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Our approach to subjective programming questions

blog.slant.co

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41–50 of 60 posts

Re: Our approach to subjective programming questions

#41

Post by logn »

This is super awesome. You're getting criticism of the font. But I have to say that I really like it. I just created my own issue and like the UI all around.

For karma, I'd recommend that each person gets points in proportion to the number of upvotes combined with the number of characters they added to an answer that appear in the final answer.

Also, I think you need some sort of comparison or overview for each issue. And next to the pie chart I think you should allow for a 140 character final recommendation, listed individually for each user. E.g., "Dan recommends SilkJS because it's easy to write, fast, and better than Node"

Re: Our approach to subjective programming questions

#42

Post by T-R »

logn wrote: post #41

This is super awesome. You're getting criticism of the font. But I have to say that I really like it. I just created my own issue and like the UI all around. For karma, I'd recommend that each person gets points in proportion to the number of upvotes combined with the number of characters they added to an answer that appear in the final answer. Also, I think you need some sort of comparison or overview for each issue…

Great ideas! Thanks kindly.

Re: Our approach to subjective programming questions

#43

Post by anateus »

I like a lot of this approach. But, please replace the pie charts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_chart#Use.2C_effectiveness_...

Humans aren't that good at telling more than very rough ratios in angle rather than length. Yes, when the differences are large you could tell at a glance the overall distribution of answers, but when it is close, you lose that. A horizontal stacked bar would achieve a similar visual flair but would be much more intuitively accurate.

Re: Our approach to subjective programming questions

#44

Post by jyrkesh »

I really like the idea, and what few bits of criticism I had you have already seemed to address.

I just wanted to compliment you on something specifically that I though was really great: the registration process. Very similar, no confirmation fields, and, most importantly, I was signed in immediately after clicking finish. It didn't take me away from or reload the page I was on, and it didn't ask me to confirm my email. The small things really matter.

Re: Our approach to subjective programming questions

#45

Post by charlieflowers »

Cool! You have "discovered what Stackoverflow users were doing," and where Stackoverflow stomped it out like a plague, you have made an offering for it. Good job!

I'm still amazed at Stackoverflow's failure to follow their own stated philosophy ("discover what your users are doing and enable it") in this particular area.

Re: Our approach to subjective programming questions

#46

Post by charlieflowers »

pnathan wrote: post #37
martinced wrote: post #10

Yes, yes and yes! Why limit topics to stuff where there's no objective answer? There are a lot of people (including people with 20K rep+ on SO) who quit SO in disgust and who would just love to share their knowledge on both objective and non-objective question. Pivot immediately. Do both objective and non-objective : ) Instant winner IMHO, going to help people there immediately!

I found SO (over time) to give less and less useful information: the best information was always in the quasi-subjective questions. It's nice to know how to use something, but really, I want to understand why . The SO/SE theory is against those questions. I have 19K rep on SO, 5Kish on P.SE, and I barely contribute anymore. So I am planning on creating a Slant account and experimenting when I get home.

I feel exactly the same way (not with the high rep you have, but a decent rep that I worked hard to cultivate in the past).

I think there are a good number of us who feel this way.

It is frustrating for a company to say it wants to "discover what its users are doing and enable it", and then to see that company squash so many individual pieces of excellent content those users have created.

Re: Our approach to subjective programming questions

#47

Post by argonaut »

StuieK wrote: post #29
6ren wrote: post #28

I think many people, like me, have been waiting for someone to address this obvious niche that has been crying out for attention. There's also an interesting path to monetization: it's pretty much models the buying process, esp for the enterprise. Also generalises to purchasing decisions, in general - it's relevant to all transactions. i.e. the whole economy. However... very hard to do well. It's good start, but nail…

> I found the site slow to load (actually got the wait or cancel dialog). Sorry about that, we are under some heavy load and didn't have time to do even the most basic speed optimisations (gzip etc). Its very high priority. > The presentation of information is too "detail-heavy" (i) the list of questions includes 3 alternatives and even some lines about each. The typical user wants to scan the topics to find one of i…

Another thing I particularly like about threads comparing two or more different technologies/frameworks/languages is when someone says "X does Z badly, and here is why Y does Z better." Slant seems to not be able to facilitate this very well.

Re: Our approach to subjective programming questions

#48

Post by wanderingstan »

I was just thinking of this idea over dinner tonight, when a friend was giving his recommendations on PHP and Ruby frameworks and their pro/cons. "There should be a site for this type of knowledge!" I thought. And --boom!-- I get home, and here it is on HN.

Re: Our approach to subjective programming questions

#49

Post by dinkumthinkum »

charlieflowers wrote: post #45

Cool! You have "discovered what Stackoverflow users were doing," and where Stackoverflow stomped it out like a plague, you have made an offering for it. Good job! I'm still amazed at Stackoverflow's failure to follow their own stated philosophy ("discover what your users are doing and enable it") in this particular area.

Pretty much for any question you find via Google that you are really interested in, you will find an SO question that fits the bill and has some big long jibber jabber filled message about being closed for such and such reason.

The strange thing to me was that when Jeff left was like when it went full tilt. It's like Mao died and the rest of the party big wigs realized they weren't being the best communists they could be and just started going overboard to stomp any possible conflict with Maoist ideology.

Re: Our approach to subjective programming questions

#50

Post by dinkumthinkum »

6ren wrote: post #28

I think many people, like me, have been waiting for someone to address this obvious niche that has been crying out for attention. There's also an interesting path to monetization: it's pretty much models the buying process, esp for the enterprise. Also generalises to purchasing decisions, in general - it's relevant to all transactions. i.e. the whole economy. However... very hard to do well. It's good start, but nail…

The strange thing is if SO actually decided to cater for this, which would be pretty trivial, they would win this game by default. It's basically just ocd run amok.
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