Saturday, October 19, 2013

Stack Exchange or: How I learned to love Q&A and stop visiting Yahoo Answers.

(Part I)


I've been thinking about starting a separate blog which would be more technical and software-related in nature, but for now, I wanted to explain to my non-software friends (who often ask about my work and whether Stack Exchange is a typo) why Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow are important to people like me, and might even be useful to you, too.

My typical I-don't-know-how-to-describe-this-but-I'll-try-to-sum-it-up-in-a-way-that's-short-and-understandable-yet-without-any-context-which-would-have-been-useful-in-giving-you-a-sense-of-the-company description goes like this: "They run a bunch of Q&A sites on the internet and a job board for tech jobs - primarily software development jobs."  While that isn't dishonest, it doesn't answer how it's different from Yahoo Answers, how our job board is different from any other job board ever, or why it would be such a great place to work. So let's start with the first, and most important, question in this edition of The Spolsky [coding] Horror Picture Show - Part I.

How is it different from Yahoo Answers?


If I ever invite you to Stack Exchange headquarters, seriously, don't ask this question. The one time I've seen it asked, our HR manager threatened to kick him out of the building, followed by everyone walking away from the table.

When I started writing this (a couple weeks ago), the most recent question on Yahoo Answers was Where can I get marijuana seeds in miami? followed by other gems such as:
And those are just questions asked in the last 17 minutes.

The most recent question on stackoverflow.com is Cannot set socket to nonblocking ...okay, so that probably isn't a helpful comparison for non-programmers. Here are some recent questions on other Stack Exchange sites:

Alright, so maybe you're thinking our sites kind of look like Yahoo Answers-style sites without the terrible questions and generally devoid of internet trolls, but why? I could go on about how our unofficial mission is to improve the quality of information of the internet, but here's the simple answer from my personal perspective:
We let the community of each site build and moderate itself.
... and if the community can't do either, or both, we shut it down.


Area 51 (alien site[ings] are neither confirmed nor denied)


A site begins its life as an Area 51 proposal where someone suggests an idea. Let's just pretend for a moment that I had an interest in aviation, and I think the world would benefit from a Stack Exchange site for flying. So I propose an "Aviation and Aerospace" site and I start telling my pilot friends about it. They follow my proposal and add "sample questions" which they think would be a good fit for this site. The sample questions are important because they help define what would be on-topic for the site. Everyone can vote on questions they like best and when 40 questions have at least 10 up-votes, the proposal is considered "defined."

Next, people are asked to commit to the proposal. While waiting for at least 200 people to commit, there is some final discussion during this phase where, for example, someone might point out that the scope of the sample questions relates very little to the aerospace industry, and perhaps a better name for the site would simply be "Aviation." The general idea is that we don't want to launch a site until we understand what it's going to be about, and know there are going to be people using it.

If my aviation proposal makes it through the commitment phase, we will launch aviation.stackexchange.com on a probationary basis (the beta phase). This gives us a chance to see whether or not the site works in reality. If very few people ask questions, or questions go unanswered, we shut it down. If the questions or answers are of low quality (in other words, it doesn't look like the site is going to improve the quality of knowledge on the internet) we shut it down. However, if the community is successful, we promote it to a new permanent site.

Quick side note: What do we mean by quality questions? Here's how one of our other developers put it:
SE Q's are different because they are objective (answerable) and show attempts to answer before asking
— Nick Larsen (@fody) October 19, 2013
Now, if I really wanted to be a moderator on my new aviation site, I could come up with a platform (explanation of how I would moderate and handle conflicts) and have people vote for me. We let sites elect their own moderators because it puts the responsibility for maintaining good content in the hands of the passionate individuals who are knowledgeable in the subject area. It would be cost-prohibitive for us to pay employees to do all the moderation work, and why would we when the community actually does a better job anyway?

Of course, there's even more to it; reputation, badges, meta sites, Creative Commons License (like Wikipedia, users can edit other users questions and answers), chat, etc, but I think you get the gist. If you're interested in knowing more about how it works, read our about page or the Area 51 FAQ. And, even better, if we have a community based around a subject which interests you, join the community! If we don't, consider advocating for a new Stack Exchange site. Right now I'm part of the Aviation site proposal (Surprising, I know... sadly, I'm not actually the one who proposed it, though).
Stack Exchange: Rendezvous at Big Gulch will return in Part II: The Sequel.
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