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50% Quora answers collapsed (Help!)

Hey Everyone,

I started writing on Quora religiously from January. I faced some initial trouble with collapsed answers and had even reached out on IH for some feedback then (Earlier post).

I have since added about 76 answers and all was going well with the monthly views of my answer reaching 5000. Suddenly over the day before, I noticed that 26 answers had been collapsed and I received no notifications. So, I assumed it is the Quora bot at work with some new algorithm change. I tried to look at the pattern of collapsed answers and all had external links in them. So, today I removed the links from the remaining answers and another 12 answers were collapsed!

This is madness and I have spent a lot of effort in getting the answers up. I contacted Quora support yesterday itself and as expected haven't heard from them yet. Can someone advise on what could be a plan of action?

Many thanks in advance :)

  1. 1

    Same thing happened to me. Quora's own policy states that you should get a notification when posts get collapsed, but I had this happen to ~50 answers with no notification. Support team said they reviewed and decided to uphold their decision.

    Ultimately, it's their community. Technically they can do what they want. I still engage on Quora, but far less engaged than prior to the arbitrary collapsing.

    The support team is usually friendly and occasionally helpful, but since that experience I've just chosen to put less effort into Quora since it seems like it could happen at any time.

    1. 2

      Quite true Stefan. The without notification part, I guess happens when the bot collapses your answer. Then ideally a moderator is supposed to take a look at it to make a final decision - there is no scheduled timeline for this though.

      I am pretty tempted to take a pretty similar low-effort approach with Quora. But I think it can be pretty beneficial for my startup. So I am thinking of ways of mitigating such situations in the future.

      1. 1

        Same situation again haha. Quora has been great for driving brand awareness for my newsletter Remotely Inclined.

        The Quora team said the biggest reason things get collapsed is linking to the same external blog post too many times ("too many" is not defined and could be 2, 10, or 50 times).

        In my case, I didn't link out in all the collapsed posts. But that was just was Quora mod says was a best practice to avoid things getting marked as spam.

        1. 2

          I don't have anything against the Quora support team, but they are a joke. Only templated mail replies :P/

          But as you said it is their community, so their rules :)

  2. 1

    Hi @karthik_2206, Sometimes Quora bot behaves quite strangely.

    Follow these steps:-

    1. Don't write content less than 300-400 words. Always keep it detailed.

    2. Support facts with resources.

    3. Don't always put external links on all answers. Create a balance.

    4. Interlink your answers in between. This is a great way to generate views on your answers. Same way we do with blogs.

    5. Use Images/GIfs to improve your answers & look visually appealing

    6. Contact Quora support & tell them to reinstate your answers & that you haven't violated any policies. ( my best answer was removed 5 times, But I reinstated it 5 times lol with Quora support team)

    Hope this helps you.

    I have also written a Quora Marketing Guide here

    1. 2

      Hey Tejas,

      Thanks a lot for the great suggestions. I actually remember your advice from the previous time I reached out on IH and I have been following them since - so, only half of my answers contain external links. So this was an absolute shock.

      Quora has been quite painful to be honest. I continue to see very low-quality answers which aren't penalised and hence these decisions don't make sense. Also, 50% (30-35 answers getting collapsed has been super painful.

      I actually got a temporary ban yesterday night - this isn't related to the answer collapse. Rather, it was because I tried to solve for it. Here are the sequence of events:

      1. I had 76 answers with none collapsed.

      2. 2-3 days back (I think June 29th), close to 25 answers were auto collapsed. I got no notification but happened to notice my profile on a non-signed in browser.

      3. I reached out to Quora and didn't hear back from them. So in the interim, I analysed the answers that were collapsed. I noticed that each of those answers had a link - even though it was at the very end (not anywhere in the middle of the answer).

      Till here, while my answers were being at a very high-rate, there was nothing specific to a ban. But now I tried to solve for the collapsed answers.

      1. So I just removed the links from the remaining answers and instead posted it in the comment section so that the answer follows the constraints placed (i.e. no links in the answer). Immediately, another 10 answers were collapsed.

      2. Next, I see that my account has been blocked for a couple of weeks. I now understand that I wasn't supposed to post my link to the comments section. But this clearly had nothing to do with the vast bunch of answers being collapsed, because they were happening before I even tried this.

      I am sort of resigned to my fate about this. Quora's customer support reached out to me after I got banned (in relation to my earlier mail to them about my answers getting collapsed). Now they had the excuse of me breaking their policy (link in comments), which clearly had nothing to do with the collapse of answers. They just gave me a templated answer and no more information.

      Would be great to hear your thoughts on whether you think there is anything I could do though :)

      1. 1

        Actually there might be one reason that I think of:-

        1. Either those answers were the same & repetitive.

        Many times quora did remove my answers because I repeated them more than once.

        That might be one reason.

        Otherwise I can't understand the reason now!

        1. 1

          That could be the case Tejas - since the answers are in the same domain, there is an overlap of content, even though I try to keep it unique. To be honest, I am a bit lost myself. After this episode ends, I will write a post explaining my entire experience so that people can probably find some lessons in it :)

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