StackOverflow launches chat | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow launches chat

chat.stackoverflow.com

112 pointsspolsky76 comments

I think SO chat could be to irc as SO itself is to Usenet or Usenet-style mail lists. When I first started programming, I asked questions on mail lists. I learned a ton this way (perl-beginners was especially good), but some lists had a lot of rules and some very, very type-A regulars: no top posting, give exact error messages, read the FAQ first, etc. None of these rules were necessarily unreasonable or unfair, but there was an inordinate amount of time spent telling new folks all the rules they were breaking: "The boilerplate disclaimer at the bottom of your email is longer than four lines. Signatures and bottom matter may only be four lines or less. Do not write to this list again until you...." Irc in my experience can be similar (just a few weeks ago, I had someone barking one-word commands at me on irc, because I was asking a question incorrectly).

By contrast, SO is relatively frictionless. There is some fussing about tags and which site to ask on, but for the most part, you ask and you get an answer. Less rules. I suspect that SO chat could be similarly frictionless, in comparison to irc.

FWIW, It's easy to come to this conclusion about any 'new' 'fresh' 'empty' medium.

The reason people bark one word commands on IRC, and often treat n00bs with contempt is just that IRC is so damn big and busy. Millions of people use it daily. Millions of questions/answers/conversations flow through it daily. But, it's still the best (IMHO) way to get instant contact with geniuses, and instant answers to your questions. Tech giants hang out on IRC and you can immediately (And without having to signup or get reputation points) chat with them.

So 'SO chat' could be a great medium to get answers.... until it gets big.

I concur. The userbase of IRC and StackOverflow is going to be fairly similar, I'd imagine.

You must have 20 reputation on Stack Overflow to talk here.

I guess I'll be sticking to IRC.

I think that minimal barrier to entry is a good idea. Because chatting is associated with SO accounts and there a minimum rep requirement (albeit a very small one), it will be much easier to keep spammers out of the chat.

But I'm not a spammer!

I don't doubt it's effectiveness at keeping spammers out. But when building a spam filter you also have to keep in mind the false positive rate. By excluding anyone who don't have the time or inclination to spend time grinding for rep on SO, they're excluding a great deal of knowledgable people.

You could get 20 rep with 5-10 minutes of effort. I think that's an acceptable barrier.

I disagree. 20 rep is about 5 or 6 good answers, depending on how lucky you are and how popular your technology of choice is. How many people are going to put in that much effort just so that they can use a chatroom?

How is it 5-6 "good" answers? You get 10 rep per up vote. I'd imagine any "good" answer would get at least 1 vote, so I would say 2 answers, 3 at max.

If they aren't willing to answer or ask a question to use a chat room structured around answering and asking questions, I think I'm okay with the situation.

You must have a strange definition of "good" or only answer questions about the most obscure topics imaginable (more obscure than, say, the practical applications of functional zippers). Your numbers would require an average of 0.3 upvotes per good answer and they assume that not a single answer is accepted. If you average one upvote per answer, two would be sufficient. If an answer is accepted, that automatically puts you over 20 rep.

Two upvotes or one accepted answer is enough. You don't get 1 karma per upvote as on HN.

FWIW, that rep-to-answer ratio is far from my experience; though I don't know the site-wide average, and I mostly posted over a year ago.

I'm not saying it's not too much of a hassle -- of course that's up to you.

I have 21 rep with 1 answer and 1 question....

You're essentially proving that the rep requirement is valid because if you're not interested enough to answer a few questions, the chat probably isn't for you.

Even a couple of mediocre questions can get you 20 points on SO. Something as fundamental as "Why is this pointer returning an address in memory instead of a value?" will get you upvoted at least a few times.

Yeah, some of their barriers to entry on certain pieces of functionality are a little annoying for genuine new users.

Fortunately, on the functions that matter, they blow their competition out of the water. Before SO came around, I dreaded seeing Experts Exchange links in my search results.

Given how long SO has been around, however, I would value a UI refresh over chat.

Yeah, the expert sex change site has NEVER gotten me to sign up. There is one site though that has links to being able to chat with "a real lawyer", "a real doctor" etc. in realtime, and that is very tempting. Especially when their ad is exactly on an article where you need to find something out. What about that?

