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> A core problem for Stack Overflow is the lack of people willing to curate material. I think the word "curate" is interesting here, as in, pick for emphasis.

> A core problem for Stack Overflow is the lack of people willing to curate material. I think the word "curate" is interesting here, as in, pick for emphasis. I think maybe a mistake that SO makes is to close or remove topics, rather than "deemphasize" them. Instead of closing things, why not just make poor answers and poor discussions lead to less likelihood of being found in the search engine. (I suppose this might take some coordination with Google et al..) One thing I don't particularly like about SO is that the questioner must select the "accepted" answer. Quite often this isn't the best one, or there isn't a best one, or there is too much discussion in the comments and not in the answers. What is missing imho is a meta vote. Individual questions and answers have votes, but I think the "selection of the best answer" should also have a kind of "confidence vote". This might help to make the most interesting questions and answers more visible. On the other hand maybe it's so "meta" that no one would use it, and a recommendation engine is only as good as the willingness of users to recommend things.. But in any case my overarching point is that there are too many "binary" evaluations of goodness on SO, instead of letting things bubble up to the top when they're interesting. (The difficulty of course being to define "interesting" as useful and accurate, rather than just clickbaity.)

Chaebixi 9y ago
> I think the word "curate" is interesting here, as in, pick for emphasis. I think maybe a mistake that SO makes is to close or remove topics, rather than "deemphasize" them. Questions should also "age" and become deemphasized with time, especially for more popular topics. SO is getting old, with a lot of out-of-date stuff, and relying on manually closing topic to maintain quality isn't going to help with that. If stuff aged out, it would push the more recent stuff to the top. It would also increase engagement since there'd be space to answer the old questions in new ways without it being futile. That's not to say the old answers are bad (people have to work on legacy stacks after all), but you should only find that stuff if you want it.
- radarsat1 9y ago
  True, it should be possible to flag information as old or obsolete without it being marked "wrong". Maybe similarly, there are cases where the specifics may be out of date but the idea or concepts are nonetheless valid. Perhaps it should be possible to mark answers as "timeless".
  - shagie 9y ago
    A down vote is not marking it wrong. It is indicating that it is not useful (compared to other content?). As to "timeless" - consider that even such material can expire. The "timeless" information about how to simulate a closure in Java (valid from 1996 to 2014) is no longer timeless. The timeless material applicable for all versions of Python (until Python 3) would make it just as difficult to get rid of as a green checkmark next to the answer that someone found helpful at some point in the past. If you ever create a meta-moderator user script for Stack Overflow I'd be interested in seeing how well it works. The biggest problem being the volume of material that is coming in on a daily basis.
shagie 9y ago
Curate was very specifically chosen. There is moderation - which is about the selection of material to see and its removal... and then there is curation which focuses on maintaining existing material. These are only a few instances of places on Stack Overflow where community curation of larger material has worked. The C++ community on Stack Overflow is very careful and protective with https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-... . But outside of that, most people let questions and answers rot. Fun and interesting can happen when it doesn't become a distraction for the site as a whole. MathOverflow, with more active curation that is possible with a larger active contributor to overall community ratio is able to handle list questions ( https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/big-list?sort=votes&pageSize=15 https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/big-list?sort=vote... ) in a way that has often failed to be curated well on Stack Overflow. The "less likelihood" is a binary thing. Stack Overflow can't say "index this, but don't show that result often" to google. Google does what it wants. The way to remove noise to help with the signal for that vision of good programming knowledge is to, well, remove noise. People up voting fun things makes that signal for good material even harder to find though.
- radarsat1 9y ago
  > Curate was very specifically chosen. There is moderation - which is about the selection of material to see and its removal... and then there is curation which focuses on maintaining existing material. Right, but I guess I'm sort of suggesting that what is needed is something in-between. "Soft" curation, if you want. Just an idea anyways, but it seems to be like it would be more scalable, and less likely to cause controversy e.g. when something gets deleted. > The "less likelihood" is a binary thing. Stack Overflow can't say "index this, but don't show that result often" to google. Google does what it wants. But yeah I guess that is the crux of the matter.. not much can be done about other people indexing old/bad stuff.
deleted 9y ago
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Chaebixi 9y ago

> I think the word "curate" is interesting here, as in, pick for emphasis. I think maybe a mistake that SO makes is to close or remove topics, rather than "deemphasize" them. Questions should also "age" and become deemphasized with time, especially for more popular topics. SO is getting old, with a lot of out-of-date stuff, and relying on manually closing topic to maintain quality isn't going to help with that. If stuff aged out, it would push the more recent stuff to the top. It would also increase engagement since there'd be space to answer the old questions in new ways without it being futile. That's not to say the old answers are bad (people have to work on legacy stacks after all), but you should only find that stuff if you want it.

radarsat1 9y ago
True, it should be possible to flag information as old or obsolete without it being marked "wrong". Maybe similarly, there are cases where the specifics may be out of date but the idea or concepts are nonetheless valid. Perhaps it should be possible to mark answers as "timeless".
- shagie 9y ago
  A down vote is not marking it wrong. It is indicating that it is not useful (compared to other content?). As to "timeless" - consider that even such material can expire. The "timeless" information about how to simulate a closure in Java (valid from 1996 to 2014) is no longer timeless. The timeless material applicable for all versions of Python (until Python 3) would make it just as difficult to get rid of as a green checkmark next to the answer that someone found helpful at some point in the past. If you ever create a meta-moderator user script for Stack Overflow I'd be interested in seeing how well it works. The biggest problem being the volume of material that is coming in on a daily basis.

shagie 9y ago

Curate was very specifically chosen. There is moderation - which is about the selection of material to see and its removal... and then there is curation which focuses on maintaining existing material. These are only a few instances of places on Stack Overflow where community curation of larger material has worked. The C++ community on Stack Overflow is very careful and protective with https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list https://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-... . But outside of that, most people let questions and answers rot. Fun and interesting can happen when it doesn't become a distraction for the site as a whole. MathOverflow, with more active curation that is possible with a larger active contributor to overall community ratio is able to handle list questions ( https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/big-list?sort=votes&pageSize=15 https://mathoverflow.net/questions/tagged/big-list?sort=vote... ) in a way that has often failed to be curated well on Stack Overflow. The "less likelihood" is a binary thing. Stack Overflow can't say "index this, but don't show that result often" to google. Google does what it wants. The way to remove noise to help with the signal for that vision of good programming knowledge is to, well, remove noise. People up voting fun things makes that signal for good material even harder to find though.

radarsat1 9y ago
> Curate was very specifically chosen. There is moderation - which is about the selection of material to see and its removal... and then there is curation which focuses on maintaining existing material. Right, but I guess I'm sort of suggesting that what is needed is something in-between. "Soft" curation, if you want. Just an idea anyways, but it seems to be like it would be more scalable, and less likely to cause controversy e.g. when something gets deleted. > The "less likelihood" is a binary thing. Stack Overflow can't say "index this, but don't show that result often" to google. Google does what it wants. But yeah I guess that is the crux of the matter.. not much can be done about other people indexing old/bad stuff.

deleted 9y ago

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