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I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

205 points by bozho 10y ago

Insanity 10y ago
I don't think SO is declining either. I myself don't contribute that much anymore either, but I used to. Mostly because of reasons stated in this article. There are some valid points though for both contributing and not contributing to SO. The fact that you need to be 'really fast' to answer questions does indeed hold mostly for the simple answers. And actually there I found that it's best to write a short, concise answer to the question and post that - more chance of being first - and then alter your question to add additional information that was not crucial, but still nice to have. Anyway, SO is still a good resource for problems that are not that esoteric. With esoteric questions, the odds of someone finding your question and being able to answer it in reasonable time is smaller, and you're probably better of either looking through the docs yourself or, if possible, looking at the open-source code. That it's hostile to newbies could be true. But it can also be hostile to people who have been using the site for quite some time. That is, unfortunately, part of the internet these days. Trolls are hard to avoid on websites with a big community.
dukoid 10y ago
BTW: Do competition sites have an army of downvoters to bury leaked questions (it's kind of frustrating when one spends time answering one of the rare more interesting questions and it gets downvoted into oblivion because of a duplicate that wasn't answered properly and then also disappears...)
Fuxy 10y ago
I don't quite agree as someone with few points on StackOverflow the mods can be quite hostile and inflexible when it comes to the rules. For instance I found a browser bug in the code submitted on a stack overflow answer [1] and I edited it and it got rejected because it wasn't in the spirit of what the original author intended or something like that. I also had no way of replying to the rejection motivating what my reasoning was and maybe reinstating it luckily the original author got in touch and fixed it himself later on. At that point I wasn't even able to comment on the reply since I didn't have enough points so I would ague the barrier to entry is quite high if all you want to do is just fix a few mistakes you spot while using the site. Also there are multiple communities like Ask Ubuntu, Server Fault each with their own points which means I run into the same problem over and over again even though I have proven myself on anther sister community. [1](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12131273/twitter-bootstrap-tabs-url-doesnt-change/36179228#36179228 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12131273/twitter-bootstra...)
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  They actually give you 101 points on every new site if you're a proven user, which lets you comment.
  - Fuxy 10y ago
    How many points do you need to be a proven user then?
    - tokenizerrr 10y ago
      200
- ogrisel 10y ago
  > For instance I found a browser bug in the code submitted on a stack overflow answer [1] and I edited it and it got rejected because it wasn't in the spirit of what the original author intended or something like that. It occurred several times that moderators rejected valid or helpful edits to some of my answers for the same "spirit" reason. However I still got notifications and edited my answer accordingly so the effort of the original contributors was not wasted (but they did not get any credit / karma for it).
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  I ran into the same problem myself recently. Only in my case the original poster didn't agree with the edit either, since the wording was "obvious to him". He recommended i propose an edit and let mods decide (failed twice already, same reason as for you), or write my own answer (question was locked). It led me to try and find the mission statement of SO and it only says it wants to be the biggest resource of questions and answers. No word about quality. I suspect they only care about answer amount as that helps their google rank, and quality doesn't.
- V-2 10y ago
  > At that point I wasn't even able to comment on the reply That's the root cause of the problem. Once that's fixed, I think commenting is better than editing the answer. As a mod I often can't know - having no time to verify - whether an edit such as yours actually fixes some bug or not. It has nothing to do with being hostile. I agree that you should be able to simply leave a comment (new users used to have the right to comment once, if that's no longer the case, I find it quite stupid) that points something out, while keeping it clear who states what. Then if your fix is helpful, the comment gets upvoted, and everybody's happy. The author of the answer will typically acknowledge it by editing their answer, or risk getting downvotes otherwise (since now it's apparent that the answer isn't fully correct).
Lapsa 10y ago
top 2% here i can understand the reasoning but i left SO when they broke it into pieces with StackExchange network i actually enjoyed stuff like code golfs, joke questions (minus endless flow of repetitive xkcd references) have always been interested in THAT programming part where problem meets consciousness meets technology. spent a lot of time puzzling around questions on design, patterns - more ethereal side of programming nowadays stuff like that gets quickly eliminated and more technical questions often gets spammed with shallow bullshit i've already checked couple of times
- raesene6 10y ago
  interestingly I thought that breaking things up helped a lot and that they could do better by continuing that trend.. For me a big part of the problem of SO (as opposed to other SE sites) is that it's too big for the mods to really have much option other than applying blanket rules without exception. On the smaller sites there seems to be more scope for a more flexible approach to moderation as the question/answer flow is more manageable. Also I think it lets more people get engaged by feeling to be a key part of a smaller community where on SO their contribution would be very unlikely to be noticed as the site is soo big..
  - Lapsa 10y ago
    it's a trade off on current trajectory - i suppose it does get cleaner and more focused, better integrated with google and whatnot but i find contributing unpleasant. and it doesn't attract the greatest minds anymore (<-- ain't talking about me) when SO appeared - it was like a nuclear explosion in software development field. i remember it was enough to follow some tags i were interested in to easily ride THE bleeding edge without losing all the good legacy bits. blogs, tools, ideas, fun, community sentiment - it had it all
  - r00fus 10y ago
    The only problem with the break-up is that it results in the moderations of "not appropriate for this forum" when e.g. you ask about effects of say SSD cloud storaage on your app performance and you're asking on stackoverflow instead of serverfault or soemthing. And the moderation is not helpful in migrating your question to the other forum either. One analogy might be if the US were split into 50 states with their own, strict, immigration policies.
gotofritz 10y ago
I still use SO every day, and also have enough rep to be an editor, and I don't think it's in decline. But I have also stopped answering to questions. Mostly because the race to be the first to answer easy questions to get rep stopped being fun very early on, and there are only a few interesting questions among all the "do my homework for me" and barely comprehensible questions. As for editing, editors come in all shape and form, and let's be honest, developers can often be opinionated so and so's who can spend hours debating tabs vs. spaces. I think the moderating reflects what we are as a community, I'm afraid. For example, I always reject any edit that only changes the format of the code because I find it a complete waste of time. I am sure there are other mods who would do the opposite, and actually go and reformat code in as many questions as they can find. Who's to say one approach is right and the other wrong? There aren't actually any guidelines in the modding pages. It does get annoying sometimes; for example, I was refused the tag vanilla-js because of reasons by someone who didn't even seem to be a js developer. Had a few heated discussions, in the end the mods won. But hey, you know what? Who cares, the site is still useful What are the realistic alternatives? Quora?
bryanlarsen 10y ago
Stackoverflow works great for me, and I don't know why more people don't appear to use it like I do. 1) When you've got a problem, Google it. 98% of the time the answer will be in top 5 links to stackoverflow or documentation. You upvote the answer and question. 2) 1.5% of the time, stackoverflow will have a related question, but either it doesn't have an answer, or the answer has issues. You figure it out yourself, so you post a comment or answer or just the crappy workaround you used because you ran out of time to figure it out completely. 3) The remaining 0.5% of the time, you get nothing. You post a question, but of course nobody answers because it's an esoteric, hard question. 24 hours later you post an answer to your own question, or more likely a crappy workaround. And eventually somebody posts a great answer to your question. (Once this happened to me >3 years after I posted it!) It's way too late for you, but it will help the next person with the same problem. You don't get a lot of karma quickly this way since you're posting esoteric stuff, but you do tend to pick up some badges that are designed to reward this sort of behaviour, like "Populist" and "Necromancer". You do pick up karma slowly and steadily, though. What's satisfying is seeing an answer tick over from zero to one ~12 months after you posted it, realising that you saved somebody hours of frustration. If you answer an easy question, you've saved somebody a few minutes. When you answer a hard one, you've saved hours or days.
- fixermark 10y ago
  Concur. I remember the days prior to Stackoverflow (where the average search for a programming question landed me on expertsexchange). They were not good days.
- epaga 10y ago
  Top 2% here - I have used Stackoverflow this way for years. It has saved me hundreds of hours of searching over the years and still does. One thing I'd add is I try to leave a thank you comment in addition to an upvote when I find an answer to a hard question. Getting comments years later thanking you for a quick answer you jotted down at some point is so satisfying.
  - alexc05 10y ago
0xmohit 10y ago
you can’t easily ask a question without having it downvoted, marked as duplicate, or commented on in a negative way I wouldn't really agree. If the question is clear and even if it is a FAQ, then you'd not receive answers but also upvotes (for posting a FAQ) especially in popular tags such as python, regex, java. That said, there are several other problems with SO: - too many poor quality questions - too many poor quality accepted and highly upvoted answers - activity in a limited number of tags - the reputation (apparently virtual bitcoins) cause the overall answer quality to decline (search for "Fastest gun in the west problem" on meta SE)
0xmohit 10y ago
Stackoverflow is a little more boring for contributors now than it was before (which is why I gradually stopped answering), simply because most of the general questions have already been answered. This sums it up. I'd not find it fun to answer the same questions over and over. Doesn't imply that no-one should answer those; just that it leads one to wonder the value being added.
pavlik_enemy 10y ago
For me the biggest problem with SO is that it's hard to get answers to advanced questions in some areas. Not a lot of people could answer the question in the first place, because it's about some obscure and rarely encountered problem, and these experts are constantly spammed with basic questions from inexperienced programmers. Though it depends on the area you're interested in - I've got almost no answers to advanced Rails-related questions and got pretty good responses to Scala-related stuff I'm interested in (but maybe it's because Scala questions were about more basic stuff)
- jakub_g 10y ago
  This is why bounties were invented - not a silver bullet, but might help getting visibility to the question.
- coldnebo 10y ago
  Yeah, unfortunately looking for advanced Rails answers means sifting through lots of silt: answers that were correct for version X but no longer, answers that avoid the question by doing something else, cargo cult solutions.
  - Annatar 10y ago
    That's a good indicator of the quality of the software. A piece of software is only as good as its documentation and compatibility to itself.
- 2-4-Flinching 10y ago
  Yea, I asked an advanced Java question and got downvoted -20 with no answers. It was downvoted because it was something you actually had to have understanding of Java and the API. That has been my experience with stackoverflow. Ask a simple question get love. Ask something advance get downvoted and sometimes trolled. So sad people can't just move on if they don't know and answer and have to downvote to make them feel better.
  - pavlik_enemy 10y ago
yesbabyyes 10y ago
This is my experience as well. I'm in the top percentile and I almost never answer any more. The points keep coming though, for a handful of popular questions/answers. Answering is way less rewarding than a few years ago, but SO is working fine. From the opposite point of view, I have asked one question on SO to which I never received an answer, probably because it's not possible (it had to do with Flash streaming).
ubertaco 10y ago
SO is another area where I feel "out of sync" with the rest of the "programming world", in that I've... * ...never posted a question to SO (because I've never found it either necessary or helpful to do so), * ...only ever "copy-pasted" from SO once (it was a CSS polyfill for iOS having broken "support" for vh/vw) * ...only attempted to answer questions on SO twice, exclusively out of a feeling of "am I missing something?" I've been programming for 16 years, and doing so professionally for 7 of those. I've always seen StackOverflow as like a worse version of MDN or something: obscure API-specific stuff that should be in documentation for libXYZ or XYZService but for some reason isn't, with answers supplied by random internet people and "graded" by other, less-knowledgeable random internet people. For more advanced stuff (like "what are higher-kinded types" or "how do monads help simplify concurrency"), online articles, tutorials, or IRC channels have always been a sufficient supplement to just trying stuff myself. I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.
- 4ad 10y ago
  I don't think you are missing anything. I also have never asked anything on SO, and never used SO as a reference. SO only seems to work for factual simple answers that are found in the documentation or manual pages. For higher level discussion SO is not appropriate; mailing lists and IRC work best for that. I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random stuff on SO works for them
  - debaserab2 10y ago
    I think there is definitely something to what you're saying. Reading API documentation is in itself a skill - when you're starting out, a lot of times you don't even know the right question to ask that would be covered in API documentation. Instead, you ask the wrong question on SO and end up getting the right answer because you have other humans that are able to interpret it. As you get better, you begin to understand what the right question is and how to use the actual reference material provided to you.
  - ci5er 10y ago
    > I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random stuff on SO works for them This is probably true. I'm not a Windows developer and on a recent project I had to use their IDE (which turns out to quite nice, if you are an IDE person) and a set of their APIs. I read, but did not understand, some pretty fundamental/basic MS-authored documentation. I found a few answers to questions related to other people not understanding it either, and was on my way again. To be fair to MS, it was documented, completely and accurately. I just wasn't accustomed to some of their calling conventions and was getting yelled at by the linker. EDIT: Outside of embedded systems, where there are a lot fewer moving parts than on your typical MS OS box, it's been a while (20 years?) since I was thrown at an environment where everything changed from what I am accustomed to. OS. Language. CPU architecture target. IDE. IDE configuration for project build. Build process. SDKs. Calling convention. Oh, and the 2M line code-base that I had just been introduced to (and where none of the MS Visual Studio project files had been checked into version control - so I'm fumbling in the dark there). Googling for the error message and landing on SO at least gets you to the point that you know you have a configuration problem vs a calling convention problem. That tells you where you need to start looking in the documentation.
Annatar 10y ago
Stack overflow, like a lot of the forums out there, suffers from the same pathology: it is very easy to stumble upon an answer which answers the question, and is correct in a very wide context, but is actually bad advice (low quality correct answer, which without experience is bad practice). And now comes the catch-22: if I do not have enough experience to recognize the correct-correct answer, the answer presented will actually propagate some solution, implementation, or practice, which is bad in the long term. EXAMPLES Example 1: new user asking a system administration / configuration management question "how do I change DNS settings on my system?" "oh, just edit /etc/resolv.conf by hand." (When the correct-correct answer would be "learn how to create an OS package which delivers the correct /etc/resolv.conf, or create an OS package which configures the system to be a DHCP client, and then keep that under revision control.") Example 2: a developer asking how to link properly "I compiled abc and linked with def only to find that abc cannot find the def shared library. How do I fix this?" "Use ldconfig or set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/shared/library." (When the correct-correct answer would be "when compiling abc, set -R'$ORIGIN:$ORIGIN/../lib:/path/to/lib' or -R'$ORIGIN:$ORIGIN/../lib64:/path/to/lib64', depending on whether you're compiling 32- or 64-bit, and always use the compiler's front end to link as well.")
- ap22213 10y ago
  Plus, for specialized topics, a good portion (10-15%?) of the top-voted answers are just wrong or misleading. About once every few weeks in reviewing one of my team's code, I see something strange. I ask them about it, and they say they did it that way because of SO. Then, I have to explain why it's not a good idea to do in our code. Then, I have to spend a couple hours showing them why, because clearly 'everything on the Internet is correct.' Overall though, SO has saved me a TON of time over the years. But, lately I have been more often reading user mailing lists or looking at the source code.
  - Annatar 10y ago
    Stack overflow can save a lot of time, but only if perused by someone with experience who is just looking for their next clue, and will know how to turn a low quality but correct answer into a clean solution. In such a case, stack overflow can be very useful, but then the same goes for any random Linux forum.
dx034 10y ago
I would love to use stackoverflow actively, but wasn't very successful so far. It's great to use as a passive user. It's a great encyclopedia. But all my attempts to ask questions were unsuccessful. I posted 3 questions where I did not receive any answers or clues at all. The questions seem to have a lot of views, so I tried to answer them myself later (in cases I found one). Which is ok, but makes it like an encyclopedia. On two other occasions I needed help to figure out which way to attack a problem (which systems to use). I wrote a detailed description of my data, use case, restrictions, etc. Both questions were heavily downvoted as they're too subjective and not specific enough. Apart from downvotes I received some unhelpful spam so that I deleted the questions after a while. Luckily, I got more helpful answers on Reddit. I understand that SO wants to keep discussions on topic, but why can't I ask questions about how to implement a problem, or which design to use best for a given data set? So the problem is, I cannot use it for too specific questions (often receive no answer) but also not for too general ones (receive downvotes as being too subjective). Everything in the middle is covered already. Some communities in the network seem to handle that much better, GIS for example has been a great help to me (as they allow open questions).
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  Go is the first language I learned from the docs alone and from reddit. Never once did I go to SO. I even wrote an introductory book on it, and wrote one or two answers for Go questions. never had to refer SO. doesn't imply that I think SO is declining.
  - dx034 10y ago
    Go just has an amazing documentation. Especially the fact that it links directly to the source code helps a lot. IMO way better than what Java or C# offer as an official documentation (just to name the two where I struggled the most).
