I have a confession to make. I’m human, and sometimes I get tired, and sometimes I get tired of specific things, and this Quora nonsense is wearing me out. I’m sick of it. In fact, while I’ve enjoyed the nearly unanimous support I’ve received (save two anonymous cowards who attempted to defame me) I was unhappy with the arrangement from the minute it started. It should have never happened.
I enjoyed posting on Quora. It had a good community– a declining one, but a slowly declining one– and some really good content. I’m sad to be leaving it. I think that the best thing it did for me and my writing was to give me focus. Rather than for me to sit down and feel like I have to open a vein and spill 5 kilowords to thoroughly explain a topic, I’d jump in, answer a question (sometimes quickly, and I know that I’m not known for being terse) and be done. I also liked the quick feedback. Anyway, this is more of a loss for Quora than it is for me. People go to Quora because it has people like me, and the more willing it is to alienate talent, the less useful it will be.
So I’ve lost, in that I shouldn’t have been banned from Quora. Quora has also lost because absolutely no one, except for two mouth-breathing anonymous idiots who couldn’t write to save their own flaccid, withered dicks, believes that Quora banned me for the benefit of the community. No one who isn’t an idiot believes that I was banned for reasons pertaining to any conduct on that site. It is unclear exactly why I was banned, but it clearly wasn’t anything I did on or around Quora.
Yes, I did use an alternate account to browse health-related content, more than 2 years ago. There were (and still are) severe privacy problems surrounding the “Anon User” function and I simply didn’t trust Quora’s guarantees of anonymity. I wouldn’t normally point this out, because I really liked Quora (the product and the people) until they 9/4’d me, but Quora’s judgment when it comes to privacy is quite poor; three years ago, it was public information who had read an answer. You could opt out by choosing to go anonymous for that question, but you had to do so for every question if you didn’t want to announce that you had read its answers. Was this “sock puppeting”? No, it was not. It was not done for deceptive purposes nor to abuse anonymity. It’s not even clear that it was against any of Quora’s policies. In any case, it’s pretty obvious that that’s not the real reason for me being banned (even if it’s the stated one) because it’s an inoffensive action, and because it was so long ago.
We still don’t know whether Y Combinator played a role in this debacle. I was firmly convinced at first, and now I’m less so, if only because of the extreme lack of professionalism and ethics that Quora has shown in handling this. I’d put my priors at 90/10 instead of 99/1, at this point. We may never know if Y Combinator played a role. We will know, by Friday at the latest, whether Quora wants people to think Y Combinator was responsible. Quora can’t win, at this point. Let’s consider three possible outcomes:
- Quora explicitly points the finger at an investor. This is almost certainly not going to happen, and it would be ruinous for Quora to do so. If someone has the power to extort Quora into banning a user, then Quora clearly can’t name that person.
- Quora publicly fires the moderator responsible for the ban, and reinstates my account. This is the best possible outcome for Quora; it loses the least by firing and replacing one employee, compared to the alternatives. This is also the outcome that I prefer, but I don’t expect it to happen.
- Quora does nothing, implicitly pointing the finger at Y Combinator. Right now, almost everyone who’s aware of this banning suspects Y Combinator of being involved, because of the timing and also because of Paul Buchheit’s malicious attack on me, which occurred on August 10. Quora can claim that it acted independently, but no one will believe them because of their demolished moral credibility. The only way that they can convince anyone that Y Combinator and Paul Buchheit weren’t involved in a bad-faith ban and an abuse of power is to take option (2).
In other words, Quora either has to fire people (making the ban look like an isolated fuckup that they quickly reverted) or it is throwing shade on Y Combinator– and Paul Buchheit in particular. While Paul Buchheit nearly admitted guilt, he hasn’t actually confessed (and, for all we know, might not be guilty) and I highly doubt that Quora’s investors would be happy if the company formally implicated him.
It’s a Catch-22. If Quora fires a moderator or two, people will wonder if it just made those employees into fall guys to cover its own sloppy ass. If Quora doesn’t fire an admin, we won’t necessarily know that Y Combinator was responsible for the bad-faith ban, but we’ll know that Quora wants people to think that Y Combinator was responsible.
So I’ve lost, and Quora has lost, but at the same time, I’ve won. The image of a “unicorn” is in tatters and the appearance is of brutal, investor-level corruption.
Let’s look at the stupidity of this whole thing. Because I challenged Paul Graham to a duel on August 20, Quora has lost its moral credibility for good. And since I wasn’t just anybody, but a “Top Writer” with 8,600 followers, Quora just told almost 9000 of its users to go fuck themselves. (In addition, to enforce the ban, Quora violated its own stated privacy procedures around anonymity. If it weren’t me at the center of controversy, that alone would bring all the knives out on Hacker News.) It took that little (a silly rap-battle challenge that even I didn’t take seriously) on my side to bring Silicon Valley down that far. Will Quora survive? Yeah, probably, in some form. Is Silicon Valley toast? Hardly scratched. But look at the ratio. Look at how little effort (a silly Tweet that I gave the hashtag, “#Kefka2016”) that it required from a relative nobody (that’s me) to bring a “unicorn” to shit the bed. This is good news! Silicon Valley is fragile. It can be beaten. By one person? Maybe not. By a hundred? That’s a start. And, as with Quora, its own worst enemy by far is itself.
Silicon Valley’s incestuous network of extortions and manipulations is being exposed, and its former moral credibility is falling to pieces and, with it, so may its cancerous dominance of technology. If that happens, then we all win, and we can build whatever comes next. And I can now say that I’ve been a small part of the process.
