programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
I didn't fully understand 37 Signals' advice to Have an Enemy until recently.
Sometimes the best way to know what your app should be is to know what it shouldn't be. Figure out your app's enemy and you'll shine a light on where you need to go.When we decided to create project management software, we knew Microsoft Project was the gorilla in the room. Instead of fearing the gorilla, we used it as a motivator. We decided Basecamp would be something completely different, the anti-Project.
One bonus you get from having an enemy is a very clear marketing message. People are stoked by conflict. And they also understand a product by comparing it to others. With a chosen enemy, you're feeding people a story they want to hear. Not only will they understand your product better and faster, they'll take sides. And that's a sure-fire way to get attention and ignite passion.
I've explained Stack Overflow to hundreds of people, and by far the most effective way to explain what we do -- the way that causes people to visibly "get it" almost instantly, with a giant cartoon lightbulb practically appearing over their head -- is this:
We're like experts-exchange, but without all the evil.
I never appreciated how easy Experts-Exchange makes it for us. They are almost universally loathed. We don't just have a rival, we have a larger than life moustache-twirling, cape-wearing villain to contrast ourselves with.
No matter how much we may suck (and we try very, very hard not to suck), we can simply point to the experts-exchange website and we instantly become the hero. The good guy. The underdog.
I have absolutely nothing against Experts-Exchange. Realize that I've been a fan of the smackdown learning model for a long time; it's like kayfabe in professional wrestling. There are no hard feelings; this "rivalry" is mostly useful as a way to explain what it is we do. This internet is certainly big enough for the both of us -- big enough, in fact, for hundreds of Q&A websites.
That said, if you have an arch-enemy -- the more horrible and evil and larger-than-life the better -- consider yourself lucky. They're doing you a huge favor.
So, who's your arch-enemy?
Shame your login mechanism is broken. Admittedly I haven't visited the site for a couple of months but now when I log in with my Google ID it describes me as unknown and has lost my history...
Dave Griffiths on March 23, 2009 2:18 AMBe careful when posting general Google Queries lol. This one was posted just a few hours after your post.
http://www.dominicantrip.com/?experts-exchange-sucks/
Upana on March 23, 2009 2:28 AMMy blog is the #1 search result in Google for stackoverflow sucks! Hooray for me!
(http://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/2009/02/stackoverflow-sucks.html)
Stackoverflow does really suck, for the reasons described there.
Stackoverflow's users are too quick to close topic for something they deem inappropriate. An offtopic folder would be a better solution than outright censorship.
FSK on March 23, 2009 2:36 AMPut it in double quotes for great justice:
Search results: 7
a href=http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=%22stackoverflow+sucks%22http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=%22stackoverflow+sucks%22/a">http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=%22stackoverflow+sucks%22/a">http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=%22stackoverflow+sucks%22http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=%22stackoverflow+sucks%22/a
Search results: 457
a href=http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=%22experts-exchange+sucks%22http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=%22experts-exchange+sucks%22/a">http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=%22experts-exchange+sucks%22/a">http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=%22experts-exchange+sucks%22http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=%22experts-exchange+sucks%22/a
The type of censorship on SO being complained about is merely an extension of our politcally correct society, which includes programmers.
The past 15 years or so have witnessed a large shift in how one should think and speak, and who not to offend.
For example, you can criticize hetero-sexuals, Christians and Moslems, and those who smoke cigarettes. But you are headed for hell if you criticize homo-sexuals, Jews, or globalism. Gone are the days where you are allowed to disagree, and yet not be hateful.
In other words, fit in, or you will be flagged for deletion.
I think that's why the movie Matrix did so well; people literally are walking around programmed, and not knowing it. That's why I find the label on this blog, programming and human factors so appropriate in this instance.
Currently stackoverflow has all the experts and not the kids trying to achieve an expert level by posting useless answers. hope it stays that way, otherwise I'd have to add it to my hide these sites from search results list.
oo on March 23, 2009 3:16 AMExperts-Exchange is most certainly evil and still plays a lot of games with search engines and referrers.
