13 ms·

Looking for a new CEO

237 points by g3rv4 8y ago

sergiotapia 8y ago
Where do they go from here? It seems every question has been asked and every new question has a 50/50 of getting closed by MoDeRaTorS as off-topic. Gamification probably got them here, but is it a recipe for continued success or a detriment to StackOverflow?
mooreds 8y ago
Wow. Hard to see how you move the needle on making SO more welcoming when so much of the behavior is in the larger community. I suppose there may be some software changes that could help. But I wish the next CEO luck, and appreciate what Joel and the team have brought into the world.
- robdachshund 8y ago
  One thing I'd like to see is a crackdown on bad mods. So many topics get closed for stupid reasons when there is healthy discussion. Can't count the number of times I've seen people in the thread rallying against the mod that closed it because they were have a valuable conversation.
peeters 8y ago
> One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see. > > I care a lot about this. Being a developer gives you an unparalleled opportunity to write the script for the future. All the flak that Stack Overflow throws in the face of newbies trying to become developers is actively harmful to people, to society, and to Stack Overflow itself, by driving away potential future contributors. And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier. It's good to see that acknowledgement coming from Joel. I wasn't one of those newbies facing that snark, but as an earlier contributor it was really depressing to see the general attitude shift from "yeah OK this question's not the best but it was asked in good faith so I'll answer" to "you're a worthless human being for wasting our time with imperfection".
- codeulike 8y ago
  Its basically become ModOverflow edit: Thought I was coining something here but it was actually coined in 2015 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870816
  - cletus 8y ago
    Oh I love the way you put this. I just checked and I've been a member for 10 years and 6 months. I used to answer questions. A lot. In the early days (at one point it was Jon Skeet, Marc Gravelli then me) and I'm kind of surprised how much karma I still get form those old answers. But I haven't really answered anything in 8+ years. Even one year in I commented on and started several threads on Meta about the "mod problem". And it's only gotten worse. To riff on a phrase, "those who can, answer, those who can't, mod", which is fine, but there is a particular kind of toxic personality that gets attracted to the authority of being a mod that then appoints itself the arbiter of content. You are fighting a constant battle to keep these toxic (but well-intentioned--mostly) souls out. I saw even then the trend of closing interesting questions as "subjective". My opinion then--and now--is you can ask a question like "what are the advantages of React.js vs Vue.js?" in an intelligent way without it being a flame war. The fact that it doesn't have an objective answer is (IMHO) irrelevant. You can divine useful information from the answers to that question that will help you go one way or the other. There is a lot of subjectivity in programming and a lot of not strictly better solutions. Giving people some points to consider as a starting point is incredibly valuable.
    - geoka9 8y ago
      I noticed the "subjective" closing many times and always wondered why that criterion was even introduced on SO. I mean what's wrong with a comment/question being subjective as long as it contains useful information?
      - saywhatnow 8y ago
        I believe the thinking is that what's wrong with it is that over time it tends to attract flamewars and downvotes which are not useful to people searching for answers to their questions.
ProAm 8y ago
SO is like Amazon, I don't like using it, I don't want to use it, but its so big it's unavoidable. The culture on SO is pretty bad, while it might be better than the Q&A sites of yesteryear it's not a lot better.
- monksy 8y ago
  Also it's been that way for years.
- Kaveren 8y ago
  What improvements could be made to Q&A sites to deal with the culture problems you point to?
  - ProAm 8y ago
    I just don't go there unless it's my last resort. I'll turn to irc, github, discord, quora and sadly even reddit before I go to SO.
- jessriedel 8y ago
  It's not just a bit better, it's miles away the best. Likewise for Wikipedia, which is unparalleled at its job and also has lots of negative culture. I'd challenge you to find a community-generated and community-run site that is a tenth as big/successful as either of those but is substantially more welcoming. In other words: the problem is probably not with anything particular to StackOverflow or Wikipedia, the problem is with human beings. That's not to claim that a new website with new rules/structure couldn't arise that was even bigger yet more welcoming -- there's no reason to think the insights that drove StackOverflow are optimal -- but just that it will require further innovations in how communities are structured.
  - ProAm 8y ago
    I disagree. The old sites while sometimes had wildly varying answers, so does SO, especially in newer technologies that change frequently (React, etc...) you'll find answers that are 6 months old but out of date and new questions get closed pointing to the old ones. And the culture on the old sites was never as vile as SO is. I won't be sad when the next gen Q&A comes around to fix the problems SO introduced, just like when SO came around to fix the issues of the other sites.
kareemm 8y ago
Talk about increasing shareholder value! The result of: (num_person-hours_saved_by_SO * num_of_developers_in_world * dev_hourly_rate) must be staggering. I'm sure companies around the world can point to SO for a non-trivial percentage of bottom line revenue. And forget about the bean counters for a sec: as a DEV, SO saves so much pain that I have no idea what I did before it came to be. SO is truly doing God's work (and I'm not a religious man).
- yes_man 8y ago
  > The result of: (num_person-hours_saved_by_SO * num_of_developers_in_world * dev_hourly_rate) must be staggering. I'm sure companies around the world can point to SO for a non-trivial percentage of bottom line revenue. There's also a negative effect on global developer skillset when developers don't have to dig deeper into things or read documentations because they can just find a working example from SO. Although Stackoverflow still probably has a positive net effect for global skill of developers regardless. But a developer who learns from the bottom up will most likely outperform a developer who relies on finding working solutions from SO in the long run. And while a company prefers to have a solution right now for monetary reasons, the quality of developers the global workforce has in the same long run dwindles when the primary goal is to save developer hours "right now". Again highlighting that I still do consider SO a net positive, just that it is not a flat out black and white hours saved function
  - chessturk 8y ago
    You know, I recently posted about how I learned to program with no home internet connection. Learning to only rely on the docs for major libraries has really helped me use obscure stuff. That said, SO is still a wealth of information.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    > There's also a negative effect on global developer skillset when developers don't have to dig deeper into things I consider “being able to resourcefully look up the answer to your question” a critical developer skill, regardless of whether that answer comes from an online forum or page 254 of the official spec or finding the right academic paper. Having a nice searchable online resource contributes positively to this developer skill!
lultimouomo 8y ago
I was curious if they would have been listing the job on their own platform. They don't: https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-overflow#jobs https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-overflow#jobs
- baud147258 8y ago
  I like how they are calling their helpdesk people "Junior Technology Concierge"
sremani 8y ago
>> ASP.NET MVC technology on a real website without too much of a disaster. (In fact .NET has been a huge, unmitigated success for us No matter what other's esp. those in start up world say, .NET stack delivers value in spades, and it has only improved with .net core.
- jchw 8y ago
  Big fan of the C# language, but honestly until .NET Core a lot of us simply had to ignore it. I think MS was counting on it for selling Windows as a platform at a time and I'm sure that worked to a degree but it probably didn't do the long term trajectory of .NET any favors. Luckily so far even with some missteps the .NET Core launch has been great. My only complaint is that debugging needs to work outside of Microsoft editors. Jetbrains has their own implementation, but I find it annoying that there is no CLI tool, and I also recall a licensing snafu that broke debugging in Rider for a while...
- sergiotapia 8y ago
  dotnet core is crazy. I haven't used C# in about 8 years, and turns out you can now write static C# application that cross-compile to Linux, Mac and Windows with a single command. It's _INSANE_ to me that this is possible. I'm looking into getting back into C# after a long road travelled through Ruby, Javascript, Go, Elixir.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Not only is .NET fantastic to work with, it also pays incredibly well. But we'll keep that between us, shall we? ;)
blub 8y ago
The idea that SO is "educating" anyone is laughable. It's mostly the place where one gets information about poorly documented APIs. What's especially repulsive to me is how well trained SO users are, spending many minutes nicely formatting their questions and answers for those worthless internet points.
