Question
What's a good strategy for ensuring that a trollish and factually incorrect, yet popular, Quora answer gets sufficiently voted down?
Answer
Write a better answer (in terms of both substance and rhetoric) and call out the other answer politely, but firmly on its bullshit. Then tweet/share your answer on Facebook. If you've got decent network capital, your followers should do the rest: upvote your answer, downvote the offending answer you want to see held accountable for its misinformation.
This will work if you've got roughly the same clout (i.e. a decent following and PeopleRank on Quora, not klout outside) as the answer you're competing with, and it doesn't have too much of a head start. As a rule of thumb, pulling abreast with an answer with 100 votes will require you to be 10x more influential than the competing poster. Even then it is hard.
If you don't have enough PeopleRank/following on Quora, establish it first by answering a lot of related questions in that topic area and getting good cred. Then when you turn your attention to the answer you want to take down, you'll be doing so from a position of strength. It's like grinding in a video game.
People mistake Quora for a meritocracy based on subject-matter expertise. That's half true. The other half is a basic popularity contest. An established person with a following and a high PeopleRank can easily beat a much more well-informed new user.
That said, expertise in specific topic areas usually wins the day if you hang around long enough and are decently sociable and good-humored. I've watched a couple of experts with thin skins and insecurity get beaten up and leave pouting because they were intent on waving degrees and other credentials and writing answers with an air of presumed, rather than demonstrated authority, or trying to rely on impenetrable jargon to intimidate readers rather than persuading them. It may work in some other contexts, but it doesn't seem to work on Quora. Which is a good thing.
This will work if you've got roughly the same clout (i.e. a decent following and PeopleRank on Quora, not klout outside) as the answer you're competing with, and it doesn't have too much of a head start. As a rule of thumb, pulling abreast with an answer with 100 votes will require you to be 10x more influential than the competing poster. Even then it is hard.
If you don't have enough PeopleRank/following on Quora, establish it first by answering a lot of related questions in that topic area and getting good cred. Then when you turn your attention to the answer you want to take down, you'll be doing so from a position of strength. It's like grinding in a video game.
People mistake Quora for a meritocracy based on subject-matter expertise. That's half true. The other half is a basic popularity contest. An established person with a following and a high PeopleRank can easily beat a much more well-informed new user.
That said, expertise in specific topic areas usually wins the day if you hang around long enough and are decently sociable and good-humored. I've watched a couple of experts with thin skins and insecurity get beaten up and leave pouting because they were intent on waving degrees and other credentials and writing answers with an air of presumed, rather than demonstrated authority, or trying to rely on impenetrable jargon to intimidate readers rather than persuading them. It may work in some other contexts, but it doesn't seem to work on Quora. Which is a good thing.