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.

Comments

high quality?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do they ensure high quality? Meaning, how does this not evolve into just another programming Q/A web forum?

As as aside, the no-registration-required attribute is nice.

Re:high quality?

[Sancho]

Questions and answers can be rated, so that helps. As your rank increases (by posing good questions and helpful answers) your abilities on the site increase, up to the point where you virtually become a moderator. The algorithm for determining this may need some tweaking--right now, you need 6000 points to achieve the highest rank, and you get 10 points for a being modded up (losing 2 for being modded down.) If it's anything like other moderation systems, a bunch of people will get together to mod each others questions and answers up enough to become Stack Overflow gods.

Re:Not Joel Spolsky's Site

[catfood]

A-freaking-men. I don't understand why Google keeps ranking their results so high.

Stack Overflow

[Anonymous Coward]

It works while it's new but it won't be long before there are just questions and no answers. Most of them are silly anyway, like what does the scope operator do without a scope, eg ::func();

Who would want to answer such question that one can look up in 2 or 3 google queries? That's a rhetorical question.

Initial thoughts

[Bogtha]

I've been using it for the past day or so, and although there are lots of decent questions, there are also a lot of people who post things that could easily be answered by with Google or RTFM, a lot of students posting homework questions (and getting answers!), and a lot of people posting bad code as answers. Time will tell whether they can build a community that can resolve these problems, but in my experience, the quality of these types of communities only goes down.

Reputation System

[Nerdposeur]

I think the most interesting thing about StackOverFlow is the reputation system. The more good questions and answer you create, the more power you get. From the FAQ:

Here's how it works: if you post a good question or helpful answer, it will be voted up by your peers. If you post something that's off topic or incorrect, it will be voted down. Each up vote adds 10 reputation points; each down vote removes 2. Amass enough reputation points and Stack Overflow will allow you to do more things on the site, beyond simply asking and answering questions, such as:

15 - Vote up
15 - Flag offensive
50 - Leave comments
100 - Vote down
250 - Close your questions (no longer accept answers)
500 - Retag other people's questions
750 - Edit community wiki posts
2000 - Edit other people's posts
2000 - Delete comments
3000 - Close other people's questions

At the high end of this reputation spectrum there is little difference between users with high reputation and moderators. That is very much intentional. We don't run Stack Overflow. The community does.

Knowledge RPG?

[Arc the Daft]

I'll probably get downmodded for admitting I bought Spore, but the similarities between Stackoverflow's achievements and the space stage of Spore are uncanny.

Like many sites, you are given geek powers the more you use the sight and the more helpful you are, ultimately giving you lots of mod powers. Addictive, but will the people that attain the powers use them for good?

Only time will tell...

I was a beta tester

[jerbenn]

The site is now out of beta. I was one of the original beta testers and I can attest that this application is truly revolutionary from the other BBS/Q&A sites that exist out there. First off, it is totally free. Secondly, all of the stupid answers and questions get voted down and disappear very quickly. (Like the guy wanting you to "send me teh codez for class assignment"). Thirdly, the user interface is superb for a web-based app as well as the search functionality. It takes all of the new fangled web features and combines them into this site. You can even get 'badges' sort of like slashdot karma. Way to go Jeff and Joel!

Re:Expert sex change, again?

[nawcom]

it's called stack overflow and people expect it to look pretty? Personally, I would expect the site to look like the Cobol on Cogs site with a name like that.

I hate the Yahoo Answers site, and this looks like its going to be a version of that for computer related questions.

"Best subversion client for Mac OS?"
(how bout svn you dope)

"What is the single most effective way to keep from getting Slashdotted"
(I won't even comment on this)

Personally I can't wait until the relationship questions come up. "How do I get a girl?" "What do boobs feel like?" hehe.

And devshed?

[ducomputergeek]

I've used Devshed for more than a decade. Usually I've been able to at least find people to point me in the right direction. Okay, layout and ads are a pain, but it's free.

Quick, but wrong

[Animats]

I asked a moderately hard Perl question (there's a problem in Date::Manip that seems to be configuration dependent), and within two minutes, I had a wrong answer. No useful replies yet.

High expectation

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been betatesting the site for about 1 month..and I seems to be working just fine, really.

Lets hope the community makes something good out of it. Big expectations are set on the reputation and voting system in order to make it something useful instead of something full of crappy questions and sub-standard answers rated high.

Re:Not Joel Spolsky's Site

[CodeBuster]

If Google is ranking them highly then they are either paying ExpertExchange for robot access (doubt it) or ExpertExchange is engaging in a form of cloaking (i.e. pay or you cannot see what the search engine saw without paying), which I thought the Google page rank algorithm penalized because it is frequently a sign of black-hat SEO. I agree that subscription only sites should be identified as such in the Google search results, although most of us know by now that ExpertExchange charges for answers and avoid it for that reason anyway. I don't dispute their right to charge for answers, but why should I pay them when I can usually find the same information for free unless it is very specific or obscure?

Correction in terminology

[SuperKendall]

Knowledgeable programmers don't hang around sites like Experts Exchange or Stack Overflow answering newbie questions.

I think rather than saying "Knwledgeable Programmers" you meant to say "assholes".

Because the experts I knw are happy to help newbies on occasion. And the reason you'd otherwise hang around stack overflow at other times is to see the more interesting and difficult questions, and answers. And to develop a public reputation for expertise. So at any time there is a helthy enough set of experts aorund willing to help newbies that questions get answered (or they get told where to look if they had just used search, also an acceptable response).

And the truth is Experts Exchange did have some very good content, it was just hell to get to.