There’s a rumor about me, pertaining to Quora, that I’ve now heard from two different sources, and it’s recently been published on the Internet. It’s… yet another thing that I have to deal with. Okay, so it’s half-true. From a Quora poster:
Quora tried to extend the olive branch but […] Michael demanded the termination of Bodnick in order to return
(The back story to all this, for those unaware of it, is that Quora banned me when an investor demanded they do so. What did I do to piss off that investor? I challenged Paul Graham to a rap battle on Twitter. Yes, seriously. That’s what happened. Now, they’re regretting it because a large number of people hate them.)
The part that’s true is that Quora, presumably recognizing how much it had damaged its own brand in banning me and then by trying to lie about the reason, did reach out to offer an arrangement in which I’d be unbanned, in exchange for returning to their community and saying nice things about them. It’s also true that the negotiation fell through. I did not, at any time, bring anyone’s termination into discussion. It’s not even something that I would do, in a case like this. I certainly have no animus toward Bodnick, who didn’t make the decision. That part never happened.
So here’s what did. Quora showed me some metrics indicating that activity by users internally considered to be “high-quality” (a designation that has a high correlation with Top Writer status) was dropping and that bad-faith bans [1] were often cited. Quora is, as it should be, deathly afraid of turning into Yahoo Answers. People are increasingly afraid to stake their reputations on a forum where they’re at risk of having “This account has been banned” slapped across their profile, by an unaccountable corporation and sometimes for no reason, and so a lot of the top talent is leaving.
[1] Of course, the “bad-faith” part is my words. They would not admit that other users were banned in bad faith and referred to my being banned as merely “unfortunate”.
It was clear that they wanted to bring me back for optical reasons. They agreed to un-ban me, in exchange for me saying a few nice words about them and about Bodnick that I wouldn’t mind having to say. So I asked for terms. First, I wanted them to admit that I had been banned at an investor request, putting to death this rumor that I’d been running a voting ring. They agreed to that. It wouldn’t be an issue, they said, so long as I didn’t ask them to name the specific investor. Second, I wanted a provision under which, if I were ever banned again, I’d be paid a fee of $3.00 per word for every contribution since I started using the site. Of course, so long as they did the right thing, they’d owe me nothing.
That might seem like an absurd request. So let me explain my reasoning. Answering questions on Quora is unpaid. People write on Quora because, if they do it well, it improves their reputations. End of story. Being banned, even for no reason, demolishes all of that gain to reputation. You can write thousands of words of high-quality content, but if “This account has been banned” is written across your profile, that’s all that anyone will see. What’s to say that Marc Bodnick’s successor won’t mistake me for an Indian feminist (Indian feminists tend to get banned a lot on Quora; I have no idea why that is) and ban me again? I’m not going to create content for them, unpaid, if that risk is hanging over me. It’s stupid to expose myself to that risk without a splash fee.
They came back with 45¢ per word, with various terms included. Most were reasonable: only posts with at least 1,000 views would be counted, posts over 1500 words would be counted as 1500, and comments and anonymous answers wouldn’t be counted. I was fine with all of those. Those terms seemed reasonable, and I was willing to come down (probably not all the way to 45¢, but down from $3) on the per-word number because we were discussing a fee that ought never to be paid. They even threw in a $3,000 spot bonus in order to apologize for the original ban. What turned me off, in the end, was that they threw a cap ($20,000) on top of this fee structure. In other words, no matter how much free work I did, they could ban me again (demolishing the reputation that I might build by creating content) for a price that, compared to the cost to them of being under another investor extortion, was quite low.
In the end, I decided that my reputation’s worth more than $23,000, and told them to fuck off.
