I have been writing answers on the question-and-answer website Quora since October 2018, I have frequently cross-posted in-depth articles answering questions about ancient history to both this blog and Quora, I have built up no less than 24,868 followers on that site (as of the time I am writing this), and I have made many friends there. It therefore saddens me to announce that I am leaving Quora for the foreseeable future and most likely permanently.
Sadly, I am leaving not because I want to leave, but rather simply because I have no choice. Even though I have scrupulously followed every minutia of Quora policy, Quora Moderation has automatically collapsed or deleted nearly every answer I have written for the past three months and now they have repeatedly threatened to ban me from the site for supposedly violating a policy that I am not actually violating.
A further explanation
As I previously mentioned in this post I wrote last month, ever since early March 2022, Quora Moderation has automatically and immediately collapsed nearly every single answer I have written, without sending me any kind of notification and without giving me any opportunity to appeal for my answers to be uncollapsed. They have even automatically collapsed old answers that I have merely made minor edits to.
The answers don’t show up on my screen as collapsed when I’m logged in and I only know they are collapsed because they receive very few views and upvotes, other users have told me that they show up as collapsed on their screens, and, if I log out and view a question I have answered, my answer to the question does not show up.
There seems to be absolutely no rhyme or reason to which answers they collapse and which ones they don’t. They’ve collapsed the vast majority of the answers I’ve written, but, every so often, I have written one and they haven’t collapsed it. At first, I thought that they were collapsing all my answers that included any external links. Then, on 27 May, I wrote an answer that included an external link and they didn’t collapse it. On that same day, I wrote three different answers with no links whatsoever and they collapsed all of them immediately.
They do not seem to be any more likely to collapse answers in which I express political opinions or answers in which I discuss adult themes than they are to collapse any of my other answers. Notably, of all the answers I wrote on 27 May, the one that they didn’t collapse was one in which I responded to an incendiary controversy that was attracting a lot of attention on Quora at the time about the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s vocally fatphobic condemnation of the plus-size model Yumi Nu’s bikini-clad cover photo for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. That answer even included an image of the cover photo at the center of the controversy.
Meanwhile, one of the answers they did collapse was a seemingly completely innocuous one about how common it is for 100-level courses at large research universities to be taught by graduate students. If someone were to guess which of those answers Quora Moderation would be more likely to collapse, one would guess the first one, but yet, for some reason, it was the second.
On 1 June 2022, when I opened Quora, I found a message on my screen from Quora Moderation telling me that some of my recent answers were found to violate Quora’s spam policy and that, if I continued to post answers that are spam or that solicit spam, I will be permanently banned from the site. The only option was to click a button that said “I understand.”
After I received that message, I realized that, somehow or another, I clearly must have upset a moderator or someone powerful at Quora and they must be doing everything they possibly can to drive me away from the site or ban me. Quora Moderation will consider any answer I write, no matter what it is about, whether it includes any links, or what I say in it, to be spam and use that answer as an excuse to ban me. I therefore decided that I will not write any new answers on Quora in order to avoid giving the moderators any kind of content that they could use as an excuse to ban me.
On 12 June, I made a few minor wording edits to an old answer that I originally posted back in February 2021. Quora Moderation immediately collapsed the answer I edited. The next time I opened Quora, I saw the exact same message from moderation that I had seen on 1 June telling me that some of my recent answers were found to violate Quora’s spam policy and that, if I continue to violate Quora’s policy on spam, I will be permanently banned from the site.
I’m guessing that this is probably my last warning and that, if I post any answer of any kind or make any kind of edits to any answers I have already written, I will be banned from Quora. I have therefore decided not to risk it and to leave the site before I am banned. I will not post any new answers and I will not edit any answers I have already written.
I find all this especially frustrating because Quora Moderation seemingly does nothing to prevent or hinder overtly racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, antisemitic, xenophobic, ableist, and otherwise hateful content from metastasizing throughout their site.
For some reason, Quora Moderation seems eager to collapse all my answers and ban me for supposed “spam,” but yet they refuse to take action against hardcore misogynistic spaces like “Men’s Union,” white supremacist spaces like “It’s OK to be White,” Neo-Nazi and Neo-Fascist spaces like “White Traditionalism” and “Discussions of Fascism,” Holocaust denial spaces like “Holocaust Forensics,” and so on—despite ostensibly claiming that hateful content and harmful misinformation like Holocaust denial violate their policies.
