let people log in with Twitter and Facebook, to make StackExchange reputations easily exportable to other platforms.
StackOverflow should change absolutely nothing about their login process. It is perfect. I anonymously answered one question, and all of a sudden I have a profile. No confirmation e-mail, no Facebook or Twitter crap. Just use the site and bam! you're registered. It remembers me every time I come back and it makes absolutely no fucking attempt to worm its way into my social graph.
Just be careful with your account in that state. Stackoverflow only knows your account by a cookie right now. You can't log into it from another machine or if you happen to clear your cookies you won't be able to log back in.
So it is in your best interest to "solidify" your membership if you care about your account.
I briefly liked Quora (partly because its the first site I've seen that serves up minified HTML). Now I find it boring, insular, and full of group think. Much like this article. And the valley. The concept that some non-valley site, that doesn't have all the cool kids behind it, might actually be successful is just not allowed within the techcrunch world-view.
You're a little harsher than I would be but you make a good point. The problem with online reputation on this type of system is most people won't verify the answers before they upvote them. At the same time an insular community creates a competition for status. So you get people who try to find and answer questions as quickly as possible regardless of whether the answer is right or not.
As someone who goes to Stack Overflow regularly I see this situation all the time. It goes like this...
1. Person asks a question (e.g. "I need to build a service that will serve school districts in Los Angeles County. How do I go about doing that?")
2. Someone comes along and answers the question with something that seems right (e.g. "Here are a bunch of links on building REST services...")
3. That answer gets upvoted and the answerer gets his reputation boosted
4. Later someone comes along with the right answer (e.g. LA Unified requires all services to be WSDL discoverable so you need to look at SOAP"). But it's too late because the question's already scrolled into the abyss.
So the guy who gave the wrong answer gets a better reputation and the guy who got the right one gets nothing (and the person who asked the question likely took the upvoted answer and didn't check back so they waist untold hours on the wrong thing)
I'm curious why you're impressed by minified HTML. Usually, given the CPU cost to minify a page and the fact that savings are in the tens of bytes after gzip, it is nearly certainly an overall performance and user experience loss.
The same people who say SO has "a poor UX" are the same people who say that Reddit has "a poor UX". They're conflating gradients, rounded rectangles and text shadows with a user's experience of the site.
I want to make this Blue Oranges 35 thing real. Here's a start:
Level 0 (basic):
• XHR, not ajax
• No anchoring namespaces (no /r/ or /b/, just have users/spaces at the root.)
• No file extensions in URLs (no .html, .cgi, .aspx, ...)
• All production HTML/JS/CSS has newlines stripped to 32k characters per line.
• gzip for all html, js, css, json, ...
• Proper password storage
• Not exploitable by injection
• No XSS problems
• ...
Level 1 (extended):
Level 0 +
• Proper expires headers
• Proper CDN usage
• All authenticated transactions over https
• All JS/CSS minified but with full versions readily accessible.
• ...
Level 2 (optimal):
Level 1 +
• All pages generate in under 300ms
• All images properly sized/crushed
• ...
If reputation is that important, then StackExchange's partition strategy is actually very effective. If you want to find good coders you go to StackOverflow. If you're looking for good photographers, you go to SE's photography site. There's no need for a centralized reputation hub. The reputation of a great coder on StackOverflow can't be diminished as a result of the creation of some new SE's long tail site.
But I doubt online reputation is that important. The reason I visit StackOverflow is to find answers to programming questions, not to look for experts. As for the experts, they don't need high karma on some Q&A site to get job offers.
The network effect and the quality of contributors is everything. Start in an entirely new field and you'll end up with the blind leading the blind, and the quality and reputation of the site will plummet. Just take a look at That Other Q&A Site.
For a new field, the site needs enthusiastic and highly competent contributors; otherwise it will fail.
StackOverflow is definitely more important right now.
But one thing I think they're messing up is the process for launching new StackExchange sites. They're trying this thing to qualify new sites to ensure they have critical mass, but I think it's too restrictive and hurting their growth.
As an example, I "pledged" to contribute to the AI stack exchange site if it were to launch. When it launched as a trial it received maybe 100 questions and some good answers in the first few weeks. I got answers to all my questions - good ones which pointed me toward research I hadn't found in Google etc.
But a week later it had been shut down and they emailed everyone saying it didn't meet minimum activity thresholds. Those questions and answers are no longer available on the net.
The question is whether a StackExchange site with relatively small activity is still useful. I think it is - at least it's more useful than not having them at all. Who is to say a small site couldn't become much bigger over time.
Reddit has done well letting users create any subreddit they want. There is a diverse ecosystem of subreddits out there with varying levels of activity. Keeping the long tail of subreddits around to see which flourish doesn't seem to hurt anything - so I don't understand the StackExchange approach to this.
(It reminds me of Wikipedia deleting obscure pages also - what does it hurt to have them?)
So you base that Stack Exchange has failed on one out of the two failed sites, out of over forty proposals that are still there?
As has already been mentioned elsewhere, if the site lacks genuine expertise of the topic, the blind will simply follow the other blind. Putting a site that doesn't work out of it's misery is doing the users a favor in the long run
I never understood this 'There can be only one' attitude. I'm fine with thousands of these sites existing. There doesn't have to be 1 that's better than all the rest, and I don't have to spend every waking moment finding it, or making sure I'm already using it.
Sites also don't have to be 'important' for them to matter to people.
My guess is that we're seeing the results of the tech blogger echo chamber. These self proclaimed experts need methods to legitimize their existence and quantify their awesomeness. What better way than a big fat number on the one end-all-be-all site? See also: Scoble was biggest contributor on Quora.
Of course, it's all ridiculous (for now). Most people in the real world have better things to do than troll around on Q&A sites hoping for karma. Until someone figures out how to convert karma into a competitive paycheck, this is all nonsense.
The point he is making is that stackoverflow is important because
1. It is useful at work
2. It is useful for getting work
He dimisses the possibility that people asking questions about photography might not be photographers doing it for a living ( and a hodgepodge of sites focused on photography, mathematics, Apple, video games, board games, role-playing games, and science fiction. Interesting? Sure. Important? Hell, no. )
Besides who can be more obsesses about scores than gamers?
Mathoverflow is awesome. I don't know if the stack exchange guys run it (it certainly uses their software), but it is already professionally relevant for practicing mathematicians.
I was actually thinking about a startup idea around this general theme. I'm going to share it with Hacker News, tell me what you think.
I do not think reputation should be owned by a single site because unlike social networking, there are going to be lots of places to contribute to your online presence.
Yes, stack overflow is important when trying to hire a programmer, but I have also looked at blogs, twitter, github projects, etc.
What really needs to happen is for a startup to create a way to aggregate activity online into a central location to disseminate to the world. Blogging made sense as a means to communicate an idea in 2001, but 10 years later, this needs to change. The internet is shifting heavily towards one that is more focused on communities and the interactions in that community are what are most reflective of an internet identity/reputation.
Just think about your own lives. Yes, sometimes you have one off ideas that you would love to blog and tweet about. That's great, you should keep doing that. But I bet you are also dropping bombs of wisdom on various sites like Quora, Hacker News and Stack Overflow that you wish you could share with more people and keep in a more permanent place.
There needs to be a central place to disseminante the highlights of an online presence. And that site should own the online reputation.
This has been tried in several eras; there was an initiative 'OpenPrivacy' (folding around 2002) that wanted a standard for portable profiles and reputations, and this also seemed to me the original focus of RapLeaf.
More recently, about.me (acquired by AOL) and flavors.me have tackled one portion of this, the user-controlled aggregation of their multiple presences. There may still be prospects for a new service, though the resistance of existing reputation silos could be a problem.
It's not hard to display online reputations side by side on a resume. Reputations mean different things to different people, according to different contexts.
I think Joel and Jeff touched on the issues discussed in the article in their podcasts.
