23 ms·

The Stack Overflow Age

233 points by jnet 8y ago

klmr 8y ago
> One of the biggest such forums was called Experts Exchange. By what metric? I don’t know anybody who was actually subscribed there (although they must have existed). Instead, people were using various other forums that were free. Some of these forums were absolutely huge, both in terms of number of users, and by the number of questions/discussions. Experts Exchange started dominating Google search results, true. But I always thought this was merely due to SEO trickery, not because they were actually widely used. Truth be told, I would be hard pressed to even call it a “forum” — typical forums (bulletin boards) functioned very differently.
- reitanqild 8y ago
  Worth noting: I always just scrolled to the very bottom of the page to see the answers on EE. This might not have worked in the start (I don't know) but as far as I can remember it worked. I think they did this intentionally because google would ban them otherwise.
  - wilkystyle 8y ago
    I think you could also click to view the cached version of the page.
  - simias 8y ago
    IIRC they changed their approach several times and I think for a while you wouldn't have access to the answer at all until they changed it to what you describe (answer buried at the bottom of the page). I assume they settled on that format for the reason you mention, Google would have ended up removing them from their results if they kept cheating.
  - nmstoker 8y ago
    Yes, scrolling down was what I recall too. Once in a while it wouldn't work and I ditched EE pretty much as soon as SE got going
- wilkystyle 8y ago
  I would guess that the metric he's using here is Google search result popularity. I definitely remember the exact experience he describes regarding EE and Google search results.
- vermooten 8y ago
  Remember when the url made it look like Expert Sexchange? :)
- Slansitartop 8y ago
  >> One of the biggest such forums was called Experts Exchange. > By what metric? I don’t know anybody who was actually subscribed there (although they must have existed). Instead, people were using various other forums that were free. Or just used workarounds. I remember always going to the Google Cache versions, because that was what the GoogleBot saw, so it had the answers. I wouldn't be surprised if their SEO trickery made it one of the biggest single Q&A sites of the time, since people will go where search takes them.
  - zwieback 8y ago
    I remember that too, there was a brief time between the comp.lang.xyz usenet groups and SO where the google cache for EE was a great resource for me.
- astannard 8y ago
  It definitely featured near the top of google results for many questions. I remember being annoyed at the paywall many a time.
- rconti 8y ago
  I don't know a lot of people who subscribe to stackoverflow either. Use it? yes. Subscribe? no.
  - chipperyman573 8y ago
    In order to view an answer on Experts Exchange, you had to subscribe.
    - daurnimator 8y ago
      Did you? I always just scrolled past the fold.
      - chipperyman573 8y ago
        I think they changed it once SO started becoming popular (I may be misremembering the timeline, but I definitely remember being very frustrated about not being able to view the answers at one point)
        daurnimator 8y ago
        I think they may have had a google-wall: if you came from google you could scroll down to the content, but if you were just browsing the forum you couldn't see the answers.
    - aembleton 8y ago
      I used to change my user agent to be that of a Google Bot
  - pubby 8y ago
    Experts Exchange used to cost money to use. (a subscription)
clavalle 8y ago
The Pedant Police make Stack Overflow very difficult to use.
- booleandilemma 8y ago
  I don’t think so. They try to keep it a question and answer site, not a question and opinion site.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    I have tried to ask questions two times in the last few months and the responses were pretty much "if you don't know what you are doing you should hire an expert" or "why would would anyone do such a thing?". I definitely didn't feel very welcome and will stop posting there. It seems most questions that get answers are very simple and straightforward ones. Difficult stuff doesn't get discussed.
    - baud147258 8y ago
      Perhaps in the first case the question you asked was too broad compared to the standard expected for SO questions? Or too precise to be of use to anyone else?
      - maxxxxx 8y ago
        The question was pretty broad but I think discussing it would have been very valuable for quite a few people. What bothered me were the snide responses. At minimum they should have stayed quiet or explained that SO doesn't deal with this kind of question.
        aw3c2 8y ago
        > discussing SO is not for discussion!
        Someone1234 8y ago
boffinism 8y ago
Good to see Joel is blogging a bit more these days. I know a lot of people disagree with a lot of what he says, but he always has points of view worth discussing, in my opinion.
- scottinseattle 8y ago
  I think it's really weird that right now both Joel Spolsky and Steve Yegge started blogging again. Maybe we're about to hit the apocalypse
ProAm 8y ago
It's too bad the culture of SO turned out the way it did. I was eager and happy to use it early on but was quickly disillusioned and it's my last resort to turn to if I have questions these days.
- yulaow 8y ago
  Same, and the problem is that the "mods" enforce that culture instead of fighting it, making it worse and worse over time.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  This is why I always vote in moderator elections for those who make a point of being kind to new people, or are still new themselves. Not the rookies who have nothing to say in the "why me" section and don't even have access to the moderator tools which you get at 10k rep, but a balance. Most of the community seems to be aware of the issue when prompted, but most times when I see moderation happening, it's not as friendly as one might hope... I always try to provide helpful pointers and comments for the author, if I happen to notice it in time.
