Stack Overflow:Building Social Software for
the Anti-Social<br />Jeff Atwoodcodinghorror.comstackoverflow.com<br />

So I went to New
Zealand Consulate and asked if it was true. And they said: &quot;Indeed. New Zealanders can visit Australia without a Visa&quot;. And I said:&quot;Well, I wanna be a New Zealander. My father is a New Zealander. Can I get a New Zealand passport?&quot; And they said: &quot;Certainly, Sir. Go down to the basement, get some pictures taken, bring them up&quot;. And I did, and they did, and they made me a passport.<br />Joel Spolsky<br />

Step 1:<br />Know your audience<br
/>

Q:How do you tell an
introverted computer programmer from an extroverted computer programmer?<br />

A:<br />An extroverted computer programmer
looks at your shoes when he talks to you.<br />

“In the early years of
programming, a program was regarded as the private property of the programmer. One would no more think of reading a colleague&apos;s program unbidden than of picking up a love letter and reading it.”<br />

“This is essentially what a
program was, a love letter from the programmer to the hardware, full of the intimate details known only to partners in an affair.”<br />

This series of books is
affectionately dedicatedto the Type 650 computer once installed atCase Institute of Technology,in remembrance of many pleasant evenings.Donald Knuthdedication toThe Art of Computer Programming1968<br />

One of the great pioneers
of computer and online gaming, Dani Berry died in 1998. Some of her aphorisms are still frequently quoted by game developers, including<br />”No one ever said on their deathbed, ‘Gee, I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.’”<br />

Step 2: Know your topic<br
/>

Programming is now a social
activity<br />Like it or not.<br />

Social software for the anti-social
<br />(programmers)<br />

Step 3:<br />Understand people’s motivations<br
/>

Modern programming may be a
social activity, but programmers are still introverted and anti-social.*<br />What motivates us to work with confusing, complicated, erratic people instead of simple computers?<br />*and that’s how we like it!<br />

A shared passion:<br />We love
programming.<br />

A common enemy:<br />We hate
Bad Code.<br />

I don’t have to agree
with you<br />I don’t have to be “friends” with you<br />I don’t even have to like you<br />… but we have a shared passion, a shared enemy, and we can learn from each other.<br />

The currency of Stack Overflow
is information.<br />Programmers map social relationships on top of that.<br />Do you really need software to tell you who your friends are?<br />

Work<br />vs.<br />work<br />

Work is when your boss
tells you to do something, you do it, and you get paid.<br />work is motivated by inherent interest and generally unpaid. <br />

Usability testing techniques developed over
the past 25 years for Work no longer apply for work.<br />We shouldn&apos;t be asking, “Can you complete the task?” but rather “Are you motivated to do it in the first place?”<br />

Little-w work:<br />Tiny slices of
frictionless effort<br />Amortized across the entire community<br />

“If you take Wikipedia as
a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project --every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in -- that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.”<br />

Fast, fast, fast<br />No registration
required<br />Simple Markdown formatting<br />Edit anything, anytime (with rep)<br />Every question has an input box at the bottom, inviting you to participate and share what you know<br />

“I&apos;m doing a (free) operating
system (just a hobby) [...] I&apos;d like to know what features most people would want.”<br />“Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.”<br />“In the past, we could do little things for love, but big things required money. Now, we can do big things for love.”<br />