
Quora's "India Problem" - Brajeshwar
https://www.quora.com/Navin-Kabra/Blog/Quoras-India-Problem
======
GhotiFish
I think Quora has a Quora problem. It's Quora. The bait and switch yahoo
answers with the anti-user attitude. Why the hell are people using this
service?

~~~
maqr
It's not like there aren't people competing in this space either (like
StackExchange). I would love to understand why people use Quora and how they
got to the level of popularity that they seem to enjoy.

~~~
saurik
StackExchange does not compete in this space as they do not provide vertical
instances of their site for general questions and answers like Quora, and have
the overall attitude that such things are too open-ended and not handled well
by their format (so when you see such questions on any of the larger
StackExchanges, while there is always a flurry or really great and really
valuable user contributions, the question is always quickly closed by
moderators). If StackExhange _wanted_ this space, they could probably own it
very quickly.

------
arjie
I hope this website dies. It is Expertsexchange reborn, with the downside that
all questions are open-ended and consequently all answers are rubbish.

~~~
tzs
Please explain what was "rubbish" about this answer:
[http://qr.ae/IsPDn](http://qr.ae/IsPDn)

~~~
arjie
I was using hyperbole. In the English language at least, it is used as a
rhetorical device. Other examples:

1\. "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse": Rarely is the person actually capable
of eating a horse.

2\. "I'd die if he found out": Rarely would the person actually die. They'd
probably be mortified (ah ha, nice pun there, eh?).

3\. "Everyone's a critic": Nope, not everyone. Some people are not critics.

------
incision
Some variation of this topic comes up over and over again.

I've seen people bitch about Brazilians on Orkut, Chinese on WoW, Blacks on
MySpace/Twitter, Indians on Quora and Android users on Instagram.

For all its potential as a connector, the Internet is full of homogeneous echo
chambers. There's some threshold for these places where integration suddenly
becomes a "problem".

I've occasionally wondered if the future of recommendation engines are systems
which feed us a steady stream of what we want to hear and filter out
everything and everyone else.

~~~
rayiner
> For all it's potential as a connector, the Internet is full of homogeneous
> echo chambers.

That's the point of the internet. To be able to seek out more people who think
like you and have the exact same interests so you don't have to deal so much
with all the heterogenous people in the real world.

------
gedrap
Many people have their own views on this topic (India problem) but most of
them will keep it to themselves because nowadays mentioning almost anything
related to some specific country/race/religion will get them called 'racists'.
But it doesn't count when talking about Americans, Europeans, white people.
You can tell anything you want about them.

And that's crazy.

~~~
beachstartup
well. the problem is white people don't seem to give enough of a shit to
actually do anything about it. who's fault is that?

at least white nationalists have the balls to just come out and say what they
mean.

coward.

------
JazCE
"But no-one was complaining when Silicon Valley was dominating the feed? So
isn't it racist to complain when Indian topics dominate?

There are two main reasons why most people find it not too irritating to have
a Silicon Valley dominated social network. First is that most social networks
are initially dominated by Silicon Valley, so in general, people are used to
Silicon Valley content. The second, and more important reason is that many
people in other countries are interested in keeping tabs on what's going on in
Silicon Valley because they feel that the same thing will reach their country
in an year or two. So, too much Silicon Valley content is usually not a
problem for most people."

This pretty much invalidates the argument... Do they really want silicon
valley content or is it just the authors bias?

~~~
Wilya
I can't speak for everyone, but that's certainly the main reason why I'm not
on Quora. Even before the whole "login to read" thing, I sometimes went there,
skimmed through the topics and profiles of people and my impression was "So,
it's a social network for Silicon Valley people. Why should I care ?"

------
Tichy
I have a similar problem with feminism on Twitter, perhaps I would even like
to be able to block politics completely. Machine Learning to the rescue?

------
PaulHoule
Indians are what, half of the English speakers in the world? Any en-language
site with a global audience is going to have more Indians in it than most US-
ians are used to.

~~~
eip
And Chinese are the other half.

~~~
acchow
Chinese represent half of the world's English speakers? Either I can't detect
the sarcasm here or you have some odd misconception of China.

~~~
eip
China Daily reports that more than 300 million Chinese already are studying
English—nearly one quarter of the country’s population. And in the next five
years, all schools will begin teaching English in kindergarten, and all state
employees younger than 40 will be required to master at least 1,000 English
phrases.

------
guylhem
I'm sorry but it is just as racist as when people complained about Orkut being
"invaded" by brazilians.

There's a product, there is a population, and a good fit. How exactly is it a
problem? If you don't like indian content, just don't read it. No one is
forcing you.

What if most of the content on facebook was suddently in spanish? Would you
stop using it or ask for a anti-hispanic filter??

