The biggest payoff of "effort versus appreciation" comes down to these three for me:
(*Ice cream flavors most requested by tasters include: sakura-zuke – salt-pickled cherry blossom, strong black coffee – French roast whole beans cooked in milk with lots of caffeine, and wasabi)
The real answer is:
Most men prefer the toilet seat down, and a standard urinal off to the left a bit.
Failing that, we can always use the sink in an emergency (sorry short guys), and you'll be none the wiser… Unless it's asparagus night.
Ladies: that might be the best reason to make sure it's never asparagus night.
And I say that as someone who loves asparagus.
Anyway, the point is, urinating in a standard toilet is the last resort of men… We use men's rooms on a nearly-daily basis, and that experience tends to make us terrified of using any standard toilet besides the one at mom's house. Most of the time, we pre-wipe a seat regardless – between all the liquid drops of who knows what, the clinging hairs, and the… smudges… Well, better safe than sorry.
One thing this question really seems to be asking is, "why do men get so upset when women yell at them for leaving the seat up?"
And the answer to that is simple – we spend so much time not dying of the Black Plague in men's rooms, that even trying to imagine that women would assume a toilet clean enough to sit down on without prior examination (the only reasonable explanation for why they might "fall in" to a seat-raised toilet… Well, we just always pictured women as smarter and more cleanliness-focused than that. And really, anything that jarring to one's assumptions can be highly stressful and upsetting.
Looking over the stats of some of the "consistently great contributors", and mapping that against the "most followers" list… I'd say that it happens a lot – if you include "celebrity" as a job title, or expand scope to include "general notoriety" across many other axes.
In part, it's just more likely that someone with a high degree of recognizability will be able to provide amazing personal insights within a set of focused topics… But it's also true that those rare times (for most) that they stray into topics they are not well known for, the novelty of their answer (even if it isn't that great) again makes the follow worth it.
That said, if your goal is to fill your feed streams on Quora with great quality content, then there does not seem to be as clear a correlation between that goal, and following people based on an external criteria like job title (apologies to the many edge cases – but for every great Facebooker or Hollywood screenwriter contrib, there are quite a few more with shinier-sounding jobs who either lurk, flail, or abandoned their accounts).
A few things come to mind:
Besides the quality of their content, what makes a Quora user more desirable to follow?
I like the "perceived distinction" of the various scoring methods:
(Note: All of the above is simply my perception of how the system may use differentiation to help auto-moderate answers in the most efficient manner possible – there may be truth to any, all, or none of the above)
Currently the issue I have with the system is the apparent inability to both upvote AND mark an answer as "Not Helpful" – in practical terms, this comes up fairly regularly – sometimes even unhelpful answers do more to spark further discussion/resolution of an issue than the one-liner answers that are completely on-topic.
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