Why would I recently get several Quora upvotes for a question I answered 7 years ago?

If Quora works anything like a lot of other social media sites, then I’m guessing it has to do with the algorithm that the more people you have responding, the more it comes up in people’s feed. Also, there are new people getting on Quora all the time, I imagine, so they may just now be seeing your question and responding, which then draws it to other people’s attention, etc. All that is speculation on my part though since I don’t have a whole lot of experience with Quora.

Its called “Necro-Posting”. It can happen when one person up-votes an answer or adds another answer.

It happens. Maybe the news cycle comes back. Or a year has passed, when people forget that they asked the question previous.

I sometimes ask the same question after a year because it was a holiday of an event or whatever.

But why so many necroposts in such a short amount of time?

@LostInParadise All you need is one to send activity notices to other members, whom are following the question. One leads to two, then three ect.

Are you sure that an upvote causes activity notices to be sent? And even if it does, why would so many people upvote an answer that was previously there? Either my answer was there the first time they visited the question or else my answer would have given an activity notice.

@LostInParadise No, I am not sure. I rarely use Quora.

My guess is someone, somewhere, shared a link to your answer in an active thread.

It happens here too. Someone sees an older related question in a side bar, answers it and then that question gets re-activated and posted on.

Pure magic.

I get emails telling me answers to questions I posted on forums years ago have new responses all the time. One poster who searched for something very specific will necro-bump an old thread with a response. It now shows up on the top of the forum feed where it’s now visible, and thus, it gets a flurry of new responses.

I like @longgone ‘s theory. While it could be something Quora’s algorithms did, and might also be partly that, I think the most probable cause for a sudden group, would be:

1) Someone looking at a current busy discussion on the same topic, likely not even on Quora, does a web search about the topic, and the search engine finds your answer (because the search engine may not care much or at all about the date of things it finds).

2) That person posts a link to your older Quora post to the current busy discussion, leading various people to it at the same time, some of whom happen to have Quora accounts (many of which auto-log-in), and some of them upvote your answer there.

That makes sense, and it would explain why the upvotes are not accompanied by comments. Any comments are more likely to be made to the active entry linking to my answer.

I’ve noticed Quora has started resending me emails for Qs that I’ve recently ignored. Many are old & recycled once I get there. There is a date on the Q but NO year. Sometimes I can tell from previous responses that it is several years old, sometimes I can’t. On some of the newer Qs, I open & immediately look to see if there are any responses. If none, I usually respond. If there are responses, I read to see if the person has already received the same answer that I plan on giving. I almost always upvote 1 or more of the responses because I find them to be good advice. I’m sure that some of the Qs might be older if I couldn’t figure out how old they are. Who knows, it’s possible I upvoted one or more of your entries.