For example, if you just click here:
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Software/Server_Software/Web_Servers/Apache/Q_21617133.html
you'll see some generic PHP question with NO answers on the page. However, if you click here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=apache+%2B+php+%22libphp4%2Eso%22+not+found
and click the first (or whichever) link that takes you to the EXACT SAME PAGE, you'll find all the answers hidden at the very bottom of the page. However, even this isn't always true. If you have Javascript enabled, you sometimes find the answers hidden via a script so even via Google you can't see the answers. Adding the domain to IE's Restricted Sites or using something like NoScript works pretty well to bypass that, however.
I'm sure referrer sniffing is against Google's TOS (or whatever you want to call their rules about blacklisting misbehaving websites), but EE has been doing it for years now.
It's too bad really. I remember when EE first started: free accounts, free points, nice site, smart people. It was a nice enough community that I actually played expert for a while helping people out. Now, however, they still have smart people but it costs you your soul and a paycheck to really use the site.
One can hope Stack Overflow (which I'm seeing more and more in my Google search results for technical problem) won't tread a similar path.
Nick on March 23, 2009 3:37 AMIndeed, this is a very useful way to both punt your project across to potential consumers and keep the development team focused around the goal of making your product the antithesis of another product.
However, it also begs the question: as hard as it is in today's world, where almost EVERYTHING has been mechanized and software-ized, what happens when you're trying to develop something that, in the most literal of senses, has no opposite to it? =p
Bit hard to know where to focus your efforts when you find yourself in that situation. =)
Just a lil' bit of thinking fodder.
Fernando on March 23, 2009 3:41 AMAbsolutely -- what if your competition *isn't* evil, but actually competent and producing a decent, generally liked product?
EE makes it very very VERY easy for us. If anything I should be sending them gifts and flowers and thank-you letters.
Jeff Atwood on March 23, 2009 3:52 AMSurprised it took you so long to recognise E-E as the anti-You. Marketing blind-spot, eh?
Roughly speaking, QA websites (and we'll restrict ourselves to tech questions here, because, although there's not much difference, they outnumber non-tech sites by a hideous amount) over the last ten years divide themselves into three broad categories:
(1) Pay me now, sucker.
(2) Play the Signal/Noise Game! Send Meh Teh Codez!
(3) At least faintly useful.
The economic drivers here are (a) do I want to run a site that makes money up front? and (b) do I want a quadrillion send-me-tehs subscribers?
Google rankings distort this process, but I think it's fair to say that (1) is a legacy of pre-Internet subscription-based services, and they're both dead and ivery very annoying/i and (2) is an unfortunate consequence of letting every dippy QA twerp post their results in an inappropriate place. Consequently, (3) becomes interesting. Possibly more interesting than you currently realise.
Stack Overflow is, at the moment, faintly useful. Not much more than that. Not a bad beginning, in fact.
@Dennis Forbes: And just wait until someone makes a competitor to StackOverflow, but allowing for the entire database to be open (similar to Wikipedia, which Stackoverflow often draws comparison to. I can download every single bit of data from Wikipedia, the entire history of changes, and so on. Given that it is user contributed content, it makes sense that it should be open). Suddenly StackOverflow will be the evil player, and someone else will play the good game.
Category error. The ability to download every single sodding byte of Wikipedia does not make it open and does not make it free. Only a masochist would subject themselves to filtering through all this garbage -- after which, said masochist istill/i has to make decisions like which bit do I believe? or which bit do I look up elsewhere? or is it time for my Dramamine now?
Bottom line: Editing is important. I'm pretty sure that any QA site will bfail/b without editing.
Maybe StackOverflow is different. I very much doubt it. Meanwhile, at least it's free.
real_aardvark on March 23, 2009 3:57 AMThank you, Jeff! This is so, so true and your examples are excellent. When we started out we were positioned as NOT your expensive POS system (insert names of 2 competitors) -- now we're having to look harder for enemies, but the principles remain the same.