In the meantime, I will continue to post new articles on a regular basis here on my blog Tales of Times Forgotten and I will continue to answer questions about ancient history in r/AskHistorians.
I believe you’ve made the right decision. I’ll continue to follow you on this blog. Best wishes.
Thank you! I don’t think I’ve really had much of a decision in this whole situation, but I’m glad you think I’m handling it well anyway.
How very odd.
I had noticed that I had not seen your
erudite and well written answer in the past few weeks
but had no idea that someone at Quora has a vendetta against you.
I always learned something new or something deeper,
from your posts.
I hope the move to Boston goes well and so to your graduate studies.
Thank you so much! I hope they go well also!
For what it’s worth, this seems to have been a spam false-positive. We’re correcting the issue on our end.
Damn. I can’t say I’m surprised considering what’s happened in the last few months, but this is still so frustrating. You’ve genuinely been one of the things that brighten my day for the past couple of years. But this is what it’s come to. I’ll just be following the blog from now on. Quora doesn’t own your voice.
Thanks! I appreciate it. I really wish I could make an announcement on Quora that I am leaving, but I fear that any announcement I might make would be immediately collapsed or deleted and it could result in Quora Moderation banning me from the site forever.
So you’ve basically stopped breathing for fear of catastrophes any movement might lead to 🙂 If a ban would mean deletion of all you previous posts, then doing nothing is the right choice. But if those posts would remain despite a ban, then you should make the noise you wish to make.
I disagree with people using “-phobia” or “hate speech” labels unironically but speech is free for all, and I protest Quora for their what seems to be censorship. Tech-tyranny is a real thing (and we’ve seen nothing yet. Wait until man is merged with machine, so-called transhumanism, read: dehumanization), and we all should stand against that, bipartisanly.
Elo n Mu sk wanted to buy Twi tter because he likes “freedom”. The kind of freedom he likes is not freedom of speech. It is discharging awful instincts and drives that in my opinion, a high civilization should repress, such as saying; “this group of people are good the other is bad therefore they should die!”. We need repression because we cannot go out and kill whoever we decide deserve to die. Repression is not a bad thing.
I am sorry we live in an reverse repressed world where good people as you, interesting and loving people are banned and awful people have voice.
I’m sorry for what is happening in our world. My best wishes to you ❤ and thank you for your posts here. I enjoy them and they instruct me. TY.
Elon Musk’s appeals to the ideal of “free speech” are nothing more than an empty rhetorical ploy. Ironically, I wrote a Quora answer about this back in April that is among the few I have written in the past three months that Quora Moderation has not collapsed or deleted.
I’m not sure that I would personally agree with your statement “Repression is not a bad thing.” It’s not a matter of suppression of speech being inherently good or bad, but rather a matter of the fact that some kinds of speech inherently stifle other kinds and one therefore has to decide which kinds of speech one wishes to protect at the expense of other kinds of speech. No matter what, basically anyone who holds the ability to regulate speech on a platform is suppressing speech, either actively by removing or deterring speech of a certain kind or passively by allowing others to verbally drive out or deter certain forms of speech.
Thank you for your answer! I agree with you. I am not always good in articulating my arguments. Lol.
What I belive is that it is an important role the role of deliberating and then deciding what should be said and what should not be said.
Let’s say for example someone say they belive in God (and I don’t), I will do repress or surpress or I will “shut myself up” and I won’t say I find them ‘stupid’ to belive in God cause there is no point in doing that. I wouldn’t hurt someone saying their belief is stupid, when they are not hurting anyone. In that sense I think “suppressing is not a bad thing”.
It is not a question of being hypocrite it is a question of politeness and kindness. Not that I wouldn’t politely say what I belive. I would.
Some people want to instill their poison to other people and when they are powerful things can be dangerous. But the greatest problem is: many powerfulpeplo are awful. Good people are majority but they are not willing to hurt others. So the balance will always weight in favor of awful powerful people who want to hurt others. Sad. But I still believe in human beings. 😊😊🤗
While you can, request a data dump of all the content you have on Quora. So that (a) you can reproduce the content that you may have never put on your blog; (b) you have proof in case people start copying your answers, as I am sad to say I expect.
I did that about a year ago, as I rarely write on Quora anymore myself. I was not, as far as I can tell, a victim of this bizarre and vile collapsing trend, but I don’t like the Partner Program and that thing for paying for questions, and I don’t like how they have treated so many people.
Quora’s loss. I will continue to follow your writings on this blog! I am very sorry that you had to go through that.
