In the days when Quora was nice and open with fewer restrictions, we had credits to regulate the madness.
If only it worked properly, it would have been a very nice system. You had many opportunities to earn credits.
Get 10 credits for every upvote on your answer
Get 50 credits for upvote on your answer from the original question asker
Get 10 credits for every person who follows the question you asked
Get 500 credits every week if you were broke
Collect 25% of credits spent to ask you a question even if you don't write an answer
Collect 100% of credits spent to ask you a question after you write an answer.
Once you had a pile of credits, there were two things you could do with them.
Promote any Quora content using credits. I think it was 50 per person, but I would have to check. There was a 5-fold >price increase to fight credit inflation, so I think 10 to 50 is right.
Ask someone to answer your question.
There were problems with promotion. Promotion basically didn't work. Promoting content didn't result in a lot of >engagement. In some instances, it made things worse. It was too easy to promote. You could mis-tap your screen >and promote something to 10000 people and thus wipe out your credit balance. There was no confirmation screen to ensure it wasn't a mistake.
As for A2A, Quora gave writers a choice to either be available for free or charge credits. If the person you wanted to A2A followed you, you could ask him for free.
If you were available for free, you would get swamped with A2As. I would get 300+ per day. Quora did a very good job promoting me as a source! ?
There were problems with A2A pricing. Quora set our price. You would start at 25 credits and then Quora would dynamically increase your price with no upper limit. Some of us would cost tens of thousands of credits to ask.
You could reset your A2A price, but it would quickly escalate into thousands for popular writers. Some of Quora's superstars followed me, so I could ask them for free. ?
Of course, while A2A made popular writers basically unreachable, our mailboxes were not restricted. Anyone could write a message circumventing the A2A system. Etiquette developed how to politely ask high profile writers to answer questions.
