Stack Overflow, a juggernaut of QA boards for software professionals, has been around for quite some time. What’s fascinating is that it’s now being compared with Quora, the more-recent QA-type site that’s been getting a lot of criticism for not being very helpful:
Over 80 percent of questions get a good answer, Mr. Spolsky wrote, and many of the new Stack Exchange sites have 100 percent answer rates. One of the issues with Quora, a well-funded Bay Area startup founded by former Facebook employees, is the high number of unanswered questions.
Quora’s so bad that people have even created spoof websites:
Cwora is one of those.
It’s admittedly hard to get a QA site right but there are enough of them doing it right historically to ask why the new players are getting it so wrong?
Ryan Hayes says
One of the reasons StackExchange sites have such a high answer rate is that many questions that wouldn’t get an answer get closed immediately or don’t have a site because there’s not a community big enough to support that category of answer (like “I found a beanie baby in my closet. It’s one that looks like a puppy, do you think my daughter would like it?”). With Quora, you can ask whatever question you want, but there may only be one person who is even remotely interested in that topic, and may never even be on enough to see it.
P.S. Vote for me! 😀 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/election#post-38879
Agile Scout says
EXACTLY. QUORA for the lose