Interview With A Mefier
I had the pleasure of talking the other day with Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror) about Metafilter, community moderation, social software—and their new just-now-in-public-beta project Stack Overflow, an attempt to synthesize programming Q&A interactions with wiki-inspired collaborative editing and community moderation. Think Ask Metafilter meets Reddit meets Everything2 meets the goatee-less non-evil doppelganger of Experts Exchange, maybe.
You can read the notes and listen to the podcast here; I join the call at just about 20:00 in the podcast and talk with Joel and Jeff for the remainder of the hour. I use the word “crap” at least twice and the phrase “king of the shitpile” once; Joel makes Ron Paul jokes about Reddit; and Jeff briefly discusses how babby is formed. Among other things.
Give it a listen; it’d mean a lot to your mother and me.



potch Said,
September 17, 2008 @ 11:18 pm
Reposting here from the SO Mefi thread, for emphasis:
Listened to the Stack Overflow podcast with cortex. To summarize:
cortex: “I really feel like the existence of MetaTalk as a backchannel has been instrumental in the succe-”
Jeff Atwood: “PEOPLE CAN VOTE ON EVERYTHING”
Joel Spolsky: “I agree, Jeff. So Josh, how do you guys keep the spam down?”
cortex: “Well, the moderators have a variety of predictive tools that let us zero in on potentia-”
Jeff Atwood: “PEOPLE WILL JUST VOTE ON IT”
et cetera.
Ian Patrick Hughes Said,
September 18, 2008 @ 2:14 pm
I did find it rather hilarious that those two even had a guest. When I read the show re-cap before listening I remember thinking, “When are they going to find time for a third person to talk?”.
Awesome job though.
Jeff Atwood Said,
September 21, 2008 @ 5:14 pm
> Jeff Atwood: “PEOPLE CAN VOTE ON EVERYTHING”
> Joel Spolsky: “I agree, Jeff. So Josh, how do you guys keep the spam down?”
I think you’re mixing Joel and me up here.
Just sayin’.
p.s. YOU CAN VOTE ON ANYTHING!
Josh Millard Said,
September 22, 2008 @ 7:06 am
Heh. Hiya, Jeff.