Mark Smith on March 23, 2009 4:02 AMThis is analogous to the tech talk about git that Linus Torvalds gave at google. In short , he said that his design goal behind git was : *not* to do whatever cvs did as a version control tool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
Learning on March 23, 2009 4:04 AMAnother point to consider is the opposite idea and say we're just like XXXX but better, that one always seems to fail. (Replace XXXX with something like World of Warcraft for fun results)
Robert on March 23, 2009 4:04 AMspokt.com's rival is myfamily.com
Dan on March 23, 2009 4:09 AM@Fernando: what happens when you're trying to develop something that, in the most literal of senses, has no opposite to it? =p
Then you have found the motherlode - a niche :)
schmoo on March 23, 2009 4:17 AMReminds me of the old way of pitching TV shows to people - 'It's like Big Brother crossed with Scrubs' or somesuch. It gives people a mental model of your idea by starting from a known base.
@Fernando I'd say that in that case you should look for where your product DOES differ from, and improve on, the market leader (and if it doesn't, why are you building it at all?) and exploit that. E.g. 'Git is like SVN but with distributed repositries'*
* May be a complete misunderstanding of Git.
Mark on March 23, 2009 4:21 AMMine is popular opinion. However this has a habit in some circles of making me somewhat unpopular.
Jax on March 23, 2009 4:21 AMWe're like experts-exchange, but without all the evil.
Spot on!
Bob on March 23, 2009 4:58 AMOur evil evil arch-enemy is Adobe, but we survive just because flash exist in the first place :-/
Happy Programmer on March 23, 2009 5:09 AMI have to admit that when you announced stackoverflow I thought it would just be another shitty QA site for the pile, but it is actually very useful.
Micah on March 23, 2009 5:19 AMThere is *nothing* like having a goal to aim for. Without it, you're just a ship without a navigational system, drifting aimlessly at sea.
I'm working on a .NET version of all those god-awful tools Sun releases for working with Oracle databases. You know--those tools that are written in Java. The SLOW ones. The *needlessly* slow ones. The bloated, needlessly slow ones. The bloated, needlessly slow ones that won't let you view more than one object at a time, and constrain the number of rows you can select. And so on. Yeah, great tools.
So, my quest is to design a great tool in C# for querying Oracle databases and their metadata really, really fast. Oracle, without the suck.
And for the record, I turn every developer and teammate I can onto StackOverflow. It's the best thing to come around since, well, refactoring tools.
Using Google to find an answer you need is like rooting through a landfill trying to find the Action Comics #1 your mom threw out ages ago because she thought it was useless. Going to StackOverflow to find an answer you need is like having a personal legion of information experts hovering right over your shoulder.
Mike Hofer on March 23, 2009 5:39 AMVid cards from a certain hardware vendor. Costly enough to have users expecting to run everything on it. Successful enough to take in consideration. Slimy enough to turn bug workarounding in a full-time job.
Graphics from another vendor is worse but at least users seem to understand why they spent so little for their last generation laptop.
MaxDZ8 on March 23, 2009 5:49 AMCategory error. The ability to download every single sodding byte of Wikipedia does not make it open and does not make it free.
Where are you quoting free from? As for the open, yeah, the database is open (hey, I actually said that) in every sense of the word. Category? Huh? You're having an argument with your imagination.
And the point of Wikipedia having an open database is that it removes the lock-in -- if tomorrow Jimmy decided to make it a pay subscription site, someone else can spool up a competitive Wikipedia using all of the information that the commons contributed, and which Wikipedia has no claim or exclusivity over. For sites built on user contributions, it's something that I think should be *demanded* nowadays. People should have learned by now how these things turn.
Dennis Forbes on March 23, 2009 5:52 AMI wonder if I'm gonna see that picture used on Facebook now to tag people... :P
michaelp on March 23, 2009 6:05 AM@Fernando: A friend of mine did that. Didn't make him rich but sales were definitely good.
Until someone made a program 'like his, without all the evil'...
configurator on March 23, 2009 6:17 AMWhilst I can see where you and 37 signals are coming from, Iím not sure if itís the healthiest approach. You really want to be thinking about them as rivals rather than enemies. That is, you want your product to be better than the alternatives, not the opposite.
The problem with thinking about your rival as your enemy is that you get into a mindset that can see nothing in their product, and completely underestimate them as a threat. Adding a moral element to the picture only makes the complacency worse; of course no-one will buy the rival product ñ itís evil.
