Plagiarism on Quora: The Latest Scandal

For those who are not already aware, for at least the past year or so, an account on Quora using the name of “Kevin Richardson” was posting extremely top-notch answers about history. Kevin’s credential claimed that he has a PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin. It has recently, though, been exposed that this “Kevin Richardson” is not a real person, but rather a fraudulent account created under a fake name. Moreover, every single answer that “Kevin” ever posted was completely plagiarized word-for-word from other sources. Most of his answers were stolen from writers at r/AskHistorians. The moderators of that subreddit are the ones who investigated and exposed him.

In this post, I would first like to discuss just how pitiful Quora’s moderation against plagiarism really is, how “Kevin” managed to fool the entire community of history writers on Quora (myself included), and how his fraud was eventually exposed. I am also going to present a list of people who write excellent answers about history who I can confirm are not plagiarists. Finally, I will explain how I personally came to write on Quora and why I have so far continued to do so, despite (among other things) the endemic plagiarism.

Quora Moderation and plagiarism

Before I talk about the account that used the name “Kevin Richardson,” I think I should make a brief note about just how inconsistent the enforcement against plagiarism on Quora really is. Quora’s official policy includes a section that prohibits all forms of plagiarism and Quora Moderation does sometimes take moderation action against plagiarism. Nonetheless, Quora’s system for detecting and flagging plagiarism is notoriously inconsistent and inaccurate; it routinely flags answers that are not plagiarism as plagiarism while leaving answers that actually are plagiarized completely untouched.

When I write a long, detailed article, it is very common for me to post the same article simultaneously on both Quora and my blog Tales of Times Forgotten. I do this mainly because, over the years, I have built up two more-or-less separate audiences on the two platforms. There are people who read my blog who don’t read my answers on Quora and people who read my answers on Quora who don’t read my blog.

I figure that, if I’m going to put in the hours of work to write a really solid, in-depth article about something, then I want to post it in both places so that the maximum number of people will see it. Posting an article in two places at once also ensures that I will still have a backup version online in case something happens to one version or the other.

This is not in any way a secret, nor am I trying to deceive anyone. On the contrary, I am very open about what I do. Whenever I post an article to both Quora and my blog, I always leave a little note at the bottom of the Quora answer noting that I’ve also posted a version of the same article on my blog with a link to the post on my blog. This is all in perfect compliance with Quora’s official policy on plagiarism and attribution, which states:

“If you are republishing your own content from another site, you may omit blockquote formatting and cite the original publication at the end of your answer/post.”

Despite this, Quora Moderation has occasionally collapsed or deleted some of my posts in the past for alleged “plagiarism” without any further explanation, presumably for some reason having to do with me crossposting them to my blog.

Whenever this has happened, I have always appealed the moderated answer with an explanation in which I quote Quora’s official policy. In return, Quora Moderation has always restored my answers with an apology and some explanation that my answer must have been flagged by mistake. It is still very annoying whenever this happens, though.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of accounts are able to thrive using exclusively plagiarized content stolen from other places online. Indeed, sometimes they steal from other users on Quora. I have personally encountered answers posted by other users on Quora that are blatantly plagiarized word-for-word from answers that I originally wrote on Quora months or even years earlier.

Quora, of course, has absolutely no incentive to crack down on this, since Quora makes much of their advertising revenue through their questions and answers showing up in Google searches and the folks at the corporation know that tacitly allowing plagiarized content on their site is good for search engine optimization.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the top portion of Quora’s official policy on plagiarism, which is at best inconsistently enforced

How I first encountered “Kevin Richardson”

With all this background in mind, let’s talk about the recent scandal.

I was first introduced to “Kevin Richardson” through Habib Fanny, a writer on Quora for whom I have immense respect, who referenced Kevin in one of his answers. I think this may have happened sometime in summer 2021, but I don’t know the exact date. I am naturally a bit of a cynic, so, despite Habib’s recommendation, I was still initially very suspicious of Kevin and I was quite hesitant to upvote any of his answers.

