Spolsky: but a pointer on an 80386... for a while the 80386 was the target.  On an 80386, a pointer consisted of (or even on the 8086 in general) a pointer consisted of two parts, the segment and the offset.  So it's like "where do you want to start your pointer?" and then "what's your offset inside there?".  And you couldn't just indirectly say "here's my pointer, just do something with this." You could, finally in 32-bit clean mode, but we didn't have that. What you had to do, was there was this thing called the segment register, and you loaded the segment register saying, "From now on my pointers which are 16 bits are going to be offset from this particular point. And the very loading of that segment register would cause all kinds of operating system traps to get executed and all kinds of interesting things to happen and it was a very, very slow operation. So if you were doing any kind of pointer manipulation, which you were cause it was C and everything was pointer manipulation, you wanted to load that segment register as infrequently as possible because that was a very, very expensive operation. And chances are, you're doing a whole bunch of pointer operations that are all in the same segment - for a while at least. You really want to be able to just load it once and then maybe do your next 20 operations with that as the base register. So all the Excel code had this assumption that they could do that - it gave them the ability to do that. And that made it just screamingly fast compared to the competition. I mean, I remember when Borland came out with Paradox for Windows, and they did not take this into account and they just used - it was C++ code, so they really had no choice but to use pointers for all their methods because it was all virtual tables and C++ objects. The net result was that they just used these pointers naively, pretending that the top 16 bits - every time they wanted to use a pointer, they reloaded the segment register, and that just made this app really, really slow. I mean, it took 90 seconds to start. You know Excel could launch in 10 or 15 seconds.

Atwood: Wow.

Spolsky: So this was this feature that they eventually got added to the regular Microsoft C compiler called base pointers, and I think then they stopped using their own compiler. But their philosophy was really not to trust anybody and to have control over everything so that there's some hope they can get it to work without having an external dependency. You know, I've sort of taken this with me a long ways, and every time I've failed to do that I've tended to regret it. Every time we've put outside technology into Fog Bugz we've regretted it. There's a lot of these excellent components, and they are really great components, that are made by vendors like .Net components and they're widgets like the cool calendar widget dropdown that you put into your web page and all that kind of stuff. And inevitably what I've found is that they are good enough for enterprise code, like internal apps that you're using at the insurance company, and they're just never good enough for the kind of app you want to ship that has to be perfect. Somehow there is something that's not commercial quality about them. You know it's fine if there's 20 people using it, and they're all using it the same way, it allows you to in fifteen seconds put a calendar dropdown into something. But then you'll get to some customer who says, "You know we don't start our week's on Sunday in my country". And you'll say, "Oh", and you'll find out this library doesn't have that feature. As a hypothetical example.

[12:57]

Atwood: Right!

Spolsky: Which I ...

Atwood: I believe that's one advantage of some of the web stuff is because everything is just public facing by default. You don't have sort of this, this internal development ghetto effect. Like... 'cuz I... we have... I mean, to be fair, any talk of dependencies, we have tons of dependencies, right? It's just a question of what dependencies you wanna take, like, I mean, jQuerry is a dependency, right?

Spolsky: Hhm.

Atwood:  We're using the WMD control, that's a dependency.

Spolsky: Hhm.

Atwood: There's these little add-ons for jQuery that...

Spolsky: But you know what, if there was a bug in... if you found a bug in jQuery, you would just go, edit the source and you would be shipping your own private version of jQuerry and problem solved.  And it wouldn't be ideal, but at least you wouldn't be screwed.

[13:32]

Atwood: Right ... We have actually done that and let me actually give an example.  So the WMD editor has a bug with international keyboards.  Like there's no way we would have found this because we don't use international keyboards but obviously some of the people that use StackOverflow do and

Spolsky: Sure

Atwood: They were, I think, understandably very annoyed because they couldn't enter like right bracket.  Which is like an important key particularly in markdown.  That's one of the key, like one of the delimiters you use sometimes.

Spolsky: Yeah, the...

Atwood: Um.  And they actually, huh, the prob...I'm still trying to get the source from from the authors so we don't actually have the source.  What we have is well ob...not...I guess obfuscated is not the right word but minified javascript where they compress it down so all the variables are "a", "b", "c" and things like that.  So it's not exactly fun code to look at anymore [laughs].

