The 2018 Top Writers are writers who answer knowledge questions with knowledge.

The award decisions appear to be based on the types of questions we answer, rather than how engaging our answers or personalities are. There’s some brilliant writers here, with amazing answers, but this award appears to be judged on how ‘helpful’ a writer’s contributions are.

Don’t get me wrong, reading answers that give insight into another person’s country, culture, religion, gender or generation certainly helps the spread of knowledge, and I love brilliant, funny answers to hypothetical questions, and even snarky answers to stupid, or even ignorant trolling questions. Those clever, hilarious answers deserve upvotes for craft and content, but answers to those types of questions can’t be defined as ‘helpful’.

The more ‘What would you do if Hitler crawled out of your dishwasher?’ or ‘Why was it so easy for New Zealand to conquer the U.S. in WWII?’ questions I see in my feed, the more this site becomes useless fluff.

Many of the most engaging and popular writers here do provide helpful content, and many of them are more deserving of this award than I am. But all too often it’s obvious many are writing for their audience, and answer for the sake of entertainment and story telling.

I’ll admit it’s fun to write answers to funny questions. And I love some of that useless fluff, but this award isn’t for that stuff.

In any ad-supported, content-based web business you have two choices: go for audience, or go for traffic.

• The engaging, popular Quorans thrive without awards. They’re awarded by their popularity. Those writers build audience, bringing back thousands of followers everyday.
• The ‘Knowledge Writers’ drive traffic – people that are looking for answers that are deeper and more experience-driven than a wiki article, technical reference or tutorial. They’re vital in giving this site authority, and all important in-bound links. My answer to a question like ‘how to fill a box with color in CSS’ is never going to get many upvotes but it gets views, most of them coming from outside this site.

Many of the best answers on Quora, whatever the topic, are the very definition of ‘niche’ and will never get the recognition they deserve.

At the same time popular answers and writers get that way because of the operant conditioning tactics embedded in the system. Quora is highly successful at feeding the need for attention and validation. Popularity rewards popularity.

We could argue which strategy - going for audience or traffic – is more successful, but it appears Quora is attempting to nurture both by giving this award to many of us who are the opposite of popular, audience-building, charismatic writers.