It all began when I noticed that a medical doctor in Somalia was one of my followers. This morning I took a look at the list of followers to this space, which has been growing at a nice steady pace since I started posting content on a daily basis.
I checked the medical doctor’s profile, and wouldn’t you know it, his profile description matched this space’s description word for word!
So I reported him for plagiarism, then blocked him from the space.
There were two other followers who upon a cursory check turned out to have posted nothing but sexually explicit and harrassing content. So I blocked and reported them too.
Neither of those profiles had bothered me directly… but I’d rather have real followers, thank you. Plus, while I’m well aware that anything I post here is going to be seen by all kinds of people, I’d rather not encourage some kinds. Really, I don’t want to be sharing the depths of my heart with people who are going to plagiarize or who think and write depraved thoughts. So I’m very thankful for the block and report features and I use them.
I’ve written content in a number of places online over the years, including several social media sites. I’ve also done Internet marketing in the past (I’m really bad at it), so I know all about SEO and algorithms and the vagueries of how one’s content gets before eyeballs and that sort of thing. I have found Quora to be the best place ever for getting traction by simply writing well. I don’t know how this site does it, but I’ve had more views on my content on Quora than I’ve had anywhere else. I’ve never advertised or promoted myself here, and yet my content has already reached millions per the Quora statistics. So I’m really happy about how that’s all worked out.
But the riff raff…
Here are some types of riff raff stuff I’ve noticed and figure would be helpful to let you all know about.
Romance scammers These folks will comment on something I’ve written but won’t say one word about what I’ve written. They’ll say stuff like “You have beautiful eyes” and directly ask me to follow them so we can have a private conversation. The very first one, I attempted to set him straight. I told him I usually don’t start private messaging people until we’d had a fair amount of interaction publicly. He replied to that with some boilerplate about my lovely profile and beautiful eyes, so I told him I really wish he’d said something about my actual content. I told him I was going to delete our entire thread in ten minutes but he was welcome to try again. I actually set my timer for ten minutes. During that time he upvoted my second comment but made no attempt to further engage. A week or two later I saw the very same profile say the exact same thing on some other answer. Ever since then I don’t even bother. I just block and report.
Look my profile These folks have nothing else to say except “look at my profile” but they can’t even get the grammar right. I’ve seen sometimes ten or fifteen identical comments from the same profile. My strategy with them is to report them—so far I’ve only seen them on other people’s answers—and then alert the OP that they might want to block a few people.
One topic wonders One of the profiles I blocked from this space literally only wrote about one particular item of clothing. Said item of clothing was even in the profile name. This can’t possibly be a real profile! They don’t need to be reading my stuff, that’s for sure!
There are probably other kinds of Quora riff raff. If you’ve encountered some other types, please share in the comments. It might be nice to have a bit of a comprehensive list of what we should all be on the lookout for to at the very least not encourage.