  - shagie 8y ago
    Unfriendly/ rude moderation is what happens when the tools in place to try to keep the site’s content in alignment with the person’s vision fail. Not enough votes. Not enough time. Poor filters. Too low a barrier to post a new question. People then turn to social tools. Rudeness ensues. An open question is what is the vision of the site... and there are probably many of them.
- baud147258 8y ago
  What's so bad about the culture? I've never had any problem there. Please note that I've answered a bunch of question, but only on a tag with not a lot of frequentation.
  - ythn 8y ago
    On some of the high traffic tags (Java, C++, Python) there are a few high rep users that will swoop in on any basic-level question within seconds and close as duplicate/off-topic/too-broad, etc. So on the one hand it is not very newbie or tutorial friendly, but on the other hand, it clears away those kinds of questions to make room for more difficult questions that may not have a good answer on SO yet. Even still, most newbie questions do get some degree of help from empathetic users in the comments.
payne92 8y ago
SO is definitely a force, but I feel its usefulness has faded from inattention to the user experience and use cases. For example: #1. There's a huge "homework problem" (narrow, specific questions that aren't broadly useful). Consider flagging homework as homework (and excluding it from searches), trying to divert questioners to other resources before their question is posted ("this looks like homework..."), and more thinking about ways to codify the use case. I'd gladly help with homework if there were tools focused on that (e.g. ability to comment on specific lines of code -- Gooogle Docs for posted source code, etc.) #2. There are oddly subjective editorial decisions, such as closing my question about an API for generating USPS priority mail labels as "off topic": https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5690713/how-to-programmatically-generate-usps-priority-mail-labels https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5690713/how-to-programma... (My view: "is there any API for doing X" is no different than "is there any method/function for doing X", it's a question of existence, not opinion. But even then, opinions are often very useful!) #3. The best answer is often buried under the "accepted" answer. Over time, highly upvoted answers should drift to the top. #4. There should be explicit UI support for flagging stale/out-of-date information. SO has a long tail of information now, and much of it is dated. It should be super easy to note and see that.
- bmh_ca 8y ago
  On #3 and #4 I had what I believed to be some reasonable conceptions to formulate parameters for a discussion, here: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/71522 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/71522 Basically I suggest dividing the questions into categories of: 1. Timeless: Questions with a timeless best answer, which is unlikely to be improved or updated in the future; 2. Revolving: Questions with a "best answer" today but in the future there will be a "better answer"; and 3. Wiki: Questions that are constantly being improved and updated. Among a few other notions. Insofar as it was a problem of interest when I wrote it in 2010, it's only become a more prominent issue since.
- ProAm 8y ago
  Questions should never be closed on a site that has a voting system. Completely defeats the purpose of both options. There is nothing wrong with asking a similar question to another or posting answers that are similar to others. People learn in different manners, sometimes it might take a person to read the same question (but a little different) a few different times before they can grasp the concept. It's meant to be a forum to help people, not rewrite the manual on a programming language. If there was only one way people should literally just RTM.
zwieback 8y ago
It's interesting to see all the negative comments about the SO culture here. I just hadn't really noticed it but maybe it is a problem for beginners. I generally find what I'm looking for and when I post a question I try to research first to avoid spam. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
- Someone1234 8y ago
  I cannot help but read "beginners" in a derogatory tone. Or at the very least a way to hand-wave away the unhealthy atmosphere that has formed at SO. It is definitely a problem for people with low SO Reputation since others can come along and edit their posts completely changing the context and meaning, and seem more brave to bully low rep users (e.g. delete/dup their posts). I have fairly high SO Rep from way-back-when, and all I seem to use that for is undoing others abusive mod actions (like de-dupping something that points to a completely different programming language or framework). But it isn't a community I care to take part in much these days, too toxic. Back in my day SO existed exactly to help beginners. Now they want to be "the Wikipedia of programming questions." So be it, but none of us have to stick around to help form their little out of date empire of desert.
  - krapp 8y ago
    The problem is, helping beginners can be dangerous to an online community. New users are the main vector for spreading the Eternal September effect, while they're necessary to the life of a community, they also inevitably hasten its intellectual and cultural demise. At some point, if a community wants to maintain a high standard of quality, it has to start being hostile to newcomers. Sometimes you have to tell them to GTFO and RTFM.
