What is Quora’s policy against users who frequently write factually incorrect answers? has an answer by a Quora Insider, and a Quora Trusted Reporter.
Triangulating between these two answers, and the Quora’s answer to How does Quora deal with reports of factually incorrect answers? policy:
- The official consequence of incorrect answers is collapsing the answer.
- Persistent incorrect answers may (at the mods’ discretion) be deemed spam.
- Incorrect answers are not a reason for banning users (in the stated policy); but spam is.
- In Marc Bodnick’s exegesis of the policy, persistent violation of policy results in bans, which makes the spam-connection explicit.
Of course, User (long live the resistance!) is right: it’s a theology. More specifically, the process of banning someone is a Star Chamber, as a result of being a cryptocracy. (See the intriguing Chrys Jordan’s answer to What if Quora were a country?) The spam connection is at the Star Chamber’s discretion to draw.
In fact, Marc’s answer had a pretty funny comment underneath:
Grant Barnes: Thank you. Will Quora say more about its criteria for factual accuracy in regard to questions of science?
https://www.quora.com/What-is-Qu…
Marc Bodnick: Probably not. Jay Wacker – have we said anything publicly about this?
Oops. You’ve lifted the curtain there.
Konstantinos Konstantinides, that Greek proverb’s actually rather more violent in the original: it’s literally “better they take your eye out than your name”. But your response assumed a readership well-informed about the proclivities of individual users, enough to make judgement calls about individual users. If Quora had confidence that we could all do that, and that those judgements would scale, they wouldn’t be modding the place so heavily.
Or at least unleashing bots and outsourced near-bots to do so…