Well, I answered the top #1 answer a couple of months ago: Nick Nicholas’ answer to For Quora writers who have over 1000 answers: What is your favorite answer you have written?
That answer pinpointed as my favourite Nick Nicholas’ answer to How can one summarize the Watergate scandal to a kid? Still pretty proud of it, still thinking about illustrating it eventually. Though how I’d market it to kids is an issue.
I don’t do rankings very well, I just don’t think in those terms. So I’ll pick four more, not so much as my all time faves, but as representative of my favourite type of answer. And because I like to annoy Habib.
- I like to jump into a problem posed by a question, whose answer I do not know at all—and try and work it out from first principles. That happens a fair bit in some out-there linguistics questions, and I’m starting to do a bit of it in cultural studies and history as well. Some people would call it guesswork. I call it informed hypothesising—the kind scholars do when they tackle a new problem. (And I do make a point of warning readers that’s what I’m doing.)
My exemplar is the first time I did this, which was my third answer ever: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Why do the names of many Greek letters end in “a”? - I like to answer questions through which I work out more about who I am and where I stand about things. Habib Fanny, who A2A’d me this, feeds a lot of questions like that, but he’s not the only such source!
I’ve done a lot of those exploring my Greek culture, but I’ll put up as my exemplar Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do Australians like being Australian citizens? I actually almost shed a tear writing this. (Which is un-Australian, I know.) - I try to be funny, I think, or at least stream-of-consciousness droll. There are few if any examples of answers mostly played for laughs; I do try to answer the question much of the time. But Edward Conway praised me for this answer that I wrote at La Gigi’s prompting for madcapness; and Edward has good aesthetics about him. So: Nick Nicholas’ answer to Nick Nicholas, why are you so fascinated with Nixon?
- I like protesting what I think goes wrong here on Quora. I like drawing cartoons. And occasionally, I get to combine the two. As in Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do you believe Quora moderation is doing a good and responsible job of maintaining this site’s policies? Why or why not?