This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What is Quora used for? Can I use it to post my social life? What can I use Quora for?”
You can use Quora to ask questions or answer questions.
What you do with those questions or answers is entirely up to you.
For example, my use of Quora has evolved into a sketchbook of ideas where I repurpose some of the answers I write here into articles for publication on other sites.
This was a natural evolution for me that occurred from when I first joined over ten years ago. I was drawn to an academic vibe at the time, with primarily intelligent questions and answers from people who were very knowledgeable and extremely generous in sharing their knowledge.
It felt like a welcoming environment of aspiration for contributing value to our world.
Sadly, most of that is gone or buried under volumes of nonsense as the profit motive prioritized decisions that cared little about preserving knowledge sharing. Quora has succumbed to the same community-deteriorating profit-chasing phenomenon that all other social media sites have.
My personal life was also supremely upended shortly after joining, and I stuck with Quora, not out of my original intent of adding to a marketing funnel for my consulting efforts as an instructional designer but out of a therapeutic need to feel I was still able to make positive contributions to other people’s lives.
As Quora quality devolved, so did my participation to such a degree that it became a vessel for venting. As much as that has helped me to cope with what I’ve endured, it’s often toxic and destructive to a fragile state of mind. Fortunately, writing leaves a trail for facilitating introspection, which has become a path out of personal darkness for me.
I hope my latest stage of using Quora as a springboard of ideas and back into a life of some modest dignity will be a stage where I can leave most of my negativity behind and be grateful to Quora for functioning as my only source of productive therapy over the last decade.
A condition of where my life is at right now involves meeting with an actual therapist. I have concluded, however, that he’s a hired assassin for an entity that seeks to escape responsibility for the consequences of its actions through a strategy of encouraging suicidal ideation.
That may seem like hyperbole, but there is no other explanation for the overtly antagonistic and abusive behaviours exhibited by this “professional.”
For me, the only valid forms of therapy I have ever experienced have been through my creative expressions, which have mostly been through writing and creating pictures.
For me, Quora will, hopefully, be a means of moving on from a stage of inertia into a productive future where I can encapsulate ideas I’ve explored here into formats that can serve as some form of legacy to my life I can feel proud of.
What you want Quora to be for yourself is whatever value it brings to your life. Generally speaking, however, as social beings, how we manage our social interactions, whether in person or online, defines our lives for each of us.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is Neil deGrasse Tyson wrong to suggest that talented athletes credit God when they win on social media?”
I think there is something severely wrong on so many levels that it’s impossible to address them without an entire book and a lot of research to identify the dynamics of a business decision justifying the dissemination of lies in society to stimulate engagement and generate revenue.
This is horrifying on so many levels that it insults every aspect of humanity, human society, and the social contract. This contributes to the widespread decay and ultimate destruction of civilized society on the most malignant levels. This crap is worse than the stage of “subliminal seduction” we went through in the 1970s when laws were crafted to prohibit embedded “invisible messaging” within entertainment media.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has never suggested any such thing, and although it’s easy to attribute this claim to a believer on a mission of Lying for Jesus, it’s not. This is even worse than a believer trolling for reactions by lying.
For non-Quorans: This screengrab indicates the question author, and in this case, the question was written and posed by a bot designed to stimulate engagement on this social media site. This is a common revenue-generation strategy employed by media outlets across the board. Fox Entertainment, for example, has built its empire entirely upon this toxic revenue generation model.
Targeting information appealing to the limbic system is like serving up crack to a heroin addict, and that shapes the society we are cultivating by allowing this practice to dominate media. The effects are profound.
Not only does this represent an abysmally immoral strategy for generating revenue, but it’s also a strategy that furthers a divide between people in a society already at the edge of fracturing into chaos. This strategy for engagement is ultimately a violent assault on our social contract and is responsible for the dramatic divisiveness characterizing our social dynamics today.
