
Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why? - cwan
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/20/quora-vs-stackexchange/
======
neutronicus
_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 and it
makes _absolutely no fucking attempt to worm its way into my social graph_.

~~~
alain94040
_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.

~~~
Simucal
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.

~~~
chc
You're making the same mistake as people who try to get programmers to fix
their printer because programmers are "computer people." Competence with one
technology does not confer instant familiarity with another — and however
clear you might find OpenID, just the array of company logos alone is kind of
overwhelming and highly unusual. Pretty much the opposite of "Don't make me
think."

~~~
Locke1689
To a certain extent, security will always have to make the user think. There's
simply no way around that without complete service dictation.

~~~
chc
Yes, but Stack Overflow's signup screen takes more thinking than most sites
(by virtue of being different, not to mention its complexity). Amazon's signup
is far simpler and it does not seem to be terribly insecure.

~~~
Locke1689
Actually if you have an older Amazon account it was shown to be pretty
terribly insecure.

------
ojbyrne
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.

~~~
TomOfTTB
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 Overflow regularly I see this situation all the
time. It goes like this...

1\. Person asks a question (e.g. "I need to build a service that will serve
school districts in Los Angeles County. How do I go about doing that?")

2\. Someone comes along and answers the question with something that seems
right (e.g. "Here are a bunch of links on building REST services...")

3\. That answer gets upvoted and the answerer gets his reputation boosted

4\. Later someone comes along with the right answer (e.g. LA Unified requires
all services to be WSDL discoverable so you need to look at SOAP"). But it's
too late because the question's already scrolled into the abyss.

So the guy who gave the wrong answer gets a better reputation and the guy who
got the right one gets nothing (and the person who asked the question likely
took the upvoted answer and didn't check back so they waist untold hours on
the wrong thing)

~~~
moe
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.

~~~
tastybites
It's faze. Read more books.

~~~
moe
It's also phase. Get out more.

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

~~~
tastybites
Wow, urban dictionary. Consider me schooled.

------
Ygor
"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?

~~~
flyosity
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.

~~~
bayareaguy
Not so. As I commented earlier[1], SO's data/ink ratio sucks compared to YC.

1- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=305304>

~~~
codinghorror
the use case is rather different, though: Hacker News is a list of articles
other people have written with discussion and commentary. Stack Overflow is a
list of questions from your peers with potential answers. (Also, that's a
really old screenshot)

------
yuvadam
Actually, I think StackExchange is doing just fine.

Going for the vertical communities (which have some overlap, no doubt) is a
very clever strategy - _it works_.

Pray tell exactly what Quora is achieving with its strategy. Right now it
looks like an over-hyped version of _Stack Exchange - Startups_.

------
quan
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.

------
rlpb
The strategy StackExchange is following is textbook. In fact, here it is:
[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crossing-Chasm-Disruptive-
Mainstream...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crossing-Chasm-Disruptive-Mainstream-
Essentials/dp/0060517123)

The network effect and the quality of contributors is everything. Start in an
entirely new field and you'll end up with the blind leading the blind, and the
quality and reputation of the site will plummet. Just take a look at That
Other Q&A Site.

For a new field, the site needs enthusiastic _and_ highly competent
contributors; otherwise it will fail.

------
barmstrong
StackOverflow is definitely more important right now.

But one thing I think they're messing up is the process for launching new
StackExchange sites. They're trying this thing to qualify new sites to ensure
they have critical mass, but I think it's too restrictive and hurting their
growth.

As an example, I "pledged" to contribute to the AI stack exchange site if it
were to launch. When it launched as a trial it received maybe 100 questions
and some good answers in the first few weeks. I got answers to all my
questions - good ones which pointed me toward research I hadn't found in
Google etc.

But a week later it had been shut down and they emailed everyone saying it
didn't meet minimum activity thresholds. Those questions and answers are no
longer available on the net.