I will admit that my initial suspicion was partly (and perhaps unfairly) triggered on account of his profile image, which was a cartoon image of an angry sumo wrestler. This seemed to me like a very strange image for someone claiming to have a PhD in African history. Normally I would expect such a person’s profile image to be either a photo of their face or an image of something related to Africa or African history in some way. The cartoon sumo wrestler seemed a bit random, and I couldn’t find anywhere where he gave any kind of explanation of how the image was personally relevant or significant to him, so I will admit that that put me off a little bit.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Kevin Richardson’s profile (taken from Jeremy Salkeld’s thread on Twitter, since I never had a chance to screenshot Kevin’s original profile)

A second thing that made me suspicious was the fact that he used three completely different last names for himself. His name was displayed in his profile as “Kevin Richardson,” but the URL for his profile displayed his name as “Kevin Badiambila-Frédéric” and, in his profile bio, he introduced himself as “Kevin Richardson Emangongo.” I couldn’t find any explanation in his profile for why he was using three different last names, so my cynical first guess was that “Kevin Richardson” was a fake account created by someone who couldn’t decide which fake name to use.

ABOVE: Screenshot from Jeremy Salkeld’s Twitter thread showing Kevin Richardson’s use of three different names for himself in his profile—something I noticed when I first encountered him back in around summer 2021

A third thing that made me suspicious was the fact that he described himself in his profile credential as “Researcher. Historian. Africanist. Archaeologist. Biologist.” The first four of these credentials struck me as plausible, since professional historians are nearly always professional researchers, and it is not uncommon for historians (especially ancient historians) to also have training in archaeology. The claim that he was also a “biologist,” though, struck me as completely incompatible with his claim to have a PhD in African history.

I know a thing or two about history PhD programs because I had to do a lot of research about them in preparation to apply to them myself, which I did in December 2021. In order to get into a history PhD program, a person must have an undergraduate degree in history or a closely related field in the humanities or social sciences. Once a person enters a history PhD program, they must undertake intense study of the specific area of history that they are wanting to specialize in; they will certainly have no time for pursuing a degree in any of the “hard sciences” on the side.

A PhD is the highest degree a person can possibly attain. It is, at the very least, extremely rare for someone to earn a PhD in one field and then go back to earn another degree in a completely different field. This is not just a matter of most people who earn PhDs not wanting to go back for another degree after finishing it; most higher ed programs (both undergraduate and graduate) will not accept someone who already has a PhD.

Meanwhile, although people with history PhDs have been known to go into whole variety of different fields outside academia (in part because the academic job market is so atrocious), biology is a highly specialized profession and there is next to no chance that anyone would hire someone with a PhD in history as a biologist.

Thus, it seemed to me that the only way Kevin could have received any kind of formal education in biology beyond the high school level would be if he double-majored in biology and history or a history-related social science as an undergraduate.

I reasoned that, even if this scenario were the case, it would still be rather dishonest for someone who double-majored in biology and a completely unrelated field in undergrad before going on to earn a PhD in a field completely unrelated to biology to claim to be a “biologist” without qualification or explanation, since, in this scenario, biology would certainly not be their area of professional expertise.

Finally, a fourth thing that made me initially very suspicious of Kevin was the fact that his profile bio seemed to contain unnerving discrepancies about his area of research. In the second paragraph of his bio, he said this about his research:

“My own work focuses on intergroup struggles over land and agrarian livelihoods in Southern Africa from 1657 to 1916, with an emphasis on the 19th century Cape and Transvaal and heavy doses of the history of scientific geography (surveying, mapping, titling, et cetera).”

Later, in the same paragraph he said this:

“I can also answer questions about colonization and White settler communities in Southern Africa and their conflicts, cultures, and key figures, from the 1870s onwards!”

Finally, in the third paragraph, he said this:

“While my interests are primarily Ancient Africa, slave trade, pre-colonial warfare, colonial & post-Colonial Africa . . .”

While it is not at all implausible that someone with a PhD could have an interest in multiple areas of African history, I found it immediately very strange that these three statements seemed to contradict each other.

