Oliver Emberton describes the pattern most answers follow:

1. The first few votes come from a mix of your followers and people following the topic. These people are almost always more likely to upvote, as you can see by the red spike at the beginning.

2. Hopefully some of those early viewers upvote the answer. As they do, your answer is shown to their followers, and Quora seems to show to more people overall. Note the sharp increase in viewers during this phase.

3. As more viewers see the answer, they become less likely to upvote (see the drop in the red graph). These appear to be people who use Quora less often and people who are increasingly distant from the topic being answered.

4. Eventually Quora throttles back the number of viewers. When an answer is only being upvoted by 2-3% of viewers, it pretty much gets no viewers.

Most posts go viral quickly or go nowhere.

The key to getting upvotes is to write content that is not only good but for a mainstream audience.

That means using positive statements, images, and sound-bite phrases where possible.