The question is whether a StackExchange site with relatively small activity is
still useful. I think it is - at least it's more useful than not having them
at all. Who is to say a small site couldn't become much bigger over time.

Reddit has done well letting users create any subreddit they want. There is a
diverse ecosystem of subreddits out there with varying levels of activity.
Keeping the long tail of subreddits around to see which flourish doesn't seem
to hurt anything - so I don't understand the StackExchange approach to this.

(It reminds me of Wikipedia deleting obscure pages also - what does it hurt to
have them?)

~~~
ivoflipse
So you base that Stack Exchange has failed on one out of the two failed sites,
out of over forty proposals that are still there?

As has already been mentioned elsewhere, if the site lacks genuine expertise
of the topic, the blind will simply follow the other blind. Putting a site
that doesn't work out of it's misery is doing the users a favor in the long
run

~~~
caf
I'm not sure that raw activity level is a good proxy for the amnount of
genuine expertise in the topic that is present.

Some topics - of which AI is quite possibly one - are simply more niche than
others, and therefore naturally will have less askers, less answerers and less
experts.

Perhaps a better metric than raw activity level would be proportion of
questions without an accepted answer? The tumbleweed sites that "don't work"
would be characterised by many unanswered questions.

------
wccrawford
I never understood this 'There can be only one' attitude. I'm fine with
thousands of these sites existing. There doesn't have to be 1 that's better
than all the rest, and I don't have to spend every waking moment finding it,
or making sure I'm already using it.

Sites also don't have to be 'important' for them to matter to people.

~~~
brown
My guess is that we're seeing the results of the tech blogger echo chamber.
These self proclaimed experts need methods to legitimize their existence and
quantify their awesomeness. What better way than a big fat number on the one
end-all-be-all site? See also: Scoble was biggest contributor on Quora.

Of course, it's all ridiculous (for now). Most people in the real world have
better things to do than troll around on Q&A sites hoping for karma. Until
someone figures out how to convert karma into a competitive paycheck, this is
all nonsense.

~~~
SwellJoe
I'd be hesitant to hire someone that had huge karma on any site (including
HN), unless they had real projects to show that their passions include
shipping rather than just talking real pretty about it on the Internet.

Someone can be clever and knowledgeable, and still be a poor employee or co-
founder. (And, my least productive times are often when I'm most interested in
what's happening on reddit/HN/etc.)

~~~
robryan
Decently large karma means there would be a lot of comments to browse through
though which can give you an idea about the person. To a point be
knowledgeable on startups and the tech scene is an advantage but yeah there is
a point where time is better spend getting something done.

~~~
SwellJoe
My comment should be taken with the knowledge that I have pretty big karma at
both reddit and HN (and StackExchange, though I've never browsed or considered
signing up for quora). Obviously, I like to think I'm a pretty useful person
to have around in a company. So, my comment is definitely one of balance
rather than "don't hire people who talk a lot on the Internet".

------
jayzee
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, no._ )

Besides who can be more obsesses about scores than gamers?

~~~
neutronicus
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.

~~~
Aqwis
I believe he is referring to Math StackExchange (math.stackexchange.com), a
site which was created to serve as a MathOverflow-equivalent for mathematics
students or others who aren't professional mathematicians. I've found Math
StackExchange to be highly useful, and the quality of the answers you get is
higher than anywhere else.

~~~
cristoperb
But there is also <http://mathoverflow.net/>

Here's a meta question asking about the differences between the two sites:

[http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/41/differences-...](http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/41/differences-
between-mathoverflow-and-math-stackexchange)

------
charlesju
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.

~~~
gojomo
This has been tried in several eras; there was an initiative 'OpenPrivacy'
(folding around 2002) that wanted a standard for portable profiles and
reputations, and this also seemed to me the original focus of RapLeaf.

