A lot of things are truly fishy about the site, not only on the answers but also on its comment section. This is something I truly believe could easily be solved by some form of systematic filtering, like some form of spam filter. But looking at how rampant this problem is being left unchecked for so long, it’s hard to even believe the site cares about the problem at all.
Another thing related to bots and “bribes” — anyone with some knowledge on how “social media engagement” works might at some point speculate some users might have used some form of paid or generated contents either by bot or paid contributors to increase engagement, and thus displaying more degree of credibility to the affected users or answers. This of course should not include peers who just drop by to give support to writers, but that’s another thing to consider as well. Now with that being said, I’m not trying to de-legitimize the genuine responses that might be there, but it is difficult to be optimistic about authenticity of any content over there when you observe the way the site have handled disputes, banning of users and the comment section.
I was actually rather unaware of any of these during my active period, and thought this sort of things happened only on Instagram or Facebook. But there was one time a user by the name “Sierra Spaulding” (now banned) made an answer on how you could actually pay money for more followers and engagement on Quora which opened up my eyes to such possibilities. So it won’t be any surprise if at some point or another, it was actually the case that some people used such services.
Either way, I’ve noticed that spam posts actually appeared a lot in blogs, YouTube comments or Instagram. However, to my knowledge, in case of blogs, you usually could set up some form of spam protection to prevent such comments from flooding the comment section. But I’m not entirely sure there was any such system on Quora other than the collapsing of some comments which seems to be more affected by downvotes instead of a systematic spam filter.
About spam filter for answers, however — that is supposedly put in place according the site’s guidelines — it is truly a subject of discussion on its own to gauge how effective the filter truly is, when some legitimate answers like several I wrote down — including this one — could be labeled as “spam” out of the blue after 2 years being uploaded with no problem. I also noticed that recently, there was a bit of a news regarding this particular problem involving Jordan B. Peterson’s answer on list of 42 rules of life that highlighted exactly this. So with all that being said, I personally wouldn’t hold my breath to see any major improvement on this from the moderators’ end.