My arch enemy is the evil Dr. Caligari.
Robert S. Robbins on March 23, 2009 6:44 AMMy arch enemy is http://www.librarything.com/
they are good guys but their service just does no help you keep track of your reading like http://www.booksiamreading.com/ does.
Stefan Hayden on March 23, 2009 6:52 AMWith the death of interruption marketing the snake oil salesmen have to get their twisted minds around social media and viral techniques.
If you are using friends and customers to market your products then forget facts and figures and explore the world of storytelling.
Start with the evil web services monopolist, boo! enter our dashing hero ;_0)
Word of mouth Mike on March 23, 2009 7:02 AM@anon: You have to take into account people complaining about actual stack overflows. :)
Nicholas Bundy on March 23, 2009 7:21 AMI wonder if I can selectively apply the enemy motivator on a micro-scale and make a poorly designed feature in my own application the enemy of a new approach. What is Foo Manager? Well, you know our customers really hate Bar Manager, so we're scraping it and replacing it with Foo Manager.
Or does that just create inter-team rivalries or perhaps lead to throwing out the good with the bad?
Dave C. on March 23, 2009 7:27 AMSaturn (the car company) is currently running an ad campaign that says, Nothing sells Saturns better than letting our customers test-drive a GM.
sep332 on March 23, 2009 7:28 AMhttp://sucks-rocks.com/rate/experts+exchange/stack+overflow
Anonymous on March 23, 2009 7:29 AMAnother word for this is capitalism.
Daniel on March 23, 2009 7:41 AMIf you think about it, youtube had competition from all the quicktime and real media crap. Back then streaming video was a pain in the ass, even more easy than beating up EE.
Hoffmann on March 23, 2009 7:45 AMIsn't this just called competition? I'm not sure what the point here is.
Charles on March 23, 2009 7:52 AM@Mike Hofer - I'm really interested in that project you are working on. I have to deal with the stupid Oracle tools on a weekly basis. In the future you may want to type in your website when you post so we can check out the project. Thanks!
Chad Geidel on March 23, 2009 8:48 AMAnother thing Experts-Exchange did wrong was selecting their name. They now HAVE to put the hyphen in it and capitalize the E, because without that, their name is easily read as: Expert-sex-change
Louis Kessler on March 23, 2009 8:50 AMIt's gotta be Billy Joel! The evil-genius of rock...
Jmzrbnsn on March 23, 2009 8:51 AMSaturn (the car company) is currently running an ad campaign that says, Nothing sells Saturns better than letting our customers test-drive a GM.
And this is why Saturn (and the rest of GM) is going down the tubes...Infighting.
Funnily enough, for the main project I'm working on (or planning to work on) my enemy IS Basecamp (and Highrise, since my app is a bit of both).
Wayne on March 23, 2009 8:57 AMwhy do you think experts-exchange put a dash ' - ' between experts and exchange
because if they didn't have that dash ( - )...it would be called
expertsexchange ( or: expert sex exchange)
haha -- just thought it would be a laugh for some people.
Keep up the good writes, jeff!
paul on March 23, 2009 9:00 AMI used to vilify Experts-Exchange because of the search engine cloaking, but ever since they started including the answers at the bottom of the page (just scroll down) I've become quite grateful for the site, as the answers are very often spot on. Not sure how their model works (if the contributors have really proven themselves experts or something), but the quality of result is extremely good.
And just wait until someone makes a competitor to StackOverflow, but allowing for the entire database to be open (similar to Wikipedia, which Stackoverflow often draws comparison to. I can download every single bit of data from Wikipedia, the entire history of changes, and so on. Given that it is user contributed content, it makes sense that it should be open). Suddenly StackOverflow will be the evil player, and someone else will play the good game.
Dennis Forbes on March 23, 2009 9:03 AMyou can also get to this much more simply with:
http://e-e.com
less typing. less confusing.
no sex in the name.
no change in the name.
Expert Sex Change LOL!
PaulG on March 23, 2009 10:05 AMYou're half-way to evil Jeff!
