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Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

The closing paragraph:

Spolsky says that the easiest way he's heard people explain the difference between Stack Overflow and old fashioned forums is that when you go to Stack Overflow, the right answer is at the top of the page. That's a charming way to put it and it's sure to be interesting to see the team that's assembled take a shot at building that kind of experience around other kinds of topics.

Now THAT is an elevator pitch: Stack Overflow is just like old fashioned forums, only when you go to Stack Overflow, the right answer is at the top of the page.

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That's correct. And the iPad is just a tablet notebook like the one from Microsoft in 2000.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2000/nov00/11-13...

And the iPhone is really just a cleaned up smart phone.

StackOverFlow took an old idea, cleaned it up and made a better product. Seems pretty simple after the fact.

Getting the small things right in a product really makes a big difference. StackOverFlow isn't perfect (and neither was the iPhone or iPad) but they got a good minimal viable product and now they're off to the races.

I'm all for Ries, Blanks, lean, mvp, etc. etc., but all the lean jargon is getting overused and abused.

It's not always at the top, though. Call it the reddit effect: sometimes the top-voted item is not the one that is the most informative, relevant or correct, but the one that appears so by virtue of being well written, backed by someone with sufficient karma, and clever enough to get upvotes. The asker may then mistakenly pick this as the accepted answer and the better but less hive-mind-friendly answers get pushed away.

When skimming the site I've occasionally seen better answers at the bottom of a page getting ignored while people shout about the top few answers. If I didn't know better, I would have ignored them too.

This happens a lot less on Stack Overflow than on reddit. The asker isn't supposed to accept the most popular answer, either. They're asking a question because they have a problem to solve. They should be testing solutions and accepting the one that works. I often see accepted answers with fewer upvotes than the most popular ones. The fact that both the most popular and the accepted answer are at the top of the screen is a nice feature of the site.

The asker may be testing out some of the answers, but in reality most of the problems to be solved during software development are about balancing tradeoffs, e.g. security vs. performance. The reason the best solution is the best may not become apparent for years, when the project needs to scale, changes hands, needs to upgrade, gets hacked, etc.

In such a case, how is the asker, lacking such experience, able to pick out the right answer except by number of upvotes? Same goes for anybody reading the page. I'm just saying a popularity-driven Q&A site has its drawbacks.

You're assuming that both the asker and the crowd are incompetent. No kind of Q&A site is going to produce good results under those conditions.

I'm not assuming that. I'm suggesting that certain answers may become more popular and rise to the top for reasons that have nothing to do with correctness. These include but are not limited to: the style in which the answer is written, the assertiveness/aggressiveness of the answer, the decision to include or not include sample code, the karma or reputation of the answerer, and the current vote count and visibility of the answer.

I think it is safe to assume that there is a gradient in experience among SO users and that for those on the lower end, votes may be more influenced by the issues I just listed than any standard of correctness. It's simple crowd psychology, and already well established at other voting sites like digg and reddit.

Digg and reddit aggregate links across a wide variety of topics and have a very diverse user base. Stack Overflow's focus is more narrow (much like that of Hacker News). The crowd is a lot more focused as a result. People are a lot less easily influenced by writing style than by correctness. (Try posting code that won't compile and see what happens.)

Yes, people are influenced by reputation and good writing on subjective questions, but those are discouraged on SO, and they don't really have one right answer anyway.

Stack Overflow is optimized for Q & A, while you can do more than just asking questions in a forum (i.e. actually making friends and building communities).

They are both great. Really, every forum should just have a Q & A section that implements Stack Overflow or use a similar widget.

Stack Overflow is about instant gratification. This isn't a bad thing. It's what it is. Another way to look at it is this way:

Stack Overflow gives a man a fish. Forums teach a man to fish.

Now, when you need a fish, you need a fish. You don't need to learn to fish. But in the long run, forums, and discussion, usually provide better value. This doesn't mean SO can't teach people. However, it doesn't encourage teaching. It's setup for questions and answers, not discussion.

Books aren't set up for discussion. I'm guessing that you think they aren't good for "fishing" either?

