
StackOverflow launches chat - spolsky
http://chat.stackoverflow.com
======
telemachos
I think SO chat could be to irc as SO itself is to Usenet or Usenet-style mail
lists. When I first started programming, I asked questions on mail lists. I
learned a ton this way (perl-beginners was especially good), but some lists
had a _lot_ of rules and some very, very type-A regulars: no top posting, give
exact error messages, read the FAQ first, etc. None of these rules were
necessarily unreasonable or unfair, but there was an inordinate amount of time
spent telling new folks all the rules they were breaking: "The boilerplate
disclaimer at the bottom of your email is longer than four lines. Signatures
and bottom matter may only be four lines or less. Do not write to this list
again until you...." Irc in my experience can be similar (just a few weeks
ago, I had someone barking one-word commands at me on irc, because I was
asking a question incorrectly).

By contrast, SO is relatively frictionless. There is some fussing about tags
and which site to ask on, but for the most part, you ask and you get an
answer. Less rules. I suspect that SO chat could be similarly frictionless, in
comparison to irc.

~~~
points
FWIW, It's easy to come to this conclusion about any 'new' 'fresh' 'empty'
medium.

The reason people bark one word commands on IRC, and often treat n00bs with
contempt is just that IRC is so damn big and busy. Millions of people use it
daily. Millions of questions/answers/conversations flow through it daily. But,
it's still the best (IMHO) way to get instant contact with geniuses, and
instant answers to your questions. Tech giants hang out on IRC and you can
immediately (And without having to signup or get reputation points) chat with
them.

So 'SO chat' _could_ be a great medium to get answers.... until it gets big.

~~~
javanix
I concur. The userbase of IRC and StackOverflow is going to be fairly similar,
I'd imagine.

------
alextgordon
_You must have 20 reputation on Stack Overflow to talk here._

I guess I'll be sticking to IRC.

~~~
Simucal
I think that minimal barrier to entry is a good idea. Because chatting is
associated with SO accounts and there a minimum rep requirement (albeit a very
small one), it will be much easier to keep spammers out of the chat.

~~~
alextgordon
But I'm not a spammer!

I don't doubt it's effectiveness at keeping spammers out. But when building a
spam filter you also have to keep in mind the false positive rate. By
excluding _anyone_ who don't have the time or inclination to spend time
grinding for rep on SO, they're excluding a great deal of knowledgable people.

~~~
chc
You can get 20 rep by asking or answering a single — literally, one — half-
decent question. My last answer (a few days ago, so I'm not exactly grinding)
netted me 90 rep. Alan Kay has 2,429 rep from one answer and one question.

I would estimate that there's a vanishingly small number of people who are
completely unhelpful in Q&A but would be fabulously knowledgeable in chat. I
mean, there's you, but I just don't suppose there are that many others. If it
keeps out every spammer and blocks three people who would legitimately be
helpful, that's probably the best filter ever.

~~~
davidw
So if you're new and want to use this chat you have to:

* Log in.

* Find a question that you can answer, or post one.

* Wait and hope you get some points.

In the same amount of time you could have already hopped on IRC and received
an answer.

~~~
chc
I think you're not considering the possibility that this chat is specifically
for the Stack Overflow community, not for people who have no interest
whatsoever in Stack Overflow. Your complaint is like saying, "HN wants me to
register to comment? Screw that noise, I'll just hop on IRC and comment
there!" You're perfectly welcome to do that — but you still have to register
to comment on HN. Different communities have different and often somewhat
arbitrary standards.

~~~
davidw
It seems pretty good as far as things like this go, and I'm sure it'll do ok,
but a big part of anything like this is network effects: people go where other
people are.

My guess is that SO is currently big enough to attract viable communities for
several of these "channels", but that many others will end up as ghost towns,
and that, overall, IRC will continue to be 'bigger' for real time chat. It's
probably a big enough space that this can be successful in its own right, even
if it's not huge, although I think I will tend to prefer IRC.

Also, signing up for HN is way faster than having to ask/answer a question.

------
bena
What I find funny is how in the beginning Jeff Atwood resisted all of these
"social" features like discussion sites and official chat channels because it
was all about asking and answering questions. And he wanted to build a
community around that. What he didn't realize is that a community is defined
by those "social" features. Experts Exchange doesn't have a community because
they don't foster the social aspect of the experience.

At least Jeff realizes that to build a community, you need to let the
community engage itself and has eased up on his "no social features" stance.

~~~
nerfhammer
Still needs direct messages. When someone wants to message me apropos of
nothing they do so by commenting on an answer of mine chosen at random.

