Stackoverflow rolls out "Chat with an expert" | Hacker News Reader

Stackoverflow rolls out "Chat with an expert"

meta.stackoverflow.com

78 pointsaSig28 comments

Disregarding the current date, this is actually a great idea. Instant gratification for a fee. Yes, I'd pay for that.

They could recruit their experts from the community itself, limited to those over a certain karma threshold, adding further incentive to participate.

Sounds like what Quora is/was doing with their currency system (are they still doing this?)

I'd definitely find it useful, and would pay for it. The trick is figuring out how to recruit/pay the "experts" who would need to be fairly high-value people but who would nevertheless have to make themselves available on a moment's notice.

And it had better not be implemented as one of those stupid unsolicited pop-up chat windows.

The question I always have is: is a high karma a meaningful measurement of somebody's abilities?

No, but it is a meaningful measurement of participation.

...and in a lot of cases, account age. I haven't participated in Stack Overflow for years, but there's still a steady trickle of points accumulating from my mediocre questions and answers of old.

I still visit the site regularly just to see how many new rep points I've gotten from old answers. What is my life?

Nope. On SO at least there are lots of folks who amassed hundreds of thousands of reputation merely for being on the site early enough to be able to answer simple and common questions like "how I can remove an array member" and the like.

I'm pretty sure the folks who have amassed "hundreds of thousands of reputation" did it merely by answering 1000's of questions.

http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/105837/how...

Sure there are a few questions with highly voted up answers because they are widely useful, but there is certainly the minority of high rep earners. Even the new people who are gaining lots of rep are doing it by answering hundreds of questions.

http://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=newusers

Only partially. It's a combined measure of your knowledge and participation on the site.

> As a registered user, your reputation on the site is a part of your identity on the site. It reflects, to an extent, your familiarity with the site, the amount of subject matter expertise you have and the level of respect your peers have for you.

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/7238/150097

In addition to that, it is possible to write well written, but highly specialized answers that gain few upvotes, or relatively simple answers that accrue large number of upvotes simply because it is a common question. In this sense, reputation is a measure of how 'valuable' your contribution to the site is, which is often, but not always aligned with how knowledgeable you are. There are other outliers too, like answers that get featured on Proggit or HN, but those are far less common.

(It also used to be possible to gain large amount of reputation by simply being the first to reply to a poll with a popular answer, but those type of questions are no longer acceptable).

Fools aside, this is a horrible idea. There are no experts here. There are loud people, and people with friends, but no community votes up the experts, only the eloquent, or the charismatic. Einstein wasn't president, JFK was. Some occasions, that's okay, but if I'm paying actual money, it certainly isn't.

You don't think the top users on SO are experts?

The question is whether they are domain experts or SO experts

That's a false dichotomy.

I've seen people ask questions about Scala on SO and get answers from Martin Odersky, the language's inventor.

I'd say that counts as an expert.

I agree 100%, and it's my point.

Oh FFS! This looked like a great product that seemed a natural monetization of their platform, that I would actually use and pay for. But its a fucking april fools joke connected to an eliza bot.

Flask started out as an April Fool's joke that eventually became a real product, there's no reason why the same can't happen with this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flask_(programming)#History

How funny: Just yesterday my friend (whom I met on StackOverflow months ago) mentioned that someone in the JavaScript chat channel was asking about some canvas tutorial, one that I just so happened to write. He summoned me so that the questioner could in fact, chat with an expert. (Or at least the author.)

The (none-too-interesting) transcript as proof:

http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/8574110#857...

Unfortunately the question wasn't particularly interesting and concerned an old tutorial. But I love SO because it really does let you chat with experts (Skeet being the most obvious), if not always in real time.

This would make a great feature but as an April Fool's joke it seems to fall a bit flat. On that link a couple users are being upset by it.

Maybe don't April Fool's your users with terrible service?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools_Day

The S.O. experts always responds: Your question is off-topic and will be closed.

If it means people posting their random code and asking others to debug it disappears from stackoverflow I'm all for it.

While their at it it would be nice if questions marked as duplicate were either deleted or at least had a pointer to the duplicate

Uh, duplicates always have the question that they are a duplicate of linked - http://i.imgur.com/1lata16.png. In fact, if you don't see this it's probably a bug and you should report it http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/ask?tags=bug

This seems relevant, http://adviza.stackexchange.com/transcript/3H7fYEZJI0KJ

This product would make Jon Skeet millionnaire.

More properly, towards the bottom, it should say "You must log in to LOOK at this question"...

Could i have my own robot in my own favor without setting up high performance server?

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