Consequence of lack of onboarding. Would be easily fixed by popping up instructions for voting and feed shaping the first time a new user votes.
Quora may be exacerbating the behaviour by automatically blocking topics when you downvote questions. They also downvote a question for you when you only want to report it for something. The downvote remains after the reported issue has been corrected.
You may be interested in some history of computer-aided collaboration: https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen