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Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

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21–30 of 141 posts

Re: Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

#21
Stackoverflow has provided value to me. Quora just provides moments of lazy recreation, if any.

And who is pronouncing Twitter as the silver? None of my Fb contacts are even remotely aware of any of the apps I use, never mind have an account or a need to use them. With Twitter I usually find at least ten followrazzi for every new app/service I sign up for.

Twitter is business. Facebook is the ten dipshits and the nine-toed women I used to know.

Re: Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Click one of the links down the bottom, the other pages have their infamous search/ask/etc input.

You're right, thanks. I'm giving my nod (for whatever that's worth) to the Stack* sites for putting questions right on the home page

I agree, Quora has a pretty bad first-time user experience.

Re: Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

#23
I think Joel and Jeff touched on the issues discussed in the article in their podcasts.

And Jeff always proclaimed that the purpose of the site is a very pragmatic one. To be a source of help for the specific professional community. Not a place to meet your buddies and hang out.

And there's a place for both. Personally, I like that StackOverflow stays away from too much social interaction and focuses on providing valuable technical content.

Re: Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

#24
If reputation is that important, then StackExchange's partition strategy is actually very effective. If you want to find good coders you go to StackOverflow. If you're looking for good photographers, you go to SE's photography site. There's no need for a centralized reputation hub. The reputation of a great coder on StackOverflow can't be diminished as a result of the creation of some new SE's long tail site.

But I doubt online reputation is that important. The reason I visit StackOverflow is to find answers to programming questions, not to look for experts. As for the experts, they don't need high karma on some Q&A site to get job offers.

Re: Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, thanks. I'm giving my nod (for whatever that's worth) to the Stack* sites for putting questions right on the home page

I agree, Quora has a pretty bad first-time user experience.

Especially the "we've opted you into 15 different e-mail notifications that you'll have to disable one-by-one".

Re: Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

#26
post #7

I briefly liked Quora (partly because its the first site I've seen that serves up minified HTML). Now I find it boring, insular, and full of group think. Much like this article. And the valley. The concept that some non-valley site, that doesn't have all the cool kids behind it, might actually be successful is just not allowed within the techcrunch world-view.

I'm curious why you're impressed by minified HTML. Usually, given the CPU cost to minify a page and the fact that savings are in the tens of bytes after gzip, it is nearly certainly an overall performance and user experience loss.

Re: Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

#27

let people log in with Twitter and Facebook, to make StackExchange reputations easily exportable to other platforms. StackOverflow should change absolutely nothing about their login process. It is perfect. I anonymously answered one question, and all of a sudden I have a profile. No confirmation e-mail, no Facebook or Twitter crap. Just use the site and bam! you're registered. It remembers me every time I come back a…

What happens if you clear your cookies?

Re: Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

#29

let people log in with Twitter and Facebook, to make StackExchange reputations easily exportable to other platforms. StackOverflow should change absolutely nothing about their login process. It is perfect. I anonymously answered one question, and all of a sudden I have a profile. No confirmation e-mail, no Facebook or Twitter crap. Just use the site and bam! you're registered. It remembers me every time I come back a…

StackOverflow should change absolutely nothing about their login process. It is perfect

Maybe it works for you, but I'm still utterly confused about how to login. But hey, I only have about 25 years of coding and online experience.

To be fair, it's not SO's fault.

Re: Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

#30
My impression thus far of StackOverflow - and I could certainly be wrong about this - is that the most reputation goes to those in the most popular technology boat. In other words, a high reputation says as much or more about what you work on versus how 'good' you are.

I guess this is a fundamental problem with any metric that reflects popularity.

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