I'm having problems using the library. I'm doing the following: site = stackexchange.Site(stackexchange.StackOverflow) user = site.user(userid) And I'm getting the following exception: ValueError at /answers No JSON object could be decoded After some debugging, I see that the line which throws the error is: `dump = json.load(conn)` (around line 410). When I try printing the urllib object I get back (conn), I get the following: \x1f\x8b\x08\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x04\x00\xed\xbd\x07`\x1cI\x96%&/m\xca{\x7fJ\xf5J\xd7\xe0t\xa1\x08\x80`\x ... I don't have any experience with urllib, so I'm not sure if that's a good output, although it doesn't look right to me (by contrast, opening http://www.google.com gives back actual meaningful text). Any ideas as to what the problem could be? **Edit:** Just running the code snippet in your question in IDLE is causing a problem.