Quora Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Why I Am Leaving Quora

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.

Quora Moderation and Holocaust Deniers

Nearly everyone who has ever written anything on the question-and-answer site Quora harbors a seething disdain for Quora Moderation, which is notorious for collapsing and deleting answers and comments that are completely in line with Quora’s stated official policies for improper and seemingly arbitrary reasons while simultaneously leaving answers and comments that clearly violate Quora’s official policies completely untouched.

I previously discussed Quora Moderation’s arbitrariness in a post I wrote back in February of this year. In this post, however, I want to talk about some more events that have happened since then that have greatly furthered my disliking for Quora Moderation. In particular, I want to bring to attention a recent incident in which, for unclear reasons, Quora Moderation seems to have effectively taken the side of Holocaust deniers.

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.