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Stack Exchange 2.0

187 points by babakian 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
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tptacek 16y ago
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?
- markbao 16y ago
  Yeah, it'd be like an electron colliding with a positron. The only thing that'd be left would be gamma rays.
- spolsky 16y ago
  I consider Jason a friend (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-56/ 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.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    So then, do you think that Mahalo has a bum rap? Because the rep they have here is pretty close to "Google spammer".
    - spolsky 16y ago
      I do the best I can not to comment on competitors, although I can't always live up to my ideal. There are a lot of companies built on the business model of making low-cost, low-quality pages for long-tail Google search results, either algorithmically or with low-paid humans. There's clearly an arbitrage opportunity there, providing some kind of semi-crappy web page on a topic so narrow that there isn't anything on the web yet, but low quality content doesn't interest me at all.
      - gnaritas 16y ago
        > low-cost, low-quality pages for long-tail Google search results It's called spamming. Mahalo is spam, Jason is a spammer; friend or not that's simply what he does.
ErrantX 16y ago
My first thought was "woah that's a laborous process". But then I guess that is the intention.
ajg1977 16y ago
Frankly I think this sounds terrible. 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 16y ago
  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.
- yequalsx 16y ago
  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.
pclark 16y ago
So it's free? Doesn't this fly in the face of Joel "charge for software" Spolsky? Venture Capital rules!
- rguzman 16y ago
  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.
  - frederickcook 16y ago
    "We believe that if our platform creates value for a large number of users, we will have opportunities to make money." That doesn't sound like a new business model, it sounds like wishful thinking.
    - nl 16y ago
      um... Advertising? Seems to work for a few sites around the place.
suckafree 16y ago
The success of StackOverflow was built on the backs of smart programmers who don't say anything unless they have something good to say. I've been to a few of the other StackExchange sites and the communities were not the same. Mostly the blind leading the blind. StackExchange 2.0 is a weak attempt at still trying to replicate the unreplicateable (I know this is probably not a word). It will fail because few of these "new" sites will not pass muster during the beta phase.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Huh? They built StackOverflow too. From zero. Are you saying there aren't other communities of with good S/N ratios, or that SX2.0 won't be able to find them?
  - suckafree 16y ago
    I forgot to add the word "community". It should read: "The success of the StackOverflow community was built on the backs of smart programmers... And yes, SX2.0 will have a hard time building the critical mass around anything other than programming.
latch 16y ago
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.
- ajg1977 16y ago
  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.
  - xelipe 16y ago
    Their new business model is more complicated than their previous business model. The five steps to citizenship seems like a weird concept. People that want to host a Q&A site like these don't want to be told they aren't good enough to have a top-level domain. Imagine wanting a blog and WordPress or Tumblr thought you undeserving of a top-level domain. Stack Exchange 2.0 has more steps to have a top-level domain site than the Chinese government has for it's citizens to acquire a domain. I'm sure there is a good Rails/PHP Q&A clone webapp.
    - Tawheed 16y ago
      Sounds like a design by committee
    - tcdent 16y ago
      Imagine wanting a blog and WordPress or Tumblr thought you undeserving of a top-level domain. And just look at how many crap blogs are on each of those platforms. Their goal is to curate quality content and the free-reign model has already proven itself to be incapable of it.
    - thenbrent 16y ago
zavulon 16y ago
I'm really tired of political bias sipping into everything I read on topics not related to politics. It's such bad business too. Why would you make a snarky comment risking pissing 50% of your readers off, when you can simply contain yourself and stay on subject instead?
- telemachos 16y ago
  I looked and looked, and my first thought was "He doesn't like Schoolhouse Rock? Schoolhouse Rock isn't political." Then I noticed this from the start of the article, "Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing." I have a hard time finding that to be anything but a casual and not very detailed analogy. Sarah Palin -> lots of ambition::the SO team -> lots of ambition. How is it snarky? (If anything, he's comparing himself and his team to Palin, so how snarky could it be.) You're overanalyzing, I think.
  - wwalker3 16y ago
    They also mention running for Vice President of the US, so it's not exactly subtle. I just don't see the upside to bringing in such a polarizing political figure. Regardless of what you think of Sarah Palin, it hits a sour note to find her in a product pitch.
    - jawngee 16y ago
      Get over yourselves, have a laugh once in awhile. (Unless, of course, you are pro-Palin, but I'm assuming because you are able to type that you are not).
      - axod 16y ago
        I have a really hard time believing anyone on HN is pro-Palin :/ That would just be bizarre.
        zackattack 16y ago
nopassrecover 16y ago
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.
pkaler 16y ago
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.
commieneko 16y ago
I was hoping this link was Hypercard related...
ck2 16y ago
I see an impending problem with using a 3rd party service like stack exchange, not just for hosting but for operating the content you create. Just like there is voting to enable a site, they could just as easily take it away from you someday. It's like the few hosted forum services out there, or an even simplier model, wp.com blogs vs. a blog on your own vps. If it's important to you and you want control over quality, content and features, build it and host it yourself (yet another reason why I am not crazy about clouds).
- netcan 16y ago
  Don't you see any advantage in lowering the bar for having a blog, forum or SE site?
cryptnoob 16y ago
I find myself emotionally torn about this. 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 16y ago
  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. Does a better alternative exist?
