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91 points by bdfh42 18y ago

tdavis 18y ago
Already annoyed by it and all it took was some random clicking around: http://is.gd/2EPh http://is.gd/2EPh Apparently the "right" answer to this language-agnostic question is one that provides a single Ruby (surprise) alternative. Since when do opinions have correct answers? I would love to see great things from Stack Overflow, but I would be surprised if it turns out to provide better answers than can be found by googling and reading mailing list archives -- or at least better answers that are consistently marked as such (or not marked at all, depending on the situation). Introducing voting doesn't magically mean the "good" stuff floats to the top. Edit: Oh, and people are already "trolling for reputation" as evidenced by a single question having 10 of the same exact answer. I thought this is what voting was going to "solve?" sigh
- kylec 18y ago
  Usually the duplicate answers happen in unison. If it's an easy question, there are usually around 5 answers posted simultaneously. If this happens, you're usually supposed to delete your answer if you see a better one, but as you can imagine there are different criteria used to determine which answer is better. Ultimately this is solved by the voting and answer selection by the asker.
- omouse 18y ago
  That answer is wrong too because Beautiful Soup also exists for Ruby: http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/ http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/
  - philf 18y ago
    If you read the Rubyful Soup web site you would've noticed that it's unmaintained and the author recommends hpricot.
    - omouse 18y ago
      Unmaintained doesn't mean the library is bad.
tialys 18y ago
Ugh... I know it's a site for programmers, but would it have broken the budget to hire a designer? I can't tell what anything is at first glance and it all looks jumbled to me.
- adamc 18y ago
  Had exactly the same response.
  - greyman 18y ago
    I think the design is OK.
- kylec 18y ago
  They did: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/stack-overflow-beta-design/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/stack-overflow-beta-de...
- jrockway 18y ago
  Your dislike of the design does not necessarily mean that a designer was not consulted.
  - tel 18y ago
    Feels like it does mean the designer did not do a good job since I'm sure much of the YC crowd is more or less the core audience for Stack Overflow.
    - jrockway 18y ago
      Are you sure about that? I haven't asked a programming question (in public) for a number of years. I am too lazy to sit and wait for someone to tell me how to solve my problem when I could discover the solution on my own. I assume that most people here are like that. (Otherwise they would be on Reddit instead ;)
      - 18y ago
michael_dorfman 18y ago
I was amused by the contrast between (on the one hand) Joel's long list of instructions and "how-to" hints in his blog post, and (on the other hand) the seeming absence of instructions/guidance on the site itself. (The guidance is actually there if you dig around far enough, but it sure doesn't look that way to a casual user.) I also find it interesting that you apparently need 15 reputation points before you can upvote, which means you have to successfully answer one or more questions. In practice, this means that a drive-by/first-time user can't use their expertise to choose the best answer among the existing set, but have to chime in with a (most likely redundant) answer first, which seems counter-productive.
- kylec 18y ago
  The threshold is to prevent bots from upvoting stuff. It requires a minimal amount of participation that can easily be achieved by a simple answer or question.
  - wensing 18y ago
    This is a bit of a meta comment, but I find this sort of response to feedback to be counterproductive. Don't defend/justify the way the system works or why it works the way it does. Read between the lines and find a way to satisfy the customer.
    - mechanical_fish 18y ago
      Don't defend/justify the way the system works or why it works the way it does. Read between the lines and find a way to satisfy the customer. That might be good advice if the customer contacts you one-on-one. But when the customer posts their complaint to a message board that's read by thousands of third parties, it's helpful to put up an explanation of why the system was designed the way it was. Otherwise I, who have never used the service and am just skimming this thread, might come away with the wrong impression. It's important to avoid getting into a flamewar with your customers, but pointing out the rationale behind your design decisions isn't necessarily offensive. Yes, it's not what the complainer really wants to see, but it is what I, the silent reader of the thread, want to see. And people like me outnumber the original complainer N to 1.
subbu 18y ago
I don't know why some users are saying the design is not good. I found it to be pretty neat and clutter less. It doesn't come in the way.
- bmj 18y ago
  I don't find it terrible, but I think the question text on the main page could be larger than the Votes/Answers information. I mean, isn't the question more important the number of votes or answers? I'm not scanning the home page for the question with the most votes or answers.
  - silentbicycle 18y ago
    Or, from another angle: What kind of effect will making the number of votes, answers, and views more prominent than the question have on the site? Will it encourage gaming the system / posting for points rather than to be helpful?
- jrockway 18y ago
  In my opinion, the colors don't look good together, and the main page is way too busy. Tags have too much emphasis. (Reddit does the same thing, and it's ugly there too.) Anyway, I am not the target demographic, so my opinion really doesn't matter.
- bayareaguy 18y ago
  Compare Hacker News - http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Picture1a.png http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Pict... With Stack Overflow - http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Picture2a.png http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Pict... In Tufte-speak, Stack Overflow clearly has a much lower data/ink ratio and way too much chart junk.
  - subbu 18y ago
    Interesting classification. But I wouldn't put the answer/view count in crap. Otherwise there is no way of judging/weighing the answers and its usefulness.
coglethorpe 18y ago
Sure, my search results for answers to programming questions have turned up dubious results from time to time, but usually my answer is on the first page. Occasionally I'll have to refine my query and find the answer on my second attempt. With that in mind, I'm not sure how much better this new site is going to be.
- baha_man 18y ago
