Stack Overflow Beta

Some of you may have heard of Stack Overflow, the web app Jeff Atwood over at coding horror has been working on for the past 6 months or so in collaboration with Joel Spolsky and various others. The aim of the project is provide a proper platform for programmers to exchange expert information for specific and general scenarios. If you caught the reference to expert sexchange you may understand that aforementioned godforsaken-hell-hole of a site has a similar premise.

While some of the information on expert sexchange is useful (there is clearly a lot of gaming going on) the site has degraded steadily since the policy to bully novice users into payment by hiding the answers at the very bottom of a very long page came into force. Stack Overflow, then, is the light to this dark, the yin to this yang, the day to this night, the police to this conman, the… ok enough of that.  The lack of good, readily available programming information is definitely a problem and it is becoming increasingly frustrating to find good answers using Google is becoming difficult particularly with new or obscure technology. The question is will stackoverflow be any better if it becomes full of junk?

Stack Overflow uses a karma like system combined with digg-style voting to enable a “question” to be answered in the best way possible and to maintain that information once a reasonable answer has been attained.  Once a question has been active and the answer has a good amount of votes then it is locked to voting by low ranking users. Of course there is still a wiki-style revision history as a double protection. Hopefully these features will go some way to protecting the site from the spam lords and vandals that plague so many community driven sites.

On a side note, there is now an Open Search plugin for stackoverflow enabling searching direct from the browser. This is an unofficial plugin created by a user. It is community support like this that will push stack overflow from being an interesting oddity to a full blown web staple.

Recently I obtained an invite to the private beta of this interesting little site. Though I had an idea of what to expect as I had been listening to the effort drenched podcast over at the stack overflow blog.
I was very suprised at how quickly Jeff Atwood et al had produced a working site but not only that, one that works well. I think the use of other web applications to speed bug reporting and enable the users like me to give feedback has done a great service to the site. It will be interesting to see what happens when the walls of beta fall and the world is unleashed on the site though. A social site is only as good as the people that use it. Will stack overflow succumb to the woeful fate of digg, youtube and so many before it? Will there be so much rubbish that the gold will be impossible to locate? Atwood’s karma system may save it for a while but for how long?