StackOverflow is to Quora as Wikipedia is to Encarta.
Give it some time and Quora will simply disappear.
Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
21–30 of 70 posts
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#22Isn't Joel (one of the founders) in El Cerrito in the Bay Area?
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#23While 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…
Crucify people for asking a duplicate? When you flag a question as a duplicate, SO asks for the previous question's address, posts it as a comment, and when four people confirm the duplicate, a big link to the original question is put at the top of the page. AFAIK, there's no crucifying step.
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#24To 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…
Need trumps shooting the shit any day of the week.
Stackoverflow serves a need and therefore has staying power, quora tries to serve that same need in a way that does not work well in the long run, I think it will simply blow over. Remember 'ask Jeeves' and all those other sites along the same line? Salons tend to go out of fashion after a while.
It's interesting how we're discussing this on a site that does both, serve a need and has people 'shooting the shit', maybe HN will outdo both of them one day ;)
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#25Boy, 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.
Never heard of Quora
Does this mean I'm out of touch or way ahead of the curve?
Or possibly so far behind the curve that I'm being lapped - but look like I'm ahead of the curve in a photo finish?
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#26I 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.
Quora is a bit like Twitter in the sense that many signed up because Bruce Willis' son was on it. On Quora there's that elite selection of superstars who draw the proles in.
It's entirely unsustainable though. It is a community destined to fail, as cool as it is right now.
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#27While 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…
Crucify people for asking a duplicate? When you flag a question as a duplicate, SO asks for the previous question's address, posts it as a comment, and when four people confirm the duplicate, a big link to the original question is put at the top of the page. AFAIK, there's no crucifying step.
Just my experience. When I've seen duplicates people seem to jump at them, look down at them, yell and curse and scream things your mother wouldn't want to hear you saying. Maybe crucify is too harsh a word :)
Obviously these are my observations, others probably have differing ones. Maybe mine are worsened by the fear of rejection, not following one of their fascist regime style rules, or overall timidness about sounding dumb.
(I exaggerate a little, clearly. However, it does push me to the point of doing a good fifteen minutes of digging up permutations and variations before asking a question to determine it has never shown up before. I understand that is along the lines of what they want, but always feels like they go overboard.)
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#28I'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.
SO made available a CC'd database during a period when many -- including many on here -- were arguing that there should be an open-source, wikipedia-like alternative, coupled with a lot of nonsensical "I could make that on a weekend" claims.
That movement disappeared once SO started making the DB available for download.
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#29I 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.
Quora is a bit like Twitter in the sense that many signed up because Bruce Willis' son was on it. On Quora there's that elite selection of superstars who draw the proles in. It's entirely unsustainable though. It is a community destined to fail, as cool as it is right now.
Seriously, you think Quora is cool? No. It's already uncool and getting more and more uncool as we speak. You can see how the quality has degraded over the last month or so, before they made it invite only again. You already see mega-important SV people like Scoble posting inane images on questions in order to game upvoting, &c.
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#30To 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…
I'm from Europe and I know SO. I didn't know Quora until I forced myself to click on one of the Quora links on HN.
To me it looked like a SO knockoff and I guess it looks that way to most people.