They realised that StackExchange was failing, but because they don't realise the reasons why their attempted correction is only making it worse.
Their software is a hideously complicated and over-engineered attempt to twist human relationships into math. It only works on StackOverflow because:
a) The tech community was desperate for an alternative to hidebound mailing lists on one hand and expertsexchange on the other
b) How to put this? A whole lot of nerds really would like to be able to reduce the complexity of human relationships to math, too, and willingly participated.
But without a userbase that's dying for a solution, any solution, and especially a userbase prepared to put up with convoluted ranking-rating-have-I-got-enough-points-to-change-my-profile-picture-yet point-scoring games the software is actually a millstone. You're not going to get a liberal arts Q&A site that takes off with those restrictions. This is why StackExchange was such a dud.
By not realising this, their solution is more of the same! "Sure, you can start a site, you just need pi+4 users to seed your initial contract bounding, then that will need to be ranked to 6 by a quorum of level 3 users, and after an initial 26-day period of zzzzzzzzzz <click>".
You want to create a good Q&A site, you need to have a community, and it needs to be well-tended by empathic people who know how and where to prune. The software is pretty much irrelevant. Look at http://ask.metafilter.com/ for a success story: totally flat, forum-esque, but answers are obvious, there's no chatter or bullshit, and it works on the most amorphous and wide-ranging types of questions.
There is no shortcut solution to this problem. There is no way to mathematically manage human connections like this that works in this space. The route to success is careful relationship management, not yet more programming.
Sounds like you have a great business plan. In the meantime, I think that the Stack Overflow model has proven itself among nerds, and I think that your assertion that nerds are weird in some way and need completely different software than the rest of the world is not backed up by any evidence.
I disagree that the software is irrelevant. Discussion groups that don't allow voting have no way to distinguish answers that the community thinks are good from answers that the community thinks are bad. Discussion groups that don't allow editing have no way to change answers as the world changes, so wrong answers stick around. Discussion groups without tags are forced to splinter communities into smaller and smaller fragments because they have no way of dealing with overlapping communities. Discussion groups without reputation systems are overrun with spam.
I can't think of anything I disagree with MORE than the concept that "the software is irrelevant." The software DEFINES how the community works with each other and is absolutely critical.
1) I don't think they're trying to model 'the complexity of human relationships.' That's what Facebook tries to do. The trust metrics are crude, but the real goal seems to be to get credible upvotes for answers.
I use SO all the time, have great success, and haven't made any friends there. Because that's not what it's for.
2) Maybe this model won't work for EnthusiasticCatBreeders.com, but it will probably work for a lot of sites. Maybe it will self-select for topics where the people interested are a bit nerdy.
That's OK. There is still a lot of room for nerdy growth. I can imagine sites about cell phones, economics, geomapping, and lots of other topics where the audience is a bit nerdy, there are right and wrong answers, and this will probably work.
I think it has more to do with not being able to leverage their personal blog audiences against other topic areas. It was easy for them to seed Stack Overflow just by talking about it on their blogs.
Google gave me metafilter answers for my non-technical questions that were really excellent a few times; but I hadn't made that connection til your comment. Time to try it directly!
A SO site might perform well as a support channel for a software library product. I've used a mailing list in the past, but it's not as a good, in many ways. If it's free for commercial use, I might give this a go. It seems ideal to deliver support for an open-source software product - anyone done this?
This harks back to our corporate goal to “make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions.” A ghost town, without traffic, does not get people answers, but it does draw a few people away from other sites that might do so. We do not believe that the Internet benefits from putting up placeholder sites with negligible traffic that do not attract high quality communities. And we want the Stack Exchange brand to be synonymous with great community Q&A sites, even if we don’t necessarily cover every topic under the sun.
If Joel Spolsky somehow managed to actually touch Jason Calacanis, would some kind of catastrophic cosmic event occur? Or would they both simply annihilate each other?
I consider Jason a friend (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-56/), a very smart guy, and a great entrepreneur, although I have a different philosophy than he does on how to build a Q&A site.
I think he's taken too much inspiration from politics. Turfing out the simple "pay X, get Y" idea, we now get ~1000 words explaining a concept, its bureaucratic underpinnings, and a rationale of how something that offers less is, in fact, offering a lot more. Yet no longer do you "own" a site you can invest time into, you're instead a caretaker for a site that stays in the SO fold for them to monetize.. a bit like a sub-Reddit (except Reddit's source is open so you can take your toys home, if you wish).