  - zwieback 8y ago
    Beginner was not meant derogatory, I just meant that as the phase of starting to learn something. The types of questions are different at that stage. Also, after learning a few different languages or libraries it's probably easier to ask questions that don't get moderated out even if someone is a beginner in that new language. I don't know much Java but a lot of C# and C++ so I can probably ask a Java question that doesn't displease attention of overzealous moderators. Your point about how SO has changed is good, the early days definitely felt different but making the huge amount of questions usable does call for a slightly different approach. Glad to hear some high-rep users are trying to balance out the modding behavior, thanks for that.
aepiepaey 8y ago
Stack Overflow is useful at times, and frustrating at others. If you have basically no idea what you're doing, or just want an example for something, it can be great. On the other hand, if you try to find an answer about something you're really knowledgeable about, the result is often unsatisfactory: Like trying to find the reference documentation to answer some specific question, and the documentation is buried under a lot of SO questions (that usually don't answer that question).[1] Or you find someone who asked exactly the question you're looking for an answer to, but it either: has no answer, despite being very old, or has been closed due to being "not constructive" or "off topic". [1]: While I generally prefer the in-language documentation, e.g. Python's integrated documentation is often missing notices (deprecation notices, warnings about illogical behaviour, ...) that exist in the web version.
- kaycebasques 8y ago
  > Or you find someone who asked exactly the question you're looking for an answer to, but it either: has no answer, despite being very old “Who were you, DenverCoder9? What did you see?!” https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wisdom_of_the_ancients.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wisdom_of_the_ancients.png
  - mark-r 8y ago
    You should really link to the actual cartoon page instead of just the image. Not only do you get links to the rest of the site but the hover text is almost always worth seeing. https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  Yes, once you start asking _really_ difficult questions that require in-depth knowledge of a niche topic to answer SO becomes less useful, since the pool of people who know enough to actually answer your question is too small. In cases like that I usually just end up answering my own question later, after I've figured it out by other means.
  - klenwell 8y ago
cortesoft 8y ago
Ah yes, old expert sexchange and scrolling to the bottom for answers....
zeveb 8y ago
> In the early days of the Internet, before the Web, there was a system called Usenet which created primitive online discussion forums. I wouldn't call Usenet groups 'primitive online discussion forums'; indeed, I rather strongly believe that in most respects Usenet was better & more advanced than current technologies. It was fast. How fast? Really, really fast: every article was already sitting on your local system, so there was no network lag (or just LAN lag, if your local system was on a network). Articles were plain ASCII text: no ads, no images, no JavaScript. The combination of local articles & small articles wins over web pages every day of the week. It was easy to find stuff. While the system was distributed across the world, there was a nice, neat hierarchy. This wins over the Web, which needs a service like Google to be usable. If one wanted to, one could perform full-text search over the entire newsfeed in realtime (James 'Kibo" Parry was famous for this). Imagine being able to grep the Internet! It was decentralised: you could get multiple newsfeeds from multiple sources. You could have site-local newsgroups if you wanted to, or just share certain groups with your peers. It had killfiles. It's hard to express, nowadays, how valuable these were. And you were in control, not some unaccountable moderator. A 21st-century version of Usenet, with encryption, authentication & Unicode, and capable of scaling up to 7 billion people, would be just awesome. Web forums are a primitive version of Usenet.
- grkvlt 8y ago
  I think there's some rose-coloured reviewing going on here. > It was fast [...] easy [...] you were in control [etc.] Not that I recall. It was slow, and could take from hours (local organisation or same city) to days (rest of the world) for an article to be propagated on Usenet. Yes, it was all cached locally, but often systems would download new articles only once a day, often at night when bandwidth (scarce and expensive, costing 'hundreds, if not thousands of dollars' as the rn warning went) was available. Conversations didn't take place in anything near real-time, but over days. It didn't have history, or archives, either. Binary newsgroups would be kept for days only (due to their size) while the 'alt' hierarchy was kept for longer and the 'big 7' longest (eventually multiple years, but originally only months, causing the loss of many early Usenet postings that were never archived.) As for moderation and accountability, moderated newsgroups were controlled by people who could choose whether or not to accept articles, and the creation of a new group, even in the 'alt' hierarchy was at the whim of some news administrator, while the 'big 7' required the 'Usenet Cabal' to agree, after a voting process that while democratic was complex and confusing. Actually getting access to a group required your local news administrator to decide whether it was worth the disk space and bandwidth, so there was no guarantee that you would see every group or message. As for full-text search over the entire newsfeed, Kibo was famous for this because it was rare. Searching news was difficult and time and compute resource hungry; most people did not have the resources to accomplish this. The Web is a "version of Usenet, with encryption, authentication & Unicode, and capable of scaling up to 7 billion people" plus interactivity, colour, images, video, hypertext, programmable extensibility, you name it...