Spolsky: Yeah

[14:12]

Atwood: But somebody actually went through and actually found a little work-around and I feel bad because when they posted this I didn't realize that they actually found a work-around so I was like "Oh that's interesting" and I just didn't come back to it.  But then somebody was complaining that this bug had stayed open for like three weeks and so I finally then went and then put in that fix.  So you're right, having the source is great, because you can fix little problems that you run into and when you pick up components from the web (if you're talking about javascript) they're all sort of...um...you get the source by definition.  I think that's actually one of the grea...I had a blog entry about this.  That's one of the great strengths of the web.  Everything is essentially open source by default, I mean, if you're curious about what Google is doing on you remember when uh you know maps came out and everyone's like "oooh".  You know, maps, it's all this innovative zoom-in, zoom-out technology.

Spolsky: Yeah

[14:57]

Atwood: You could just view source and if-if you were, you know, motivated enough, you could figure it out, right?  There wasn't like an executible that you had to decompile or anything like that.  So I feel

Spolsky: [garbled - interrupting] Flash

Atwood: Go ahead

Spolsky: Unless it's Flash all flash.  I mean like yahoo maps is all flash and you can't figure out what they're doing.

Atwood: Oh, right.  Right.  Right.  Right.  Right.  Well, that gets back into the whole we call it a rectangle problem - the browser where you have this alien rectangle [laughs] that lives in another universe and it pokes a hole into your dimension and then like this crazy stuff comes through and yeah.  So it...it...on a related note, let's close out the topic.  So the struggling with the deadlock put us back I would say at least four or five days.  So in order to have a smooth landing, there's also a couple of features that I really desperately want us to get in before we open to the public like say a captcha for [laughs] I think that's kinda important when we go live.  Um.  So adding like a week to the schedule really helps us to have a smooth landing.  I mean we could launch on the third.  I mean we honestly could, but it would be a little desperate.  We would be really flailing,
[20:26]
Atwood: But people who do something like that, they don't want attention or anything, they're not feeding on it at all, they're not interested in things like attention at all. The work is it's own reward, it doesn't matter if anyone is looking. Have you seen that thing on the ... I meant to blog about this but the whole concept of just, not looking at things, to basically discourage them. Or that, conversely, looking at things encourages them, like the whole Paris Hilton thing and just talking about these things over and over incessantly actually reinforces the whole trend. There was a series of children's books I don't know if you've heard them, they're called: "The Great Brain". It's set in Utah -

Spolsky: Yeah

Spolsky: (laughs)

Atwood: This is led by Lisa Simpson, who says "Just don't look at them and they'll go away!"

Spolsky: (laughs)

Atwood: Its amazing how powerful that philosophy is. If there are things happening you don't like just don't talk about it or don't give it any attention, and look at the things that you actually care about and actually want (to have happen).

Spolsky: Thats right. That was like the Clinton administration's policy on Rwanda.

Atwood: (uncertain chuckle) Well thats the issue of social injustices, which I think is a little bit different.

Spolsky: There are definitely people who are attention seeking, but you know what? That the thing about trolls, "don't feed the trolls" or whatever. You know what, trolls are doing a great service to the Internet, they're making it entertaining and interesting.

Atwood: Absolutely. There's definitely been, and I think I referred to it in the previous podcast, "youthful experimentation" at stackoverflow. We're still in fact seeing that.

Spolsky: (chuckles)

Atwood: We're still seeing people just try stuff to push buttons and see what they can get away with.

Spolsky: One of the things that will happen, and it happened with IRC all the time, when people get addicted to a social technology or something. They're addicted to the site, the love it, they come and they answer all the questions, but at some point there is just not enough of the main content that everybody is enjoying for them to entertain themselves. They have to find ways to entertain themselves for the next three hours after they've spent the 8 hours doing the regular thing they were supposed to be doing. So on IRC they would start these little flame-bot wars and they would write little bots to protect themselves against the wars, and they would try to cause splits so that they could take over somebody's nickname, and that kind of stuff. They weren't doing the kind of stuff that IRC was for, which was chatting, they'd taken it to the next level because they ran out of people to chat with and that became boring. So they started kind of attacking the system itself.

