Disregarding the current date, this is actually a great idea. Instant gratification for a fee. Yes, I'd pay for that.<p>They could recruit their experts from the community itself, limited to those over a certain karma threshold, adding further incentive to participate.
Oh FFS! This looked like a great product that seemed a natural monetization of their platform, that I would actually use and pay for. But its a fucking april fools joke connected to an eliza bot.<p>See also: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5470437" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5470437</a>
How funny: Just yesterday my friend (whom I met on StackOverflow months ago) mentioned that someone in the JavaScript chat channel was asking about some canvas tutorial, one that I just so happened to write. He summoned me so that the questioner could in fact, chat with an expert. (Or at least the author.)<p>The (none-too-interesting) transcript as proof:<p><a href="http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/8574110#8574110" rel="nofollow">http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/8574110#857...</a><p>Unfortunately the question wasn't particularly interesting and concerned an old tutorial. But I love SO because it really does let you chat with experts (Skeet being the most obvious), if not always in real time.
This would make a great feature but as an April Fool's joke it seems to fall a bit flat. On that link a couple users are being upset by it.<p>Maybe don't April Fool's your users with terrible service?
If it means people posting their random code and asking others to debug it disappears from stackoverflow I'm all for it.<p>While their at it it would be nice if questions marked as duplicate were either deleted or at least had a pointer to the duplicate