It you feel like "these people are really overtaking my place", maybe the
problem is not with them, but with you.

There are many websites, and one may want to cater to a WASP-only audience.
But maybe it won't be as successful.

~~~
millstone
"Just don't read content you aren't interested in" is paradoxical, because the
determination of interest requires reading. The problem is that Quora presents
users with content they aren't interested in, and don't give users tools to
filter that content. If left unchecked, Quora may converge to a monoculture,
which would make it much less important than it could be.

But you're absolutely right to point out the racism of the phrase "India
problem." The problem is with Quora, not the users or their countries of
origin.

> What if most of the content on facebook was suddently in spanish? Would you
> stop using it or ask for a anti-hispanic filter??

Absolutely, if Facebook insisted on showing me Spanish-languge content no
matter what I did. The relevant metric is not "majority of content on the
site" but "majority of the content presented to me."

~~~
theorique
_" Just don't read content you aren't interested in" is paradoxical, because
the determination of interest requires reading._

When I last used Quora, you could follow different topics and people.
Presumably, if you aren't interested in Perl coding, you don't follow that
topic, and you don't get exposed to Perl content.

In what way is India-centric content 'forced' on Quora users in a way that
(e.g.) Perl-centric content is not?

Is Quora attracting English-speaking Indians as users in disproportionate
numbers compared to users not from India?

~~~
rdl
Like half of the new users are English-speaking Indians, if not more. It got a
following in the IITs and exploded there, while stagnating elsewhere.

------
andrewcooke
does quora support multiple languages yet? i ask because when i was there
(years ago - and i should add, given comments below, that some of the
commentators i remember best were indian) a similar cultural problem was
playing out, where they were clamping down on non-english posts. being vaguely
bi-lingual i was happy to chat in spanish and so noticed the resentment.

anyway, in retrospect (and assuming they still don't support multiple
languages) it seems like the quora reflex - to prefer "ban it" over
"understand and adapt" \- has come home to roost. instead of providing tools
to support multiple communities / languages, they relied on exclusion through
language, which was fragile to a community that uses english.

it's actually quite satisfying, if you're happy to watch quora burn.

------
gojomo
More generally, they're having a 'plaza problem', where a universally-shared
space, with too much visibility of bulk and differing-tastes content, creates
scaling problems.

There's a good discussion of this concept of 'plazas' and 'warrens' in social
software (originating with Xianhang Zhang) here:

[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-
the-...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-edge-of-
legibility/)

------
mojuba
In this regard, Quora seems to be in a unique position among similar web
sites. Why doesn't StackExchange have a "race problem", for example? (And what
I really mean by "race problem" is people complaining about it, somehow
feeling uncomfortable or discouraged by it, rather than the "problem" itself.)

I think Quora's more fundamental problem is that the rules of the social game
were not well though out. For example, I find that the user's feed can become
too noisy too quickly. It is too easy for someone to add a crappy unrelated
question into a topic you follow.

As a result you see people who value their time leaving the social network, no
matter how "intellectualist" the network wanted to be in the beginning.

Indians just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time: exactly at
the time of interesting people (including interesting Indians) leaving.

Somehow I'm still hoping to see Quora's revival. Just noticed a question about
Noam Chomsky and thought: so why doesn't Noam Chomsky himself answering it?
This wouldn't sound like a fantasy a few years ago.

If I were Quora, I'd re-think the user's dashboard with those who value their
time in mind.

~~~
gojomo
There are some similarities with how, when Orkut took off in India and Brazil,
its open-community/broad-affiliation features became less useful in the US.

------
pdog
I don't think blocking India-specific topics is enough. Even general questions
are dominated by answers from people with "Indian-sounding" names.

~~~
computer
Is there a specific problem with people with Indian-sounding names answering
questions, or is this just casual racism?

~~~
rdl
Indian names are good predictors of contributors of low-value content on
Quora, but not because Indians in general suck. It's that most of the users
added after 2012 are Indian _and_ most recent additions also suck. "Indian
name" is highly correlated with "joined after 2012" and "suck". I think non-
Indian recent joiners are actually worse than Indian recent joiners, but it's
not as easy to immediately tell when someone joined.

Indian users from pre-2012 were indistinguishable from other users. (2013
isn't that much worse than 2012, yet; the decline really accelerated in late
2011). Some of the best users on Quora are "early Indian users".

