Ask HN: Could stackoverflow.com work for other fields?

Are you famous in your field? No? Then it won't work.<p>HN works because PG is here. Reddit worked because PG was there to help it start.<p>Digg works because Kevin Rose is there.<p>StackOverflow works because Joel and Jeff are there.<p>Unless you've got a large audience to toss at the project on day one, expect a long, hard slog.

The amount of time spent in front of a computer with an internet connection in a working day would be the key to success of such a site.<p>It would probably have higher traction among, say, graphical designers than medical staff.

<a href="http://www.sermo.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.sermo.com</a> does this for docs - docs talk to other docs, and pharma companies and hedge funds pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to eavesdrop and seed specific questions they want answered. (The sign-in page restricts randoms to MDs and DOs to register.) It's a brilliant business model.

Something like SO could work in other fields. But, the devil is in the details of the moderation and incentive schemes. The features of the site matter, but not nearly as much as the community. So, it is more of an anthropology and sociology problem than a build-a-webapp one.<p>For law and medicine, for instance, you'd have to fight the mindset of "online is not reliable". In programming it is fairly easy to check if someone's answer is trustworthy because you can go and test it yourself relatively quickly and unambiguously. In other fields establishing the credibility of someone answering a question is a lot more tricky. That said, I think bar associations have (bad) sites to ask each other questions.<p>I agree with Jeff that you can't make a general site of this sort without an intense amount of moderation. (he said so in a recent SO podcast)<p>In short, it all comes down to the community. And it is probably hard to figure out what incentives and moderation to have for a given community if you are not a part of it yourself.

I think it'll work for other fields but not as well as programming.<p>Programming gets you a much higher volume of traffic. The same programmer, might come to your site 100 times during the week to find solutions to the different problems. Its also a field where you have a lot of amateurs and students looking for solutions.<p>The other fields you mention under specialty, are all the "oh shit my car broke down what could it be?" type. Its a one time problem, after which the person won't come back for 2 years. So you'll never see the same growth as SO, because you don't have any repeat users.

I had thought so. On closer inspection though, it's unlikely.<p>Why? Have a look at reference sites online. There were plenty of sites like experts-exchange before StackOverflow, and if you trawl Google Groups, you'll see a similar thing. Plenty of people asking technical questions, not so much anything else.<p>Certainly, you don't see medical students out there asking the best way to diagnose a rare disease.<p>There is one exception though -- Travel sites. Travel questions and forums are pretty big, and I think a Q&#38;A site for that could be enormous.<p>Meanwhile Yahoo Answers, AskMeFi, etc continue to fill the gaps for other niches that might actually work.

I think so.<p>In fact, I believe it so much, that's my startup: <a href="http://www.chuwe.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.chuwe.com</a> - "Stackoverflow for startups and small businesses."<p>As brandnewlow pointed out, starting it is a massive uphill battle - chicken and egg problem as it were. The software's only small part. We're attacking it in what we hope is a novel way, but you would have to find an approach unique to the area you were targeting, I imagine.<p>If you're interested, I've been planning on open-sourcing chuwe in a bit after we make it a bit more robust. Contact me and we can work out something if you'd like to just take the software and modify it to your own niche!

I think so. I have a concept I'm working on that's more a request forum than a Q&#38;A board but I'm borrowing a few things StackOverflow has implemented well (nothing unique - mainly the simple wiki revisions).<p>Something else to consider are the 'game' factors. StackOverflow implemented badges and they work well initially (and teach the user how to use the site). At the end of the day the things that tie you into a site are the things that make you want to keep going at it. On most discussion boards it's reputation/karma but little things like badges and medals help too.<p>Obviously it depends on whether the field needs/can have a question and answer platform, but I can see this discussion model working for most technical areas of knowledge.

as a site? sure.<p>as a business? hard to tell.<p>Yahoo Answers holds the potential to encompass every use case for StackOverflow and all your offshoots. However, I sincerely believe that the added context that a site like StackOverflow provides (being that it's curated specifically toward programmers) does provide real value. That sort of context injection could certainly be carried over to other verticals (provided the sites can attract seed contributors and curators).

A large part of the problem and solution relies on the field we're talking about. There are law forums, but unfortunately, the law is incredibly specific and varies wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. There would have to be a LawOverflow for every county. Medicine is incredibly situational as well, and that doesn't include the doctor patient confidentiality clause, which means the doctor needs permissions even to ask general questions. Now, if you were talking about students, then the style still wouldn't work, because the answers are in the textbooks, not in other people. Cars and home improvements have the best chance, but as was mentioned, The people answering the questions have to be spending a lot of time at the computer, rather than spending their doing work on cars, or doing construction work on a house.<p>The reason StackOverflow works is that computers work based on their code, and so a certain compiler will interpret C# code in a certain predictable way, so the people answering the questions don't have to be anywhere near you. And they are able to answer in a relevant way. The same is not true for other fields.

Perhaps. The advantage with programming is that there is a lot of general knowledge that goes beyond languages, etc and even at the language level you have sufficient number of people with general interest. Where you can replicate that it should work. In the sciences I am not so sure. You tend to get too specific and there isn't a general enough dialogue you can have in most communities.

Get HN code &#38; build your own doctorsnews, autonews etc. :) or may be add categories to HN system.

Is computer-related but I read @codinghorror tweets about a SO for sysadmins.<p>I just imagined a SO for the medicine field, I'll read it everyday!, imagine a doctor asking for help to another doctor?, and not only that, a doctor asking for feedback on a research... wow

Mathematics, perhaps?