- philwelch 16y ago
  "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.
bonaldi 16y ago
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/ 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.
- deleted 16y ago
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- billybob 16y ago
  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.
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andrewvc 16y ago
And why would I put myself through this when I can setup one of the many stack overflow clones on a VPS right now?
- jwtanner 16y ago
  Because the stack overflow clones aren't exactly finished http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-clones http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-...
  - andrewvc 16y ago
    Perhaps, but its inevitable that they'll improve, and the second they do, no one will want to subject themselves to this review process.
benofsky 16y ago
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.
Tawheed 16y ago
Q&A SITE != COMMUNITY
matrix 16y ago
I don't understand all the naysaying on here. I think this new plan has a pretty good chance of growing the business well. Mind you, I'm a bit unclear exactly what the sources of revenue are. I'm sure very targeted advertising would be one revenue stream.
cantastoria 16y ago
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.
petercooper 16y ago
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 ;-)
papachito 16y ago
Just so you know, I have an open source alternative to stackexchange and we do free hosting too http://shapado.com http://shapado.com we also import stackexchange sites (beta).
- vaksel 16y ago
  i have one of the bigger stack exchange sites...and I'll be moving to Shapado if Stack Exchange kicks me off. I was already looking into them, since their rates were almost 3 times cheaper $50/1mm page views vs SEs $129/1mm pageviews. If you don't let the admins make money, there is no reason for them to bother building a community.
  - netcan 16y ago
    How would you make money from an SE site?
    - vaksel 16y ago
      ads and affiliate links...same way you'd make money from most sites.
fady 16y ago
Fellow Stackexchange admin for http://sfanswers.com 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 :(
- johns 16y ago
  Why not jump ship to Shapado?
kbrower 16y ago
I have a stackexchange site. This is what my admin page says: This site will remain free and operational until at least Tuesday, July 13, 2010. What is the best drop in replacement?
- papachito 16y ago
  It's http://shapado.com http://shapado.com.
- gojomo 16y ago
  Haven't used it, but there's also OSQA, if you can run your own server. OSQA is Django-based, whereas Shapado has a hosted offering and is RubyOnRails-based. They both appear to be close copies of StackExchange from a cursory look.
- zapc 16y ago
  Shapado looks good, and its Rails based. However it has a dependency on MongoDB , which makes it less suitable for widespread deployment, as well as being licensed under the GNU Affero General Public license, which is something to be wary of.
deleted 16y ago
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billybob 16y ago
I'm surprised at the negative reactions here. I thought it sounded brilliant, honestly, and I look forward to seeing more sites blossom.
- yequalsx 16y ago
  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.
AndrewWarner 16y ago
I did an interview Joel, the site's co-founder, about why they made this decision. It should be done processing in about 25 minutes.
- alanl 16y ago
  where can I listen?
  - jackowayed 16y ago
    http://mixergy.com/stack-exchange-joel-spolsky-interview/ http://mixergy.com/stack-exchange-joel-spolsky-interview/
callmeed 16y ago
I don't quite get this. I was actually just about to create a SE account for the purpose of building an audience for our niche startup. So, now my idea has to be vetted? Lame.
SandB0x 16y ago
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.
almakdad 16y ago
Glad to see my thoughts come true! http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/519276165/stack-exchange-is-free-a-hopeful-prediction-comes http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/519276165/stack-exchange-is... This is the best way to clean up the Q&A and Forums landscape.
jswinghammer 16y ago
I'm a pretty big fan of Joel, Jeff, and Stackoverflow so I was really hoping for something other than what I got here. I was hoping to try using a stackexchange site for software support. Instead what I'm looking at seems very complicated and pretty much useless for all but the largest business applications. It may or may not work for personal interest sites but it seems like business users lose out in this scheme. I wish them the best but this seems like a pretty bad idea. They can obviously change course and I hope they do. Fortunately it seems like shapado.com offers what I'm looking for.
euroclydon 16y ago
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.
richardburton 16y ago
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 http://www.qhub.com
Kilimanjaro 16y ago
Like Usenet, Google Groups, or Reddit, just get one nice name and let everybody open their groups and compete for traffic. Then you get millions of visitors and then you monetize it as you please. The time is ripe to replace google groups.
bluethunder 16y ago
I would argue that some tweaks to their original plan would have make it work much better, plus some plain old evangelising. The pricing for one thing was too expensive and should have more slabs (say starting from something like 10$ a month). $120/month is a serious commitment, expecially on something which might not really take of also. imho the new plan is extremely complex and there is really no reason why i would want a community to 'approve' of my new qna site. Just plain wrong at the roots wrong.
richardw 16y ago
All your (good) answers are belong to us. Here's the deal: SE sites either work, or don't. When they don't, they bring in $129 until the owner gets bored. When they do work, SE loses all the extra revenue they could be making if they owned it. This way, they get every extra advertising cent. Basically 'we can make more if we keep all the money in-house'.
chanux 16y ago
I see the gates opened up. I walk in. And see some other gates half the way.
netcan 16y ago
During this phase, people who are interested in a potential site are asked to electronically “sign” a commitment to help make the site a success. They are committing publicly to participate actively in the site, by asking questions, answering questions, developing a system of tags, and generally helping the site get off the ground. I really like this behavioural economics stuff that stackoverflow are in to. They should get Dan Ariely on their podcast.

