5 ms·

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

rdl 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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?
  - rdl 13y ago
    The Indians on Quora, even the "problem Indians", are not problems due to English -- it's not like "how is babby formed" on Yahoo Answers. For the most part their English is superior (although maybe overly formal) to anyone else's. I think a lot of it is that the Indian users on Quora are largely drawn from the IITs, so they're either high achievers in India (and often from high SES backgrounds), or they're IIT alumni in the US. I really don't think Quora's specific Indian problem has much to do with them being Indian so much as the overall decline of the site. (There is some India-specific content, and India-specific answers to questions which really aren't India-specific, but that can be largely filtered by topic. The really annoying content is when it's pervasive.)
  - ridiculous_fish 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      >>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.

rdl 13y ago

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 13y ago
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?
- rdl 13y ago
  The Indians on Quora, even the "problem Indians", are not problems due to English -- it's not like "how is babby formed" on Yahoo Answers. For the most part their English is superior (although maybe overly formal) to anyone else's. I think a lot of it is that the Indian users on Quora are largely drawn from the IITs, so they're either high achievers in India (and often from high SES backgrounds), or they're IIT alumni in the US. I really don't think Quora's specific Indian problem has much to do with them being Indian so much as the overall decline of the site. (There is some India-specific content, and India-specific answers to questions which really aren't India-specific, but that can be largely filtered by topic. The really annoying content is when it's pervasive.)
- ridiculous_fish 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    >>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.