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 StackOverf

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.