~~~
mistermann
Exactly. And they also need the dreaded discussion FORUMS....for some topics,
they are appropriate.

------
chrisbroadfoot
The animations are insufferable. Why does _everything_ have to fade and squish
and move?

~~~
tickle_me_elmo
Not everything squishes.

~~~
chrisbroadfoot
Okay, but if it doesn't squish, it probably flies around the page :)

------
jonpaul
This is kind of cool. My major concern is that everyone would be quick to go
to chat and ask the question instead of posting a question. I mean, we all
want instant gratification, so why wouldn't we use chat?

~~~
telemachos
There may be some loss in the questions column, but probably not so much. As
it is, irc exists and so does SO (and obviously there are other ways to get
help beyond those two).

I still use both irc and SO, but for different things. I tend to go to SO if I
have a specific question, but it's relatively contained, concrete and non-
trivial. If I have a smaller question and Google fails me, I'll pop into irc
and try there. If the question is larger (needs more setup to ask, for
example), I go to SO first. At the same time, if the question is _very_ open-
ended I go to irc, since I find SO can somewhat unwelcoming towards open-
ended, vaguer questions. (As an example of that, I'm working on a cli grading
program in Ruby, and I'm having a hard time deciding the big questions: what
goes where, which things are classes, how to store, extract and calculate the
data. I spent about half an hour last weekend in irc with some random stranger
who was kind enough to bounce ideas around. irc can also sometimes suck for
vague questions, but sometimes it works.)

~~~
flatline
Good point, I still see a ton of questions on SO like, "How do I add two
numbers in teh PHP?", which seem to get both upvoted and replied to a lot
because hey it's easy karma. Chat is the perfect place for this kind of stuff,
because a) most new programmers I would hazard don't know about IRC, b) you
can help clarify a poorly or sparsely worded question quickly in chat and c)
it will hopefully decrease the dross on the front page.

~~~
allenp
And another nice thing is that if you're in chat and a question is just too
big or too detailed (or you just don't want to deal with it) you can always
just tell the person "go post this question."

I think this would reduce a lot of the drive-by chat noise.

------
davidw
How is this better than IRC?

~~~
spolsky
I haven't used IRC in years, so it may have changed, but the big wins:

* Stateful server. When you enter a room, you immediately see the conversation that has been going on there. That means it's possible to have conversations that are long-spanning (more like email) because you don't necessarily have to see replies scrolling by

* Integration with Stack Overflow accounts and reputation. Bad behavior is almost completely eliminated thanks to the tie in to the reputation system (you need some rep on Stack Overflow to chat, for example)

* Super slick user interface. You have to see it to believe it. Try it for a while and see.

~~~
davidw
FWIW, the guy behind mibbit.com has a partial solution to the 'stateful
server' problem for IRC. In some ways though it's not a problem: it keeps
things more informal. I think the ideal thing might be to get a little bit of
history when you join.

The reputation thing is both a positive and a negative. It's going to be a
barrier to entry for some people - both good apples and bad. Hard to know the
ratio...

The interface is nice, but I like my IRC client too.

------
karmawhore
With few exceptions, the midrange karma scored ServerFault users eschew more
misinformation or guesswork than fact. One poster necroed a thread that was 13
months old and posted information that hasn't been true since the early days
of Mysql 4.x. I debated whether it was worth correcting the post.

The barrier to entry should be karma < 50 or karma > 9000\. Oddly,
StackOverflow's userbase is considerably more accurate, but, the median range
karma scored user generally has been upvoted and given points that don't
correspond to skill or knowledge, but, answers posted by those higher karma
users, correct or not are valued more highly.

Once someone figures out how to get people to answer accurately without having
to receive the +1 carrot, then you'll have a community worth contributing to.
Right now, all you need to do on SF/SO is answer first, answer often and use
technical jargon.

------
chanux
Will be great once <http://github.com/ghewgill/soirc> is complete.

------
csallen
Very cool, I'm tempted to lurk in one of these rooms all day.

It'd be very cool if the chat rooms also displayed an auto-updating list of
related questions to the side. For example, if you're sitting in the Ruby room
and someone posts a question to StackOverflow with the `ruby` tag, a link to
the question would appear in in this list.

Another cool idea would be a way for people to turn their chat questions into
real questions on StackOverflow. Obviously copying and pasting works just
fine, but I think a built-in feature could improve upon it. And it might be a
way to give people reputation for helping others via chat.

