

Ask HN: Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields? - erictobia

I tried asking this question on the actual site, but it was closed as "non-programming-related" fairly quickly.<p>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/674232/could-stackoverflow-work-for-other-fields-closed<p>Unfortunately, I'm still curious to hear what people think. Here is my original question:<p>"Pick the specialty: medicine, law, science, finance, cars, home improvement...any field that has specialized 'domain knowledge'.<p>Could someone build a successful forum, like SO, for other areas of expertise? Is there something different about programming that makes this site work exceptionally well?"
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brandnewlow
Are you famous in your field? No? Then it won't work.

HN works because PG is here. Reddit worked because PG was there to help it
start.

Digg works because Kevin Rose is there.

StackOverflow works because Joel and Jeff are there.

Unless you've got a large audience to toss at the project on day one, expect a
long, hard slog.

~~~
transburgh
Was Kevin Rose known (on a PG level) before Digg??

I would say no.

~~~
falsestprophet
He sheepishly reviewed his company on the geek-dense Screensavers program on
TechTv (now Attack of the Show, I think, on G4).

~~~
Radix
I miss Screensavers from the ZDTV era. Tech was ok, G4 is unwatchable.

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hcho
The amount of time spent in front of a computer with an internet connection in
a working day would be the key to success of such a site.

It would probably have higher traction among, say, graphical designers than
medical staff.

~~~
walesmd
I could definitely see this paying off for the design community, help desk
technicians or CS students (their numbers are one the rise).

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sachinag
<http://www.sermo.com> does this for docs - docs talk to other docs, and
pharma companies and hedge funds pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to
eavesdrop and seed specific questions they want answered. (The sign-in page
restricts randoms to MDs and DOs to register.) It's a brilliant business
model.

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rguzman
Something like SO could work in other fields. But, the devil is in the details
of the moderation and incentive schemes. The features of the site matter, but
not nearly as much as the community. So, it is more of an anthropology and
sociology problem than a build-a-webapp one.

For law and medicine, for instance, you'd have to fight the mindset of "online
is not reliable". In programming it is fairly easy to check if someone's
answer is trustworthy because you can go and test it yourself relatively
quickly and unambiguously. In other fields establishing the credibility of
someone answering a question is a lot more tricky. That said, I think bar
associations have (bad) sites to ask each other questions.

I agree with Jeff that you can't make a general site of this sort without an
intense amount of moderation. (he said so in a recent SO podcast)

In short, it all comes down to the community. And it is probably hard to
figure out what incentives and moderation to have for a given community if you
are not a part of it yourself.

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vaksel
I think it'll work for other fields but not as well as programming.

Programming gets you a much higher volume of traffic. The same programmer,
might come to your site 100 times during the week to find solutions to the
different problems. Its also a field where you have a lot of amateurs and
students looking for solutions.

The other fields you mention under specialty, are all the "oh shit my car
broke down what could it be?" type. Its a one time problem, after which the
person won't come back for 2 years. So you'll never see the same growth as SO,
because you don't have any repeat users.

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timcederman
I had thought so. On closer inspection though, it's unlikely.

Why? Have a look at reference sites online. There were plenty of sites like
experts-exchange before StackOverflow, and if you trawl Google Groups, you'll
see a similar thing. Plenty of people asking technical questions, not so much
anything else.

Certainly, you don't see medical students out there asking the best way to
diagnose a rare disease.

There is one exception though -- Travel sites. Travel questions and forums are
pretty big, and I think a Q&A site for that could be enormous.

Meanwhile Yahoo Answers, AskMeFi, etc continue to fill the gaps for other
niches that might actually work.

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sgrove
I think so.

In fact, I believe it so much, that's my startup: <http://www.chuwe.com> \-
"Stackoverflow for startups and small businesses."

As brandnewlow pointed out, starting it is a massive uphill battle - chicken
and egg problem as it were. The software's only small part. We're attacking it
in what we hope is a novel way, but you would have to find an approach unique
to the area you were targeting, I imagine.

If you're interested, I've been planning on open-sourcing chuwe in a bit after
we make it a bit more robust. Contact me and we can work out something if
you'd like to just take the software and modify it to your own niche!

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RossM
I think so. I have a concept I'm working on that's more a request forum than a
Q&A board but I'm borrowing a few things StackOverflow has implemented well
(nothing unique - mainly the simple wiki revisions).

Something else to consider are the 'game' factors. StackOverflow implemented
badges and they work well initially (and teach the user how to use the site).
At the end of the day the things that tie you into a site are the things that
make you want to keep going at it. On most discussion boards it's
reputation/karma but little things like badges and medals help too.

Obviously it depends on whether the field needs/can have a question and answer
platform, but I can see this discussion model working for most technical areas
of knowledge.

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KevBurnsJr
as a site? sure.

as a business? hard to tell.

Yahoo Answers holds the potential to encompass every use case for
StackOverflow and all your offshoots. However, I sincerely believe that the
added context that a site like StackOverflow provides (being that it's curated
specifically toward programmers) does provide real value. That sort of context
injection could certainly be carried over to other verticals (provided the
sites can attract seed contributors and curators).

~~~
sgrove
I agree, but monetization's always difficult.

The trick is finding a niche that you're interested in, can serve well with
the site's format, and _has money_.

If you find that niche and you approach it in a novel way, then you can
(likely) serve it infinitely better than a general questions and answers site
like mahalo/yahoo answers.

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DnB
A large part of the problem and solution relies on the field we're talking
about. There are law forums, but unfortunately, the law is incredibly specific
and varies wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There would have to be a
LawOverflow for every county. Medicine is incredibly situational as well, and
that doesn't include the doctor patient confidentiality clause, which means
the doctor needs permissions even to ask general questions. Now, if you were
talking about students, then the style still wouldn't work, because the
answers are in the textbooks, not in other people. Cars and home improvements
have the best chance, but as was mentioned, The people answering the questions
have to be spending a lot of time at the computer, rather than spending their
doing work on cars, or doing construction work on a house.

The reason StackOverflow works is that computers work based on their code, and
so a certain compiler will interpret C# code in a certain predictable way, so
the people answering the questions don't have to be anywhere near you. And
they are able to answer in a relevant way. The same is not true for other
fields.

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bbgm
Perhaps. The advantage with programming is that there is a lot of general
knowledge that goes beyond languages, etc and even at the language level you
have sufficient number of people with general interest. Where you can
replicate that it should work. In the sciences I am not so sure. You tend to
get too specific and there isn't a general enough dialogue you can have in
most communities.

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chanux
Get HN code & build your own doctorsnews, autonews etc. :) or may be add
categories to HN system.

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igorgue
Is computer-related but I read @codinghorror tweets about a SO for sysadmins.

I just imagined a SO for the medicine field, I'll read it everyday!, imagine a
doctor asking for help to another doctor?, and not only that, a doctor asking
for feedback on a research... wow

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madcaptenor
Mathematics, perhaps?

