StackOverflow Filled With Programming Queries
If you’re still looking for a community to ask your programming questions, Stack Overflow may be your answer. The site, which has been in private beta for some time, opened to the public today, and it’s seeing considerable use already. Popular blogger Jeff Atwood announced the site in April and FogCreek’s Joel Spolsky joined.
Users vote up or down questions and answers. The site also allows wiki-like content editing. Anyone can ask or answer questions, but users need to reach a higher reputation level to vote or edit. Users gain a reputation by sharing answers, asking questions, and being voted up and down by others.
To vote up, a user must receive 15 points of reputation. Voting down requires even more: 100 points. To put this in perspective, I answered a question (yet received no votes either direction) and received one point. Most similar web communities allow all users, sometimes even users not logged in, to be able to vote.
This “not every user is equal” approach seems like a good way to ensure quality content and to encourage users to stick around longer. StackOverflow seems to have a more open version of Digg’s system of giving more weight to users who have participated in the past.
The site has several aspects that show it was created by savvy programmers. For one, when I added a new question, it searched current questions and found a good match. Also, the site supports OpenID and didn’t make me fill a bunch of info out after signing in.
What I’d love to see: searching via multiple tags. Currently the only way to navigate the site for questions that interest me is via a single tag. It seems logical that programmers would want and, or, and subtractive searching. I expect that’s coming.
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