Hacker News Reader

Comment by keithwarren | Hacker News Reader

It is one thing to clone SO in an effort to give a FOSS choice to the StackExchange format but trying to compete with SO by building a clone is heading in the wrong direction. Challenging SO is not about technology, it is about the number and quality of users. Metcalfe's law wins the day here.

View on HN

Challenging SO is not about technology, it is about the number and quality of users. Metcalfe's law wins the day here.

There are a lot of good discussion sites running terrible software, like LtU and Perlmonks. This would allow them to keep their communities intact but actually run software that doesn't actively discourage contributions. (Ever use Perlmonks? That's why people hate Perl!)

Yes, there are a ton of sites out there running terrible software that doesn't fit how they use it. phpBB and vBulletin are a scourge on the internet's communities. There's tons of mediocre Drupal installs out there, and generic blogs where the clueless master just posts regular 'open threads'.

But I'll be damned if I can't think of a worse fit for any of these people than a SO-style QA-wiki. The last thing they need is fucking badges!

Atwood pointed this out in his post "Code: It's Trivial" (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/07/code-its-trivial.ht...).

I agree, but we're not in the business of growing a Q&A site about programing, we're in the business of allowing anyone to start their own Q&A site about any subject, using their own server or ours.

papachito, sorry if my curt response came off as anything other than positive. I was just adding a link to a past Atwood article pointing out that the technology is not the emphasis here, but it is rather the building of a community lead by dedicated and passionate leaders. Giving others a platform and tools to do this is commendable!

Thanks :)

Maybe the title of this post is misleading....you guys are not "taking on" stackoverflow, you're actually taking on "stackexchange", such that it is cheaper, and also doesn't suck?

Duplicating SO makes no sense to me, duplicating SE makes a lot of sense to me.

I agree, though for the info I'm not the one who submitted and picked that title.

thats why you chose the AGPL license! ;)

Exactly. What matters in a Q&A site like shapado is not the features, it's the community. So we might as well share the features and make it the best Q&A platform as possible so we can focus on growing our own communities on it.

It's more of a StackExchange alternative than a SO one. You are free to create your own site about programing if you want to go against SO, but we're not. For example, this guy did http://www.coders.es/ for the Spanish community.

Yes! SE starts at $139/month...pretty expensive in my opinion.

A lot worse if you are in a country where $ are hard to get.

Or you are in a country that Fogcreek can't do business with

Or you want a site on a topic that FC, or their bankers, or their VC or their government don't want you to have one on

Or you want an internal secure site for your society, company, hospital, police force

> Or you want an internal secure site for your society, company, hospital, police force

This is the real win in my opinion. On the open web, the SE sites are not just about the technology -- that is quite a small part of the problem.

Internally, especially in smaller companies, involvement is less of an issue and the technology becomes are more significant part of the problem. This is where I see a lot of opportunity for Shapado.

I'm assuming SE are going to have an in-house appliance or virtual machine version for companies.

No company is going to have it's knowledge base on someone else's servers - especially not any industry 'knowledge rich' (urghhh) enough to need an SE site

Reply on news.ycombinator.com