According to the first statement, Kevin’s research focuses on “Southern Africa” in the period of “1657 to 1916” and, according to the third, his primary interests include “colonial” Africa—but yet, according to the second statement, he can only answer questions about white settler communities in Africa “from the 1870s onwards.”

This is very strange, considering that the Dutch began colonizing South Africa all the way back in the seventeenth century. Indeed, although I am not by any means an expert in African history, my guess is that the year 1657 is significant because, according to the current revision of the Wikipedia article “Free Burghers,” that is the year when Dutch settlers known as “Free Burghers” began to claim and farm lands along the Liesbeek River.

Thus, I couldn’t help but wonder: If Kevin’s academic research focuses on Southern Africa in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, why does his expertise on white settler communities in Africa supposedly begin in the 1870s, near the very end of the period he supposedly studies? Shouldn’t he know a thing or two about the people who were colonizing Africa in the period he is supposedly an expert in?

I now, of course, know from reading Jeremy Salkeld’s Twitter thread that the reason for this discrepancy is that Kevin’s profile bio was a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together using passages plagiarized from at least three different sources. The three statements about Kevin’s interests that I have quoted above come from at least two different sources. The first statement (the one about the supposed focus of Kevin’s academic work) is plagiarized from an answer that u/khosikulu wrote on r/AskHistorians six years ago. The other two statements are of unknown origin, possibly made up by Kevin himself.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Kevin Richardson’s profile bio, with portions identified by Jeremy Salkeld as plagiarized from u/khosikulu in r/AskHistorians highlighted in yellow, portions identified by Salkeld as plagiarized from the “About Me” page on The History Blog website highlighted in green, and portions of unknown origin (possibly original to Kevin) left unhighlighted

I tried searching for “Kevin Richardson” on Google to see if I could find anything I could use to verify his purported identity and credentials, but, apparently, “Kevin Richardson” is a fairly common name and, when I searched for it, the top results that came up were all either about some musician or some zookeeper.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the results of a Google search for the name “Kevin Richardson”

I subsequently tried searching for “Kevin Richardson University of Texas at Austin.” This search turned up many results about many different people named “Kevin Richardson” who had various associations with the University of Texas at Austin, including an Assistant Director of Social Strategy and Development, but nothing about a Kevin Richardson who had earned any kind of PhD in history.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the results of a Google search for the phrase “Kevin Richardson University of Texas at Austin”

How I was tricked by Kevin’s elaborate plagiarism scheme

Despite my initial skepticism toward Kevin, I had no evidence that I could use to definitively prove that he was lying about his identity or his credentials. The fact that I wasn’t able to find anything about him on Google didn’t necessarily prove anything, since any results about him might have easily been buried underneath the countless results about other people named “Kevin Richardson.”

Over the course of the next several weeks, I found that Kevin’s answers started popping up in my Quora feed, because many people whom I already followed were upvoting them. The vast majority of the time, when people on Quora fraudulently claim to possess PhDs in history, it is extremely easy for me to spot them as liars, because they obviously lack basic knowledge about historical methods that even someone with merely a BA in history could be expected to possess, or they support really wacky fringe theories that no one with a degree in history would be likely to support. This was not the case with Kevin; I found that his answers were consistently erudite—exactly the sort of thing that I would expect a person with a PhD in African history to write.

It did cross my mind that “Kevin” could be plagiarizing his answers from somewhere, but he was posting so many answers of such consistently high quality that I couldn’t think of a place online where he could be finding them all. Unlike some other people who plagiarize on Quora, “Kevin” never included links to any of the pieces he was plagiarizing, which made his plagiarism more difficult to discover.

One thing I knew for certain was that he couldn’t be plagiarizing his answers from Wikipedia. As I will discuss a bit more later in this post, I was personally a very prolific writer and editor on Wikipedia from December 2016 until roughly January or February 2019, so I have a very good impression of what a Wikipedia article sounds like. Kevin’s answers didn’t read at all like the sort thing one would normally find on Wikipedia; they made references to the author in the first person, they used contractions and non-encyclopedic language, and they sometimes even included jokes.