    - thewhitetulip 10y ago
      True that.
br3w5 10y ago
Hold on what the hell - I just skimmed through the 'decline of...' article referenced by the above article to look for the one of the reason for those 2013 stats being that there are users that can find the answers to the questions they need without asking and without answering. I am within the 8% that have answered more than 5 questions but I don't have time to actively contribute but do use it everyday and am voting on questions and answers everyday. If there are more like me then how is it in decline? That the referenced article doesn't cover this then undermines the other arguments about its attitude to users (arguments I largely disagree with).
p333347 10y ago
There are three ways to use stackoverflow - ask, answer and lurk. Asking is hard as the admins are quite intolerant of anything that doesn't abide by the rules, in their opinion. That said, small quick queries, those that would get shot down when posted as questions, are best asked in chat rooms and you will get a useful answer. The notification comes in handy when a chat room question is answered after an extended period of time. Answering is harder, as questions are usually highly problem specific (due to the rules), mostly particular framework or domain related, and only those who have faced similar issues can make meaningful posts. Often times the multi hundred thousand rep kings can get away with non answers (some even get accepted) in spite of a lesser rep king complaining about that in the comments. That leaves with lurking. Lurking has benefited me immensely. It seems every problem you have is already answered in like 2010. The programmers.stackexchange is much better as it allows opinion based, discussion oriented posts although the admins seem to be getting intolerant there lately, which is a bit odd.
- acjohnson55 10y ago
  To be fair, asking on SO isn't all that difficult. It just requires a little patience, to read and understand the guidelines, and to craft a high quality question. Unfortunately, when someone's blocked on some tricky programming task they've already been banging their head against for hours, it's probably a time when patience is in short supply. But, that patience is often rewarded with a solution. I'm amused to see programmers.stackexchange get a positive call out, because it used to be the paragon of moderator intolerance. Perhaps that culture has changed for the better.
  - p333347 10y ago
    > To be fair, asking on SO isn't all that difficult. It just requires a little patience, to read and understand the guidelines, and to craft a high quality question. This is what is troublesome. There are far too many questions with many impassioned comments that suggests they were closed and reopened multiple times. It seems the interpretation of rules is done too stringently and arbitrarily for most people's liking. > I'm amused to see programmers.stackexchange get a positive call out, because it used to be the paragon of moderator intolerance. Perhaps that culture has changed for the better. I had a nice run there as a participant compared to stack. Even as a lurker, I don't find that many questions meted out the stack treatment.
erikb 10y ago
I agree, most normal questions are answered on Stackoverflow already. There is a lot of opportunity in the edge cases though. And it's true that these are the answers that take experts and time. Maybe SO should advertise more experienced people to share their knowledge as well.
kefka 10y ago
I work in emergent technology and R&D. My questions don't have a SO question, let alone an answer. I get that in general programming, SO is great. Or if you need to know how to generate a N-dimensional array and initialize it for floats -- sure. But what about: How can the Hololens be used in an Academic sports setting as training hardware? I'm brainstorming rapidly, then digging in what the Hololens can do (by experimentation, no less), and then investigating the API for what's exposed. The API is the easy part, as it the simple programming.
- rubidium 10y ago
  The closer you are to actual research, the less helpful anything in print or online will be in answering your question. SO is for questions that have known solutions or quickly knowable solutions. Sounds like you're actually looking for a collaboration tool.
bandrami 10y ago
SO is problematic when combined with the current trend towards CADT release models. The "non-duplicate" question you get pointed to was seven releases ago, and the solution in the answer has been deprecated. Doesn't matter, though: still marked as "duplicate".
johnslegers 10y ago
I’m the author of the article "The Decline of Stack Overflow". I initially published it in July 2015, when it got ±65,000 views in two days. I republished it @ Hackernoon this weekend at their request, which resulted in ±125,000 additional page views, bringing the total page views of the article since its publication in 2015 to ±245,000. The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations. On SO, I currently have 11,914 rep, 9 gold badges, 66 silver badges and 73 bronze badges. I’ve posted 492 answers and 6 questions (that haven’t been deleted). I’ve been programming since 1999 and I’ve worked as an IT professional since 2006, and my experience ranges from PHP and JS to SAP and PL/SQL. I also released my own open source frontend framework and several other open source projects on Github. So I know how to program and understand many of SO’s intricate workings! Those rare times I’m stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to find any useful answer on SO. My questions either get no answers at all or downvoted and/or closed (for arbitrary reasons) by people who clearly lack the experience to even remotely understand what I’m talking about. During my time on SO, I’ve been bullied by 20+k users several times and even got a temporary ban by one of them moderators for no other reason but pointing out that another user was acting like “a little Hitler”… in a private conversation with moderation. Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most privileged segments of its membership. Considering the popularity of my article, I’m considering writing a follow-up and go in greater detail on my experiences with SO and how SO could be improved. However, I’m quite busy these days, so it may take a while before it actually gets published… if it ever gets published. Nevertheless, these are my 5 cents I’d like to add here…
- jmcomets 10y ago
  > The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations. I disagree. Many people simply view an article to understand the author's opinion (my case). IMO the "new user" experience on StackOverflow really depends on the topic addressed. Maybe that's just programmer personality speaking, I wish someone would do a study on the traits of programmers depending on their language / line of work...
shardinator 10y ago
Hi Bozho, thanks so much for your help over the years. SO might be in decline, but it's one of those few products that makes you realise that better product design can change things for the better.
kzisme 10y ago
I've recently began using SO more actively (providing answers). Most of the questions I've found and tried to answer were duplicates, but since I didn't have enough reputation to mark it as duplicate. (or enough rep to comment on a post to ask for more information on a poorly asked question) It's fairly depressing to attempt to try to be active on a site like SO when it's setup for failure in the beginning. It's irritating when users with 10k+ reputation can more easily gain reputation by commenting, editing, and "moderating" new questions. The other issue I have is that for new questions it's more about being first to answer a question rather than what is actually correct. I also dislike providing answers to new questions, and the OP is a brand new user asking a question and never marks an answer as correct... I wish it was easier and less frustrating to be active, but I suppose I'll keep trying.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  One of my least favorite SO patterns is seeing a top answer with ~150 points that's simply wrong, and then a second or third answer with ~20 points that's actually correct. For high-profile questions this gets sorted out eventually, but it sometimes persists indefinitely for niche questions, and it's really unfortunate. I know "first mover advantage" is hard to solve (cf. Reddit), but it's a really big deal for SO.
  - kzisme 10y ago
    It's frustrating as well when the question that was asked gets answered by me, and I receive a slew of down-votes since I answered it first. The next few answers are essentially copy/paste of my answers or other answers on the question...but I'm still negatively impacted by the down-votes since I only have ~39 rep and wow has getting started been a pain.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      A weird observation: starting with SO is particularly punishing if you come to it as an established programmer. The karma restrictions don't chafe much if you're a novice who mostly asks questions, and occasionally answers a simple topic they recognize. If you're experienced, you want to give more complex answers, and perhaps comment on other answers that you think are suboptimal. Doing that, you feel the new users restrictions (and the sting of uninformed downvotes) constantly. 50 karma is big, because the option to comment on other people's posts is core to giving relevant answers ("Did you want it to do X, or Y?") and using the site properly. Honestly, I'd just ask a few questions (if your domain is uncommon enough that they won't be duplicates) and let that karma carry you until the site becomes usable.
geordee 10y ago
I stopped getting answers in SO. These days I see that the answer could be there in SO, Github, Gists, blogs and Google is the first place I go to. A few years back, I could go to SO for practically anything to do with coding. And I was doing Ruby and Rails.
gjolund 10y ago
SO mods are some of the most toxic people I have encountered on the internet.
domador 10y ago
I never even STARTED contributing to Stack Overflow, because of the high barrier to entry for new users. Since now you essentially can't post a question without answering several yourself, I didn't bother asking questions about certain thorny technical issues. I tried a couple of times, ran into the barrier, and gave up. Maybe some of these could have been the kind of thought-provoking questions that the blog post's author would have enjoyed. Who knows how many other would-be Stack Overflow users have had a similar experience. Could Stack Overflow be cutting off its own long tail by having such restrictive barriers to entry for casual, minor would-be contributors like myself? Fortunately, many of the questions I've needed help with have already asked and answered by others on S.O. But I've had to find help for my more exotic questions elsewhere.
