Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It | Hacker News Reader

Forget Quora, New York's Stack Overflow Is Killing It

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140 pointsbjonathan65 comments

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.

Stack Exchange is mostly Questions & Answers

Quora is mostly Questions & Opinions

Actually, it depends on whether you consider volume of upvotes or volume of questions. If you look at the highest-upvoted "questions" on Stack Overflow, they most consist of things like "what is your favorite programming comic" or "is perl still relevant". These are not questions that can be answered factually; they merely ask for opinions.

Now, there are a lot more "how do i replace foo with bar in a string"-type questions, but those individually do not get many upvotes or views.

So really, SO is both.

"Does SO experience a bike-shedding effect?"

there are a few of these type questions that are semi-grandfathered in from much earlier on, but now that http://programmers.stackexchange.com is online for the more discussiony and whiteboardy stuff that isn't so code-centric, we moved the useful questions of that type there. The rest get deleted. (You can still get to them through the creative commons historical dumps, of course)

Need trumps shooting the shit any day of the week.

Stackoverflow serves a need and therefore has staying power, quora tries to serve that same need in a way that does not work well in the long run, I think it will simply blow over. Remember 'ask Jeeves' and all those other sites along the same line? Salons tend to go out of fashion after a while.

It's interesting how we're discussing this on a site that does both, serve a need and has people 'shooting the shit', maybe HN will outdo both of them one day ;)

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.

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.

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.

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.

it is a small bubble, they put a few ppl in a bubble and just blow that particular bubble big.

Use it and have a look at how the community works. You'll find the intricacies in its product design interesting.

Stack Overflow aims to be an objective reference tool. Stack Exchange is something different - it is an infrastructure for creating Q&A websites, many of them (very) subjective. Take the infamous "Programmers" Stack Exchange, for instance, the subjective little brother of Stack Overflow.

subjective but also practical and concrete; see http://programmers.stackexchange.com/faq

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.

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

Never heard of Quora

Does this mean I'm out of touch or way ahead of the curve?

Or possibly so far behind the curve that I'm being lapped - but look like I'm ahead of the curve in a photo finish?

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?

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.

It's wasting its buzz time, then. If (that is, When) this hubbub blows over and we think of Quora as "that thing that never caught on" it will already be too late to gain traction.

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.

The referral-based strategy may have limited the user base for a while, but after all the press they've gotten lately, it's certainly no longer working for them. (Besides which, if the goal was to keep using that as a strategy long-term, a more explicit invitation-based system, a la forrst, might have been more sustainable.)

Unfortunately for them, what really attracted people to quora originally was more that the initial users were an interesting group of people, than anything particularly unique that the software was doing. Now that everyone and their dog has an account, the really interesting stuff is rather harder to find, for the moment; their challenge is dealing with that before "no one goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

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.

Quora's terms ostensibly do allow republishing, but not by any standard license, and with a number of custom conditions, such as:

• not if the original contributor ticked 'not for reproduction'

• no modifications

• pledge to remove an author's name, or update or delete content to match Quora, upon receiving a request

I can understand what motivates such conditions; I recall writing similar ones into a homemade license a decade ago. But they do prevent the easy and wide reuse a standard/CC license allows.

(Quora also has this perplexing statement: "[C]rawling the Service is permissible in accordance with these Terms, but scraping the Service without the prior consent of Quora except as permitted by these Terms is expressly prohibited." In common parlance, 'crawling' and 'scraping' overlap so much as to be nearly synonyms. So this statement makes these terms, like many others on the net, seem engineered to be vague enough that Quora can object to anything they don't like after-the-fact.)

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

Presumably following the right topics and people will allow you to filter out the senseless and inane questions. They also are trying to do a better job of monitoring them than many other Q&A sites, incorporating also crowd monitoring.

Nobody does. Quora is just a new club where the owners have some celebrity friends. Give it time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's odd; I find Quora sluggish, cramped, cluttered and painful to use in comparison to SO. I also find it less intuitive to use; every time I go there (about 5 times so far), I get the feeling that there's a lot of interesting conversations going on somewhere on it based on my inbound link, but I don't know how to get from one to the other. Almost all content I see from browsing, rather than coming in via a link, is banal to the point of immediate disengagement. I don't think I've spent more than a sustained 7 minutes or so on the site.

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.

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.)

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?

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.

Something about "Apply for Membership" feels overly want-to-be-elite to me.

I'm moderately into Forrst. It's solid, but not amazing or anything.

It's really nice for showing things off and getting feedback. The community has yet to really hook me, though.

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.

> 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.

StackOverflow is to Quora as Wikipedia is to Encarta.

Give it some time and Quora will simply disappear.

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?

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

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.

StackOverflow hopes to be Quora of programming!

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

Stack Overflow is _the_ Q&A for programming.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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...

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?

Interesting emphasis on 'New York'.

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

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

Jeff, the other founder, is in El Cerrito.

Joel, in fact, is in New York.

How do you know?

thanks, Readability

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