I always laugh when people bring up Quora as if they already won. They haven't even launched yet.
The thing with Q&A is that Q&A is a commodity, a user doesn't care if the answer comes from Quora, Stackoverflow, or Hunch. All they care about is getting the answer after typing their question into Google.
The Q&A wars have already passed and the winner is Yahoo Answers. They dominate the results for most Q&A related questions.
Q&A traffic is 90% search engine. And search engines love older sites and Yahoo has a 5 year head start in ranking, a PR of 8, MILLIONS of active users and billions of pages.
I mean seriously, the Q&A market right now, is all about picking up scraps that Yahoo left over.
The Q&A wars haven't even started, and I say that as someone who runs a Q&A site.
Yes, Yahoo has tons of traffic, but 1) they're already being overtaken by answers.com 2) SO identifies Software as being underserved by existing solutions. Software is a 400 Billion dollar industry. Who knows how many other industries aren't being served by Yahoo Answers.
The author is right, we're at the model T era in terms of technology. Relying on Google to find the appropriate question is a good short term tactic, but will be beaten in the long run by other approaches, and doesn't work now outside of the consumer internet. Areas underserved now: B2B anything, corporate tech support (because they don't get much google juice), technical but non-web 2.0 areas like law, accounting, medicine.
Simple upvotes will eventually succumb to the slashdot/reddit phenomenon. Upvotes don't matter when popularity is not a good indicator for the answer you're trying to find. Think music preferences. "What music should I listen to?" is a terrible question for anything based on upvoting. A better system would take into account knowledge about the user, or knowledge about people with similar tastes to the user.
1. answers.com is another juggernaut from years ago. It was launched in 1999, but was rebranded in 2005. So giving them as an example doesn't work.
2. StackOverflow works for programmers, but like Joel and Jeff say, 90% of their traffic also comes from Google.
3. The reason Stack Overflow worked because they were able to bring in their communties from the start. Sure a stackoverflow for law would be nice...but good luck finding thousands of lawyers to give their advice away for free.
4. Yes technology sucks....but Google and users care little about technology...for Q&A 90% of traffic is Google...if you haven't hit that statistic yet, you must have a very new site. Google IS Q&A, to dismiss them is suicide.
5. Here is the thing...users just don't care. They don't care if the top answer was upvoted by 20 people, or if a magic unicorn decreed that it's the top answer. They just want the answer. Even if the site is nothing but pure text, as long as the answer is what the person was looking for, they are happy
There's more to Q&A than just the consumer internet. There's the things people find on Yahoo Answers today, and then there's everything people want answers for, whether Yahoo Answers has a category for it or not. The second is an order of magnitude larger than any site out there right now.
You're absolutely right to focus on whether the user gets the right answer or not. They don't care about technology. My point is that there is a huge untapped market that can't be served by YA or SO, for technology reasons.
The thing with Q&A is that Q&A is a commodity, a user doesn't care if the answer comes from Quora, Stackoverflow, or Hunch. All they care about is getting the answer after typing their question into Google.
The Q&A wars have already passed and the winner is Yahoo Answers. They dominate the results for most Q&A related questions.
Q&A traffic is 90% search engine. And search engines love older sites and Yahoo has a 5 year head start in ranking, a PR of 8, MILLIONS of active users and billions of pages.
I mean seriously, the Q&A market right now, is all about picking up scraps that Yahoo left over.
And I say that as someone who runs a Q&A site.