While I don’t always agree with the positions you take, I have learned a lot from your posts and do not think any of them justified sanctioning by Quora.
I think that for some reason you simply got on somebody’s shit list.
Spencer:
I left Quora ages ago for the same reason. Not that my postings were important and there were not even close as relevant as yours.
In particular, I was severely warned of malpractice of any kind when I posted a reply to some Islamic guy asking how was it possible to find 21 virgins for each Islamic male in Heaven (or whatever).
Believe me? I don’t miss anything.
Keep going with your work here.
Bressan
Courage, my young friend. You will soon be entering graduate school, and I hope you will be lucky enough to have as your professors and (especially) your Committee Chairman those who will appreciate your talent and your zeal to encourage you even when they disagree with some of your views.
If you are honest and candid, as you very much appear to be, you will offend many people—or rather, many will TAKE offense at what you write. Be prepared to be rejected and even hated for your views, not despite your desire to discover and state the truth but because of it.
When I was a graduate student 63, 64 and 65 years ago, I was viewed by others as a non-conformist. I wasn’t, though I am now. Rather, I was a failed would-be conformist. I was troubled. I was referred to a psychoanalyst (Dr. George Maines) who told me, “You will have to be twice as good as anyone else in your field to succeed.” Maybe the right number was thrice, maybe it was one-and-a-half, and at 85, I still do not know how much success I have achieved.
Do not be deterred, do not be inhibited. Go wherever your head and heart take you.
One of my specialties is the game of contract bridge. Two months ago, one of my bridge friends, Eddie Kantar, died at age 89. I consider him to have been the best bridge player ever. He wrote many books and articles. He made no enemies in his entire life. My name is linked with his, partly as an editor of one of his books, partly for a convention known as “The Kantar-Kleinman Four Spades.”
Success? Not exactly. After an important match, two members of the team that opposed his team were accused of cheating and expelled from organized bridge. 96 deals were involved, and a substantial number were against him. He knew these opponents and had previously been their teammate. If anyone was sharp enough to know whether he’d been cheated, it was Eddie. He went to his death without ever being willing to express his opinion. I believe the cheating accusation to have been false. If Eddie thought so also but still said nothing, then from my perspective he was a failure.
Every truth that you perceive you must shout from the rooftops.
Courage!
Spencer, can’t you see this is God’s will, chastising you for not following the commandments of the Lord?
L.O.L!
I suspect Quora, as with a number of other platforms, is leaning so heavily on automated methods that it can’t properly manage itself anymore.
I suspect this is due to less return on investment than the backers expected.
I’m sure you’ll do fine without Quora.
Using Reddit or editing Wikipedia pages are alternatives for getting noticed, as I’m sure you’re aware.
I disagree with you on many things, but you are a good source for the academic consensus on classical antiquity and increasing numbers of people will come to know that.
I also think Quora Moderation’s collapsing of Spencer’s answers has to do with Quora relying very heavily on bots for moderation instead of actual humans and that Quora has cut down on costs for human mods because the site has not generated sufficient revenue.
I don’t think the collapsing would be as random as it is if a human or humans were doing it.
I definitely think that bots are involved here. The collapsing seems too random for an actual human moderator to be doing it by hand. Strangely, though, no one else seems to be having this problem and it seems to only be affecting me. Somehow, I must have gotten on some bad list or something, but I’m not sure how.
I think you really did just piss off some moderator and they programmed a trigger-collapse/delete on anything you post. No other way it would be so immediate. I don’t know why a few ones still stay up, though. It’s weird.
Yeah, this sounds more like a spam-filter glitch than anything else. Is it possible a spam bot got ahold of your account, posted some spam, and everything got deleted without your noticing? Then maybe your account got flagged for some extra-strength spam algorithm?
Shadow bans suck.
I agree, a similar thing happened to me. I received an email telling me that an answer I had made six months previously was being moderated because it infringed the rules. The question was:
A mathematician named Harry Lear claims that the value of Pi is wrong and has corrected it. What do you think?
My answer that deserved moderation was: “Get a life”
As a result I quit Quora
Dear Mr. McDaniel,
I am an avid fan of yours and shall continue to follow you wherever you make your work available.
Of course, as a protestant pastor, now delegated by my Church of Württemberg to serve the US-military here in Stuttgart, I do not always agree with you, but your research is extremely good, and always worth reflecting in my arguments & thinking.
God bless & protect you,
your
Gerrit-Willem Oberman
Spencer, I don’t know much about Quora, but could the the length of your articles have anything to do with whether they collapsed it or not.
