I am quite looking forward to Superuser. I think it's going to be vastly bigger than Stack Overflow as it could attract many more users who may be less experienced in Internet discussions.
On the other hand I imagine it's going to be more dynamic and have a wider variety of questions.
How do you think it will turn out? Will you be a active member?
I will "sign up". I did on ServerFault, but as I'm not a sys admin I can't really contribute there. I think I'll more likely to be able to answer the questions on SuperUser, but I'm also more likely to be annoyed with the number of questions that could be solved by the poster doing a Google search themselves.
It is most likely going to be the place where we attempt to send all the junk we don't want clogging up StackOverflow and ServerFault. You can drawn your own conclusions about how that's going to turn out for SuperUser itself.
It will definitely have the highest Noise to Signal ratio out of the three because of it's free-for-all nature.
Right now, I've got nowhere to ask my computer questions.
If I've got a programming issue, then Stack Overflow works great. But because I'm not a cable monkey, Server Fault thumbs its nose at me:
A moderator closed this question regarding screen resolutions as "not sysadmin related".
I think the "rules" of Server Fault should be relaxed.
And since that's not likely, Super User might fill that gap. I don't understand Jeff's "Anything goes!" and "Ewoks!" attitude, though. I hope he's not trying to make it silly and useless.
I think it will be a cool experiment - very interesting to see what comes up when combining this concept with a wider variety of questions (which we certainly can expect) and overall more relaxed rules. After all, everyone seems to agree that the SO/SF software would be great for a lot more than programming/sysadmin questions.*
Too early to say if I will be an active member - will have to see what it turns out like. But I am fairly sure that the site will develop an active, knowledgeable (and addicted?) userbase rapidly (like SO, and more so than SF); the reputation system and other features will make sure of that. And there will be no shortage of questions either, if the typical user experience will be anything like I suspect: "get great answers to almost any computer question in 5-10 minutes".
(* Which makes me wonder if we'll see an übersite some day where you can ask anything, from any walk of life... :) The problem would obviously be getting experts from every field to the same place.)
I already have some ideas of the topics that would be good, one or two I may ask (I am currently looking for a monitor/tv and recommendations are good). I think a large scope will make this site more fun, and as long as it has careful moderation it will not turn into Yahoo answers.
But Zack is right, It's gonna be awesome to have a Stack Overflow for computer questions.
SO and Severfault got their user base, which is a pretty apt one, by saying "Hey, the other helpsites aren't very good, and we can improve. A lot of smart people who read our blogs, so here, we invite you to join our site." I would suspect, then, that for the first n months, questions will be pretty good because the user base will mainly be the people who are already active on SO and Serverfault.
Over time, as more people come on board, it isn't inconceivable that we'll start seeing Yahoo-answers type problems: unclear questions, scant on details.
Many forums try to combat this by having a sticky "FAQ" thread, in which they take common questions and post them at the top, along with links to the relevant posts.
The other thing that happens is that people ask questions and nobody knows. This happens a lot when searching (for example) the Ubuntu forums - lots of problems specific to someone's hardware and video chip, and plenty of people who have the same problem, but nobody who has an answer.
So what is yet to be seen is this:
We know that this (usually) works for code-related questions. But taking the time to explain scheduling to someone when you already understand the concepts is different from doing the necessary research to figure out a display-driver problem. Of course, I say things like that because, to me, many of these things are a complete mystery.
So my hope is that, in contrast to ubuntuforums, superuser will help experts come out of the woodwork. But right now... its hard for me to even conceive that such experts exist!
How do you think it will turn out?
Well... You know how every week or so, someone starts whining about how their favorite question on SO got closed or deleted or down-voted or unkind comments posted to it?
And how when they're informed that, strictly speaking, "What did you put on your resume to get a job where you could hang purple drapes in your private office... as a programmer?" isn't really programming related, they get all indignant and claim that this policy of requiring programming questions is fascist and could all be handled by judicious use of tags and an army of people to maintain them?
SuperUser is the site that'll prove them right. Or not.
Not so sure on the answers part - but I have a stack of questions to ask that are "too lightweight" to ask on server fault or are not directly related to programming.
e.g. a.) This might sound stupid... but I want to be able to (re)sort my tasks on the windows taskbar (e.g. move/drag tasks left/right) of others. b.) Why do most of my PCs offer no "always do this" option when I plug in my USB key, but this computer removes that checkbox/option. etc.
