Unless they change the "rules", I think it will suffer the same problem as the other Stacks: They don't handle duplicate questions very well.
In succession, duplicates are annoying and detrimental, but on the other hand, the best answer in 2008 may not be the best answer in 2010 and there's no easy way to update old questions and bring attention to their need for new answers.
The set of answers for broad questions at SO is gradually becoming stale and the new questions are beginning to become uselessly specific to the person who asks the question.
Maybe a way to append or revise older questions as a lower-reputation user would help, and doing so would bring the question back into the community's foreground to be seen by fresh eyes.
Edit: "They" meaning the website, the community and the SO engine combined, not necessarily one or the other individually.
This site seems like it would suffer even more so. On Joel's blog, the the announcement for this site [1] asked "Want to know how ... delete your Facebook account?". How long is the accepted answer to that question going to be up to date, and will it be updated every time Facebook tweaks their site to discourage account deletion?
'will it be updated every time Facebook tweaks their site to discourage account deletion?' - that's the idea.
'How long is the accepted answer to that question going to be up to date?' - hopefully as soon as FB changes the system and someone realizes the answer is wrong.
But their software is heavily reified against that sort of thing -- a new answer is made and then it's karma would have to surpass the existing one (which the karma-inflation problem makes easier) but it also needs to get accepted in place of the existing one, screwing over the original answerer. The already-accepted answer could also be community-wiki-edited beyond recognition.
Pretending temporality doesn't exist doesn't make it go away.
But the problem is that only the original poster can accept answers, and a newly added (and correct) answer may be pushed so far down the list of answers, it could take a needlessly long time to overcome the currently highest upvoted solution.
Ideally, a user could report something as out of date, or the ranking algorithm would degrade the value of an answer as it ages (which would be a problem for ageless Q/A situations like traditional computer science questions).
To whomever put this custom skin over the SO Engine (and sure you're reading HN, aren't you?), that's an awesome job. This site looks really unique compared to Stackoverflow, Superuser etc. and quiet appealing too.
Chrome, OSX. The grid lines match the story separator lines and the baseline of all of the fonts. the "Top Questions" and the navigation tabs are off, but the rest is on. the drop shadow of the top bar is about 3px off from the top bar itself...
Web app questions definitely don't belong on SO (unless you're developing them) or SF (unless you're administering them). They might work on SU, but they've been explicitly banned for some time. And Meta is only for discussing the SO network. So no, there's really no other place in the existing network for them.
The segregation actually isn't so bad the more I think about it -- people with tons of karma from questions about mundane windows sysadmin and inane adolescent theming shouldn't be running roughshod over people trying to figure out how to do something in gmail.
That's right. The segmentation is about making sure that each site has a critical mass of experts, and enough of a focus that said experts won't be annoyed by off-topic questions. (Of course it's debatable where the line should be.)
Joel and Jeff have said several times that "Google is the UI". So the segmentation doesn't hurt the "answer consumers", who'll come in through Google with little regard for which site is which, while benefiting the "producers", who do care.
They really seem like they belong on Super User to me. I would think the Stack Overflow founders of all people would see the arbitrariness of treating Web applications and desktop applications as completely different things. Web apps are more like desktop apps than desktop apps are like plugins or computer hardware, yet those categories are allowed on Super User.
SuperUser is Jeff Atwood's hobbyist self-identity manifested as a Q&A site. The allowed categories neatly cover everything he's blogged about on CodingHorror that wouldn't fit into SO or SF first. There are a lot of Jeff Atwoods out there, so it works.
You know what would make a really hilarious and likely-successful StackExchange site? One focused on http://BoingBoing.net -- it'd be all about how best to anagramize a subway map or break functioning consumer electronics by hot-gluing brass gears onto them, but there's clearly already an audience for Cory Doctorow's self-identity (just as there was for Jeff).
That was a serious comment; I'm not being snide. Stack Overflow is the only company I know of in the Q&A space with the deliberate strategy of creating individual Q&A communities for like-minded experts. The strategy of creating one uber-site for everything with a question mark, in our opinion, leads to crappy, low quality sites like Yahoo!Answers, where the current hottest question is "Is my name as weird as i think?"
But you are being snide. You've always done a nice job of framing yourself exclusively against your shittiest competitors. Being better than Yahoo Answers is not something you should be particularly proud of.
A site born out of an existing strong community of clever people can easily sustain QA around that communities' purpose. If it's a general-purpose community, then it'll work just fine: http://ask.metafilter.com is terrific and makes enough from advertising to pay 4 full-time salaries and essentially funds the rest of the site.
It's success was a direct inspiration for the creation of Yahoo Answers. You're well aware of it's existence -- you had one of the Metafilter moderators (Josh Millard) as a guest on your and Jeff's podcast, but you weren't very receptive to what he had to say (Jeff was particularly obtuse). Y'all didn't understand why you needed an outlet site like http://metatalk.metafilter.com -- and then when you implemented http://meta.stackoverflow.com the way you did it exhibited zero comprehension (the worst of which has since been cleaned up).
It's like you refuse to understand how communities really make sites like these function, because to do so would force you to acknowledge that your and Jeff's existing audiences were what made SO work. You've rejected that assertion out of hand over and over, insisting that the innovative design of your social software was primary. We'll see if you can launch successful vertical subsites for things like travel / fashion / music suggestions or parenting / romantic / job advice.
Unfortunately this does not cover questions like "how to do get information X from Google Adsense or Google Analytics". Anybody knows a good place for such questions?
If you're interested in the pro webmasters site, it's likely to go into closed beta in a matter of days... you should commit to the site today so that you can participate in the closed beta. The closed beta will be 7 days long after which we open the beta to the public.