Atwood: Right, and we're definitely looking at that. I mentioned that CAPTCHA thing, and thats the next piece of the puzzle that has to go in. We have rate limiting mechanisms. One of the early things that happened to us was -

Spolsky: Flooding.

Atwood: - somebody wrote a bot that would just revise posts every minute to keep it on the top of the stack. Actually there is a certain amount of people doing that still, which I'm trying to discourage. They way I like to discourage things is, where possible, creating rules in the system that make that behavior not desirable. Not negative, necessarily, but things happen that make it not worth much to you. So let me give you a specific example in that scenario. You have the user who's just editing their own posts every three hours so that its always on the top of the stack. We have this concept now, its actually implemented though I talked about it in previous podcasts, of the community owned post. Because one of the great divides in stackoverflow is that we have this ownership system where you get voted up and down, your content gets voted up and down, and that affects your reputation. You own stuff, so when you post something you own it. Then you contrast that with the Wikipedia model which is that nobody seems to own it, and we're trying to do both of those things. At the transition point we came up with a couple rules. The initial rule I had was that edits by four different people will cause a post to switch from being owned by Joel, for example, to being owned by the community user. At that point you don't lose any reputation that you got up to that point, but any future upvotes on that content don't go to anybody they go to the content. I think this is the way it should be. Ultimately you're voting on the content more than the person anyway, so hopefully people are ok with this. Seeing that people kept editing stuff over and over I bent the rules a little bit and said ok, if you edit your own thing more than N times then it also becomes a community owned post. There is no real value to the user, in terms of getting additional reputation, to bump stuff up to the top of the stack anymore because if you edit your own thing enough you won't get any reputation from it. It behooves you to only edit it once, or however many times you need to edit it but hopefully no more than once, and just let it sit there and have people find it organically and naturally the way it is supposed to happen.

Spolsky: That will happen more when we're open to Google for searches. I think right now one of the problems with stackoverflow that some people have been experiencing is that they ask a question, and its a little too esoteric to get a response right away, and then it disappears from view for a while. Once the site has a much larger critical mass of people and is searchable by Google, those questions will naturally have people come to them so they won't need to try these little tricks to get them in front of people again to get an answer.

[28:20]

Spolsky: You not actually recording the revision?  You're not doing the diff thing?

Atwood: [Not] within the threshold.  Right now the threshold is actually 5 minutes.  So up to 5 minutes after you post, if you edit your own stuff.  Now if I go edit it, it's a real revision.

Spolsky: Now...that's OK, except that you sort of run the risk that the historical record is...if somebody posts something and it's seen as being...

Atwood: Sure, if the threshold is like 2 hours, right?

Spolsky: ...5 minutes.  Let's say I ask the question "Is Jeff Atwood smart?"  (laughs)  And then you reply saying "Yes!  Absolutely.  Definitely."  And then I go back and change "smart" to "stupid" one second later.  "Ah-hah...you said you were stupid!"  And there's no track record.  Not only that, but everybody can say "There's supposed to be an audit trail here.  Let's look at the audit trail...oh, look!  It wasn't edited!"

Atwood: Right.  No, that's true.  That does leave you vulnerable.  And I think that's where you come to playing with the rules, and seeing what happens.  Another example of setting the rules...you can't always anticipate all the side effects of the rules you're going to set.  And you don't always get the behavior that you wanted out of the rules that you set either.  You have to be very, very careful.  So when I instituted the rule of 5 edits by the owner causing a post to go to community mode, the next day somebody complained about that.  Actually this was today.  Somebody posted a thread on "What are your favorite developer magazines?"  And because it's not in my opinion a great question, because it really can't be answered and it's very subjective.  It's not a great question is the bottom line.  So it got edited a lot, immediately.  People started editing the tags.  Somebody changed the title.  The net effect was within 45 seconds of this guy posting it, it was in community mode.  And he was kind of complaining about that [saying] "Look, I've had no chance to get any rep from this post at all."  I kind of agreed--although again, not a great question.

Spolsky: You shouldn't get any credit for a not great question.

Atwood: You could argue that this is totally correct behavior.  I can see where he's coming from, and one thing I thought of was having a certain time window where...it's four edits by four different people, but it has to be more than one hour.  Or whatever time interval.

