Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood just launched the public beta of Stackoverflow today, with the intent of building a community for high-quality technical questions and answers. I’ve been using the site for about three weeks now, during the closed beta, and I’ve noticed a disturbing trend that was outlined in Joel’s announcement post today:

Want to know an easy way to earn reputation? Find a question somewhere with several good, but incomplete, answers. Steal all the answers and write one long, complete, detailed answer which is better than the incomplete ones.

The site presents an interface where much of the functionality is hidden from new users. You can’t comment on posts, for example, until you’ve earned 50 “rep”. Voting up takes 15 rep, voting down takes 100 rep, and each downvote you place will cost you one rep. You gain rep by posting questions and answers that other users vote up, or accept. The result is an addictive system that, in theory, prevents “Griefing” (the system does NOT prevent griefing, by the way. It is extremely easy to game.)

Because of this, it is tempting to re-post successful content from other sources, and nothing the creators (Atwood and Spolsky) have incorporated into the site, or the recent announcements, has indicated that this is objectionable. Afterall, good content on Stackoverflow will improve their service, regardless of where it came from, and regardless of whether it is properly credited.

After using stackoverflow for a couple weeks, I think that they have created a useful service, but I also want to call them out for providing an environment that is encouraging plagiarism. Duplication/copying of content within stackoverflow does not set easy with me, but I’m willing to accept that the content I create for stackoverflow is public domain, and is free to be copied at will. However these posts are not.