  '...usually my answer is on the first page' The founders intend that eventually the answer you're looking for will show up as a stackoverflow.com question in the first page of Google results. They get more advertising revenue, the purported benefits to their users are: * You don't have to pay or even register to use the site (unlike Experts Exchange). * If an answer goes out of date (e.g. it only applies to the beta version) it can be updated. * You can always add your own comments (not all blogs allow comments). * If you manage to solve some tricky problem yourself, you can easily publish the information to help others (not everyone has their own blog).
- queensnake 18y ago
  Especially if you look in the right usenet group.
axod 18y ago
Sure seems to be quite a lot of microsoft/windows/.net there right now.
- swilliams 18y ago
  Well, all of the founds are pretty heavy MS based; same with their audiences. I believe that joelonsoftware's .NET questions group was going to shutdown and forward all the users to here too. I did find some decent Non-Windows questions in there, but there could be more.
- StrawberryFrog 18y ago
  Yup. The reason for this is that the site usage has been ramped up with private invites etc. The makers are well-known.net pundits, so the people that have been following thier activity and signing up are too. Now they're ready to let the general public in, so if you want your favourite environment/tool/language represented, get on in there. If you don't want to get in there, stop complaining.
  - axod 18y ago
    It was just an observation, not a complaint :)
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
calvin 18y ago
Somehow tags don't seem to be the best way to organize this type of question asking and information gathering. They're certainly helpful for searching and gathering semantic data, but I'd find it much more useful to see the site have "sections" for different programming languages a la C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.
- kaens 18y ago
  In this specific case, the tagging works out a lot like "sections" anyhow - I do believe that most of the questions are language-specific, and that if you go browse the tags, most of the ones with a lot of questions are language tags. The tags-as-sections thing breaks down when you get a little more abstract than "x language", as the tags used will be ambiguous (people can retag stuff though, so that's something of a moderation system).
  - calvin 18y ago
    The difficulty comes in having to browse through the hundred popular tags to find one specific language tag where you want to ask a question or provide help to people. Granted, it's not that hard to do, but it's not optimal from a usability perspective. For instance, PHP wasn't listed in the popular tags even though it's one of the top ten most popular programming languages (http://www.langpop.com/ http://www.langpop.com/). To find this tag, I had to click Tags, search for PHP, and click PHP.
    - kaens 18y ago
      That is true, although for asking questions you can just tag it as the language. Php probably wasn't listed in the popular tags due partially to the windows/.NET tendency of the site, and the tendency of the people participating in the beta to be the type that doesn't like php.
liuliu 18y ago
Voting is good. for most part, people are just to lazy to give a comment(me,too!). So, web 2.0 sites developed such voting and poking things to get us out of typing.
jrockway 18y ago
Add .NET to the list of languages whose libraries don't work with my OpenID. (So far, only the Perl libraries seem to support delegation. Considering how widely-documented delegation is, this really surprises me. It's a conspiracy, I tell ya.)
- bct 18y ago
  It's got no problem with my OpenID, which is delegated <http://necronomicorp.com/bct> http://necronomicorp.com/bct>.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    Very interesting. I ( http://jrock.us http://jrock.us ) seem to have an X-XRDS-Location http-equiv header, whereas you don't. I'm not sure why extra information would prevent it from working with some sites (and not others). I will investigate... thanks for the info.
jobeirne 18y ago
I was under the impression that most people understood pure democracy is doomed from the start. Guess not.
tzury 18y ago
As a consumer, I will keep asking Google all my questions. If they will appear at the top 5, they might get a visit.
tlrobinson 18y ago
I'm not sure I'll be a regular user of Stack Overflow, but I do hope they replace Experts Exchange as the top search hits for all my random programming questions.
- kalid 18y ago
  Agreed. Tip for experts exchange: just scroll to the very bottom of the page. The answers appear in plain text. (The hard way is to change your user-agent to a search crawler... they need to display the text to somebody ).
  - andreyf 18y ago
    The hard way is to change your user-agent to a search crawler Google would delist them if they did that. Google indexes the text on the bottom of the page, the rest of the page is images.
mattchew 18y ago
I am excited to see how this works as social software. I hate "karma" systems in discussion forums. As soon as you introduce karma points, your forum is now dual purposed, part for the original intent (say, discussing Hacker News) and part for playing the karma game. I accept that karma points are at least a known working solution to spammers and trolls. But if it wasn't for that, I'd much rather read a conversation without the built in popularity contest. At stackoverflow, they've turned that all on its head. When I read the reputation rules (see the unofficial FAQ) I thought, "this is all karma game". And then I thought a little more and realized that for the purpose of the site, that might work perfectly. If the guy with the question is the one who hands out the karma, the incentives of the guy and the karma gamer are nicely aligned. Very clever. I saw someone talking about the closed beta, and he described it as "fun". Well, that sounded strange, but now I believe it. Jeff and Joel turned karma gaming into an actual game, with the incidental effect of generating good answers to technical questions.
subbu 18y ago
I wish there was another feature. Store my favorite q/a threads within my profile. Delicious doesn't cut for these kind of bookmarks.
halo 18y ago
I had a quick play with the design using Greasemonkey, and I think it's much more readable by increasing the page-width and standardising the font-sizes. The script is a little slow but shows that with only a bit of work the site's design could be improved dramatically. I'd have liked to expand the banner at the top, but sadly it's a table so a pain to work with. Screenshot: http://img391.imageshack.us/my.php?image=stackunderflower9.png http://img391.imageshack.us/my.php?image=stackunderflower9.p... Link to script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33804 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33804
acesamped 18y ago
I like how you took an idea that was semi-out there, molded it, made it free, and tossed it out there. genius. I think the best thing you guys did with stack overflow was to give the community so much potential power. bravo.

