Would Quora be more beneficial if it operated more like Steemit, giving incentive to contributors, thus compelling more involvement with the site?
It would be more beneficial to its contributors, that’s for sure. Quora could experiment with a token system with built-in inflation and an initial distribution tailored to its needs to see whether it would work for them - with of without making Quora a Steem front end. For the tokens to work like tokens on the Steem blockchain, it should be possible to trade the tokens on a marketplace, either an internal one or an external one like on Steem, for instance. The voting system should be stake-based to prevent spam and to provide an incentive to purchase the tokens.
The initial distribution could be such that a large majority of the tokens could be controlled by Quora at first for them to be able to reward users as they see fit. The experiment could be run on a small scale first and introduced gradually to the rest of the platform if it was successful.
For more info on Steem, join the Steem Quora Space called The Steemian Roundup - link: Steemian Roundup