Unlike a number of other Q&A sites where the person asking the question picks the winning answer, Slant accepts that they're asking because they don't know the answer, so they allow everyone in the community to pitch in by upvoting the best answer.
Most Q&A sites give each user the chance to give an answer (sometimes multiple answers). A lot of the content of each user's answers will overlap, resulting in duplication of information (thus more to read), or information being lost in noise (e.g. if someone sees existing answers and adds a missing point without copying existing information, their point will likely languish at the bottom of the list of answers as it did not answer the majority of the question).
Slant approaches this differently; rather than focusing on the users, it focuses on the points; Pros and Cons. Any user may amend the information in a pro/con, may vote based on how much that pro/con influenced their decision, and may add their own pros and cons if certain points are missing from the canon.
An enumeration of recommendations is easily viewed as a list, making it a good starting point for researching available options. This is the opposite of other sites in which multiple choices may be listed within a single answer, with the need for the user to read through paragraphs of information to pick out the key articles.
Slant.co's reason for being is to answer subjective questions. It was born with the knowledge that other sites existed to handle objective questions and answers, but they made no attempt to handle the intricacies of subjective answers. Slant.co is the only site focused on solving this specific area.
Subjective questions may have more than one answer. Slant allows people to vote for more than one answer as being correct, and to append the pros and cons which influenced their decision to their vote; thus giving a context of in which situations each answer may be considered correct.
You do not need to have an account to view existing content (questions or answers). People can see what they're getting into before deciding if they'd like to sign up for an account and contribute to the site.
The site is currently dedicated to questions within the technology area.
It is implied that as popularity grows it may open up to questions in other subject areas (ref: use of "Starting with..." on their Twitter profile).
It can be difficult to get user-ratings for Android apps that are not available on the Google Play Store.
So far other sites either indirectly use Google Play Store rankings or some technical writer tells you "which are the best XXX apps for YYY".
Slant isn't financially tied to any products listed on it. All the categories (organized into 'questions'), products (organized as 'options'), and pros/cons are added, and edited by real users - there is no way for a company to pay to have a favorable review (and if they try to do it themselves, the community can report (flag) or edit any false claims).
Slant is a great website for comparing products to each other, but if your question isn't about products, the limits of Slant's format start to show more clearly.
Each subjective statement needs to be backed up with objective information. An opinion has to be backed up with facts. An evidence for a claim on Slant can be provided with examples, sources, and facts.
Some ratings seem fake and many of the top lists seem very outdated listing products years and years old when there are better modern alternatives. Probably paid rankings.
Many questions can lead to the same app.
Example:
https://www.slant.co/topics/4648/~es-file-explorer-alternatives-for-android
https://www.slant.co/topics/1956/~file-explorers-on-android.
If you comment something on "Total Commander", you have to do this in more than one place.
According to this the Slant team is working on this issue.
The site is still young and has yet to build up the large user base required to have users with knowledge of all areas in which questions may be asked.
Developers need to create systems to detect spam votes. At one point Salix was bot voted to the top of "what are the best linux distributions for desktops".
Some sites have been criticised for their use of gamification techniques. Whilst the debate is still open on both sides, Slant has an effective mechanism for rewarding contributions which stands outside of this.
Slant allows you to view a user's profile giving you access to non-debatable facts; they've made this many contributions, asked this many questions, voted on this many topics. You can then drill down into these contributions to view the related details.
Where many of the current remote job boards are specifically for employees looking to apply to positions, reddit is a good place to post "for hire" ads and allow the employers to contact you.
Quora forces people to log in to see content, which severely restricts the usefulness of the site, and limits willingness to write content for the site.
This is why they force people to use their real names instead of getting a user called pooplicker888. You can see if they are professional or amateur (trust me, the amateur people can be more experienced than the professionals).
Many people are most recognisable by screen names which can't be used on Quora. It also is a matter of privacy - some people aren't comfortable having their real name listed on a website for the entire world to see.
Each post is attached to a specific user and each user can only post once in a thread, so it's impossible to rank (there is a communal wiki on each question). The format is best for qualitative responses.
You get credits for writing great questions and answers. This credit can later be used to promote your questions and ask knowledgeable people to answer them.
Wortherendum is based on binary answers - worth it/not worth it. Simple voting is all that is needed in order to answer the question. Textual answers can optionally be used to for more detailed explanations.
The Stack Exchange sites are specifically designed to work for objective questions; questions with subjective answers are explicitly discouraged.
See their blog for more information.
The Stack Exchange sites have a large user base.
Due to this being broken down to sub-sites per topic however some of their sites have more users than others, so depending on the subject matter of the question this pro may not apply.
Whilst sites under the Stack Exchange banner are focussed on specific topics, there are a wide variety of such sites.
As such Stack Exchange could be described as being open to questions on any subject matter, but has the advantage that within its sub-sites, questions are targeted to the specific users/audiences of those sites.
The reward system feels like you're in a popularity contest. While this encourages good answers, it feels like everything is built around the reward system. So much that, you need to have certain points to unlock features on the site.
Users are scored based on their contributions, with the context of those contributions also being scored (i.e. answering a question tagged as being about XML increases that user's XML score). This results in allowing the questioner to gauge a rough idea of the answerer's relative knowledge within a domain when considering their answers vs contradictory answers from other users.
Whilst some information is displayed to non-members, to participate in asking or answering incurs a fee. This is bad for members and non-members alike, as in addition to blocking non-members from using the service, it restricts the pool of users from which answers may be gathered.
Answers are resolved by means of a search engine rather than a community. This means that answers are found through simple search algorithms rather than based on knowledge / researched answers, so you're likely to get a number of false matches.
An example: The site includes a Question of the Day; today's being What makes up 60% of the human Brain?. Clicking Get the Answer gives you a correct answer Sixty percent of the human brain is made up of fat..
However, type (better yet, copy & paste) that exact same question into their own search bar, and you'd be led to believe that the correct answer was water.
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