187 points by babakian 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

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?

markbao 16y ago
Yeah, it'd be like an electron colliding with a positron. The only thing that'd be left would be gamma rays.
spolsky 16y ago
I consider Jason a friend (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/podcast-56/ 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.
- tptacek 16y ago
  So then, do you think that Mahalo has a bum rap? Because the rep they have here is pretty close to "Google spammer".
  - spolsky 16y ago
    I do the best I can not to comment on competitors, although I can't always live up to my ideal. There are a lot of companies built on the business model of making low-cost, low-quality pages for long-tail Google search results, either algorithmically or with low-paid humans. There's clearly an arbitrage opportunity there, providing some kind of semi-crappy web page on a topic so narrow that there isn't anything on the web yet, but low quality content doesn't interest me at all.
    - gnaritas 16y ago
      > low-cost, low-quality pages for long-tail Google search results It's called spamming. Mahalo is spam, Jason is a spammer; friend or not that's simply what he does.

ErrantX 16y ago

My first thought was "woah that's a laborous process". But then I guess that is the intention.

ajg1977 16y ago

Frankly I think this sounds terrible. 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 16y ago
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.
yequalsx 16y ago
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.

pclark 16y ago

So it's free? Doesn't this fly in the face of Joel "charge for software" Spolsky? Venture Capital rules!

rguzman 16y ago
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.
- frederickcook 16y ago
  "We believe that if our platform creates value for a large number of users, we will have opportunities to make money." That doesn't sound like a new business model, it sounds like wishful thinking.
  - nl 16y ago
    um... Advertising? Seems to work for a few sites around the place.

suckafree 16y ago

The success of StackOverflow was built on the backs of smart programmers who don't say anything unless they have something good to say. I've been to a few of the other StackExchange sites and the communities were not the same. Mostly the blind leading the blind. StackExchange 2.0 is a weak attempt at still trying to replicate the unreplicateable (I know this is probably not a word). It will fail because few of these "new" sites will not pass muster during the beta phase.

