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Joel Spolsky wrote an excellent post on building a community: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html http://www.joelonsoftware.co

Joel Spolsky wrote an excellent post on building a community: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswi... Of course he later closed his flourishing community suddenly. Very suddenly. Everyone was confused. And the worlds he's built since, such as StackOverflow, are deliberately completely devoid of all community. The smallest remnants of the community survive and evolve at http://www.crazyontap.com/ http://www.crazyontap.com/ But still, that old post was so good I had to dig it out and read it again. I think it all still stands.

gilleain 11y ago
Totally agree that SO has little community (or quite a hostile one, if any) but that may be because it is a victim of its own success. I see the same thing happening in other stack-exchange sites, sadly. The underlying problem may be the gradual fatigue at questions of the form: "HOW DO I DO DIS???!! SOLVE THIS FOR ME NOW PLZ!!" or even the more subtle "I was wondering about this homework-like question...?" which are - inevitably - just lazy students posting their homework. These get closed as "homework question". On the flip side, there are interesting questions which don't fit into the SE model. These are the speculative or more open-ended discursive ones. These get closed as "too broad". On SO itself, it kind of feels like most questions are homework - or even just people unable/unwilling to use search engines. Then innocent questioners who word their question wrong get caught in the crossfire, and have their question closed.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  Agreed, there's a problem in both directions on the stack* sites, but Overflow is the single worst offender. An observation; reading the meta sites (where they discuss the community) turns up a lot of downright vitriolic ire directed at the stinkin' no-reps who pollute the site with their ill-thought-out questions, like someone traipsing through the house with muddy shoes on. In fact, I'd wager that if someone who had a mind to ask a question on SO read the meta site first, they'd be completely turned off from the attitude on display. And I say this as someone that's been on both sides of the equation. I've had questions closed for "too broad" even when they're asking a pretty direct question with an equally direct answer, I've seen the flags pile up in the review queues.
- blakeyrat 11y ago
  My own personal experience with SO as a Q&A site is I've had a literally 0% success rate. None of the questions I've posted have ever been successfully answered. (Now I don't even bother.) I think that's because the site encourages people to get all the internetpointzzz reputation currency, and not to, you know, actually answer questions. And the questions I asked were somewhat difficult, because I'm not a dummy and I did a lot of research before posting them. So, as a software developer, I do not find SO "successful" as a Q&A site. As a community, it seems their biggest flaw is they try to solve literally every problem with the reputation system, and they've turned it into a weird mess. For example, the SO FAQ says "if you know or find the answer, go ahead and answer your own question". But the reputation system says, "Nope, no permissions. We were just yanking your chain." Very off-putting for literally everybody who doesn't spent 4 hours a day there farming reputation.
  - philovivero 11y ago
    Have you found... anything... anywhere that will answer your questions? Because like you, I'm relatively bright and I do a lot of research before asking my questions. Hence they tend to get zero answers from: IRC, mailing lists, personal emails of luminaries, Stack Overflow, Slashdot, or anywhere. Generally I just keep hammering away and digging deeper until I figure out which CPU register is flipping wrongly that, to the top of the stack, caused the database query to return the wrong result (to give a synthetic example of the sort of thing I tend to run into and solve).
    - blakeyrat 11y ago
      Not really. I usually just assume if the question isn't answered by 2-3 different mediums, it's unanswerable. Then I work-around it, usually with some horrible hack that I hate. Most recently, I was trying to twist and mold WebAPI2 into accepting a multipart/form-data request while also using the auto-serializer. I asked everywhere and every one, and nothing. The work-around is just awful, goddamned awful, but oh well. I blame the developers who apparently think this REST API is "done" despite it being impossible to, for example, upload a user's profile image using it. Guh.
  - 11y ago
cubano 11y ago
Is it just me or is Joel's insightful article really depressing?

gilleain 11y ago

Totally agree that SO has little community (or quite a hostile one, if any) but that may be because it is a victim of its own success. I see the same thing happening in other stack-exchange sites, sadly. The underlying problem may be the gradual fatigue at questions of the form: "HOW DO I DO DIS???!! SOLVE THIS FOR ME NOW PLZ!!" or even the more subtle "I was wondering about this homework-like question...?" which are - inevitably - just lazy students posting their homework. These get closed as "homework question". On the flip side, there are interesting questions which don't fit into the SE model. These are the speculative or more open-ended discursive ones. These get closed as "too broad". On SO itself, it kind of feels like most questions are homework - or even just people unable/unwilling to use search engines. Then innocent questioners who word their question wrong get caught in the crossfire, and have their question closed.

Karunamon 11y ago
Agreed, there's a problem in both directions on the stack* sites, but Overflow is the single worst offender. An observation; reading the meta sites (where they discuss the community) turns up a lot of downright vitriolic ire directed at the stinkin' no-reps who pollute the site with their ill-thought-out questions, like someone traipsing through the house with muddy shoes on. In fact, I'd wager that if someone who had a mind to ask a question on SO read the meta site first, they'd be completely turned off from the attitude on display. And I say this as someone that's been on both sides of the equation. I've had questions closed for "too broad" even when they're asking a pretty direct question with an equally direct answer, I've seen the flags pile up in the review queues.
blakeyrat 11y ago
My own personal experience with SO as a Q&A site is I've had a literally 0% success rate. None of the questions I've posted have ever been successfully answered. (Now I don't even bother.) I think that's because the site encourages people to get all the internetpointzzz reputation currency, and not to, you know, actually answer questions. And the questions I asked were somewhat difficult, because I'm not a dummy and I did a lot of research before posting them. So, as a software developer, I do not find SO "successful" as a Q&A site. As a community, it seems their biggest flaw is they try to solve literally every problem with the reputation system, and they've turned it into a weird mess. For example, the SO FAQ says "if you know or find the answer, go ahead and answer your own question". But the reputation system says, "Nope, no permissions. We were just yanking your chain." Very off-putting for literally everybody who doesn't spent 4 hours a day there farming reputation.
- philovivero 11y ago
  Have you found... anything... anywhere that will answer your questions? Because like you, I'm relatively bright and I do a lot of research before asking my questions. Hence they tend to get zero answers from: IRC, mailing lists, personal emails of luminaries, Stack Overflow, Slashdot, or anywhere. Generally I just keep hammering away and digging deeper until I figure out which CPU register is flipping wrongly that, to the top of the stack, caused the database query to return the wrong result (to give a synthetic example of the sort of thing I tend to run into and solve).
  - blakeyrat 11y ago
    Not really. I usually just assume if the question isn't answered by 2-3 different mediums, it's unanswerable. Then I work-around it, usually with some horrible hack that I hate. Most recently, I was trying to twist and mold WebAPI2 into accepting a multipart/form-data request while also using the auto-serializer. I asked everywhere and every one, and nothing. The work-around is just awful, goddamned awful, but oh well. I blame the developers who apparently think this REST API is "done" despite it being impossible to, for example, upload a user's profile image using it. Guh.
- 11y ago

cubano 11y ago

Is it just me or is Joel's insightful article really depressing?