I’m hoping this isn’t an opinion question, although I guess it’s phrased that way. I don’t generally look anyplace else when trying to answer certain types of questions. A glance at the various queries posted here over time would indicate that there’s a wide variety of questions that are asked, there are a number of informed responders and the design of the site tends to weed out frivolous or unserious requests. It’s such the great site. Are there others that are as well-designed so that one might have virtually any serious question answered by such a respectable population of members and visitors?
I’m not aware of any other forum that has such a large community of well-informed, serious-minded (when we want to be) posters.
The Something Awful forums have an extraordinary amount of expertise in a vast array of fields.
They just like to disguise it with schoolboy humour and offensive language and of course their paywall.
The various StackExchange communities are better than here for certain kinds of questions. The thing is, they’re all very specialized compared to General Questions, and anything the mods don’t feel fits the mission of the place will be shut down quickly. They trade diversity for having a really good signal-to-noise ratio.
Quora is known for having people like Steve Case answering questions, but a Quora account is tied to your real name, which automatically limits the kinds of things people can ask about. Also, it is, again, a more technically-focused site than GQ is, and questions can be edited by people other than the original asker.
You can scroll through this list of some of the bigger question-and-answer websites. Notice how many of them have defined topic areas: That might make them better or worse than GQ in terms of ratio of questions answered successfully, but it certainly makes them different from this place.
Quora has promise, although it’s still relatively new and their UI needs some work.
Not to Indistinguishable too badly, but various subreddits (that is, fora in the Reddit universe) are extremely good for certain specific types of questions. /r/sex is a go-to place for sexual questions of all types, and /r/math is great for any type of math question you might have. /r/politics, on the other hand, is a wretched hive of scum and idiocy, but that’s what happens when a single forum gets to have a massive number of active members.
I don’t know of any other site as generally helpful over such a broad range of topics - on the other hand there are dedicated independent forums for just about any and every area of interest you can imagine, which I think can be better places to ask (or search!) if you really want to dig deep into a particular subject.
this is the best wide subject forum i’ve seen for general and specific questions.
So why isn’t Straight Dope listed there?