- Kaveren 8y ago
  This is a very cynical way to look at it. Some people may just like helping people and sharing knowledge, and maybe they've also received help themselves and want to give back to the community. I don't think this is repulsive. There's many great questions that aren't about undocumented APIs. Take this [0] for example. As a side benefit, I'm sure the active contributions can give contributors something to show to prospective employers. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53452713/why-is-2-i-i-faster-than-2-i-i-in-java https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53452713/why-is-2-i-i-fa...
  - kkarakk 8y ago
    i got question banned for 10 downvotes spread across 3 questions-2 of which are still unanswered but have been "edited for grammar". not one comment as to why the downvotes. stack is little more than a toy for answering straightforward questions now
yazaddaruvala 8y ago
The biggest problem with SO now is the volume of content. This ends up trickling into all parts of the community which demands perfection from both the question asker and answerer. I really hope the SO team is successfully able to move from un-versioned, free-form text based Q&A into an API documentation++ platform. Ideally a documentation platform that helps drive good debate and eventually consensus.
- Karunamon 8y ago
  They tried and gave up on precisely that idea. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-documentation https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d...
no1youknowz 8y ago
I was pretty into SO back in '13, contributing and asking questions. I recently posted a question. Here's how it went. Posted question, gave some urls to documentation, wrote up code example and asked for help on a specific point. Downvoted and commented that it wasn't what the rules specified. Although I didn't find anything wrong with my post compared to said rules, but adjusted the post. Downvoted again. Adjusted again and still more downvotes and no helpful comments. At this point I just deleted the question and sought help elsewhere. ------ Whereas before you would get your question edited if it wasn't within the guidelines or perhaps people would not downvote but comment on how you could be more specific. Instead it was as if I had to "do the work" for them to understand what was being asked or do as much as I could so it wasn't taxing for them. The help I got elsewhere was actually from reddit. Another user actually did go through my code and the solution was trivial. Being a solo developer and not having more than 1 pair of eyes can sometimes get you in the weeds. Now I just use SO for reading and getting hints on what I'm working on myself. It's good in that respect. It's just a shame it's gotten so toxic. I know from reading other forums when someone mentions SO, it's just not the same anymore. I genuinely feel bad for new comers.
- sampo 8y ago
  Your question was about one of the big languages or frameworks, probably? SO can still be nice in its smaller corners, outside of the busiest mainstream topics.
- umvi 8y ago
  > Another user actually did go through my code and the solution was trivial. The solution may have been trivial - maybe even a single character fix, but this smells like you posted a wall of code and wanted someone to go through it with a comb for you. You likely got downvoted because you didn't provide a minimal verifiable example and instead posted way more code than was necessary to produce the bug. If you post anything more than a few lines of code, you are probably providing TMI and need to spend more effort distilling down the problem. 9 out of 10 times, you'll find the root of the problem yourself during this distillation process, especially if the problem is trivial. Then again, this is wild speculation, but I see this a lot when I am helping newbies.
umvi 8y ago
This is my opinion on what's happening. New programmers want to learn. However, they want to learn using the path of least resistance (who wouldn't?). SO is universally known by everyone as the place where experts gather. So why do newbies choose to ask questions on SO? Ultimately because they see it as the path of least resistance to accomplishing their goal of [learning, homework, etc.]: - Why read a book on C++ when you just need to know how to do that one specific thing and an expert could give you a targeted response? - Why wrestle for hours with compiler messages when an expert can solve it in 2 seconds? - Talking to your teacher or professor is scary, vulnerable, and the very thought might make you anxious. Much more comfortable to ask an internet stranger! - Homework is due tomorrow, it's too late to ask the teacher for help! Time to ask SO, there's no time for anything else. - My programming school/teacher/course is complete garbage. Or I'm attempting to self-learn without formal courses. Time to lean on SO as a crutch to help me through. However, this is a problem because it creates a power dynamic. Professionals want to help and get help from other professionals. Throw newbies in the mix and they are essentially a parasite - they want help from professionals and can't give anything back (yet). Honestly, I think one solution is to put asking questions behind a paywall or rep wall. People can still read everything for free, but to ask a question you need to either pony up or be a contributing member of the community. This would make a lot of newbies reconsider asking a question on SO because it's like: "Hmm, I guess I could ask SO as a last resort, but maybe... I could put in a few more hours of effort or ask my teacher, which are free" This in turn would significantly reduce low effort newbie burden on the community and encourage the newbies to visit the sources of knowledge they ought to be going to in the first place. This is all based on my own anecdotal observations, but I never asked a question on SO until I was a working professional. I used SO all the time in school, but read only - I leaned on my high school teacher and college TAs mainly when I needed help.
- detaro 8y ago
  I think to a degree it's also: Stack Overflow killed many of the other spaces you could have asked for help before. Hand-holding a beginner is easier if you can go back-and-forth, e.g. in a forum, but those mostly died out because lots of traffic went to SO (also a general shift away from forums in general, but I believe SO vastly accelerated that for programming topics).
uberman 8y ago
There is a fundamental problem with StackOverflow and I don't know they (a new CEO) can fix it. Many "new users" of the service view (or want to view) SO as a "question and answer" site similar to ask.com or Quora. I don't think this is unreasonable at all as even Google will suggest that SO is one of the most popular question and answer sites on the web. This flies in the face of the desire of SO leadership, many of its moderators and, the "old guard" to have the site be a curated programming resource akin to Wikipedia. This is also not unreasonable. The rub comes with SO desire to invite questions to be answered rather than soliciting tutorials or documentation akin to how Wikipedia works. SO even had a failed attempt at exactly this (SO Documentation) a year or two ago. In essence, they (SO) want the benefits of both models while not recognizing the irreconcilable conflict. New users find the community hostile and belittling, seasoned users find questions condescendingly trivial and repetitive. I look forward to seeing what their new CEO's vision is. Cultural change is hard though.
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  I think there's also a distinction between "what's the best way to do X in Y language" (which I would call educational) and "please help me find the bug in this block of code" (which I would call operational). Any platform that invites the former, inevitably gets a lot of the latter. It's never great to feel like random strangers are demanding that you do their job for them. And often those "find my bug" questions are not at all illuminating for other readers. Like, knowing that this particular person misspelled the variable name or forgot a semicolon is not going to be make you a better coder. And I think we've all seen some variation of "questions" like "please to write code to sort this list and insert it into Salesforce" or whatever, where it's clearly a simple job that someone just wants the Internet to write for them.
- zelon88 8y ago
  Perhaps with the rise in computer learning SO can someday try to determine the level of experience of the OP and then only show those questions to developers of similar skills and experience. That way veterans won't have to sift through "hello world" scripts all day and C# guys don't have to wade through tons of java posts. kind of like a curated FB newsfeed, but for SO. More relevant content should make everyone happier while solving the hostility problem and making SO (dare I say it) enjoyable for everyone.
bradenb 8y ago
Part of me thinks that they should just archive SO as it is now (making it accessible and read-only from a specific secondary location) and just reset stackoverflow.com. I know a lot of programming problems are timeless, but many are not. Seems like hitting reset every few years could be useful.
samfisher83 8y ago
I answered a question and got downnvoted for answering a newbie question.
- Sahhaese 8y ago