tptacek 16y ago
Huh? They built StackOverflow too. From zero. Are you saying there aren't other communities of with good S/N ratios, or that SX2.0 won't be able to find them?
- suckafree 16y ago
  I forgot to add the word "community". It should read: "The success of the StackOverflow community was built on the backs of smart programmers... And yes, SX2.0 will have a hard time building the critical mass around anything other than programming.

latch 16y ago

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.

ajg1977 16y ago
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.
- xelipe 16y ago
  Their new business model is more complicated than their previous business model. The five steps to citizenship seems like a weird concept. People that want to host a Q&A site like these don't want to be told they aren't good enough to have a top-level domain. Imagine wanting a blog and WordPress or Tumblr thought you undeserving of a top-level domain. Stack Exchange 2.0 has more steps to have a top-level domain site than the Chinese government has for it's citizens to acquire a domain. I'm sure there is a good Rails/PHP Q&A clone webapp.
  - Tawheed 16y ago
    Sounds like a design by committee
  - tcdent 16y ago
    Imagine wanting a blog and WordPress or Tumblr thought you undeserving of a top-level domain. And just look at how many crap blogs are on each of those platforms. Their goal is to curate quality content and the free-reign model has already proven itself to be incapable of it.
  - thenbrent 16y ago

zavulon 16y ago

I'm really tired of political bias sipping into everything I read on topics not related to politics. It's such bad business too. Why would you make a snarky comment risking pissing 50% of your readers off, when you can simply contain yourself and stay on subject instead?

telemachos 16y ago
I looked and looked, and my first thought was "He doesn't like Schoolhouse Rock? Schoolhouse Rock isn't political." Then I noticed this from the start of the article, "Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing." I have a hard time finding that to be anything but a casual and not very detailed analogy. Sarah Palin -> lots of ambition::the SO team -> lots of ambition. How is it snarky? (If anything, he's comparing himself and his team to Palin, so how snarky could it be.) You're overanalyzing, I think.
- wwalker3 16y ago
  They also mention running for Vice President of the US, so it's not exactly subtle. I just don't see the upside to bringing in such a polarizing political figure. Regardless of what you think of Sarah Palin, it hits a sour note to find her in a product pitch.
  - jawngee 16y ago
    Get over yourselves, have a laugh once in awhile. (Unless, of course, you are pro-Palin, but I'm assuming because you are able to type that you are not).
    - axod 16y ago
      I have a really hard time believing anyone on HN is pro-Palin :/ That would just be bizarre.
      - zackattack 16y ago

nopassrecover 16y ago

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.

pkaler 16y ago

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.

commieneko 16y ago

I was hoping this link was Hypercard related...

ck2 16y ago

I see an impending problem with using a 3rd party service like stack exchange, not just for hosting but for operating the content you create. Just like there is voting to enable a site, they could just as easily take it away from you someday. It's like the few hosted forum services out there, or an even simplier model, wp.com blogs vs. a blog on your own vps. If it's important to you and you want control over quality, content and features, build it and host it yourself (yet another reason why I am not crazy about clouds).

netcan 16y ago
Don't you see any advantage in lowering the bar for having a blog, forum or SE site?

cryptnoob 16y ago

I find myself emotionally torn about this. 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 16y ago
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. Does a better alternative exist?
philwelch 16y ago
"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.

bonaldi 16y ago

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/ 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.

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billybob 16y ago
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.

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andrewvc 16y ago

And why would I put myself through this when I can setup one of the many stack overflow clones on a VPS right now?

jwtanner 16y ago
Because the stack overflow clones aren't exactly finished http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-clones http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/2267/stack-overflow-...
- andrewvc 16y ago
  Perhaps, but its inevitable that they'll improve, and the second they do, no one will want to subject themselves to this review process.

benofsky 16y ago

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.

