Slashdot Mirror
StackOverflow For Any Topic
RobinH writes "StackOverflow, the successful question-and-answer website for programmers, is now over a year old and its top user has just passed 100,000 reputation points. Now one of the creators of StackOverflow, Joel Spolsky, and his company Fog Creek, are developing a software-as-a-service form of the StackOverflow engine called StackExchange to support any topic you want. The software is currently in private beta, but the first few beta sites have surfaced. Topics include business travel, the home, parenthood, the environment, finance, and iPhone game development."
While I wholey appreciate the community and efforts of people involved in StackOverflow, I believe that Joel is subject to entirely too much fanfair and hero worship. I'd line him up right next to Dvorak in the grouping of "Right about as often as the sun shines on my dog's ass."
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Anyone remember the short lived Ask Slashdot section on sex? No one had any answers, so they had to shut it down.
StackOverflow is really impressive, and useful. I find myself adding "site:stackoverflow.com" to google queries when I'm troubleshooting some code problem. If there's an answer on there, it's almost always better than the answers on other sites. With none of the horrible multi-page answers, scribd paper, navigation hell that plagues other sites.
Great idea to branch this into other areas, but I wonder how many dedicated users you'll see like jon skeet when it comes to a parenthood advice website.
You drank my drink, you drunk!
It is good to know that the parenting forum is asking the most important questions.
over a year old and its top user has just passed 100,000 reputation points.
That can't be right. I've been posting on 4chan for years and I don't have 1 reputation point, let alone 100,000.
Have you used Stack Overflow? It's quite different from a Wiki, and is much more focused than a bulliten board. The ability to rate questions and answers makes it much easier to find good responses than generic phpBB sites.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
You would have a point, except StackOverflow provides dumps of their databases in XML format and under a public license.
The posters at Stack Overflow know what they're talking about.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
You get useful answers that actually help.
Yes, because until you interact with the community and earn points it's hard to make an asshat of yourself. I recommend you watch "Learning from StackOverflow": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ
Seriously, what mouth-breather decided you should only be able to search tags instead of a full-text search?
It's also likely that the apparent (I've only skimmed the site) quality of the questions and answers there are because of the subject matter. What works for programming questions probably won't work for a lot of other domains -- just look at the dreck that is wiki.answers.com, yahoo answers etc.
/.'s karma system and stack's rep. points both have real web uses. It would be cool to see a standardization of this idea and have it follow you across the net. Granted it could be abused, gamed, misused and just worthless to some. But no system is 100% useful. I could easily see where a standardized web karma could be very useful.
I'm still trying to figure out if this would be make for a utopian or dystopian internet.
But, hey! What happens when StackOverflow folds (which it will, eventually)?
Then, suddenly, all the knowledge contracts and contracts to a single point until it goes "POOF!" - nada, zero.
Actually, all the content on StackOverflow is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-Wiki license. They make monthly dumps of the entire question and answer database available. If SO ever folds, it would be quite easy to use the data dump to put up a new site with all the accumulated knowledge
Never seen it come up in a google search.. maybe it's got its niche..
Usenet beats any of these sites anyway - there's decades of experience on that.
No, it doesn't always come up in Google search (try searching with site:stackoverflow.com in your programming searches, though), because that is Google's algorithm. As far as a programming/technical site, though, Stackoverflow (and its sister sites; serverfault.com (for admin/IT questions) and superuser.com (for general computer use questions)) is a *wonderful* resource. Don't knock it until you try it.
As for your comment about Usenet, I do agree that there is a myriad of experience on there. Nowhere else are you going to see the beginnings of Linux and quite a bit of discussion on other technologies. BUT - Stackoverflow is current, its well moderated (by a user-community) and has some extremely knowledgeable and thoughtful people on its site to help out.
I disagree with the GP post that is simply a Slashvertisement. I wish someone had told me about the site sooner.
It's very well designed. Compared to anything else in the same category, it's like the iPhone to a generic WinMo phone. It's easy to use, it's intuitive, it's powerful, it's fast, it's obvious and yet nobody comes close.
I've heard many people make fun of Joel, and I would have been a bit skeptical but stackoverflow is an undeniable success.
Even the commercially supported and very expensive ones are *terrible*. They're full of distracting and useless information, their design is full of lines and tables and outlines that serve no purpose whatsoever, they don't present information in a sensible manner (usually signatures, dates, names and navigation take 5 times more space than the actual messages, for instance), and they just simply suck.
Look at stackoverflow. What do you see? Pure information. Navigation is the bare minimum. There is no useless labels. Things work as expected, along the principle of least surprise. The site is snappy. It uses Ajax where it's useful, not for the sake of it. It uses OpenID. It does tag quite well. The wiki markup is one of the most sensible around, and the editor is the best trade-off I've seen between unreadable markup and slow, clunky wysiwyg.
