

Tagmask – a new approach to organizing a programmers’ community - pankratiev
http://tagmask.com/vladimir/posts/10

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citricsquid
"The main feature of Tagmask is that you have the ability to see only the
information that you want to see". Does anyone feel like they want the
opposite, that the value in reddit, HN and others is discovery of new things,
not more information on old?

~~~
merijnv
I think the point is to discover new information, but by restricting the set
to prevent only seeing the lowest common denominator. This is something I've
wished for many times. There are lots of items and people on HN I find
interesting, however there is also a lot of startup group think, Silicon
Valley groupies and blogosphere wars (Hi TechCrunch!), which, frankly I
couldn't care less about and tends to clutter up the front page. The ability
to somewhat restrict new information to people I consider valuable seems
useful to me.

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dhess
I signed up and used a 30-character secure (alpha+symbols) password. The
signup accepted the password, but now I'm unable to sign in, and the password
reset isn't working. Help? My tagmask account name is dhess, and my contact
info is in my profile.

~~~
vietor
Is there a common library that's being used which causes this behavior?

I've encountered it elsewhere, and it's amazingly annoying. Nothing says fun
like having to reset your password 4 times in a row because the website is
silently modifying it.

~~~
dotBen
A common design pattern flaw is only hashing the first x characters of the
password and storing the result during sign up but then hashing the entire
password on log in which results in a miss-match during authentication.

If you use long passwords try removing the last character and seeing if you
can still log in to your favorite website - on many you probably can.

~~~
vietor
Yeah, I'm aware the problem was truncation, it just took me a few tries to
figure it out. My making a typo seemed much more probable than something that
stupid being true.

In practice, what sort of process do you think would cause someone to
implement this mistake? It seems obviously dumb to truncate something that
you're hashing anyway. (To truncate it to something human relevant anyway,
rather than like 512 characters).

That's why I asked if it was in some bugged library, it seems bizarre that the
same totally boneheaded design would be recreated independently. It's not just
that it truncates it, it's that it does it _differently_.

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jkaufman
I signed up and think the concept is great.

With minimal use, the first issue I had was that the tags to the left of the
post (Link, Article, etc.) drew my eye and I found myself only skimming
through those instead of the titles.

Second, clicking on the title of a LINK post takes me to the comment page
where the only way to get to the link itself is the small link button next to
the name. Seems like it should link directly to the article or at least the
comment page should have a summary and/or link that is easier to find.

Looks great overall - keep it up

------
there
_Sites like Hacker News and Reddit provide for their users one or more ‘front
pages’ containing interesting posts that have been up-voted by the community
and are popular at a particular moment in time. However, out of these posts,
the user is unable to configure the topics on which he wants to see posts, and
the themes that he doesn’t want to see._

that is exactly what subreddits on reddit are for. subscribe to the subreddits
you care about, unsubscribe to the ones you don't. your front page will then
be customized to show you stuff you'll want to read.

do many casual reddit readers not know about this?

the only difference here seems to be that a single link can be tagged with
multiple tags, as opposed to reddit categorizing links with one category
(though the same link submitted to multiple subreddits are linked together
through the "other discussions" tab, but discussions are separated).

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jot
In some respects it sounds like you are building a programmer-centric version
of Quora.

Great idea. Would definitely recommend doing some user testing. I found the
Feed 1 and Feed 2 tabs quite confusing, especially as they seem to have
identical content.

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joe_the_user
I would like to try puzzling out why SO has gradually become less useful over
time.

I was really into SO about nine months after it started. It felt both
exciting, functional and useful. I will be honest and say Karma certainly does
and did motivate me. At that time also, I wanted to put together something
like a "resume of answers". If a would-be employer wanted to see both my
philosophy and my skill, they would just have to peruse my questions and
answers.

So I "worked" answering SO questions for about a month, got to ~1800 Karma and
stopped.

After that, I've mostly used SO to get questions answered. And I've noticed
SO's quality has gradually gone down hill; I once could count on getting good
answers to my questions and I just can't get answers to any substantial
questions.

So what's going on? When I began with SO, it was really big already but
nowhere as big as it is now. I'd classify myself as a senior-software-
engineer, generalist. I pride myself on not just solving problems quickly but
solving them "well" - how to solve the problem at hand in a way that's
maintainable, etc, etc. "Working" on SO, I would look on the new questions.
Skipping the really elementary ones, I'd find fairly challenging ones that
were within "the purview of a generalist". To answer the ones I knew, I had to
type pretty fast. I still put a fair amount of effort into my answers. I
wasn't the fastest but I was fast that I was getting Karma.

