I’ve obviously been paying a lot of attention (and “lurking”, although my interest in posting there is pretty much gone for good) to Quora– the site that banned me because I jokingly challenged investor Paul Graham to a rap duel– and the mess that followed. I may be a controversial figure for my 2012 exposure of stack-ranking at Google, or for many of the lies I’ve exposed inside the startup game, or maybe just because some people hate static typing, but I was a model contributor to Quora by any definition. I don’t have rally people. Quora’s users and employees are already pissed-off on my behalf. If anything, I’m trying to hold them back.
What has disappointed me about Quora’s conduct is not the ban itself. The dominant theory seems to be that it was subjected to undue pressure by investors and had no choice. However, this spot-on post by “James Crann” (a declared pseudonym) was, unfortunately, yanked from the site this morning. I’m glad that I was able to catch it. It was gone before 9:00 am. The post was inoffensive and reasonable. It did not even assert that one explanation of “QuoraGate” was the correct one. There was no reason to remove it from the site, unless something needed to be covered up.
Forgive any errors, as I’ve had to hand-type this text out from a screenshot.
Why was Michael O. Church banned from Quora?
James Crann (ed. note: this was a declared pseudonym).
I have no idea, but it’s almost certainly not the official explanation.
One possibility is the “investor-level extortion” theory that Michael has put forward. See his blog post: What the September 4, 2015 Quora disaster (#QuoraGate) tells us about VC-funded tech’s future. Another is that someone at Quora felt that Michael was getting “too big” and had to be taken down. Many forums ban posters who seem to be “breaking away” with a powerful following, and Michael is one of the most-followed non-celebrity posters. Or it could have been some other private grudge. Marc Bodnick and Michael Church always seemed to respect each other, but they had very different political views. It does seem odd that a site would take such action against a popular user, and there are a number of possible answers. I’m not as quick as Michael is to jump to a specific one of them, because I saw the Y Combinator feud as entertainment more than as a threat to anything. Honestly, I thought it possible that the YCs were in on the joke and using it for free publicity.
Quora could be having strings pulled on it, or it could be covering up for an overzealous admin who just triggered a land mind. To me, stupidity is as feasible an explanation for this as an investor extortion.
As I mentioned in a comment on Ryan Chew’s answer, there are several reasons why the “sock puppet” explanation is almost certainly untrue. For one thing, Michael Church has 8,590 followers and anything he posts gets at least 10 legitimate upvotes, sometimes hundreds. I have a hard time believing that Michael Church has these scores of sock puppets, all with rich histories and many tied to real people, and that his success on Quora isn’t due entirely to the quality of his answers.
Second, sock puppeting wouldn’t be very effective on Quora because it has a PageRank-like system wherein the socks’ votes would (rightfully) be assigned a low level of credibility. (ed. note: I believe this to be correct, though I have no inside knowledge). For answer placement, who is doing the voting matters more than the raw number of up- or downvotes (and that makes sense).
I also don’t buy that Michael [has used] sock puppets to troll. He doesn’t seem to need the cover of anonymity to voice controversial opinions. He wants what he is saying tied to his real name. And while I’ve only met him a few times (ed. note: I don’t know who this person is, and I’m not going to share my guesses) he doesn’t seem to have a lot of free time and I can’t imagine that he has the time or interest necessary to run a sock puppet army.
Finally, it’s inconceivable that Quora would violate user privacy just because it suspects someone who doesn’t need sock puppets has an alternate account. Quora may suspect that Michael has more than one account (because it’s the Internet, and most people do) but they’re obviously using sock puppetry as a “We know what’s best for you” evasive answer. Something else is going on. It could be a VC putting pressure on Quora, or it could be an incompetent admin.
Disclaimer: I am not using my real name, because I fear a ban on my real-name account for speaking the truth about this.
Here are the photos that establish that this post (now not merely “collapsed” but actually covered up) did exist.
That post was removed around 7:00 am Pacific time. If there is a silver lining to all this, it’s that some poor bastard had the job of doing a corporation’s cover-up work at 7 am on a holiday. I would bet that he is a lot more upset with Quora than I am.