Gradually, I began to lay aside my initial suspicions and believe Kevin’s deception. I decided that my initial reaction to Kevin’s angry sumo wrestler cartoon profile picture was unfounded. If he liked the sumo wrestler cartoon, who was I to question his choice of his own profile picture?

Likewise, I explained away his use of multiple names, thinking that perhaps he might have changed his name a couple of times to make it progressively more familiar to English-speakers. After all, I myself originally went by my full name “Spencer Alexander McDaniel” on Quora before eventually dropping my middle name from the display to make it simply “Spencer McDaniel.” (For an explanation of why I did this, see this answer I wrote in March 2021.)

I explained away Kevin’s implausible “biologist” credential, thinking that maybe he had double-majored in biology in undergrad and maybe done some kind of biology-related work before going on to graduate school in history and maybe he was still clinging to the label “biologist” for some reason or another.

I even dismissed the apparent discrepancies about his historical interests in his bio, thinking that maybe I was misunderstanding things due to my own lack of expertise in modern African history and there was some specialized explanation for it all.

In other words, despite my initial skepticism, like many others on Quora, I was taken in by Kevin’s elaborate plagiarism scam. Still, even as I was reading and upvoting his answers, there were some things I noticed that seemed a bit strange. For one thing, his answers were stylistically inconsistent with each other. Sometimes they were witty and eloquent; other times they were dry and boring, even when they were about similar topics. Sometimes he wrote answers with excessively long paragraphs resembling walls of text; other times he wrote short, choppy paragraphs.

Also, although he displayed consistent interests in the history of Africa, colonialism, the slave trade, and Black people in the United States, there was a very unusual lack of a distinct, consistent personality across his answers. Sometimes he seemed adamantly on board with approaches to history more informed by social justice; other times he seemed oblivious or ambivalent to them. Sometimes he used profanity rather excessively; other times he never swore at all.

Sometimes he even wrote confusing answers that didn’t seem to directly address the questioner or the question. For instance, he wrote a series of answers debunking Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies that I found particularly strange, because each installment in the series didn’t seem to directly address the specific question that it was supposedly written in response to and instead addressed the book itself piecemeal by chapters.

I now know from reading this thread on r/BadHistory that the entire series was plagiarized wholesale from an earlier series of posts about the book in that subreddit. The reason each post didn’t directly address the question is because the original posts in r/BadHistory weren’t written in response to questions at all and were therefore not well suited for Quora’s question-and-answer format.

ABOVE: Screenshot showing an original post in r/BadHistory by u/anthropology_nerd (left) and screenshot showing Kevin Richardson’s identical plagiarized answer on Quora (right)

Kevin also seemed to display an extraordinary (almost incredible) expert knowledge of areas of history very distant from his putative areas of specialization. I was particularly astonished when I came across a couple of answers that he posted in succession around the beginning of this year, in which he seemed to display a truly astounding degree of familiarity with the historical sources for the campaigns of Alexander the Great.

These answers were clearly indicative of someone who has intensely studied Alexander for many years and read all the major ancient primary sources about his life. This seemed to me like something that a specialist in modern African history would be very unlikely to have the time to do, especially considering that Kevin had never before shown such knowledge of ancient Greek history.

I would say that Steve Theodore, Eleftherios Tserkezis, and I myself have established reputations for ourselves as the foremost experts on ancient Greek and eastern Mediterranean history on Quora. Steve has an MA in ancient history from Brown University. Eleftherios has a BA in classics and an MA in Byzantine history from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. As for myself, I’m only a few months away from graduating with a BA in history and classical studies from Indiana University Bloomington, with ancient Greek history as my main area of focus. Despite this, those couple of seemingly one-off answers Kevin posted easily rivalled or surpassed even what Steve, Eleftherios, or I might have been expected to write on the subject.

