We are working on a forum-like project where we have to show the answers in a feed just like Quora.<p>The ranking should converge toward an ordering that is independent of the amount of attention an answer has gotten. This means that sometimes highly upvoted answers will rank below answers with fewer upvotes. As usual, the quality of a writer's previous answers will provide a hint to us about how a new answer should rank, but once we have enough votes on an answer, those become the most important signal for ranking. All of this will mean that new answers can now get to the top very quickly if they are the best.<p>user (content creator) -- (unique) id -- name -- email -- etc...<p>user_following -- (unique) id -- user_id<p>user_content -- (unique) id -- user_id -- post_title -- post_body -- post_created_date -- etc...<p>user_feed -- (unique) id -- creator_id -- content_id
With this approach you are going to make it difficult for new writers.
You could also consider length of answer, grammar, known vocabulary.
Quora seems to also seems to rank recent answers on top for a while until it reaches a view limit. So probably takes rate of up vote as upvote/view count. Instead of taking age of answer you could consider view count .<p>Have a look at RankSvm if that helps. It would require good amount of data though .