91 points by bdfh42 18y ago

Already annoyed by it and all it took was some random clicking around: http://is.gd/2EPh http://is.gd/2EPh Apparently the "right" answer to this language-agnostic question is one that provides a single Ruby (surprise) alternative. Since when do opinions have correct answers? I would love to see great things from Stack Overflow, but I would be surprised if it turns out to provide better answers than can be found by googling and reading mailing list archives -- or at least better answers that are consistently marked as such (or not marked at all, depending on the situation). Introducing voting doesn't magically mean the "good" stuff floats to the top. Edit: Oh, and people are already "trolling for reputation" as evidenced by a single question having 10 of the same exact answer. I thought this is what voting was going to "solve?" sigh

kylec 18y ago
Usually the duplicate answers happen in unison. If it's an easy question, there are usually around 5 answers posted simultaneously. If this happens, you're usually supposed to delete your answer if you see a better one, but as you can imagine there are different criteria used to determine which answer is better. Ultimately this is solved by the voting and answer selection by the asker.
omouse 18y ago
That answer is wrong too because Beautiful Soup also exists for Ruby: http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/ http://www.crummy.com/software/RubyfulSoup/
- philf 18y ago
  If you read the Rubyful Soup web site you would've noticed that it's unmaintained and the author recommends hpricot.
  - omouse 18y ago
    Unmaintained doesn't mean the library is bad.

tialys 18y ago

Ugh... I know it's a site for programmers, but would it have broken the budget to hire a designer? I can't tell what anything is at first glance and it all looks jumbled to me.

