4 ms·

Stack Overflow utterly destroyed the other answer sites for just this reason: they make choices based on what is best for the user, not Stack Overflow. Check th

Stack Overflow utterly destroyed the other answer sites for just this reason: they make choices based on what is best for the user, not Stack Overflow. Check the traffic of Expert Sexchange, or Quora, vs. the entire SO network. If all you care about is short term gains, you lose to the company that wants to build a trusted brand. At least that's the way I think it should work out, and in this case I think it has. There is such a clear delineation between good and evil in this market, and such a clear leadership position held by the "good", that it's interesting that folks are wringing their hands worrying about whether SO gets enough impressions out of this. They don't need/want merely impressions. They want your trust and your participation. I know where I go when I have a question...how about you?

eru 12y ago
I go to Google (or Bing), and the search engine sends me to stack overflow. To agree with you: occasionally, quora pops up. But I actively avoid them.
- avinassh 12y ago
  Also Quora forces you to signup even to view all answers/comment. (or you have to do silly url hack, appending ?share=1). Secondly the quality of answers on Stackoverflow network is much better than Quora. Lastly, I have seen some answers deleted by Quora mods for their personal reasons.* There is no way such thing can happen on Stack Overflow. * this [0] is the question I remember. Directi is an Indian company. And mods who work for Directi deleted the answers which showed Directi in badlight. It doesn't matter whether answers were correct or not, let the downvotes decide them, but this kinda of censorship is not cool. [0] - http://www.quora.com/Is-Directi-banned-from-IIT-placements http://www.quora.com/Is-Directi-banned-from-IIT-placements
  - acdha 12y ago
    Yes - I deleted my Quora account after catching them doing search-engine cloaking. Their policies make it clear that their priority is juicing numbers for eventual resale rather than building a useful resource.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Lastly, I have seen some answers deleted by Quora mods for their personal reasons. There is no way such thing can happen on Stack Overflow. First, there is no way that there is "no way such a thing can happen" on SO. SO has moderators who are human. They have guarded themselves against becoming paywalled by putting a CC license on everything they make, but there's no technical solution that can solve moderators being human. Second, there are people who complained specifically about the pettiness of the mods. Google for complains about Stack Overflow and you'll find them, including on HN. EDIT: it now occurs to me your specific complaint may have been "mods deleting answers." But mods on SO can delete questions, answers, and comments. You can find people talking about this in meta.stackoverflow.com, among other places.
    - lambda 12y ago
      Note that high-reputation users can see deleted questions and answers on SO, and petition for them to be undeleted. So there is at least a check on the ability of the moderators to delete things for personal reasons. Most of the complaints about deletion or closing on SO are not about it for petty personal reasons, but instead a general community mindset that is a bit too quick to jump to closing imperfect questions, questions that are close to duplicates but not quite, questions that are somewhat subjective but still have a lot of users interested in them, and so on.
      - slantyyz 12y ago
        >> Note that high-reputation users can see deleted questions and answers on SO, and petition for them to be undeleted. While overall, SO's a great place to get questions answered, the problem, in my mind, is that there might be a disconnect between the high-reputation users and newbies who asked and the newbies come to SO to find answers to the questions that do flagged down or deleted. While I don't think that any of the high rep users are newbie haters, I do think it can be challenging for them to see things from a newbie's point of view.
        sosborn 12y ago
        In my experience, the standard newbie questions have all been answered. A quick search is all it takes to find the answer. The problem, of course, is that newbies rarely know the right questions to ask (read: search), which is to be expected because they don't posses the right amount of domain knowledge.
  - pconner 12y ago
    There's an extension to get rid of the log-in requirement: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quora-unblocker/pcjnlebeogfamlbeloiccdidgmaeojhe?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quora-unblocker/pc...
inanutshellus 12y ago
I started seeing this feature a few weeks ago, and I love it. They even bold exactly the segment of the answer you're interested in. Amazing stuff. I basically treat it like any other link in Google that just happens to have the text I want formatted differently than other links. In most cases I end up clicking the link anyway to verify the context is correct. VERY FRICKIN' COOL.
santacluster 12y ago
Extremely ironic that you post this in response to Google search results, which have become a prime example of choosing what's best for Google over what's best for the user after first decimating the opposition. And so far still pays off nicely for Google, even though the results are getting shittier and more biased year after year. The only lesson here seems to be "destroy your opposition first, before you start focusing on ruthless exploitation". Let's just hold off on drawing conclusions about SO until another decade.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  I agree. I was a Google cheerleader for years (and still hold some GOOG, though one of these days I'll do some research and find a new company to move it to). But, I have lost a lot of trust in them. I use DDG for search, Firefox for browser, though I still have a lot of data at Google. But, in this case I don't think Google's behavior is misaligned with user interests or with those of SO.
username223 12y ago
Who's the "user"? I sometimes find useful information on SO, but I would never think to ask a question there ("closed because ..."), much less play their "gamification" of Usenet. They're less terrible than the "?share=1" people, but that's not saying much.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  Their traffic and user engagement says they have a lot of "users", and vastly more than their competition (despite the huge hype about Quora, they got absolutely wrecked by SO/SE). I don't go in for the gamification stuff, but I like finding correct answers without the bullshit of forced logins, SEO trickery, ghosting of answers, etc. I login to SO/SE because I get value from it (I ask questions and logging in let's me get notifications when someone answers). I suspect the gamification is the least of what they got right. The core things they got right are that they respect their users, they make it easy/quick, they give you the best answer where you expect to find it (including in search engine results and without logging in), and they treat the content as thought it belongs to the community rather than the company. It's kinda like what reddit (and HN) got right. The upvotes are ancillary, but fun sometimes.
j_baker 12y ago
Not to mention that SO's content is released under a Creative Commons license, and for exactly this reason. Google doesn't really even need their permission to do something like this.

