
Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It - bjonathan
http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/new-yorks-stack-overflow-14-times-bigger-quora
======
spolsky
To 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 questions about
reproduction in mammals.

Stack Exchange is more a reference tool... something you use when you NEED a
specific answer to an actual question that actually _has an answer_. We're the
reference section of the library, they're an awesome salon where smart people
are shootin' the shit.

~~~
leon_
I'm from Europe and I know SO. I didn't know Quora until I forced myself to
click on one of the Quora links on HN.

To me it looked like a SO knockoff and I guess it looks that way to most
people.

~~~
simonw
Look deeper. Quora's magic sauce is that it only shows you questions that
either your contacts have interacted with or that correspond to topics you are
tracking. As a result, every time you visit you get stuff that you are
genuinely interested in.

~~~
alextp
Or you see no new stuff at all (if you don't have enough contacts/topics)
while there are lots of interesting things going on in the other parts of
quora that you have almost no way of finding out about without heavy
searching.

This pretty much made me stop using quora.

~~~
simonw
I guess that's why they push you so aggressively to pick up contacts and
topics - some of the stuff they do there is really clever, like inviting your
friends to suggest topics for you if you don't have any yet.

------
whereareyou
Boy, this is exactly what I have been thinking! Quora gets all the press (and
it is a great service), but Stack Overflow/Exchange have been so much more
helpful to me because of its specificity. Plus, Stack's game mechanics really
work on me and encourage me to want to write good answers and help people.

~~~
levigross
if you were the main source behind the movie "the social network" you can make
a door handle and you will still get press.

------
kijinbear
Go to StackOverflow.com and you can instantly see what kind of questions are
being asked and answered. The UI may feel a little cluttered, but the
information is there. Hang out for a few more minutes and you can appreciate
the value of this service. You might as well sign up and start using it.

Go to Quora.com and you're asked to log in or create an account. No idea
what's behind that login. Not even a search bar. Since there isn't any useful
page that I can browse to, I might as well just contribute to their bounce
rate. Why would I create yet another online account without even knowing what
the benefits are?

~~~
chucknthem
Part of the reason for quora to do that might be to limit their user base to
people who already know what it is (people who are referred)

Exposing what it is and making it really easy for anyone to sign up will make
it degrade into yahoo answers in no time.

Stack overflow on the other hand embraces new programmers asking and finding
answers to questions because they're all going to be related to programming
(if not it gets modded down really quickly). Quora doesn't have that
niche/topic restriction and is much easier to troll.

~~~
kijinbear
Maybe you're right, and maybe they want to stay small for now. In which case
the linked article is misleading in comparing Quora with StackOverflow.

That doesn't change the fact that I do everything I can to avoid websites that
tell me to sign up first. It just feels incredibly disrespectful.

Facebook might be able to get away with "sign up first, and we'll show you
what this shit is all about", but not your average startup.

------
kqueue
I'd also like to point out that Stack Overflow's database is available to the
public under the creative commons license. Quora's database is not.

~~~
ergo98
SO made available a CC'd database during a period when many -- including many
on here -- were arguing that there should be an open-source, wikipedia-like
alternative, coupled with a lot of nonsensical "I could make that on a
weekend" claims.

That movement disappeared once SO started making the DB available for
download.

~~~
spolsky
Historically untrue. Stack Overflow promised that its data would belong to the
users _from the very beginning_. The data was created by its users and belongs
to its users. We saw what happens when a commercial entity starts to try
charging for content generated by its users (mostly experts-exchange, but also
imdb and cddb) and wanted to ensure that could never happen. Our creative
commons data dump is a promise to the community that the content they've
created can never be locked behind a paywall.

~~~
ergo98
_Historically untrue._

What's untrue about it? While SO had a CC policy since the early days, the
actual CC database, which was the subject of my post, was made available well
over a year later, coinciding with a outpouring of foolish developers claiming
that they could recreate the site on the weekend. I recall the timing simply
because it was interesting seeing how that momentum disappeared.

------
moultano
_"If a proposed site doesn't have critical mass, we just won't create it. Even
if it does get created, it has to maintain a certain level of traffic and
quality or we'll close it down,"_

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for making the web a better place.

------
badmash69
Quora 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.

------
davidw
I don't really get Quora. It seems to have some good questions, but many inane
ones as well. My guess is that with time, there's going to be some crowding
out, too.

~~~
ergo98
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.

~~~
wyclif
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.

~~~
wyclif
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.

------
matthiaswh
While I'm still a big fan of Stack Overflow (and a couple others), I find
Quora to be more... friendly, useful, and usable.

Usable in the overall layout is cleaner, less cluttered, more intuitive. Also,
the question suggestions are incredibly accurate and prevent _me_ from asking
duplicates (many will inevitably ignore them). However, if someone asks a
duplicate question it usually is given a friendly response, recommended to the
previous question, and probably closed.

Stack Exchange sites tend to crucify people for asking a duplicate. Their
recommendations aren't as useful in my experience. However, when dealing with
programming it's possibly harder from the questioner's point of view to tell a
duplicate (they may not know what they're trying to ask, hence going there
instead of searching). Their rules just seem so punitive and stringent that
every time I go to ask a question I feel like I'm going to get slapped on the
hand.

Finally, I seem to get more responses on Quora right now. This is just an
observation, not based on quantitative data. Likely this will change as people
get sick of it or it's swarmed with more takers and less givers.