No, strangely the length of my answers does not seem to matter either. Quora Moderation seems to collapse my answers indiscriminately of length. For instance, that answer I mentioned that I wrote on 27 May about how common it is for 100-level courses to be taught by grad students was only three paragraphs long.
In truth, I imagine sites like Quora (similar to YouTube) will only care and act if these hateful groups start to scare off advertisers as money generated from ads are what really matters to them.
Well said.
Thanks for your work on Quora. As a 73-year-old German, I don’t want to speculate about the reasons. I will stay on your blog.
I have never taken Quora seriously and you gave it better than it could receive.
I open up Quora with about the same seriousness as I would devote to picking up stray pennies on the sidewalk–it isn’t always worth the time.
I do note that a certain kind of psychological bully will delight in making their misdeeds random or at least arbitrary–knowing that their target will be more inclined and perhaps more obligated to put thought into the misdeed than they had to. Proxy negative attention, perhaps, or a feeling that one does not have to answer to how they use whatever advantage they have–who knows?
I am not sayin that is certainly happening here but I am saying that what you describe could match that pattern. As with certain defects of wikipedia, quora gets away with this kind of thing because it is what we have. It bears a resemblance to what the internet should have been.
One day, if we don’t collapse civilization first, I think that there will be a venue that rewards people who put effort, learning, and integrity into what they post publicly. You certainly exemplify where that possibility would come from, if only it can be rightly curated and supported.
Onward to better things.
When you were crossposting your blog posts to Quora, did you not decide on your blog posts until after the question they were answering was asked?
It’s complicated. Sometimes I would start answering a question someone else had asked on Quora and then it would evolve into a long-form article, so I would cross-post it here to my blog. Other times, I would think of an idea for an article I wanted to write and then search to see if someone had asked a relevant question on Quora for me to post the article as an answer. If I did this and couldn’t find any relevant questions that anyone else had asked, then I would typically ask the question myself and post the article as an answer to my own question. In general, if there was a particular topic I wanted to write about, then I wouldn’t wait for someone else to ask a question about it on Quora.
First of all, this really sucks. This is definitely unjust and whenever a platform does that to a person, the feeling of complete helplessness is overwhelming. Just a couple of weeks ago Instagram logged me out and then refused to let me back in. The forgot password mechanism did not work and then I got a message that “if I don’t log in within the next 24 hours, my account will be permanently removed”.
The next day the account was fine. I suspect it was an error on their side, but it was very annoying.
Second, my first thought would be that the problem is automatic in nature. A problematic moderator cannot be ruled out, of course, but I think it’s a less likely option.
In fact, even as I’m writing this comment, I don’t know if it’ll be posted, because when I wrote a long comment under your previous Quora post, the comment was hidden. I tried posting it again, but the site said “the same comment was already submitted to moderators”. I pinged you on Patreon and you said you don’t know anything about it and you don’t see the comment. So, I guess even this blogging platform has mechanisms to automatically delete content. Quora most probably does too.
If a machine learning algorithm somehow marked you as a problematic user, all sorts of things could happen. I actually worked in a similar anti-fraud system at SoundCloud. And unfortunately false positives are part of the trade.
I hope you will begin posting your answers here. You can copy interesting questions from Quora and post your answers here.
All in all, it sucks. Let’s hope you can get back to Quora after a while. It’s definitely a massive promotional vehicle for this blog.
There are few benefits in creating free content for Quora! A website that is full of garbage and wrong advice.
But copying questions from Quora and posting the answers here on this blog is an excellent suggestion; it helps to find topics that interest the public.
HI Spencer
Just letting you know I have shared this on Quora.
See here: https://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-Spencer-McDaniel
If you prefer I take it down, jut let me know.
What an awesome idea!
Absolutely commend your action – Quora’s loss. I have always benefitted from and appreciated your thoughtful detailed posts. I’ll continue to benefit as I follow “Tales of Times Forgotten”.
Thanks for all you contribute to liberal education, Spencer.
Thank you so much for the compliment! I really appreciate your support and the support of everyone else who reads this blog.
Hello Spencer,
I have to admit that as I read your headline and the first paragraph I waited for a punch line that didn’t come. I can’t imagine their reasoning and have never read an answer from you that wasn’t in-depth and rational. I don’t know enough about the inner workings of that site, but I hope enough people complain and request to see you back there. The way you described how quickly, and quite arbitrarily as well, your posts were being removed makes me wonder if someone there has a grudge against you.
