I am not Kat Rectenwald, as the following should show:
Nick Nicholas’ answer to Do any popular Quorans ever delete their answers?
(tl;dr: NOOOOOOOOO!!!)
And you, OP, are neither me nor Kat. So it’s impossible to make an absolute determination on matters of personal preference.
But let us lay out the considerations.
PRO DELETION:
- Your old answers may well be crap, especially if your Quora Kung-Fu did not emerge fully mature from the skull of Zeus, like mine totes did.
- You know more stuff than you did, and you have better judgement now: you don’t want your past incorrect or ill-formed questions to represent you.
- You take pride in your work.
CON DELETION:
- Non-trivial effort in seeking, judging, and eliminating old answers. Especially if you’re garullous.
- Damaging others’ content, in case they have referenced yours for whatever reason.
- How often does an old answer of yours even show up in someone else’s feed? How often do you see someone year-old answer in your feed? To my mind, not often enough. So you’d be expending effort for a problem that will very rarely surface.
- That is of course at the mercy of the Quora UI goldfish (see e.g. Hey! They changed the Quora UI font again! by Nick Nicholas on The Memes of Production) Recently old answers started surfacing more than usual, and Rage Against Quora complained about it. It was still only an occasional old answer.
- How often do you scroll down someone’s collected answers, all the way down to their answers from last year? Especially in the unpaginated Quora UI, which makes jumping back in time acutely painful. Once again: it will normally take work for an old answer to be surfaced.
- If the Quora algorithms can tell an old answer is crap, they won’t surface it anyway.
- You looooove every single word you have ever uttered. (Well, I do.) So you would never countenance deleting a single jot. (Well, I wouldn’t.)
The Con arguments are, admittedly, laziness, low return on investment, conceit (though so is pride in one’s work), and a small risk of linkrot. For many people, those Con arguments aren’t compelling. For me, they are, and it’s the Pro arguments that aren’t compelling.