I now know that both of these answers about Alexander were, in fact, plagiarized word-for-word in their entireties from a couple of posts that Jeremy Salkeld actually wrote on r/AskHistorians, one of them over a year ago and the other one three months ago. All that knowledge about Alexander that Kevin apparently displayed was actually Salkeld’s.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Jeremy Salkeld’s original post about the historiography of Alexander, which he made in r/AskHistorians over a year ago (left) and screenshot of Kevin Richardson’s identical, plagiarized answer, posted on Quora on 31 December 2021 (right)

How the moderators at r/AskHistorians exposed Kevin’s plagiarism

Jeremy Salkeld mentions in a tweet that he and the other moderators on r/AskHistorians first became aware of Kevin’s serial plagiarism in late November 2021. The moderators investigated the issue and, on 8 February 2022, Salkeld wrote a detailed thread on Twitter exposing the “Kevin Richardson” account as fraudulent, revealing that every single answer Kevin ever wrote was, in fact, plagiarized, mostly from r/AskHistorians.

On the same day, Roel Konijnendijk, a scholar of ancient Greek military history who holds a PhD in ancient history from University College London and who is currently both a teaching fellow in the history department at the University of Edinburgh and a moderator on r/AskHistorians, shared Salkeld’s thread. Despite the fact that I’ve been following Dr. Konijnendijk on Twitter for at least a couple of years now, for some reason or another, I didn’t see his share on the day that he made it. Consequently, a couple of days passed before I learned the truth.

On 9 February, an anonymous person shared Salkeld’s Twitter thread with Gabriel Guzman, the creator and admin of the popular Quora space “Left Brain.” Although Guzman is no longer very active on Quora, he shared the thread with Habib Fanny, who wrote an answer on Quora in response to the question “What is the worst case of plagiarism on Quora?” on 10 February. In this answer, Habib shared Salkeld’s thread and broke the news of Kevin’s plagiarism to the vast majority of the people who had followed him, including me.

On that same day, Salkeld wrote a second follow-up thread in which he exposed the “Kevin Richardson” account’s vast network of supporting sockpuppet accounts. He describes this network, saying:

“Since my first thread, I have been doing some digging on ‘Kevin Richardson’s sockpuppets. And the whole thing is deeper than I could have imagined, involving at least 19 accounts going back to mid-2018.”

Salkeld goes on to analyze the sordid details of Kevin’s sockpuppetry in depth.

To be very clear, the person who is running this operation is not some supergenius; it doesn’t take a supergenius to copy answers from Reddit and paste them on Quora. Nonetheless, the person who is behind this is clearly extremely dedicated. They have been at work for longer than I have been on Quora, building a network of sockpuppets. Now that the “Kevin Richardson” account has been exposed, they will undoubtedly try to make a comeback in the Quora history community using a different account.

ABOVE: Screenshot of a tweet by Jeremy Salkeld showing a chart he made showing just a few of the accounts in the same vast network of sockpuppets as the “Kevin Richardson” account and their close interrelationships

Concerning my own existence and intellectual honesty

As a result of this whole scandal, I think it is fair to say that many people who read and write answers about history on Quora are feeling shook and unsure of who they can trust. I therefore thought I would mention some Quora writers who I know are real people and who I know write excellent, original answers about history. The obvious place to start is with myself.

It is fairly easy to verify that I really am who I say I am because there are plenty of external sources that can confirm my identity. For instance, this post on the IU Classical Studies department webpage dated to 16 May 2019 includes a photo of me standing with other department scholarship winners with my name in the caption. The official summer 2019 IU Classical Studies department newsletter references me as a scholarship winner and includes the same photo of all the scholarship winners standing together.

I have also appeared in three video interviews with Nick Barksdale for his YouTube channel The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Here’s a link to the first interview, a link to the second, and a link to the third. In all three videos, I appear with my full face and upper body visible on screen, I am introduced as “Spencer McDaniel,” and I explicitly identify myself as the author of the blog Tales of Times Forgotten.

All of this evidence is of the kind that would be extremely difficult for someone to fabricate.