More recently, about.me (acquired by AOL) and flavors.me have tackled one
portion of this, the user-controlled aggregation of their multiple presences.
There may still be prospects for a new service, though the resistance of
existing reputation silos could be a problem.

~~~
charlesju
These are not addressing the same problem, which is that we're shifting from a
stand alone idea sharing platform model to a community idea sharing platform
model that needs consolidation from the inherent fragmentation of the
ecosystem (Quora, Hacker News, etc.)

I think those are all trying to tackle a subtle difference than what I am
talking about. About.me and Flavors.me is more so about one off content
creation and status profile sites (blogs, twitter, linkedin, facebook).

What I'm saying is that things like Quora, Hacker News, are now becoming the
preferred medium to share ideas as opposed to standalone sites. Many Quora
answers are essentially blog posts.

------
codeglomeration
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.

------
statictype
Dumb question: I went to <http://www.quora.com> and it's asking me to sign up.
I know that the actual questions and answers are publicly viewable but is
there any obvious way to get to them from the home page?

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

~~~
statictype
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_

~~~
andywhite37
I agree, Quora has a pretty bad first-time user experience.

~~~
linker3000
Totally. StackExchange sites welcome you with a display of their goods as soon
as you approach the front of house, but having just headed over to Quora for
the first time ever, I felt like I had been chased up a blind alley and
couldn't find a doorway. I managed to sneak in through a crack in the fence
(by going to another page as suggested in this thread, but the site front end
seems to be designed to put off visitors.

------
mmphosis
<http://stackoverflow.com/> is easy to browse without having to login.

<http://quora.com/> puts up a wall.

~~~
mkenyon
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.

~~~
lwat
Yea I complained about this before. It's not clear at all what your facebook
data will be used for. In fact I'm going to go delete my Quora account right
now, I didn't realize just how much data they can get from me!

------
Maro
I think online reputations work and matter a lot in Silicon Valley and the
startup world, but anywhere else, not that much.

Also, the attack on the "other" SE sites is lame. I regularly visit and am
active on the Physics SE, and Quora's got nothing on it.

~~~
taylorbuley
Agreed. The author: _a hodgepodge of sites focused on photography,
mathematics, Apple, video games, board games, role-playing games, and science
fiction. Interesting? Sure. Important? Hell, no._

All these "other" SE sites are built around the things that real people are
passionate about. That stuff is quite important!

------
kunley
I strongly disagree with the common conception that high points on
StackOverflow would be a good measure of coder's quality. They are merely the
measure of someone's involvement in answering the questions.

Sadly, many answerers are just point hunters. They seem to monitor questions
and quickly google for answers. I observed this asking specific detailed
questions. Most answers were something obvious, something without accordance
to the details of the question, or just blind guesses. People are just putting
answers in the hope they will earn at least an upvote!! It's not only stupid,
but i guess it's a massive abuse of the original idea behind this site.

Add the fact that most points are earned by people answering questions about
C#/.NET. It's related to the fact that this platform somehow has masses of
mediocre programmers, or even people suddenly put in the role of programmers.
They go asking tons of questions while they should rather RTFM or polish their
skills by coding. No wonder that a mass of questions generates a mass of
answers. So the whole stack exchange idea of points is about quantity, not
quality.

~~~
petercooper
Agreed. I'm somewhere around the top 40 on HN but it would be absurd to say
I'm even near the top 100 hackers or entrepreneurs around here. I just know
how, when and what to say more than many of the folks actually getting on with
their work ;-)

------
praptak
This cannot be stated often enough: SO reputation is worthless for assessing
fitness for hire.

Lots of short, google-able answers to trivial questions will get you much more
points than thoughtful answers to hard questions.

