6 ms·

Is it time for SO 2? Lets be real, many articles are out of date with answers being for older versions, the culture is getting worse and the company is looking

Is it time for SO 2? Lets be real, many articles are out of date with answers being for older versions, the culture is getting worse and the company is looking to cash in on the thing. Could we use a blank slate?

Etheryte 6y ago
Conceptually, Stack Overflow did something amazing for its time. I agree however that after all these years there are now visible shortcomings in the approach, and simply starting the same thing from scratch wouldn't solve the problems. The primary format of SO is Q&A. Some Q&A is timeless, as in the answer is still relevant today as it was 10 years ago. Some Q&A invalidates quickly and would probably need to be touched up every year or so. How to account for both? Another issue SO strongly struggles with is the same entry-level questions being asked again and again, in different wordings. I wouldn't really put the onus on the newcomers here, as they're often new to programming to begin with and thus couldn't know what's a problem other people might have already had, how to search for things etc. But the tooling to help them avoid those situations is crucial. Currently, possibly related questions are shown when writing a new question, but the problem still persists. How to better avoid this problem? Is this simply a matter of nailing down on the related questions algorithm or is there a better approach? And lastly, the company. There are many very real cases where the change in management has hurt the SO both as a site and a community. I think the answer lies somewhere between SO, MDN and Wikipedia - with all the ups and downs it offers. Clearly, making a global knowledge base and then tacking on investor interest later doesn't work out all that well. To date, I don't think this problem is really solved, as Wikipedia also has a number of issues it struggles with. Without addressing this core issue, the rest are more or less irrelevant with time.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Some Q&A invalidates quickly and would probably need to be touched up every year or so. How to account for both? I’ve seen answers regarding my two major areas of interest - AWS and .Net Core being updated by the original authors as new features came out and new versions of the framework are released.
  - Etheryte 6y ago
    While this is one approach, I think it's only a partial solution. Stack Overflow has a huge user base and many users who were once active are now either occasional visitors or have moved on completely. I think something akin to a stale vote would work, because trying to organically out-vote an answer that has gathered hundreds of votes over the years but is now out of date doesn't really work. Another alternative is Stack Overflow's "community owned" answers, but those bring another layer of politics into play.
MauranKilom 6y ago
You might be interested in codidact.org. With a significant portion of SO/SE mods going on strike as a result of the company's missteps in the past months/year, the push for an alternative site was strong, and it's being built right now.
rileymat2 6y ago
For people working on maintenance of old systems, a lot of those out of date articles are quite useful.

Etheryte 6y ago

Conceptually, Stack Overflow did something amazing for its time. I agree however that after all these years there are now visible shortcomings in the approach, and simply starting the same thing from scratch wouldn't solve the problems. The primary format of SO is Q&A. Some Q&A is timeless, as in the answer is still relevant today as it was 10 years ago. Some Q&A invalidates quickly and would probably need to be touched up every year or so. How to account for both? Another issue SO strongly struggles with is the same entry-level questions being asked again and again, in different wordings. I wouldn't really put the onus on the newcomers here, as they're often new to programming to begin with and thus couldn't know what's a problem other people might have already had, how to search for things etc. But the tooling to help them avoid those situations is crucial. Currently, possibly related questions are shown when writing a new question, but the problem still persists. How to better avoid this problem? Is this simply a matter of nailing down on the related questions algorithm or is there a better approach? And lastly, the company. There are many very real cases where the change in management has hurt the SO both as a site and a community. I think the answer lies somewhere between SO, MDN and Wikipedia - with all the ups and downs it offers. Clearly, making a global knowledge base and then tacking on investor interest later doesn't work out all that well. To date, I don't think this problem is really solved, as Wikipedia also has a number of issues it struggles with. Without addressing this core issue, the rest are more or less irrelevant with time.

scarface74 6y ago
Some Q&A invalidates quickly and would probably need to be touched up every year or so. How to account for both? I’ve seen answers regarding my two major areas of interest - AWS and .Net Core being updated by the original authors as new features came out and new versions of the framework are released.
- Etheryte 6y ago
  While this is one approach, I think it's only a partial solution. Stack Overflow has a huge user base and many users who were once active are now either occasional visitors or have moved on completely. I think something akin to a stale vote would work, because trying to organically out-vote an answer that has gathered hundreds of votes over the years but is now out of date doesn't really work. Another alternative is Stack Overflow's "community owned" answers, but those bring another layer of politics into play.

MauranKilom 6y ago

You might be interested in codidact.org. With a significant portion of SO/SE mods going on strike as a result of the company's missteps in the past months/year, the push for an alternative site was strong, and it's being built right now.

rileymat2 6y ago

For people working on maintenance of old systems, a lot of those out of date articles are quite useful.