ABOVE: Screenshot of me talking in my third video interview from last year with Nick Barksdale for his YouTube channel The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages

When it comes to personal integrity, I have never knowingly committed any form of plagiarism in my life—not even when I was in K-12 school. All forms of plagiarism are utterly anathema to everything I stand for. If you have ever read any of my answers on Quora and/or any of my articles on my blog, you’ll have noticed that I am extremely fastidious about citing my sources.

If I quote someone, I always give the name of the author, provide a specific citation to the source of the quote, and put the quote in quotation marks. If I paraphrase or summarize another person’s arguments, I always cite them and give them credit. If I quote someone else’s translation of an ancient source, I always give not only the name of the original author and a citation for the specific passage I am quoting, but also the name of the person who translated it, because I firmly believe that translators deserve credit. If I use an image, I always cite where the image comes from in the caption.

If I make a mistake or I omit something important from a post I have written, someone else points out my mistake or omission, and they provide adequate sources to demonstrate that it is indeed a mistake or omission, I always go back and correct myself. I’ve even recently gotten in the habit of giving name shout-outs to people who correct me to thank them and give them credit for the correction.

If you run any substantial non-quote portion of any post I’ve written online through a plagiarism checker, you will find no results with anyone else’s name attached to them dated earlier than my post itself. There may be other results that show up from other people plagiarizing me, but, if you check the dates, you will find that my post predates all the others. I often reiterate or summarize other people’s ideas, but I always do so in my own words.

Other Quora writers who write excellent answers about history and don’t plagiarize

As for other people who write about history on Quora, I have personally met Sarah McLean, John Oparinde, Steve Theodore, and Luka Trkanjec face-to-face over Zoom and had conversations with all of them at great length. I can therefore confirm that they are all real people and they are all every bit as knowledgeable and passionate about history in person as they are in their answers. They can all confirm the same for me.

Just to make sure that none of these writers are plagiarizing their answers from elsewhere, I took several sample answers from each of them and ran them all through a free plagiarism checker. I found that they were all completely original, with no results coming up in the search other than their answers themselves.

ABOVE: Screenshots showing Sarah McLean, John Oparinde, Steve Theodore, and Luka Trkanjec’s Quora profiles

There are also some other Quorans who write answers about history who I feel I can confidently say are thoroughly legit, even though I have never met them face-to-face. Let’s start out with Eleftherios Tserkezis. As of the time I am writing this answer, I have never met Eleftherios face-to-face, but I have had many exchanges with him on Quora and I can confirm that he is every bit as eminently erudite and courteous in his comments and in direct messages as he is in his answers.

I can also confirm that Eleftherios really does have an MA in Byzantine history, since the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki has an online record on their library website of his master’s thesis from 2020 titled “Ο δίκαιος αυτοκράτορας: Η εικόνα του Θεοφίλου (829-842) στις πηγές” (“The Just Emperor: The Image of Theophilos (829-842) in the Primary Sources”). I have also run several of Eleftherios’s answers through a plagiarism checker and found no instances of plagiarism.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the information card for the archive of Eleftherios Tserkezis’s master’s thesis from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki library website

I have never met Matt Riggsby face-to-face, nor have I ever interacted with him through any kind of comments or direct messages, but I can verify that he does indeed have an MA in archaeology from Boston University, since the Boston University website has a complete list of all its alumni in archaeology, which lists a certain “Matthew Riggsby” as having graduated with an MA in 1994, with a master’s thesis titled “Following the money: bronze coin circulation in the late antique eastern Mediterranean.” I also ran some of Riggsby’s answers through a plagiarism checker and found no plagiarism.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the Boston University webpage listing “Matthew Riggsby” as the recipient of an MA in archaeology in 1994

Similarly, I can confirm that Garrett Ryan, who occasionally writes excellent answers about ancient history on Quora, definitely really has a PhD in ancient history from the University of Michigan, since the website for the University of Michigan’s Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History (IPAH) has a page congratulating him on his most recent book publication. The page refers to him as “IPAH alum Garrett Ryan (PhD ’16).”

