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Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

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

#51
post #17

"they ought to clean up their very Web 1.0 UX" SO has one of the best UX on the web. I don't care if you call it Web 1.0, 2.0 or Blue Oranges 35, but don't clean it. And also - "clean up by letting people log in with Twitter and Facebook"? How do you clean up by adding stuff?

The same people who say SO has "a poor UX" are the same people who say that Reddit has "a poor UX". They're conflating gradients, rounded rectangles and text shadows with a user's experience of the site.

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

#52
I really like question2answer.org - a LAMP self-hosted Q&A site. http://www.question2answer.org/directory.php, I set one up yesterday at http://revboat.com - it reminds me of job board: http://www.jobberbase.com.

What question2answer needs is a plugin that calls upon the right users to come in and answer a question according to its tags and categories -- and ideally some shared session/domain login.

With Q&A, one should go out to where the action is happening, so decentralization is the key in this case.

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

#53
I was actually thinking about a startup idea around this general theme. I'm going to share it with Hacker News, tell me what you think.

I do not think reputation should be owned by a single site because unlike social networking, there are going to be lots of places to contribute to your online presence.

Yes, stack overflow is important when trying to hire a programmer, but I have also looked at blogs, twitter, github projects, etc.

What really needs to happen is for a startup to create a way to aggregate activity online into a central location to disseminate to the world. Blogging made sense as a means to communicate an idea in 2001, but 10 years later, this needs to change. The internet is shifting heavily towards one that is more focused on communities and the interactions in that community are what are most reflective of an internet identity/reputation.

Just think about your own lives. Yes, sometimes you have one off ideas that you would love to blog and tweet about. That's great, you should keep doing that. But I bet you are also dropping bombs of wisdom on various sites like Quora, Hacker News and Stack Overflow that you wish you could share with more people and keep in a more permanent place.

There needs to be a central place to disseminante the highlights of an online presence. And that site should own the online reputation.

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

#54
post #17

"they ought to clean up their very Web 1.0 UX" SO has one of the best UX on the web. I don't care if you call it Web 1.0, 2.0 or Blue Oranges 35, but don't clean it. And also - "clean up by letting people log in with Twitter and Facebook"? How do you clean up by adding stuff?

I want to make this Blue Oranges 35 thing real. Here's a start:

Level 0 (basic):

   • XHR, not ajax
   • No anchoring namespaces (no /r/ or /b/, just have users/spaces at the root.)
   • No file extensions in URLs (no .html, .cgi, .aspx, ...)
   • All production HTML/JS/CSS has newlines stripped to 32k characters per line.
   • gzip for all html, js, css, json, ...
   • Proper password storage
   • Not exploitable by injection
   • No XSS problems
   • ...
Level 1 (extended):

   Level 0 +
   • Proper expires headers
   • Proper CDN usage
   • All authenticated transactions over https
   • All JS/CSS minified but with full versions readily accessible.
   • ...

Level 2 (optimal):

   Level 1 +
   • All pages generate in under 300ms
   • All images properly sized/crushed
   • ...

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

#55
Meh, I hate the Quora UI. I'm too busy/lazy to find questions that interest me on it. Stackoverflow, on the other hand, is very quick and easy to navigate and has a very friendly UI.End result: I use stackoverflow regularly and have only ever viewed Quora maybe five times.

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

#56
post #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?

Does it really matter? Accounts are just a minor convenience for most users of StackOverflow, they're not the gateways to your content like Facebook.

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

#57
post #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?

You become a new user. Unless you solidify your account before doing so.

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

#58

I was actually thinking about a startup idea around this general theme. I'm going to share it with Hacker News, tell me what you think. I do not think reputation should be owned by a single site because unlike social networking, there are going to be lots of places to contribute to your online presence. Yes, stack overflow is important when trying to hire a programmer, but I have also looked at blogs, twitter, github…

It's not hard to display online reputations side by side on a resume. Reputations mean different things to different people, according to different contexts.

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

#59
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

It's faze. Read more books.

It's also phase. Get out more.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=phase

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

#60

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.

UX rule #1249042:

If anything on a site is ever confusing, it's always the site's fault, not the user's. So don't feel bad.

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