Having people vote for stuff within a framework they ultimately don't control is crazy. We maintain a façade of democracy in politics because it keeps the populace happy, but with Web sites, online communities, and programming languages.. good leadership typically comes straight from the "owners" - at least to start with.
At the end of the day though, I guess Stack Overflow is his baby and he can do what he likes. If Apple can change the rules mid-game, so can Spolsky ;-)
Instead of providing a service that allows people to create, maintain (and yes, perhaps fail) their own community Q&A sites as they see fit, the Stack Exchange team now seem to be aiming to crowd-source the creation and maintenance of Q&A sites deemed interesting enough to exist. And if you've listened to the past few podcasts, "interesting enough" generally means "contains pages likely to rank well in Google".
If that was the case, they wouldn't be (a) creating huge barriers to creating new communities, and (b) tearing down sites that failed to attract a threshold amount of participation. It's clearly not simply a Google spam scheme.
I have no idea what they are actually thinking but their new direction reminds me of the story of how black pearls became sought after. One aspect of this is that the StackExchange sites might end up with a reputation boost based on surviving the vetting process. Perhaps, by virtue of this survival, it will make people more inclined to trust the sites.
Trusted sources is a big problem on the web right now. There are a gazillion sources of information but it is increasing difficult to sift fact from opinion/fiction. Maybe this is their answer to this. Wolframalpha seems to be trying to address this as well but from a different approach.
This is sharecropping, pure and simple. That's bad, since it's not me doing the share cropping. I suspect they can be very successful. Usenet was wonderful .. until it wasn't. A network of sites that can give us high value information instead of the adwords dreck that is polluting the web, should indeed, be a net positive to the world.
Much like an interstate highway is a net positive to society, I suspect this network of sites will be also. It doesn't always work out so well for the little towns the highway goes through, however, and I fear the carnage that might result from this as well. Creative destruction is still destruction, hence my torn emotions.
It is sharecropping to the extent that StackOverflow is sharecropping, but not as much as Yahoo Answers, Experts Exchange and others. Yes, you provide content and someone else makes money. On the other hand, you get answers and the content you provide is Creative Commons. You can download it all and start your own site if you like. I'd say that's a pretty open-handed and friendly approach.
"It doesn't always work out so well for the little towns the highway goes through, however, and I fear the carnage that might result from this as well."
Totally off-topic question: how so? Don't most of these little nowhere towns turn into vast opportunities to build gas stations and hotels where no opportunity existed before? I'm not denying any bad side-effects, just asking what they are.
Not a fan of the SX family, but you have to give them credit for recognizing relatively early on that something wasn't working, and actually implementing the significant changes to try and make it better.
Actually it sounds more like they have completely changed their business plan.
Before: Provide communities and companies the software and hosting that enabled the creation of high-quality Q&A sites.
Now: Create a carefully cultivated garden of user-maintained Q&A sites with active communities and minimal overlap.
And that's fine of course, but it seems a little odd to judge the former was failing (after what, six months?) by using the goals of the second as a criteria for success.
Fellow Stackexchange admin for http://sfanswers.com. I'm glad I waited for beta to end, before spending thousands on marketing, shirts, stickers, etc...
I emailed them as well. SF Answers is my baby and I will do whatever it takes to keep it alive. SF Answers has huge potential, esp for our city folk, and I hope it can remain a site. Not really happy about this, but I'm a team player and would work directly with them on keeping this site up. Otherwise OSQA seems to fit the bill.. Fellow San Franciscans come join us!
I will continue to use SE, until they officially shut me down :(
This seems like history repeating itself. Joel's first foray into the consumer market (CityDesk) was a failure but he was able to fall back on the large community of programmers his blog attracted to make FogBugz a success. With StackExchange it seems like things are happening in the reverse order.
It must be frustrating to not be able to break out of the programmer oriented market. I'm not saying this will be a failure but without the large audiences from Joel and Jeff's respective blogs they've got some serious mass marketing to do. It might be time hire a marketing firm.
I doubt that it being free has much to do with "VC rules!". Given the success of fogcreek, I'd guess that they could've made stackexchanges free from the get-go. They just found a new business model. Maybe with the help of their VCs.