Now, as it happens, some Ryan’s answers actually do turn up results in a plagiarism checker other than his answers themselves, but, if you check those other results, it turns out that he’s actually just crossposting his own answers to both Quora and r/AskHistorians using his Reddit account u/toldinstone.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the page on the University of Michigan’s Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History website mentioning Garrett Ryan as a PhD alumnus

Finally, there’s Alex Mann. He and I disagree vehemently about a wide range of issues and we had some rather high-profile disagreements last year, owing to a clash between his outspoken right-wing views and my outspoken left-wing views. Mann’s politics have moved in a more liberal direction over the course of roughly the past six months, due to his distaste for Donald Trump and Trumpist politics and his deeply unpleasant experiences with various right-wing extremists, Neo-Confederates, Neo-Nazis, and Holocaust deniers, but he still remains significantly to the right of me on most issues.

Despite our differences, I acknowledge that Mann is highly knowledgeable about Roman history. It is also abundantly clear that he writes his own answers without plagiarizing them from anywhere, since he has very distinct, consistent writing style across all his answers, he has a very consistent personality that comes out strongly in his writing, and his answers turn up no instances of plagiarism in the plagiarism checker. I am unable to independently confirm that he really has an MA in Latin and history from Ohio University, but I can certainly believe that he really has one.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Alex Mann’s profile

What are legitimate history Quorans like us doing here?

The fact that such a prominent writer as “Kevin Richardson” who was so respected on Quora could turn out to be not even a real person raises the question of why anyone who knows anything and takes themself seriously is writing about history on Quora. I thought I would therefore explain—both for my usual readers on Quora and for anyone from r/AskHistorians who might be reading this—the history of how I became a history writer on Quora and why I’ve stuck around so far.

I first joined Quora in October 2018. At the time, I was in the first semester of my first year attending Indiana University Bloomington as an undergraduate student. I had been writing on Wikipedia ever since December 2016 under the username Katolophyromai, but I was starting to get really fed up with Wikipedia for several reasons.

One of the things I hated about Wikipedia was the anonymity. I was putting in hours and hours of work every week cleaning up articles about ancient history, religion, and mythology and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people were reading my work every single day, but I was doing all this completely anonymously and I was receiving no credit for any of my work, other than a multiplicity of “barnstars” and limited on-site recognition in February 2018 as a “Precious Wikipedian.” I wanted to write somewhere under my own name, where my work could be recognized as my own.

Another thing that I hated about Wikipedia was the unbearably toxic environment. There are some truly wonderful, kind, and thoughtful people on Wikipedia, but, sadly, extraordinary rudeness, vicious personal insults, bullying, harassment, and generally toxic behaviors are absolutely rampant. Although Wikipedia does have systems for banning users who repeatedly engage in these kinds of behaviors, these systems are slow to act, so abusive editors often stick around for a very long time before eventually being banned. Some even manage to accrue a certain degree of respect and even power within the community.

One third and final thing that I hated about Wikipedia, which is related to the second thing I mentioned, was the fact that I was constantly forced to defend what I had written by arguing with all kinds of mischief-wreaking vandals, delusional crackpots, nationalist fanatics, zealots, bigots, and even just well-intentioned editors who felt they knew a lot more about a subject than they really did and who vehemently insisted on their own ignorant opinions without any reliable sources to back them up.

I never wanted to argue with such people. Nonetheless, because anyone can edit Wikipedia and disputes over content are required to be resolved through discussion, I found that I had no choice but to argue with them simply in order to protect the accuracy of the articles I myself had written or revised.

ABOVE: Screenshot showing the top of the current revision of my userpage on Wikipedia

When I first started writing on Quora, I had no intentions to stick around and become a prominent writer. I figured I would just write a few answers about ancient history and continue writing on Wikipedia. I soon discovered, though, that Quora was in many ways a more enjoyable place to write than Wikipedia.

At the time, Quora had a strict policy that everyone was required to write under their real, legal name. I very much liked this policy, in part because, after writing on Wikipedia for so long, I liked the idea of writing under my real name and receiving credit and recognition for my work. I also felt that having a rule that everyone was required to write under their own legal name contributed to a general atmosphere of greater accountability and greater awareness of other Quorans as real human beings, rather than simply nameless, faceless entities producing words that appear on the screen.