The problem I have with filtering stuff on Quora is that I've successfully
filtered most of the bad content, but now I have virtually no content in my
feed at all. The percentage of worthwhile questions/answers has _really_
fallen. If they didn't have essentially limitless internal funding, they'd be
shutting down. They have made no meaningful product improvements in ~years.

~~~
AJ007
I'm not a Quora user but I've seen this issue occur on numerous message boards
and online communities over the years. I have seen one default ban anyone the
moderators think is Indian.

The real problem is the output: broken English & logic that is
indistinguishable from trolling.

The reason why this seems to be an "Indian" issue is because of English
literacy which is good enough to be usable, but with very poor grammar, at a
massive scale. Other countries, be it France, Russia, or China, appear to have
either English literacy that is either high enough quality as to be
indistinguishable from being non-native, or it is just a tiny blip that goes
unnoticed. I would suspect that "Indian" is the term many of the outliers of
these other groups are being grouped in to.

Solutions? The ones that lump everyone in to groups based on their country of
origin are the simplest. The least "racist" would be to divide the community
down these lines, just as Google does.

The bigger question to me is, how are so many people learning English so
poorly, but in a usable form?

~~~
ridiculous_fish
I have chatted with people (primarily from India, but also from some other
countries) who were intelligent, but wrote using the stereotypical broken
grammar, heavy abbreviations, zero capitalization, and rampant misspellings.
"plz send me obj jaba code for engg proj vey urgent."

I asked them why they type that way, and the answer I got was that it saves
time, and as long as the ideas are communicated successfully, who cares?
Especially on a medium as transient as the Internet! In turn, they were
baffled at why I typed with so many unnecessary words and letters.

In the USA, correct English is a way of signaling respect for your content and
for your reader. If I am unwilling to invest my time to spell and punctuate
properly, I have no right to ask you to invest your time in reading what I
wrote.

For these typists, there are other signals. For example, a common question was
"sir plz cn u hlp me". Respect is conveyed via the first two words, and the
style is intended to be neutral and not communicate anything. In turn, I found
"sir" to be weird and overly deferential, and the style to be incredibly off-
putting.

So that's one factor I identified. I'd be interested in hearing from others.

~~~
kamaal
>>I asked them why they type that way, and the answer I got was that it saves
time, and as long as the ideas are communicated successfully, who cares?

What??? Ironically while working at a major US based call center here in
Bangalore, my American English instructor told me I need to exactly do that.
In fact she always used to insist I need to let go of my 'British English' and
adopt the 'US English' standards. 'Want to' had to become 'wanna', 'I would'
had to become I'd - And stuff like that.

To me it felt like I had to unlearn all the good things to speak in US
English.

>>In the USA, correct English is a way of signaling respect for your content
and for your reader.

This really made me laugh. By British and even by standards of English spoken
in Indian schools. Most Indians and can write and speak better English than
most Americans can ever do.

India probably has the highest number of publications and consumption of
English material and may easily account to half of the world's English
speaking population- magazines, newspapers, books, novels, text books, printed
form etc you name it and India will easily come out on top.

You seem to be(disturbed and) referring to a form of communication called 'SMS
lingo' which is very famous among kids around the world, not just India. Its
more of generation gap, while I chat with kids around- I get equally irritated
as your are. Yet among them, this is what they call 'cool'.

On a side note, there was once a time when people complained about a lot of
Indians in Wikipedia. This is going to happen with any English based site.

------
volume
I found out about the "India problem" from the response I got on this quora:
[https://www.quora.com/Expertise/What-are-examples-of-
experts...](https://www.quora.com/Expertise/What-are-examples-of-experts-who-
in-the-end-are-not-really-experts)

You'll see that the first 8 pictures posted in ranked order are all of indian
decent. At firs I thought maybe Varrun Ramani's upvotes were some sort of
4chan/anonymous hack but that's the first time I discovered this "Indian
problem".

This is my "best" quora with the most followers. Anecdotally, it's peaked
around 500 and it seems the makeup of it has skewed towards Indians.

For me, it's just another tool to research and discover things. I'm sure if I
worked for quora, I'd like it to be way more than just that.

I like the comments about having country specific stuff, but then again that
seems to be tough to break down current content that way. Perhaps that is a
Manhattan Project that Quora needs to tackle.

That all said, if I wanted to make a "random indian name generator" I'd
definitely harvest it off certain quoras.

------
kineticfocus
The world IS pretty big. Always interesting getting unique perspectives.

------
Buzaga
Quora was always a 'club' and not a 'community', that's why it sort of can't
grow... clubs are meant to be exclusive, when they grow there's always 'this
place was so much cooler before', I guess an actual community won't care
because it will provide ways for people to contribute that brings up the whole
community, with a purpose and value enjoyed by everyone in it, that's an
ecosystem that can grow. If someone contributes to Rails core, nobody will
care if the dude lives in a nudist community in Camboja smoking pot and doing
OSS code naked everyday. It's structural.