grouseway 8y ago
>Instead of putting all the Java programmers in one little forum and all the C++ programmers in another, we dumped everyone together and just let them tag their questions And yet for some reason the site can't handle off-topic and pure "answerable by fact" questions on one site? So often I search for something and the top post is an closed off-topic post on SO. I've never even had one of my own SO questions closed as off-topic so it's not a personal grudge - I just think the site is very stubborn about this. So many questions and organic search results is a huge signal that they are ignoring. It's not like they're running a forum were the first page would be polluted with off topic stuff if they allowed it. Their fear of becoming yahoo Q&A has prevented them from filling a need that is there. Often I just want to people's opinions on stuff - that's mostly why I read HN.
jq170727 8y ago
A few months ago I wanted to learn jq really well but unfortunately I didn't really know where to start and couldn't find much of what I would call well written documentation so I decided to train myself by contributing an answer to every reasonable jq question on StackOverflow. I found many of the newbie restrictions off-putting and if I wasn't there with the specific goal in mind to improve my own skills by helping others with their real problems I probably would have just left immediately like I'm sure many others have. Getting involved in the pettiness of the self-appointed there isn't worth the time. I stopped contributing when my free time evaporated after changing jobs. I might go back to StackOverflow when things settle down but I feel like I know jq well enough now, my experiment has run its course and for me to learn more I'm going to have to spend some time working on the jq internals and going into deeper questions then SO can handle.
peacetreefrog 8y ago
I think Stack Overflow is great and it's helped me a lot in the past, but I'm not sure how useful it'll be in the future. I've been learning Elm the past few weeks and have noticed a lack of good SO questions and answers on it. It's a smaller community, but I also think many people go to the Elm Slack channel to ask their questions, which they get in realtime. Not sure if that's just an Elm thing. A language specific Slack is useful in the moment (probably moreso than SO) because you get a real time answer and can ask follow ups etc, but I can't help but think there's a ton of knowledge/people asking similar questions that is just disappearing into the ether. Makes picking things up harder for more people long term.
- klenwell 8y ago
  Sounds like an opportunity for someone to pick up some SO karma. Just try not to spend it all in one place.
- SahAssar 8y ago
  That's the problem with platforms like slack, the question is decoupled from the answer and it usually isn't archived in a searchable way. The next person googling that question will have to ask it again instead of just looking up the answer.
marktangotango 8y ago
And, also: we’re just a few weeks away from launching Stack Overflow Teams, the biggest upgrade to Stack Overflow ever, so that’s going to be really cool. Ah that explains firing up the old blog editor again content marketing ftw!
firefoxd 8y ago
Reading this thread makes it feel like stackoverflow has become the new PHP. You can't even say something positive about it before hell breaks loose. It is really really useful. Actually it is indispensable. It got so many things right, just think about the world before Stackoverflow. But the few things it gets wrong, people make it seems like it breaks everything else. Yes, it sucks. Most of the time I can't find an answer, I am frustrated. When i ask on Stackoverflow and the question gets closed or just marked as duplicate, i get even more frustrated. Does it mean it sucks as a whole? Hell no. We gotta be grateful for the good part, and help fix the bad parts.
- dnomad 8y ago
  SO sucks for the most part. I've certainly given up on it. It's certainly not that I think I could do a better job. Managing such a large community is more than likely a losing game. It's only going to get worse, I suspect, because of the growing inequality between the old-timers (who don't actually seem that interested in answering questions but in excessive moderation) and the newbies. The only hope of SO is devolution: spin out the communities that can be saved and give them more autonomy. But this will never happen. This means the site is going to die. There are powerful negative forces aligned against it. Eventually, even the old timers who've amassed these enormous reps, are going to start wondering why they devote so much time and energy to making Joel rich. Wikipedia, at least, is a non-profit foundation. The interesting thing will be what comes after SO. I'm always struck by the Ubuntu community which does a much better job providing fast, relevant answers and support to the community than SO ever did. (The Stack Exchange, https://askubuntu.com/ https://askubuntu.com/, is dead. All the exciting stuff happens elsewhere.) There's also something much more organic; you've got blogs, wikis, Q&A, chat, and various reddit forums all working together to serve the community. This seems to me be the future and should scale better than SO at the end of the day.
kapauldo 8y ago
too many hall monitors on SO
amai 8y ago
Stack Overflow (and the Stackexchange network as a whole) is the second most important website on the internet (after Wikipedia). Thank you Joel for this.