- bhandziuk 10y ago
  I don't know if you were being hyperbolic but asking a question requires no previous community engagement. There is no barrier to entry. This is part of the issue with SO though in that so many people ask questions without trying to figure things out for themselves or because it is their first time asking a question on the internet they have a very hard time with it. Veteran users are frustrated by new user's attitude and new user's attitude is often that they are asking a question because they are hitting a wall. They've stalled out on their task and are frustrated and the question they end up posting shows this. It will lack context, enough information to reproduce, be an XY problem or some issue like that. These questions are either difficult or impossible to answer. Making them stop is a very hard problem, unfortunately.
  - domador 10y ago
    No, I was not being hyperbolic. When I tried asking a question, the site told me I had to answer a number of other people's questions first (or something along those lines) before I could post my question. It happened on a couple of separate occasions, and then I just stopped trying. Maybe they've removed this restriction since then, but it was sure annoying (and discouraging).
therealbobsmoot 10y ago
Biggest problem on SO is the constant need by the moderators to mark a question as 'not a question', when it's actually a really question and gets a lot of good answers.
- ravenstine 10y ago
  How were these questions stated? Whenever I have seen this happen, it's because the user was behaving like they were posting on a vBulletin help forum. For example, the title might be "question about rails" and the body might say something like "Uploads don't work. Here's my controller code." There are two problems here. First, no actual question is being asked. There may be an implicit question, but that's not what SO is about as it isn't terribly helpful to those searching for answers. Second, the user may be missing so much fundamental knowledge about the subject that a sufficient answer would require more work than is worth anyone's time, and would contain more information than is in the scope of a single specific question. SO is meant for answers to precise problems, and isn't a tutorial site. Sure, some people may post good answers, but the question may be too nebulous if it exists at all. I really don't see that kind of thing happen often enough to be a big deal, but that's the only sort of case I have seen get the treatment that you describe. As I have said before, I would rather have some of my questions be rejected on some basis than have SO be a complete garbage dump. In contrast to other sites in general, SO/SE is very clean.
  - r00fus 10y ago
    Maybe better moderation responses would help - ie, recommendations, links to guidelines, etc. Have those improved recently?
fail2fail2ban 10y ago
I want to contribute but there's some reputation barrier. About 1/4 of the time, the best answer isn't chosen but I don't have the ability to help vote up the best answer.
ravenstine 10y ago
I rarely have the sort of experiences on SO that some seem to have. From my witnessing the kind of frustration friends have had with SO, and from experiencing my own occasional mistakes, I think some people are just poor at stating an actual question, but can describe their problem in detail, which is fine except often just talking about a problem without conveying the direction one is looking to go towards isn't helpful to others. Some people also just get offended really easily. Perhaps it comes from a past of spending time on very Machiavellian BBSes, but my skin is rather thick and I've only once run into a complete jerk on the Stack Exchange system, though not on Stack Overflow. It's easy to complain about any system, but what do we really have that's better than Stack Exchange? Quora? Yahoo Answers? lol Maybe Experts Exchange, but the userbase hasn't been nearly as large as SE in years. I personally like the fact that SO/SE is so strict because, for all the power of the internet, there is mostly incorrect information on it. I'd much rather some people get dissatisfied with it, and that some of my questions get closed or downvoted easily, than have to wade through a ton of duplicate questions with answers that appear to be written by 12 year olds. The only thing that I wish SO would implement is mandatory explanations for downvotes. Upvotes help a question get attention so there really isn't a big need for an explanation, but a negative score from a few voters early on can prevent a perfectly valid question from ever being taken seriously. This has happened to me on a couple occasions where I knew that the question was valid and the body properly formatted, but someone just didn't like the question for whatever reason. It's a good thing that a bounty can fix this, but I shouldn't have to spend 100+ of my points just because one or two people didn't like that I was asking a question that supposedly every programmer should know and I'm an idiot for asking it. I have no clue what people are talking about when it comes to a "signal to noise" ratio; Stack Exchange is one of the least noisy sites I've ever seen.
eugenekolo2 10y ago
I don't think you're looking at it from the right angle. SO is a great resource that's amassed a lot of simple questions. My personally favourite use of it is to find boiler plate code, or to get answers to simple questions in languages I'm not an expert in, but unfortunately get forced to use for whatever reason. The same is true for sysadmining tasks. I'm wearing far too many hats to remember how to change hostname on 4 different operating systems - it's far easier to just google and click the SO link than to read manuals every time I have a simple task. Additionally, your answer regarding: > On the other hand, even the simplest questions are not closed just because they are simple. One of my favourite examples is the question whether you need a null check before calling an instanceof. My answer is number 2, with a sarcastic comment that this could be tested in an IDE for a minute. And a very good comment points out that it takes less than that to get the answer on Stackoverflow. Is particularly bad. "Test in an IDE" is not a valid response when the question pertains to a JVM implementation. Your Sun JVM may be different than my Apache JVM, different than JoeShmoe JVM. A better answer might be to refer to lines in the official JVM specification, and note if there's an ambiguity, and that most implementations follow X, but not necessarily...
bipbopbipbop 10y ago
I see them as a HN for the masses. If HN is a billboard for YC, anyone with a little $ can have their ad on SO. Seems to be working just fine.
edoceo 10y ago
Why has SO entered the hiring market? Are they losing focus? I use SO profile as part of my hiring process but does the world really need another job-board?
coryfklein 10y ago
It's easy to nitpick and find fault with Stack Overflow, but it is hard to argue with the results. The site has done something amazing: it has harnessed the wild democracy that is the internet and produced something of great and lasting value to a lot of people. It didn't do that by being a wild-west open-to-anything community. If that's what you want, go to Reddit. But you'll be hard pressed to find quality content that goes beyond "16 Animal Memes That Speed Up Your PHP And Improve Your Sex Life". It's the structure that allows Stack Overflow to succeed. Cut the string from the kite and it doesn't fly up to the clouds, it comes streaking down to the ground.
brudgers 10y ago
I believe one of the features of StackOverflow's design is that people quit the site when they become burned out answering repetitive/uninteresting/homework/etc questions. Because the alternative is that they hang around the site and entertain themselves by treating people badly...despite the design, I believe that the way in which 'homework' questions are used as an excuse for unhelpful behavior illustrates the general problem that concerned Spolsky [1] when designing the site. [1] and perhaps Atwood to a lesser degree based on their difference of opinion regarding 'how do I move the turtle in Logo'. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...
kazinator 10y ago
Stackoverflow is a waste dump of crap questions that need to be put on old (and permanently deleted). This is not the case with some other SE sites, which run a "tigher ship". For instance, the moderation review queues on the Electronics SE site are kept small; everything gets processed. The moderation queue on SO is huge. Currently, 8.8K questions with close votes need review. Hundreds of low-quality posts. In Electronics SE: 6 close votes need review at the moment, 3 First Posts and 1 re-open. That's it. I clicked on Review in SO just now to start reviewing close votes. The very first question that comes up is from 6 years ago.
ommunist 10y ago
I cannot even start to contribute to Stackoverflow, because it is way too complicated ladder to become helpful.
scraft 10y ago
I have 851 reputation (top 39% of all users), I have answered 15 questions, about 50% haven't received any points, a few have received a minimal amount, and two or three have received a bunch of points. My answers are generally to quite niche topics, I have never gone out of my way to answer questions, I typically post an answer when I have invested a good chunk of time to find the solution to something and then see a question about the same issue. I sometimes see questions I could answer (or improve existing answers), but do not provide an answer as I find it hard to justify the time, I feel that if I wanted to rack up points on stackoverflow it wouldn't be that hard to post several answers a day. My reputation has gone up pretty much steadily, for the last three years, with an average of about 3 or 4 posts per year. I am a pretty light user, and being in the top 39%, if anything, surprises me as I could easily imagine being in the top 80%. I find stackoverflow very useful, I work in games development which is quite a broad subject, in an ideal world I'd have very in depth knowledge about hundreds of topics, but in reality stackoverflow allows me to get quick answers to a huge amount of questions/problems, which in turn gives me more time to devote on area which I feel are most important. I haven't noticed stackoverflow going down hill in the time I have used it.

