Comment by justrudd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justrudd | Hacker News Reader

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I would consider my wife a foodie (a baker not a chef). I thought she might like the site (she enjoys answering questions about the recipes that she posts on her site). So I pointed her to it, showed her the basics, and left. Came back about 30 minutes later and she was trolling through other food blogs answering questions in comments.

She tried to up vote an answer and got the yellow box (Login or register). She ended up on the OpenID page and couldn't find where to put her e-mail or password. She has a GMail account, and I told her she could click on the "Google" icon.

She found the "Click here to sign up" link, but that just sent her to MyOpenID. A site she'd never heard of. And I've grilled it into her not to create accounts on sites she hasn't heard of or hasn't been recommended by someone or that she was redirected to.

So the site has some novice computer user problems. In my wife's defense, she is a great photographer, baker, and has several master's degrees in science (even worked at JPL for a bit on the Mars rover that burned up in the atmosphere). But she is a complete novice when it comes to computers. And the site turned her off in about 5 minutes.

I don't normally swear in Hacker News comments, but it is such a fucking tragedy that we still have this problem, especially on StackExchange sites owned by people like Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood who should really know better.

I'd like to make two points:

1. The majority of users will have a very specific interaction with the site: finding answers to specific questions via Google, and that's it. Most users have no interest in being part of a "community" around these topics.

2. I agree that OpenID as a requirement is annoying, it even stopped me from using the site for a long time. But Jeff and Joel are sticking to OpenID on principle, because they believe it is a better way of doing things. Can't really get mad at people who "sabotage" a bit of business to stand up for something they think is right.

I don't think it should be such a pain in the ass to register, even if the majority of users "have no interest" in being part of a community. How does making the sign up easy screw up the experience of those not wanting to sign up?

I too found registering with open id confusing. I actually searched around the web how my openid url should look like and pasted it in input box. It didn't occur to me that Google logo below might be a button that will do that for me.

Not to mention that when she does log in, she'll find out you can't upvote unless you have a certain amount of karma or whatever equivalent (that was my experience with the site).

I really liked that in Hacker News, being able to vote right from the start.

This is one of the big design problems IMO. Features that aren't usable should either be hidden or very obviously marked as disabled. The voting buttons are exactly the same for everyone, even though they're useless to most people. Whenever I find a new StackExchange site, I instinctively try to vote up good answers and get the annoying "You need more rep" popup.

StackExchange as a platform is going to face an uphill battle if they don't rethink their entire strategy.

The Area51 'vetting' process is an unnecessary barrier to creating new and interesting 'exchanges' (I guess it makes sense from a cost perspective), and they need to adjust the user experience for the non-geeky universe.

As they view it, it's not an unnecessary barrier. It's there for a few specific reasons: 1) Make sure there is enough interest to get the site going. 2) Build up momentum for the grand opening.

Don't forget, all these Stack Exchange sites are thought up by the community, but then deployed and paid for by Stack Exchange. They don't want hundreds of "ghost towns" around the web, they want to only create a new site if they think there's a reasonable chance it will grow into a site as vibrant as Stack Overflow. That's what the whole process is about. Time will tell if it's a good process.

Yes, they're paying for the infrastructure. That fact is not lost on me.

But think about the real costs. Assuming that they have a nice scalable multi-tenant design, a ghost town is not going to have a lot of content or users, which means only a small hit on their database. Yes, tons of ghost towns add up to significant costs, but that can be easily fixed with some simple rules around inactivity over a set period of time.

Wayne Gretzky famously said "You miss 100% of the shots you never take." StackExchange is taking a 'rifle' approach. More power to them. My own personal opinion is that a 'shotgun' approach could result in more successful sites than the one they're taking. Just my 2 cents.

They actually tried the "shotgun" approach first, but decided to move to this model earlier this year. They describe the reasons behind this here: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/04/changes-to-stack-excha...

I think this diagram sums it up great: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/wp-content/uploads/se2-venn-di...

That was a completely different strategy. Their proposed high prices had them wondering why nobody was biting.

I'm talking about a shotgun approach while going free.

Jeff has actually spoken about this a few times. The ghost sites do have a cost beyond just resources. The stack exchange format only really works when you get a certain critical mass of people to ask questions. They have found if you get people together and people ask questions then people will come to answer them. The trick is getting enough people together to start asking questions.

When you have an empty site and someone sees the last question was weeks or months ago they just browse away. Helping getting the community over that initial hurdle is important.

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