61–70 of 103 posts
I have a stackexchange site. This is what my admin page says: This site will remain free and operational until at least Tuesday, July 13, 2010. What is the best drop in replacement?
They both appear to be close copies of StackExchange from a cursory look.
They realised that StackExchange was failing, but because they don't realise the reasons why their attempted correction is only making it worse. Their software is a hideously complicated and over-engineered attempt to twist human relationships into math. It only works on StackOverflow because: a) The tech community was desperate for an alternative to hidebound mailing lists on one hand and expertsexchange on the othe…
1) I don't think they're trying to model 'the complexity of human relationships.' That's what Facebook tries to do. The trust metrics are crude, but the real goal seems to be to get credible upvotes for answers. I use SO all the time, have great success, and haven't made any friends there. Because that's not what it's for. 2) Maybe this model won't work for EnthusiasticCatBreeders.com, but it will probably work for a…
You can do that on eBay, because the metric is really simple -- "did this user deliver, or did they rip you off?" But when it comes to judging the value of technical advice, it's much muddier.
We have thousands of years of experience at these sorts of judgements though, and can size people up in the blink of an eye. It's much more difficult online, but we're learning -- and numbers aren't really a part of it. Certainly not the morass of numbers of StackOverflow.
So it's free? Doesn't this fly in the face of Joel "charge for software" Spolsky? Venture Capital rules!
I doubt that it being free has much to do with "VC rules!". Given the success of fogcreek, I'd guess that they could've made stackexchanges free from the get-go. They just found a new business model. Maybe with the help of their VCs.
That doesn't sound like a new business model, it sounds like wishful thinking.
I did an interview Joel, the site's co-founder, about why they made this decision. It should be done processing in about 25 minutes.
where can I listen?
This is the best way to clean up the Q&A and Forums landscape.
They realised that StackExchange was failing, but because they don't realise the reasons why their attempted correction is only making it worse. Their software is a hideously complicated and over-engineered attempt to twist human relationships into math. It only works on StackOverflow because: a) The tech community was desperate for an alternative to hidebound mailing lists on one hand and expertsexchange on the othe…
A SO site might perform well as a support channel for a software library product. I've used a mailing list in the past, but it's not as a good, in many ways. If it's free for commercial use, I might give this a go. It seems ideal to deliver support for an open-source software product - anyone done this?
I wish them the best but this seems like a pretty bad idea. They can obviously change course and I hope they do. Fortunately it seems like shapado.com offers what I'm looking for.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) I don't think they're trying to model 'the complexity of human relationships.' That's what Facebook tries to do. The trust metrics are crude, but the real goal seems to be to get credible upvotes for answers. I use SO all the time, have great success, and haven't made any friends there. Because that's not what it's for. 2) Maybe this model won't work for EnthusiasticCatBreeders.com, but it will probably work for a…
Just to expand a bit -- when I talk about modelling the complexity of human relationships I don't mean making friends, I mean how they try to turn the complicated ways we have of judging and trusting other people into a number. You can do that on eBay, because the metric is really simple -- "did this user deliver, or did they rip you off?" But when it comes to judging the value of technical advice, it's much muddier.…
Frankly I think this sounds terrible. Instead of providing a service that allows people to create, maintain (and yes, perhaps fail) their own community Q&A sites as they see fit, the Stack Exchange team now seem to be aiming to crowd-source the creation and maintenance of Q&A sites deemed interesting enough to exist. And if you've listened to the past few podcasts, "interesting enough" generally means "contains pages…
Trusted sources is a big problem on the web right now. There are a gazillion sources of information but it is increasing difficult to sift fact from opinion/fiction. Maybe this is their answer to this. Wolframalpha seems to be trying to address this as well but from a different approach.