  My 'best' answer is an answer to a question which received downvotes and was almost deleted because it was badly asked. The question submitter never returned, my answer is left "unaccepted" and the submitter has never had any other activity on the site. Despite that, the question has had ~15k views earning the submitter the 'famous question' badge. My answer was never 'accepted' so it doesn't have 'famous answer' badge but the ~30 up votes it has had has given me over half my SO karma. Instead of taking the time to understand the question actually being asked, others just downvoted the both of us and moved on. SO answers shouldn't be allowed to be marked as duplicate. If someone is asking then either they failed to find the "duplicate" based on their search terms, or their problem is subtly different and the other answer doesn't help, or they don't understand the other answer. In all those cases, just marking duplicate and closing the "duplicate" doesn't help anyone.
  - linuxftw 8y ago
    > If someone is asking then either they failed to find the "duplicate" based on their search terms, or their problem is subtly different and the other answer doesn't help, or they don't understand the other answer. Or they didn't bother searching possibly? I think the 'up-vote only' model might be helpful for SO. If 1000 people down vote, but 100 people up vote, who's vote should carry more weight? Obviously, 100 people found the question/answer useful, so it's not useless. Whereas, we don't get a lot of value from a down vote, just that each individual that down voted didn't find the information useful/relevant. If it's indeed a duplicate, well maybe it is, but perhaps the new question is a better version of the question (more/less generic/specific depending on context).
    - samfisher83 8y ago
      A lot of the close questions have like 1000s of viewed so people were looking for an answer.
ykevinator 8y ago
Stack overflow is a 50/50 gamble. You either get help or some self righteous jerk flags your question and tells you youre stupid. I hope the new CEO fixes this. Their brand equity is really bad but you use them because you don't have that many options.
- umvi 8y ago
  > Stack overflow is a 50/50 gamble Only when asking questions. I find in my work I read/use 100 questions or more for every 1 question I ask. SO is amazing 99% of the time, and a bit of a gamble that 1% of the time when you have a specific question you couldn't find resources on.
  - linuxftw 8y ago
    Yeah, as someone who has never asked a question, I can generally find what I'm looking for without much effort. So, from a 'drive users from google search' perspective, the current moderation model must be working quite well. I have little sympathy for questions asked by complete beginners. SO is probably not the best place for that kind of thing.
    - moate 8y ago
      >>I have little sympathy for questions asked by complete beginners. SO is probably not the best place for that kind of thing. Welcome to the problem (as I see it) with SO! As someone who was a complete beginner during the modern age of SO, I can tell you that it sure helped me get into my current career (which is not coding related whatsoever) by driving me away from the profession. "Who the fuck wants to work with assholes like this"? Was I asking stupid questions? Of course! Does anyone on SO owe me anything? Not even a tiny bit! But this is a cultural choice. If this is what you want, then it's doing exactly what it's supposed to. But many people don't want this. If I go to a library, the librarians will help me to the best of their ability. That doesn't mean they teach me French, but at least show me where the French books are. More often the tone from a comment was "lol, gtfo n00b or get gud m8" which is unhelpful. Rarely was I getting a suggestion of a resource that could help me answer the question I was posing. "RTFM" isn't useful if you don't know what that manual even is. There's all sorts of people with all sorts of personal stories about their experience with the SO community, ranging from "I wouldn't be the CTO of my company if not for them" to "I will never work in this industry again". I'm not saying I'm right, or that things need to bend to me. I'm just putting a perspective out there.
chadash 8y ago
It always saddens me a bit when I see companies looking to hire outside executives rather than promoting from within. You promote someone to CEO and that opens up a slot for someone to replace that person, and then the next person and so on. As an employee, since I often don't see this, it makes me feel like I ought to move to a different company if I want to move up. Now there are cases where hiring an outsider makes sense. Perhaps you are bringing in someone with experience to run a fast-growing company and no one internally has that experience. Or you are hiring a new CFO for a tech startup and there just isn't a large pool of people to promote internally to that specific position. But given that stack overflow is a tool made by developers and aimed large at developers--and a mature company--it would be nice to see someone rise through the ranks from a developer position at the company to replace the CEO.
- moate 8y ago
  As many people have pointed out: The value here might be getting someone who's able to change the company culture and focus. Stack currently feels like an attempt to be the worst parts of both Wikipedia and Ask.com. They need to do a better job at something, and everyone will have an opinion about what the fix is, but it feels like they need a change. That said, hiring a developer to run Stack sounds weird to me. If anything, I'd think you need a communications/publishing person since the goal is collecting, archiving and distributing data. Maybe an archivist or librarian even.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    > The value here might be getting someone who's able to change the company culture and focus. Are there many (or any?) cases of this having a long-term effect on a company's culture/focus? I know it's the most-advertised reason for hiring an outside CEO, but I couldn't find any examples of a company's culture changing, and staying changed for years/decades, as a result of doing so.
    - moate 8y ago
      IDK. Probably? Best I can do is give up an article about why CEOs turn over (and more frequently now than previously). Changing culture can be hard, but is possible. https://www.strategy-business.com/article/20306?gko=bfb5b https://www.strategy-business.com/article/20306?gko=bfb5b
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0x262d 8y ago
if late capitalism ruins stack overflow I swear to god I will throw a fit online more seriously, this is a real concern, a super useful communal website with really high traffic is ripe for commodification.
paddy_m 8y ago
Can someone explain glitch.com to me. I looked at the website and I don't have a clue what it does or why it would be useful? It looks like some meme game.
- anildash 8y ago
  From a developer perspective, Glitch is a full-stack coding environment that lives in the browser and allows realtime simultaneous code editing with automatic instant deployment. You can run any stack, but we've optimized for easily deploying Node apps, and any app you see on the site, you can "remix" — which clones the entire stack of that app and gives you your own, instantly deployed, copy of the app. The code editor does a lot of smart things like having a super-friendly revision tracking system (called "Rewind") that lets you just slide back a timeline slider if you want to go back to a past commit, but under the hood, it's just regular git. There's also a social network built around those apps, so you can make collections of apps you want to use, or projects you want to refer to for your own work. And we're working to build a Teams product so you can use all those code collaboration features at work and integrated with your other tools. Finally, there's a capability that's kind of complementary to what Stack Overflow does, which is that you can "raise your hand" (click on the emoji of the person with their hand raised) right in the code editor in Glitch, and it'll allow people to come in and help you with your code in realtime. There's more to it, but that's what it does today.
  - paddy_m 8y ago
    Thank you.
- deleted 8y ago
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- tokyodude 8y ago
  glitch.com is like jsfiddle.net on steroids. You get multiple files and a node based server to test with. With jsfiddle you just get one page. with glitch you can build an entire site both front end and back end.
billfruit 8y ago
While SO has been a great resource over the years, a significant concern as I see now is the too rapid churn in many topics like various JS frameworks, android development, etc, where things are moving fast, accepted answers are frequently obsolete and have become misleading or wrong, and I have not come across mechanisms to handle this situation. Also a fragmentation into multiple subject sites also isn't a great idea IMHO, now for some categories for example you have to think of cross-posting to get maximum responses.
- umvi 8y ago
  I would like to see more effort in this area. "volatile" tags (like JS) should auto mark popular questions as "stale" after a while and shuffle them back into the question queue so that people can either provide up-to-date answers to affirm that the answers aren't stale and are still relevant
- H1Supreme 8y ago
  Really excellent point here. I can't even count the number of times I've found answers for Android, that turn out to be already outdated. Limiting answers by a date range via Google search sorta works. But, old answers still sneak in. That creates another problem where I automatically distrust answers more than 2-3 years old. Even if they turn out to be correct.
dyarosla 8y ago
Love the jab at Quora ‘Oh and—hey!—we do not make you sign up or pay to see the answers.’ It’s sad how many companies nowadays do all they can to convert users to signups/downloads/app installs. Give people the chance to sign up on their own accord.