48,500 results
http://www.google.com/search?q=stackoverflow+sucks
105,000 results
http://www.google.com/search?q=experts-exchange+sucks
Saturn (the car company) is currently running an ad campaign that says, Nothing sells Saturns better than letting our customers test-drive a GM.
And this is why Saturn (and the rest of GM) is going down the tubes...Infighting.
No they aren't. They have competitor products on-site to compare, not other GM models.
It's probably different when you're running a site as a source of income, but I've found that the evil arch-nemesis site/product is satisfying on a short-term level, compared to the admittedly more delicate method of working directly with your competitors, and nullifying perceived competition to a degree.
That doesn't mean you don't have to be the best at what you do, but it does allow for someone else to handle stuff that might be out of your scope, or not quite aligned with how you'd do things. It helps foster positive community behavior, as opposed to grudges and smack talk. And really, if you're doing your best, the competition will probably wither away at some point anyway ;)
Matt Dunphy on March 23, 2009 10:32 AMHa, I wasn't very clear with that last post. I encourage the positive behavior as a better alternative to internet pissing matches :p
Matt Dunphy on March 23, 2009 10:34 AMThe funny thing is, I always thought that ExpertsExchange hid the answers for me, forcing me to sign up. It took a long time to realize that if you scroll down tons of irrelevant crap, the answer is at the very bottom.
It still sucks though, and I like StackOverflow much better. One thing about SO though: you really should work on your front-end code more, it has serious divitis and can be performance-optimized a lot. I know you don't care too much about these things, just saying.
Ferdy on March 23, 2009 10:46 AM@Matt Dunphy, I understand what you're saying. That's true, though it may be a bit Pollyanish. Nevertheless, whenever I see reference to this smackdown learning model, I just want to projectile vomit.
Charles on March 23, 2009 10:46 AMThis post is already in the first page of the search results! :) a href=http://www.google.com/search?q=experts-exchange+suckshttp://www.google.com/search?q=experts-exchange+sucks/a">http://www.google.com/search?q=experts-exchange+sucks/a">http://www.google.com/search?q=experts-exchange+suckshttp://www.google.com/search?q=experts-exchange+sucks/a
Experts Exchange. Ewww! They ought to remove it from google search results.
Jaskirat on March 23, 2009 10:56 AMOne of these things is not like the others:
We're like experts-exchange, but without all the evil.
They are almost universally loathed.
We don't just have a rival, we have a larger than life moustache-twirling, cape-wearing villain to contrast ourselves with.
I have absolutely nothing against Experts-Exchange.
Just a hint - it's the last one, the one that isn't slander and probablly headded straight for deformation proceedings.
It's just good to know that there are people and organisations out there who won't take the unethical tactic of calling their opposition evil (without examples nor explanation) and they calling their own company and products saviours.
It just warms my heart to see a good very balanced, informed and unbiased debate is taking place.
Well done.
@anon, @brian:
At least both SA and EE better than having sex with a beautiful woman.
507,000 results
http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=having+sex+with+a+beautiful+woman+sucks
Or maybe your method is just flawed.
Matt on March 23, 2009 11:32 AMexpert-sexchange
bennby on March 23, 2009 11:49 AM@Matt
Woman overrides the default implementation of Object.Sucks with a far more pleasant one.
Aehiilrs on March 23, 2009 11:55 AMOh my God, do I have an enemy?!!
In fact I have several....... Joomla!, Drupal and every other CMS that is rotten at the core. And why oh why are they always the darlings of project managers who don't have to wrestle with un-secure, buggy, undocumented and just plain bad code?
In fact I got so annoyed I built my own CMS. One that is good!!
And now, thankfully I get to use it to build sites on.
The bonus......? I find out today if I'm to be made redundant. And if I am, I will take my CMS and bring it to the world.
Who knows, I may even start my own little tech startup. :-)
(no-one has ever said I was sane)
So I agree with Jeff. Find your enemy, and don't be them. Use their shortcomings and failures to point out just how much better you are. And with any luck people will like your product, and your enemy will improve theirs.
And the arms race will be on to build better software. And in that arms race, everybody wins.
Trevor on March 23, 2009 12:00 PMThe login mechanism at stackoverflow is anoying. I would rather pay for expert exchange then using it.
