A2A Susan Bertolino, and I don’t like it that the A2A attribution is gone.
A historical approach to this question:
With reference to the current Quora policy, Quora’s answer to What is Quora’s policy on adding images and videos to answers?, and its history:
Any changes (to my knowledge) are prospective and not retroactive.
As of 11/2016, the following were banned:
- Memes
- From other posts from Quoradom, images need not be captioned to be considered memes, they just need to suggest the catchphrase and not be directly illustrative of the post. E.g. both of the following count as memes:
- Include a humorous or graphically violent image or video that isn’t helpful to someone interested in learning the answer to the question
- The second Dr Evil picture would be caught by this rule too.
- Include a sexual image on a question without an adult topic.
2016–04–01: The ban of graphically violent images, and the clarifying paragraph on when they could be used, was added.
The following types of image were also banned until 2016–11–18, and are thus no longer banned. See https://www.quora.com/log/revisi…
- “text-as-picture” images: an image where a quotation, sentence, or list of words has been converted into an image for the purpose of highlighting / visually emphasizing the language.
- Infographics.
- The former exceptions to this policy were: Original diagrams and infographics created by Quora users; third-party infographics and diagrams that (1) are clearly very helpful to the answer and (2) are not visually weighted to text-as-picture.
- The third-party infographics ban used to be prosecuted aggressively, and famously Xu Beixi was banned for 6 months for refusing to comply with it.
- Image-only and video-only answers.
- That surprises me, but that ban has been explicitly removed.
- However per Quora’s answer to What are the main policies and guidelines for answers on Quora?: “Image- or video-only answers should be captioned and (where applicable) accompanied with an explanation of their relevance to the question.”
- EDIT: That no longer surprises me: Video on Quora by Tommy MacWilliam on Quora Product Updates
Questions can be answered entirely with video, or video can be used to supplement written answers.
The following exceptions to bans were removed on 2016–11–18, and thus are likely now considered banned:
- Answers to questions that specifically ask for meme pictures, images, or videos.
- … OK, that’s worrying.
- Tweets
- A lot of tweets of course are just glorified memes. Now that tweet embedding has been enabled, it remains to be seen how this will be enforced.