- troygoode 8y ago
  It isn't a jab specifically at Quora, it's a jab at what the entire market looked like before Stack Overflow came along – namely their arch-nemesis at the time: Experts Exchange.
- Grue3 8y ago
  And yet Quora culture is much less toxic. Maybe they had the right idea? It's kind of like Something Awful vs 4chan situation. Or public toilet vs paid toilet.
_hardwaregeek 8y ago
I've stopped using StackOverflow too much, although it's probably more because of my particular development needs. Namely, StackOverflow breaks down if you need an answer about something reeeally specific, say a bug in a particular library. This is especially exacerbated in ecosystems without centralized, large libraries, like Rust, as well as in ecosystems that are fairly new, like Rust. Now, I don't think StackOverflow should necessarily address this, as this problem is a little niche. But I do think it might get a little less niche as developers move off the gigantic monolith library paradigm (jQuery, Boost, etc.). Maybe there should be a way to sync GitHub issues with StackOverflow (although each side has incentive to keep the user on their end). Or maybe there should be a way of pinging important people in the ecosystem. It's nice to @ someone in a GitHub issue if you know who has the solution to your problem.
pier25 8y ago
I was quite active in SO around 2013 and still have a decent reputation there. I rarely ask and answer questions anymore because 99% of the times the question is already there with a number of answers. In many cases those answers have been updated to reflect changes in the times (browser APIs, languages, etc) which is awesome. I've suffered from its toxicity a number of times, but that hasn't been my dominant experience. All in all it's a super useful tool. I guess a lot of programmers don't remember what it was like before SO, with vague forum threads that never got to the point.
gesman 8y ago
Hopefully new CEO will tame some of the extremist mafia moderators and reopened interesting discussions and questions.
tnolet 8y ago
I use SO almost daily but boy is that culture toxic. Twitter level toxic. The new CEO has a tough job ahead.
- umvi 8y ago
  Honestly, I haven't really seen much toxicity lately. Could you link to some questions asked recently that have toxicity? I mainly hang out in python/c/c++ but even badly written newbie questions still tend to get answers from friendly users, despite the downvotes. Unless you are considering the downvotes themselves "toxic"
nlawalker 8y ago
Is there something that SO can do to further segment the site and/or the question pool without making it too hard to use or driving too many questions into total invisibility? The problem with SO as I see it is that every question is part of the same pool of questions, only differentiated by topic tags. Every question is held to the same standards. This is a contrast to the actual people who use the site: askers and answerers are all using, looking for and expecting a huge variety of different approaches and responses, and have wildly varying levels of experience. Reddit's subreddits completely transforms the site for people who use them - people who browse the front-page have an entirely different experience and different expectations from those who curate. I wonder if there's something similar SO can do.
- everfree 8y ago
  Stack Overflow is like Reddit's equivalent of /r/programming. There are tons of other Stack Exchange sites on everything from Cooking to Electrical Engineering to Role-playing, I encourage you to check them out. That being said, it's true that they all use the same approach: Concise questions and answers without any extra discussion.
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ne01 8y ago
I thought stack overflow is driven by contributors ego, I didn’t know it had a CEO.
aboutruby 8y ago
Stack Overflow is such a mess I prefer helping people on Reddit / Discord / Slack nowadays. SO is becoming read-only in my opinion.
umvi 8y ago
There are a couple types of people: - Those who were "burned" asking questions on SO and have a grudge against it now (mainly people just starting out in programming) - "Lurkers" who mainly just drive by from Google links and don't ever ask questions - Experienced programmers with accounts that mainly lurk, occasionally ask or answer a question, and never really have problems with the site - Power users with crazy high rep who who are extremely pedantic and patrol their favorite communities too zealously and aggressively, and often unsympathetically I like to think the vast majority of people are in categories 2 and 3 and are very satisfied with the quality and utility of SO. The problem is that: - category 1, while a minority, is extremely vocal about their displeasure with the site and so that gets a lot of attention - category 4 types tend to exacerbate category 1 types - category 4 though also does a very good job keeping the site clean, accurate, well-edited, etc. Moderation is a thankless, tedious job, and the people most willing to do it might have other undesirable personality qualities unfortunately.
- tedmiston 8y ago
  > Moderation is a thankless, tedious job, and the people most willing to do it might have other undesirable personality qualities unfortunately. I'm sorry you feel this way. I donate my time to occasionally moderate on SO to help people learn and become better programmers. In my experience, the vast majority of mods quietly help like this asking nothing in return.
  - umvi 8y ago
    I could very well be wrong. I've never been a mod myself; maybe the bad ones just stand out. It's certainly noticeable on certain subreddits when the good mods are slowly displaced by power tripping bad mods.
pkamb 8y ago
The most annoying thing about Stack Overflow for me is the multiple account system for every site on the Stack Exchange network. I have thousands of points of reputation on Stack Overflow. Why can am I not allowed to edit posts or cast open/close votes on SuperUser or WebApps or AskDifferent? Many of these sites are esentially the same site and rules and user base, but with slightly different topics. Some questions would fit on any of the sites, and it's down to the random Google search you followed as to which site you end up loading. I'll essentially never be able to gain the rep needed on the non-SO sites, even the bigger tech ones that have tons of crossover with Stack Overflow. You can be a 20k rep Stack Overflow account, but land on a Stack Exchange question from Google and it's a complete crapshoot if you'll even be able to upvote the question.
- tedmiston 8y ago
  I do think the cross-exchange rep / privileges is an unsolved problem. Hopefully they will address it at some point. For the time being I just concentrate my time on SO as opposed to the 5-10 other relevant exchanges like Server Fault or Software Engineering.
- KabaKun 8y ago
  > You can be a 20k rep Stack Overflow account, but land on a Stack Exchange question from Google and it's a complete crapshoot if you'll even be able to upvote the question. If you have 200+ rep on any one site, you can upvote on any other site (assuming you didn't spend/lose the rep somehow) if you actually create an account there. Downvotes require more rep (125), so that requires some participation on that specific site. This Association Bonus (100 free rep on all sites as a reward for earning 200 on one) is designed to address a lot of your concerns. It allows upvoting, flagging and commenting. If you see something that should be closed, you can flag it for closure to bring it to the attention of users with sufficient rep to close or indicate non-answers as such so that higher rep users can vote to delete them. The system as-is definitely leads to a lot of confusion, though. The explanation I've heard for the siloing of reputation between the sites is that reputation is an indication of trust and expertise in using a specific site. If you know how what's on or off topic on SO, that doesn't necessarily mean you know what's on or off topic on Puzzling or InfoSec. Each site has slightly different cultural expectations, and the belief - which maybe should be tested - is that that expertise doesn't cross between sites. One part of the problem here is that someone can spend hours using a site and know what's on topic or what should be deleted or downvoted or closed and still never have any reputation on that site... and on the other end of that spectrum, you can find very high rep users who either don't use those moderation tools or use them incorrectly because they haven't actually taken the time to understand how the community expects them to be used. It's a hazy indicator of expertise at best but it's also a relatively low-effort one to implement. It takes work to balance it and decide what actions warrant a reputation reward but it's okay. Finding a better/different way to achieve this indication of expertise and privilege may be worth considering and may allow users to "test out" in a privilege to earn it without needing a specific amount of points. This would allow invested users access to privileges without requiring them to also be expert askers or answerers.
xtracto 8y ago
We need an improved version of StackOverflow that factor age of a reply (decaying points or something) and that groups similar answers with for same questions but at different dates. Several times when I search for something (say, how to do X in Ionic) I find a reply that is old and does not apply to the current version of the library.
- tedmiston 8y ago
  The "Active" sort tab feature on answer pages is meant to address this problem.
dramm 8y ago
All submitted resumes will be put on hold for five days and then deleted. :-)

