StackOverflow Working Better than Expected

StackOverflow is a programming question and answer site that Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood started a few months ago. I have to admit that I was pretty pessimistic about their success. There are a lot of these types of sites for a lot of different communities and almost none of them have really taken off. One way to tell that a site hasn't taken off is when you land on one of their pages from a search and your question matches someone else's, but invariably they never got a useful answer either. And, it happens again and again to the point where you don’t even bother following the results for that particular site. You already know it's not going to help.

However, I do have one way of seeing the impact of these types of sites. Since I've written a lot of articles about WCF, some fraction of the programming answers in this camp tends to link back to me and I can see the traffic when someone else finds the answer to the question. StackOverflow has been steadily growing in traffic this way and surpassed pretty much every similar site in a few months. This is big because their few months of answers are competing against the long tail of other site's few years worth of answers, and they're still winning. While it's still only fractionally as popular as the MSDN forums for the specific topic of WCF, I'd recommend keeping it in the back of your mind the next time you hit a dead end looking for an answer.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 15, 2009
  This is too funny, because I just joined StackOverflow as a result of finding through a web search.  I decided to check back here for a topic that was not yielding useful web search results (the use of mexTcpBinding) before posting a question there. FYI, nobody believes you actually exist as a singular life form.  Regardless, you are appreciated.