This precisely reinforces the post on my Thotbag space, citing Yuval Noah Harari’s statements during a round table discussion about the threat democracy itself is facing. Here is the meme I posted that includes his full text:
Along with Mr. Harari’s warning, Ian Bremmer pointed at the problem this divisive, conflict-escalating disinformation creates for society:
This fraudulent question is worse than Quora violating its own, now primarily defunct BNBR policy; it’s an assault on human decency on the most corrupt of levels for the most corrupt reasons.
This should not be disturbing only to atheists who fight back against a daily assault from believer trolls seeking to provoke emotional reactions. This should be disturbing to everyone who cares in the least about things like integrity and the social contract that has never been strained to such a degree as what we are living with today.
If society collapses into chaos — If people’s lives are unnecessarily lost because we can’t or won’t back away from the cliff we march toward — Then this kind of manipulative nonsense perpetrated upon us all for the sake of profit will be responsible for the nightmares ahead that we are about to encounter.
This is central to my argument on why social media should not be operated on a for-profit model. Social media is a community development endeavour, and we must consider how we approach its role in society more thoroughly than consigning personal information to a feeding ground for mining material profit.
That we are being strategically and systematically provoked by algorithms to hate each other should horrify all of us.
Quora users are no different than anyone else on other social media sites.
The virtual environment, coupled with the insulation of an identity divorced from who people are in real life, allows them to indulge in their basest behaviours without repercussions to themselves.
Some are deliberately more abusive online than they would be in person because of a lack of consequences to them in life. Some use social media as a vehicle for venting their frustrations, and that often involves victimizing others.
It’s a dynamic that exists everywhere but is exaggerated online due to the shield a fraudulent identity provides.
All social media is much like Quora, but I would argue that Quora is more civilized than Facebook. A lot of aggression on Facebook is expressed passively through the emoticon reaction system. Facebook UI also sucks big time for permitting extended dialogues, while Quora’s system of ownership of content and content threads by the answer writer helps to minimize aggressions here.
Quora’s system is less antagonistic than Facebook’s because of its structure and is more efficient than other sites at handling long discussion threads.
Insofar as degrees of meanness on social media, my decades of experience on Usenet remain unsurpassed in meanness. Still, social media has generally degenerated in decorum to more closely resemble interpersonal dynamics on Usenet.
It’s a shame that social media has become so toxic. This devolution of courtesy is an argument for a publicly owned and supported social media venue that eliminates the profit motive by operating as a non-profit entity to serve as a community development tool, performing various community development functions and providing various public services.
A sign-on system, for example, could replace the various sign-on systems that people use for logging into sites where sensitive data is stored while ensuring one’s data is accessed through a single entity that provides access to one’s government-related needs such as their taxes or identification needs, and etcetera.
Social media has always been about community development. I have found amusement in statements about upholding community standards from privately owned entities like Facebook that routinely violate the bounds of decency within a community-oriented context. I often complained to Quora about inconsistently applied BNBR standards, and the result of attempting to manage nuance was resolved for them as a business decision deemed too expensive to operate effectively. There was no profit-oriented point to them to pretend that being nice and respectful was an important feature to protect.
Part of the problem with moderating systems is that petty people find ways to weaponize moderation against people they decide to behave spitefully toward.
I’ve been considering a series of articles on social media while arguing in favour of a community-based, owned-and-operated system that can address a number of the shortcomings while functioning as a means of “encouraging” improved interpersonal dynamics through a self-moderating model, but that’s a significant endeavour while I’m currently in the process of addressing more profound to me issues through a struggle I’ve been undergoing for the last decade. I hope I finally get a resolution to it soon and in time to focus on other areas in which I hope to make more constructive contributions to society rather than the wholly destructive path I’m currently on.
In short, and as a summary, however, people can be pretty mean everywhere, and sometimes, there’s nothing one can do about it but try to avoid or dismiss their meanness. It might help to be aware that not everyone is always mean. I’ve noticed within myself while using Quora as a public therapy tool for coping with my circumstances that my bouts with meanness correlate directly with my mood, and my mood is often affected by my current experiences. The best I can do is to learn to understand myself so that I can better understand the meanness of others, and that seems to be helping because their meanness over time has a decreasing impact on my psychology while I’ve become more effective in addressing their meanness in ways that I hope help them to improve.
