As Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer says, you have to go digging to find out. I joined in August 2015, when the new dispensation of moderation was already in place; and by the time I started paying attention to moderation (after Jimmy Liu was banned in May 2016), Run-Over-Pedestrian-Gate had already been and gone.
I haven’t dug enough; but this is what I have pieced together. See also: Research:Online Community Conduct Policies/Quora
- The Oct 2010 Quoragate “Blake Ross” Farrago is the first instance when a user is banned. One has to dig deep to find out what had happened, but it involved a Facebook employee working on a Facebook product competing with Quora, and I *think* moderation back then was done by Quora staff—maybe even the Founders themselves.
- The Olden Days: In 2011, Moderation is set up based on Wikipedia’s administrator policies (Transparency and Moderation by Marc Bodnick on Bodnick Old Posts, Transparency and Moderation II by Marc Bodnick on Bodnick Old Posts). Moderation is done by community volunteers as administrators, who often came to decisions jointly, and were required to log rationales for their deletion and blocking actions. They are still visible here as Emeritus Moderators. Prominent members include Christopher VanLang, Achilleas Vortselas, Tracey Bryan, Marcus Geduld, Tatiana Estévez. A lower tier of users, reviewers, could insta-collapse and report answers.
- Inactive admins were retired, and new admins appointed, every six months. (How are new admins on Quora selected, and inactive moderators retired?)
- Quora policy is developed by Quora employees. The current head of policy is also the head of Quora ontology, Jay Wacker.
- Anecdotally, Community volunteers enforcing did not work closely with Quora staff developing policy. However, VanLang has an ongoing consultative relation with Wacker.
- January 2015: Moderation at Scale: Distributing Power to More People by Marc Bodnick on The Quora Blog. Moderation is insourced to Quora employees, and moderation privileges are removed from users. Scalability is cited as the reason why. One community volunteer, Tatiana Estévez, continues on as a Quora employee.
- In the same announcement, Trusted Reporting (Quora feature) is rolled out: trusted users (initially former admins) are given the ability to insta-collapse answers, succeeding to the former Reviewer function. Anecdotally, this capability has been rolled out to some 200 users.
- September 2015: Run-Over-Pedestrian-Gate: Srikar Vallabhaneni’s answer to What are some of the most controversial answers ever written on Quora? Possibly the most controversial moderation incident, involving Marc Bodnick and Feifei Wang. While employed at Quora, Bodnick played a prominent role both in announcing policy and in castigating users about policy; it is not clear to what extent he was actually involved in enforcing policy.
- January 2017: Tatiana Estévez deletes her Rage Against Quora blog: Why was the blog Rage Against Quora deleted (noticed on January 24, 2017)? Rage Against Quora was a blog started by Estévez, from before when she was a Quora employee, as a place where users could share gripes about Quora; it was a superset of the contemporary The Insurgency and Bug? or Feature? blogs, although mostly the latter rather than the former.
- Some component of Moderation has been automated, for reasons of scalability, though we do not know how much.
- Some component of Moderation is done by Quora employees, including Tatiana Estévez and Jonathan Brill. Again, we do not know how much.
- While Quora Moderation is quite opaque, two long-standing surmises about moderation implementation have been recently confirmed. At least some moderation functionality has been subcontracted out, namely moderation of Anonymous content (Anonymous Screening by Jack Fraser on The Insurgency). And Top Writers are subject to a different moderation regimen from other users (The tribunal of the marshals by Nick Nicholas on The Insurgency).