adamc 18y ago
Had exactly the same response.
- greyman 18y ago
  I think the design is OK.
kylec 18y ago
They did: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/stack-overflow-beta-design/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/stack-overflow-beta-de...
jrockway 18y ago
Your dislike of the design does not necessarily mean that a designer was not consulted.
- tel 18y ago
  Feels like it does mean the designer did not do a good job since I'm sure much of the YC crowd is more or less the core audience for Stack Overflow.
  - jrockway 18y ago
    Are you sure about that? I haven't asked a programming question (in public) for a number of years. I am too lazy to sit and wait for someone to tell me how to solve my problem when I could discover the solution on my own. I assume that most people here are like that. (Otherwise they would be on Reddit instead ;)
    - 18y ago

michael_dorfman 18y ago

I was amused by the contrast between (on the one hand) Joel's long list of instructions and "how-to" hints in his blog post, and (on the other hand) the seeming absence of instructions/guidance on the site itself. (The guidance is actually there if you dig around far enough, but it sure doesn't look that way to a casual user.) I also find it interesting that you apparently need 15 reputation points before you can upvote, which means you have to successfully answer one or more questions. In practice, this means that a drive-by/first-time user can't use their expertise to choose the best answer among the existing set, but have to chime in with a (most likely redundant) answer first, which seems counter-productive.

kylec 18y ago
The threshold is to prevent bots from upvoting stuff. It requires a minimal amount of participation that can easily be achieved by a simple answer or question.
- wensing 18y ago
  This is a bit of a meta comment, but I find this sort of response to feedback to be counterproductive. Don't defend/justify the way the system works or why it works the way it does. Read between the lines and find a way to satisfy the customer.
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    Don't defend/justify the way the system works or why it works the way it does. Read between the lines and find a way to satisfy the customer. That might be good advice if the customer contacts you one-on-one. But when the customer posts their complaint to a message board that's read by thousands of third parties, it's helpful to put up an explanation of why the system was designed the way it was. Otherwise I, who have never used the service and am just skimming this thread, might come away with the wrong impression. It's important to avoid getting into a flamewar with your customers, but pointing out the rationale behind your design decisions isn't necessarily offensive. Yes, it's not what the complainer really wants to see, but it is what I, the silent reader of the thread, want to see. And people like me outnumber the original complainer N to 1.

subbu 18y ago

I don't know why some users are saying the design is not good. I found it to be pretty neat and clutter less. It doesn't come in the way.

bmj 18y ago
I don't find it terrible, but I think the question text on the main page could be larger than the Votes/Answers information. I mean, isn't the question more important the number of votes or answers? I'm not scanning the home page for the question with the most votes or answers.
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  Or, from another angle: What kind of effect will making the number of votes, answers, and views more prominent than the question have on the site? Will it encourage gaming the system / posting for points rather than to be helpful?
jrockway 18y ago
In my opinion, the colors don't look good together, and the main page is way too busy. Tags have too much emphasis. (Reddit does the same thing, and it's ugly there too.) Anyway, I am not the target demographic, so my opinion really doesn't matter.
bayareaguy 18y ago
Compare Hacker News - http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Picture1a.png http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Pict... With Stack Overflow - http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Picture2a.png http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Pict... In Tufte-speak, Stack Overflow clearly has a much lower data/ink ratio and way too much chart junk.
- subbu 18y ago
  Interesting classification. But I wouldn't put the answer/view count in crap. Otherwise there is no way of judging/weighing the answers and its usefulness.

coglethorpe 18y ago

Sure, my search results for answers to programming questions have turned up dubious results from time to time, but usually my answer is on the first page. Occasionally I'll have to refine my query and find the answer on my second attempt. With that in mind, I'm not sure how much better this new site is going to be.

baha_man 18y ago
'...usually my answer is on the first page' The founders intend that eventually the answer you're looking for will show up as a stackoverflow.com question in the first page of Google results. They get more advertising revenue, the purported benefits to their users are: * You don't have to pay or even register to use the site (unlike Experts Exchange). * If an answer goes out of date (e.g. it only applies to the beta version) it can be updated. * You can always add your own comments (not all blogs allow comments). * If you manage to solve some tricky problem yourself, you can easily publish the information to help others (not everyone has their own blog).
queensnake 18y ago
Especially if you look in the right usenet group.

axod 18y ago

Sure seems to be quite a lot of microsoft/windows/.net there right now.

swilliams 18y ago
Well, all of the founds are pretty heavy MS based; same with their audiences. I believe that joelonsoftware's .NET questions group was going to shutdown and forward all the users to here too. I did find some decent Non-Windows questions in there, but there could be more.
StrawberryFrog 18y ago
Yup. The reason for this is that the site usage has been ramped up with private invites etc. The makers are well-known.net pundits, so the people that have been following thier activity and signing up are too. Now they're ready to let the general public in, so if you want your favourite environment/tool/language represented, get on in there. If you don't want to get in there, stop complaining.
- axod 18y ago
  It was just an observation, not a complaint :)
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]

calvin 18y ago

Somehow tags don't seem to be the best way to organize this type of question asking and information gathering. They're certainly helpful for searching and gathering semantic data, but I'd find it much more useful to see the site have "sections" for different programming languages a la C++, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.