The thing is, it feels like now, to answer a reasonably answer-able question,
I'd have to bang it out in second or be behind ten other answers and be
ignored regardless of the quality. So I just don't bother.

So, problems I can see.

Scale in question-answers: Many people answering questions means _an_ answer
comes up quickly and that might be good enough for a lot of question-askers.
But there's a tendency for the super-quick answers to be garbage-answers. They
only answer the question at hand - the super-quick answerers have become kind
of the Demand Media of programming problem solving.

Scale in question-askers: Many more people asking questions result in lower
quality questions. There are lots and lots of questions that qualify as
programming questions but just barely. And there are lots of people very
quickly banging out the answers to these and getting lots of Karma for it.

Scale in low-signal-to-noise-ratio: With so much quality stuff, the skilled
question answers and askers have left. The guy who knows c++ inside and out
just doesn't have an incentive to race to answer ten trivial questions and so
they go away not wanting to compete with the guy does race to answer all this.

So my diagnosis is scale.

Further, I think the SO have noticed some of these problems but their efforts
to solve them have more or less failed.

A while back, there was a large rearrangement of Karma in which the Karma for
asking questions was halved. I suspect this was because they noticed that a
lot of questions were going unanswered (part-and-parcel of the problems I
mentioned above). I don't think this "incentivization" process worked. Rather
than incentivize people to answer unanswered questions, I think SO needs to
"put the fun back" into answering questions. SO was once like I game I could
"win". Now it feels like a game I can't win, that's at a scale where it's
impossible to win.

The badges I get just don't cut it. I think Joel & Jeff again realize the "you
can't win" quality of current SO and try to compensate with badges since I
find "I've gotten a badge" each I've logged onto to my otherwise moribund
account in the last eight months.

What I think you would need to produce a programmers community which could
stay viable longer is to do things to make sure that people could succeed in
the meat of the matter - answering questions. For example, you might force a
delay in people's answers or a delay in answers of people below a certain
karma. You might actually limit the number of answers a person could give in
24 hours to force people to improve the answer they did give. You might give
people more karma for answering higher valued questions.

You might also limit the ability of totally random questions to jump to the
front after a while.

You might adopt a variety of "quality measures" to discourage building karma
with only simplest answers.

I'm sure my analysis is imperfect, subjective and based on my own
predilections. Perhaps some people just love the questions and answers I'm
calling "low quality".

However it may go, these are my "rough notes" for an improved Stack Overflow.

~~~
treeface
I think there's a lot of quality in your comment, but I think you're making a
whole bunch of broad, generalized assumptions about the state of the entire SO
community. In my experience, it's still a highly-functional community with a
wide range of interesting questions and answers. As a developer, a lot of
questions I see on there during the day challenge me and force me to push the
boundaries of my knowledge. Because of this, I understand the languages I code
in much better than I did just several months ago. Furthermore, I'm exposed to
many other languages that I would've never taken a look at had it not been for
that Stack widget on my Android giving my lots of interesting questions.

Just today, for example, I came across this question:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4619519/jquery-css-to-
sho...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4619519/jquery-css-to-show-merge-
style-relationship-between-two-columns-like-filemerge)

At first I wanted to ignore it because I didn't really have enough time, but
then I remembered some CSS3 monstrosity I saw on HN once where they got really
clever with border radii and I wanted to see if I could do something similar.
An hour later, I had come up with a halfway workable solution to his problem
and everyone comes out a winner. (If it's not clear, I'm treeface on SO too)

I typically don't care so much about karma...I care about being able to deeply
understand the tools I'm using, and SO really forces me to see them from a
huge number of angles.

~~~
joe_the_user
_I think there's a lot of quality in your comment, but I think you're making a
whole bunch of broad, generalized assumptions about the state of the entire SO
community._

Yeah, it's really hard to analyze the communities/applications that have
sprung up on the Internet. A generality is a view of giant table - it's won't
tell you everything but it's better than nothing. When an internet community
gets seriously _big_ , it can be highly functional and highly disfunctional at
the same time.

Among other things, SO's current quality probably varies a lot depending on
the language you use. I went from using Ruby to using Matlab and finally back
to using c++ in the time I was writing about. That might have biased the
sample I had of the infinite dimensional SO-space. SO/Ruby might be great
still for all I know.

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Mathnerd314
Instead of tags, why not use a recommendation system?

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joshu
Tags? Just a fad.

