Inglua

I’ve been playing with the stackoverflow beta since Saturday. Stackoverflow is a project by Jeff Atwood (of CodingHorror fame), with moral support by Joel Spolsky (JoelOnSoftware). Together they’ve been doing a podcast for almost four months. Stackoverflow launched a private beta last Friday.

frontpage

Stackoverflow has a fairly simple concept. Users can ask questions about programming related topics, other users answer them. The questioner may mark one or more answers “accepted” – these answers move to the top of the list and are marked in green.

Anyone may up- or downvote questions and answers – this affects the order of the answers. There are separate lists of the most recent questions, the most popular questions, and questions with the least answers. Questions also have tags (mostly programming languages and frameworks), and users can browse questions per tag.

Currently, with only a couple of hundred users, the site works reasonably well. If I ask a question that isn’t too technical (unless it’s .NET – the userbase is heavily skewed towards the .NET platform) I usually get several decent to good answers within the hour – afterwards, the responses taper off dramatically. The edit box uses markdown, with good syntax highlighting for most programming languages. There’s a live javascript-based preview, which works very well. It’s not yet possible to subscribe to interesting questions. Your own questions and answers appear on your profile page, but even there it’s hard to see which questions have received new answers.

Tag page

Stackoverflow tries to be a forum and a wiki at the same time, and uses a single abstraction (the question + answers) for two different things (a forum thread and a wiki article).

That’s ambitious, and I’m not sure if it’s going to work. There are already complaints that by sorting the answers by score, it’s impossible to follow the flow of the discussion. Having multiple sorting options may not be the answer. Also, because the software presents replies as answers to the question and doesn’t have threading, it somewhat inhibits a free-flowing discussion, with counter-questions, requests for clarifications, arguments, etc.

Question Page

Also, Stackoverflow has a couple of wiki-like features which haven’t quite kicked in yet. For one, when users hit a certain karma threshold, they may edit anyone’s question or answer. Versioning, reverting and diffs are also planned. For now, only a handful of users have reached the threshold, but I wonder what effect this will have on the social interactions on the site.

It’s a bit premature to criticize a site that’s been live for five days. The developers have been extremely active, and have already implemented many suggestions from the community (using the excellent and highly recommended UserVoice customer feedback site).

But I believe that the original intention was to be a more wiki-like resource, with time-tested answers to popular questions, and it isn’t like that at all now – it feels much more like a forum, with a heavy dose of voting and karma thrown in. It will be interesting to see whether the developers are agile enough to steer it toward the original goal.

I wish them the best of luck.