Stack Overflow was a good stab at solving the problem, and the UI execution was excellent, as well as the promotion of the site by two widely-read bloggers.
My personal frustration with the site is that their engagement model was a little too game-like. While reputation and badges might be a good metric for the quality of the contribution, the actual implementation ended up reinforcing a base of easy homework questions, and people racing for the simplest answers.
I found that when asking descriptive questions, that I would quickly get several one-line answers that pretty much guessed at the answer based on the title. Even the nuanced answers tended to have answers and explanations that either ignored the problem or suggested things already asked in the question.
Sticking with the question, I can either comment on an answer, or edit my own question to address it, or I could comment a response to the comment. Working this way, I have managed to at least get good leads a few times, but the really difficult questions ended up being things I had to solve myself.
Lately, though, I find that it pops up in my preliminary googling of a problem early on, and at least provides better references than generic forums or experts-exchange.
If they could find a way to make reputation and badges reinforce the _quality_ of the answer, instead of the _response time_ of the answer, and encourage difficult questions rather than the proliferation of basic questions, and the attitude that answering the most of them the fastest made you some kind of "elite" programmer, then I think it could be very powerful.
That being said, when I am tracking down an obscure error or specific exception, I usually find it on the libraries forum, or a forum with a narrower focus, but they definitely like the UI polish of SO.
My personal frustration with the site is that their engagement model was a little too game-like. While reputation and badges might be a good metric for the quality of the contribution, the actual implementation ended up reinforcing a base of easy homework questions, and people racing for the simplest answers.
I found that when asking descriptive questions, that I would quickly get several one-line answers that pretty much guessed at the answer based on the title. Even the nuanced answers tended to have answers and explanations that either ignored the problem or suggested things already asked in the question.
Sticking with the question, I can either comment on an answer, or edit my own question to address it, or I could comment a response to the comment. Working this way, I have managed to at least get good leads a few times, but the really difficult questions ended up being things I had to solve myself.
Lately, though, I find that it pops up in my preliminary googling of a problem early on, and at least provides better references than generic forums or experts-exchange.
If they could find a way to make reputation and badges reinforce the _quality_ of the answer, instead of the _response time_ of the answer, and encourage difficult questions rather than the proliferation of basic questions, and the attitude that answering the most of them the fastest made you some kind of "elite" programmer, then I think it could be very powerful.
That being said, when I am tracking down an obscure error or specific exception, I usually find it on the libraries forum, or a forum with a narrower focus, but they definitely like the UI polish of SO.