237 points by g3rv4 8y ago

Where do they go from here? It seems every question has been asked and every new question has a 50/50 of getting closed by MoDeRaTorS as off-topic. Gamification probably got them here, but is it a recipe for continued success or a detriment to StackOverflow?

mooreds 8y ago

Wow. Hard to see how you move the needle on making SO more welcoming when so much of the behavior is in the larger community. I suppose there may be some software changes that could help. But I wish the next CEO luck, and appreciate what Joel and the team have brought into the world.

robdachshund 8y ago
One thing I'd like to see is a crackdown on bad mods. So many topics get closed for stupid reasons when there is healthy discussion. Can't count the number of times I've seen people in the thread rallying against the mod that closed it because they were have a valuable conversation.

peeters 8y ago

> One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see. > > I care a lot about this. Being a developer gives you an unparalleled opportunity to write the script for the future. All the flak that Stack Overflow throws in the face of newbies trying to become developers is actively harmful to people, to society, and to Stack Overflow itself, by driving away potential future contributors. And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier. It's good to see that acknowledgement coming from Joel. I wasn't one of those newbies facing that snark, but as an earlier contributor it was really depressing to see the general attitude shift from "yeah OK this question's not the best but it was asked in good faith so I'll answer" to "you're a worthless human being for wasting our time with imperfection".

codeulike 8y ago
Its basically become ModOverflow edit: Thought I was coining something here but it was actually coined in 2015 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870816
- cletus 8y ago
  Oh I love the way you put this. I just checked and I've been a member for 10 years and 6 months. I used to answer questions. A lot. In the early days (at one point it was Jon Skeet, Marc Gravelli then me) and I'm kind of surprised how much karma I still get form those old answers. But I haven't really answered anything in 8+ years. Even one year in I commented on and started several threads on Meta about the "mod problem". And it's only gotten worse. To riff on a phrase, "those who can, answer, those who can't, mod", which is fine, but there is a particular kind of toxic personality that gets attracted to the authority of being a mod that then appoints itself the arbiter of content. You are fighting a constant battle to keep these toxic (but well-intentioned--mostly) souls out. I saw even then the trend of closing interesting questions as "subjective". My opinion then--and now--is you can ask a question like "what are the advantages of React.js vs Vue.js?" in an intelligent way without it being a flame war. The fact that it doesn't have an objective answer is (IMHO) irrelevant. You can divine useful information from the answers to that question that will help you go one way or the other. There is a lot of subjectivity in programming and a lot of not strictly better solutions. Giving people some points to consider as a starting point is incredibly valuable.
  - geoka9 8y ago
    I noticed the "subjective" closing many times and always wondered why that criterion was even introduced on SO. I mean what's wrong with a comment/question being subjective as long as it contains useful information?
    - saywhatnow 8y ago
      I believe the thinking is that what's wrong with it is that over time it tends to attract flamewars and downvotes which are not useful to people searching for answers to their questions.

ProAm 8y ago

SO is like Amazon, I don't like using it, I don't want to use it, but its so big it's unavoidable. The culture on SO is pretty bad, while it might be better than the Q&A sites of yesteryear it's not a lot better.

monksy 8y ago
Also it's been that way for years.
Kaveren 8y ago
What improvements could be made to Q&A sites to deal with the culture problems you point to?
- ProAm 8y ago
  I just don't go there unless it's my last resort. I'll turn to irc, github, discord, quora and sadly even reddit before I go to SO.
jessriedel 8y ago
It's not just a bit better, it's miles away the best. Likewise for Wikipedia, which is unparalleled at its job and also has lots of negative culture. I'd challenge you to find a community-generated and community-run site that is a tenth as big/successful as either of those but is substantially more welcoming. In other words: the problem is probably not with anything particular to StackOverflow or Wikipedia, the problem is with human beings. That's not to claim that a new website with new rules/structure couldn't arise that was even bigger yet more welcoming -- there's no reason to think the insights that drove StackOverflow are optimal -- but just that it will require further innovations in how communities are structured.
- ProAm 8y ago
  I disagree. The old sites while sometimes had wildly varying answers, so does SO, especially in newer technologies that change frequently (React, etc...) you'll find answers that are 6 months old but out of date and new questions get closed pointing to the old ones. And the culture on the old sites was never as vile as SO is. I won't be sad when the next gen Q&A comes around to fix the problems SO introduced, just like when SO came around to fix the issues of the other sites.

kareemm 8y ago

Talk about increasing shareholder value! The result of: (num_person-hours_saved_by_SO * num_of_developers_in_world * dev_hourly_rate) must be staggering. I'm sure companies around the world can point to SO for a non-trivial percentage of bottom line revenue. And forget about the bean counters for a sec: as a DEV, SO saves so much pain that I have no idea what I did before it came to be. SO is truly doing God's work (and I'm not a religious man).

yes_man 8y ago
> The result of: (num_person-hours_saved_by_SO * num_of_developers_in_world * dev_hourly_rate) must be staggering. I'm sure companies around the world can point to SO for a non-trivial percentage of bottom line revenue. There's also a negative effect on global developer skillset when developers don't have to dig deeper into things or read documentations because they can just find a working example from SO. Although Stackoverflow still probably has a positive net effect for global skill of developers regardless. But a developer who learns from the bottom up will most likely outperform a developer who relies on finding working solutions from SO in the long run. And while a company prefers to have a solution right now for monetary reasons, the quality of developers the global workforce has in the same long run dwindles when the primary goal is to save developer hours "right now". Again highlighting that I still do consider SO a net positive, just that it is not a flat out black and white hours saved function
- chessturk 8y ago
  You know, I recently posted about how I learned to program with no home internet connection. Learning to only rely on the docs for major libraries has really helped me use obscure stuff. That said, SO is still a wealth of information.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  > There's also a negative effect on global developer skillset when developers don't have to dig deeper into things I consider “being able to resourcefully look up the answer to your question” a critical developer skill, regardless of whether that answer comes from an online forum or page 254 of the official spec or finding the right academic paper. Having a nice searchable online resource contributes positively to this developer skill!

lultimouomo 8y ago

I was curious if they would have been listing the job on their own platform. They don't: https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-overflow#jobs https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-overflow#jobs

baud147258 8y ago
I like how they are calling their helpdesk people "Junior Technology Concierge"

sremani 8y ago

>> ASP.NET MVC technology on a real website without too much of a disaster. (In fact .NET has been a huge, unmitigated success for us No matter what other's esp. those in start up world say, .NET stack delivers value in spades, and it has only improved with .net core.

jchw 8y ago
Big fan of the C# language, but honestly until .NET Core a lot of us simply had to ignore it. I think MS was counting on it for selling Windows as a platform at a time and I'm sure that worked to a degree but it probably didn't do the long term trajectory of .NET any favors. Luckily so far even with some missteps the .NET Core launch has been great. My only complaint is that debugging needs to work outside of Microsoft editors. Jetbrains has their own implementation, but I find it annoying that there is no CLI tool, and I also recall a licensing snafu that broke debugging in Rider for a while...
sergiotapia 8y ago
dotnet core is crazy. I haven't used C# in about 8 years, and turns out you can now write static C# application that cross-compile to Linux, Mac and Windows with a single command. It's _INSANE_ to me that this is possible. I'm looking into getting back into C# after a long road travelled through Ruby, Javascript, Go, Elixir.
SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Not only is .NET fantastic to work with, it also pays incredibly well. But we'll keep that between us, shall we? ;)

blub 8y ago

The idea that SO is "educating" anyone is laughable. It's mostly the place where one gets information about poorly documented APIs. What's especially repulsive to me is how well trained SO users are, spending many minutes nicely formatting their questions and answers for those worthless internet points.