SO can be useful for preliminary screening, but only if you look at the actual
answers.

~~~
daemin
Like with other aspects of hiring (IQ Tests, Programming Tests, Writing Tests,
Interviews, GPA's, Uni Results) they should be a facet in making the final
decision.

The way I see it there are two main ways to use someone's Stack Exchange
reputation.

First just using the fact that they have an account and reputation, in finding
out how involved and engaged they are with the community.

Secondly drilling down into the questions they've asked, and the answers
provided to get a better understanding of someone's strengths and weaknesses,
and seeing where their expertise lies.

Also at the end if there's no other way to make a decision between two people,
one can just take the person with the higher reputation score.

------
dansingerman
Quite an annoying article - creating conflict for the sake of it?

StackExchange and Quora are only very superficially similar. StackExchange is
very specifically about asking questions that have definitive answers, and
getting those answers.

Quora is a question-based social network discussion site.

Not the same thing at all.

------
tejaswiy
I also find the Stackexchange sites generally give me more relevant answers
faster. The advantage of having a beta time where a core group users get to
explicitly state their interest perhaps?

------
scott_s
I looked at the existing answers, and I don't think anyone made this point: SO
and its spinoffs are an example of _do what you know_.

People can smell when someone not from their domain tries to make something
for them - and it does not smell good. In order for the SO model to work, they
need experts versed in the area to be the core of the community. There are two
ways to do this: try to attract such people after creating the site, or let
the site organically arise because it was created by such people.

------
dkersten
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.

------
cletus
I clicked this link expecting the usual TC love-in with Quora--and I got that
--but I actually agree that the StackEchange model is flawed.

What works for programmers doesn't necessarily work for other groups (and vice
versa). I will be shocked if any of these becomes a site as important in their
respective field as SO.

As for Quora... Please for God's sake TechCrunch will you shut up about Quora.
It's a Q&A site with a Facebook login that is liked by the Valley insiders--
and is thought important by the same--because the other Valley insiders use
it.

Until it gets appeal beyond the Valley it's a storm in a teacup. What's more
I'll go out on a limb and say _Quora will never get mass appeal_.

To the Quora founders: congratulations on the Emperor's new clothes. Sell up
before the jog is up.

~~~
adrianwaj
Quora has been successful at obtaining authoritative opinions - something that
Google Knol failed to do because it grants an online reputation, instant
readership and following to those that express their opinion, which seems to
be important to such people. Furthermore, to me, it's like Ask HN and
Hackerfollow on steroids. I still won't participate in it, but will read it
like I read Wikipedia.

------
adrianwaj
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.

------
jdap
StackOverflow works beautifully - it's hit that "this just feels RIGHT" stage.

It's less clear right now that the StackExchange / Area51 model is working.
The process of selecting topics, building support and getting going looks good
on paper, but it looks as though it's lost a lot of momentum.

So the StackExchange team need to take seriously the issue that as things
stand, the model of building out into new Q&A territories can't depend solely
on people who are comfortable with SO (e.g. devs) and take that familiarity
into another sphere (e.g. devs who also bake).

------
gsivil
The issue of "reputation" is really interesting and my guess is that will be
more and more important in the future. It is already important in specialized
communities where it makes sense to be an expert or a master or a ninja or you
name it or gain karma points.

But I am not sure how important can it be in communities with many many users
and without a well defined focus. He refers to a few metrics for the social
component but it is not clear yet what a good and appealing "reputation
metric" could be.

------
SoftwareMaven
I completely agree with this. I tried to get a product management site up and
running ([http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/28281/product-
mana...](http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/28281/product-management)),
because I know the value I've gotten from the software development side. It is
an impossible task that I've since given up on. My questions now go to Quora.

------
kayoone
SO is a very successfull Site without all the koolaid, wich is great. Hell,
the even run everything on Windows... On HN you would probably get beaten to
death when saying something like that.

~~~
arethuza
Argh - fat fingers, ipad, morning - downvoted by mistake!

~~~
kayoone
np ;)

------
Hafiz
lol. , Quora needs lot of improvement to compete with stackoverflow. And both
have different structures

------
jsavimbi
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.

------
georgieporgie
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.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
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).

------
tastybites
The older I get the more transparent sites like techcrunch become. Shitty
personal opinions are apparently worth a lot of money if you have the right
audience.

