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Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

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

#31

Post by Simucal »

neutronicus wrote: post #5

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…

Just be careful with your account in that state. Stackoverflow only knows your account by a cookie right now. You can't log into it from another machine or if you happen to clear your cookies you won't be able to log back in.

So it is in your best interest to "solidify" your membership if you care about your account.

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

#32

Post by Simucal »

alain94040 wrote: post #29
neutronicus wrote: post #5

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.

I can see why a non tech-savvy user would be confused by OpenID but I it surprises me how many programmers are confused by it.

On the login page they list a bunch of common providers you can login with if you already have an account with them: Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, etc. Click their icon, type in your credentials.

If you don't have an account with one of those or don't wish to use them then it has a big register link to sign up with a myOpenID account.

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

#33

Post by kunjaan »

alain94040 wrote: post #29
neutronicus wrote: post #5

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.

>But hey, I only have about 25 years of coding and online experience. To be fair, it's not SO's fault.

That was an absurd statement. Why don't you rather tell us what confuses you about the login process?

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

#34

Post by xiongchiamiov »

TomOfTTB wrote: post #16
ojbyrne wrote: 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.

You're a little harsher than I would be but you make a good point. The problem with online reputation on this type of system is most people won't verify the answers before they upvote them. At the same time an insular community creates a competition for status. So you get people who try to find and answer questions as quickly as possible regardless of whether the answer is right or not. As someone who goes to Stack O…

I try and do my part by voting up the answers that are truly useful when I come across a question by searching, but I agree that it does tend to be a first-come first-serve type of system for the most part.

They've taken some steps to alleviate that (badges for getting an older answer upvoted to +5), but it's still an issue.

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

#36

Post by wazoox »

neutronicus wrote: post #13
jayzee wrote: post #2

The point he is making is that stackoverflow is important because 1. It is useful at work 2. It is useful for getting work He dimisses the possibility that people asking questions about photography might not be photographers doing it for a living ( and a hodgepodge of sites focused on photography, mathematics, Apple, video games, board games, role-playing games, and science fiction. Interesting? Sure. Important? Hell…

Mathoverflow is awesome. I don't know if the stack exchange guys run it (it certainly uses their software), but it is already professionally relevant for practicing mathematicians.

It must be unrelated because there's http://math.stackexchange.com/

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

#37

Post by xiongchiamiov »

georgieporgie wrote: post #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.

Reputation is, by and large, a measure of how time you spend on the site, much like an MMO. If you're interested in more popular technologies, you tend to have more questions to answer (and yes, more people read and upvote your answers).

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

#38

Post by mkenyon »

mmphosis wrote: post #35

http://stackoverflow.com/ is easy to browse without having to login. http://quora.com/ puts up a wall.

Furthermore, when you create an account with Quora, it begs and pleads with you to give it all your personal information in your Facebook account. Not just "What is your token ID?" or even "Who are your friends?", no! Everything about you!

But what takes the cake is the history tracking that Quora uses. It suggests topics that interest me. Like both Barnes and Noble and Borders... from an article I read on HN yesterday. Blatantly telling your users that you're spying on their activity is a great way to endear them to your service.

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

#39

Post by alain94040 »

kunjaan wrote: post #33
alain94040 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>But hey, I only have about 25 years of coding and online experience. To be fair, it's not SO's fault. That was an absurd statement. Why don't you rather tell us what confuses you about the login process?

I'll give you the example of the OnStartups answers community. I am logged in on Safari, and when I go to my user page, it says my OpenID is from Yahoo. Fine.

Now I open Firefox. I try to login to OnStartups, because it doesn't know who I am. I click on Yahoo, go through the authentication process. Guess what: it says it can't find that account on OnStartups (wrong answer), but finds it on StackOverflow, and asks me if I want to link it to my new account. What???

It's almost as bad as the experience I described with multiple Google accounts: http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2010/11/15/the-10-step-google-l...

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

#40

Post by moe »

TomOfTTB wrote: post #16
ojbyrne wrote: 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.

You're a little harsher than I would be but you make a good point. The problem with online reputation on this type of system is most people won't verify the answers before they upvote them. At the same time an insular community creates a competition for status. So you get people who try to find and answer questions as quickly as possible regardless of whether the answer is right or not. As someone who goes to Stack O…

I think your description of the problem is about right.

But: As a SO-consumer this particular problem doesn't phase me.

The better answers usually have more votes and sometimes the green checkmark is even on the best one - but when it's not, who cares?

To me as a SO-consumer a bigger problem recently has been the duplication. For any given question there may be dozens of threads which makes it harder to track down the good one(s). If SO wants to improve they should imho work on their deduplication efforts.

This might even be automatable to a point; let users vote on questions to be merged, and perform the merge when either the author agrees or a vote-threshold is met.

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