233 points by jnet 8y ago

klmr 8y ago

> One of the biggest such forums was called Experts Exchange. By what metric? I don’t know anybody who was actually subscribed there (although they must have existed). Instead, people were using various other forums that were free. Some of these forums were absolutely huge, both in terms of number of users, and by the number of questions/discussions. Experts Exchange started dominating Google search results, true. But I always thought this was merely due to SEO trickery, not because they were actually widely used. Truth be told, I would be hard pressed to even call it a “forum” — typical forums (bulletin boards) functioned very differently.

reitanqild 8y ago
Worth noting: I always just scrolled to the very bottom of the page to see the answers on EE. This might not have worked in the start (I don't know) but as far as I can remember it worked. I think they did this intentionally because google would ban them otherwise.
- wilkystyle 8y ago
  I think you could also click to view the cached version of the page.
- simias 8y ago
  IIRC they changed their approach several times and I think for a while you wouldn't have access to the answer at all until they changed it to what you describe (answer buried at the bottom of the page). I assume they settled on that format for the reason you mention, Google would have ended up removing them from their results if they kept cheating.
- nmstoker 8y ago
  Yes, scrolling down was what I recall too. Once in a while it wouldn't work and I ditched EE pretty much as soon as SE got going
wilkystyle 8y ago
I would guess that the metric he's using here is Google search result popularity. I definitely remember the exact experience he describes regarding EE and Google search results.
vermooten 8y ago
Remember when the url made it look like Expert Sexchange? :)
Slansitartop 8y ago
>> One of the biggest such forums was called Experts Exchange. > By what metric? I don’t know anybody who was actually subscribed there (although they must have existed). Instead, people were using various other forums that were free. Or just used workarounds. I remember always going to the Google Cache versions, because that was what the GoogleBot saw, so it had the answers. I wouldn't be surprised if their SEO trickery made it one of the biggest single Q&A sites of the time, since people will go where search takes them.
- zwieback 8y ago
  I remember that too, there was a brief time between the comp.lang.xyz usenet groups and SO where the google cache for EE was a great resource for me.
astannard 8y ago
It definitely featured near the top of google results for many questions. I remember being annoyed at the paywall many a time.
rconti 8y ago
I don't know a lot of people who subscribe to stackoverflow either. Use it? yes. Subscribe? no.
- chipperyman573 8y ago
  In order to view an answer on Experts Exchange, you had to subscribe.
  - daurnimator 8y ago
    Did you? I always just scrolled past the fold.
    - chipperyman573 8y ago
      I think they changed it once SO started becoming popular (I may be misremembering the timeline, but I definitely remember being very frustrated about not being able to view the answers at one point)
      - daurnimator 8y ago
        I think they may have had a google-wall: if you came from google you could scroll down to the content, but if you were just browsing the forum you couldn't see the answers.
  - aembleton 8y ago
    I used to change my user agent to be that of a Google Bot
- pubby 8y ago
  Experts Exchange used to cost money to use. (a subscription)

clavalle 8y ago

The Pedant Police make Stack Overflow very difficult to use.

booleandilemma 8y ago
I don’t think so. They try to keep it a question and answer site, not a question and opinion site.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I have tried to ask questions two times in the last few months and the responses were pretty much "if you don't know what you are doing you should hire an expert" or "why would would anyone do such a thing?". I definitely didn't feel very welcome and will stop posting there. It seems most questions that get answers are very simple and straightforward ones. Difficult stuff doesn't get discussed.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    Perhaps in the first case the question you asked was too broad compared to the standard expected for SO questions? Or too precise to be of use to anyone else?
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      The question was pretty broad but I think discussing it would have been very valuable for quite a few people. What bothered me were the snide responses. At minimum they should have stayed quiet or explained that SO doesn't deal with this kind of question.
      - aw3c2 8y ago
        > discussing SO is not for discussion!
        Someone1234 8y ago

boffinism 8y ago

Good to see Joel is blogging a bit more these days. I know a lot of people disagree with a lot of what he says, but he always has points of view worth discussing, in my opinion.

scottinseattle 8y ago
I think it's really weird that right now both Joel Spolsky and Steve Yegge started blogging again. Maybe we're about to hit the apocalypse

ProAm 8y ago

It's too bad the culture of SO turned out the way it did. I was eager and happy to use it early on but was quickly disillusioned and it's my last resort to turn to if I have questions these days.