~~~
jefffoster
The creator of the room can set various feeds which show up as comments in the
room. You can do exactly the thing you describe by clicking the Ruby tag,
grabbing the RSS feed and selecting it as a feed for the room.

------
tlrobinson
An IRC bridge would be nice, since all my other dev chat rooms are on IRC.

------
twymer
Certainly a cool idea, but doesn't this distract from people posting new
questions on the site?

~~~
spolsky
And that is bad why... ? :-)

Actually there is a major class of problems people have where they are so
stuck that they don't even know what question to ask on Stack Overflow. Being
able to ask a question live, and get immediate feedback, and have a quick
conversation with someone more knowledgeable than yourself, before (or instead
of) asking a question on Stack Overflow, will allow programmers to get help
with a whole new class of problems.

And of course, that's in addition to the "social hang out" feature that chat
provides to the Stack Overflow community.

~~~
smokinn
Well it's "bad" because you lose easily findable history.

One of the big things StackOverflow has going for it is permanence. Someone
asks a question, gets an answer and then google indexes it for the next person
who has the same problem.

With the chat it will fix the problem for 1 person but the scalability of
investing your time into an answer that could potentially help a lot of people
over time is lost. Even if google indexes all of the chat conversations
reading through a chat transcript looking for the answer is tedious.

~~~
codinghorror
right, but since no reputation is ever gained from chat (you can only lose
rep, in extreme cases) we don't think this will be a problem in practice.
There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat.

~~~
AgentConundrum
_There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat._

Yes, there is. In fact, it's the same basic incentive that people have to
answer questions on StackOverflow: to help people. The reputation system is a
nice plus, but I'd hardly call it a deal breaker for it to be missing.

In order to accept your premise, you would have to agree that there is a
certain class of answerer who, when presented with a question in chat, would
think to themselves "gee, I think I know how to help this guy, but I'd really
rather not help him since I'm not getting quasi-meaningless points on a
website".

You've always said that the primary audience for StackOverflow is Google. The
premise being that the site will accumulate a collection of good answers to
common (and some uncommon) questions, so that the _second_ person to ask that
question won't have to. The impermanence of the chat system defeats this
premise utterly.

It's also odd to see you responding negatively to a comment (i.e. negatively
towards questions in chat, not the commenter) when that comment was in
response to Joel himself saying chat is the best medium to ask certain classes
of problems.

------
simplegeek
Awesome, I'm just curious as to what technology and tools did you use to
implement this? Anyone has any idea?

~~~
spolsky
All new, shiny, custom code, built on the Microsoft platform. I'm sure a
detailed blog post will follow.

~~~
dugmartin
Very well done Mr. Spolsky. I've heard Jeff say in podcasts that he doesn't
like threaded comments but without something like that to connect posts busy
rooms become unreadable.

What about a hybrid where you can click on a question to respond and your
response is still added at the bottom but when anyone hovers over the response
a line shows up connecting the response to the question?

~~~
spolsky
It already does that.

~~~
dugmartin
Insert oops reply here.

------
ankimal
The best way to use it would be to ask a question, and paste the link to the
question in the relevant chat room. You dont "have to" paste the link as it
shows up part of feeds in the chat room anyway(if you tagged the question
correctly), but pasting the link and talking about it would probably get you a
quicker response.

------
chrisbroadfoot
The UI feels clunky and it doesn't feel like Stack Overflow.

Did the same people really design {chat.,}stackoverflow?!

~~~
gecko
I assume you're being somewhat facetious, but the answer is a definitive yes.
The team had previously used Campfire, but felt it had a lot of UI issues, and
attempted to solve them with chat. I don't know for sure whether they intended
chat to be for all of SO from the beginning, but it's been a big effort by
their team for awhile.

------
swilliams
I'm completely in the dark about the development, but the UI looks a LOT like
37signals' Campfire app (<http://campfirenow.com>). Was this intentional or a
coincidence?

~~~
johns
Intentional: [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/48249/web-based-
irc-...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/48249/web-based-irc-for-the-
trilogy)

------
simonsarris
Neat!

I like this idea a lot. Instead of just hounding the Canvas tag to
(reactively) teach and learn, users like me can now (proactively) discuss the
HTML5 Canvas.

I can also get real-time feedback on what people want as far as new tutorials
go.

------
estel
I seem to just be getting 503'd. Is that my firewall, or has the collective
weight of, uhh... HN bought it down?

------
Omnipresent
Looks a lot like campfire from 37Signals