eru 12y ago

I go to Google (or Bing), and the search engine sends me to stack overflow. To agree with you: occasionally, quora pops up. But I actively avoid them.

avinassh 12y ago
Also Quora forces you to signup even to view all answers/comment. (or you have to do silly url hack, appending ?share=1). Secondly the quality of answers on Stackoverflow network is much better than Quora. Lastly, I have seen some answers deleted by Quora mods for their personal reasons.* There is no way such thing can happen on Stack Overflow. * this [0] is the question I remember. Directi is an Indian company. And mods who work for Directi deleted the answers which showed Directi in badlight. It doesn't matter whether answers were correct or not, let the downvotes decide them, but this kinda of censorship is not cool. [0] - http://www.quora.com/Is-Directi-banned-from-IIT-placements http://www.quora.com/Is-Directi-banned-from-IIT-placements
- acdha 12y ago
  Yes - I deleted my Quora account after catching them doing search-engine cloaking. Their policies make it clear that their priority is juicing numbers for eventual resale rather than building a useful resource.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Lastly, I have seen some answers deleted by Quora mods for their personal reasons. There is no way such thing can happen on Stack Overflow. First, there is no way that there is "no way such a thing can happen" on SO. SO has moderators who are human. They have guarded themselves against becoming paywalled by putting a CC license on everything they make, but there's no technical solution that can solve moderators being human. Second, there are people who complained specifically about the pettiness of the mods. Google for complains about Stack Overflow and you'll find them, including on HN. EDIT: it now occurs to me your specific complaint may have been "mods deleting answers." But mods on SO can delete questions, answers, and comments. You can find people talking about this in meta.stackoverflow.com, among other places.
  - lambda 12y ago
    Note that high-reputation users can see deleted questions and answers on SO, and petition for them to be undeleted. So there is at least a check on the ability of the moderators to delete things for personal reasons. Most of the complaints about deletion or closing on SO are not about it for petty personal reasons, but instead a general community mindset that is a bit too quick to jump to closing imperfect questions, questions that are close to duplicates but not quite, questions that are somewhat subjective but still have a lot of users interested in them, and so on.
    - slantyyz 12y ago
      >> Note that high-reputation users can see deleted questions and answers on SO, and petition for them to be undeleted. While overall, SO's a great place to get questions answered, the problem, in my mind, is that there might be a disconnect between the high-reputation users and newbies who asked and the newbies come to SO to find answers to the questions that do flagged down or deleted. While I don't think that any of the high rep users are newbie haters, I do think it can be challenging for them to see things from a newbie's point of view.
      - sosborn 12y ago
        In my experience, the standard newbie questions have all been answered. A quick search is all it takes to find the answer. The problem, of course, is that newbies rarely know the right questions to ask (read: search), which is to be expected because they don't posses the right amount of domain knowledge.
- pconner 12y ago
  There's an extension to get rid of the log-in requirement: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quora-unblocker/pcjnlebeogfamlbeloiccdidgmaeojhe?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quora-unblocker/pc...

inanutshellus 12y ago

I started seeing this feature a few weeks ago, and I love it. They even bold exactly the segment of the answer you're interested in. Amazing stuff. I basically treat it like any other link in Google that just happens to have the text I want formatted differently than other links. In most cases I end up clicking the link anyway to verify the context is correct. VERY FRICKIN' COOL.

santacluster 12y ago

Extremely ironic that you post this in response to Google search results, which have become a prime example of choosing what's best for Google over what's best for the user after first decimating the opposition. And so far still pays off nicely for Google, even though the results are getting shittier and more biased year after year. The only lesson here seems to be "destroy your opposition first, before you start focusing on ruthless exploitation". Let's just hold off on drawing conclusions about SO until another decade.

SwellJoe 12y ago
I agree. I was a Google cheerleader for years (and still hold some GOOG, though one of these days I'll do some research and find a new company to move it to). But, I have lost a lot of trust in them. I use DDG for search, Firefox for browser, though I still have a lot of data at Google. But, in this case I don't think Google's behavior is misaligned with user interests or with those of SO.

username223 12y ago

Who's the "user"? I sometimes find useful information on SO, but I would never think to ask a question there ("closed because ..."), much less play their "gamification" of Usenet. They're less terrible than the "?share=1" people, but that's not saying much.

SwellJoe 12y ago
Their traffic and user engagement says they have a lot of "users", and vastly more than their competition (despite the huge hype about Quora, they got absolutely wrecked by SO/SE). I don't go in for the gamification stuff, but I like finding correct answers without the bullshit of forced logins, SEO trickery, ghosting of answers, etc. I login to SO/SE because I get value from it (I ask questions and logging in let's me get notifications when someone answers). I suspect the gamification is the least of what they got right. The core things they got right are that they respect their users, they make it easy/quick, they give you the best answer where you expect to find it (including in search engine results and without logging in), and they treat the content as thought it belongs to the community rather than the company. It's kinda like what reddit (and HN) got right. The upvotes are ancillary, but fun sometimes.

j_baker 12y ago

Not to mention that SO's content is released under a Creative Commons license, and for exactly this reason. Google doesn't really even need their permission to do something like this.