Kaveren 8y ago
This is a very cynical way to look at it. Some people may just like helping people and sharing knowledge, and maybe they've also received help themselves and want to give back to the community. I don't think this is repulsive. There's many great questions that aren't about undocumented APIs. Take this [0] for example. As a side benefit, I'm sure the active contributions can give contributors something to show to prospective employers. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53452713/why-is-2-i-i-faster-than-2-i-i-in-java https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53452713/why-is-2-i-i-fa...
- kkarakk 8y ago
  i got question banned for 10 downvotes spread across 3 questions-2 of which are still unanswered but have been "edited for grammar". not one comment as to why the downvotes. stack is little more than a toy for answering straightforward questions now

yazaddaruvala 8y ago

The biggest problem with SO now is the volume of content. This ends up trickling into all parts of the community which demands perfection from both the question asker and answerer. I really hope the SO team is successfully able to move from un-versioned, free-form text based Q&A into an API documentation++ platform. Ideally a documentation platform that helps drive good debate and eventually consensus.

Karunamon 8y ago
They tried and gave up on precisely that idea. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-documentation https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d...

no1youknowz 8y ago

I was pretty into SO back in '13, contributing and asking questions. I recently posted a question. Here's how it went. Posted question, gave some urls to documentation, wrote up code example and asked for help on a specific point. Downvoted and commented that it wasn't what the rules specified. Although I didn't find anything wrong with my post compared to said rules, but adjusted the post. Downvoted again. Adjusted again and still more downvotes and no helpful comments. At this point I just deleted the question and sought help elsewhere. ------ Whereas before you would get your question edited if it wasn't within the guidelines or perhaps people would not downvote but comment on how you could be more specific. Instead it was as if I had to "do the work" for them to understand what was being asked or do as much as I could so it wasn't taxing for them. The help I got elsewhere was actually from reddit. Another user actually did go through my code and the solution was trivial. Being a solo developer and not having more than 1 pair of eyes can sometimes get you in the weeds. Now I just use SO for reading and getting hints on what I'm working on myself. It's good in that respect. It's just a shame it's gotten so toxic. I know from reading other forums when someone mentions SO, it's just not the same anymore. I genuinely feel bad for new comers.

sampo 8y ago
Your question was about one of the big languages or frameworks, probably? SO can still be nice in its smaller corners, outside of the busiest mainstream topics.
umvi 8y ago
> Another user actually did go through my code and the solution was trivial. The solution may have been trivial - maybe even a single character fix, but this smells like you posted a wall of code and wanted someone to go through it with a comb for you. You likely got downvoted because you didn't provide a minimal verifiable example and instead posted way more code than was necessary to produce the bug. If you post anything more than a few lines of code, you are probably providing TMI and need to spend more effort distilling down the problem. 9 out of 10 times, you'll find the root of the problem yourself during this distillation process, especially if the problem is trivial. Then again, this is wild speculation, but I see this a lot when I am helping newbies.

umvi 8y ago

This is my opinion on what's happening. New programmers want to learn. However, they want to learn using the path of least resistance (who wouldn't?). SO is universally known by everyone as the place where experts gather. So why do newbies choose to ask questions on SO? Ultimately because they see it as the path of least resistance to accomplishing their goal of [learning, homework, etc.]: - Why read a book on C++ when you just need to know how to do that one specific thing and an expert could give you a targeted response? - Why wrestle for hours with compiler messages when an expert can solve it in 2 seconds? - Talking to your teacher or professor is scary, vulnerable, and the very thought might make you anxious. Much more comfortable to ask an internet stranger! - Homework is due tomorrow, it's too late to ask the teacher for help! Time to ask SO, there's no time for anything else. - My programming school/teacher/course is complete garbage. Or I'm attempting to self-learn without formal courses. Time to lean on SO as a crutch to help me through. However, this is a problem because it creates a power dynamic. Professionals want to help and get help from other professionals. Throw newbies in the mix and they are essentially a parasite - they want help from professionals and can't give anything back (yet). Honestly, I think one solution is to put asking questions behind a paywall or rep wall. People can still read everything for free, but to ask a question you need to either pony up or be a contributing member of the community. This would make a lot of newbies reconsider asking a question on SO because it's like: "Hmm, I guess I could ask SO as a last resort, but maybe... I could put in a few more hours of effort or ask my teacher, which are free" This in turn would significantly reduce low effort newbie burden on the community and encourage the newbies to visit the sources of knowledge they ought to be going to in the first place. This is all based on my own anecdotal observations, but I never asked a question on SO until I was a working professional. I used SO all the time in school, but read only - I leaned on my high school teacher and college TAs mainly when I needed help.

detaro 8y ago
I think to a degree it's also: Stack Overflow killed many of the other spaces you could have asked for help before. Hand-holding a beginner is easier if you can go back-and-forth, e.g. in a forum, but those mostly died out because lots of traffic went to SO (also a general shift away from forums in general, but I believe SO vastly accelerated that for programming topics).

uberman 8y ago

There is a fundamental problem with StackOverflow and I don't know they (a new CEO) can fix it. Many "new users" of the service view (or want to view) SO as a "question and answer" site similar to ask.com or Quora. I don't think this is unreasonable at all as even Google will suggest that SO is one of the most popular question and answer sites on the web. This flies in the face of the desire of SO leadership, many of its moderators and, the "old guard" to have the site be a curated programming resource akin to Wikipedia. This is also not unreasonable. The rub comes with SO desire to invite questions to be answered rather than soliciting tutorials or documentation akin to how Wikipedia works. SO even had a failed attempt at exactly this (SO Documentation) a year or two ago. In essence, they (SO) want the benefits of both models while not recognizing the irreconcilable conflict. New users find the community hostile and belittling, seasoned users find questions condescendingly trivial and repetitive. I look forward to seeing what their new CEO's vision is. Cultural change is hard though.

snowwrestler 8y ago
I think there's also a distinction between "what's the best way to do X in Y language" (which I would call educational) and "please help me find the bug in this block of code" (which I would call operational). Any platform that invites the former, inevitably gets a lot of the latter. It's never great to feel like random strangers are demanding that you do their job for them. And often those "find my bug" questions are not at all illuminating for other readers. Like, knowing that this particular person misspelled the variable name or forgot a semicolon is not going to be make you a better coder. And I think we've all seen some variation of "questions" like "please to write code to sort this list and insert it into Salesforce" or whatever, where it's clearly a simple job that someone just wants the Internet to write for them.
zelon88 8y ago
Perhaps with the rise in computer learning SO can someday try to determine the level of experience of the OP and then only show those questions to developers of similar skills and experience. That way veterans won't have to sift through "hello world" scripts all day and C# guys don't have to wade through tons of java posts. kind of like a curated FB newsfeed, but for SO. More relevant content should make everyone happier while solving the hostility problem and making SO (dare I say it) enjoyable for everyone.

bradenb 8y ago

Part of me thinks that they should just archive SO as it is now (making it accessible and read-only from a specific secondary location) and just reset stackoverflow.com. I know a lot of programming problems are timeless, but many are not. Seems like hitting reset every few years could be useful.

samfisher83 8y ago

I answered a question and got downnvoted for answering a newbie question.