205 points by bozho 10y ago

I don't think SO is declining either. I myself don't contribute that much anymore either, but I used to. Mostly because of reasons stated in this article. There are some valid points though for both contributing and not contributing to SO. The fact that you need to be 'really fast' to answer questions does indeed hold mostly for the simple answers. And actually there I found that it's best to write a short, concise answer to the question and post that - more chance of being first - and then alter your question to add additional information that was not crucial, but still nice to have. Anyway, SO is still a good resource for problems that are not that esoteric. With esoteric questions, the odds of someone finding your question and being able to answer it in reasonable time is smaller, and you're probably better of either looking through the docs yourself or, if possible, looking at the open-source code. That it's hostile to newbies could be true. But it can also be hostile to people who have been using the site for quite some time. That is, unfortunately, part of the internet these days. Trolls are hard to avoid on websites with a big community.

dukoid 10y ago

BTW: Do competition sites have an army of downvoters to bury leaked questions (it's kind of frustrating when one spends time answering one of the rare more interesting questions and it gets downvoted into oblivion because of a duplicate that wasn't answered properly and then also disappears...)

Fuxy 10y ago

I don't quite agree as someone with few points on StackOverflow the mods can be quite hostile and inflexible when it comes to the rules. For instance I found a browser bug in the code submitted on a stack overflow answer [1] and I edited it and it got rejected because it wasn't in the spirit of what the original author intended or something like that. I also had no way of replying to the rejection motivating what my reasoning was and maybe reinstating it luckily the original author got in touch and fixed it himself later on. At that point I wasn't even able to comment on the reply since I didn't have enough points so I would ague the barrier to entry is quite high if all you want to do is just fix a few mistakes you spot while using the site. Also there are multiple communities like Ask Ubuntu, Server Fault each with their own points which means I run into the same problem over and over again even though I have proven myself on anther sister community. [1](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12131273/twitter-bootstrap-tabs-url-doesnt-change/36179228#36179228 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12131273/twitter-bootstra...)

guard-of-terra 10y ago
They actually give you 101 points on every new site if you're a proven user, which lets you comment.
- Fuxy 10y ago
  How many points do you need to be a proven user then?
  - tokenizerrr 10y ago
    200
ogrisel 10y ago
> For instance I found a browser bug in the code submitted on a stack overflow answer [1] and I edited it and it got rejected because it wasn't in the spirit of what the original author intended or something like that. It occurred several times that moderators rejected valid or helpful edits to some of my answers for the same "spirit" reason. However I still got notifications and edited my answer accordingly so the effort of the original contributors was not wasted (but they did not get any credit / karma for it).
Mithaldu 10y ago
I ran into the same problem myself recently. Only in my case the original poster didn't agree with the edit either, since the wording was "obvious to him". He recommended i propose an edit and let mods decide (failed twice already, same reason as for you), or write my own answer (question was locked). It led me to try and find the mission statement of SO and it only says it wants to be the biggest resource of questions and answers. No word about quality. I suspect they only care about answer amount as that helps their google rank, and quality doesn't.
V-2 10y ago
> At that point I wasn't even able to comment on the reply That's the root cause of the problem. Once that's fixed, I think commenting is better than editing the answer. As a mod I often can't know - having no time to verify - whether an edit such as yours actually fixes some bug or not. It has nothing to do with being hostile. I agree that you should be able to simply leave a comment (new users used to have the right to comment once, if that's no longer the case, I find it quite stupid) that points something out, while keeping it clear who states what. Then if your fix is helpful, the comment gets upvoted, and everybody's happy. The author of the answer will typically acknowledge it by editing their answer, or risk getting downvotes otherwise (since now it's apparent that the answer isn't fully correct).

Lapsa 10y ago

top 2% here i can understand the reasoning but i left SO when they broke it into pieces with StackExchange network i actually enjoyed stuff like code golfs, joke questions (minus endless flow of repetitive xkcd references) have always been interested in THAT programming part where problem meets consciousness meets technology. spent a lot of time puzzling around questions on design, patterns - more ethereal side of programming nowadays stuff like that gets quickly eliminated and more technical questions often gets spammed with shallow bullshit i've already checked couple of times

raesene6 10y ago
interestingly I thought that breaking things up helped a lot and that they could do better by continuing that trend.. For me a big part of the problem of SO (as opposed to other SE sites) is that it's too big for the mods to really have much option other than applying blanket rules without exception. On the smaller sites there seems to be more scope for a more flexible approach to moderation as the question/answer flow is more manageable. Also I think it lets more people get engaged by feeling to be a key part of a smaller community where on SO their contribution would be very unlikely to be noticed as the site is soo big..
- Lapsa 10y ago
  it's a trade off on current trajectory - i suppose it does get cleaner and more focused, better integrated with google and whatnot but i find contributing unpleasant. and it doesn't attract the greatest minds anymore (<-- ain't talking about me) when SO appeared - it was like a nuclear explosion in software development field. i remember it was enough to follow some tags i were interested in to easily ride THE bleeding edge without losing all the good legacy bits. blogs, tools, ideas, fun, community sentiment - it had it all
- r00fus 10y ago
  The only problem with the break-up is that it results in the moderations of "not appropriate for this forum" when e.g. you ask about effects of say SSD cloud storaage on your app performance and you're asking on stackoverflow instead of serverfault or soemthing. And the moderation is not helpful in migrating your question to the other forum either. One analogy might be if the US were split into 50 states with their own, strict, immigration policies.

gotofritz 10y ago

I still use SO every day, and also have enough rep to be an editor, and I don't think it's in decline. But I have also stopped answering to questions. Mostly because the race to be the first to answer easy questions to get rep stopped being fun very early on, and there are only a few interesting questions among all the "do my homework for me" and barely comprehensible questions. As for editing, editors come in all shape and form, and let's be honest, developers can often be opinionated so and so's who can spend hours debating tabs vs. spaces. I think the moderating reflects what we are as a community, I'm afraid. For example, I always reject any edit that only changes the format of the code because I find it a complete waste of time. I am sure there are other mods who would do the opposite, and actually go and reformat code in as many questions as they can find. Who's to say one approach is right and the other wrong? There aren't actually any guidelines in the modding pages. It does get annoying sometimes; for example, I was refused the tag vanilla-js because of reasons by someone who didn't even seem to be a js developer. Had a few heated discussions, in the end the mods won. But hey, you know what? Who cares, the site is still useful What are the realistic alternatives? Quora?

bryanlarsen 10y ago

Stackoverflow works great for me, and I don't know why more people don't appear to use it like I do. 1) When you've got a problem, Google it. 98% of the time the answer will be in top 5 links to stackoverflow or documentation. You upvote the answer and question. 2) 1.5% of the time, stackoverflow will have a related question, but either it doesn't have an answer, or the answer has issues. You figure it out yourself, so you post a comment or answer or just the crappy workaround you used because you ran out of time to figure it out completely. 3) The remaining 0.5% of the time, you get nothing. You post a question, but of course nobody answers because it's an esoteric, hard question. 24 hours later you post an answer to your own question, or more likely a crappy workaround. And eventually somebody posts a great answer to your question. (Once this happened to me >3 years after I posted it!) It's way too late for you, but it will help the next person with the same problem. You don't get a lot of karma quickly this way since you're posting esoteric stuff, but you do tend to pick up some badges that are designed to reward this sort of behaviour, like "Populist" and "Necromancer". You do pick up karma slowly and steadily, though. What's satisfying is seeing an answer tick over from zero to one ~12 months after you posted it, realising that you saved somebody hours of frustration. If you answer an easy question, you've saved somebody a few minutes. When you answer a hard one, you've saved hours or days.

fixermark 10y ago
Concur. I remember the days prior to Stackoverflow (where the average search for a programming question landed me on expertsexchange). They were not good days.
epaga 10y ago
Top 2% here - I have used Stackoverflow this way for years. It has saved me hundreds of hours of searching over the years and still does. One thing I'd add is I try to leave a thank you comment in addition to an upvote when I find an answer to a hard question. Getting comments years later thanking you for a quick answer you jotted down at some point is so satisfying.
- alexc05 10y ago

