Still a noob programmer, but I'm a huge fan of SO. I've yet to find a thread with any real bickering or pretentiousness, and 9 out of 10 times find an answer.
It seems like they dominate search results also, which is why I'm surprised that Quora, which I've never heard of, seems to get more respect?
Quora has a much smaller community mostly composed of people interested in start-ups in the Silicon Valley. They get coverage on sites like TechCrunch and HN because of that and the founders left Facebook (most likely because Zuckerberg replaced one of them as CTO with Brett Taylor).
I talked to them and they believe they can beat the competition simply by piggybacking off Facebook's social system and by using AI filtering to prevent people from being overloaded since they allow every topic unlike Stackoverflow.
It seems like they dominate search results also, which is why I'm surprised that Quora, which I've never heard of, seems to get more respect?