yulaow 8y ago
Same, and the problem is that the "mods" enforce that culture instead of fighting it, making it worse and worse over time.
lucb1e 8y ago
This is why I always vote in moderator elections for those who make a point of being kind to new people, or are still new themselves. Not the rookies who have nothing to say in the "why me" section and don't even have access to the moderator tools which you get at 10k rep, but a balance. Most of the community seems to be aware of the issue when prompted, but most times when I see moderation happening, it's not as friendly as one might hope... I always try to provide helpful pointers and comments for the author, if I happen to notice it in time.
- shagie 8y ago
  Unfriendly/ rude moderation is what happens when the tools in place to try to keep the site’s content in alignment with the person’s vision fail. Not enough votes. Not enough time. Poor filters. Too low a barrier to post a new question. People then turn to social tools. Rudeness ensues. An open question is what is the vision of the site... and there are probably many of them.
baud147258 8y ago
What's so bad about the culture? I've never had any problem there. Please note that I've answered a bunch of question, but only on a tag with not a lot of frequentation.
- ythn 8y ago
  On some of the high traffic tags (Java, C++, Python) there are a few high rep users that will swoop in on any basic-level question within seconds and close as duplicate/off-topic/too-broad, etc. So on the one hand it is not very newbie or tutorial friendly, but on the other hand, it clears away those kinds of questions to make room for more difficult questions that may not have a good answer on SO yet. Even still, most newbie questions do get some degree of help from empathetic users in the comments.

payne92 8y ago

SO is definitely a force, but I feel its usefulness has faded from inattention to the user experience and use cases. For example: #1. There's a huge "homework problem" (narrow, specific questions that aren't broadly useful). Consider flagging homework as homework (and excluding it from searches), trying to divert questioners to other resources before their question is posted ("this looks like homework..."), and more thinking about ways to codify the use case. I'd gladly help with homework if there were tools focused on that (e.g. ability to comment on specific lines of code -- Gooogle Docs for posted source code, etc.) #2. There are oddly subjective editorial decisions, such as closing my question about an API for generating USPS priority mail labels as "off topic": https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5690713/how-to-programmatically-generate-usps-priority-mail-labels https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5690713/how-to-programma... (My view: "is there any API for doing X" is no different than "is there any method/function for doing X", it's a question of existence, not opinion. But even then, opinions are often very useful!) #3. The best answer is often buried under the "accepted" answer. Over time, highly upvoted answers should drift to the top. #4. There should be explicit UI support for flagging stale/out-of-date information. SO has a long tail of information now, and much of it is dated. It should be super easy to note and see that.

bmh_ca 8y ago
On #3 and #4 I had what I believed to be some reasonable conceptions to formulate parameters for a discussion, here: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/71522 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/71522 Basically I suggest dividing the questions into categories of: 1. Timeless: Questions with a timeless best answer, which is unlikely to be improved or updated in the future; 2. Revolving: Questions with a "best answer" today but in the future there will be a "better answer"; and 3. Wiki: Questions that are constantly being improved and updated. Among a few other notions. Insofar as it was a problem of interest when I wrote it in 2010, it's only become a more prominent issue since.
ProAm 8y ago
Questions should never be closed on a site that has a voting system. Completely defeats the purpose of both options. There is nothing wrong with asking a similar question to another or posting answers that are similar to others. People learn in different manners, sometimes it might take a person to read the same question (but a little different) a few different times before they can grasp the concept. It's meant to be a forum to help people, not rewrite the manual on a programming language. If there was only one way people should literally just RTM.

zwieback 8y ago

It's interesting to see all the negative comments about the SO culture here. I just hadn't really noticed it but maybe it is a problem for beginners. I generally find what I'm looking for and when I post a question I try to research first to avoid spam. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?

Someone1234 8y ago
I cannot help but read "beginners" in a derogatory tone. Or at the very least a way to hand-wave away the unhealthy atmosphere that has formed at SO. It is definitely a problem for people with low SO Reputation since others can come along and edit their posts completely changing the context and meaning, and seem more brave to bully low rep users (e.g. delete/dup their posts). I have fairly high SO Rep from way-back-when, and all I seem to use that for is undoing others abusive mod actions (like de-dupping something that points to a completely different programming language or framework). But it isn't a community I care to take part in much these days, too toxic. Back in my day SO existed exactly to help beginners. Now they want to be "the Wikipedia of programming questions." So be it, but none of us have to stick around to help form their little out of date empire of desert.
- krapp 8y ago
  The problem is, helping beginners can be dangerous to an online community. New users are the main vector for spreading the Eternal September effect, while they're necessary to the life of a community, they also inevitably hasten its intellectual and cultural demise. At some point, if a community wants to maintain a high standard of quality, it has to start being hostile to newcomers. Sometimes you have to tell them to GTFO and RTFM.
- zwieback 8y ago
  Beginner was not meant derogatory, I just meant that as the phase of starting to learn something. The types of questions are different at that stage. Also, after learning a few different languages or libraries it's probably easier to ask questions that don't get moderated out even if someone is a beginner in that new language. I don't know much Java but a lot of C# and C++ so I can probably ask a Java question that doesn't displease attention of overzealous moderators. Your point about how SO has changed is good, the early days definitely felt different but making the huge amount of questions usable does call for a slightly different approach. Glad to hear some high-rep users are trying to balance out the modding behavior, thanks for that.

