zadik
But yeah, he was banned in bad faith. The stated reason was an account he used, and never posted with, to avoid being snooped by the “who has read this?” feature, which was later killed anyway for its privacy issues. The real reason was that YC basically forced them to do it. This is an open secret in Silicon Valley. The whole reason YC bought Quora was because they expected it to be much bigger than it actually became, and YC wanted control of the narrative.
The irony is that these days Quora is almost entirely manipulation and sock puppets, and a big part of the reason for that is the reputation they deservingly gained in the 2010s for maltreating their best writers.
That move destroyed trust by their writer community and pushed them into a series of increasingly desperate moves to keep the good writers they still could. This, as well as monetization pressure, is why it is in the unusable state you see today.
This isn’t exactly a new problem. People with means have always paid other humans to belch misinformation. The only change post-AI is that it’s cheaper. The class balance is shifting.