The Freak Parade

Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky have teamed up to produce a new Q & A web site for programmers of any make or model, StackOverflow.com. A more formal review of the site than this one can be found here. The conclusion of of that reviewer was, as I interpreted it, more or less “meh.” Personally, I feel like the site has enormous potential. It sort of feels like Experts Exchange and Digg got a bit too intimate, perhaps after a few cocktails at a social media trade show vendor party, and Experts Exchange ended up pregnant. Even though they decided to go their separate ways, the decision was made to keep the baby, name it StackOverlow.com, and send it out in the world to make its own way. Actually, Digg might not be the father - StackOverflow.com reminds me very much of a very old but still active social “prose” site called Everything2 for wannabe writers that I used to haunt when I fancied myself literate.

Voting is pervasive throughout the experience; you can vote on both questions and answers to questions, and the default ordering of answers in any given question is controlled by popularity. This has gotten some complaints, because it disrupts the “thread” of any discussion that has taken place. I think they will solve this problem, though, by distinguishing “answers” from “discussion” somehow. Personally, while the discussion portion of any of these questions can sometimes be interesting, and, rarely, an important part of the answer, usually the discussion eventually leads to one post with the shining gem of wisdom I need. I don’t mind clicking another tab to see the threaded discussion if it interests me, and I quite like the popular answers being listed first. In most cases, I think this will cut to the chase for people searching for an answer, and for those who want follow the train of thought it is a very fast click away (provided the site is able to maintain its responsiveness).

Like Experts Exchange, a personal ranking system (called Reputation), and a so generous as to be rather silly badge system, provides the perceived carrot to ask questions, answer questions, and generally participate.

StackOverflow.com has a clean, pleasing aesthetic and is extremely responsive (I hope this holds up as it scales). From that perspective, it blows Experts Exchange out of the water; Experts Exchange took the whole “glossy, shiny button” concept way, way too far and looks like it was dipped in candy, which drives me up the wall. It is also a bit sluggish, and they *really* want to sell you a premium subscription, one of StackOverflow.com’s stated anti-goals, and I think that alone will make StackOverflow.com successful. Who wants to pay to get the answer to a question a fellow member of the community provided for free? Some people do, apparently, but I’m not one of them.

The site is missing some fundamental pieces such as RSS feeds and thread subscriptions, all of which are called out in the review referenced above and promised by the developers, so I don’t think those things are even worth talking about, the site is an infant child, after all, and will cut its teeth in short order I imagine.

There is no question in my mind that the site will be successful with the rank and file developer, the kind of developer that might otherwise have turned to Experts Exchange. It is no easy task to find the appropriate forum to ask a question about a particular technology, especially if your question crosses technology boundaries or you have several questions about several technologies, so if there is a friendly, active community of people able to answer questions on a broad range of topics, a site that doesn’t have its hand in your face asking for a credit card, it will be the first place to turn for a large category of technical questions.

How much value the site will hold for me personally will be determined by the types of “gurus” the site attracts and keeps engaged over time. I never had much luck with Experts Exchange because I do a pretty thorough job of searching the web before I ask a question in a forum. By the time I’ve finished that process and come up empty handed the lurkers at Experts Exchange are rarely ready with an answer, and so I ended up answering almost all of my EE questions myself if a solution was ever found. The discussion lists of various open source tools I’ve encountered recently are a different story, however. These communities are inhabited by some staggeringly intelligent folks who *can* answer the really tough questions. If some of those people end up on StackOverflow.com then I think the chemistry will be unstoppable, which would probably encourage me to stick around and answer a few of the lower order questions myself while helping myself to someone else’s genius

One thing I would like to see is the ability to create “groups” or sub-communities within StackOverflow.com that still feed the home page but provide a sub-home page for certain broad topics. The tags are nice, but I think it would be powerful (and maybe attract key thought leaders) if there were, say, a “Messaging” subsite, or a “Test Driven Development” subsite, or even subsites for individual products or tool sets or technologies. I get that the Tagging feature does this in an ad hoc way, but I think another layer of course grained categorization would really add a useful dimension, especially if it profiles users active in those sub-communities.

The one thing I don’t like, although I can’t say I’d remove it because it is the touch of “cocaine” in the Coca Cola that makes you want another sip, is the Reputation system. I may be alone in this, because our culture is driven, and we are deeply programmed to be motivated by, a “reward” system that emphasizes competition and hierarchical ranking, but I think it detracts from the experience overall. At the same time, it is the scoring system that keeps me checking back, it effects me as powerfully as anyone else (though I imagine it will wear off quickly), which makes it a good business move, but I still don’t like it. I like that the questions and answers can get voted up and down based on quality and relevance - I think that is fantastic - I just don’t like the atmosphere that handing out arbitrary popularity points creates. I think it motivates you to think about how your answers or questions will be perceived by the crowd rather than about how helpful they are to the person asking the question, or how relevant they are, and I also think it creates a totally artificial aura of authority around people who, often enough, may just have more time on their hands than others. This is a purely personal perspective, of course, but I would have more respect for the whole system if it operated without the fundamentally silly and vapid yet strangely motivating rewards system.

One thing I *really* like about this system (although it is hamstrung during the beta process) is the clean “permalink” every question gets, allowing you easily bookmark, link to, blog about, e-mail, etc. an interesting or useful Question/Answer thread. I think this feature, in addition to the others, has the potential to really make the site popular.

All in all I think StackOverflow.com is very well conceived and very well executed. Obviously it has
rough edges, but they’ll be smoothed so quickly you’ll forget they were ever there. I am certain it will be successful, and I truly hope that it develops a community of developers from every spectrum and area of technology, because the possibility of having one place to go to ask a question at virtually any level of technical complexity that my feeble mind is capable of and getting an intelligible response is very exciting.

If you want to sign up for the beta, you can do that here.