5

I am interested in what is and what was the "competition" for Stack Overflow. Some of these have failed and are no longer existent, and I want to know what the notable such ones are, and why they failed, and what was the result of their policy experiments at making a good Q&A site for programming.

I am asking here since this is probably a concentration of knowledge in the area of "Q&A programming sites" and some people are no doubt aware of what else exists.

So, the question is how did key policy on allowed question types differ from SO and what were the results of these "policy experiments" for one or more of these SO competitors?

Improve this question
8

Major competitors (not failed yet):

  • ExpertsExchange: Make you pay to get answers. Little or no community moderation. Focus is on getting answers. Moderate quality rules.
  • Yahoo! Answers: Little or no community moderation. Focus is on getting answers. Little or no quality rules
  • Quora: More of a social site. Focus is on promoting discussion and streamlining consumption (like Facebook), with a slight focus on compiling good information. Slightly more community moderation.

These are all in stark contrast with Stack Exchange:

  • Focus is on compiling a good resource for a topic.
  • A lot of community moderation, and the community's voice is heard
  • Relatively high quality rules to facilitate the above point.

In this way, SE is more like Wikipedia, albeit less collaborative. And we all know how successful/well known Wikipedia is.

This doesn't completely answer your question, but it's a start :)

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .