Q is better at "soft" knowledge - psychology, personal history, experience, opinion.
SE is better for "hard" knowledge - clearly-defined problems with specific solutions.
Having said that, I find SE very, very frustrating.
Given any problem, the answers invariably seem to include multiple takes with distracting or irrelevant side points; show-boating comments, often nit-picky, about very minor issues; just plain wrong answers that have been massively upvoted; no account of chronology - later answers always have fewer votes than older answers, even if they're better solutions; moderator show-boating with questions closed for no good reason (e.g. when dupes aren't really dupes.)
SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content.
I enjoy my Quora feed, but I treat it more as entertainment. I wouldn't use it for anything mission critical. I actually agree with Q and not the WB comments - comments about private experiences or opinions are the property of the authors, not communal property, and authors should have the right to withdraw them.
Also - FB isn't archived either. Do the WB people have the same negative attitude to FB groups?
As for SE - sometimes I try to use SE for mission critical problems. Usually I get a few hints from the answers, then end up having to solve the problem independently.
Yes my biggest pet peeve with Stack Overflow specifically is that instead of an answer to the question, you'll often see a lecture about how the poster is doing it wrong. Usually this is because the responder didn't actually read the question and is trying to get their internet points in before someone else answers it.
It's not a bad idea to outline a different approach, but it's almost always better to first answer the question and then add your opinion afterwards. I've even seen questions where they poster will state "I'm not doing it the accepted way because..." and still see useless responses saying "You should do it this conventional way instead" etc.
I think this is just a negative of having a points reward system that encourages answer sniping. However, without a points system you'd see far less content. I've accepted it as a necessary evil, and overall I'm pretty happy with the quality of SO content once you learn to filter out the nonsense.
I'm sympathetic to some of your complaints about SE, but I think this is a mistake:
> SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content.
You can see the effect of this approach in many cases where the community has tried to establish a "canonical" Q&A about some recurring topic, and it's frequently not pretty; every tangentially relevant detail that somebody thought to tell the world about gets edited in, and then never gets edited out. Unless somebody is willing to purge lots of users' contributions entirely (which they generally aren't), this one great beast of an answer just continues to grow and grow in scope, gradually losing any sort of coherent narrative or direct relevance to the question.
The failed Stack Overflow Documentation project failed in a similar way. Wikipedia articles about programming topics also seem to me to generally be tedious, confusing and riddled with inaccuracies.
The competition-based model that SE uses certainly has failure modes, but a more collaboration-based model also has failure modes - ones that I think are more serious and crippling.
Agreed I have seen many SO answers in areas where I have expertise where wordy waffly feel good answers - that don't actually answer the question asked get preferred of short and to the point 3 or 4 line answers.
There is also to much vote whoreing going on with people chipping in with non relevant answers. I wish I had a pound for every employment answer that mentions "right to work" when its not an American employment question.
Q is better at "soft" knowledge - psychology, personal history, experience, opinion.
SE is better for "hard" knowledge - clearly-defined problems with specific solutions.
Having said that, I find SE very, very frustrating.
Given any problem, the answers invariably seem to include multiple takes with distracting or irrelevant side points; show-boating comments, often nit-picky, about very minor issues; just plain wrong answers that have been massively upvoted; no account of chronology - later answers always have fewer votes than older answers, even if they're better solutions; moderator show-boating with questions closed for no good reason (e.g. when dupes aren't really dupes.)
SE's problem is that accretion wins over refinement. IMO it should have been more like a Wiki, with a much clearer distinction between content - i.e. stock answers, with comments - and debate about content.
I enjoy my Quora feed, but I treat it more as entertainment. I wouldn't use it for anything mission critical. I actually agree with Q and not the WB comments - comments about private experiences or opinions are the property of the authors, not communal property, and authors should have the right to withdraw them.
Also - FB isn't archived either. Do the WB people have the same negative attitude to FB groups?
As for SE - sometimes I try to use SE for mission critical problems. Usually I get a few hints from the answers, then end up having to solve the problem independently.