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Comment by alextgordon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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 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'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.

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

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.

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.

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 :)

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