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Rudolph J.

Fargo, United States

Contributor Level

Total Points
91

1 Review by Rudolph

  • Quora

7/20/21

I started writing physics answers on Quora because I went to college for it and love discussing it. I found so many highly inaccurate answers on the site. For example, I wrote an answer on length contraction and included John Bell's Spaceship Paradox as support for my answer as well as other sources. Out of about 30 answers to the question only two were correct and they were not the most upvoted. I wrote to many of the highest upvoted answers and explained why their answer was incorrect and included sources to back everything up. Many of them got defensive and/or deleted my comments. Answer writers can delete comments in Quora and the main Quora feed only shows the one answer on a particular topic so many casual Quora readers will think the answer is factual. Answers are pretty much deemed "correct" by massed upvoting which is not how science or any discussion of topics where facts and logic can be used should be judged. One person did try to fix their answer but I went back to it about a dozen times and it was still wrong for yet a different reason. The person had an ideological belief on how Relativity "should work" and kept wanting to incorporate it into his answer. If people can become ideological on something as well-tested and as hard science as Special Relativity even in the face of overwhelming evidence and their answer is still massively upvoted there's a problem.

I saw another answer by an American hating European who stated UK houses are smaller than US houses because it's colder in the UK than the US. This answer had 2,600 upvotes and had dozens of other easy to verify false statements. There are many areas where statements could be debated as information may be incomplete or many different reasonings may have support (politics or economics for example) but saying UK houses are smaller than US houses because of heating is so ridiculously wrong. It only takes one person legitimately disputing a statement to falsify it. Voting by mob rule is very wrong as the mob on average is not an expert. Many laypersons just upvote answers because they sound good to them.

Answers with too many down votes get hidden from most people's view. Well-written answers are all too often down voted. People often upvote the answers knowing they're wrong. I pointed out factually wrong information on some answers and the person's thousand of followers attacked me with nonsense. They never addressed anything I said directly and mostly did ad hominem attacks. The worst one was the anti-American writer I mentioned earlier (I honestly thought they did not understand but later found out they were knowingly lying). This writer only cares about spreading anti-American propaganda. Too many writers seek upvotes and likes above everything else. Moderators do not care (if anything they are also pushing for views and upvotes).

The Be Kind Be Respectful guideline and other moderation guidelines are highly subjective. I've had moderators take down comments I've written when I included facts backing up everything I said and attacked no one. "Kindness" is very subjective. It's not "kind" to burst someone's ideological bubble by posting a countering view. Most people are able to rationalize views they hate as "unkind." The human ability to rationalize always amazes me. Someone says A and another person rationalizes they said B. Quora policy and the non-transparent nature of moderation makes it all too easy for moderators to rationalize the deletion of any content they don't like. History has shown us that anyone with the power to censor abuses that power. Only a very strong and transparent policy is capable of stopping rampant moderator abuse. Quora does not have this.

People who become moderators believe in moderating speech. Those who believe in moderating speech the most value "kindness" and "compassion" above "logic" and "reasoning." Those who believe in free speech and open debate the most are unlikely to become moderators. They feel it's their duty to stamp out all "hurtful" content. Except any debate or search for factual information will likely hurt people's feelings. Someone getting an F on a physics test is "hurtful" to the student but if the student legitimately gets the answers wrong then that's simply reality. I see Quora Moderators deleting content heavily based on ideological grounds. The content simply upsets the readers of the space (Quora is broken into different spaces for different topics). Different spaces in Quora also have different moderators and they use inconsistent moderation. All of this makes Quora overall somewhat left leaning but individual spaces become echo chambers that match the ideological leaning of the moderators of the space.

If you upvote content from a certain user or space Quora sends you more of that type of content. It makes everyone's feed into an echo chamber where many of the writers are actively seeking to push an ideological agenda and people directly countering the answers are suppressed.

I've had responses taken down by moderation and no reasoning is given (I've never had a reason given nor was I ever suspended from Quora). I do an appeal and give a lengthy reason why the content does not violate any guidelines and they almost always put it back up. I've had this happen dozens of times. The content is usually then flagged again a few days or week later and I defend it again. Generally, the moderators eventually decide to remove it for NO REASON given. I understand that bots and users can flag content but how does a moderator review the content and restore it multiple times but then eventually take it down? That's a human moderator doing that. It's also inescapable that moderators follow bias because of how different moderation is between the different spaces.

Moderating is bad, ideologically driven, and there is so much factually incorrect information on Quora to make it toxic to the general populace. It's most aptly described as a propaganda machine. People often like it because Quora is designed to get users to come back so they push content matching your ideology and likes/dislikes. It purposefully makes toxic echo chambers to maximize profit. However, if you're a user who digs deeper than their main Quora feed (I always read every single answer and comment on a question before upvoting so I never relied on Quora spoon feeding me) you'll quickly figure out how bad Quora is.

Google pushes Quora answers in its search engine and people often take Quora answers as fact. I tried working inside the Quora site to make it better but I can't do that anymore.

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