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I never found the quality to be anywhere near as good as Stack Exchange, even when Quora first launched. Why anyone would knowingly use Quora over Stack Exchan

I never found the quality to be anywhere near as good as Stack Exchange, even when Quora first launched. Why anyone would knowingly use Quora over Stack Exchange is a mystery to me; I suspect that most Quora users simply aren't aware that Stack Exchange exists, since SE traditionally catered primarily to a technical audience. Edit: One of my biggest gripes with the platform is that it's always solicited a large number of promotional answers. Anytime I end up on Quora, I'm usually stuck scrolling through a long list of "Use my product, it's the best!" answers. It appears to make no effort to discourage or remove such content, and, for whatever reason, those answers tend to get heavily upvoted.

anonytrary 8y ago
SE is much more difficult to start using than Quora, which is also probably why it has higher quality content. Quora has absolutely no quality control.
- zenexer 8y ago
  That's definitely true, though I find that the less technical platforms are laxer. However, that level of quality control is exactly what keeps me coming back. If you ask a stupid question, SO is going point it out rather bluntly. Quora will give you a best-effort answer so someone can plug their latest product. Ask a vague question on Quora, and you'll get a vague answer. Ask a vague question on Stack Overflow, and you'll get downvoted along with comments to the order of, "You haven't provided enough information for us to give you an answer."
- nurettin 8y ago
  quora did SEO right. It has huge visibility, and thus, high quality answers get huge votes, even from people who aren't from that field of expertise. So perhaps post quality is lower than SE, but vote quality is magnitudes higher in my experience.
  - anonytrary 8y ago
    Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I've looked things up on Google and frequently see Quora answers at the very top. I'd say at least half the time I click on the link, the top answer, it is either highly biased, anecdotal, just plain wrong, or a combination of those things. Many of the answers are also in broken English. Despite this, the answers get thousands of upvotes and it makes me question whether or not the Quora userbase is competent at identifying good content. Over time, I've grown to not trust the first answer on Quora as I trust the top answer on SE. At that point, the Quora result becomes a waste of an entry on Google's front page. As others have said in this thread, Quora seems to be suited towards personal questions and opinion-based questions, in which case, maybe Quora and SE are compliments to each other.
baroffoos 8y ago
I asked someone who uses Quora. the same thing and they said quora is for reading opinions and experiences and Stack Exchange is for finding the facts. The only time I ever found the posts on quora valuable was when I was thinking about applying for one of the big tech companies and I wanted to know a bit about what the people who have worked there think about it. That kind of stuff would be off topic on Stack Exchange but thats also the reason why Quora is mostly junk because of a lack of quality control.
gnulinux 8y ago
SE has a very strict notion of having the "correct answer" to each question which is enforced in all communities except some (Interpersonal SE and "soft questions" come to mind). Even in those contexts, answers must be well cited and be credible in a certain way (e.g. in Interpersonal SE all answers must be grounded by personal experiences). This makes it a fundamentally different website than Quora. Quora is about expertise, opinion and anecdotes. SE is about facts and answers deemed credible enough by the community.
- gaius 8y ago
  SE has a very strict notion of having the "correct answer" to each question Probably had. The secret of SE’s success was the rigorous curation as encouraged via the gamification system, explicitly at the design of the site’s founders. Now there are various interpretations of their change in direction, but the quality has noticeably deteriorated for both questions and answers. There’s no sign of a credible rival right now but when one appears it will do to SE what SE did to ExpertsExchange overnight, and for the same reasons.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    ExpertsExchange was also a UX tire fire, whatever SE is, it's not that.
- sideshowb 8y ago
  Personally I think this is a reason to sometimes use quora. The one right answer cult is a huge limitation of se, which frustratingly often closes good questions just for being subjective. This is not site policy but over zealous modding. "We never claimed that subjective questions were horrible abominations that should never be asked." https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-su...
coldtea 8y ago
>I never found the quality to be anywhere near as good as Stack Exchange, even when Quora first launched. Why anyone would knowingly use Quora over Stack Exchange is a mystery to me; I suspect that most Quora users simply aren't aware that Stack Exchange exists, since SE traditionally catered primarily to a technical audience. SE has nowhere near the breadth of Quora, and almost no social, personal life, and politics related topics. At least any SE site I've chanced on, and I'm a member of several.
- krageon 8y ago
  There are SE sites specifically for social and personal life issues.
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
SE and Q do different jobs. Q is better at "soft" knowledge - psychology, personal history, experience, opinion. SE is better for "hard" knowledge - clearly-defined problems with specific solutions. Having said that, I find SE very, very frustrating. Given any problem, the answers invariably seem to include multiple takes with distracting or irrelevant side points; show-boating comments, often nit-picky, about very minor issues; just plain wrong answers that have been massively upvoted; no account of chronology - later answers always have fewer votes than older answers, even if they're better solutions; moderator show-boating with questions closed for no good reason (e.g. when dupes aren't really dupes.) SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content. I enjoy my Quora feed, but I treat it more as entertainment. I wouldn't use it for anything mission critical. I actually agree with Q and not the WB comments - comments about private experiences or opinions are the property of the authors, not communal property, and authors should have the right to withdraw them. Also - FB isn't archived either. Do the WB people have the same negative attitude to FB groups? As for SE - sometimes I try to use SE for mission critical problems. Usually I get a few hints from the answers, then end up having to solve the problem independently.
- XCabbage 8y ago
  I'm sympathetic to some of your complaints about SE, but I think this is a mistake: > SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content. You can see the effect of this approach in many cases where the community has tried to establish a "canonical" Q&A about some recurring topic, and it's frequently not pretty; every tangentially relevant detail that somebody thought to tell the world about gets edited in, and then never gets edited out. Unless somebody is willing to purge lots of users' contributions entirely (which they generally aren't), this one great beast of an answer just continues to grow and grow in scope, gradually losing any sort of coherent narrative or direct relevance to the question. The failed Stack Overflow Documentation project failed in a similar way. Wikipedia articles about programming topics also seem to me to generally be tedious, confusing and riddled with inaccuracies. The competition-based model that SE uses certainly has failure modes, but a more collaboration-based model also has failure modes - ones that I think are more serious and crippling.
dhimes 8y ago
The vibe on many of the technical branches of SE is one of exclusivity and pretentiousness. Just Friday I was stuck on using some old CLI tool that nobody uses any more, and my problem was two some obscure settings in the myriad options that you can set that had to be configured for this case just because. Somebody at SE came back to an ancient question on the site last year and updated it with the answer last year. And I can't even thank him. Quora is much easier to assimilate into.
manigandham 8y ago
Quora still has some incredible gems and answers from people directly involved with the question. Unfortunately, as all content sites, their growth has led to a rapid decrease in quality, and their efforts to inflate questions has only made it worse.