You can get 20 rep by asking or answering a single — literally, one — half-decent question. My last answer (a few days ago, so I'm not exactly grinding) netted me 90 rep. Alan Kay has 2,429 rep from one answer and one question.

I would estimate that there's a vanishingly small number of people who are completely unhelpful in Q&A but would be fabulously knowledgeable in chat. I mean, there's you, but I just don't suppose there are that many others. If it keeps out every spammer and blocks three people who would legitimately be helpful, that's probably the best filter ever.

> "You can get 20 rep by asking or answering a single — literally, one — half-decent question"

So what you're saying, is that any spambot could thwart the system easily, and the arbitrary restriction is silly, and mainly just means this will not take off beyond fanatical SO users (Which is fine, if that's their aim).

IRC has developed fantastic ways to keep out spammers and idiots. And the methods don't usually involve things like this.

No, I'm not saying that. In practice, AFAIK no spambot has ever acquired more than 2 rep. Spam is flagged really fast, and it's also downvoted at an astonishing rate. I imagine it would be possible for a spambot to thwart the system, but it would be pretty hard, actually. It would require a much greater degree of agility and coordination than spambots tend to have.

For perspective, it would be far easier to spam the front page of Hacker News, and yet most people agree that HN's system works pretty well.

So if you're new and want to use this chat you have to:

* Log in.

* Find a question that you can answer, or post one.

* Wait and hope you get some points.

In the same amount of time you could have already hopped on IRC and received an answer.

I think you're not considering the possibility that this chat is specifically for the Stack Overflow community, not for people who have no interest whatsoever in Stack Overflow. Your complaint is like saying, "HN wants me to register to comment? Screw that noise, I'll just hop on IRC and comment there!" You're perfectly welcome to do that — but you still have to register to comment on HN. Different communities have different and often somewhat arbitrary standards.

It seems pretty good as far as things like this go, and I'm sure it'll do ok, but a big part of anything like this is network effects: people go where other people are.

My guess is that SO is currently big enough to attract viable communities for several of these "channels", but that many others will end up as ghost towns, and that, overall, IRC will continue to be 'bigger' for real time chat. It's probably a big enough space that this can be successful in its own right, even if it's not huge, although I think I will tend to prefer IRC.

Also, signing up for HN is way faster than having to ask/answer a question.

Not to be rude, but StackOverflow is a Q&A site. Why would you not just ask the question you had there instead of trying to answer questions to make it to the chat rooms?

You'd probably get enough reputation from that question to be able to ask your next one on the chat rooms if you wished.

We were talking about the chat, not SO as a Q&A site, which is something it does quite well - much better than IRC for some things.

I went on IRC countless time to get answers, and depending on what, when and where you ask questions, the answer ratio is really low. Think about it, some pretty good people are camping on IRC, but sometime they are going to sleep. SO is asynchronous by nature and there is a real motivation for people to formulate good answers and good questions. SO is the resume of the future!

You might not be a spammer, but you're also not part of the community. 20 points is a very low barrier to entry. Why don't you add your knowledge to SO and worry about Chat later?

Two measly upvotes? You'd only need to post one reasonable answer somewhere.

It's really easy to get a couple of hundreds rep points on SO. You should, just in case you need to post there :)

What I find funny is how in the beginning Jeff Atwood resisted all of these "social" features like discussion sites and official chat channels because it was all about asking and answering questions. And he wanted to build a community around that. What he didn't realize is that a community is defined by those "social" features. Experts Exchange doesn't have a community because they don't foster the social aspect of the experience.

At least Jeff realizes that to build a community, you need to let the community engage itself and has eased up on his "no social features" stance.

Still needs direct messages. When someone wants to message me apropos of nothing they do so by commenting on an answer of mine chosen at random.

Exactly. And they also need the dreaded discussion FORUMS....for some topics, they are appropriate.

The animations are insufferable. Why does everything have to fade and squish and move?

because that's web 2.0 baby!

Not everything squishes.

