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The article nailed it. Chances are that the world of QA sites is switching from narcism based reputation systems to the real web currency: user attention. That

The article nailed it. Chances are that the world of QA sites is switching from narcism based reputation systems to the real web currency: user attention. That is, if I spend some of my attention on your problem, the system will remember it the next time I have a question. This is what I am doing with http://www.TwoToReal.com http://www.TwoToReal.com: Unlike SO/Quora/etc. it is a synchronous QA site for questions where you didn't get an answer on the the former QA sites. As it works by pulling in other expert users into a real-time web chat, I had to be very careful to find a reasonable trade-off between disturbing the expert (i.e. asking another user by IM to participate) and benefiting the questioner. Rule-of-thumb at TwoToReal: the more you are allowing yourself to be "disturbed" the more will be asked for participation the next time you have a question. Soon it will allow you to "invest" more of your attention on one question by letting the system pull in more than one expert. Thus the currency of attention.

gbelote 15y ago
I believe that's part of the motivation behind bounties: if I've invested a lot of time and accumulated karma, I can spend that karma to improve the quality/speed of answering my question. Re: TwoToReal. It's an interesting idea, although it seems like it adds burden to the answerer. One quality I like of SO is that it encourages people to ask better questions (keep concise, provide relevant details, etc), but in a system where I'd be getting real-time help I might become lazier about posting my question. "I have a problem with node.js" rather than "I'm getting this output when trying to use node in this way".
- derpapst 15y ago
  That's a totally valid point, gbelote. Nevertheless, there will always be questions where you don't know you to frame a question - even after having searched around for a while. E.g.: if you are new to Linux and X doesn't start - how could you ask if you are new to the whole field? A bit of guidance by an expert could help in 5min. And then, sometimes it is just like the xkcd strip at http://www.twotoreal.com/site/about/ http://www.twotoreal.com/site/about/ I view it as a last resort - after SO/Quora/etc. could not help.
  - gbelote 15y ago
    That's a good point. I was thinking about it as a direct replacement of SO, but like you said it doesn't have to be. Good luck!

gbelote 15y ago

I believe that's part of the motivation behind bounties: if I've invested a lot of time and accumulated karma, I can spend that karma to improve the quality/speed of answering my question. Re: TwoToReal. It's an interesting idea, although it seems like it adds burden to the answerer. One quality I like of SO is that it encourages people to ask better questions (keep concise, provide relevant details, etc), but in a system where I'd be getting real-time help I might become lazier about posting my question. "I have a problem with node.js" rather than "I'm getting this output when trying to use node in this way".

derpapst 15y ago
That's a totally valid point, gbelote. Nevertheless, there will always be questions where you don't know you to frame a question - even after having searched around for a while. E.g.: if you are new to Linux and X doesn't start - how could you ask if you are new to the whole field? A bit of guidance by an expert could help in 5min. And then, sometimes it is just like the xkcd strip at http://www.twotoreal.com/site/about/ http://www.twotoreal.com/site/about/ I view it as a last resort - after SO/Quora/etc. could not help.
- gbelote 15y ago
  That's a good point. I was thinking about it as a direct replacement of SO, but like you said it doesn't have to be. Good luck!