111–120 of 209 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you even bayesian?
I think he's talking about the difference between correlation and causation. You're right though in that from a law enforcement POV the two look roughly the same.
Are Indians not voting Democrat?
Quora was great years ago, but now it’s just a glorified Yahoo Answers full of Indians giving non-answers and fake stories in broken English.
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This bizarre racism seems quite off-topic.
On one hand I feel the same reaction you have to the parent, phrased this way it sounds like he/she is denigrating a whole nation. On the other hand, there was something that happened here that we should probably talk about. A few years ago some of the topics (especially human-relationship subjects) experienced a sudden surge of content from people from India. I know many smart and erudite Indians, and these new user…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
What happened in India was from mid-2016 usable internet access became super cheap. This suddenly added at least a hundred million new users to the Internet in a short span of time, people who were being exposed to totally new communities beyond their facebook friend circle. This is not about India, this happens whenever there is a clash between new users and old users and the number of new users is overwhelmingly larger than the old ones. This should have happened when China started getting internet, but I guess their government policies coupled with less number of English speakers than India prevented it. But this is not the last time this is happening. After the Indians settle down, I guess next will be Africa and we will start again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On one hand I feel the same reaction you have to the parent, phrased this way it sounds like he/she is denigrating a whole nation. On the other hand, there was something that happened here that we should probably talk about. A few years ago some of the topics (especially human-relationship subjects) experienced a sudden surge of content from people from India. I know many smart and erudite Indians, and these new user…
Eternal September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September What happened in India was from mid-2016 usable internet access became super cheap. This suddenly added at least a hundred million new users to the Internet in a short span of time, people who were being exposed to totally new communities beyond their facebook friend circle. This is not about India, this happens whenever there is a clash between new u…
One part of the article that I really disagree with is the part about the Wayback machine. As much as I believe it's important we retain the information we put on the internet, I fully support that if I put something on the internet and I am the creator of such content, I should be allowed to remove that content I created if I wish. This is closely aligned with the GDPR's "Right to be forgotten", yes this is in relat…
I think in the vast majority of cases people don't actually care about deleting their content, they care mostly about disassociating something from their identity. Maybe they asked something dumb or controversial years ago and they don't want it to show up with their name on it. I think maybe there should be more of a trend of websites not showing usernames next to posts and just an identifier like "Purple" that chan…
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I never found the quality to be anywhere near as good as Stack Exchange, even when Quora first launched. Why anyone would knowingly use Quora over Stack Exchange is a mystery to me; I suspect that most Quora users simply aren't aware that Stack Exchange exists, since SE traditionally catered primarily to a technical audience. Edit: One of my biggest gripes with the platform is that it's always solicited a large numbe…
SE has a very strict notion of having the "correct answer" to each question which is enforced in all communities except some (Interpersonal SE and "soft questions" come to mind). Even in those contexts, answers must be well cited and be credible in a certain way (e.g. in Interpersonal SE all answers must be grounded by personal experiences). This makes it a fundamentally different website than Quora. Quora is about e…
Probably had. The secret of SE’s success was the rigorous curation as encouraged via the gamification system, explicitly at the design of the site’s founders. Now there are various interpretations of their change in direction, but the quality has noticeably deteriorated for both questions and answers. There’s no sign of a credible rival right now but when one appears it will do to SE what SE did to ExpertsExchange overnight, and for the same reasons.
Quora was great years ago, but now it’s just a glorified Yahoo Answers full of Indians giving non-answers and fake stories in broken English.
Tell me about it. I was probably among the few thousands of Indians using the website during 2012-2013. It helped me so much with learning programming, asking experts, reading about their experiences about working on large scale projects. I thought Quora was the go-to place for useful advices. A year or so and a Quora popularity boom later, I had hundreds of followers, feeds with all kinds of life stories and experie…
For me personally, Quora was special because the people on it were so different from each other. My first few follows were a NASA engineer, a published author, a student with radical views on theology etc.
But over time, with popularity, the site has devolved into a homogeneous mixture of people with similar views on most topics, from the same strata of society, mostly from the same country(/ies), with the same educational backgrounds, same sense of humour (My friend used to joke that the average writer on Quora is INTP Engineer from IIT who is working at a MNC but wants to change the world through NGO-work).
I think the change came about when Quora stopped charging for asking questions. This led to a flood of nonsense questions and a flooding of experiential questions over factual ones (eg. What is it like to be an older sibling vs. Why is the Attack on Normandy considered a turning point?). And of course experiential questions have waaaaaay more people who want to share their experiences on the same.
I think the day I lost hope entirely was when I was A2A "If Pakistan kidnaps Sachin Tendulkar, what would India government's response be?" (Yes, I'm Indian, but this question is silly in itself and the chest-thumping answers on this were even sillier).
Today, I still use Quora, though the last answer I wrote was about 3 years ago. I still have about 9K followers, but I follow a carefully curated list of about 70 accounts. It's utility as a website to "share knowledge" is very limited and I look at it today as essay-Twitter (Similar noise, similar debating, but just like Twitter, once in a while something good shows up)