Sahhaese 8y ago
My 'best' answer is an answer to a question which received downvotes and was almost deleted because it was badly asked. The question submitter never returned, my answer is left "unaccepted" and the submitter has never had any other activity on the site. Despite that, the question has had ~15k views earning the submitter the 'famous question' badge. My answer was never 'accepted' so it doesn't have 'famous answer' badge but the ~30 up votes it has had has given me over half my SO karma. Instead of taking the time to understand the question actually being asked, others just downvoted the both of us and moved on. SO answers shouldn't be allowed to be marked as duplicate. If someone is asking then either they failed to find the "duplicate" based on their search terms, or their problem is subtly different and the other answer doesn't help, or they don't understand the other answer. In all those cases, just marking duplicate and closing the "duplicate" doesn't help anyone.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  > If someone is asking then either they failed to find the "duplicate" based on their search terms, or their problem is subtly different and the other answer doesn't help, or they don't understand the other answer. Or they didn't bother searching possibly? I think the 'up-vote only' model might be helpful for SO. If 1000 people down vote, but 100 people up vote, who's vote should carry more weight? Obviously, 100 people found the question/answer useful, so it's not useless. Whereas, we don't get a lot of value from a down vote, just that each individual that down voted didn't find the information useful/relevant. If it's indeed a duplicate, well maybe it is, but perhaps the new question is a better version of the question (more/less generic/specific depending on context).
  - samfisher83 8y ago
    A lot of the close questions have like 1000s of viewed so people were looking for an answer.

ykevinator 8y ago

Stack overflow is a 50/50 gamble. You either get help or some self righteous jerk flags your question and tells you youre stupid. I hope the new CEO fixes this. Their brand equity is really bad but you use them because you don't have that many options.

umvi 8y ago
> Stack overflow is a 50/50 gamble Only when asking questions. I find in my work I read/use 100 questions or more for every 1 question I ask. SO is amazing 99% of the time, and a bit of a gamble that 1% of the time when you have a specific question you couldn't find resources on.
- linuxftw 8y ago
  Yeah, as someone who has never asked a question, I can generally find what I'm looking for without much effort. So, from a 'drive users from google search' perspective, the current moderation model must be working quite well. I have little sympathy for questions asked by complete beginners. SO is probably not the best place for that kind of thing.
  - moate 8y ago
    >>I have little sympathy for questions asked by complete beginners. SO is probably not the best place for that kind of thing. Welcome to the problem (as I see it) with SO! As someone who was a complete beginner during the modern age of SO, I can tell you that it sure helped me get into my current career (which is not coding related whatsoever) by driving me away from the profession. "Who the fuck wants to work with assholes like this"? Was I asking stupid questions? Of course! Does anyone on SO owe me anything? Not even a tiny bit! But this is a cultural choice. If this is what you want, then it's doing exactly what it's supposed to. But many people don't want this. If I go to a library, the librarians will help me to the best of their ability. That doesn't mean they teach me French, but at least show me where the French books are. More often the tone from a comment was "lol, gtfo n00b or get gud m8" which is unhelpful. Rarely was I getting a suggestion of a resource that could help me answer the question I was posing. "RTFM" isn't useful if you don't know what that manual even is. There's all sorts of people with all sorts of personal stories about their experience with the SO community, ranging from "I wouldn't be the CTO of my company if not for them" to "I will never work in this industry again". I'm not saying I'm right, or that things need to bend to me. I'm just putting a perspective out there.

chadash 8y ago

It always saddens me a bit when I see companies looking to hire outside executives rather than promoting from within. You promote someone to CEO and that opens up a slot for someone to replace that person, and then the next person and so on. As an employee, since I often don't see this, it makes me feel like I ought to move to a different company if I want to move up. Now there are cases where hiring an outsider makes sense. Perhaps you are bringing in someone with experience to run a fast-growing company and no one internally has that experience. Or you are hiring a new CFO for a tech startup and there just isn't a large pool of people to promote internally to that specific position. But given that stack overflow is a tool made by developers and aimed large at developers--and a mature company--it would be nice to see someone rise through the ranks from a developer position at the company to replace the CEO.

moate 8y ago
As many people have pointed out: The value here might be getting someone who's able to change the company culture and focus. Stack currently feels like an attempt to be the worst parts of both Wikipedia and Ask.com. They need to do a better job at something, and everyone will have an opinion about what the fix is, but it feels like they need a change. That said, hiring a developer to run Stack sounds weird to me. If anything, I'd think you need a communications/publishing person since the goal is collecting, archiving and distributing data. Maybe an archivist or librarian even.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > The value here might be getting someone who's able to change the company culture and focus. Are there many (or any?) cases of this having a long-term effect on a company's culture/focus? I know it's the most-advertised reason for hiring an outside CEO, but I couldn't find any examples of a company's culture changing, and staying changed for years/decades, as a result of doing so.
  - moate 8y ago
    IDK. Probably? Best I can do is give up an article about why CEOs turn over (and more frequently now than previously). Changing culture can be hard, but is possible. https://www.strategy-business.com/article/20306?gko=bfb5b https://www.strategy-business.com/article/20306?gko=bfb5b

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

0x262d 8y ago

if late capitalism ruins stack overflow I swear to god I will throw a fit online more seriously, this is a real concern, a super useful communal website with really high traffic is ripe for commodification.

paddy_m 8y ago

Can someone explain glitch.com to me. I looked at the website and I don't have a clue what it does or why it would be useful? It looks like some meme game.

anildash 8y ago
From a developer perspective, Glitch is a full-stack coding environment that lives in the browser and allows realtime simultaneous code editing with automatic instant deployment. You can run any stack, but we've optimized for easily deploying Node apps, and any app you see on the site, you can "remix" — which clones the entire stack of that app and gives you your own, instantly deployed, copy of the app. The code editor does a lot of smart things like having a super-friendly revision tracking system (called "Rewind") that lets you just slide back a timeline slider if you want to go back to a past commit, but under the hood, it's just regular git. There's also a social network built around those apps, so you can make collections of apps you want to use, or projects you want to refer to for your own work. And we're working to build a Teams product so you can use all those code collaboration features at work and integrated with your other tools. Finally, there's a capability that's kind of complementary to what Stack Overflow does, which is that you can "raise your hand" (click on the emoji of the person with their hand raised) right in the code editor in Glitch, and it'll allow people to come in and help you with your code in realtime. There's more to it, but that's what it does today.
- paddy_m 8y ago
  Thank you.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tokyodude 8y ago
glitch.com is like jsfiddle.net on steroids. You get multiple files and a node based server to test with. With jsfiddle you just get one page. with glitch you can build an entire site both front end and back end.

billfruit 8y ago

While SO has been a great resource over the years, a significant concern as I see now is the too rapid churn in many topics like various JS frameworks, android development, etc, where things are moving fast, accepted answers are frequently obsolete and have become misleading or wrong, and I have not come across mechanisms to handle this situation. Also a fragmentation into multiple subject sites also isn't a great idea IMHO, now for some categories for example you have to think of cross-posting to get maximum responses.

umvi 8y ago
I would like to see more effort in this area. "volatile" tags (like JS) should auto mark popular questions as "stale" after a while and shuffle them back into the question queue so that people can either provide up-to-date answers to affirm that the answers aren't stale and are still relevant
H1Supreme 8y ago
Really excellent point here. I can't even count the number of times I've found answers for Android, that turn out to be already outdated. Limiting answers by a date range via Google search sorta works. But, old answers still sneak in. That creates another problem where I automatically distrust answers more than 2-3 years old. Even if they turn out to be correct.

dyarosla 8y ago

Love the jab at Quora ‘Oh and—hey!—we do not make you sign up or pay to see the answers.’ It’s sad how many companies nowadays do all they can to convert users to signups/downloads/app installs. Give people the chance to sign up on their own accord.

troygoode 8y ago
It isn't a jab specifically at Quora, it's a jab at what the entire market looked like before Stack Overflow came along – namely their arch-nemesis at the time: Experts Exchange.
Grue3 8y ago
And yet Quora culture is much less toxic. Maybe they had the right idea? It's kind of like Something Awful vs 4chan situation. Or public toilet vs paid toilet.

