Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Quora misbehaviour

Working with extreme leftwing sites is never rewarding. Fairfax News once published under my name several letters to the editor when they would not publish my letters. Their reason for not publishing my work was because of taste, not because I did anything wrong. But the letters they published under my name were awful and could have been blocked by them for professional reasons, except they agreed with editors over AGW, recycling and politics.

Quora is another. I had been invited to write questions for them. There were performance standards. I taught myself to fit inside the standards and gradually increased my output. Initially, writing up to ten questions a day I was paid about thirty cents a day. I could not do more as I was finishing my books on Bread of Life. I used that to include my bible quotes and lay view among the questions asked, and answered.

When I had been invited to write for Quora I'd been advised about burn out. I was told to expect there to be flame wars and told it was best to not respond, but just be professional. It was the old President Bush policy of "Don't explain. Don't complain" When I was posting the bible quotes I was asked if I was doing it for money. Some tried to copy the style and then post bible quotes before I did. Quora would collapse some of my series into irrelevant quotes of different verses, or questions with different meanings given different answers. Eventually I finished my bible quotes, but noticed that some of them were linked to Bible Gateway and some to my site. At first, Quora told me they felt Bible Gateway was spammy. Then Quora felt my site was spammy. Quora would put grammatical errors in my questions, or would prevent me removing grammatical errors. If I tried to correct things, they would point to terms and services and ask "Are you slow?"

I tethered my questions to news postings, favouring news.com.au as well as sundry science, space and FB meme discovery. Quora responders were negative and hostile and counter to the terms of service. They took pride in reporting and Quora seemed to support them in being irrational. In one illustration, Quora pointed to a comment I made "It is not compassionate to drown people who want to be migrants, or subject them to the piracy of people smugglers." Quora asked me if I felt it was against their terms of service. I felt it was a reasonable statement to make and difficult to dispute.

I began stepping up my question output. I discovered if I wrote 20 questions a day, I could get more than a dollar. I'd been advised writing 80 questions a day could get me an average of $US1500 a week. After I finished my books in May, I began expanding my output. I posted a question on CNN being unpopular, and a former CNN executive responded. And I was banned after several months. I'd asked about 1800 questions and provided a similar number of answers. I'm unable to go to the site, because I cannot log in.

During my time on Quora I answered questions. Mental health is important to me, and I answered questions on whistleblowing. I posted a question early on about an online spammer who offered me money. Quora told me I wasn't allowed to bully other Quora users. I hadn't been aware they were, but didn't repeat the line. I came across a catfish who claimed to be a suicidal whistleblower. I reported them to US authorities.

I wasn't burned out. I was burned.

I'll include a snapshot of my account from Quora after they booted me. It shows almost all my answers were removed, including my bible quote answers. But my questions are still there, mostly. I don't know if they deleted my CNN question as being offensive. I was told I was banned because my questions were trollish. What percentage of my questions were trollish? Why were my answers to separate questions deleted?



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