Okay, but if it doesn't squish, it probably flies around the page :)

This is kind of cool. My major concern is that everyone would be quick to go to chat and ask the question instead of posting a question. I mean, we all want instant gratification, so why wouldn't we use chat?

There may be some loss in the questions column, but probably not so much. As it is, irc exists and so does SO (and obviously there are other ways to get help beyond those two).

I still use both irc and SO, but for different things. I tend to go to SO if I have a specific question, but it's relatively contained, concrete and non-trivial. If I have a smaller question and Google fails me, I'll pop into irc and try there. If the question is larger (needs more setup to ask, for example), I go to SO first. At the same time, if the question is very open-ended I go to irc, since I find SO can somewhat unwelcoming towards open-ended, vaguer questions. (As an example of that, I'm working on a cli grading program in Ruby, and I'm having a hard time deciding the big questions: what goes where, which things are classes, how to store, extract and calculate the data. I spent about half an hour last weekend in irc with some random stranger who was kind enough to bounce ideas around. irc can also sometimes suck for vague questions, but sometimes it works.)

Good point, I still see a ton of questions on SO like, "How do I add two numbers in teh PHP?", which seem to get both upvoted and replied to a lot because hey it's easy karma. Chat is the perfect place for this kind of stuff, because a) most new programmers I would hazard don't know about IRC, b) you can help clarify a poorly or sparsely worded question quickly in chat and c) it will hopefully decrease the dross on the front page.

And another nice thing is that if you're in chat and a question is just too big or too detailed (or you just don't want to deal with it) you can always just tell the person "go post this question."

I think this would reduce a lot of the drive-by chat noise.

SO is kind of unwelcoming to that sort of thing, but the format of SO is just not well-suited to open-ended questions, or anything requiring more than a few words of discussion. The limits on replies and unpredictable order of answers make it frustrating.

Not to knock chat, but most of the questions I ask during the work week are answered within 5-10 minutes. It's only on weekends when I notice the turnaround is longer.

How is this better than IRC?

I haven't used IRC in years, so it may have changed, but the big wins:

* Stateful server. When you enter a room, you immediately see the conversation that has been going on there. That means it's possible to have conversations that are long-spanning (more like email) because you don't necessarily have to see replies scrolling by

* Integration with Stack Overflow accounts and reputation. Bad behavior is almost completely eliminated thanks to the tie in to the reputation system (you need some rep on Stack Overflow to chat, for example)

* Super slick user interface. You have to see it to believe it. Try it for a while and see.

FWIW, the guy behind mibbit.com has a partial solution to the 'stateful server' problem for IRC. In some ways though it's not a problem: it keeps things more informal. I think the ideal thing might be to get a little bit of history when you join.

The reputation thing is both a positive and a negative. It's going to be a barrier to entry for some people - both good apples and bad. Hard to know the ratio...

The interface is nice, but I like my IRC client too.

Its focused on the already established community of SO users - and it exists in the same place people are already hanging out answering questions. Plus the chat logs are being stored and made available the same way all the commons Q&A data is - I just think it'll turn out to be more and more valuable as they improve on it.

CODE BLOCKS! It has code blocks!!!!!!!!!!

No more pasting @ nomorepasting.com

EDIT: Well you do have to go to gist to post code but it does INLINE it into the chat!!!

With few exceptions, the midrange karma scored ServerFault users eschew more misinformation or guesswork than fact. One poster necroed a thread that was 13 months old and posted information that hasn't been true since the early days of Mysql 4.x. I debated whether it was worth correcting the post.

The barrier to entry should be karma < 50 or karma > 9000. Oddly, StackOverflow's userbase is considerably more accurate, but, the median range karma scored user generally has been upvoted and given points that don't correspond to skill or knowledge, but, answers posted by those higher karma users, correct or not are valued more highly.

Once someone figures out how to get people to answer accurately without having to receive the +1 carrot, then you'll have a community worth contributing to. Right now, all you need to do on SF/SO is answer first, answer often and use technical jargon.

Will be great once http://github.com/ghewgill/soirc is complete.

Very cool, I'm tempted to lurk in one of these rooms all day.

