
Stack Overflow Launches - bdfh42
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/09/15.html
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mattchew
I am excited to see how this works as social software.

I hate "karma" systems in discussion forums. As soon as you introduce karma
points, your forum is now dual purposed, part for the original intent (say,
discussing Hacker News) and part for playing the karma game.

I accept that karma points are at least a known working solution to spammers
and trolls. But if it wasn't for that, I'd much rather read a conversation
without the built in popularity contest.

At stackoverflow, they've turned that all on its head. When I read the
reputation rules (see the unofficial FAQ) I thought, "this is _all_ karma
game". And then I thought a little more and realized that for the purpose of
the site, that might work perfectly. If the guy with the question is the one
who hands out the karma, the incentives of the guy and the karma gamer are
nicely aligned. Very clever.

I saw someone talking about the closed beta, and he described it as "fun".
Well, that sounded strange, but now I believe it. Jeff and Joel turned karma
gaming into an actual game, with the incidental effect of generating good
answers to technical questions.

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tdavis
Already annoyed by it and all it took was some random clicking around:
<http://is.gd/2EPh>

Apparently the "right" answer to this language-agnostic question is one that
provides a single Ruby (surprise) alternative. Since when do opinions have
correct answers?

I would love to see great things from Stack Overflow, but I would be surprised
if it turns out to provide better answers than can be found by googling and
reading mailing list archives -- or at least better answers that are
consistently marked as such (or not marked at all, depending on the
situation). Introducing voting doesn't magically mean the "good" stuff floats
to the top.

Edit: Oh, and people are already "trolling for reputation" as evidenced by a
single question having 10 of the same exact answer. I thought this is what
voting was going to "solve?" _sigh_

~~~
omouse
That answer is wrong too because Beautiful Soup also exists for Ruby:
<http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/>

~~~
philf
If you read the Rubyful Soup web site you would've noticed that it's
unmaintained and the author recommends hpricot.

~~~
omouse
Unmaintained doesn't mean the library is bad.

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tlrobinson
I'm not sure I'll be a regular user of Stack Overflow, but I do hope they
replace Experts Exchange as the top search hits for all my random programming
questions.

~~~
kalid
Agreed. Tip for experts exchange: just scroll to the very bottom of the page.
The answers appear in plain text.

(The hard way is to change your user-agent to a search crawler... they need to
display the text to _somebody_ ).

~~~
andreyf
_The hard way is to change your user-agent to a search crawler_

Google would delist them if they did that. Google indexes the text on the
bottom of the page, the rest of the page is images.

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subbu
I don't know why some users are saying the design is not good. I found it to
be pretty neat and clutter less. It doesn't come in the way.

~~~
bmj
I don't find it terrible, but I think the question text on the main page could
be larger than the Votes/Answers information. I mean, isn't the _question_
more important the number of votes or answers? I'm not scanning the home page
for the question with the most votes or answers.

~~~
silentbicycle
Or, from another angle:

What kind of effect will making the number of votes, answers, and views more
prominent than the question have on the site? Will it encourage gaming the
system / posting for points rather than to be helpful?

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michael_dorfman
I was amused by the contrast between (on the one hand) Joel's long list of
instructions and "how-to" hints in his blog post, and (on the other hand) the
seeming absence of instructions/guidance on the site itself. (The guidance is
actually there if you dig around far enough, but it sure doesn't look that way
to a casual user.)

I also find it interesting that you apparently need 15 reputation points
before you can upvote, which means you have to successfully answer one or more
questions. In practice, this means that a drive-by/first-time user can't use
their expertise to choose the best answer among the existing set, but have to
chime in with a (most likely redundant) answer first, which seems counter-
productive.

~~~
kylec
The threshold is to prevent bots from upvoting stuff. It requires a minimal
amount of participation that can easily be achieved by a simple answer or
question.

~~~
wensing
This is a bit of a meta comment, but I find this sort of response to feedback
to be counterproductive. Don't defend/justify the way the system works or why
it works the way it does. Read between the lines and find a way to satisfy the
customer.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_Don't defend/justify the way the system works or why it works the way it
does. Read between the lines and find a way to satisfy the customer._

That might be good advice if the customer contacts you one-on-one. But when
the customer posts their complaint to a message board that's read by thousands
of third parties, it's helpful to put up an explanation of why the system was
designed the way it was. Otherwise I, who have never used the service and am
just skimming this thread, might come away with the wrong impression.

It's important to avoid getting into a flamewar with your customers, but
pointing out the rationale behind your design decisions isn't necessarily
offensive. Yes, it's not what the complainer really wants to see, but it _is_
what I, the silent reader of the thread, want to see. And people like me
outnumber the original complainer _N_ to 1.

~~~
wensing
You might outnumber them, but you may be less vital. A person that takes the
time to write is a potential evangelist.

And you'd better be pretty confident about 'N'. Threads like this and readers
like yourself may provide a short term boost or bust, but communicative
visitors can broadcast the message off-line for months to come.

I think you'd agree that we should aim higher (much, much higher), than just
avoiding getting into a flame war.

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tialys
Ugh... I know it's a site for programmers, but would it have broken the budget
to hire a designer? I can't tell what anything is at first glance and it all
looks jumbled to me.

~~~
jrockway
Your dislike of the design does not necessarily mean that a designer was not
consulted.