This sounds immensely complicated, maybe they should have worked out a better way for selling the software. Making it free and having this stupendously complex proposal system seems kinda short-sighted.
If quality is so important they need to get designers to look at their sites fast. StackOverflow is fine (especially as it's for programmers) but the original clone sites (the PC and Server ones) have terrible colour schemes that are both hard to interact with and simply reflect badly on the brand. Getting a UI expert or two to work on optimising the UI for non-programmers wouldn't go astray. Getting someone like Smashing Magazine or someone involved in a design-shard of StackExchange would be a good start.
Me too. I suspect their goal is to form trusted Q&A sites. Their goal, I think, is to make the brand synonymous with trusted information on the internet.
So, Weblogs Inc meets knowledge exchange. What I don't quite follow is why contributors would want to propose a Stack Exchange.
For example, imagine I'm a shoe cobbler. I may want to contribute to a Stack Exchange so that it positions me as an expert and drives more traffic to my business.
That's the point of Stack Overflow careers. I'm not sure how that works for shoe cobblers.
The people behind phpBB don't decide who can and, more importantly, who can't build a forum in case it doesn't flourish. They just put the software out there.
If anyone feels like building a Q&A site for free without having to go through an approval procedure they can also check out http://www.qhub.com
There's a lot on money on the line with programming. The quicker we get answers, the faster we get our job done. I can't think of another field where answers are even so possible as in programming. If it were possible with Law or Engineering, I think you would see those type of professionals flock to an SE type site too.
If there were an easy way to have a StackExchange site running alongside an old established forum it could really kick off. For example, I think the Ubuntu Forums would be dramatically better if I didn't have to wait through 8 pages of posts to find the best solution to a problem.
[+] [-] bonaldi|16 years ago|reply
Their software is a hideously complicated and over-engineered attempt to twist human relationships into math. It only works on StackOverflow because: a) The tech community was desperate for an alternative to hidebound mailing lists on one hand and expertsexchange on the other b) How to put this? A whole lot of nerds really would like to be able to reduce the complexity of human relationships to math, too, and willingly participated.
But without a userbase that's dying for a solution, any solution, and especially a userbase prepared to put up with convoluted ranking-rating-have-I-got-enough-points-to-change-my-profile-picture-yet point-scoring games the software is actually a millstone. You're not going to get a liberal arts Q&A site that takes off with those restrictions. This is why StackExchange was such a dud.
By not realising this, their solution is more of the same! "Sure, you can start a site, you just need pi+4 users to seed your initial contract bounding, then that will need to be ranked to 6 by a quorum of level 3 users, and after an initial 26-day period of zzzzzzzzzz <click>".
You want to create a good Q&A site, you need to have a community, and it needs to be well-tended by empathic people who know how and where to prune. The software is pretty much irrelevant. Look at http://ask.metafilter.com/ for a success story: totally flat, forum-esque, but answers are obvious, there's no chatter or bullshit, and it works on the most amorphous and wide-ranging types of questions.
There is no shortcut solution to this problem. There is no way to mathematically manage human connections like this that works in this space. The route to success is careful relationship management, not yet more programming.
[+] [-] spolsky|16 years ago|reply
I disagree that the software is irrelevant. Discussion groups that don't allow voting have no way to distinguish answers that the community thinks are good from answers that the community thinks are bad. Discussion groups that don't allow editing have no way to change answers as the world changes, so wrong answers stick around. Discussion groups without tags are forced to splinter communities into smaller and smaller fragments because they have no way of dealing with overlapping communities. Discussion groups without reputation systems are overrun with spam.
I can't think of anything I disagree with MORE than the concept that "the software is irrelevant." The software DEFINES how the community works with each other and is absolutely critical.
[+] [-] billybob|16 years ago|reply
I use SO all the time, have great success, and haven't made any friends there. Because that's not what it's for.
2) Maybe this model won't work for EnthusiasticCatBreeders.com, but it will probably work for a lot of sites. Maybe it will self-select for topics where the people interested are a bit nerdy.
That's OK. There is still a lot of room for nerdy growth. I can imagine sites about cell phones, economics, geomapping, and lots of other topics where the audience is a bit nerdy, there are right and wrong answers, and this will probably work.
