I’m ready for this topic to die out. I’m just not into Quora anymore. But there are a few things that I need to address.
Earlier on Twitter, I mentioned that Quora was planning an 18% “emergency raise” pool in order to offset the morale problems associated with an unjustified (and unjustifiable) user ban. I have a second source that is giving a number closer to 14 percent. I’m guessing that the bulk amount is known (although no one has shared the exact dollar figure with me, fearing retaliation, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the executives shared slightly different numbers with each person informed as a way of tracing any leaks) but there’s some uncertainty around the denominator (i.e. Quora’s total payroll).
If we take the more conservative 14% and assume 115 employees at $100,000 per year (on average) we’d get an annual raise pool of about $1.6 million. That’s not a bad amount of money to make for other people just by getting banned from a website.
Of course, some people will participate in this emergency raise pool and some won’t. The people who don’t are unlikely to get any raises or bonuses for a while.
My advice to Quora employees trying to maximize their fortune is as follows: show some dissatisfaction over the decision. Not a lot. Don’t explicitly threaten to leave, just imply that the magic is starting to fade in the wake of this event. If your boss tells you to shut the fuck up about #QuoraGate, then shut the fuck up about it and get back to work. If your boss shares your opinion, thank him for being on the right side of things and remain loyal. Do good work, since you won’t get anything unless they want to keep you. Remain loyal to your employer, while seeming just a little bit more tired and less willing to, say, carry a pager or put your career goals on hold. When your performance review comes, ask for a raise. Be aggressive. The people who are really pissed off about my account being banned will be getting 30 percent raises and large bonuses, and the people who don’t say anything are probably not getting anything for a year (because an “emergency raise pool” usually means that regular raises and bonuses are on hold for a while). Ask for promotions, get a better title, etc. Now, when a company’s internal reputation is uncertain and morale is a serious executive-level concern, is the time to ask for things. The window will close.
To be honest, I don’t think that attrition is an actual risk for the company at this point. People don’t usually leave companies, at least not immediately, because their companies do something distasteful. I mean, we’re only talking about a user ban (and some nasty dishonesty around why that user was banned). As far as ethical crimes by corporations go, it’s about a 1.5 out of 10 on the sin scale at worse. More of a threat is that people will be vaguely dissatisfied and underperform now that the “magic” is gone. If even one people actually quit because of me being banned, I’d be surprised. I do think that it will be a significant contributor to a few departures over the next 12 months, and that the general energy of the company will be deflated. It’s hard to recover from a bad-faith user ban (people will argue forever about what is and is not “sock puppeting”, but absolutely no one believes that explanation, and an extensive censorship campaign to cover up the real reason doesn’t help, either).
Let me mention one thing about “sock puppeting”. I don’t do it, because it doesn’t work. I found that out on Wikipedia in 2004. It takes an enormous amount of energy and even if the sock puppets aren’t detected or proven, it looks ridiculous. One person stating an idiosyncratic opinion has an effect. People rarely change their opinions immediately after a heated debate– and if it gets nasty, they’ll pull farther apart and become more extreme– but can, in some circumstances, drift over time as they learn things that support the alternative hypothesis. That’s happened to me. A year after an argument, something will happen that convinces me that my “opponent” was more right than I’d originally been willing to accept. Two people stating an idiosyncratic opinion has less effect. A second identity that always supports the first, whether that second identity is controlled by the same person (“sock puppet”), an explicit collaborator (“meat puppet”), or just a random sycophant, actually makes them both look worse. It doesn’t establish consensus. And if you try to maintain five or more distinct identities to create false consensus, that’s only going to be transparent and a waste of time– and it will take a lot of time, too. I don’t “sock puppet” because I played that game 10 years ago and it proved to be completely pointless. It doesn’t fucking work, so can we get on with our lives?
Two years ago, I used an alternate account to browse health-related topics because I didn’t trust Quora’s privacy story. (That account still works, putting the lie to Quora’s claim that it “caught” me. “Sock puppeting” is a convenient proximate cause for any user ban because (a) it’s ill-defined, (b) using multiple accounts is usually quite harmless, (c) almost everyone does it, and (d) it carries an implicit threat which is to breach that person’s privacy.) That fact doesn’t fucking matter. Quora has tons of users with multiple accounts and doesn’t give the square root of a fuck. What matters is that Quora told its user community to go fuck itself, because no one in said community believes that that was the real reason for me to be banned. The real reason, although the exact mechanics are still unclear, was something unrelated to my conduct on the site and probably involving Y Combinator and Paul Buchheit in particular. Paul Buchheit as essentially admitted guilt by continuing to comment on the matter while transparently pretending not to have been a part of the decision.
There’s more that Quora has done to embarrass itself in the past 12 hours. One of the two anonymous brownshirts is now claiming to be a moderator at Quora. I don’t know whether it’s true, but if it’s not, then Quora ought to ban him for the dishonest claim, and if it is, then this is huge black mark on Quora since it’s an obvious violation of the “Be Nice; Be Respectful” policy. I guess that “BN;BR” doesn’t apply to people who piss off Paul Buchheit, though. Neither does “Don’t Be Evil”, a now-laughable three-word platitude that is the only reason anyone has ever heard of him.