~~~
tel
Feels like it does mean the designer did not do a good job since I'm sure much
of the YC crowd is more or less the core audience for Stack Overflow.

~~~
jrockway
Are you sure about that? I haven't asked a programming question (in public)
for a number of years. I am too lazy to sit and wait for someone to tell me
how to solve my problem when I could discover the solution on my own.

I assume that most people here are like that. (Otherwise they would be on
Reddit instead ;)

~~~
d0mine
You could ask question and answer it yourself.

 _It's also perfectly fine to ask and answer your own programming question,
but pretend you're on Jeopardy: phrase it in the form of a question._ </quote>
<http://stackoverflow.com/faq>

If (if) you don't want to share you knowledge for the benefit of fellow
programmers then that's another question.

~~~
jrockway
_If (if) you don't want to share you knowledge for the benefit of fellow
programmers then that's another question._

I share my knowledge for the benefit of fellow programmers at the 10 or so
conferences I go to a year, and on my ad-free blog.

------
tzury
As a consumer, I will keep asking Google all my questions. If they will appear
at the top 5, they might get a visit.

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axod
Sure seems to be quite a lot of microsoft/windows/.net there right now.

~~~
StrawberryFrog
Yup. The reason for this is that the site usage has been ramped up with
private invites etc. The makers are well-known.net pundits, so the people that
have been following thier activity and signing up are too.

Now they're ready to let the general public in, so if you want your favourite
environment/tool/language represented, get on in there. If you don't want to
get in there, stop complaining.

~~~
axod
It was just an observation, not a complaint :)

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coglethorpe
Sure, my search results for answers to programming questions have turned up
dubious results from time to time, but usually my answer is on the first page.
Occasionally I'll have to refine my query and find the answer on my second
attempt. With that in mind, I'm not sure how much better this new site is
going to be.

~~~
baha_man
'...usually my answer is on the first page'

The founders intend that eventually the answer you're looking for will show up
as a stackoverflow.com question in the first page of Google results. They get
more advertising revenue, the purported benefits to their users are:

* You don't have to pay or even register to use the site (unlike Experts Exchange).

* If an answer goes out of date (e.g. it only applies to the beta version) it can be updated.

* You can always add your own comments (not all blogs allow comments).

* If you manage to solve some tricky problem yourself, you can easily publish the information to help others (not everyone has their own blog).

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jobeirne
I was under the impression that most people understood pure democracy is
doomed from the start. Guess not.

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jrockway
Add .NET to the list of languages whose libraries don't work with my OpenID.
(So far, only the Perl libraries seem to support delegation. Considering how
widely-documented delegation is, this really surprises me. It's a conspiracy,
I tell ya.)

~~~
bct
It's got no problem with my OpenID, which is delegated
<[http://necronomicorp.com/bct>](http://necronomicorp.com/bct>).

~~~
jrockway
Very interesting. I ( <http://jrock.us> ) seem to have an X-XRDS-Location
http-equiv header, whereas you don't. I'm not sure why extra information would
prevent it from working with some sites (and not others).

I will investigate... thanks for the info.

------
halo
I had a quick play with the design using Greasemonkey, and I think it's much
more readable by increasing the page-width and standardising the font-sizes.
The script is a little slow but shows that with only a bit of work the site's
design could be improved dramatically. I'd have liked to expand the banner at
the top, but sadly it's a table so a pain to work with.

Screenshot:
[http://img391.imageshack.us/my.php?image=stackunderflower9.p...](http://img391.imageshack.us/my.php?image=stackunderflower9.png)

Link to script: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33804>

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calvin
Somehow tags don't seem to be the best way to organize this type of question
asking and information gathering. They're certainly helpful for searching and
gathering semantic data, but I'd find it much more useful to see the site have
"sections" for different programming languages a la C++, Perl, PHP, Python,
Ruby, etc.

~~~
kaens
In this specific case, the tagging works out a lot like "sections" anyhow - I
do believe that most of the questions are language-specific, and that if you
go browse the tags, most of the ones with a lot of questions are language
tags.

The tags-as-sections thing breaks down when you get a little more abstract
than "x language", as the tags used will be ambiguous (people _can_ retag
stuff though, so that's something of a moderation system).

~~~
calvin
The difficulty comes in having to browse through the hundred popular tags to
find one specific language tag where you want to ask a question or provide
help to people.

Granted, it's not that hard to do, but it's not optimal from a usability
perspective.

For instance, PHP wasn't listed in the popular tags even though it's one of
the top ten most popular programming languages (<http://www.langpop.com/>). To
find this tag, I had to click Tags, search for PHP, and click PHP.

~~~
kaens
That is true, although for asking questions you can just tag it as the
language.

Php probably wasn't listed in the popular tags due partially to the
windows/.NET tendency of the site, and the tendency of the people
participating in the beta to be the type that doesn't like php.

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acesamped
I like how you took an idea that was semi-out there, molded it, made it free,
and tossed it out there. genius. I think the best thing you guys did with
stack overflow was to give the community so much potential power. bravo.

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liuliu
Voting is good. for most part, people are just to lazy to give a
comment(me,too!). So, web 2.0 sites developed such voting and poking things to
get us out of typing.

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subbu
I wish there was another feature. Store my favorite q/a threads within my
profile. Delicious doesn't cut for these kind of bookmarks.