0xmohit 10y ago

you can’t easily ask a question without having it downvoted, marked as duplicate, or commented on in a negative way I wouldn't really agree. If the question is clear and even if it is a FAQ, then you'd not receive answers but also upvotes (for posting a FAQ) especially in popular tags such as python, regex, java. That said, there are several other problems with SO: - too many poor quality questions - too many poor quality accepted and highly upvoted answers - activity in a limited number of tags - the reputation (apparently virtual bitcoins) cause the overall answer quality to decline (search for "Fastest gun in the west problem" on meta SE)

0xmohit 10y ago

Stackoverflow is a little more boring for contributors now than it was before (which is why I gradually stopped answering), simply because most of the general questions have already been answered. This sums it up. I'd not find it fun to answer the same questions over and over. Doesn't imply that no-one should answer those; just that it leads one to wonder the value being added.

pavlik_enemy 10y ago

For me the biggest problem with SO is that it's hard to get answers to advanced questions in some areas. Not a lot of people could answer the question in the first place, because it's about some obscure and rarely encountered problem, and these experts are constantly spammed with basic questions from inexperienced programmers. Though it depends on the area you're interested in - I've got almost no answers to advanced Rails-related questions and got pretty good responses to Scala-related stuff I'm interested in (but maybe it's because Scala questions were about more basic stuff)

jakub_g 10y ago
This is why bounties were invented - not a silver bullet, but might help getting visibility to the question.
coldnebo 10y ago
Yeah, unfortunately looking for advanced Rails answers means sifting through lots of silt: answers that were correct for version X but no longer, answers that avoid the question by doing something else, cargo cult solutions.
- Annatar 10y ago
  That's a good indicator of the quality of the software. A piece of software is only as good as its documentation and compatibility to itself.
2-4-Flinching 10y ago
Yea, I asked an advanced Java question and got downvoted -20 with no answers. It was downvoted because it was something you actually had to have understanding of Java and the API. That has been my experience with stackoverflow. Ask a simple question get love. Ask something advance get downvoted and sometimes trolled. So sad people can't just move on if they don't know and answer and have to downvote to make them feel better.
- pavlik_enemy 10y ago

yesbabyyes 10y ago

This is my experience as well. I'm in the top percentile and I almost never answer any more. The points keep coming though, for a handful of popular questions/answers. Answering is way less rewarding than a few years ago, but SO is working fine. From the opposite point of view, I have asked one question on SO to which I never received an answer, probably because it's not possible (it had to do with Flash streaming).

ubertaco 10y ago

SO is another area where I feel "out of sync" with the rest of the "programming world", in that I've... * ...never posted a question to SO (because I've never found it either necessary or helpful to do so), * ...only ever "copy-pasted" from SO once (it was a CSS polyfill for iOS having broken "support" for vh/vw) * ...only attempted to answer questions on SO twice, exclusively out of a feeling of "am I missing something?" I've been programming for 16 years, and doing so professionally for 7 of those. I've always seen StackOverflow as like a worse version of MDN or something: obscure API-specific stuff that should be in documentation for libXYZ or XYZService but for some reason isn't, with answers supplied by random internet people and "graded" by other, less-knowledgeable random internet people. For more advanced stuff (like "what are higher-kinded types" or "how do monads help simplify concurrency"), online articles, tutorials, or IRC channels have always been a sufficient supplement to just trying stuff myself. I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.

4ad 10y ago
I don't think you are missing anything. I also have never asked anything on SO, and never used SO as a reference. SO only seems to work for factual simple answers that are found in the documentation or manual pages. For higher level discussion SO is not appropriate; mailing lists and IRC work best for that. I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random stuff on SO works for them
- debaserab2 10y ago
  I think there is definitely something to what you're saying. Reading API documentation is in itself a skill - when you're starting out, a lot of times you don't even know the right question to ask that would be covered in API documentation. Instead, you ask the wrong question on SO and end up getting the right answer because you have other humans that are able to interpret it. As you get better, you begin to understand what the right question is and how to use the actual reference material provided to you.
- ci5er 10y ago
  > I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random stuff on SO works for them This is probably true. I'm not a Windows developer and on a recent project I had to use their IDE (which turns out to quite nice, if you are an IDE person) and a set of their APIs. I read, but did not understand, some pretty fundamental/basic MS-authored documentation. I found a few answers to questions related to other people not understanding it either, and was on my way again. To be fair to MS, it was documented, completely and accurately. I just wasn't accustomed to some of their calling conventions and was getting yelled at by the linker. EDIT: Outside of embedded systems, where there are a lot fewer moving parts than on your typical MS OS box, it's been a while (20 years?) since I was thrown at an environment where everything changed from what I am accustomed to. OS. Language. CPU architecture target. IDE. IDE configuration for project build. Build process. SDKs. Calling convention. Oh, and the 2M line code-base that I had just been introduced to (and where none of the MS Visual Studio project files had been checked into version control - so I'm fumbling in the dark there). Googling for the error message and landing on SO at least gets you to the point that you know you have a configuration problem vs a calling convention problem. That tells you where you need to start looking in the documentation.

Annatar 10y ago

Stack overflow, like a lot of the forums out there, suffers from the same pathology: it is very easy to stumble upon an answer which answers the question, and is correct in a very wide context, but is actually bad advice (low quality correct answer, which without experience is bad practice). And now comes the catch-22: if I do not have enough experience to recognize the correct-correct answer, the answer presented will actually propagate some solution, implementation, or practice, which is bad in the long term. EXAMPLES Example 1: new user asking a system administration / configuration management question "how do I change DNS settings on my system?" "oh, just edit /etc/resolv.conf by hand." (When the correct-correct answer would be "learn how to create an OS package which delivers the correct /etc/resolv.conf, or create an OS package which configures the system to be a DHCP client, and then keep that under revision control.") Example 2: a developer asking how to link properly "I compiled abc and linked with def only to find that abc cannot find the def shared library. How do I fix this?" "Use ldconfig or set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/shared/library." (When the correct-correct answer would be "when compiling abc, set -R'$ORIGIN:$ORIGIN/../lib:/path/to/lib' or -R'$ORIGIN:$ORIGIN/../lib64:/path/to/lib64', depending on whether you're compiling 32- or 64-bit, and always use the compiler's front end to link as well.")

ap22213 10y ago
Plus, for specialized topics, a good portion (10-15%?) of the top-voted answers are just wrong or misleading. About once every few weeks in reviewing one of my team's code, I see something strange. I ask them about it, and they say they did it that way because of SO. Then, I have to explain why it's not a good idea to do in our code. Then, I have to spend a couple hours showing them why, because clearly 'everything on the Internet is correct.' Overall though, SO has saved me a TON of time over the years. But, lately I have been more often reading user mailing lists or looking at the source code.
- Annatar 10y ago
  Stack overflow can save a lot of time, but only if perused by someone with experience who is just looking for their next clue, and will know how to turn a low quality but correct answer into a clean solution. In such a case, stack overflow can be very useful, but then the same goes for any random Linux forum.

dx034 10y ago

I would love to use stackoverflow actively, but wasn't very successful so far. It's great to use as a passive user. It's a great encyclopedia. But all my attempts to ask questions were unsuccessful. I posted 3 questions where I did not receive any answers or clues at all. The questions seem to have a lot of views, so I tried to answer them myself later (in cases I found one). Which is ok, but makes it like an encyclopedia. On two other occasions I needed help to figure out which way to attack a problem (which systems to use). I wrote a detailed description of my data, use case, restrictions, etc. Both questions were heavily downvoted as they're too subjective and not specific enough. Apart from downvotes I received some unhelpful spam so that I deleted the questions after a while. Luckily, I got more helpful answers on Reddit. I understand that SO wants to keep discussions on topic, but why can't I ask questions about how to implement a problem, or which design to use best for a given data set? So the problem is, I cannot use it for too specific questions (often receive no answer) but also not for too general ones (receive downvotes as being too subjective). Everything in the middle is covered already. Some communities in the network seem to handle that much better, GIS for example has been a great help to me (as they allow open questions).

thewhitetulip 10y ago
Go is the first language I learned from the docs alone and from reddit. Never once did I go to SO. I even wrote an introductory book on it, and wrote one or two answers for Go questions. never had to refer SO. doesn't imply that I think SO is declining.
- dx034 10y ago
  Go just has an amazing documentation. Especially the fact that it links directly to the source code helps a lot. IMO way better than what Java or C# offer as an official documentation (just to name the two where I struggled the most).
  - thewhitetulip 10y ago
    True that.

