> If you discriminate against people whose names are 'weird'
I'm curious why this issue triggers a knee-jerk response of "that's discrimination".
Seems to me that Quora may just perceive that it's not a worthwhile use of customer-service time and resources to deal with edge cases in output from their name approval algorithm. "Fax in your ID" allows a remedy with a standardized procedure and minimal resources spent on their part.
Keep in mind what a small population this really is. You need the intersection of three sets: "rejected name", "bona fide applicant not a scammer/clown", and "unable or unwilling to access a scanner like by getting oneself to a Kinko's". It's quite plausible that this set of corner cases is sufficiently small as to simply not be worth Quora's time to handle. Quora is not a government with an obligation to serve everybody. Of course it sucks for those who happen to fall into that set, but the overall perspective is that those are small points in a large sea of data.
Never assume malice where incompetence will suffice. This includes incompetence by willful neglect in favor of other priorities.
Right, what's commonly meant when people say 'discrimination' is that someone is making choices between people on criteria that shouldn't matter, such as skin colour, sexual orientation, gender or ... name.
It's not intentional discrimination, but it has a discriminatory - harassing Arab and Indian customers more often.
Whatever the case, it makes them come across as jackasses.
It's not like "real sounding names" is going to prevent trolls. Trolls have the time and patience to pick a credible-sounding fake name. People who want to use the site for it's proper purpose will just feel insulted.
If they want real names, they could do it just by creating social pressure to provide a real name, and doing the Facebook trick of using user-submitted data to build your user name. If a few hold-outs don't want to play along with it, what's the big problem?
>It's not intentional discrimination, [...]
Whatever the case, it makes them come across as jackasses.
The level of decorum here appears to have dropped significantly in the last few days with a lot of this sort of personal attack.
If they unwittingly discriminated against someone because of an unintentional consequence of an action taken in good faith and believed to be benevolent (preventing trolling, spamming and such on Quora) then how does that make the programmers "jackasses" (ie contemptibly foolish/stupid)?
Why not just say that it's a flawed filter, why the need for this sort of talk?
That isn't a personal attack on a HNer (unless the tech support happens to be a HNer, then that's unintentional). If my project does well enough to get a HN discussion, I'm sure I'll be stunned at the rude responses, but that's not people trying to be mean, it's just that people talking about someone they see as a third party tend to be a lot more straight-talking than if they are talking about each-other.
It's just that asking somebody to show some ID just because their name seems strange seems a bit ... strange. It's a website, not a home loan.
I'm curious why this issue triggers a knee-jerk response of "that's discrimination".
Seems to me that Quora may just perceive that it's not a worthwhile use of customer-service time and resources to deal with edge cases in output from their name approval algorithm. "Fax in your ID" allows a remedy with a standardized procedure and minimal resources spent on their part.
Keep in mind what a small population this really is. You need the intersection of three sets: "rejected name", "bona fide applicant not a scammer/clown", and "unable or unwilling to access a scanner like by getting oneself to a Kinko's". It's quite plausible that this set of corner cases is sufficiently small as to simply not be worth Quora's time to handle. Quora is not a government with an obligation to serve everybody. Of course it sucks for those who happen to fall into that set, but the overall perspective is that those are small points in a large sea of data.
Never assume malice where incompetence will suffice. This includes incompetence by willful neglect in favor of other priorities.