4 ms·

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 cle

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.

barrkel 16y ago
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.
chc 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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.)

barrkel 16y ago

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.

chc 16y ago

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 16y ago
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.)