If you’re not interested in the ongoing #QuoraGate debacle, just skip this post. You won’t be the worse for it.
UPDATE 8:24am CDT: Quora seems to have done the right thing and has deleted the thread in which the two posts, cited below, resided. Is this Gettysburg? Has this border state known as Quora come to fight with the North?
UPDATE #2: Disregard the above. They haven’t done the right thing. They just merged that question with another one, creating a multi-question where half of the answers don’t make sense.
Well, I figured it was only a matter of time before someone(s?) started throwing out lies about me. This is a predictable evolution in this sort of thing. We’ve now got some brownshirts, working under the cover of anonymity. They’re probably randoms just looking to stir shit, because I don’t think any venture capitalist cares about this thing; now that Quora caved to the extortion and banned me, I think they’re done in this game because I’ve been properly “punished”. At any rate, as I had predicted, the current crop of brownshirts is abusing Quora’s anonymity feature to argue in bad faith. I expected this. I knew that it was coming.
One of the brownshirts, on Quora, commented on my usage of sock puppets after the Quora ban. It’s true. I create lurker accounts to watch what is going on, on the site. How could I not be doing so? This is an evolving, upsetting, and bizarre story that Quora brought on itself, and it involves me, so I’d be stupid if I weren’t paying attention to it. I also created a “canary” (or “test”) answer– a high-quality answer on a math question that had nothing to do with this debacle and would not be traced to me– in order to see whether Quora would violate its own stated privacy policy in order to enforce the ban. (The canary died.) Am I using Quora in any meaningful way? No.
Lurking is not what sock puppeting is. Using an anonymous account when you are under political adversity is prudent, not maliciously deceptive. Everyone intelligent agrees that there are times when anonymous speech and multiple identities (or “role accounts”) are valid. Writers use pen names. Sock puppeting is when you deliberately represent yourself as a multiplicity of individuals with the purpose of rigging voting systems. (Clearly, though, it’s too much to ask for some people to get their terms right.) That’s not something that I’ve ever done on Quora, and I don’t even think it would work because, as has been discussed ad nauseum, Quora weights up- and downvotes based on the user’s credibility as measured by historical metrics that ought to be hard to fake. I don’t need to use sock puppets on Quora because I have almost 8,600 actual followers, and that number is growing faster after my “demise”, and I earned every single one of them the old-fashioned way: by writing high quality answers on the site.
I’ll confront some of these brownshirts, just because the things they’re saying are irritating and I’ve had to deal with such misinformation for a long time. I doubt that Quora asked these people to emerge, and Quora probably wants nothing to do with them. If it’s smart, Quora will distance itself from them and ban them as well.
One said:
He has a history of [using fake accounts], for example on Wikipedia (User:Isomorphic/Minions of the Church).
Ah, that page. You know, I’m of half a mind to sue that guy, because he’s full of shit, but it’s actually quite difficult to collect on a judgment against someone who doesn’t have much. Getting the judgment is easy; getting wages garnished over a small-ticket libel suit is hard. That’s probably a good thing in general (that it is difficult to collect against a regular person, protects people from predatory lenders) but it does mean that one can win a lawsuit and end up in the hole due to legal fees. I’ve had too many Pyrrhic victories in my life, already. I do know exactly who he is, and I could discredit him pretty easily by “outing” him and revealing what else I know, but it was more than 10 years ago and it’s not worth it to destroy another person’s reputation when my own is not in real danger– because, honestly, these brownshirts aren’t bringing anything new to the table.
Yes, it’s true. I’ll confess that I wrote a card game called Ambition in 2003, and it’s actually quite a well-balanced game. (Give it a try!) However, in 2004, I was too aggressive in promoting the game and used Wikipedia to do so, and that’s something that I shouldn’t have done, because no one is allowed to promote their own work on Wikipedia and I shouldn’t have done so either. While the rules around self-promotion were not as clearly defined as they are now, it wasn’t the best thing that I could have done.
As for the listed “sock puppets” by Wikipedia user “Isomorphic”, many of those are accounts that I’ve never seen and some of those accounts I have looked into and they literally don’t exist. Half of them have zero contributions. This probably shouldn’t surprise anyone, but the hate page about me has some sloppy work behind it.
A different brownshirt (they all kind of blend together, and it’s possible that they’re the same person, but it would be hypocritical to baselessly accuse someone of sock puppeting, after that has been done to me) came out with this shit:
He got banned from Hackernews for calling Marissa Mayer a ‘cunt’, which is a very abusive thing to say to any woman.
Yeah dude, I’m sorry that I have to pull your head out of your ass to smack you across the face with the actual facts, but that never happened. Dan Gackle deleted a post and then claimed that I called her a “cunt” in that post. I didn’t. In context, that much is clear, but since the post was deleted, who can say?
The word “queynte” may be related to “cunt” and it may not be. “Queynte”, meaning “a charming, simple thing”, was used as a euphemism for the vagina by Chaucer, and some take that to indicate that “cunt” derived from that word. Others think it more likely that it derived from the Latin “cunnus”. Who knows? Who cares? I know how to fucking spell, and if I wanted to use the word “cunt”, I would have used it. However, I’m mindful of the fact that, even though I don’t consider myself a sexist person, there are some very bad people out there who have said horrible things about (and done some horrible things to) women and, in that light, it’s best to stay the fuck away from the word “cunt” when the person you need to insult is female. Call her a prick or an asshole or a scallywag instead, but don’t use any variety of “cunt” unless your target is a man. Got it. Yes, I am smart enough to follow that simple rule. “Queynte” is not “cunt”. There are literally two instances of Chaucer using it as a euphemism for the female anatomy, and he uses the same word in nonsexual contexts many more times. “Queynte” is more closely related to “quaint” than to any other modern word.
This issue isn’t about me, though, and it’s certainly not about some inoffensive 14th-century word. The main issue is that Dan Gackle abused his power as moderator to delete a comment that I made on Hacker News, take it way out of context, and then use it as a pretext to ban me from the site, so I couldn’t defend myself. A month later, under what appears to be some kind of external pressure, Quora has been pressured into doing the same thing. I don’t know who is behind this Quora nonsense, but it’s deliberate and defamatory and it now involves some marquee Silicon Valley properties. Hacker News is a piece-of-crap slow forum, full of fanboys to an overblown, passive-aggressive man-child who can’t even take a silly rap-battle challenge in stride, written in a Lisp that can’t hold a candle to Clojure. Quora, on the other hand, is a billion-dollar (or close enough, the most recent valuation at $900 million) company and its moral credibility has gone to shit in the last 96 hours. This has become, in technical terms, kind of a big deal. No one expects to be able to trust Hacker News. Quora? I probably have half a million words’ worth of my own writing that’s now locked up behind their walled garden (and I am working with attorneys on the relevant ownership questions) and that I’m technically “not allowed” to see.
There are some more false accusations from these two anonymous losers (they’re not worth trying to tell apart, and they might be the same person) but I don’t really need to defend myself, and I’m itching to get back to my regularly unscheduled life. It’s 7:30 in the morning, and I’m running late for the gym.
I’m sick of this shit. I’m so sick of these imbecilic assclowns even existing. I need a distraction. Can anyone recommend a good movie? Or even a 3-minute cat video?
