Originally Answered: How is Quora different from Yahoo Answers?
A number of things that may seem trivial but add up to a much better user experience.
- Lots of space for your answer.
- Large easy to read font
- Your answer continues to be editable for all time - with Yahoo answers it is locked when the original questioner chooses a "best answer". So at any time you may find that you can no longer edit your answer, it feels almost like you lose ownership of it. Major issue if you made a mistake in your answer or just have an idea of a better way to answer it, or it is topical and gets out of date with new developments.
- No "Best answer" and ranking of answers is done by community not by the person who originally asked the question (who may not always be good at assessing which is the best answer). Some questions need multiple answers from different viewpoints
- Cleaner nicer page layout, more modern looking also.
- Very easy to edit your answer. E.g. headers, bold font, itallics, the way it automatically finds the title of a webpage when you paste the link into the page, these automatic bullet points, quotes, easy to insert equations, images, video.
I think this is hugely important - the smoother and easier it is to do, the more relaxed people are and more they can think about their answers rather than focused on solving frustrations with the UI. This is a result of multiple little things hardly anyone notices - you need attention to detail for a good UI.
(I think this may one of the major issues with wikipedia also - the editing UI is about ten or even twenty years out of date compared with what people expect nowadays, nobody expects to have to write what to many feels like "code" just to edit text.
Yahoo Answers not so bad as wikipedia, but kind of 5 years out of date, not as easy as Facebook or Quora) - Easy to comment on each other's answers - and those comments don't distract from the answers and can form a threaded easy to navigate discussion.
- Lots of admin work going on - merging of similar questions, rewriting of badly formatted or mangled English questions
- Others can suggest edits of your answers.
- Easy to share your answer, and you can share it on a separate page just for your own answer, with a link at top of the page to the other answers.
- Your answer just looks more professionally set out - result of better web design
- Easy to write really long answers if the subject permits it. Not sure if it still does - but used to be a maximum length on a yahoo answer.
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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