When comparing Slant.co vs Yahoo! Answers, the Slant community recommends Slant.co for most people. In the question“What are the best Q&A websites for subjective questions?” Slant.co is ranked 1st while Yahoo! Answers is ranked 35th. The most important reason people chose Slant.co is:
When upvoting existing answers, you can associate the pros and cons which influenced your choice of chosen answer(s).
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Pro/con association
When upvoting existing answers, you can associate the pros and cons which influenced your choice of chosen answer(s).
Pro Community rated answers
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.
Pro Pros and cons vs users' answers
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.
Pro See all answers clearly
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.
Pro Designed for subjective questions
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.
Pro Multiple chosen answers
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.
Pro Public visibility
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.
Pro Continuously updated for relevance
Since recommendations and pros / cons can be updated by community members, content evolves to reflect modern standards.
Pro Subject matter: programming tools, services, & technology
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).
Pro Allows Google independent rating for Android apps
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".
Pro Pros and Cons don't travel from question to question
If you see a new question and choose to add an option already recommended in another question, you need to add all pros and cons from scratch.
Pro The questions and answers are concise
I can quickly know the advantages and disadvantages of every tool/app/software/game etc and decide which one fits me best.
Pro Unbiased information you can trust
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).
Pro Subjective claims have to be backed up with evidence
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.
Cons
Con Has strange ads
Drug and gambling ads are a huge turnoff.
Con Primarily for comparing products
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.
Con Fake and dated ratings
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.
Con Video ADs
They are annoying and traffic consuming.
Con Needs improvements to avoid redundancy
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.
Con Can be quite biased
For example, this one here: https://www.slant.co/topics/1196/~q-a-websites-for-subjective-questions
Con Requires javascript
Unusable without JS.
Con Maturity
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.
Con Behind Cloudflare
Slant is behind the Cloudflare MiTM.
Con Broken rating system
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".
Con Slow response
Updates uppear very slowly.
Con Closed (mostly) - only an unaffiliated Japanese version remains online
Con Very low quality of answers
Highly unreliable answers - often the answer doesn't even properly address the question.
Con Yahoo! account required
Both asking and answering questions require a Yahoo! account.
Con Single answer picked randomly as "Best answer"
The window to answer question - and to rate answers - is very short, the website will just close the question and designate a "best answer'" randomly.