Today marks the first day Stack Overflow opens its doors to the public. In case you’re not in the know, Stack Overflow is essentially a Q&A site geared towards developers of all kinds. It takes a language/technology agnostic approach and simply provides a framework within which the community can ask and answer techincal questions. Think of it as ExpertsExchange.com except free and much more community driven.

What I Like

One thing in particular that really impressed me was the way in which the system is designed to build trust with its users. When you first open an account, your level of access is somewhat limited. You start out only being able to ask questions, rate answers, etc. As your involvement in the community grows and users rate your contributions (questions, answers, comments, etc.), your user score will increase. As your score rises, you begin to build trust and the restrictions on what you can do are lifted. After some time you can even edit submitted questions wiki-style, re-tag questions, and essentially moderate user interactions.

Another handy addition adds an element of “fun” to using the site. Known as badges, users can earn them by meeting certain requirements (think Xbox achievements). These badges are visible to other users and help a user to build credibility in combination with their score. This type of formula has been proven to be addictive (think MMORPGs), as users basically “level up” the more they participate in the community. This creates the motivation to contribute to the site and ensure it continues to grow (rather than ExpertExchange’s paid model, where users are motivated by free membership to what would otherwise be a mothly charge).

What Could Improve

Overall the only areas for improvement that come to mind are the smaller details in how the system works. Some things are not quite intuitive yet, such as finding unanswered questions related to a specific topic (which is possible, but not immediately apparrent).

It would also be nice if the site would somehow encourage the growth of sub-communities. For example, one could borrow from the MMORPG concept of a guild and create user groups. Each group could be associated with a particular technology or language and could make tools available that would help facilitate communication between like-minded developers.

Conclusion

Joel and Jeff are definitely off to a great start with the site and judging from what they have produced so far, I’m optimistic about its future. Having been involved with the private beta, the team maintaining the site has bee fairly responsive and Jeff seems to be very receptive to user input. It will be interesting to see how the site evolves in the coming months.