~~~
chc
Crucify people for asking a duplicate? When you flag a question as a
duplicate, SO asks for the previous question's address, posts it as a comment,
and when four people confirm the duplicate, a big link to the original
question is put at the top of the page. AFAIK, there's no crucifying step.

~~~
matthiaswh
Just my experience. When I've seen duplicates people seem to jump at them,
look down at them, yell and curse and scream things your mother wouldn't want
to hear you saying. Maybe crucify is too harsh a word :)

Obviously these are my observations, others probably have differing ones.
Maybe mine are worsened by the fear of rejection, not following one of their
fascist regime style rules, or overall timidness about sounding dumb.

(I exaggerate a little, clearly. However, it does push me to the point of
doing a good fifteen minutes of digging up permutations and variations before
asking a question to determine it has never shown up before. I understand that
is along the lines of what they want, but always feels like they go
overboard.)

------
nonrecursive
Is 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.
It's a labor of love and I don't want to let it languish.

If you've used forrst, what do you like about it? What don't you like?

~~~
thesethings
I've used Forrst and really like it. I wouldn't compare it to your blog any
more than any other social site: it's going to enable social interactions +
discovery that you wouldn't get on your site... but give you less control. (A
fair trade I think. Both have their benefits.)

Like HN, Forrst is full of people who are earnest and invested in their
behavior there. It doesn't mean everybody is always right or perfectly
behaved, but they are sincere and really care about the topics at hand. I also
like how Forrst users particpate when they have something of value to offer,
rather than just to hear themselves type. (that's one thing that bothers me
about Quora: people speak up without any really compelling reason to. Compare
to HN when most skip threads if we're just going to repeat something.) Forrst
also has excellent design and that permeates the culture and people treat
design both as a craft and a technical skill.

The only thing I don't like about Forrst is probably just me: they have some
etiquette guidelines i don't totally get. You can show work that's in
progress, but i once saw a guy show a fully completed piece of work that a
moderator thought was too self-promote-y. Then I once got modded because I
showed some industrial (non digital) design ( because it wasn't graphic,
though featured graphic typography on a sign). It's possible this policy has
evolved OR I just didn't read the fine print closely enough, but i felt
confused.

I would encourage you to check it out.

------
cletus
I'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.

~~~
BrandonM
> Programmers by their nature self-organize. I don't think that's generally
> true for other groups

Where does this come from? I think _people_ by their nature self-organize.
Programmers are often _less_ social than their non-programming brethren.

------
jacquesm
StackOverflow is to Quora as Wikipedia is to Encarta.

Give it some time and Quora will simply disappear.

------
hasenj
I thought Quora was a Stackoverflow clone.

I never really understood wtf is the point of Quora. I go the main page and it
wants me to sign up. Really? No, I'm not gonna sign up just because you say
you're awesome. How about you prove to me that you're awesome by showing me
the real homepage that registered users see, huh?

------
toadi
Just a rehash from the Joel's blogpost how they are better then Quora.

------
ANH
Quora 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.

------
benologist
StackOverflow hopes to be Quora of programming!

~~~
moondowner
Or the opposite? Quora hopes to be Stack Overflow of varying topics.

Stack Overflow is _the_ Q&A for programming.

~~~
benologist
I was being sarcastic, these days it's fashionable to be the _Quora_ of
something.

~~~
moondowner
I get it now :)

Let's nope that Quora will get it's momentum, and userbase - the way Stack
Overflow has, because it it doesn't only people following social media news
this period will know what means to be the Quora of something.

~~~
jbri
Does "being the Quora of something" mean that you get hyped up a lot but
ultimately are beaten out by a more focused (albeit less hyped) competitor?

------
slackerIII
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.

~~~
nigelsampson
I think the Stack Exchange sites have the motivation tools with the game
mechanics. There could really be some improvement with the routing /
notifications.

------
emit_time_n3rgy
Aside from the idea of competition & killing, but also related to NYC, there
is an interesting Quora thread gaining attention,"How can New York City use
technology to serve citizens?" [http://www.quora.com/How-can-New-York-City-
use-technology-to...](http://www.quora.com/How-can-New-York-City-use-
technology-to-serve-citizens)

------
5teev
Does this headline mean Stack Overflow is actually killing Quora, ending its
very existence? Fine.

If it only means Stack Overflow is succeeding, am I the only one tired of this
figure of speech?

------
naithemilkman
Interesting emphasis on 'New York'.

~~~
tghw
The majority of the team is in New York, and I believe it's now considered SO
HQ.

------
btipling
Isn't Joel (one of the founders) in El Cerrito in the Bay Area?

~~~
songexe
Joel, in fact, is in New York.

~~~
tghw
How do you know?

------
asymmetric
thanks, Readability