[+] [-] jasonwatkinspdx|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 10ren|16 years ago|reply
A SO site might perform well as a support channel for a software library product. I've used a mailing list in the past, but it's not as a good, in many ways. If it's free for commercial use, I might give this a go. It seems ideal to deliver support for an open-source software product - anyone done this?
[+] [-] proee|16 years ago|reply
Seems they would be quite happy with that sort of recurring revenue...
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tptacek|16 years ago|reply
If Joel Spolsky somehow managed to actually touch Jason Calacanis, would some kind of catastrophic cosmic event occur? Or would they both simply annihilate each other?
[+] [-] spolsky|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markbao|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petercooper|16 years ago|reply
Having people vote for stuff within a framework they ultimately don't control is crazy. We maintain a façade of democracy in politics because it keeps the populace happy, but with Web sites, online communities, and programming languages.. good leadership typically comes straight from the "owners" - at least to start with.
At the end of the day though, I guess Stack Overflow is his baby and he can do what he likes. If Apple can change the rules mid-game, so can Spolsky ;-)
[+] [-] ajg1977|16 years ago|reply
Instead of providing a service that allows people to create, maintain (and yes, perhaps fail) their own community Q&A sites as they see fit, the Stack Exchange team now seem to be aiming to crowd-source the creation and maintenance of Q&A sites deemed interesting enough to exist. And if you've listened to the past few podcasts, "interesting enough" generally means "contains pages likely to rank well in Google".
[+] [-] tptacek|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yequalsx|16 years ago|reply
Trusted sources is a big problem on the web right now. There are a gazillion sources of information but it is increasing difficult to sift fact from opinion/fiction. Maybe this is their answer to this. Wolframalpha seems to be trying to address this as well but from a different approach.
[+] [-] cryptnoob|16 years ago|reply
This is sharecropping, pure and simple. That's bad, since it's not me doing the share cropping. I suspect they can be very successful. Usenet was wonderful .. until it wasn't. A network of sites that can give us high value information instead of the adwords dreck that is polluting the web, should indeed, be a net positive to the world.
Much like an interstate highway is a net positive to society, I suspect this network of sites will be also. It doesn't always work out so well for the little towns the highway goes through, however, and I fear the carnage that might result from this as well. Creative destruction is still destruction, hence my torn emotions.
[+] [-] billybob|16 years ago|reply
Does a better alternative exist?
[+] [-] philwelch|16 years ago|reply
Totally off-topic question: how so? Don't most of these little nowhere towns turn into vast opportunities to build gas stations and hotels where no opportunity existed before? I'm not denying any bad side-effects, just asking what they are.
[+] [-] latch|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajg1977|16 years ago|reply
Before: Provide communities and companies the software and hosting that enabled the creation of high-quality Q&A sites.
Now: Create a carefully cultivated garden of user-maintained Q&A sites with active communities and minimal overlap.
And that's fine of course, but it seems a little odd to judge the former was failing (after what, six months?) by using the goals of the second as a criteria for success.
[+] [-] fady|16 years ago|reply
I emailed them as well. SF Answers is my baby and I will do whatever it takes to keep it alive. SF Answers has huge potential, esp for our city folk, and I hope it can remain a site. Not really happy about this, but I'm a team player and would work directly with them on keeping this site up. Otherwise OSQA seems to fit the bill.. Fellow San Franciscans come join us!
I will continue to use SE, until they officially shut me down :(
[+] [-] johns|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cantastoria|16 years ago|reply
It must be frustrating to not be able to break out of the programmer oriented market. I'm not saying this will be a failure but without the large audiences from Joel and Jeff's respective blogs they've got some serious mass marketing to do. It might be time hire a marketing firm.
[+] [-] pclark|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rguzman|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benofsky|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nopassrecover|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billybob|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yequalsx|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewWarner|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alanl|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callmeed|16 years ago|reply
So, now my idea has to be vetted? Lame.
[+] [-] Tawheed|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkaler|16 years ago|reply
For example, imagine I'm a shoe cobbler. I may want to contribute to a Stack Exchange so that it positions me as an expert and drives more traffic to my business.
That's the point of Stack Overflow careers. I'm not sure how that works for shoe cobblers.
[+] [-] richardburton|16 years ago|reply
If anyone feels like building a Q&A site for free without having to go through an approval procedure they can also check out http://www.qhub.com
[+] [-] euroclydon|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SandB0x|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErrantX|16 years ago|reply