How Not To Be An “Ass Pirate”? Watch What You Answer On Quora
Once when I was in grade school, a girl who had never expressed interest before came up to me and said, “You’re pretty …” As flattered as you could be as seven year old, I said “Thank you.” To which the little proto-troll responded, “Pretty ugly.”
This is what is known as a bait and switch. People of this ilk are now all grown up, and are interacting socially on sites like Facebook and Twitter. And because the Internet feeds off of anonymity they no longer have to have to commit acts of meanness under the guise of their own real life identities. Hurrah! Many sites have an anonymity problem, including TechCrunch or maybe even especially TechCrunch.
Quora, a site that I love because of its sheer commitment to furthering the breadth of specialized knowledge, is also not immune. Today my colleague, Mashable editor Ben Parr, answered a Quora question phrased as “How do you become the next Robert Scoble or Ben Parr?”
While the question was phrased oddly (the modifier “in social media” would have seemed more appropriate in terms of scope) anybody who has lasted any amount of time our cutthroat field must have some secrets to their success, and Parr answered sincerely. And, for the most part, what he said was true.
As the question started to receive Twitter pickup, most notably a sarcastic tweet from Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera (who also happens to be my boyfriend) funny things started to happen to the original question. First it morphed into “How do you become a big loser?” or something equally as basic (I didn’t have the time to screencap it). Then it turned into this, referring to Rivera’s tweet.
And then it turned into this, which I then tweeted out as an example of Quora-baiting, indeed the first and most elaborate I’ve seen.
Parr then picked up on what had happened, replying to my tweet with “Oh no, I got pwned. Still, it speaks to issues Quora has to fix to be a viable long-term service.” Shortly thereafter the question then returned to its original “ass pirate”-less state, in what I am assuming was either adult intervention by Quora admins or a sudden relapse of conscience on behalf of the original poster.
And while it’d be great if it was the latter, my money’s actually on the former to Quora’s credit. But can this hyper-vigilance to the minutae of the Twitterati scale? Brave new world with such questions in it.
Update: Ari Shahdadi from Quora confirms that admins did indeed freeze the question after they suspected shenanigans “The question was locked just before Ben e-mailed us and I fixed it. We’re in the process of dealing with the vandal.”
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