br3w5 10y ago

Hold on what the hell - I just skimmed through the 'decline of...' article referenced by the above article to look for the one of the reason for those 2013 stats being that there are users that can find the answers to the questions they need without asking and without answering. I am within the 8% that have answered more than 5 questions but I don't have time to actively contribute but do use it everyday and am voting on questions and answers everyday. If there are more like me then how is it in decline? That the referenced article doesn't cover this then undermines the other arguments about its attitude to users (arguments I largely disagree with).

p333347 10y ago

There are three ways to use stackoverflow - ask, answer and lurk. Asking is hard as the admins are quite intolerant of anything that doesn't abide by the rules, in their opinion. That said, small quick queries, those that would get shot down when posted as questions, are best asked in chat rooms and you will get a useful answer. The notification comes in handy when a chat room question is answered after an extended period of time. Answering is harder, as questions are usually highly problem specific (due to the rules), mostly particular framework or domain related, and only those who have faced similar issues can make meaningful posts. Often times the multi hundred thousand rep kings can get away with non answers (some even get accepted) in spite of a lesser rep king complaining about that in the comments. That leaves with lurking. Lurking has benefited me immensely. It seems every problem you have is already answered in like 2010. The programmers.stackexchange is much better as it allows opinion based, discussion oriented posts although the admins seem to be getting intolerant there lately, which is a bit odd.

acjohnson55 10y ago
To be fair, asking on SO isn't all that difficult. It just requires a little patience, to read and understand the guidelines, and to craft a high quality question. Unfortunately, when someone's blocked on some tricky programming task they've already been banging their head against for hours, it's probably a time when patience is in short supply. But, that patience is often rewarded with a solution. I'm amused to see programmers.stackexchange get a positive call out, because it used to be the paragon of moderator intolerance. Perhaps that culture has changed for the better.
- p333347 10y ago
  > To be fair, asking on SO isn't all that difficult. It just requires a little patience, to read and understand the guidelines, and to craft a high quality question. This is what is troublesome. There are far too many questions with many impassioned comments that suggests they were closed and reopened multiple times. It seems the interpretation of rules is done too stringently and arbitrarily for most people's liking. > I'm amused to see programmers.stackexchange get a positive call out, because it used to be the paragon of moderator intolerance. Perhaps that culture has changed for the better. I had a nice run there as a participant compared to stack. Even as a lurker, I don't find that many questions meted out the stack treatment.

erikb 10y ago

I agree, most normal questions are answered on Stackoverflow already. There is a lot of opportunity in the edge cases though. And it's true that these are the answers that take experts and time. Maybe SO should advertise more experienced people to share their knowledge as well.

kefka 10y ago

I work in emergent technology and R&D. My questions don't have a SO question, let alone an answer. I get that in general programming, SO is great. Or if you need to know how to generate a N-dimensional array and initialize it for floats -- sure. But what about: How can the Hololens be used in an Academic sports setting as training hardware? I'm brainstorming rapidly, then digging in what the Hololens can do (by experimentation, no less), and then investigating the API for what's exposed. The API is the easy part, as it the simple programming.

rubidium 10y ago
The closer you are to actual research, the less helpful anything in print or online will be in answering your question. SO is for questions that have known solutions or quickly knowable solutions. Sounds like you're actually looking for a collaboration tool.

bandrami 10y ago

SO is problematic when combined with the current trend towards CADT release models. The "non-duplicate" question you get pointed to was seven releases ago, and the solution in the answer has been deprecated. Doesn't matter, though: still marked as "duplicate".

johnslegers 10y ago

I’m the author of the article "The Decline of Stack Overflow". I initially published it in July 2015, when it got ±65,000 views in two days. I republished it @ Hackernoon this weekend at their request, which resulted in ±125,000 additional page views, bringing the total page views of the article since its publication in 2015 to ±245,000. The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations. On SO, I currently have 11,914 rep, 9 gold badges, 66 silver badges and 73 bronze badges. I’ve posted 492 answers and 6 questions (that haven’t been deleted). I’ve been programming since 1999 and I’ve worked as an IT professional since 2006, and my experience ranges from PHP and JS to SAP and PL/SQL. I also released my own open source frontend framework and several other open source projects on Github. So I know how to program and understand many of SO’s intricate workings! Those rare times I’m stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to find any useful answer on SO. My questions either get no answers at all or downvoted and/or closed (for arbitrary reasons) by people who clearly lack the experience to even remotely understand what I’m talking about. During my time on SO, I’ve been bullied by 20+k users several times and even got a temporary ban by one of them moderators for no other reason but pointing out that another user was acting like “a little Hitler”… in a private conversation with moderation. Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most privileged segments of its membership. Considering the popularity of my article, I’m considering writing a follow-up and go in greater detail on my experiences with SO and how SO could be improved. However, I’m quite busy these days, so it may take a while before it actually gets published… if it ever gets published. Nevertheless, these are my 5 cents I’d like to add here…

jmcomets 10y ago
> The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations. I disagree. Many people simply view an article to understand the author's opinion (my case). IMO the "new user" experience on StackOverflow really depends on the topic addressed. Maybe that's just programmer personality speaking, I wish someone would do a study on the traits of programmers depending on their language / line of work...

shardinator 10y ago

Hi Bozho, thanks so much for your help over the years. SO might be in decline, but it's one of those few products that makes you realise that better product design can change things for the better.

kzisme 10y ago

I've recently began using SO more actively (providing answers). Most of the questions I've found and tried to answer were duplicates, but since I didn't have enough reputation to mark it as duplicate. (or enough rep to comment on a post to ask for more information on a poorly asked question) It's fairly depressing to attempt to try to be active on a site like SO when it's setup for failure in the beginning. It's irritating when users with 10k+ reputation can more easily gain reputation by commenting, editing, and "moderating" new questions. The other issue I have is that for new questions it's more about being first to answer a question rather than what is actually correct. I also dislike providing answers to new questions, and the OP is a brand new user asking a question and never marks an answer as correct... I wish it was easier and less frustrating to be active, but I suppose I'll keep trying.

Bartweiss 10y ago
One of my least favorite SO patterns is seeing a top answer with ~150 points that's simply wrong, and then a second or third answer with ~20 points that's actually correct. For high-profile questions this gets sorted out eventually, but it sometimes persists indefinitely for niche questions, and it's really unfortunate. I know "first mover advantage" is hard to solve (cf. Reddit), but it's a really big deal for SO.
- kzisme 10y ago
  It's frustrating as well when the question that was asked gets answered by me, and I receive a slew of down-votes since I answered it first. The next few answers are essentially copy/paste of my answers or other answers on the question...but I'm still negatively impacted by the down-votes since I only have ~39 rep and wow has getting started been a pain.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    A weird observation: starting with SO is particularly punishing if you come to it as an established programmer. The karma restrictions don't chafe much if you're a novice who mostly asks questions, and occasionally answers a simple topic they recognize. If you're experienced, you want to give more complex answers, and perhaps comment on other answers that you think are suboptimal. Doing that, you feel the new users restrictions (and the sting of uninformed downvotes) constantly. 50 karma is big, because the option to comment on other people's posts is core to giving relevant answers ("Did you want it to do X, or Y?") and using the site properly. Honestly, I'd just ask a few questions (if your domain is uncommon enough that they won't be duplicates) and let that karma carry you until the site becomes usable.

geordee 10y ago

I stopped getting answers in SO. These days I see that the answer could be there in SO, Github, Gists, blogs and Google is the first place I go to. A few years back, I could go to SO for practically anything to do with coding. And I was doing Ruby and Rails.

gjolund 10y ago

SO mods are some of the most toxic people I have encountered on the internet.

domador 10y ago

I never even STARTED contributing to Stack Overflow, because of the high barrier to entry for new users. Since now you essentially can't post a question without answering several yourself, I didn't bother asking questions about certain thorny technical issues. I tried a couple of times, ran into the barrier, and gave up. Maybe some of these could have been the kind of thought-provoking questions that the blog post's author would have enjoyed. Who knows how many other would-be Stack Overflow users have had a similar experience. Could Stack Overflow be cutting off its own long tail by having such restrictive barriers to entry for casual, minor would-be contributors like myself? Fortunately, many of the questions I've needed help with have already asked and answered by others on S.O. But I've had to find help for my more exotic questions elsewhere.