Spolsky: Ugh.  Too much tweaking.  You know what I would say?  Just tell people "Listen, if you want to ask one of these poll questions like 'What's your favorite developer magazine?', that would be a good question if you phrased it in the following way: 'What is your single most favorite developer magazine?'"  And instead of just replying, see if someone else has already given the answer, and vote it up.  And then what you get is a ranked listing of everybody's favorite developer magazines, in order from most favorite to least favorite.  But if you say "What is your favorite magazines?" and people are answering with three, and they're discussing some magazine that they subscribed to a long time ago and it's just chatter going on in there, the question becomes a mess and it just doesn't fit the Stack Overflow data model. 

Atwood: It doesn't.  That's right.  And I think that's the challenge, is also getting people to understand what is the Stack Overflow model.  

Spolsky: We can do polls, and we should do polls, for things like "Should I learn C?  Yes/No"  (laughs)  There you go...everybody vote.

Atwood: One advantage, and I haven't put this in yet, but you will be able to opt-in to the community mode so that you don't get any rep.  So then you could post things that are effectively voting questions.  Let's say we had "What is your favorite developer magazine?"  And everybody that posted in it went into community mode immediately, all those votes would go towards the magazine, no you.  I said "BYTE.  BYTE is my favorite programmer magazine.  It's a classic."  So everybody that voted for that would not be voting for me, they'd be voting for BYTE.  I wouldn't get any reputation from that at all.

Spolsky: I could not program my Atari 800 without the great articles I've gotten from BYTE magazine.  [Actually I had an Atari 800--back in 1981 or 1982, and while BYTE remains my all-time favorite programming magazine--especially in the early days before it went downhill, the magazine that helped me master the Atari 800 was Compute.]

Atwood: (laughs)  There you go.  I think I've said this before, but I think it bears repeating.  I really enjoy working on Stack Overflow--it's a really fun social experiment.  Because we're getting useful stuff out of it for the most part, to me that makes it workwhile.  You call that tweaking, but to me if it's a tweak that results in six months from now hundreds of much better questions then it's worth doing.

[32:52]

[57:56]

Spolsky: but a pointer on an 80386... for a while the 80386 was the target.  On an 80386, a pointer consisted of (or even on the 8086 in general) a pointer consisted of two parts, the segment and the offset.  So it's like "where do you want to start your pointer?" and then "what's your offset inside there?".  And you couldn't just indirectly say "here's my pointer, just do something with this." You could, finally in 32-bit clean mode, but we didn't have that. What you had to do, was there was this thing called the segment register, and you loaded the segment register saying, "From now on my pointers which are 16 bits are going to be offset from this particular point. And the very loading of that segment register would cause all kinds of operating system traps to get executed and all kinds of interesting things to happen and it was a very, very slow operation. So if you were doing any kind of pointer manipulation, which you were cause it was C and everything was pointer manipulation, you wanted to load that segment register as infrequently as possible because that was a very, very expensive operation. And chances are, you're doing a whole bunch of pointer operations that are all in the same segment - for a while at least. You really want to be able to just load it once and then maybe do your next 20 operations with that as the base register. So all the Excel code had this assumption that they could do that - it gave them the ability to do that. And that made it just screamingly fast compared to the competition. I mean, I remember when Borland came out with Paradox for Windows, and they did not take this into account and they just used - it was C++ code, so they really had no choice but to use pointers for all their methods because it was all virtual tables and C++ objects. The net result was that they just used these pointers naively, pretending that the top 16 bits - every time they wanted to use a pointer, they reloaded the segment register, and that just made this app really, really slow. I mean, it took 90 seconds to start. You know Excel could launch in 10 or 15 seconds.

Atwood: Wow.