And Jeff always proclaimed that the purpose of the site is a very pragmatic one. To be a source of help for the specific professional community. Not a place to meet your buddies and hang out.
And there's a place for both. Personally, I like that StackOverflow stays away from too much social interaction and focuses on providing valuable technical content.
Dumb question: I went to http://www.quora.com and it's asking me to sign up. I know that the actual questions and answers are publicly viewable but is there any obvious way to get to them from the home page?
Furthermore, when you create an account with Quora, it begs and pleads with you to give it all your personal information in your Facebook account. Not just "What is your token ID?" or even "Who are your friends?", no! Everything about you!
But what takes the cake is the history tracking that Quora uses. It suggests topics that interest me. Like both Barnes and Noble and Borders... from an article I read on HN yesterday. Blatantly telling your users that you're spying on their activity is a great way to endear them to your service.
Agreed. The author: a hodgepodge of sites focused on photography, mathematics, Apple, video games, board games, role-playing games, and science fiction. Interesting? Sure. Important? Hell, no.
All these "other" SE sites are built around the things that real people are passionate about. That stuff is quite important!
I strongly disagree with the common conception that high points on StackOverflow would be a good measure of coder's quality.
They are merely the measure of someone's involvement in answering the questions.
Sadly, many answerers are just point hunters. They seem to monitor questions and quickly google for answers. I observed this asking specific detailed questions. Most answers were something obvious, something without accordance to the details of the question, or just blind guesses. People are just putting answers in the hope they will earn at least an upvote!!
It's not only stupid, but i guess it's a massive abuse of the original idea behind this site.
Add the fact that most points are earned by people answering questions about C#/.NET. It's related to the fact that this platform somehow has masses of mediocre programmers, or even people suddenly put in the role of programmers. They go asking tons of questions while they should rather RTFM or polish their skills by coding. No wonder that a mass of questions generates a mass of answers. So the whole stack exchange idea of points is about quantity, not quality.
Agreed. I'm somewhere around the top 40 on HN but it would be absurd to say I'm even near the top 100 hackers or entrepreneurs around here. I just know how, when and what to say more than many of the folks actually getting on with their work ;-)
Quite an annoying article - creating conflict for the sake of it?
StackExchange and Quora are only very superficially similar. StackExchange is very specifically about asking questions that have definitive answers, and getting those answers.
Quora is a question-based social network discussion site.
I also find the Stackexchange sites generally give me more relevant answers faster. The advantage of having a beta time where a core group users get to explicitly state their interest perhaps?
I looked at the existing answers, and I don't think anyone made this point: SO and its spinoffs are an example of do what you know.
People can smell when someone not from their domain tries to make something for them - and it does not smell good. In order for the SO model to work, they need experts versed in the area to be the core of the community. There are two ways to do this: try to attract such people after creating the site, or let the site organically arise because it was created by such people.
Meh, I hate the Quora UI. I'm too busy/lazy to find questions that interest me on it. Stackoverflow, on the other hand, is very quick and easy to navigate and has a very friendly UI.End result: I use stackoverflow regularly and have only ever viewed Quora maybe five times.
[+] [-] neutronicus|15 years ago|reply
StackOverflow should change absolutely nothing about their login process. It is perfect. I anonymously answered one question, and all of a sudden I have a profile. No confirmation e-mail, no Facebook or Twitter crap. Just use the site and bam! you're registered. It remembers me every time I come back and it makes absolutely no fucking attempt to worm its way into my social graph.
[+] [-] Simucal|15 years ago|reply
So it is in your best interest to "solidify" your membership if you care about your account.
[+] [-] alain94040|15 years ago|reply
Maybe it works for you, but I'm still utterly confused about how to login. But hey, I only have about 25 years of coding and online experience.
To be fair, it's not SO's fault.
[+] [-] jules|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] talbina|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gord|15 years ago|reply
Quote of the year.
