I'll be happy as long as one of them solves the "route this question to the best person to answer it and then motivate them to answer it" problem.
Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
51–60 of 70 posts
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#52Is 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.…
Something about "Apply for Membership" feels overly want-to-be-elite to me.
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#53I'll be happy as long as one of them solves the "route this question to the best person to answer it and then motivate them to answer it" problem.
I think the Stack Exchange sites have the motivation tools with the game mechanics. There could really be some improvement with the routing / notifications.
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#54Quora is killing itself.
Quora wants my information before it lets me take a peak. I have never made it past the homepage of Quora as I don't want to logon to a site without knowing what is in there. I think there are several more people like me who are avoiding it fr the same reason
I never see Quora in the results' sites when I type in a question in Google search bar. Instead I find yahoo answers, ask.com in the results.
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#55To 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
Actually, it depends on whether you consider volume of upvotes or volume of questions. If you look at the highest-upvoted "questions" on Stack Overflow, they most consist of things like "what is your favorite programming comic" or "is perl still relevant". These are not questions that can be answered factually; they merely ask for opinions.
Now, there are a lot more "how do i replace foo with bar in a string"-type questions, but those individually do not get many upvotes or views.
So really, SO is both.
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#56Isn't Joel (one of the founders) in El Cerrito in the Bay Area?
Joel, in fact, is in New York.
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#57I've said before that I simply don't get the success of Quora. Their secret sauce is little more than a ketchup bottle with the label scrubbed out (IMHO). The one thing they've managed to do well (and exceedingly well at that) is draw in the Valley elite. Their software isn't really anything remarkable and I'm yet to be convinced that what they're doing will have any general appeal beyond the Valley.
SO is interesting. I think their format for programmers and technical people works exceedingly well. The main SO site itself absolutely kills it for programming related questions, much more than mailing lists, forums and every other programming Q&A site before it.
That being said, I really wonder how applicable that model is to other fields. The other original trilogy sites (serverfault and superuser) haven't mirrored SO's success. I wonder how well the other incubated sites have done or will do, particularly in already crowded spaces like for games and gadgets.
Programmers by their nature self-organize. I don't think that's generally true for other groups although it'd be undoubtedly true for some.
So I like Joel and Jeff. I like SO although I've been fairly inactive there for months. I like the platform but I'm just not convinced of the viability of building a large portfolio of niche verticals on that idea.
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#58Interesting emphasis on 'New York'.
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Karma to burn, and I'm hardly the only one here making the 'entropy' argument: Quora will wind up like Yahoo! Answers given enough new users + time, and by then the cool SV people will have found another plaything.
Re: Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It
#60Quora hasn't hooked me yet. What impresses me most about SO is the quality of the Q's and A's, yet there are minimal barriers to entry; it's all right there to see. Quora, on the other hand, is pretty much a brick wall until you give credentials. It was mildly annoying when a friend emailed asking me to vote up his answer on this new site 'Quora' and upon arriving there I had to give my name just to figure out what the deal was.
I guess Quora's not for me. And I don't think Quora wants me, anyway. I was blocked from editing by an admin because I didn't use my full real name when I did my single upvote to support my friend.