anonytrary 8y ago

SE is much more difficult to start using than Quora, which is also probably why it has higher quality content. Quora has absolutely no quality control.

zenexer 8y ago
That's definitely true, though I find that the less technical platforms are laxer. However, that level of quality control is exactly what keeps me coming back. If you ask a stupid question, SO is going point it out rather bluntly. Quora will give you a best-effort answer so someone can plug their latest product. Ask a vague question on Quora, and you'll get a vague answer. Ask a vague question on Stack Overflow, and you'll get downvoted along with comments to the order of, "You haven't provided enough information for us to give you an answer."
nurettin 8y ago
quora did SEO right. It has huge visibility, and thus, high quality answers get huge votes, even from people who aren't from that field of expertise. So perhaps post quality is lower than SE, but vote quality is magnitudes higher in my experience.
- anonytrary 8y ago
  Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I've looked things up on Google and frequently see Quora answers at the very top. I'd say at least half the time I click on the link, the top answer, it is either highly biased, anecdotal, just plain wrong, or a combination of those things. Many of the answers are also in broken English. Despite this, the answers get thousands of upvotes and it makes me question whether or not the Quora userbase is competent at identifying good content. Over time, I've grown to not trust the first answer on Quora as I trust the top answer on SE. At that point, the Quora result becomes a waste of an entry on Google's front page. As others have said in this thread, Quora seems to be suited towards personal questions and opinion-based questions, in which case, maybe Quora and SE are compliments to each other.

baroffoos 8y ago

I asked someone who uses Quora. the same thing and they said quora is for reading opinions and experiences and Stack Exchange is for finding the facts. The only time I ever found the posts on quora valuable was when I was thinking about applying for one of the big tech companies and I wanted to know a bit about what the people who have worked there think about it. That kind of stuff would be off topic on Stack Exchange but thats also the reason why Quora is mostly junk because of a lack of quality control.