[+] [-] ojbyrne|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomOfTTB|15 years ago|reply
As someone who goes to Stack Overflow regularly I see this situation all the time. It goes like this...
1. Person asks a question (e.g. "I need to build a service that will serve school districts in Los Angeles County. How do I go about doing that?")
2. Someone comes along and answers the question with something that seems right (e.g. "Here are a bunch of links on building REST services...")
3. That answer gets upvoted and the answerer gets his reputation boosted
4. Later someone comes along with the right answer (e.g. LA Unified requires all services to be WSDL discoverable so you need to look at SOAP"). But it's too late because the question's already scrolled into the abyss.
So the guy who gave the wrong answer gets a better reputation and the guy who got the right one gets nothing (and the person who asked the question likely took the upvoted answer and didn't check back so they waist untold hours on the wrong thing)
[+] [-] cheald|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ygor|15 years ago|reply
SO has one of the best UX on the web. I don't care if you call it Web 1.0, 2.0 or Blue Oranges 35, but don't clean it.
And also - "clean up by letting people log in with Twitter and Facebook"? How do you clean up by adding stuff?
[+] [-] flyosity|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seiji|15 years ago|reply
Level 0 (basic):
Level 1 (extended): Level 2 (optimal):[+] [-] ceejayoz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuvadam|15 years ago|reply
Going for the vertical communities (which have some overlap, no doubt) is a very clever strategy - it works.
Pray tell exactly what Quora is achieving with its strategy. Right now it looks like an over-hyped version of Stack Exchange - Startups.
[+] [-] quan|15 years ago|reply
But I doubt online reputation is that important. The reason I visit StackOverflow is to find answers to programming questions, not to look for experts. As for the experts, they don't need high karma on some Q&A site to get job offers.
[+] [-] rlpb|15 years ago|reply
The network effect and the quality of contributors is everything. Start in an entirely new field and you'll end up with the blind leading the blind, and the quality and reputation of the site will plummet. Just take a look at That Other Q&A Site.
For a new field, the site needs enthusiastic and highly competent contributors; otherwise it will fail.
[+] [-] barmstrong|15 years ago|reply
But one thing I think they're messing up is the process for launching new StackExchange sites. They're trying this thing to qualify new sites to ensure they have critical mass, but I think it's too restrictive and hurting their growth.
As an example, I "pledged" to contribute to the AI stack exchange site if it were to launch. When it launched as a trial it received maybe 100 questions and some good answers in the first few weeks. I got answers to all my questions - good ones which pointed me toward research I hadn't found in Google etc.
But a week later it had been shut down and they emailed everyone saying it didn't meet minimum activity thresholds. Those questions and answers are no longer available on the net.
The question is whether a StackExchange site with relatively small activity is still useful. I think it is - at least it's more useful than not having them at all. Who is to say a small site couldn't become much bigger over time.
Reddit has done well letting users create any subreddit they want. There is a diverse ecosystem of subreddits out there with varying levels of activity. Keeping the long tail of subreddits around to see which flourish doesn't seem to hurt anything - so I don't understand the StackExchange approach to this.
(It reminds me of Wikipedia deleting obscure pages also - what does it hurt to have them?)
[+] [-] codinghorror|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivoflipse|15 years ago|reply
As has already been mentioned elsewhere, if the site lacks genuine expertise of the topic, the blind will simply follow the other blind. Putting a site that doesn't work out of it's misery is doing the users a favor in the long run
[+] [-] wccrawford|15 years ago|reply
Sites also don't have to be 'important' for them to matter to people.
[+] [-] brown|15 years ago|reply
Of course, it's all ridiculous (for now). Most people in the real world have better things to do than troll around on Q&A sites hoping for karma. Until someone figures out how to convert karma into a competitive paycheck, this is all nonsense.
[+] [-] jayzee|15 years ago|reply
1. It is useful at work
2. It is useful for getting work
He dimisses the possibility that people asking questions about photography might not be photographers doing it for a living ( and a hodgepodge of sites focused on photography, mathematics, Apple, video games, board games, role-playing games, and science fiction. Interesting? Sure. Important? Hell, no. )
Besides who can be more obsesses about scores than gamers?