Tawheed 16y ago

Q&A SITE != COMMUNITY

matrix 16y ago

I don't understand all the naysaying on here. I think this new plan has a pretty good chance of growing the business well. Mind you, I'm a bit unclear exactly what the sources of revenue are. I'm sure very targeted advertising would be one revenue stream.

cantastoria 16y ago

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.

petercooper 16y ago

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 ;-)

papachito 16y ago

Just so you know, I have an open source alternative to stackexchange and we do free hosting too http://shapado.com http://shapado.com we also import stackexchange sites (beta).

vaksel 16y ago
i have one of the bigger stack exchange sites...and I'll be moving to Shapado if Stack Exchange kicks me off. I was already looking into them, since their rates were almost 3 times cheaper $50/1mm page views vs SEs $129/1mm pageviews. If you don't let the admins make money, there is no reason for them to bother building a community.
- netcan 16y ago
  How would you make money from an SE site?
  - vaksel 16y ago
    ads and affiliate links...same way you'd make money from most sites.

fady 16y ago

Fellow Stackexchange admin for http://sfanswers.com 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 :(

johns 16y ago
Why not jump ship to Shapado?

kbrower 16y ago

I have a stackexchange site. This is what my admin page says: This site will remain free and operational until at least Tuesday, July 13, 2010. What is the best drop in replacement?

papachito 16y ago
It's http://shapado.com http://shapado.com.
gojomo 16y ago
Haven't used it, but there's also OSQA, if you can run your own server. OSQA is Django-based, whereas Shapado has a hosted offering and is RubyOnRails-based. They both appear to be close copies of StackExchange from a cursory look.
zapc 16y ago
Shapado looks good, and its Rails based. However it has a dependency on MongoDB , which makes it less suitable for widespread deployment, as well as being licensed under the GNU Affero General Public license, which is something to be wary of.

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billybob 16y ago

I'm surprised at the negative reactions here. I thought it sounded brilliant, honestly, and I look forward to seeing more sites blossom.

yequalsx 16y ago
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.

AndrewWarner 16y ago

I did an interview Joel, the site's co-founder, about why they made this decision. It should be done processing in about 25 minutes.

alanl 16y ago
where can I listen?
- jackowayed 16y ago
  http://mixergy.com/stack-exchange-joel-spolsky-interview/ http://mixergy.com/stack-exchange-joel-spolsky-interview/

callmeed 16y ago

I don't quite get this. I was actually just about to create a SE account for the purpose of building an audience for our niche startup. So, now my idea has to be vetted? Lame.

SandB0x 16y ago

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.

almakdad 16y ago

Glad to see my thoughts come true! http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/519276165/stack-exchange-is-free-a-hopeful-prediction-comes http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/519276165/stack-exchange-is... This is the best way to clean up the Q&A and Forums landscape.

jswinghammer 16y ago

I'm a pretty big fan of Joel, Jeff, and Stackoverflow so I was really hoping for something other than what I got here. I was hoping to try using a stackexchange site for software support. Instead what I'm looking at seems very complicated and pretty much useless for all but the largest business applications. It may or may not work for personal interest sites but it seems like business users lose out in this scheme. I wish them the best but this seems like a pretty bad idea. They can obviously change course and I hope they do. Fortunately it seems like shapado.com offers what I'm looking for.

euroclydon 16y ago

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.

richardburton 16y ago

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 http://www.qhub.com

Kilimanjaro 16y ago

Like Usenet, Google Groups, or Reddit, just get one nice name and let everybody open their groups and compete for traffic. Then you get millions of visitors and then you monetize it as you please. The time is ripe to replace google groups.

bluethunder 16y ago

I would argue that some tweaks to their original plan would have make it work much better, plus some plain old evangelising. The pricing for one thing was too expensive and should have more slabs (say starting from something like 10$ a month). $120/month is a serious commitment, expecially on something which might not really take of also. imho the new plan is extremely complex and there is really no reason why i would want a community to 'approve' of my new qna site. Just plain wrong at the roots wrong.

richardw 16y ago

All your (good) answers are belong to us. Here's the deal: SE sites either work, or don't. When they don't, they bring in $129 until the owner gets bored. When they do work, SE loses all the extra revenue they could be making if they owned it. This way, they get every extra advertising cent. Basically 'we can make more if we keep all the money in-house'.

chanux 16y ago

I see the gates opened up. I walk in. And see some other gates half the way.

netcan 16y ago

During this phase, people who are interested in a potential site are asked to electronically “sign” a commitment to help make the site a success. They are committing publicly to participate actively in the site, by asking questions, answering questions, developing a system of tags, and generally helping the site get off the ground. I really like this behavioural economics stuff that stackoverflow are in to. They should get Dan Ariely on their podcast.