My Quora Status
Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope it’s a wonderful holiday for all of you. My hope is that none of you get into a knife fight at the dinner table over politics.
There are some seriously creepy people on Quora. I encountered one this morning. He pointed out that he was mentally ill and had a very disturbing profile picture. He’s never answered a question but only comments on others, then turns off the ability for anyone to respond. He then deletes his comments, and I can only imagine why. I just deleted his comment, and I’ll block him depending on his behavior. Advanced Voice reminded me that with a big audience comes the weirdos. I don’t care if he’s mentally ill or not—there are still standards of conduct we all live by.
I know it’s impossible to rationalize with mental illness, but the one thing I remember from my internship at a mental hospital in my early college days was that there were clear boundaries. That’s also when I knew I didn’t want to be a psychologist or work in mental health. What a depressing experience.
I’m down to about half my normal monthly views, and the primary reason is a lack of good questions to answer. I normally answer about seven to nine questions every 24 hours, and I’m down to about two, if that. I’m answering far fewer questions because the ones I get are fairly lame to begin with. Now, with Advanced Voice, there will be even fewer. As much as I love Quora and the participants, its biggest weakness is the cultivation of good questions. Maybe they’ve all been asked—I don’t know. I also don’t answer as many business questions because the readership is so tiny. It has to be a good question.
What I can’t seem to tap into are those bigger questions about life—the ones with more intellectual depth. But when you get into matters of the unknown, you encounter the super-creepy, angry religious zealots who scream at the world for not holding their same beliefs. They are just as angry as the mentally ill. But it comes from the opposite end too.
My point of this post is that I’m not losing interest in writing, it’s just that I’ve hit a lull.