What is an associate expert?

What expert tricks do seasoned Quora contributors employ?

• "Tricks of the trade" can mean anything that isn't obvious which can: ultimately help increase one's user quality rank, increase a user's efficiency, bypass limitations, or make Quora a better Q&A resource. If it doesn't fit that criteria, but is still an insightful trick, include it in your answer anyway. "Average Quora user" can refer to people who are no longer newbs due to their reading and application of: It's not really a "trick" if it is learned from the links above. Example: Sometimes, Average Quora Users give irrelevant answers which would be relevant in other contexts. Expert Quora users write the same answer and create a new question to post it under so as to keep the answer relevant to the question. Then, somewhere in the first question, the expert makes a link to the new question they've created. This is in line with Quora's goal to be a great Q&A resource. This also prevents any downvoting motivated by irrelevancy. In the Quora Review, I saw this article http://quorareview.com/2011/02/14/i-don%C3%A2%C2%80%C2%99t-use-quora-i-play-it/ and I thought that it was a useful analogy to think of Quora as a game. If it is a game, what do the good players do that make them better than others? If the goal improving Quora's quality as a Q&A resource, and that is how we frame "expert Quora user," then how do the experts play it differently? This isn't the best example of an insightful trick, but wrote a post with questions all sorted into a nice list, here https://oldbodnickposts.quora.com/Quora-and-the-Oscars. This is a way to make Quora a better Q&A resource. I don't think "expert Quora users" are necessarily the same as "elite Quora users," because "expert" emphasizes insight and is defined by Quora's purpose, whereas "elite" suggests popularity (at least in my mind). I think of experts as people who can "see things" that others can't see. Based on this post:  , I have further reason to not use the word "elite" because this post does not define elite as having tricks of the trade. This post seems to define elite as being a high activity user. What do expert Quora users do that normal users don't?

• Answer:

  There are three big "tricks of the trade" that I have found, but I can't guarantee that any are non-obvious or interesting. I am by no means a Quora expert but I've been around for a spell and I'll try to share in the hope that these are helpful. 1: STFU I like to talk (type). I like to be involved in conversations, share my opinions, and hear the opinions of others. When I started using Quora I dove into a lot of questions and got mixed results. What became clear to me is that I needed to STFU. The rule I came to for myself is that unless a question specifically asked for opinions, I would not answer unless I had specific knowledge or experience that I believed allowed me to speak with some authority on the subject. No more "weighing in," or "IMO." If I don't know, I try to STFU. It works pretty well. 2: One Sentence (Overheard and adopted). Always be able to state your answer in a single sentence, preferably the first sentence of the answer. Use the rest of the answer to expand on it. If you can't sum up your answer in one sentence then refer to rule #1. 3: Writing on teh Webs I'm no professional writer, and my answers often include big blocks of text. The inimitable encouraged me to move to a more internet-y style, including section headers and paragraphs no longer than 3 or 4 lines. I've tried to do that, and had positive results. Anyhow I don't know if any of those are at all useful, and they may very well be obvious to everyone else. I feel that following them has improved the quality of my contributions, and the feedback I get seems to back that up.