4 ms·

And that is bad why... ? :-) Actually there is a major class of problems people have where they are so stuck that they don't even know what question to ask on

by spolsky 16y ago

And that is bad why... ? :-) Actually there is a major class of problems people have where they are so stuck that they don't even know what question to ask on Stack Overflow. Being able to ask a question live, and get immediate feedback, and have a quick conversation with someone more knowledgeable than yourself, before (or instead of) asking a question on Stack Overflow, will allow programmers to get help with a whole new class of problems. And of course, that's in addition to the "social hang out" feature that chat provides to the Stack Overflow community.

smokinn 16y ago
Well it's "bad" because you lose easily findable history. One of the big things StackOverflow has going for it is permanence. Someone asks a question, gets an answer and then google indexes it for the next person who has the same problem. With the chat it will fix the problem for 1 person but the scalability of investing your time into an answer that could potentially help a lot of people over time is lost. Even if google indexes all of the chat conversations reading through a chat transcript looking for the answer is tedious.
- subbu 16y ago
  How about storing chat history as part of StackOverflow archives? This could solve the problem of findability. But then it might contain too much junk.
  - twymer 16y ago
    The problem is that SO wants their main source of incoming traffic to be from google. They want people to search for something they are trying to solve, and find an answer on SO from google. There's no way to expect that the SEO for chat archives could possible provide this.
- codinghorror 16y ago
  right, but since no reputation is ever gained from chat (you can only lose rep, in extreme cases) we don't think this will be a problem in practice. There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat.
  - bullseye 16y ago
    >> There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat. Is this a good thing? Personally, I don't know, nor would I care, how to implement a reputation system in chat. But I would hope that the answers in chat would be of the same caliber as the static questions.
  - AgentConundrum 16y ago
    There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat. Yes, there is. In fact, it's the same basic incentive that people have to answer questions on StackOverflow: to help people. The reputation system is a nice plus, but I'd hardly call it a deal breaker for it to be missing. In order to accept your premise, you would have to agree that there is a certain class of answerer who, when presented with a question in chat, would think to themselves "gee, I think I know how to help this guy, but I'd really rather not help him since I'm not getting quasi-meaningless points on a website". You've always said that the primary audience for StackOverflow is Google. The premise being that the site will accumulate a collection of good answers to common (and some uncommon) questions, so that the second person to ask that question won't have to. The impermanence of the chat system defeats this premise utterly. It's also odd to see you responding negatively to a comment (i.e. negatively towards questions in chat, not the commenter) when that comment was in response to Joel himself saying chat is the best medium to ask certain classes of problems.
  - bear 16y ago
    Perhaps folks interested in gaining more rep could harvest valuable questions and answers from chat and repost into the trilogy sites as a community service?

by spolsky 16y ago

smokinn 16y ago

Well it's "bad" because you lose easily findable history. One of the big things StackOverflow has going for it is permanence. Someone asks a question, gets an answer and then google indexes it for the next person who has the same problem. With the chat it will fix the problem for 1 person but the scalability of investing your time into an answer that could potentially help a lot of people over time is lost. Even if google indexes all of the chat conversations reading through a chat transcript looking for the answer is tedious.

subbu 16y ago
How about storing chat history as part of StackOverflow archives? This could solve the problem of findability. But then it might contain too much junk.
- twymer 16y ago
  The problem is that SO wants their main source of incoming traffic to be from google. They want people to search for something they are trying to solve, and find an answer on SO from google. There's no way to expect that the SEO for chat archives could possible provide this.
codinghorror 16y ago
right, but since no reputation is ever gained from chat (you can only lose rep, in extreme cases) we don't think this will be a problem in practice. There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat.
- bullseye 16y ago
  >> There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat. Is this a good thing? Personally, I don't know, nor would I care, how to implement a reputation system in chat. But I would hope that the answers in chat would be of the same caliber as the static questions.
- AgentConundrum 16y ago
  There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat. Yes, there is. In fact, it's the same basic incentive that people have to answer questions on StackOverflow: to help people. The reputation system is a nice plus, but I'd hardly call it a deal breaker for it to be missing. In order to accept your premise, you would have to agree that there is a certain class of answerer who, when presented with a question in chat, would think to themselves "gee, I think I know how to help this guy, but I'd really rather not help him since I'm not getting quasi-meaningless points on a website". You've always said that the primary audience for StackOverflow is Google. The premise being that the site will accumulate a collection of good answers to common (and some uncommon) questions, so that the second person to ask that question won't have to. The impermanence of the chat system defeats this premise utterly. It's also odd to see you responding negatively to a comment (i.e. negatively towards questions in chat, not the commenter) when that comment was in response to Joel himself saying chat is the best medium to ask certain classes of problems.
- bear 16y ago
  Perhaps folks interested in gaining more rep could harvest valuable questions and answers from chat and repost into the trilogy sites as a community service?