Anyway, I’ll continue to follow you here, and all the best with your studies!
Regards,
Radovan
Thanks! I appreciate your support!
I am very sorry for this, but I do believe you made the right decision.
I was wondering if there was any sort of way we could access your old answers. I loved reading them, but I never was able to scroll to your oldest ones, due how Quora is structured.
Having another way to access the material you have written outside of this blog would be invaluable to me and, I’m pretty sure, many others.
I’m saddened to see Quora moderation is bearing down on you, as opposed to the actual problems throughout the site (like you said, the It’s Okay to be White space, the revisionism and denialism that’s prevalent throughout the history section of Quora, and the blatant plagiarism that went unnoticed for years).
Given the circumstances, I do believe you made the right choice, and I’ll still keep reading your insightful and detailed posts no matter what platform you move onto.
Hello again Spencer,
I commented yesterday and just checked back to see that someone had posted your reason to leave on Quora. Here’s a reply a member left. I have to admit I’m still confused by it and wonder if it just boils down to “politics”.
Regards….
“Profile photo for Shava Nerad
Shava Nerad
· 1h
What you didn’t include:
Spencer McDaniel ← twitter
Spencer McDaniel – Tales of Times Forgotten
Spencer McDaniel ← FB
And if you look, you’ll find Spencer’s Patreon if you really want to support their writing.
Though, personally, I never take anyone’s tales of woe with moderation without a grain of salt. Most campaigns against people like this are orchestrated by groups on Quora. It’s quite possible that, for example, Spencer riled up the Peterson fans and they just went to their profile and started voting things down.
It doesn’t take a Quora staffer being pissed at you. It just takes people gaming the algorithm against you, and that’s something that is also quite effective on Reddit and some other social media.
Quora has over 300M users — they have to largely moderate by algorithm or they can’t keep up a free service.
Is this viable? Probably not. But it’s how this and other social media platforms manage to give you a free platform on thin ad/data income.”
It’s a shame. It was through Qora that I came to know this blog.
Can’t you talk to some moderators/administrators to get some answers?
I don’t know who I would talk to.
I left Quora years ago when I came to see their policies as encouraging asses and bullies to be as awful as they could be to everyone but you get banned if you point out their behavior. I have no interest in being exposed to that kind of nonsense (arbitrary, overwhelming force) again. Government schooling was enough of that. 🙂
Spencer, this is Quora’s loss, not yours. You were probably their best history writer, and I think you may have influenced my writing style on the site the most. I’ll keep reading your content here. Sad that you’re leaving but totally understand why.
Thank you, John! It’s excellent to know that you will keep reading my work. You’re one of the best friends I’ve made during my time at Quora.
I wrote this comment in Terry Constanti’s answer sharing this blog. I’ve changed some wording.
Thank you for sharing, Terry. Spencer, if you are reading the comment section, can I say thank you for the insightful answers you’ve written.
Spencer is (or was) one of the few Quorans remaining to have any standards. I’ve semi-left Quora for many of the same reasons as Spencer. I still come on and make comments, but I don’t bother with questions or answers anymore. I’m not going to create anything that can generate advertising revenue.
Spencer and a few others try to back their work up. Any writers that cite sources are automatically superior to those that don’t.
In contrast, I’ve seen answers that make extraordinary claims without backup. I’ve decided that if a reader requests a source and the writer does not give one, the answer is a hoax.
We need more writers like Spencer, but they’re being put off.
The most outrageous thing? Spencer is a decent writer and rather polite. Nonetheless, Quora Moderation is threatening him. In contrast, Quora has allowed a troublemaker to impersonate a [major corporation] employee in the [major TV series] topic, despite evidence of sockpuppetry and attacking new users, for 2 years. He’s still active now.
[I’ve censored those points to avoid this blog being dragged into the nonsense there.]
Then Quora, deciding that there isn’t enough trolls already, decides to create a troll question bot. (Quora Prompt Generator)
That Quora Moderation has driven Spencer off the site is another outrage. I’m going to copy the answers I value the most in case Quora is shut down soon. I can only assume that there’s an experiment in how much damage a company can do to itself.
Again, thank you Spencer for your writings. I especially liked https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Medieval-Europe-so-popular-for-fantasy-books-movies-games-etc-as-opposed-to-other-cultures-or-time-periods-such-as-Ancient-Rome-or-Egypt/answer/Spencer-McDaniel-11