Of course, as I discuss in this answer I wrote last year, the real name policy was never really enforceable to begin with because, in practice, Quora Moderation never inquired about a person’s name as long as they used a name that “sounded like” it was a real person’s name to the moderators.

The policy also unfortunately resulted in Quora Moderation unfairly banning people who were writing under their real names if their names were unusual or non-English. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Quora Moderation greatly relaxed its enforcement of the real name policy over the course of several years and eventually got rid of the policy entirely in April 2021.

Quora certainly has always had more than its fair share of crackpots, nationalist fanatics, zealots, bigots, and well-intentioned clueless people. Nevertheless, I found that, unlike on Wikipedia, on Quora, I could simply choose to ignore such people. Such people could write their own answers spewing nonsense, but they couldn’t do anything to change or delete my answers, so I didn’t have to interact with them. Even if they left comments under my answers, I could simply downvote and ignore them.

As I spent more time on Quora, I found people writing on the site whose work I grew to enjoy, including other people who were writing about history. I made good friends with some other writers on the site. Meanwhile, I found that the steady stream of questions other people were asking about ancient history gave me plenty of things to write about and my own follower count grew surprisingly quickly.

Why I haven’t been active on r/AskHistorians

At this point, some readers may be wondering why I haven’t become active on r/AskHistorians. The answer is partly because, although the subreddit has existed since 2011, for most of that time, I had no idea that it existed. I’m not entirely sure how or when I first became aware of it; I don’t think I knew about r/AskHistorians when I first started writing on Quora in fall 2018, but I know that, by roughly a year later in fall 2019, I had definitely become aware of its existence somehow or another.

Since then, I actually have made a couple of replies in r/AskHistorians, but there are a couple of factors that have kept me from becoming more active there. The first is the seedy reputation of Reddit in general and its association with Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, incels, all kinds of other misogynists, TERFs, and so forth. This one doesn’t affect me so much anymore, since I now realize that there are plenty of subreddits, including r/AskHistorians, that ban such people and that such people have a presence on every website. (Indeed, over the past year, they’ve been building their own spaces on Quora filled with naked bigotry.)

A much bigger thing that has deterred me from wanting to become active on r/AskHistorians is the expectation of anonymity. As I mentioned earlier, one of the things I like about Quora is that, even now, nearly a year after the real name requirement was officially lifted, there is still a general expectation for people to write under their real names and most people (or at least most of the people I follow) are still using their real names.

I like writing under my real name because I like receiving credit for what I write. Having other people write under their real names also makes it possible, at least in some cases, to verify their credentials using external sources, as I have done for a number of Quora authors above.

On Reddit, though, there is, if anything, the exact opposite expectation; everyone writes under a pseudonym. There are advantages to this system, but also disadvantages. It’s not a system that I’m particularly keen on at the moment.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the top of the page for r/AskHistorians

Why I have kept writing on Quora

I would say that there are really only two reasons why I keep writing on Quora. The first reason is because I’ve already built a significant platform on the site, which is something that took me a very long time to do. Like everyone, I started out with no followers. Many of the earliest answers I wrote received no upvotes whatsoever. Now, though, as of the time I am writing this post, I currently have 23,702 Quora followers. Nearly every answer I write receives over one hundred upvotes and my most popular answers of all time have received many thousands of upvotes.

Admittedly, being popular on Quora doesn’t count for much; I have never made any money off Quora or anything like that. Nonetheless, having hundreds of people consistently reading and upvoting answers that I write does at least give me some meager encouragement about my own utility to the public and efficacy as a would-be educator.

The second reason why I keep coming back to Quora is because I’ve become good friends with some other people on the site and there are certain writers on the site whose answers I regularly enjoy reading, some (but not all) of whom I have already mentioned in this post.

Thus, in all honesty, what keeps me coming back isn’t the site itself or anything to do with any of its various policies or “features,” but rather the other people who are on the site: my followers who read and upvote my answers, the people I follow whose answers I enjoy reading, and the people I’ve become friends with.