Artor on March 23, 2009 12:09 PMMost of the time people have to be careful when choosing their nemesis(arch-enemy is less comic compliant) and even more careful when they decide to drive all their marketing based on that. How many times have you heard Like Microsoft, but better, and when you get your hands on the product its like MS in all the bad sides but bad on every MS's good sides (so it ends up being a half-true, but in the worst way).
To be honest, the first time I read the We're like experts-exchange, but without all the evil. I was a little skeptic...
My thoughts were; What the heck is wrong with EE, I use it all the time and seams to work like a charm..., then along came SO, and then the phrase suddenly got a clear meaning.
I have to admit Jeff that SO is one of the rarest exception to this rule. The bad thing about it is that now I've became highly intolerant to the singup-frist-use-next internet services. =)
Chepech on March 23, 2009 12:44 PMGot to be Lex Luthor. No doubt about it. The guy just won't go away.
Superman on March 23, 2009 1:09 PMTHE BEST QA SITE IS GOOGLE.COM...END OF STORY..
EE AND STACKOVERFLOW BOTH SUCK...
BUT THERE ARE SOME GOOD PEOPLE @ STACKOVERFLOW..I WILL GIVE THEM THAT..
AND I HOPE THE EAR BLEEDS FOR ALL THOSE CAPS HATERS...
MUHAHAHAHAHHAHAH
I hate EE, i'll do a google search and find the exact answer I want, and bam, paid site. pisses me off.
then i do a search on stackoverflow, and i get a hit.
many of my programing searches now end up being site:stackoverflow.com
Ape-Inago on March 24, 2009 4:07 AMSun has an arch enemy, but too bad that they have no other business model then hating Microsoft.
charles on March 24, 2009 4:46 AM@Micros Just to be clear, I don't like EE because I feel it profits from people's problems and reduces the flow of information (to those that can pay for it).
My gripe was the use of, as you put it, terms of abuse or obvious hyperbole. That and the fact that the article seems to be a simple attack on the opposition - they suck, we rule. Yeah - obviously the owner of a site would think that.
Deformation in some juristictions can be as simple as bringing the product or person's name into disrepute - EVEN IF the comment is true.
But I doubt that USA is that strict.
@Matt
It wasn't my method that sucked. I was mocking Jeff. Jeff implied that since many results were returned for EE sucks that it must mean it sucks.
This is a flawed argument I see again and again on the internet. And you pointed it out perfectly when you did a search for having *** with a beautiful woman sucks.
Brian on March 24, 2009 7:33 AMNot to be a total jerk, but SO is tending to be more social networking and point-whoring than a true-blue technical wiki. What's your favourite web comic and other bs are the most popular types of questions.
No offense, you can't control users, but when you get points for asking questions, people would rather ask their own question (and get points) than find an answer elsewhere. For the life of me I can't understand how Skeet et all have over 30k rep.
Loads of unanswered questions, loads of useless replies. It's a neat concept, but I don't really think it's working too well to be honest.
Personally I just lurk and maybe come across an interesting problem, but usually the sufficiently interesting questions are both too hard to ask as well as answer in such a limited UI. It's really just a fancy BBS.
EE is perhaps evil, but not really, mostly just annoying. SO isn't going to put them out of business any time soon. SO is fun and for the most part looks slick. Wheee. But its a jumble of tags that I certainly don't turn to when I need a good answer. About the only positive thing is paying for an answer using rep - at least I'll have a better chance of getting a decent answer which is good IMHO. What's the point of all that rep if you can't spend it?
I find the real answers on real tech blogs like the one by Rick Strahls. He continues to write useful, on-the-ground, and pretty unbiased technical information year after year. Go Rick!
EE-or on March 24, 2009 7:39 AMWow just wow, this is so true.
The most natural way to create yourself an arch-enemy is to fork a project. Maybe that is one of the success factors in Open Source?
Adrian Kuhn on March 24, 2009 8:01 AMMy evil enemy are kittens. they think they are so cute and fury.
Kittens are evil on March 24, 2009 11:42 AMMicros.
Philip: All of those are either pure terms of abuse or obvious hyperbole, and thus not slander/libel, at least under US law. If E-E sued Jeff or SO over that, they'd waste their money, and a good lawyer would advice them to not do so.