Spolsky: So this was this feature that they eventually got added to the regular Microsoft C compiler called base pointers, and I think then they stopped using their own compiler. But their philosophy was really not to trust anybody and to have control over everything so that there's some hope they can get it to work without having an external dependency. You know, I've sort of taken this with me a long ways, and every time I've failed to do that I've tended to regret it. Every time we've put outside technology into Fog Bugz we've regretted it. There's a lot of these excellent components, and they are really great components, that are made by vendors like .Net components and they're widgets like the cool calendar widget dropdown that you put into your web page and all that kind of stuff. And inevitably what I've found is that they are good enough for enterprise code, like internal apps that you're using at the insurance company, and they're just never good enough for the kind of app you want to ship that has to be perfect. Somehow there is something that's not commercial quality about them. You know it's fine if there's 20 people using it, and they're all using it the same way, it allows you to in fifteen seconds put a calendar dropdown into something. But then you'll get to some customer who says, "You know we don't start our week's on Sunday in my country". And you'll say, "Oh", and you'll find out this library doesn't have that feature. As a hypothetical example.

[12:57]

Atwood: Right!

Spolsky: Which I ...

Atwood: I believe that's one advantage of some of the web stuff is because everything is just public facing by default. You don't have sort of this, this internal development ghetto effect. Like... 'cuz I... we have... I mean, to be fair, any talk of dependencies, we have tons of dependencies, right? It's just a question of what dependencies you wanna take, like, I mean, jQuerry is a dependency, right?

Spolsky: Hhm.

Atwood:  We're using the WMD control, that's a dependency.

Spolsky: Hhm.

Atwood: There's these little add-ons for jQuery that...

Spolsky: But you know what, if there was a bug in... if you found a bug in jQuery, you would just go, edit the source and you would be shipping your own private version of jQuerry and problem solved.  And it wouldn't be ideal, but at least you wouldn't be screwed.

[13:32]

Atwood: Right ... We have actually done that and let me actually give an example.  So the WMD editor has a bug with international keyboards.  Like there's no way we would have found this because we don't use international keyboards but obviously some of the people that use StackOverflow do and

Spolsky: Sure

Atwood: They were, I think, understandably very annoyed because they couldn't enter like right bracket.  Which is like an important key particularly in markdown.  That's one of the key, like one of the delimiters you use sometimes.

Spolsky: Yeah, the...

Atwood: Um.  And they actually, huh, the prob...I'm still trying to get the source from from the authors so we don't actually have the source.  What we have is well ob...not...I guess obfuscated is not the right word but minified javascript where they compress it down so all the variables are "a", "b", "c" and things like that.  So it's not exactly fun code to look at anymore [laughs].

Spolsky: Yeah

[14:12]

Atwood: But somebody actually went through and actually found a little work-around and I feel bad because when they posted this I didn't realize that they actually found a work-around so I was like "Oh that's interesting" and I just didn't come back to it.  But then somebody was complaining that this bug had stayed open for like three weeks and so I finally then went and then put in that fix.  So you're right, having the source is great, because you can fix little problems that you run into and when you pick up components from the web (if you're talking about javascript) they're all sort of...um...you get the source by definition.  I think that's actually one of the grea...I had a blog entry about this.  That's one of the great strengths of the web.  Everything is essentially open source by default, I mean, if you're curious about what Google is doing on you remember when uh you know maps came out and everyone's like "oooh".  You know, maps, it's all this innovative zoom-in, zoom-out technology.

Spolsky: Yeah

[14:57]

Atwood: You could just view source and if-if you were, you know, motivated enough, you could figure it out, right?  There wasn't like an executible that you had to decompile or anything like that.  So I feel

Spolsky: [garbled - interrupting] Flash

Atwood: Go ahead

Spolsky: Unless it's Flash all flash.  I mean like yahoo maps is all flash and you can't figure out what they're doing.

Atwood: Oh, right.  Right.  Right.  Right.  Right.  Well, that gets back into the whole we call it a rectangle problem - the browser where you have this alien rectangle [laughs] that lives in another universe and it pokes a hole into your dimension and then like this crazy stuff comes through and yeah.  So it...it...on a related note, let's close out the topic.  So the struggling with the deadlock put us back I would say at least four or five days.  So in order to have a smooth landing, there's also a couple of features that I really desperately want us to get in before we open to the public like say a captcha for [laughs] I think that's kinda important when we go live.  Um.  So adding like a week to the schedule really helps us to have a smooth landing.  I mean we could launch on the third.  I mean we honestly could, but it would be a little desperate.  We would be really flailing,
[20:26]
Atwood: But people who do something like that, they don't want attention or anything, they're not feeding on it at all, they're not interested in things like attention at all. The work is it's own reward, it doesn't matter if anyone is looking. Have you seen that thing on the ... I meant to blog about this but the whole concept of just, not looking at things, to basically discourage them. Or that, conversely, looking at things encourages them, like the whole Paris Hilton thing and just talking about these things over and over incessantly actually reinforces the whole trend. There was a series of children's books I don't know if you've heard them, they're called: "The Great Brain". It's set in Utah -

Spolsky: Yeah

Spolsky: (laughs)

Atwood: This is led by Lisa Simpson, who says "Just don't look at them and they'll go away!"

Spolsky: (laughs)

Atwood: Its amazing how powerful that philosophy is. If there are things happening you don't like just don't talk about it or don't give it any attention, and look at the things that you actually care about and actually want (to have happen).

Spolsky: Thats right. That was like the Clinton administration's policy on Rwanda.

Atwood: (uncertain chuckle) Well thats the issue of social injustices, which I think is a little bit different.

Spolsky: There are definitely people who are attention seeking, but you know what? That the thing about trolls, "don't feed the trolls" or whatever. You know what, trolls are doing a great service to the Internet, they're making it entertaining and interesting.

Atwood: Absolutely. There's definitely been, and I think I referred to it in the previous podcast, "youthful experimentation" at stackoverflow. We're still in fact seeing that.

Spolsky: (chuckles)

Atwood: We're still seeing people just try stuff to push buttons and see what they can get away with.

Spolsky: One of the things that will happen, and it happened with IRC all the time, when people get addicted to a social technology or something. They're addicted to the site, the love it, they come and they answer all the questions, but at some point there is just not enough of the main content that everybody is enjoying for them to entertain themselves. They have to find ways to entertain themselves for the next three hours after they've spent the 8 hours doing the regular thing they were supposed to be doing. So on IRC they would start these little flame-bot wars and they would write little bots to protect themselves against the wars, and they would try to cause splits so that they could take over somebody's nickname, and that kind of stuff. They weren't doing the kind of stuff that IRC was for, which was chatting, they'd taken it to the next level because they ran out of people to chat with and that became boring. So they started kind of attacking the system itself.

Atwood: Right, and we're definitely looking at that. I mentioned that CAPTCHA thing, and thats the next piece of the puzzle that has to go in. We have rate limiting mechanisms. One of the early things that happened to us was -

Spolsky: Flooding.

Atwood: - somebody wrote a bot that would just revise posts every minute to keep it on the top of the stack. Actually there is a certain amount of people doing that still, which I'm trying to discourage. They way I like to discourage things is, where possible, creating rules in the system that make that behavior not desirable. Not negative, necessarily, but things happen that make it not worth much to you. So let me give you a specific example in that scenario. You have the user who's just editing their own posts every three hours so that its always on the top of the stack. We have this concept now, its actually implemented though I talked about it in previous podcasts, of the community owned post. Because one of the great divides in stackoverflow is that we have this ownership system where you get voted up and down, your content gets voted up and down, and that affects your reputation. You own stuff, so when you post something you own it. Then you contrast that with the Wikipedia model which is that nobody seems to own it, and we're trying to do both of those things. At the transition point we came up with a couple rules. The initial rule I had was that edits by four different people will cause a post to switch from being owned by Joel, for example, to being owned by the community user. At that point you don't lose any reputation that you got up to that point, but any future upvotes on that content don't go to anybody they go to the content. I think this is the way it should be. Ultimately you're voting on the content more than the person anyway, so hopefully people are ok with this. Seeing that people kept editing stuff over and over I bent the rules a little bit and said ok, if you edit your own thing more than N times then it also becomes a community owned post. There is no real value to the user, in terms of getting additional reputation, to bump stuff up to the top of the stack anymore because if you edit your own thing enough you won't get any reputation from it. It behooves you to only edit it once, or however many times you need to edit it but hopefully no more than once, and just let it sit there and have people find it organically and naturally the way it is supposed to happen.

Spolsky: That will happen more when we're open to Google for searches. I think right now one of the problems with stackoverflow that some people have been experiencing is that they ask a question, and its a little too esoteric to get a response right away, and then it disappears from view for a while. Once the site has a much larger critical mass of people and is searchable by Google, those questions will naturally have people come to them so they won't need to try these little tricks to get them in front of people again to get an answer.

[28:20]

Spolsky: You not actually recording the revision?  You're not doing the diff thing?

Atwood: [Not] within the threshold.  Right now the threshold is actually 5 minutes.  So up to 5 minutes after you post, if you edit your own stuff.  Now if I go edit it, it's a real revision.

Spolsky: Now...that's OK, except that you sort of run the risk that the historical record is...if somebody posts something and it's seen as being...

Atwood: Sure, if the threshold is like 2 hours, right?

Spolsky: ...5 minutes.  Let's say I ask the question "Is Jeff Atwood smart?"  (laughs)  And then you reply saying "Yes!  Absolutely.  Definitely."  And then I go back and change "smart" to "stupid" one second later.  "Ah-hah...you said you were stupid!"  And there's no track record.  Not only that, but everybody can say "There's supposed to be an audit trail here.  Let's look at the audit trail...oh, look!  It wasn't edited!"

Atwood: Right.  No, that's true.  That does leave you vulnerable.  And I think that's where you come to playing with the rules, and seeing what happens.  Another example of setting the rules...you can't always anticipate all the side effects of the rules you're going to set.  And you don't always get the behavior that you wanted out of the rules that you set either.  You have to be very, very careful.  So when I instituted the rule of 5 edits by the owner causing a post to go to community mode, the next day somebody complained about that.  Actually this was today.  Somebody posted a thread on "What are your favorite developer magazines?"  And because it's not in my opinion a great question, because it really can't be answered and it's very subjective.  It's not a great question is the bottom line.  So it got edited a lot, immediately.  People started editing the tags.  Somebody changed the title.  The net effect was within 45 seconds of this guy posting it, it was in community mode.  And he was kind of complaining about that [saying] "Look, I've had no chance to get any rep from this post at all."  I kind of agreed--although again, not a great question.

Spolsky: You shouldn't get any credit for a not great question.

Atwood: You could argue that this is totally correct behavior.  I can see where he's coming from, and one thing I thought of was having a certain time window where...it's four edits by four different people, but it has to be more than one hour.  Or whatever time interval.

Spolsky: Ugh.  Too much tweaking.  You know what I would say?  Just tell people "Listen, if you want to ask one of these poll questions like 'What's your favorite developer magazine?', that would be a good question if you phrased it in the following way: 'What is your single most favorite developer magazine?'"  And instead of just replying, see if someone else has already given the answer, and vote it up.  And then what you get is a ranked listing of everybody's favorite developer magazines, in order from most favorite to least favorite.  But if you say "What is your favorite magazines?" and people are answering with three, and they're discussing some magazine that they subscribed to a long time ago and it's just chatter going on in there, the question becomes a mess and it just doesn't fit the Stack Overflow data model. 

Atwood: It doesn't.  That's right.  And I think that's the challenge, is also getting people to understand what is the Stack Overflow model.  

Spolsky: We can do polls, and we should do polls, for things like "Should I learn C?  Yes/No"  (laughs)  There you go...everybody vote.

Atwood: One advantage, and I haven't put this in yet, but you will be able to opt-in to the community mode so that you don't get any rep.  So then you could post things that are effectively voting questions.  Let's say we had "What is your favorite developer magazine?"  And everybody that posted in it went into community mode immediately, all those votes would go towards the magazine, no you.  I said "BYTE.  BYTE is my favorite programmer magazine.  It's a classic."  So everybody that voted for that would not be voting for me, they'd be voting for BYTE.  I wouldn't get any reputation from that at all.

Spolsky: I could not program my Atari 800 without the great articles I've gotten from BYTE magazine.  [Actually I had an Atari 800--back in 1981 or 1982, and while BYTE remains my all-time favorite programming magazine--especially in the early days before it went downhill, the magazine that helped me master the Atari 800 was Compute.]

Atwood: (laughs)  There you go.  I think I've said this before, but I think it bears repeating.  I really enjoy working on Stack Overflow--it's a really fun social experiment.  Because we're getting useful stuff out of it for the most part, to me that makes it workwhile.  You call that tweaking, but to me if it's a tweak that results in six months from now hundreds of much better questions then it's worth doing.

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