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 o

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.