I hate "karma" systems in discussion forums. As soon as you introduce karma points, your forum is now dual purposed, part for the original intent (say, discussing Hacker News) and part for playing the karma game.

I accept that karma points are at least a known working solution to spammers and trolls. But if it wasn't for that, I'd much rather read a conversation without the built in popularity contest.

At stackoverflow, they've turned that all on its head. When I read the reputation rules (see the unofficial FAQ) I thought, "this is all karma game". And then I thought a little more and realized that for the purpose of the site, that might work perfectly. If the guy with the question is the one who hands out the karma, the incentives of the guy and the karma gamer are nicely aligned. Very clever.

I saw someone talking about the closed beta, and he described it as "fun". Well, that sounded strange, but now I believe it. Jeff and Joel turned karma gaming into an actual game, with the incidental effect of generating good answers to technical questions.

Apparently the "right" answer to this language-agnostic question is one that provides a single Ruby (surprise) alternative. Since when do opinions have correct answers?

I would love to see great things from Stack Overflow, but I would be surprised if it turns out to provide better answers than can be found by googling and reading mailing list archives -- or at least better answers that are consistently marked as such (or not marked at all, depending on the situation). Introducing voting doesn't magically mean the "good" stuff floats to the top.

Edit: Oh, and people are already "trolling for reputation" as evidenced by a single question having 10 of the same exact answer. I thought this is what voting was going to "solve?" sigh

(The hard way is to change your user-agent to a search crawler... they need to display the text to somebody ).

Google would delist them if they did that. Google indexes the text on the bottom of the page, the rest of the page is images.

What kind of effect will making the number of votes, answers, and views more prominent than the question have on the site? Will it encourage gaming the system / posting for points rather than to be helpful?

With Stack Overflow - http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/stackoverflow1/Pict...

In Tufte-speak, Stack Overflow clearly has a much lower data/ink ratio and way too much chart junk.

However from the point of view of someone who admittedly wastes too much time on distractions like YC, I'm glad their design sucks since if they copied YC outright they would be 4x as likely to suck me in. In the same screen space YC manages to show me 20 articles whereas Stack Overflow only manages to fit in 5.

Anyway, I am not the target demographic, so my opinion really doesn't matter.

I also find it interesting that you apparently need 15 reputation points before you can upvote, which means you have to successfully answer one or more questions. In practice, this means that a drive-by/first-time user can't use their expertise to choose the best answer among the existing set, but have to chime in with a (most likely redundant) answer first, which seems counter-productive.

That might be good advice if the customer contacts you one-on-one. But when the customer posts their complaint to a message board that's read by thousands of third parties, it's helpful to put up an explanation of why the system was designed the way it was. Otherwise I, who have never used the service and am just skimming this thread, might come away with the wrong impression.

It's important to avoid getting into a flamewar with your customers, but pointing out the rationale behind your design decisions isn't necessarily offensive. Yes, it's not what the complainer really wants to see, but it is what I, the silent reader of the thread, want to see. And people like me outnumber the original complainer N to 1.

And you'd better be pretty confident about 'N'. Threads like this and readers like yourself may provide a short term boost or bust, but communicative visitors can broadcast the message off-line for months to come.

I think you'd agree that we should aim higher (much, much higher), than just avoiding getting into a flame war.

You may have been confused about the scoring system using to calculate reputation. It's a little more fine-grained than a traditional up/down karma system. Since voting up gives you +10 rep, getting 15 rep is as easy as getting two people to vote up your submission.

1) The site builder added a certain effort treshhold to block out spammers.

2) The complaining user doesn't want to invest the effort to cross the treshold.

These statements are mutually exclusive. The only way to resolve this problem is to remove the need for a treshold. (i.e. remove spam from the internet)

Even if something isn't feasible, that doesn't make the customer wrong.

Complaining customers are opportunities to step away from the whiteboard and listen.

Customer: "I would like it better if every time I opened up your web page a slice of buttered toast came out of my CD drive."

Response: "[APPRECIATION: Thanks for your feedback]. [EMPATHY: We understand your desire for a tasty breakfast], and [PLAUSIBLE CONNECTION: we see how a website about coffee should help you plan a more complete meal]. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a way to do this right now. Just for future reference, [OPPORTUNITY FOR MORE INVOLVEMENT: if we were able to do this, would you like to help us test, and would you be opposed to margarine]? For now, what if [SOMETHING CLOSE TO A SOLUTION: we began building a complementary breads chart, like [example]]?

That said, I think it will be excellent for those asking the questions, but for those answering..? It'll just be the prima donnas and gold-hoarders playing the game.

The way I see it, the site is right now (mostly) good for two types of questions:

Really basic programming questions that could be answered by reading some docs.

Really domain-specific questions that are hard to find info on online. If you're working on something really interesting, but don't know enough about the domain to know where you should be looking or what you should be searching for, you can get really good guidance from the people on stack overflow who know what they're talking about.

It's also good for getting an idea of consensus about certain technologies.

I assume that most people here are like that. (Otherwise they would be on Reddit instead ;)

It's also perfectly fine to ask and answer your own programming question, but pretend you're on Jeopardy: phrase it in the form of a question. </quote> http://stackoverflow.com/faq

If (if) you don't want to share you knowledge for the benefit of fellow programmers then that's another question.

I share my knowledge for the benefit of fellow programmers at the 10 or so conferences I go to a year, and on my ad-free blog.

Except, perhaps, aesthetically. Maybe I'm wrong here too, but a failed visual design for HN readers is probably a failed design for the average web-forum-programmer, too.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/07/stack-overflow-beta-de...

Now they're ready to let the general public in, so if you want your favourite environment/tool/language represented, get on in there. If you don't want to get in there, stop complaining.

I did find some decent Non-Windows questions in there, but there could be more.

The founders intend that eventually the answer you're looking for will show up as a stackoverflow.com question in the first page of Google results. They get more advertising revenue, the purported benefits to their users are:

* You don't have to pay or even register to use the site (unlike Experts Exchange).

* If an answer goes out of date (e.g. it only applies to the beta version) it can be updated.

* You can always add your own comments (not all blogs allow comments).

* If you manage to solve some tricky problem yourself, you can easily publish the information to help others (not everyone has their own blog).

I will investigate... thanks for the info.

Screenshot: http://img391.imageshack.us/my.php?image=stackunderflower9.p...

Link to script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/33804

The tags-as-sections thing breaks down when you get a little more abstract than "x language", as the tags used will be ambiguous (people can retag stuff though, so that's something of a moderation system).

Granted, it's not that hard to do, but it's not optimal from a usability perspective.

For instance, PHP wasn't listed in the popular tags even though it's one of the top ten most popular programming languages (http://www.langpop.com/). To find this tag, I had to click Tags, search for PHP, and click PHP.

Php probably wasn't listed in the popular tags due partially to the windows/.NET tendency of the site, and the tendency of the people participating in the beta to be the type that doesn't like php.