aepiepaey 8y ago

Stack Overflow is useful at times, and frustrating at others. If you have basically no idea what you're doing, or just want an example for something, it can be great. On the other hand, if you try to find an answer about something you're really knowledgeable about, the result is often unsatisfactory: Like trying to find the reference documentation to answer some specific question, and the documentation is buried under a lot of SO questions (that usually don't answer that question).[1] Or you find someone who asked exactly the question you're looking for an answer to, but it either: has no answer, despite being very old, or has been closed due to being "not constructive" or "off topic". [1]: While I generally prefer the in-language documentation, e.g. Python's integrated documentation is often missing notices (deprecation notices, warnings about illogical behaviour, ...) that exist in the web version.

kaycebasques 8y ago
> Or you find someone who asked exactly the question you're looking for an answer to, but it either: has no answer, despite being very old “Who were you, DenverCoder9? What did you see?!” https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wisdom_of_the_ancients.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wisdom_of_the_ancients.png
- mark-r 8y ago
  You should really link to the actual cartoon page instead of just the image. Not only do you get links to the rest of the site but the hover text is almost always worth seeing. https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/
Ajedi32 8y ago
Yes, once you start asking _really_ difficult questions that require in-depth knowledge of a niche topic to answer SO becomes less useful, since the pool of people who know enough to actually answer your question is too small. In cases like that I usually just end up answering my own question later, after I've figured it out by other means.
- klenwell 8y ago

cortesoft 8y ago

Ah yes, old expert sexchange and scrolling to the bottom for answers....

zeveb 8y ago

> In the early days of the Internet, before the Web, there was a system called Usenet which created primitive online discussion forums. I wouldn't call Usenet groups 'primitive online discussion forums'; indeed, I rather strongly believe that in most respects Usenet was better & more advanced than current technologies. It was fast. How fast? Really, really fast: every article was already sitting on your local system, so there was no network lag (or just LAN lag, if your local system was on a network). Articles were plain ASCII text: no ads, no images, no JavaScript. The combination of local articles & small articles wins over web pages every day of the week. It was easy to find stuff. While the system was distributed across the world, there was a nice, neat hierarchy. This wins over the Web, which needs a service like Google to be usable. If one wanted to, one could perform full-text search over the entire newsfeed in realtime (James 'Kibo" Parry was famous for this). Imagine being able to grep the Internet! It was decentralised: you could get multiple newsfeeds from multiple sources. You could have site-local newsgroups if you wanted to, or just share certain groups with your peers. It had killfiles. It's hard to express, nowadays, how valuable these were. And you were in control, not some unaccountable moderator. A 21st-century version of Usenet, with encryption, authentication & Unicode, and capable of scaling up to 7 billion people, would be just awesome. Web forums are a primitive version of Usenet.

grkvlt 8y ago
I think there's some rose-coloured reviewing going on here. > It was fast [...] easy [...] you were in control [etc.] Not that I recall. It was slow, and could take from hours (local organisation or same city) to days (rest of the world) for an article to be propagated on Usenet. Yes, it was all cached locally, but often systems would download new articles only once a day, often at night when bandwidth (scarce and expensive, costing 'hundreds, if not thousands of dollars' as the rn warning went) was available. Conversations didn't take place in anything near real-time, but over days. It didn't have history, or archives, either. Binary newsgroups would be kept for days only (due to their size) while the 'alt' hierarchy was kept for longer and the 'big 7' longest (eventually multiple years, but originally only months, causing the loss of many early Usenet postings that were never archived.) As for moderation and accountability, moderated newsgroups were controlled by people who could choose whether or not to accept articles, and the creation of a new group, even in the 'alt' hierarchy was at the whim of some news administrator, while the 'big 7' required the 'Usenet Cabal' to agree, after a voting process that while democratic was complex and confusing. Actually getting access to a group required your local news administrator to decide whether it was worth the disk space and bandwidth, so there was no guarantee that you would see every group or message. As for full-text search over the entire newsfeed, Kibo was famous for this because it was rare. Searching news was difficult and time and compute resource hungry; most people did not have the resources to accomplish this. The Web is a "version of Usenet, with encryption, authentication & Unicode, and capable of scaling up to 7 billion people" plus interactivity, colour, images, video, hypertext, programmable extensibility, you name it...