Further, X is evil is not, even without the fact that it's hyperbole, unethical. I've used E-E, sadly, and it's evil.
The idea that E-E is the Devil is pretty well evidenced by the link that Jeff provided. Try here for more: http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=experts+exchange+is+evil (no HTML, sadly).
The opinion is commonly held already; E-E has no reputation to *harm*, and I imagine the main reason Jeff didn't give examples of why E-E is evil is that he *assumed everyone here already knew*.
Which, if you check the comments, it turns out they do.
(Sucks and Is Evil are, by the way, roughly synonymous in modern programmer usage. The only difference is that Evil is always intentional, and Sucking is sometimes unintentional. But Evil things always Suck.)
@Matt
...or maybe *yours* is:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=enq=%22having+sex+with+a+beautiful+woman+sucks%22
Result: 0
W on March 24, 2009 1:56 PM@EE-or on
I don't know about the others but most of Jon Skeet's rep is hard earned. He's the guy who used to be on almost every thread in the news groups helping people out. The guy is just immense (but not like fat or anything), as for some of the others mebbe, some of my best rep is from crappy answers to fluffy questions but I don't think the balance is _that_ lopsided. Additionally rep is just to enable the Wiki side of SO and doesn't really mean much after 3k.
Jax on March 25, 2009 6:07 AM@Zoasterboy
: I'm a Myspace Apps developer. There is a popular app known as the truth box. So I made the Lie Box.
You mean you aren't curing cancer like Jeff Atwood?
a href=http://www.egometry.com/tech/imvu-is-3d-avatar-chat-its-also-a-pride-inducing-piece-of-software-engineering/http://www.egometry.com/tech/imvu-is-3d-avatar-chat-its-also-a-pride-inducing-piece-of-software-engineering//a">http://www.egometry.com/tech/imvu-is-3d-avatar-chat-its-also-a-pride-inducing-piece-of-software-engineering//a">http://www.egometry.com/tech/imvu-is-3d-avatar-chat-its-also-a-pride-inducing-piece-of-software-engineering/http://www.egometry.com/tech/imvu-is-3d-avatar-chat-its-also-a-pride-inducing-piece-of-software-engineering//a
Charles on March 25, 2009 7:09 AMOne more try to post the link on the Atwood's cure for answer :)
Charles on March 25, 2009 7:10 AMReminds me a bit of Classmates.com ... I think they may have been Facebook's arch-enemy at one time. Worse, they were actually advertising on Facebook at one time -- to give you a lesser service than Facebook for a monthly fee!
mattbg on March 25, 2009 8:05 AM@Charles
The Lie Box does cure cancer.
IN FACT
It does anything you type into it.
And it makes cake.
And it caused the current economic downfall.
AND
It will fix the economy again, too.
Zoasterboy on March 25, 2009 9:03 AMSorry about anonymizing my name, but I'd rather not have my name associated with this.
My personal arch-enemy is one of the developers on our team who acts as if he knows everything and thinks he produces pure gold.
Since his arrival a few months ago, the team has polarized into two cliques: The people who think they know everything (and sycophants) and everyone else. Pretty obvious which clique I ended up in.
John Doe on March 25, 2009 10:35 AMyeah, but, but, but...
What if my goal is to *be* the arch-enemy? What then, eh, Svengali? Then, aren't you, Mr. Goody Goody Web Site, *my* arch enemy? Nothing says your arch-enemy has to be *evil*, now does it?
jeffH on March 25, 2009 11:14 AMEE is the only site that has ever inspired me to look for a persistent block this site from search results option in Google.
SO is the anti-EE... and we thank you all for that. er... and each other, as it were.
Christopher TruLove on March 25, 2009 12:42 PMI'm a Myspace Apps developer. There is a popular app known as the truth box. So I made the Lie Box.
Zoasterboy on March 25, 2009 1:29 PMI thought the PMI may be the enemy of Scrum, but really it is just too easy. An enemy needs to have some credibility, some secret power. Mary Poppendieck has made Scrum the enemy of Lean. Now there's an enemy worth fighting... except I am now with the enemy, and again, Lean is just too easy to beat up. Oh, what to do.
