The format isn’t identical, but it’s really, really similar. The main difference between the two seems to be that Yahoo answers has an “expiry date” for questions and the answer is chosen by popular vote if the question asker doesn’t pick one; whereas the Stack Exchange format leaves questions open indefinitely until the asker picks an accepted answer, and even then more can be contributed. Perhaps that’s more important than I think?
Is it just that Yahoo is a popular general purpose site so more people show up, and thus by sheer volume the average quality wanes? Random fluke?
Stack Overflow for programming is a fairly respected place to get answers on questions, and the other stack exchanges don’t seem too shabby either. I can’t figure out why Yahoo came to be (and be regarded as) the cesspool that it is.
Stack Exchange is divied up into fairly specific and technical categories, so people with the relevant expertise who want to help others know where to go. Yahoo Answers has a few broad and fairly wishy-washy categories (pets, sports, etc.) that aren’t as cleanly divided.
A good question, up there with how babbies are formed and why they haven’t done way with instain mothers yet.
The general quality of folks on the internet isn’t that great, I fear. Leave something open to general interest and you get Yahoo Answers and YouTube comments. If we didn’t have a pretty well established culture around here before we were opened to google searching, I suspect we might’ve suffered as well; as it is, we do get those people with the recent join dates…
Nazis and Points. Stackexchange sites allow “moderation” by power users, and give you points and badges for your contributions. Keeping low quality contributions out + a gamified system to encourage participation makes it a whole different league from yahoo answers. Edit to add - giving groups of users the ability to police their own site is a powerful concept all on its own, even without prototypical gamified elements of “Points, Badges, and Leaderboards” found there.
I honestly don’t think the self moderation would help so much if the core constituency wasn’t already of a different caliber. Do you really think that self moderation at Yahoo would improve things? And look at YouTube, which solely uses self-moderation as well as points and stuff. Yet that’s not seemed to help. People don’t vote people up there for being smart or good. They just vote people up they agree with.
I think the rewards for better answers has more to do with it. And, unlike Yahoo, you don’t automatically get one award per question. This keeps you from being able to become great just for answering a bunch of questions. (Though it’s not perfect in this.)
The bigger problem with the stack exchange sites are people gaming the system (the reason I quit) and how quickly you create a huge divide with the gamification. It much, much harder for new people to get as high up as the older people, as they have much more competition. It creates a form of insularity that I think will hurt the site over the long term. Once the people who have the highest points aren’t the most knowledgeable people on the site, it’s going to take a lot to get new experts on top, and many of those who were formerly on top are not going to take it lying down. Just like with Wikipedia, they’ll game the system due to their increased knowledge of it.