_hardwaregeek 8y ago

I've stopped using StackOverflow too much, although it's probably more because of my particular development needs. Namely, StackOverflow breaks down if you need an answer about something reeeally specific, say a bug in a particular library. This is especially exacerbated in ecosystems without centralized, large libraries, like Rust, as well as in ecosystems that are fairly new, like Rust. Now, I don't think StackOverflow should necessarily address this, as this problem is a little niche. But I do think it might get a little less niche as developers move off the gigantic monolith library paradigm (jQuery, Boost, etc.). Maybe there should be a way to sync GitHub issues with StackOverflow (although each side has incentive to keep the user on their end). Or maybe there should be a way of pinging important people in the ecosystem. It's nice to @ someone in a GitHub issue if you know who has the solution to your problem.

pier25 8y ago

I was quite active in SO around 2013 and still have a decent reputation there. I rarely ask and answer questions anymore because 99% of the times the question is already there with a number of answers. In many cases those answers have been updated to reflect changes in the times (browser APIs, languages, etc) which is awesome. I've suffered from its toxicity a number of times, but that hasn't been my dominant experience. All in all it's a super useful tool. I guess a lot of programmers don't remember what it was like before SO, with vague forum threads that never got to the point.

gesman 8y ago

Hopefully new CEO will tame some of the extremist mafia moderators and reopened interesting discussions and questions.

tnolet 8y ago

I use SO almost daily but boy is that culture toxic. Twitter level toxic. The new CEO has a tough job ahead.

umvi 8y ago
Honestly, I haven't really seen much toxicity lately. Could you link to some questions asked recently that have toxicity? I mainly hang out in python/c/c++ but even badly written newbie questions still tend to get answers from friendly users, despite the downvotes. Unless you are considering the downvotes themselves "toxic"

nlawalker 8y ago

Is there something that SO can do to further segment the site and/or the question pool without making it too hard to use or driving too many questions into total invisibility? The problem with SO as I see it is that every question is part of the same pool of questions, only differentiated by topic tags. Every question is held to the same standards. This is a contrast to the actual people who use the site: askers and answerers are all using, looking for and expecting a huge variety of different approaches and responses, and have wildly varying levels of experience. Reddit's subreddits completely transforms the site for people who use them - people who browse the front-page have an entirely different experience and different expectations from those who curate. I wonder if there's something similar SO can do.

everfree 8y ago
Stack Overflow is like Reddit's equivalent of /r/programming. There are tons of other Stack Exchange sites on everything from Cooking to Electrical Engineering to Role-playing, I encourage you to check them out. That being said, it's true that they all use the same approach: Concise questions and answers without any extra discussion.

deleted 8y ago

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ne01 8y ago

I thought stack overflow is driven by contributors ego, I didn’t know it had a CEO.

aboutruby 8y ago

Stack Overflow is such a mess I prefer helping people on Reddit / Discord / Slack nowadays. SO is becoming read-only in my opinion.

umvi 8y ago

There are a couple types of people: - Those who were "burned" asking questions on SO and have a grudge against it now (mainly people just starting out in programming) - "Lurkers" who mainly just drive by from Google links and don't ever ask questions - Experienced programmers with accounts that mainly lurk, occasionally ask or answer a question, and never really have problems with the site - Power users with crazy high rep who who are extremely pedantic and patrol their favorite communities too zealously and aggressively, and often unsympathetically I like to think the vast majority of people are in categories 2 and 3 and are very satisfied with the quality and utility of SO. The problem is that: - category 1, while a minority, is extremely vocal about their displeasure with the site and so that gets a lot of attention - category 4 types tend to exacerbate category 1 types - category 4 though also does a very good job keeping the site clean, accurate, well-edited, etc. Moderation is a thankless, tedious job, and the people most willing to do it might have other undesirable personality qualities unfortunately.

tedmiston 8y ago
> Moderation is a thankless, tedious job, and the people most willing to do it might have other undesirable personality qualities unfortunately. I'm sorry you feel this way. I donate my time to occasionally moderate on SO to help people learn and become better programmers. In my experience, the vast majority of mods quietly help like this asking nothing in return.
- umvi 8y ago
  I could very well be wrong. I've never been a mod myself; maybe the bad ones just stand out. It's certainly noticeable on certain subreddits when the good mods are slowly displaced by power tripping bad mods.

pkamb 8y ago

The most annoying thing about Stack Overflow for me is the multiple account system for every site on the Stack Exchange network. I have thousands of points of reputation on Stack Overflow. Why can am I not allowed to edit posts or cast open/close votes on SuperUser or WebApps or AskDifferent? Many of these sites are esentially the same site and rules and user base, but with slightly different topics. Some questions would fit on any of the sites, and it's down to the random Google search you followed as to which site you end up loading. I'll essentially never be able to gain the rep needed on the non-SO sites, even the bigger tech ones that have tons of crossover with Stack Overflow. You can be a 20k rep Stack Overflow account, but land on a Stack Exchange question from Google and it's a complete crapshoot if you'll even be able to upvote the question.

tedmiston 8y ago
I do think the cross-exchange rep / privileges is an unsolved problem. Hopefully they will address it at some point. For the time being I just concentrate my time on SO as opposed to the 5-10 other relevant exchanges like Server Fault or Software Engineering.
KabaKun 8y ago
> You can be a 20k rep Stack Overflow account, but land on a Stack Exchange question from Google and it's a complete crapshoot if you'll even be able to upvote the question. If you have 200+ rep on any one site, you can upvote on any other site (assuming you didn't spend/lose the rep somehow) if you actually create an account there. Downvotes require more rep (125), so that requires some participation on that specific site. This Association Bonus (100 free rep on all sites as a reward for earning 200 on one) is designed to address a lot of your concerns. It allows upvoting, flagging and commenting. If you see something that should be closed, you can flag it for closure to bring it to the attention of users with sufficient rep to close or indicate non-answers as such so that higher rep users can vote to delete them. The system as-is definitely leads to a lot of confusion, though. The explanation I've heard for the siloing of reputation between the sites is that reputation is an indication of trust and expertise in using a specific site. If you know how what's on or off topic on SO, that doesn't necessarily mean you know what's on or off topic on Puzzling or InfoSec. Each site has slightly different cultural expectations, and the belief - which maybe should be tested - is that that expertise doesn't cross between sites. One part of the problem here is that someone can spend hours using a site and know what's on topic or what should be deleted or downvoted or closed and still never have any reputation on that site... and on the other end of that spectrum, you can find very high rep users who either don't use those moderation tools or use them incorrectly because they haven't actually taken the time to understand how the community expects them to be used. It's a hazy indicator of expertise at best but it's also a relatively low-effort one to implement. It takes work to balance it and decide what actions warrant a reputation reward but it's okay. Finding a better/different way to achieve this indication of expertise and privilege may be worth considering and may allow users to "test out" in a privilege to earn it without needing a specific amount of points. This would allow invested users access to privileges without requiring them to also be expert askers or answerers.

xtracto 8y ago

We need an improved version of StackOverflow that factor age of a reply (decaying points or something) and that groups similar answers with for same questions but at different dates. Several times when I search for something (say, how to do X in Ionic) I find a reply that is old and does not apply to the current version of the library.

tedmiston 8y ago
The "Active" sort tab feature on answer pages is meant to address this problem.

dramm 8y ago

All submitted resumes will be put on hold for five days and then deleted. :-)