Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

observer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 70 posts

Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

#11

Post by spolsky »

To be honest I don't really think Stack Exchange and Quora are the same thing. Or, to be jargonny, "we're not in the same space."

Quora is Yahoo!Answers done really well... it's more social and bloggy, and it's for chat and subjective questions. It's kind of like Twitter in a Q&A format with long, blog-type answers. It's full of VCs and tech journalists, unlike Yahoo!Answers which is full of teenagers asking questions about reproduction in mammals.

Stack Exchange is more a reference tool... something you use when you NEED a specific answer to an actual question that actually has an answer. We're the reference section of the library, they're an awesome salon where smart people are shootin' the shit.

Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

#12

Post by staunch »

spolsky wrote: post #11

To be honest I don't really think Stack Exchange and Quora are the same thing. Or, to be jargonny, "we're not in the same space." Quora is Yahoo!Answers done really well... it's more social and bloggy, and it's for chat and subjective questions. It's kind of like Twitter in a Q&A format with long, blog-type answers. It's full of VCs and tech journalists, unlike Yahoo!Answers which is full of teenagers asking question…

Stack Exchange is mostly Questions & Answers

Quora is mostly Questions & Opinions

Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

#13

Post by matthiaswh »

davidw wrote: post #6

I don't really get Quora. It seems to have some good questions, but many inane ones as well. My guess is that with time, there's going to be some crowding out, too.

Presumably following the right topics and people will allow you to filter out the senseless and inane questions. They also are trying to do a better job of monitoring them than many other Q&A sites, incorporating also crowd monitoring.

Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

#14

Post by matthiaswh »

While I'm still a big fan of Stack Overflow (and a couple others), I find Quora to be more... friendly, useful, and usable.

Usable in the overall layout is cleaner, less cluttered, more intuitive. Also, the question suggestions are incredibly accurate and prevent me from asking duplicates (many will inevitably ignore them). However, if someone asks a duplicate question it usually is given a friendly response, recommended to the previous question, and probably closed.

Stack Exchange sites tend to crucify people for asking a duplicate. Their recommendations aren't as useful in my experience. However, when dealing with programming it's possibly harder from the questioner's point of view to tell a duplicate (they may not know what they're trying to ask, hence going there instead of searching). Their rules just seem so punitive and stringent that every time I go to ask a question I feel like I'm going to get slapped on the hand.

Finally, I seem to get more responses on Quora right now. This is just an observation, not based on quantitative data. Likely this will change as people get sick of it or it's swarmed with more takers and less givers.

Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

#15

Post by levigross »

whereareyou wrote: post #3

Boy, this is exactly what I have been thinking! Quora gets all the press (and it is a great service), but Stack Overflow/Exchange have been so much more helpful to me because of its specificity. Plus, Stack's game mechanics really work on me and encourage me to want to write good answers and help people.

if you were the main source behind the movie "the social network" you can make a door handle and you will still get press.

Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

#16

Post by nir »

davidw wrote: post #6

I don't really get Quora. It seems to have some good questions, but many inane ones as well. My guess is that with time, there's going to be some crowding out, too.

Nobody does. Quora is just a new club where the owners have some celebrity friends. Give it time.

Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

#17

Post by [deleted] »

spolsky wrote: post #11

To be honest I don't really think Stack Exchange and Quora are the same thing. Or, to be jargonny, "we're not in the same space." Quora is Yahoo!Answers done really well... it's more social and bloggy, and it's for chat and subjective questions. It's kind of like Twitter in a Q&A format with long, blog-type answers. It's full of VCs and tech journalists, unlike Yahoo!Answers which is full of teenagers asking question…

[deleted]

Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

#18

Post by gojomo »

kqueue wrote: post #9

I'd also like to point out that Stack Overflow's database is available to the public under the creative commons license. Quora's database is not.

Quora's terms ostensibly do allow republishing, but not by any standard license, and with a number of custom conditions, such as:

• not if the original contributor ticked 'not for reproduction'

• no modifications

• pledge to remove an author's name, or update or delete content to match Quora, upon receiving a request

I can understand what motivates such conditions; I recall writing similar ones into a homemade license a decade ago. But they do prevent the easy and wide reuse a standard/CC license allows.

(Quora also has this perplexing statement: "[C]rawling the Service is permissible in accordance with these Terms, but scraping the Service without the prior consent of Quora except as permitted by these Terms is expressly prohibited." In common parlance, 'crawling' and 'scraping' overlap so much as to be nearly synonyms. So this statement makes these terms, like many others on the net, seem engineered to be vague enough that Quora can object to anything they don't like after-the-fact.)

Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

#19

Post by barrkel »

matthiaswh wrote: post #14

While I'm still a big fan of Stack Overflow (and a couple others), I find Quora to be more... friendly, useful, and usable. Usable in the overall layout is cleaner, less cluttered, more intuitive. Also, the question suggestions are incredibly accurate and prevent me from asking duplicates (many will inevitably ignore them). However, if someone asks a duplicate question it usually is given a friendly response, recomme…

That's odd; I find Quora sluggish, cramped, cluttered and painful to use in comparison to SO. I also find it less intuitive to use; every time I go there (about 5 times so far), I get the feeling that there's a lot of interesting conversations going on somewhere on it based on my inbound link, but I don't know how to get from one to the other. Almost all content I see from browsing, rather than coming in via a link, is banal to the point of immediate disengagement. I don't think I've spent more than a sustained 7 minutes or so on the site.

Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

#20

Post by nonrecursive »

Is anyone on Forrst? Their service looks like something I woudl like. On the technology end, it looks easy to post images and code for the purpose of discussion, and that would make my life a little easier. The community looks like one I'd like to be a part of, too.

On the other hand, I'm currently re-working my own blog and am really enjoying designing the front end and tooling the backend to fit my needs precisely. It's a labor of love and I don't want to let it languish.

If you've used forrst, what do you like about it? What don't you like?

Post reply on HN