Slightly offtopic, but does anyone else read expertsexchange as Expert Sex Change?
Yes, that's why they hyphenated the name. They did that was a while ago, I think slightly after Pen Island sprang up.
Check out Vanilla for a better BB experience: http://vanillaforums.org/discussions
Is it true what they say about under-30s in America, thinking they are so smart when in fact, they're not?
That's true of everyone everywhere.
You can't take the sky from me...
When there are a dozen open source CMS packages, and countless other sites charging nothing or very little for monthly fees for similar functionality
Show me
The mods at Stack Overflow know what they're talking about.
Fixed it for ya.
I am the lawn!
How much would you pay? For this forum / QA software?
With Stack Exchange? A THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH.
If I felt like I had an idea that would have a good community around it, yes. StackOverflow is simply the best forum software I have ever used for a site oriented around questions and answers (for general discussion I do not think it would work as well, for instance it could not replace Slashdot). The motivational system between badges and voting and scores is well thought out, the software works really well on whatever browser I use it on, and the site has remained very stable even under heavy load.
After having used it for a while, and having developed server side software for a long time, I know the amount of work it would take to replicate all the good things Stack Overflow would be tremendous, and frankly I'm not sure I could really improve on it.
There's nothing wrong with paying for quality and a proven solution. Something is only "expensive" if it provides no value for what you pay.
I'm not sure if all the stack exchange ideas are really winners, but if I had something that I felt would work well I would not hesitate to use that as a solution - and furthermore I would hesitate to build any solution going against an equivalent Stack Exchange site.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Jeff Atwood has said a number of times one of the reasons Stack Overflow came about is because he hated all of the BB systems around. And he was right, the existing BB systems are terrible to use, especially so for a Q&A site.
The site is also better than a wiki for Q&A, because it has really well thought out community moderation aspects. You get more duplication than you would with a wiki, but it works out because you also get heavy user moderation redirecting you to better questions. And because it's a cross between a wiki and a forum, you have a much better ability to have different viewpoints of solutions expressed - for instance a user asking a question can accept an answer as valid, but other users can all vote up other answers as being more correct and those get prominent placement too.
If BB software and wikis are all so good, why is it nothing with the popularity and update of Stack Overflow has existed until now? I've never seen a programming site with such traction and quick uptake, never mind one that covered such a gamut of subjects! It's not just at the top of the list for C# (which is to be expected given the pedigree) but also iPhone development, and is the first place I would go for Emacs elisp questions... even Java.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have to agree with you, ChienAndalu - I haven't seen anything with the kind of functionality that StackOverflow has. I mean, there are moderation sites, but they don't have nearly the functionality or the usability.
However, the difference is programmers usually know how to -ask- questions that make sense to other programmers.
That's more true than average. But it's not wholly true, as another poster noted you get plenty of ill-formed questions on Stack Overflow.
So why does stack overflow work so well? Because unlike the site you mentioned, the community can upvote good questions, and close or cancel bad ones. Users who have gained a lot of credibility with the system by way of points awarded for good questions or answers, can edit a question they feel in fundamentally decent but badly worded.
So a good question is important if you are asking, because it's more likely to be answered or voted up (which again makes it more likley to be answered), but the bad questions will generally fall of the map and not really matter to the system as a whole. It's a great system for discarding the noise which is ever-present in any forum.
Furthermore, people who post good questions and good answers, get rewarded for doing so via points and badges, which keeps them coming back to offer more good questions and answers. The Stack Overflow model is very good at retaining exactly the members of the community that offer the most value, while subtly deflecting those who are not as useful by lack of reward. If you've listened to the Stack Overflow podcast much, you'd realize every part of the system is designed to encourage healthy behavior on the part of users and generally the approach pretty much scales.
Never as there been a more civil programming website, with very little in the way of language wars and so on because people are more motivated to help than to hinder.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With a statement like that, I'd have to wonder how long you had actually been programming.
Should you use singletons? What is the "best" development process? Is test-first the best thing ever or the spawn of satan?
While I would generally agree, StackOverflow is the place for immediate questions you have problems with, not general bullshit. That's why it's popular.
Here's an example from the front page: "In Perl, how can I concisely check if a $variable is defined and contains a non zero length string?"
Umm, stackoverflow is free; and doesnt bomb Google with it's completely obnoxious results.
#!/bin/csh cat $0
So, how does it differ from Ask Slashdot?
Mostly, it's the economy of reputation points and badges (sort of like Xbox Live achievements).
People get the warm and fuzzies just from having a score, and SO uses that instinct in all sorts of ways, to promote good questions, good answers, the refinement of good answers, and the sorting of good answers to the top.
It also helps that it's very useable. For example, the post markup language is pretty much perfect for the purpose (making it very easy to include code snippets with syntax highlighting)