Tobias Mayer on March 26, 2009 2:27 AMIf you work for a small boutique consulting company like I do, the easiest enemies are always the big guys -- Andersen, LogicaCMG, CGEY, etc. Works wonders in motivating our people, too. Unfortunately they do tend to be listed on large companies' preferred supplier lists so there really is no getting around them.
My enemy: authority (... from the past?)
Remedy: NONE
Google Search without Experts-exchange:
Or grab a search plug-in for FireFox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10687
Well, for us (SlimDX) The Enemy is XNA. They've actually made it fairly easy, by refusing to provide either DirectX 10 or 64 bit support. There's any number of selling points for us, but those two are short, easy, and undeniable. Many of our biggest users are doing crazy things that simply REQUIRE one of those two, or both.
Promit on March 26, 2009 4:48 AM@Jax yes John Skeet is a smart and humble guy. Nobody was saying it's his fault or he's a point whore. The comment was 'how the heck can someone get 30k rep' because at that point it's absurd because there's such a huge spread between him and mere mortals. Other people also tire of the meta-skeet discussions or the automatic deference to said individuals.
See there's this automatic human tendency to think one person is superior over another due to a rating. If the only rating is rep, then that answer is going to be looked on more favorably. Until of course their rep gets too high and people then punish them for slipups. Oh humans are fickle.
I make more money than you, so am I better than you?
To address your comment, if 3k rep doesn't matter, then why show it?
jonskeetissmart on March 26, 2009 5:04 AMwe try very, very hard not to suck
And **that** Mr Atwood, is a fantastic slogan for a software company.
secretGeek on March 26, 2009 6:21 AM@EE-or on,
Several of the top users on the site tend to stay away from softball questions. Jon Skeet, Mark Gravell, and Greg Hewgill all seem to have gotten the vast majority of their reputation from answering real technical questions. Several of the other top users have gotten their rep by specializing in a particular area, Konrad Rudolph in C++ and C#, and S. Lott in Python, just for a couple of notable examples. If you're only lurking on the site, then you're only seeing what's popular for that moment. If you want to see the real benefit of Stack Overflow, ask a few questions that have code for an answer.
Jeff, I'm seriously considering co-opting the Evil Amphibian as my fake arch-enemy. :)
Bill the Lizard on March 29, 2009 7:23 AMI hate them.
My own personal arch enemy is General Electric Financial in Fairfield, CT.
I have my own reasons...
Mac on March 31, 2009 2:21 AMI am
john on April 2, 2009 2:19 AMWhat if your arch enemy is your own development team?
Michael Cowan on April 2, 2009 12:29 PMHaving just read the chapter on Bootstrapping in Guy Kawasaki's The Art of The Start today - this is a great example of his point about positioning against the leader.
Other examples:
7Up: The Uncola
Southwest: As cheap as driving.
hahahahahhaha but i like keroro the best hahahhaha!
pikachu. on April 7, 2009 11:39 AMhi im volatr i am evil you know pikachu!
voltar. on April 7, 2009 11:42 AMopps spelled it wrong!
pikachu on April 7, 2009 11:44 AMDear Philip, please learn the difference between "deformation" and "defamation."
Jeff on June 3, 2009 3:16 AMSeeing that experts-exchange have been around a whole lot longer than stackoverflow, I'd say they aren't doing too bad on those google results.
Results 1 - 10 of about 104,000 for experts-exchange sucks. (0.19 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 43,500 for stackoverflow sucks. (0.16 seconds)
Anon on February 6, 2010 11:15 PM
My arch enemy == my brother-in-law.
Jon on February 6, 2010 11:15 PM500 points grade A for akimark for telling me something I didn't know. Oh sorry, this isn't EE.
EE provides a good service in fact. Whenever I have a problem I look there first. Is it expensive for what it offers? I think not.
moorhouselondon on February 6, 2010 11:15 PMI read this yesterday, which caused me to go to stackoverflow today, and the answer I needed was there (with an assist from Google.)
anon on February 6, 2010 11:15 PMThe comments to this entry are closed.
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