bhandziuk 10y ago
I don't know if you were being hyperbolic but asking a question requires no previous community engagement. There is no barrier to entry. This is part of the issue with SO though in that so many people ask questions without trying to figure things out for themselves or because it is their first time asking a question on the internet they have a very hard time with it. Veteran users are frustrated by new user's attitude and new user's attitude is often that they are asking a question because they are hitting a wall. They've stalled out on their task and are frustrated and the question they end up posting shows this. It will lack context, enough information to reproduce, be an XY problem or some issue like that. These questions are either difficult or impossible to answer. Making them stop is a very hard problem, unfortunately.
- domador 10y ago
  No, I was not being hyperbolic. When I tried asking a question, the site told me I had to answer a number of other people's questions first (or something along those lines) before I could post my question. It happened on a couple of separate occasions, and then I just stopped trying. Maybe they've removed this restriction since then, but it was sure annoying (and discouraging).

therealbobsmoot 10y ago

Biggest problem on SO is the constant need by the moderators to mark a question as 'not a question', when it's actually a really question and gets a lot of good answers.

ravenstine 10y ago
How were these questions stated? Whenever I have seen this happen, it's because the user was behaving like they were posting on a vBulletin help forum. For example, the title might be "question about rails" and the body might say something like "Uploads don't work. Here's my controller code." There are two problems here. First, no actual question is being asked. There may be an implicit question, but that's not what SO is about as it isn't terribly helpful to those searching for answers. Second, the user may be missing so much fundamental knowledge about the subject that a sufficient answer would require more work than is worth anyone's time, and would contain more information than is in the scope of a single specific question. SO is meant for answers to precise problems, and isn't a tutorial site. Sure, some people may post good answers, but the question may be too nebulous if it exists at all. I really don't see that kind of thing happen often enough to be a big deal, but that's the only sort of case I have seen get the treatment that you describe. As I have said before, I would rather have some of my questions be rejected on some basis than have SO be a complete garbage dump. In contrast to other sites in general, SO/SE is very clean.
- r00fus 10y ago
  Maybe better moderation responses would help - ie, recommendations, links to guidelines, etc. Have those improved recently?

fail2fail2ban 10y ago

I want to contribute but there's some reputation barrier. About 1/4 of the time, the best answer isn't chosen but I don't have the ability to help vote up the best answer.

ravenstine 10y ago

I rarely have the sort of experiences on SO that some seem to have. From my witnessing the kind of frustration friends have had with SO, and from experiencing my own occasional mistakes, I think some people are just poor at stating an actual question, but can describe their problem in detail, which is fine except often just talking about a problem without conveying the direction one is looking to go towards isn't helpful to others. Some people also just get offended really easily. Perhaps it comes from a past of spending time on very Machiavellian BBSes, but my skin is rather thick and I've only once run into a complete jerk on the Stack Exchange system, though not on Stack Overflow. It's easy to complain about any system, but what do we really have that's better than Stack Exchange? Quora? Yahoo Answers? lol Maybe Experts Exchange, but the userbase hasn't been nearly as large as SE in years. I personally like the fact that SO/SE is so strict because, for all the power of the internet, there is mostly incorrect information on it. I'd much rather some people get dissatisfied with it, and that some of my questions get closed or downvoted easily, than have to wade through a ton of duplicate questions with answers that appear to be written by 12 year olds. The only thing that I wish SO would implement is mandatory explanations for downvotes. Upvotes help a question get attention so there really isn't a big need for an explanation, but a negative score from a few voters early on can prevent a perfectly valid question from ever being taken seriously. This has happened to me on a couple occasions where I knew that the question was valid and the body properly formatted, but someone just didn't like the question for whatever reason. It's a good thing that a bounty can fix this, but I shouldn't have to spend 100+ of my points just because one or two people didn't like that I was asking a question that supposedly every programmer should know and I'm an idiot for asking it. I have no clue what people are talking about when it comes to a "signal to noise" ratio; Stack Exchange is one of the least noisy sites I've ever seen.

eugenekolo2 10y ago

I don't think you're looking at it from the right angle. SO is a great resource that's amassed a lot of simple questions. My personally favourite use of it is to find boiler plate code, or to get answers to simple questions in languages I'm not an expert in, but unfortunately get forced to use for whatever reason. The same is true for sysadmining tasks. I'm wearing far too many hats to remember how to change hostname on 4 different operating systems - it's far easier to just google and click the SO link than to read manuals every time I have a simple task. Additionally, your answer regarding: > On the other hand, even the simplest questions are not closed just because they are simple. One of my favourite examples is the question whether you need a null check before calling an instanceof. My answer is number 2, with a sarcastic comment that this could be tested in an IDE for a minute. And a very good comment points out that it takes less than that to get the answer on Stackoverflow. Is particularly bad. "Test in an IDE" is not a valid response when the question pertains to a JVM implementation. Your Sun JVM may be different than my Apache JVM, different than JoeShmoe JVM. A better answer might be to refer to lines in the official JVM specification, and note if there's an ambiguity, and that most implementations follow X, but not necessarily...

bipbopbipbop 10y ago

I see them as a HN for the masses. If HN is a billboard for YC, anyone with a little $ can have their ad on SO. Seems to be working just fine.

edoceo 10y ago

Why has SO entered the hiring market? Are they losing focus? I use SO profile as part of my hiring process but does the world really need another job-board?

coryfklein 10y ago

It's easy to nitpick and find fault with Stack Overflow, but it is hard to argue with the results. The site has done something amazing: it has harnessed the wild democracy that is the internet and produced something of great and lasting value to a lot of people. It didn't do that by being a wild-west open-to-anything community. If that's what you want, go to Reddit. But you'll be hard pressed to find quality content that goes beyond "16 Animal Memes That Speed Up Your PHP And Improve Your Sex Life". It's the structure that allows Stack Overflow to succeed. Cut the string from the kite and it doesn't fly up to the clouds, it comes streaking down to the ground.

brudgers 10y ago

I believe one of the features of StackOverflow's design is that people quit the site when they become burned out answering repetitive/uninteresting/homework/etc questions. Because the alternative is that they hang around the site and entertain themselves by treating people badly...despite the design, I believe that the way in which 'homework' questions are used as an excuse for unhelpful behavior illustrates the general problem that concerned Spolsky [1] when designing the site. [1] and perhaps Atwood to a lesser degree based on their difference of opinion regarding 'how do I move the turtle in Logo'. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...

kazinator 10y ago

Stackoverflow is a waste dump of crap questions that need to be put on old (and permanently deleted). This is not the case with some other SE sites, which run a "tigher ship". For instance, the moderation review queues on the Electronics SE site are kept small; everything gets processed. The moderation queue on SO is huge. Currently, 8.8K questions with close votes need review. Hundreds of low-quality posts. In Electronics SE: 6 close votes need review at the moment, 3 First Posts and 1 re-open. That's it. I clicked on Review in SO just now to start reviewing close votes. The very first question that comes up is from 6 years ago.

ommunist 10y ago

I cannot even start to contribute to Stackoverflow, because it is way too complicated ladder to become helpful.

scraft 10y ago

I have 851 reputation (top 39% of all users), I have answered 15 questions, about 50% haven't received any points, a few have received a minimal amount, and two or three have received a bunch of points. My answers are generally to quite niche topics, I have never gone out of my way to answer questions, I typically post an answer when I have invested a good chunk of time to find the solution to something and then see a question about the same issue. I sometimes see questions I could answer (or improve existing answers), but do not provide an answer as I find it hard to justify the time, I feel that if I wanted to rack up points on stackoverflow it wouldn't be that hard to post several answers a day. My reputation has gone up pretty much steadily, for the last three years, with an average of about 3 or 4 posts per year. I am a pretty light user, and being in the top 39%, if anything, surprises me as I could easily imagine being in the top 80%. I find stackoverflow very useful, I work in games development which is quite a broad subject, in an ideal world I'd have very in depth knowledge about hundreds of topics, but in reality stackoverflow allows me to get quick answers to a huge amount of questions/problems, which in turn gives me more time to devote on area which I feel are most important. I haven't noticed stackoverflow going down hill in the time I have used it.