Steve Jones sent me a link to a presentation Joel Spolsky did at Google about Stack Overflow (SO) and it’s worth watching. It’s not a community – well, not a traditional one anyway – the goal is to provide answers to questions and beyond that, to make sure answers get updated as the world changes. If you’ve looked at things like Yahoo Answers they aren’t very good, what I’ve seen on SO so far looks very good. Like any eco system they’ve spent some time figuring out what drives good behavior and how to thwart bad behavior, and doing pretty good at it as far as I can tell. It’s a lot like a wiki to me, less formal and more active.
I mention SSC at the same time for a couple reasons. One is he references the site in his presentation – one as an example of ‘community’, then again as a site that requires a login to see the answers. So while SSC isn’t ‘mine’ exactly any more, I know enough about it to find it interesting to think about the options that might lead to a good result. Way back in the beginning we required registration for a few reasons:
I give you all that as background to come back to the point – is SO a better model than SSC? Or perhaps stated better, is a better forum model? People visit the SSC forums in droves to ask and answer questions, would they be better served by the SO model? I can see the beauty in searching for something and bam, there’s a single highly rated answer (followed by lesser rated ones), where on SSC you have to follow the thread to see it evolve. I think there’s value in following the thread. Some of it incidental learning, maybe a little bit is earning the answer! But I’m not sure it’s the best way.
I look at it from a couple perspectives. One, does it threaten SSC, SQLTeam, and other technical web sites? What happens if all the pros move there to answer questions? Does a new set of pros take over, or does everyone move to the new platform for questions/answers? If they do, is SSC still a community? If they don’t move…why not?
Take a look. I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts on community, forums, and all the rest.
I think it's a better forum model because it lets me go to one place and answer more questions that blur the lines between technologies. For example, before StackOverflow I wouldn't have answered forums in a C# or Java forum, but when C# or Java folks have questions that happen to cross over into SQL Server, now I can contribute. Questions can be tagged with multiple technologies, and the right guy to answer the question might be a SQL guy instead of a C# guy.
First a disclaimer that I am one of the more frequent posters on SSC and have spent little time on StackOverflow, but I have been there.
I think there are positive things about both. I do like the fact that you can vote up or vote down a solution in StackOverflow, although I don't appreciate the fact that I have to accumulate points to do comment on or vote on an answer. And as Brent mentions the tagging is nice.
Really StackOverflow is a forum, get me an answer and hopefully I'll get the best on fast, while SSC is more of a community with give and take and discussion.
I really only have time for 1 place and since I concentrate on SQL Server I choose SSC. I also like the community feel. That certainly doesn't mean I won't ever use StatckOverflow, for .NET questions I definitely would.
I answer some questions on ServerFault, more so than Stack Overflow, but I find it interesting as well. There doesn't seem to be a lot fo discussion over there, and I tend to agree with Jack. It's not a community, bu tit is interesting. We're debating if there are things there we can take to improve what we do here.
Perhaps a hybrid might serve you well, keep your forum model, but allow people to vote for posts in a thread. I believe this is what MSDN forums do and I find it affective when I'm scanning a thread after finding it via google.
Interesting.
I wonder how many questions are direct "how to" versus discussion type, and what would the impact be if you removed all the how to questions?
I think there are way, way more "how to" questions, but the discussions add some nice depth to the site. They engage people in ways that I don't see on Stack Overflow/SF.
There are also many questions that move into debate/discussion from a simple howto. SF/SO seems to discourage that.