[+] [-] neutronicus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlesju|15 years ago|reply
I do not think reputation should be owned by a single site because unlike social networking, there are going to be lots of places to contribute to your online presence.
Yes, stack overflow is important when trying to hire a programmer, but I have also looked at blogs, twitter, github projects, etc.
What really needs to happen is for a startup to create a way to aggregate activity online into a central location to disseminate to the world. Blogging made sense as a means to communicate an idea in 2001, but 10 years later, this needs to change. The internet is shifting heavily towards one that is more focused on communities and the interactions in that community are what are most reflective of an internet identity/reputation.
Just think about your own lives. Yes, sometimes you have one off ideas that you would love to blog and tweet about. That's great, you should keep doing that. But I bet you are also dropping bombs of wisdom on various sites like Quora, Hacker News and Stack Overflow that you wish you could share with more people and keep in a more permanent place.
There needs to be a central place to disseminante the highlights of an online presence. And that site should own the online reputation.
[+] [-] gojomo|15 years ago|reply
More recently, about.me (acquired by AOL) and flavors.me have tackled one portion of this, the user-controlled aggregation of their multiple presences. There may still be prospects for a new service, though the resistance of existing reputation silos could be a problem.
[+] [-] adrianwaj|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeglomeration|15 years ago|reply
And Jeff always proclaimed that the purpose of the site is a very pragmatic one. To be a source of help for the specific professional community. Not a place to meet your buddies and hang out.
And there's a place for both. Personally, I like that StackOverflow stays away from too much social interaction and focuses on providing valuable technical content.
[+] [-] statictype|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benologist|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmphosis|15 years ago|reply
http://quora.com/ puts up a wall.
[+] [-] mkenyon|15 years ago|reply
But what takes the cake is the history tracking that Quora uses. It suggests topics that interest me. Like both Barnes and Noble and Borders... from an article I read on HN yesterday. Blatantly telling your users that you're spying on their activity is a great way to endear them to your service.
[+] [-] Maro|15 years ago|reply
Also, the attack on the "other" SE sites is lame. I regularly visit and am active on the Physics SE, and Quora's got nothing on it.
[+] [-] taylorbuley|15 years ago|reply
All these "other" SE sites are built around the things that real people are passionate about. That stuff is quite important!
[+] [-] kunley|15 years ago|reply
Sadly, many answerers are just point hunters. They seem to monitor questions and quickly google for answers. I observed this asking specific detailed questions. Most answers were something obvious, something without accordance to the details of the question, or just blind guesses. People are just putting answers in the hope they will earn at least an upvote!! It's not only stupid, but i guess it's a massive abuse of the original idea behind this site.
Add the fact that most points are earned by people answering questions about C#/.NET. It's related to the fact that this platform somehow has masses of mediocre programmers, or even people suddenly put in the role of programmers. They go asking tons of questions while they should rather RTFM or polish their skills by coding. No wonder that a mass of questions generates a mass of answers. So the whole stack exchange idea of points is about quantity, not quality.
[+] [-] petercooper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] praptak|15 years ago|reply
Lots of short, google-able answers to trivial questions will get you much more points than thoughtful answers to hard questions.
SO can be useful for preliminary screening, but only if you look at the actual answers.
[+] [-] dansingerman|15 years ago|reply
StackExchange and Quora are only very superficially similar. StackExchange is very specifically about asking questions that have definitive answers, and getting those answers.
Quora is a question-based social network discussion site.
Not the same thing at all.
[+] [-] tejaswiy|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scott_s|15 years ago|reply
People can smell when someone not from their domain tries to make something for them - and it does not smell good. In order for the SO model to work, they need experts versed in the area to be the core of the community. There are two ways to do this: try to attract such people after creating the site, or let the site organically arise because it was created by such people.
[+] [-] dkersten|15 years ago|reply