That’s essentially all we can do for each other is to ensure we protect our boundaries in ways where the meanness doesn’t destroy our self-image. If it impacts it, then it serves as a teaching moment where we improve ourselves and become less mean over time rather than more mean — which is precisely the distinction in attitude I see creating the division between the toxic MAGA phenomenon and a world struggling to cope with increasingly aggravated divisions that have been cultivated within us by the people who have been setting us against each other while they rob us of our dignities.
This post is a response to a question that was asked in its complete format: “What do people think of others who react with a laughing emoji to a serious or tragic post on Facebook? Is it worth going through the list and giving them all a nasty pm, or would this be a rather pointless and sad exercise?”
That list you imagine going through to castigate people individually is often over one hundred people and can sometimes be several hundred to over one thousand.
Going through one list of even just one hundred people would easily chew up your entire day.
You would also have to deal with pushback and people reporting you for intrusive messages on their DM.
You would likely find yourself consigned to Facebook jail for your efforts.
Even the process of blocking on Facebook is onerous enough where if that’s all you did was block one hundred people, that would easily chew up a few hours of your day…
On just one post.
Odds are excellent, and you could find at least half a dozen such posts that motivate you to block hundreds to thousands daily.
It could be a full-time job just blocking people, and you would still find a never-ending supply of names to block within a user base of two billion.
Blocking one thousand people daily would take three years to block one million people.
If you were to go by statistics that bear out at one in five people having severe mental health issues, you would need to block 400 million people.
That would be a lifelong job working every day from morning until you fell asleep without any break from that task.
If that’s how you wish to spend your life, it’s your choice, but you may find other approaches to making your point more beneficial to your sanity.
You can post a public comment on a post where you can chastize all inappropriate laugh reactions at once. I’ve done that, and it can feel rewarding when you get a lot of feedback from people who appreciate someone publicly criticizing lousy behaviour. You will also find that you’ll get laugh reactions on your complaint that you can address.
If you think you will have a discernible impact on behaviours, then you’re not being realistic because succeeding on that level will require years of effort.
You may want to consider lobbying Facebook for improvements to their blocking process because it sucks. It’s onerous and constantly redirects you to pages you probably don’t want to see repeatedly.
Change.org has a petition that has already gathered 296 signatures, and as of this writing, it requests that the Laughing Emoji be removed from Facebook altogether.
Whatever you decide to do at this point, it’s probably wisest to consider it more personal venting than instigating social change. Otherwise, you will tire yourself into a frustrated frenzy while spinning your wheels and going nowhere.
A helpful quote you should keep in mind for whatever you choose to do is from Winston Churchill.
The original and full format of the question this post responds to is as follows: “Are evolutionists telling the truth, they say abiogenesis is not evolution, then they say life evolved from a single cell, isn’t the false abiogenesis life from a single cell, can they make up their minds?”
The first few times I saw this question, I thought it odd, but it could be answered easily and quickly. I noticed it already had several answers, and I didn’t feel I could contribute anything differently to an answer, so I decided not to answer it.
It kept knocking at the back of my mind, so I checked the profile because I expected another MAGA to be behind it. I was wrong. The querent is a self-determined and self-made business owner who’s had some success through honest efforts. He even understands how Donald Trump is an evil person.
This confused me more, but I still decided not to block him and forget about the question. Here I am, though, writing a response to it. Talk about compulsion.
What I don’t get is the question itself. If one were to ask Donald Trump if he was telling the truth, he would most certainly either assert he was telling the truth or dodge responsibility for uttering an untruth as he did with his lie about Haitians eating pets. He didn’t deny lying about it, nor did he address his statement directly, but claimed he saw someone on television. He then quickly claimed he didn’t care about it while ignoring how anyone could say anything on television, particularly when that “someone” isn’t even identified. He didn’t say which program he allegedly witnessed someone making that claim. He merely distanced himself from responsibility for making that claim by claiming he witnessed someone making it on television in such a way as to grant the claim credibility. He made vague and rambling assertions about the claim while dismissing the television news reporter whose research debunked the claim.
