages, they relied on exclusion through language, which was fragile to a community that uses english.
it's actually quite satisfying, if you're happy to watch quora burn.
There's a good discussion of this concept of 'plazas' and 'warrens' in social software (originating with Xianhang Zhang) here:
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-...
I think Quora's more fundamental problem is that the rules of the social game were not well though out. For example, I find that the user's feed can become too noisy too quickly. It is too easy for someone to add a crappy unrelated question into a topic you follow.
As a result you see people who value their time leaving the social network, no matter how "intellectualist" the network wanted to be in the beginning.
Indians just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: exactly at the time of interesting people (including interesting Indians) leaving.
Somehow I'm still hoping to see Quora's revival. Just noticed a question about Noam Chomsky and thought: so why doesn't Noam Chomsky himself answering it? This wouldn't sound like a fantasy a few years ago.
If I were Quora, I'd re-think the user's dashboard with those who value their time in mind.
Indian users from pre-2012 were indistinguishable from other users. (2013 isn't that much worse than 2012, yet; the decline really accelerated in late 2011). Some of the best users on Quora are "early Indian users".
The problem I have with filtering stuff on Quora is that I've successfully filtered most of the bad content, but now I have virtually no content in my feed at all. The percentage of worthwhile questions/answers has really fallen. If they didn't have essentially limitless internal funding, they'd be shutting down. They have made no meaningful product improvements in ~years.
The real problem is the output: broken English & logic that is indistinguishable from trolling.
The reason why this seems to be an "Indian" issue is because of English literacy which is good enough to be usable, but with very poor grammar, at a massive scale. Other countries, be it France, Russia, or China, appear to have either English literacy that is either high enough quality as to be indistinguishable from being non-native, or it is just a tiny blip that goes unnoticed. I would suspect that "Indian" is the term many of the outliers of these other groups are being grouped in to.
Solutions? The ones that lump everyone in to groups based on their country of origin are the simplest. The least "racist" would be to divide the community down these lines, just as Google does.
The bigger question to me is, how are so many people learning English so poorly, but in a usable form?
I think a lot of it is that the Indian users on Quora are largely drawn from the IITs, so they're either high achievers in India (and often from high SES backgrounds), or they're IIT alumni in the US. I really don't think Quora's specific Indian problem has much to do with them being Indian so much as the overall decline of the site.
(There is some India-specific content, and India-specific answers to questions which really aren't India-specific, but that can be largely filtered by topic. The really annoying content is when it's pervasive.)
I asked them why they type that way, and the answer I got was that it saves time, and as long as the ideas are communicated successfully, who cares? Especially on a medium as transient as the Internet! In turn, they were baffled at why I typed with so many unnecessary words and letters.
In the USA, correct English is a way of signaling respect for your content and for your reader. If I am unwilling to invest my time to spell and punctuate properly, I have no right to ask you to invest your time in reading what I wrote.
For these typists, there are other signals. For example, a common question was "sir plz cn u hlp me". Respect is conveyed via the first two words, and the style is intended to be neutral and not communicate anything. In turn, I found "sir" to be weird and overly deferential, and the style to be incredibly off-putting.
So that's one factor I identified. I'd be interested in hearing from others.
What??? Ironically while working at a major US based call center here in Bangalore, my American English instructor told me I need to exactly do that. In fact she always used to insist I need to let go of my 'British English' and adopt the 'US English' standards. 'Want to' had to become 'wanna', 'I would' had to become I'd - And stuff like that.
To me it felt like I had to unlearn all the good things to speak in US English.
>>In the USA, correct English is a way of signaling respect for your content and for your reader.
This really made me laugh. By British and even by standards of English spoken in Indian schools. Most Indians and can write and speak better English than most Americans can ever do.
India probably has the highest number of publications and consumption of English material and may easily account to half of the world's English speaking population- magazines, newspapers, books, novels, text books, printed form etc you name it and India will easily come out on top.
You seem to be(disturbed and) referring to a form of communication called 'SMS lingo' which is very famous among kids around the world, not just India. Its more of generation gap, while I chat with kids around- I get equally irritated as your are. Yet among them, this is what they call 'cool'.
On a side note, there was once a time when people complained about a lot of Indians in Wikipedia. This is going to happen with any English based site.
Yeah, that's pretty annoying, isn't it?
But if you have a filter to blacklist 'Indian-sounding' names, then what about all the people who do what I'm doing: Use an alias that happens to mask my 'Indian-sounding' name?
How do you get rid of all those people?
You'll see that the first 8 pictures posted in ranked order are all of indian decent. At firs I thought maybe Varrun Ramani's upvotes were some sort of 4chan/anonymous hack but that's the first time I discovered this "Indian problem".
This is my "best" quora with the most followers. Anecdotally, it's peaked around 500 and it seems the makeup of it has skewed towards Indians.
For me, it's just another tool to research and discover things. I'm sure if I worked for quora, I'd like it to be way more than just that.
I like the comments about having country specific stuff, but then again that seems to be tough to break down current content that way. Perhaps that is a Manhattan Project that Quora needs to tackle.
That all said, if I wanted to make a "random indian name generator" I'd definitely harvest it off certain quoras.