There is no "proper role." This not a jury system following some sort of due process under the direction of a judge. It isn't even Iron Chef with points for taste, originality and presentation. This is a near-pure wisdom-of-crowds mechanism.

Quora may have soft and hard policies with kicking people out as a possible punishment. Self-appointed "community leaders" may opine on what they think the norms are or should be. But there's only the cumulative culture created by hundreds or thousands of votes cast every hour, each with a bit of private reasoning behind it. There an average and a spread, but no notion of "proper." To some extent the distribution can be narrowed, widened or shifted around a bit, but it cannot be shrunk to a point.

It may seem like some parties, like Quora admins, can shape the voting culture, but it is a severely limited capability. Any serious attempt to declare and enforce strongly codified voting behavior will simply cause a mass exodus unless cash incentives are designed to compensate.

And this is the way things should be. This is one of the good examples where the wisdom of the crowds is genuinely a better idea than any individual's idea of what is proper. The criteria some people seem to use may offend you or strike you as absolutely wrong, but that's intrinsic to the nature of such mechanisms.

In related news, the Encyclopedia Brittanica ceased paper publication yesterday, while Wikipedia powers on.