5.21.5. Quora

Quora is a generally shitty website, with mechanisms that allow wumaos to quench freedom of speech.

Quora is a major platform for Astroturfing.

Ironically, as usual, is it also blocked in China:

Examples of activity related to Ciro Santilli:

Quora is also shitty because wumaos can downvote your answer privately regardless of reputation and make it become collapsed as "Answer may need improvement", which means it goes to the bottom and readers have to click an "expand collapsed answers" button to see it, so that very few people will ever see it.

Then have to appeal and wait for moderators to evaluate it.

Ciro appealed in 2020-03-10 and the answer was reinstated on day later, but by then the question was already not being suggested as much to readers, and the other wumao answers (which criticize the USA rather than answering the question about China).

While there is some probability that the answers themselves are not wumaos, their upvoters almost certainly are and must be investigated.

Other shitty aspects of Quora include:

  • block Wayback Machine (web.archive.org, 网站时光机) archives with their robots.txt, gotta use archive.today (archive.is)

  • automatically add random topics that you don’t care about to your suggestions, with no easy way to prevent that.

  • questions cannot have more than one sentence. There used to be a question body, but it was replaced with a "link for context". Ridiculous.

As a result, on the few occasions that Ciro posts on Quora, all content will also be mirrored here. Ciro’s China Quora answers include:

Some wumaos:

Related posts: