Topic: podcasts

With the recent “REP-OCALYPSE” that happened over the weekend, we thought it was a great time to do another podcast – so come join Joel, Jarrod, and Josh as they talk about some of the recent changes to the site and the motivations behind them.

• JOEL: This is not necessarily a podcast, but it might turn into something useable, perhaps in the form of a podcast, maybe. The goal is to talk about all of the questions that are getting closed, aka REP-OCALYPSE NOW.
• Part One: there has been closing and deletion of very popular old questions going on lately. Are we happy with how this is going? What are the other options?
• This has come to a head because it got noticed all of a sudden thanks to the global reputation recalc.
• SHOG: This is a perfect storm. Prior to the rep recalc, an SO mod got it in his head that he should go clean up these old popular questions, since they’re totally inappropriate for the current standards of the site. He posted on MSO about it. Then, this rep recalc made a whole bunch of people painfully aware of a bunch of their stuff getting suddenly deleted.
• A lot of the stuff that got deleted was worthy of getting deleted. Some were valuable, though, and were worthy of discussion and possible salvation.
• JOEL: There are a few categories that the lynch mob is after that should stay open (They’re interpreting a particular rule too zealously.) One of these is talking about separate questions that all have the same answer. One of them is three different [identify-this-game] questions that all refer to the same game.
• SHOG: If you ask a bullshit joke question and it gets good answers, great! You broke the “only ask questions you really need the answer to” rule, but the page is now improving the internet. It has value. Good job!
• JOEL: An example: the center cannot hold. The activity in the answers should be protected, not the questions. Hidden features questions tend to devolve. They lose value after the top ten or so answers.
• JOEL: So! There have been a lot of bad questions that were deleted, and some higher quality ones that are hotly contested. So what about programmer cartoons, or boat programming questions? They get a million views. They bring people into the network. Making those pages be Page Not Found is violent! It breaks the internet a little!
• SHOG: A theory: this is a lottery. Most of the time you post stuff, and it goes nowhere. Sometimes it strikes a chord, people go crazy over it and generate a great page.
• JOEL: There are no new questions that this really affects. If somebody asked “what’s your favorite Pascal question” today, it would get closed in a second.
• Eric Lippert wrote a great answer a year ago on a question that pissed people off – it was a duplicate and a homework question and all sorts of terrible stuff, but the amazing answer redeemed the question.
• SHOG: We don’t want to encourage people to gamble. We can encourage them to put their money in the bank instead!
• JOEL: Back to the question. What is bad about keeping these lottery winner questions around?
• JOEL: New example: the programmer cartoons. It benefits us because there are lots of views, and because people laugh! It’s better than googling “programmer cartoons” because we have voting.
• JOEL: Programmer cartoons questions get closed. So is it okay to keep the weird exceptions around just because they were very successful?
• Concept #1: Famous RFC about TCP/IP over Pigeon that wasn’t serious. Did it break the internet? Did this one not real RFC turn all RFCs into Reddit?
• Concept #2: Purim Torah on Judaism SE. On Purim, you are required to break rules and get drunk. Purim Torah is a humorous fake discussion of Jewish law that you discuss as if it were serious. The Judaism SE community has decided to allow it during/around the time of Purim. Some of the questions are very funny.
• An example of a “Purim Torah” Stack Overflow question: What is the name of this operator: “–>”?. This question wins the lottery! It’s okay that this happens occasionally. Every culture ever has a holiday in which certain rules are relaxed a little. Purim, Halloween, April Fool’s, Thursday, Naked Friday…
• SHOG: Now. Stack Overflow isn’t linear. As it gets older, more and more of these old questions keep cropping up. You don’t need to keep adding funny programmer cartoons to that one question and bumping it up. That’s why we have locking!
• JOEL: There is a larger class of questions that we should be discussing. Stuff that’s no longer on topic, but still has amazing answers. For example: career questions.
• Are we on the same page that there exists a class of question that’s awesome enough that it can’t be deleted? What do we do about people who just noticed that their amazing internet artifact was deleted, and they’re mad?
• When frequent flyer miles became a thing, travelers were wary of using them because they didn’t want their number of miles to go down, so they would continue to be treated well by the airline. The airlines realized they had to start printing their lifetime earned miles, so people wouldn’t be afraid of “losing” those miles.
• JARROD: Nick Craver is working on that right now! If you have reputation from something that sticks around for 60 days, the rep “locks in”.
• JOEL: Maybe pageviews should also be taken into account. Another idea: archiving stuff.
• JARROD: Here’s Pekka’s idea about archiving stuff: hosting our own archive of stuff that’s been deleted but shouldn’t go away and become a Page Not Found.
• JOEL: This is not for everything that got deleted, or else it would be spam spam spam. But this is for stuff that gets heavily linked to from elsewhere on the internet that we shouldn’t just take away. We’re not ashamed of these questions, this is just part of our history

Well that’s it for this week’s podcast – join us in the coming weeks as we get back into the swing of things and test our new formats.  See you soon!

SE Podcast #32 - Rep-Ocalypse with Josh and Jarrod [ 1:02:52 ] Download

Well, it’s time for the final Stack Exchange Podcast featuring Jeff Atwood before he rides off into the sunset.  Tune in to hear Jeff and Joel reminisce about the origins of Stack Exchange, the journey along the way, and listen to some special recordings from those who have been around since the beginning.

• Joel was reading the transcript of Stack Overflow Podcast 001. It’s from April 2008. Listen to the awesome excerpt about the birth of Stack Overflow! (Stack Overflow is not another place to discuss tabs vs. spaces.)
• What was the biggest thing that surprised you about Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange? Jeff mentions the Meta Issue. Joel started out with a strong antipathy toward meta questions, or discussing the site on the site instead of discussing the topic of the site. It comes down to building the software to accommodate the direction the community goes in.  You can’t plan everything.
• Stack Overflow originally launched without comments, but that was fixed very shortly after launch, because it was something the community needed. Wikipedia hasn’t done this for Talk pages, and that’s why they’re so darn confusing.
• People have recorded nice messages for Jeff in honor of his departure. Geoff Dalgas aka Valued Associate #00003 goes first, and his clip is full of win (and awesomely bad music). Quantcast says we have 20 million visitors a month, and together they could populate a city the size of Seoul, South Korea. We have more people typing on our websites than English Wikipedia.
• Kyle Cronin sent in our next message. He’s an exemplary Stack Exchange user who contributed heavily to the birth of Meta Stack Overflow. Kyle was started a meta bulletin board after he found the official UserVoice site inadequate (that is until Jeff decided it was a core business function and made MSO).
• Next up is Josh Heyer aka Shog9, another Valued Associate who speaks very slowly. Jeff had originally put Josh in the same bucket as the Welbogs - people who get bored with chess, so they start flinging the chess pieces everywhere. Stack Overflow and Josh have grown up together. Jeff and Joel found a way to keep users like Josh interested and entertained without being detrimental to the core purpose of the sites, through Meta, Area 51, more sites, and beyond.
• History of the site: Started with Stack Overflow. Then came Server Fault and Super User, which topics were deemed off topic for Stack Overflow, but which were great fits for our audience. Then came Stack Exchange 1.0 and…
• …Valued Associate David Fullerton! He came over from Fog Creek and took the reins for Stack Exchange 1.0… which failed. Luckily, it became clear that the asset is not the software, but the community. Enter Stack Exchange 2.0! Communities were given the power to create new sites, for better or for worse. Theirs is the power to decide whether or not things like “identify this x” questions are helpful.
• There is such a thing as sites that harm the internet simply by continuing to exist. For that reason, sometimes sites need to be closed. Facts of life! (Askville is an extreme example. It can’t even hide its bad content, like Reddit can.)
• Here’s Jon Skeet, the all-time top user on Stack Overflow with more nice comments for Jeff. Jon Skeet is legendary. He has answered 20k questions on Stack Overflow thanks to his long commute to and from work. He exemplifies what makes a great Stack Overflow user, and has been justly rewarded with internet fame, and a ton of reputation.
• We’re almost at Version 3.0 of the core engine. Things are pretty polished, from a software perspective! But software is never really done, especially software that is being built for (and with) a community that’s always changing. So plenty of work remains to be done on the engine, but Jeff is leaving it in very capable hands.
• Information maintenance is a huge problem, especially in the realm of software development, and especially because Google tends to give higher PageRank to older pages. That’s a great way to have outdated information! That’s why Stack Exchange questions are always editable… but the incentive to do so is not always there. (Adding a new question still makes the page better, though, and you get reps!) Editing is a good way to earn your first few points of rep when you’re new to a site.
• Eric Lippert has our next message for Jeff. He demands markup that will make the text on our sites turn purple (because he writes his blog in purple). Eric uses Stack Overflow to interact with his customers and see what trouble they’re having and how they’re fixing them. (Eric is the Pope of C#.)
• That brings us up to today!
• Stack Overflow is enabling programmers that aren’t located in Silicon Valley-type places to make the greater programming community better and get recognized for their great work, even if they’re just a rote programmer at a regional insurance company.
• This is the final podcast with Jeff & Joel! Jeff’s last thoughts: the new babies are doing well and existing ex-baby Henry is doing well adapting to the young ones.
• Jarrod Dixon, Valued Associate #00002, will play us off.
• Jeff’s final advice: choose the adventures that scare you a little bit.

SE Podcast #31 - A Goodbye to Jeff Atwood [ 1:06:46 ] Download

Guests this week are Robert Cartaino and Rebecca Chernoff. Yeehaw! They’re members of our Community Team.

• The original Joel on Software forums were sort of a progenitor for Stack Overflow. They had strict rules: nothing off-topic was allowed – and discussing the forums themselves was off-topic. So a Joel on Software Off-Topic discussion group was created for all of That Stuff. Joel’s forums are still going strong!
• What happens if we let a community go on forever? If it’s stagnating or not really growing, it’s not necessarily making the internet worse. It’s just not doing anything. Right? But think about something like an eHow, that has low quality pages that still rank higher for most queries than other pages with real, good information. The Community Team does evaluations of the quality of sites, but they are beginning to make that process transparent to the communities or even have their communities do the checks. Or potentially to hire really deep experts now and then. Or both?
• What if we have the best site on the web, but it’s for a terrible topic? For example – what if horoscopes.stackexchange.com was the best darn horoscopes site out there. Does the topic still make sense on our engine? This is why proposals are examined so thoughly in Area 51 (and its respective discussion section).
• If you haven’t checked Area 51 out recently, you should stop by – there are lots of cool improvements that have been made. Robert, Jeff and Rebecca discuss the newfangled Area 51 process, and what sorts of mysterious things happen to a site when it spends its “week” in Private Beta.
• Sometimes proposals fail and get closed. Game of Go was one of them. It got shut down, but its questions and its users got migrated over to Board Games - which is one of the ideal ways to handle having a young site shut down. Another positive way to handle the shutting down of a site is to let its users regroup in Area 51 and try the proposal again with a different approach.
• “Wouldn’t it be simpler to just create a catch-all site, answers.stackexchange.com, and split off topics as they grow large enough for their own sites?” Basically, there is no way to grow acommunity through this method, since all the people there would have nothing in common. A counterexample is the split between Stack Overflow and Programmers - but that wouldn’t have worked with someone just asking a question about hardwood flooring on Stack Overflow and having it turn into Home Improvement.
• Really good moderation is key to everything. There are 260 moderators on the whole network! We start to identify moderators a few weeks into a site’s private beta by looking for active meta participants, editing to improve content, voting to close – doing activities other than simply asking and answering questions. This does not necessarily mean that the moderators must be the highest-rep users! That’s like asking your grandparents to be ushers at your wedding. Rebecca tells us about the changes that were made to the Stack Overflow election system for the recent moderator election. It involves badges. Learn more about elections! The Android elections are going on now.
• We hold chat-casts with moderators every few weeks to open a channel between the Community Team and the moderators. There’s also a monthly moderator newsletter with highlights of important announcements. That’s so people can get the 5-6 things they need to know without having to be too deeply ingrained in the moderators’ chat room or in metas.
• Meta Stack Overflow is to the federal government as individual site metas are to state governments. It’s possible to spend most of your time on your local site government, and the newsletter will keep you apprised of the changes on the national level.
• Moderation and meta activity are huge parts of why Stack Exchange is so awesome, but we can’t forget that it’s the amazing Q&A engine that makes all that awesomeness possible!

That’s it for Podcast #30, which is it for podcasts in 2011. See you next year!

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #30 w/ Robert & Rebecca by Stack Exchange

SE Podcast #30 - Robert & Rebecca [ 59:45 ] Download

Jeff and Joel are joined today by Chris “Moot” Poole, founder of 4chan and Canv.as.  It’s a wide ranging discussion from internet memes and tropes to the danger of the SOPA bill that is currently making its way through the house.

• We need a number display like they have in delis. If anyone out there can get us one on the cheap, Joel would appreciate it so he can always know what podcast number we’re on.
• Canvas is re-imagining a message board, because the aesthetic of forums hasn’t changed in a very long time. It’s got a focus on remixing and collaborating images.
• It’s similar to 4chan but interestingly, Canvas requires users to authenticate their login using Facebook to deter trolls, but still allows pseudonymous and anonymous posting.
• 4chan is weird. Stuff doesn’t last very long there – there’s no archive. Moot gives us a brief history of 4chan and how and why he started it.
• Its a fast way to get a message out to thousands of people because every post starts out as position zero on page zero. That’s why 4chan has a reputation for “porniness” when that actually represents a small percentage of the content that ends up there. (See the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.)
• Most of the internet’s memes originate on 4chan. They make the internet! The memes migrate to Reddit, where they move to the greater internet as a whole.
• 4chan and Reddit (and Tumblr and Twitter) reflect a recent trend away from text and toward images, short-form text, short videos, etc.
• So! Canvas! It’s a real venture-backed company. It’s not going to serve display ads (unlike 4chan which has only been monetized by banner ads).
• Shifting gears to talk about SOPA/PROTECT-IP. Hollywood wants it, and they spend way more money on campaign financing than the tech industry, so legislators are going to pass it. Hollywood wants the ability to go after ISPs who are resolving DNS entries to overseas sites, which is stupid because the workaround for that policy is simple. It wreaks havoc on the existing DMCA provisions for protecting copyrighted content online.
• A long, long time ago… people tried to sue telephone companies for allowing calls in which illegal things were discussed. That was ridiculous, and the phone companies were ruled to have no liability for how their channel is used. That’s the precedent that the internet operates on today.
• Joel describes the current provisions outlined in the DMCA that give copyright holders and websites ways to enforce copyright in a fair way that punishes only the infringer, not the website.
• It’s demonstrative of the fact that Congress is run by corporations currently; the only things that gets passed are things that companies want passed. Example: pizza is a vegetable.
• Two important books to read on the topic: Republic Lost and Master Switch.  You can also read Larry Lessig’s post on why he’s focusing on trying to reform the whole system
• Go to americancensorship.org to learn all about SOPA/PROTECT-IP, and what you should do to get involved. (Hint: in the U.S., it involves contacting your representatives.) It’s likely to come to a full floor vote soon, and we need to stop it. Add your name to the list Senator Ron Wyden will read during his filibuster of the bill.
• We come back to 4chan, where we learn about moderators, janitors, and on-topic-ness rules on the various boards. People apply to be moderators on 4chan, so it’s self-selecting.
• Chris is on Twitter, as are 4chan and Canvas. Also be sure to check out canv.as and 4chan… but don’t do that last one at work.

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #29 w/ Chris Poole by Stack Exchange

SE Podcast #29 - Chris "Moot" Poole [ 1:03:59 ] Download

Jeff & Joel are joined this week by Brent Ozar, database wizard who has helped tons of companies (including Stack) with their massive scaling needs.

• The Spanish site is live! It’s sort of strange having a site about learning one language be conducted in another. With French we decided to let them try to conduct the whole site in French. It’s an experiment!
• Gaming is having a meteoric rise due to Skyrim. Check out the graphs! (Here they are in the show notes!) Skyrim questions have 1.35 million views in ten days, at time of recording. Whoa! Thanks to badp for posting.
• Anyway! Brent Ozar is our special guest today! He is a SQL Server Master. He has a blog. He has a talk about SQL tuning and whether or not you should even do it. He summarizes it for us, and the gang talks about SQL tuning, caching, load sharing. XML shredding. You know. Database stuff.
• At Stack Exchange, and especially with Stack Overflow Careers, we are trying to elevate users and show off how awesome they are.
• Joel’s been reading up on all the Wikipedia pages on personality disorders. Most executives, especially at startups, are indistinguishable from people in insane asylums, apparently. Paranoia is a particularly common form of mental illness among executives. This is relevant because people often say they won’t send employees to a Stack Overflow event because they’ll get poached! (But it’s probably true.)
• Feel free to poach Jason Punyon, employers. (Scratch “Punyon” off your Podcast Bingo card.)
• There’s a post on the Server Fault blog about why Stack Exchange isn’t in the cloud. It’s got a nice discussion about the pros and cons of letting somebody else host your stuff, which the gang explores.
• Answering questions on Stack Exchange is about doing a little science to come up with a canonical answer instead of just posting opinions. Jeff measured the range of a remote controlled robot in Battlefield 3 so as to be able to answer this question.
• Jeff experimented with posting a question for someone else on Super User (based on this post)- and it does! Well-written questions get better answers. But we eventually have to teach the person to fish (to write their own well-written question and post it themselves).
• You can find Brent at his website or on Twitter! (Here’s his video about how Stack Overflow scales with SQL Server.)

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #28 w/ Brent Ozar by Stack Exchange

SE Podcast #28 - Brent Ozar [ 59:48 ] Download