[amaranand]

It seems like they put in a ton of work to prevent one person, Robert Scoble, from 'gaming' the system and having his sub-optimal answers go to the top. (As implied by original link and the SV drama-fest of the past couple weeks)

I think this is interesting for two reasons.

1) Based on the post by Adam D'Angelo, I don't think the changes will cause Robert Scoble's sub-optimal answers to be placed lower on the page. Scoble's past answers are interpreted to be 'high quality' by an algorithm because they get so many up votes. Every answer he posts from now on, will get a higher 'quality score' because of all the upvotes he has already included (See: "Answers written by users who have written good answers in the past will be ranked higher.")

2) This seems like a ton of work to battle the habits of one extremely unique user. It strikes me that Quora's resources could have been better used by controlling the spam caused by the social media crowd infestation (i.e astro-turfers). Or by encouraging more experts from fields other than SV start-ups to join and contribute at a high level.

Having been extremely harsh to Quora so far, I do really like that "A vote from a user who has written good answers in the past carries more weight (both upvotes and downvotes)" And this change will admittedly knock down Scoble's answers a bit.