right, but since no reputation is ever gained from chat (you can only lose rep, in extreme cases) we don't think this will be a problem in practice. There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat.
There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat.
Yes, there is. In fact, it's the same basic incentive that people have to answer questions on StackOverflow: to help people. The reputation system is a nice plus, but I'd hardly call it a deal breaker for it to be missing.
In order to accept your premise, you would have to agree that there is a certain class of answerer who, when presented with a question in chat, would think to themselves "gee, I think I know how to help this guy, but I'd really rather not help him since I'm not getting quasi-meaningless points on a website".
You've always said that the primary audience for StackOverflow is Google. The premise being that the site will accumulate a collection of good answers to common (and some uncommon) questions, so that the second person to ask that question won't have to. The impermanence of the chat system defeats this premise utterly.
It's also odd to see you responding negatively to a comment (i.e. negatively towards questions in chat, not the commenter) when that comment was in response to Joel himself saying chat is the best medium to ask certain classes of problems.
>> There's no real incentive to answer questions in chat.
Is this a good thing? Personally, I don't know, nor would I care, how to implement a reputation system in chat. But I would hope that the answers in chat would be of the same caliber as the static questions.
Perhaps folks interested in gaining more rep could harvest valuable questions and answers from chat and repost into the trilogy sites as a community service?
