StackOverflow
Fri Feb 05 2010
StackOverflow is a nice website. It contains programming questions and answers in a new way. Jeff Atwood created a self regulating community. Certain user behavior is encouraged, like answering questions, promoting good answers, giving comments.
Other behaviour is discouraged, like asking non programming related questions or giving wrong answers. The result is that you can find lots of very good questions and excellent answers. The quality is higher than comparable web sites. It really works like a mini democracy. People build on each others answers and improve them. The same characteristics that make the platform so good have a downside as well:
- There is an intense struggle going on to gain points (reputation) and badges. A number of users is there to “game” the system in a number of ways just for the fun of it. They are actively seeking ways to augment their points without contributing to the site. They want to maximize the reputation with a minimum of effort. As a result, the reputation does not equal the value of the contribution.
- The majority isn’t always right. From time to time a correct answer is downvoted while a popular answer or an answer of a popular person is upvoted.
The positive forces seem to win over the negative ones, the downvoted correct answers are an exception. The new platform will be better than the existing forum applications.
There is no guarantee for correctness, but it will not bother Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky because they only wanted to create the forum software that is applicable to a range of other subjects.
They created a number of websites, using the same system as the original StackOverflow site. So their goal is not to have the best programmers Q&A site, but to have a new kind of forum application that can be applied to any subject.
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