kaens 18y ago
In this specific case, the tagging works out a lot like "sections" anyhow - I do believe that most of the questions are language-specific, and that if you go browse the tags, most of the ones with a lot of questions are language tags. The tags-as-sections thing breaks down when you get a little more abstract than "x language", as the tags used will be ambiguous (people can retag stuff though, so that's something of a moderation system).
- calvin 18y ago
  The difficulty comes in having to browse through the hundred popular tags to find one specific language tag where you want to ask a question or provide help to people. Granted, it's not that hard to do, but it's not optimal from a usability perspective. For instance, PHP wasn't listed in the popular tags even though it's one of the top ten most popular programming languages (http://www.langpop.com/ http://www.langpop.com/). To find this tag, I had to click Tags, search for PHP, and click PHP.
  - kaens 18y ago
    That is true, although for asking questions you can just tag it as the language. Php probably wasn't listed in the popular tags due partially to the windows/.NET tendency of the site, and the tendency of the people participating in the beta to be the type that doesn't like php.

liuliu 18y ago

Voting is good. for most part, people are just to lazy to give a comment(me,too!). So, web 2.0 sites developed such voting and poking things to get us out of typing.

jrockway 18y ago

Add .NET to the list of languages whose libraries don't work with my OpenID. (So far, only the Perl libraries seem to support delegation. Considering how widely-documented delegation is, this really surprises me. It's a conspiracy, I tell ya.)

bct 18y ago
It's got no problem with my OpenID, which is delegated <http://necronomicorp.com/bct> http://necronomicorp.com/bct>.
- jrockway 18y ago
  Very interesting. I ( http://jrock.us http://jrock.us ) seem to have an X-XRDS-Location http-equiv header, whereas you don't. I'm not sure why extra information would prevent it from working with some sites (and not others). I will investigate... thanks for the info.

jobeirne 18y ago

I was under the impression that most people understood pure democracy is doomed from the start. Guess not.

tzury 18y ago

As a consumer, I will keep asking Google all my questions. If they will appear at the top 5, they might get a visit.

tlrobinson 18y ago

I'm not sure I'll be a regular user of Stack Overflow, but I do hope they replace Experts Exchange as the top search hits for all my random programming questions.

kalid 18y ago
Agreed. Tip for experts exchange: just scroll to the very bottom of the page. The answers appear in plain text. (The hard way is to change your user-agent to a search crawler... they need to display the text to somebody ).
- andreyf 18y ago
  The hard way is to change your user-agent to a search crawler Google would delist them if they did that. Google indexes the text on the bottom of the page, the rest of the page is images.

mattchew 18y ago

I am excited to see how this works as social software. I hate "karma" systems in discussion forums. As soon as you introduce karma points, your forum is now dual purposed, part for the original intent (say, discussing Hacker News) and part for playing the karma game. I accept that karma points are at least a known working solution to spammers and trolls. But if it wasn't for that, I'd much rather read a conversation without the built in popularity contest. At stackoverflow, they've turned that all on its head. When I read the reputation rules (see the unofficial FAQ) I thought, "this is all karma game". And then I thought a little more and realized that for the purpose of the site, that might work perfectly. If the guy with the question is the one who hands out the karma, the incentives of the guy and the karma gamer are nicely aligned. Very clever. I saw someone talking about the closed beta, and he described it as "fun". Well, that sounded strange, but now I believe it. Jeff and Joel turned karma gaming into an actual game, with the incidental effect of generating good answers to technical questions.

subbu 18y ago

I wish there was another feature. Store my favorite q/a threads within my profile. Delicious doesn't cut for these kind of bookmarks.

halo 18y ago

I had a quick play with the design using Greasemonkey, and I think it's much more readable by increasing the page-width and standardising the font-sizes. The script is a little slow but shows that with only a bit of work the site's design could be improved dramatically. I'd have liked to expand the banner at the top, but sadly it's a table so a pain to work with. Screenshot: http://img391.imageshack.us/my.php?image=stackunderflower9.png http://img391.imageshack.us/my.php?image=stackunderflower9.p... Link to script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33804 http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33804

acesamped 18y ago

I like how you took an idea that was semi-out there, molded it, made it free, and tossed it out there. genius. I think the best thing you guys did with stack overflow was to give the community so much potential power. bravo.