gnulinux 8y ago

SE has a very strict notion of having the "correct answer" to each question which is enforced in all communities except some (Interpersonal SE and "soft questions" come to mind). Even in those contexts, answers must be well cited and be credible in a certain way (e.g. in Interpersonal SE all answers must be grounded by personal experiences). This makes it a fundamentally different website than Quora. Quora is about expertise, opinion and anecdotes. SE is about facts and answers deemed credible enough by the community.

gaius 8y ago
SE has a very strict notion of having the "correct answer" to each question Probably had. The secret of SE’s success was the rigorous curation as encouraged via the gamification system, explicitly at the design of the site’s founders. Now there are various interpretations of their change in direction, but the quality has noticeably deteriorated for both questions and answers. There’s no sign of a credible rival right now but when one appears it will do to SE what SE did to ExpertsExchange overnight, and for the same reasons.
- jacobush 8y ago
  ExpertsExchange was also a UX tire fire, whatever SE is, it's not that.
sideshowb 8y ago
Personally I think this is a reason to sometimes use quora. The one right answer cult is a huge limitation of se, which frustratingly often closes good questions just for being subjective. This is not site policy but over zealous modding. "We never claimed that subjective questions were horrible abominations that should never be asked." https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-subjective/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/29/good-subjective-bad-su...

coldtea 8y ago

>I never found the quality to be anywhere near as good as Stack Exchange, even when Quora first launched. Why anyone would knowingly use Quora over Stack Exchange is a mystery to me; I suspect that most Quora users simply aren't aware that Stack Exchange exists, since SE traditionally catered primarily to a technical audience. SE has nowhere near the breadth of Quora, and almost no social, personal life, and politics related topics. At least any SE site I've chanced on, and I'm a member of several.

krageon 8y ago
There are SE sites specifically for social and personal life issues.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago

SE and Q do different jobs. Q is better at "soft" knowledge - psychology, personal history, experience, opinion. SE is better for "hard" knowledge - clearly-defined problems with specific solutions. Having said that, I find SE very, very frustrating. Given any problem, the answers invariably seem to include multiple takes with distracting or irrelevant side points; show-boating comments, often nit-picky, about very minor issues; just plain wrong answers that have been massively upvoted; no account of chronology - later answers always have fewer votes than older answers, even if they're better solutions; moderator show-boating with questions closed for no good reason (e.g. when dupes aren't really dupes.) SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content. I enjoy my Quora feed, but I treat it more as entertainment. I wouldn't use it for anything mission critical. I actually agree with Q and not the WB comments - comments about private experiences or opinions are the property of the authors, not communal property, and authors should have the right to withdraw them. Also - FB isn't archived either. Do the WB people have the same negative attitude to FB groups? As for SE - sometimes I try to use SE for mission critical problems. Usually I get a few hints from the answers, then end up having to solve the problem independently.

XCabbage 8y ago
I'm sympathetic to some of your complaints about SE, but I think this is a mistake: > SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content. You can see the effect of this approach in many cases where the community has tried to establish a "canonical" Q&A about some recurring topic, and it's frequently not pretty; every tangentially relevant detail that somebody thought to tell the world about gets edited in, and then never gets edited out. Unless somebody is willing to purge lots of users' contributions entirely (which they generally aren't), this one great beast of an answer just continues to grow and grow in scope, gradually losing any sort of coherent narrative or direct relevance to the question. The failed Stack Overflow Documentation project failed in a similar way. Wikipedia articles about programming topics also seem to me to generally be tedious, confusing and riddled with inaccuracies. The competition-based model that SE uses certainly has failure modes, but a more collaboration-based model also has failure modes - ones that I think are more serious and crippling.

dhimes 8y ago

The vibe on many of the technical branches of SE is one of exclusivity and pretentiousness. Just Friday I was stuck on using some old CLI tool that nobody uses any more, and my problem was two some obscure settings in the myriad options that you can set that had to be configured for this case just because. Somebody at SE came back to an ancient question on the site last year and updated it with the answer last year. And I can't even thank him. Quora is much easier to assimilate into.

manigandham 8y ago

Quora still has some incredible gems and answers from people directly involved with the question. Unfortunately, as all content sites, their growth has led to a rapid decrease in quality, and their efforts to inflate questions has only made it worse.