It'd be very cool if the chat rooms also displayed an auto-updating list of related questions to the side. For example, if you're sitting in the Ruby room and someone posts a question to StackOverflow with the `ruby` tag, a link to the question would appear in in this list.

Another cool idea would be a way for people to turn their chat questions into real questions on StackOverflow. Obviously copying and pasting works just fine, but I think a built-in feature could improve upon it. And it might be a way to give people reputation for helping others via chat.

The creator of the room can set various feeds which show up as comments in the room. You can do exactly the thing you describe by clicking the Ruby tag, grabbing the RSS feed and selecting it as a feed for the room.

An IRC bridge would be nice, since all my other dev chat rooms are on IRC.

Certainly a cool idea, but doesn't this distract from people posting new questions on the site?

And that is bad why... ? :-)

Actually there is a major class of problems people have where they are so stuck that they don't even know what question to ask on Stack Overflow. Being able to ask a question live, and get immediate feedback, and have a quick conversation with someone more knowledgeable than yourself, before (or instead of) asking a question on Stack Overflow, will allow programmers to get help with a whole new class of problems.

And of course, that's in addition to the "social hang out" feature that chat provides to the Stack Overflow community.

Well it's "bad" because you lose easily findable history.

One of the big things StackOverflow has going for it is permanence. Someone asks a question, gets an answer and then google indexes it for the next person who has the same problem.

With the chat it will fix the problem for 1 person but the scalability of investing your time into an answer that could potentially help a lot of people over time is lost. Even if google indexes all of the chat conversations reading through a chat transcript looking for the answer is tedious.

How about storing chat history as part of StackOverflow archives? This could solve the problem of findability. But then it might contain too much junk.

The problem is that SO wants their main source of incoming traffic to be from google. They want people to search for something they are trying to solve, and find an answer on SO from google.

There's no way to expect that the SEO for chat archives could possible provide this.

right, but since no reputation is ever gained from chat (you can only lose rep, in extreme cases) we don't think this will be a problem in practice. There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat.

>> There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat.

Is this a good thing? Personally, I don't know, nor would I care, how to implement a reputation system in chat. But I would hope that the answers in chat would be of the same caliber as the static questions.

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.

Perhaps folks interested in gaining more rep could harvest valuable questions and answers from chat and repost into the trilogy sites as a community service?

Awesome, I'm just curious as to what technology and tools did you use to implement this? Anyone has any idea?

Any of it going to be open sourced? :-)

All new, shiny, custom code, built on the Microsoft platform. I'm sure a detailed blog post will follow.

Very well done Mr. Spolsky. I've heard Jeff say in podcasts that he doesn't like threaded comments but without something like that to connect posts busy rooms become unreadable.

What about a hybrid where you can click on a question to respond and your response is still added at the bottom but when anyone hovers over the response a line shows up connecting the response to the question?

It already does that.

Insert oops reply here.

Any stats on usage? How many concurrent users / messages per second?

The best way to use it would be to ask a question, and paste the link to the question in the relevant chat room. You dont "have to" paste the link as it shows up part of feeds in the chat room anyway(if you tagged the question correctly), but pasting the link and talking about it would probably get you a quicker response.

The UI feels clunky and it doesn't feel like Stack Overflow.

Did the same people really design {chat.,}stackoverflow?!

I assume you're being somewhat facetious, but the answer is a definitive yes. The team had previously used Campfire, but felt it had a lot of UI issues, and attempted to solve them with chat. I don't know for sure whether they intended chat to be for all of SO from the beginning, but it's been a big effort by their team for awhile.

I'm completely in the dark about the development, but the UI looks a LOT like 37signals' Campfire app (http://campfirenow.com). Was this intentional or a coincidence?

Intentional: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/48249/web-based-irc-...

Neat!

I like this idea a lot. Instead of just hounding the Canvas tag to (reactively) teach and learn, users like me can now (proactively) discuss the HTML5 Canvas.

I can also get real-time feedback on what people want as far as new tutorials go.

I seem to just be getting 503'd. Is that my firewall, or has the collective weight of, uhh... HN bought it down?

Looks a lot like campfire from 37Signals

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