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Spolsky's Software Q-and-A Site
guzzibill writes "Joel Spolsky has announced the beta release of Stack Overflow, intended to be a high-quality source of answers to software questions. Post a software question and watch the answers flow in. Popularity voting is very much woven into the site, where both questions and answers can be edited for clarity and voted up or down for correctness. Correctly posed questions and insightful answers float to the top. This site has reached critical mass." From Joel's description, he was envisioning a source of technical Q&A about programming. So far, many of the questions are broader and less technical, such as advice on the best book about software development. It will be interesting to see where the community that's forming takes it.
Would it be any different from expertsexchange.com?
I.e. is it going to be _really_ useful?
Answers sites are extremely useful when trying to figure out relationships between two things which may not be easily translatable into a concise search query. They're also really handy when you're not quite sure what your question is - and someone else is gracious enough to solidify the thought and answer it.
I'm a big fan of yahoo answers, and I'd love to have a free site for in-depth tech stuff like this. (I've never ponied up the money for experts-exchange)
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Maybe they just need a way to (meta)moderate the questions based on views and whether it's been solved or not. They should also have a filter for stupid homework questions, e.g. How to check if the given string is palindrome? Also, questions should have a 'solved' or 'pending' tag like a bugs section instead of 'answers', which is simply a chain of replies. This way they could bury the more naive attempts at solving homework and get to the more difficult and interesting problems like writing drivers for linux : ).
five thumbs up. the look and feel of the site is very good and makes it easy to find what you want and browse a little.
Have you ever looked at the C FAQ? It's full of exceptionally useful information and tips but no beginners can comprehend it.
This will turn into the same thing. Absolute declarations of: You must do it -this- way, followed by an explanation only the converted can understand.
Coding Horror - Jeff Atwood's blog - made me ponder the usefulness of blogging many times. He has so many posts which are just misleading and inaccurate (I am sure he has good intentions), that someone even started a site called "blogging considered harmful." His inexperience shows throughout his Coding Horror website, but the biggest problem is that somehow he has managed to get a large following of people who consider him to be an expert, and yet, if you look at their comments you discover that in fact most of them seem inane.
...from posting on slashdot.
Seriously, looks aren't everything. In fact, unless the content is compelling enough even the prettiest design won't keep people coming back. Look at sites like craigslist.
And it's not like their competition (experts-exchange) is setting the aesthetic bar that high, ya know?
- Reputation system that actually matters (see Nerdposeur's post above) - Specific focus on functionality to drive user behaviour patterns - wiki approach to QnA - focus on community-driven content. - focus on keeping it free Experts Exchange has maybe 2 of the above, and nobody is really doing it the way that this site is doing it. Listen to the Stack Overflow podcast to understand a lot more about what they're doing that makes this site significantly different from the "other" answer sites.
Content s not hidden behind a gated wall, and is community edited - by responsible community members, in that there are complex rules around who can edit what to keep things open but still controlled from random vandalism.
In addition, despite the layout being sort of ugly, it has a really great feature - badges. These are Trophies or Achivements, that make it fun to keep using the site and reward you for improving things in various way.
Even just in the beta period there were a lot of pretty good questions and answers. It's harder to see that now that the general public is in but there still are good questions and informative answers, and searches should yield some pretty useful results there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's a "Homework" tag, and anyone with enough rank to tag questions can apply it (even if the student didn't.)
As for the GP's point, if SO wants to become the source of all good bits it would *need* to duplicate the questions that can be easily Googled so that it has all of the answers. A lot of the information on Wikipedia could have been Googled as well, but the people who added that info added value to Wikipedia regardless.
Easy. Post a coding question, such as "how can I write a query to do x when the tables are y and z?" or "I've got this piece of code, and it's doing x when I want it to do y", or even "I need some obscure functionality with the win32 api. how can I do this?" You know, the same thing people used experts exchange for, only now it's free.
That's possible, but the site has been in beta for a while, and bored people have been trying to manipulate it already. They've put a lot of mechanisms in place to encourage good behavior, and hopefully community monitoring will continue to stop this.
What you're saying should be pretty easy to detect, right? Like, these 10 people all post crappy answers and vote each other's crappy answers up? Those users could be penalized, and meanwhile, if the answers are truly crappy, other people can be voting them down or even deleting them.
I don't disagree with you, but there's a category of questions between your two examples which is (I think) where SO is aimed. API references sometimes tell you everything /except/ how to use a function (or at least they don't cover more than one or two standard cases). And your second question would be more suitable for SO phrased as "how can I stop Firefox from doing [x]".
I'm still on the fence as to whether their concept will work or not. I've gotten a couple of excellent answers to very specific questions that two hours of Googling didn't solve. But there's a LOT of noise on the site and the wiki-style editing that's supposed to suppress the noise hasn't been able to keep up.
The other point is that the participants in the private beta have been a self-selected group of developers who are interested in programming and making the site work. Now that it's public it should either fail or succeed really fast.
Has *anybody* paid money for expertsexchange?
I'm always in amazement that they still manage to be indexed by Google.
i would also add that teaching others is one of the best ways to teach yourself.
while i'm not a math wiz by any means (got a C in AP Calculus--though i did pass the AP test with a 5), i was involved in an after-school library tutoring program my junior and senior year. this was an excellent program, not only because it was a great resource for struggling students, but also because it was a great learning experience for the student tutors as well.
tutoring other students is a great way to review old knowledge, and sometimes you even learn alongside the students as you try to help them understand difficult concepts. there's no better way to gain a genuine grasp on challenging material than having to explain it to someone else. it really challenges you to look at, analyze, and break down difficult concepts in new ways in order to convey the concept to the person you're tutoring. and in this process, you yourself also become much more familiar with and gain a better understanding of the material.