grouseway 8y ago

>Instead of putting all the Java programmers in one little forum and all the C++ programmers in another, we dumped everyone together and just let them tag their questions And yet for some reason the site can't handle off-topic and pure "answerable by fact" questions on one site? So often I search for something and the top post is an closed off-topic post on SO. I've never even had one of my own SO questions closed as off-topic so it's not a personal grudge - I just think the site is very stubborn about this. So many questions and organic search results is a huge signal that they are ignoring. It's not like they're running a forum were the first page would be polluted with off topic stuff if they allowed it. Their fear of becoming yahoo Q&A has prevented them from filling a need that is there. Often I just want to people's opinions on stuff - that's mostly why I read HN.

jq170727 8y ago

A few months ago I wanted to learn jq really well but unfortunately I didn't really know where to start and couldn't find much of what I would call well written documentation so I decided to train myself by contributing an answer to every reasonable jq question on StackOverflow. I found many of the newbie restrictions off-putting and if I wasn't there with the specific goal in mind to improve my own skills by helping others with their real problems I probably would have just left immediately like I'm sure many others have. Getting involved in the pettiness of the self-appointed there isn't worth the time. I stopped contributing when my free time evaporated after changing jobs. I might go back to StackOverflow when things settle down but I feel like I know jq well enough now, my experiment has run its course and for me to learn more I'm going to have to spend some time working on the jq internals and going into deeper questions then SO can handle.

peacetreefrog 8y ago

I think Stack Overflow is great and it's helped me a lot in the past, but I'm not sure how useful it'll be in the future. I've been learning Elm the past few weeks and have noticed a lack of good SO questions and answers on it. It's a smaller community, but I also think many people go to the Elm Slack channel to ask their questions, which they get in realtime. Not sure if that's just an Elm thing. A language specific Slack is useful in the moment (probably moreso than SO) because you get a real time answer and can ask follow ups etc, but I can't help but think there's a ton of knowledge/people asking similar questions that is just disappearing into the ether. Makes picking things up harder for more people long term.

klenwell 8y ago
Sounds like an opportunity for someone to pick up some SO karma. Just try not to spend it all in one place.
SahAssar 8y ago
That's the problem with platforms like slack, the question is decoupled from the answer and it usually isn't archived in a searchable way. The next person googling that question will have to ask it again instead of just looking up the answer.

marktangotango 8y ago

And, also: we’re just a few weeks away from launching Stack Overflow Teams, the biggest upgrade to Stack Overflow ever, so that’s going to be really cool. Ah that explains firing up the old blog editor again content marketing ftw!

firefoxd 8y ago

Reading this thread makes it feel like stackoverflow has become the new PHP. You can't even say something positive about it before hell breaks loose. It is really really useful. Actually it is indispensable. It got so many things right, just think about the world before Stackoverflow. But the few things it gets wrong, people make it seems like it breaks everything else. Yes, it sucks. Most of the time I can't find an answer, I am frustrated. When i ask on Stackoverflow and the question gets closed or just marked as duplicate, i get even more frustrated. Does it mean it sucks as a whole? Hell no. We gotta be grateful for the good part, and help fix the bad parts.

dnomad 8y ago
SO sucks for the most part. I've certainly given up on it. It's certainly not that I think I could do a better job. Managing such a large community is more than likely a losing game. It's only going to get worse, I suspect, because of the growing inequality between the old-timers (who don't actually seem that interested in answering questions but in excessive moderation) and the newbies. The only hope of SO is devolution: spin out the communities that can be saved and give them more autonomy. But this will never happen. This means the site is going to die. There are powerful negative forces aligned against it. Eventually, even the old timers who've amassed these enormous reps, are going to start wondering why they devote so much time and energy to making Joel rich. Wikipedia, at least, is a non-profit foundation. The interesting thing will be what comes after SO. I'm always struck by the Ubuntu community which does a much better job providing fast, relevant answers and support to the community than SO ever did. (The Stack Exchange, https://askubuntu.com/ https://askubuntu.com/, is dead. All the exciting stuff happens elsewhere.) There's also something much more organic; you've got blogs, wikis, Q&A, chat, and various reddit forums all working together to serve the community. This seems to me be the future and should scale better than SO at the end of the day.

kapauldo 8y ago

too many hall monitors on SO

amai 8y ago

Stack Overflow (and the Stackexchange network as a whole) is the second most important website on the internet (after Wikipedia). Thank you Joel for this.