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Comment by guylhem | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but it is just as racist as when people complained about Orkut being "invaded" by brazilians.

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.

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"Just don't read content you aren't interested in" is paradoxical, because the determination of interest requires reading. The problem is that Quora presents users with content they aren't interested in, and don't give users tools to filter that content. If left unchecked, Quora may converge to a monoculture, which would make it much less important than it could be.

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."

"Just don't read content you aren't interested in" is paradoxical, because the determination of interest requires reading.

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?

Like half of the new users are English-speaking Indians, if not more. It got a following in the IITs and exploded there, while stagnating elsewhere.

Any time you start a sentence with "I'm sorry but", generally (a) you aren't sorry (b) the following statement is going to be wrong.

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.

I'm pretty sure the dude himself is an Indian.

He's not.

EDIT: I thought you were talking about guylhem... my mistake.

Yes, he is. His name is Navin Kabra, lives in India and graduated from IIT Bombay.

https://www.quora.com/Navin-Kabra

If 50% of the HN front page always was content about India and content people from India would be interested in, would you still be reading HN?

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.

Yes, I would like to be able to filter out Facebook content in a language I can't understand. Someone who doesn't read English should have the same ability. If there's a glut of activity about underwater basket weaving, for heaven's sake, I want to be able to get away from that, too. This is not hard to understand.

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.

Facebook, of course, solves this problem by simply being what it is - a social network. The whole point of Facebook is that you get to follow those people who are already in your social circle, and the content they produce is presumably somehow relevant to you. If Facebook suddenly started to force random Spanish (or English, for that matter) content into my feed, damn right I'd be angry and demand change. (By the way, I'm rather sure that most of the content in Facebook is not in English these days.)

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.

There's a couple of replies to your post but no one of them really care that HN got a shitstorm of posts about American politics in the last 2 years or so and that it became a lot worse two months ago with posts about NSA populating the front page. I really don't see how this is different from quora.

I don't really know how this is different, I just since left reading HN on a regular basis.

I am brazillian, and I hated what brazillians did.

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.

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