The basic idea with StackOverFlow is to ask well-defined questions and get well-defined answers, without the long messy threaded response found in most forums. The worst is when the thread ends in a dead end.

The wiki feature and the ability to include formated code are very useful. The reputation economy is essential, so more questions get answered, including older ones. What happens in a forum when no one answers a question? Ask again a few days later?

Also, they do have short discussions through comments, which I have found to be effective.

Finally, I think you, and many others, are completely missing the point of StackOverFlow, and hopefully other future sites like it. If say, for example, 100,000 people are learning [Lisp, Scala, Java, C++, Go, jQuery, C#, etc], they are going to have the a lot of similar questions that really only need to be asked once, with one or two solutions provided. Now the next 99,999 people don't need to ask the same question. So, now we have taken the FAQ and improved upon it by creating it dynamically through voting, and question matching.

There are various improvements that could be done to StackOverFlow. They are essentially creating a huge database of programming knowledge. Ideally it, or a similar project, could be organized to enable someone to start learning any new topic and become proficient by browsing and searching the site. Questions could be further categorized to enable better filtering (eg. Mac OS bug, compiler warning message, compiler error message), include specific version solutions (eg. Java 1.5, Java 1.6). A Rosetta Stone feature could be added linking solutions. For example, the question: "How do I reverse a string in [Java]?" could provide links to the Perl, C#, Java, Lisp, Scheme, Javascript solutions.

"I'm guessing that you think they aren't good for "fishing" either?"

I'm guessing you think being a smart-ass is effective?

"Books aren't set up for discussion."

No. Books are set for learning as well. Discussion isn't the only means for learning. IRC/Chat is the same way. You can learn with this as well.

"StackOverFlow is to ask well-defined questions and get well-defined answers"

Which is another way of saying what I said.

You then go one to promote several things that SO appears to do.

Reputation, for example, promotes answering questions. My experience is that the answer is succinct, and simple. It provides the answer, and that is good.

It provides the fish.

SO doesn't, however, encourage teaching. Even the setup is simple: ask a question, get an answer. The answer is most likely the answer that provides the quickest fish. Oh, you do find occasionally someone will provide a very thoughtful response, but this is the exception, not the norm for SO.

"Finally, I think you, and many others, are completely missing the point of StackOverFlow"

No, I haven't. My post that you replied to even said that what SO does it does well. You're just getting defensive, whipping insults, and for some reason, seem upset that someone wouldn't kneel down before the all might SO. I wouldn't be surprised if you are an Apple zealot.

My main contention is that SO is setup for providing answers to questions. It's not setup for discussion, or learning. SO's success is a result of human nature. People needing an answer go there, get the answer, and leave. They copy/paste and move on. That's the nature of SO. You can disagree, but you'd be wrong.

SO isn't bad. It provides fish. I love fish (tilapia is a good fish). It's a fish monger. It doesn't encourage providing bait, or tackle. Just look through the majority of answers that are rated highest. They provide code. Code someone can copy and paste. Sometimes they'll provide a link to the place someone can get code, or get a direct answer. Rarely is their discussion as to why someone is asking a question. This isn't encouraged. Answering a question with a question does't get you reputation. The reputation economy encourages answers.

I do want to address this:

"What happens in a forum when no one answers a question?"

I assume you actually mean when no one responds to a question. Answering a question is different from responding to one.

No response usually means no one is capable of answering the question. Rather than provide a half-assed answer for reputation, it simple goes unanswered.

However, no answer usually means the question is a poor one. If SO's great power is in answering questions like "Reversing strings", then it's really not tackling anything difficult. These questions get answered all the time. The questions that are more difficult, however, require discussion. When their is no direct answer. Indeed, suggesting that their is an answer (as SO does) hurts the discussion process. Suddenly, instead of learning, you read the Question, and the Answer, and assume that the Answer is the end of the discussion. It's THE Answer. But it's not. It's merely the one with the most votes.

So no, I'm right. SO gives fish. It doesn't teach fishing.

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