This leads me to why I feel compelled to answer this question:
If you didn’t trust atheists to tell you the truth about the difference between “abiogenesis” and “evolution,” then why are you asking atheists if they’re telling you the truth?
That makes absolutely no sense to me.
As a human being who happens to be an atheist, I can’t fathom why someone would lie about this distinction between two words that can easily be verified through so many other sources, including every dictionary of the English language, every encyclopedia, and everywhere these topics are broached.
It’s the kind of question that can easily be verified through countless resources, yet here you are, asking if the people you don’t trust to tell you the truth if they’re telling you the truth.
This reminds me of the aphorism of a broken clock being correct twice daily in the form of a quote by Ronald Reagan, who said, “Trust but verify.”
Suppose you don’t trust your doctor’s diagnosis. In that case, it makes more sense to get a different doctor to examine you to determine their diagnosis to contrast against your first doctor’s diagnosis. It seems highly irrational to ask your first doctor for a different diagnosis.
This is why we have independent watchdogs and fact-checkers in society, to verify independently the information provided by any single source.
Although I practically never watched “The Apprentice,” I did get pieces of episodes early on in its history, and I’m still gob-smacked by an incident in which Omarosa was recorded making a statement while on the telephone that she denied even though the recording of her making that statement was presented to her.
I’ve never understood that.
I could never do that.
If a recording of me saying something were presented, I could not fathom denying my making that statement. That was a feeling I had before the advent of AI fraudulence, so I may respond differently if I were ever in such a situation — which I doubt could or would happen.
I’m here responding to this question because I’m stumbling over how someone could be so confused about the difference between fact and fiction that they don’t know how to approach addressing their confusion beyond going back to the source of their confusion to get more reasons to be more confused.
I’m pretty sure that most answers you’ve gotten from most people will be viewed as dishonest answers by more atheists you don’t trust to tell you the truth about the difference between “abiogenesis” and “evolution.”
I could understand your question more easily if you were deliberately trolling for reactions, and that was my first thought about your question because you used the word “evolutionist.” That’s a word invented by people who deliberately seek provocation or are simply ignorant of language and don’t care about the truth of words as it is presented within the meaning they carry.
In other words, for someone who wants to convey that they care about the truth, the first word in your question is a lie.
You don’t seem malicious, and you don’t seem so utterly under-educated or mentally incapacitated to such a degree as not to be capable of discerning the truth of the matter within such a simple question that is beyond simple to verify.
It’s clear from your question that you don’t grasp basic biology. Still, even so, the rambling rationale offered up to justify your mistrust, including the accusation of being inconsistent, is a wholly fictitious scenario playing out in your mind.
I don’t understand how you could not just type both words into a search box to get your answers independently from those you mistrust.
That makes me wonder about your cognitive health and your need for human interaction. Both explanations seem to fill the gaps in my confusion about this straightforward question.
It feels like this question is less of an example of posing questions one wants answers to and more of an example of why people participate on social media — for social interaction.
We no longer spend as much time in person with each other as we once did before technology became our interpersonal brokerage system. That indicates something of value that we have lost in the process.
It certainly is true that our reach is now global. Those of us stuck in dank environments with toxic people can at least breathe a little bit by encountering other minds that can echo our own to allow us to each find our tribe. Still, we’re missing out on something fundamental to the human condition.
That’s why this question has preoccupied my consciousness, and the process of answering it has been more beneficial to me than it could be for the querent who plays at getting answers to their questions in a public forum.
Answering this question makes it easier to understand trolls like “Billy Flowers.” They are desperately lonely people who have been so used to gaining negative attention that’s all they know. They don’t care how they get their attention because they’re so lonely that any attention they get validates their existence beyond the level of disposable trash that our systems in modern society treat us all like.
This question makes me sad, but at least I now understand why.
thotbag 