Re:Trouble in the House of Stackoverflow
by gbelote on Saturday December 10, 2011 @02:43PM
(#3338289)
I believe that's part of the motivation behind bounties: if I've invested a lot of time and accumulated karma, I can spend that karma to improve the quality/speed of answering my question.
Re: TwoToReal. It's an interesting idea, although it seems like it adds burden to the answerer. One quality I like of SO is that it encourages people to ask better questions (keep concise, provide relevant details, etc), but in a system where I'd be getting real-time help I might become lazier about posting my question. "I have a problem with node.js" rather than "I'm getting this output when trying to use node in this way".
Re:Trouble in the House of Stackoverflow
by derpapst on Saturday December 10, 2011 @02:50PM
(#3338309)
That's a totally valid point, gbelote. Nevertheless, there will always be questions where you don't know you to frame a question - even after having searched around for a while.
E.g.: if you are new to Linux and X doesn't start - how could you ask if you are new to the whole field? A bit of guidance by an expert could help in 5min. And then, sometimes it is just like the xkcd strip at http://www.twotoreal.com/site/about/
I view it as a last resort - after SO/Quora/etc. could not help.
This is what I am doing with http://www.TwoToReal.com: Unlike SO/Quora/etc. it is a synchronous QA site for questions where you didn't get an answer on the the former QA sites. As it works by pulling in other expert users into a real-time web chat, I had to be very careful to find a reasonable trade-off between disturbing the expert (i.e. asking another user by IM to participate) and benefiting the questioner. Rule-of-thumb at TwoToReal: the more you are allowing yourself to be "disturbed" the more will be asked for participation the next time you have a question. Soon it will allow you to "invest" more of your attention on one question by letting the system pull in more than one expert. Thus the currency of attention.