7 ms·

The walled garden sweet spot Stack overflow and it's cousin sites have many serendipities like this - and I happily conjecture this happens more here than face

The walled garden sweet spot Stack overflow and it's cousin sites have many serendipities like this - and I happily conjecture this happens more here than facebook or twitter. I think the reason is that despite being a walled garden (ie proprietary) it still has a promise to open up the content and makes effort to moderate and grow the community - in other words what they are really selling is not the SEO but the sweet spot between "anyone posts anything" of an "ideal" internet where no rentiers exist but no one can find anyone else, and the much more corporate hand of Facebook. I am not sure reddit exists in this sweet spot either - mostly because there is just sooo much reddit.

Dirlewanger 6y ago
Both reddit/SO and say, classic forums, each have their own method of content discovery (reddit/SO always prioritize new items, forums push you to long-running threads), but both have their blind spots. With reddit you can end up with a lot of duplicates because a subreddit's dashboard decays stuff pretty fast based on the frequency of posts. It makes long-running discussion impossible. With forums you can have your long-running discussions, but you sometimes have to wade through page after page to find those specials nuggets of info.
- munificent 6y ago
  I look at this as a fundamentally hard problem of information design. You have a series of posts to present to a reader. Which posts do you give primacy to? If your reader already knows most of the context and has read the previous posts, then "re-posts" are bad, long-running threads are good, and they just want to see the latest updates. If your reader is coming to the material cold, a "re-post" may be completely new to them, and posts that presume pages and pages of existing context are completely impenetrable. You want to lean towards fresh, short threads. The challenge for designing a forum then is balancing the competing needs of those users. You can make some progress by tracking on a per-user basis which comments they've already seen. Reddit does that (maybe just for gold accounts?) where new comments are blue. That makes it pretty easy to skim through a comment thread and see just the new leaves. But there's still the question of how to sort the threads themselves. It might be interesting if that sorting was also user-specific. Maybe deprioritize threads that you've seen but not interacted with, and prioritize "live" threads that you've participated in and are still changing.
gowld 6y ago
SO is a garden, not a walled garden.
neves 6y ago
I always say that the wonder of the Internet is the collaborative Wikipedia, not Facebook walled garden. Stack Overflow network of sites is another of the great Internet wonders. Non technical people can not grasp how fantastic they are. Younger developers do not imagine a world without SO. As a private company, probably someday they will lost their techno-utopian magic (as Google already lost). It will be a very sad day.
Shog9 6y ago
A couple relevant bits of info about MathOverflow: - The site is operated by Stack Overflow/Exchange, but is owned by MathOverflow, Inc a non-profit corporation[0]. As such, it retains the right to exist independently of the Stack Overflow company - to my knowledge, it is the only public Stack Exchange site for which this is true. - Like all public Stack Exchange sites, authors retain ownership of their work, which is published under a CC-BY-SA license. Regular archives are uploaded to Archive.org and can be obtained there or via Bittorrent[1] In short, not a walled garden, and not Stack Overflow's garden. [0]: https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/969/who-owns-mathoverflow https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/969/who-owns-mathove... [1]: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
- lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  Re: MathOverflow Inc - I had not only not heard of this, but never even considered it was possible :-) Yes, I think I am wrong to use the term walled garden, but it's hard to think of something else. In a "platonic ideal" of the internet everyone would have their own internet connection, and a server and say post their own interesting queries and somehow others would find and answer them. Perhaps search was assumed to solve it all then. But the universe is much more "clumpy" than that so people will gather around certain locations, in nature they are natural oasis. Perhaps we should drop the walled garden idea - gardens, walled or otherwise need tending and upkeep and that passed the ability of one or two people to do in their spare time somewhere around 1991 on usenet. Tending a garden is a costly affair. I think perhaps walled city might be a better term? It implies the "never leaving" which is what facebook seems to aspire to. perhaps a better analogy is "chargeable car parking". :-)
  - Shog9 6y ago
    This is yet another one of those situations where the use of a dying metaphor[0] hurts communication; you wall up a garden to protect what is inside from the harsh conditions outside: wind, cold, vermin... The implication is that the people in the garden are delicate flowers who would be destroyed by the conditions on The Greater Internet if they were to be exposed. The antonym to the walled garden is the open garden or field, with hardy plants able to withstand and even thrive in the local atmosphere. They're still cultivated - weeded, fertilized - but there's no need to create a microclimate to just to accommodate them. In this context, Facebook does make some effort toward walling off their gardens, but... As you note, Facebook's primary goal isn't protecting it's dominating - Facebook is just as happy to own major portions of the 'Net in pursuit of this goal, and more than a little reluctant to provide any real protection beyond what is absolutely necessary. Beyond that... We all garden. From little personal websites and blogs, to big community gardens[1] like Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and even Hacker News. We plant, we harvest, we tend these plots, alone or together, but make little effort to isolate them from the larger world - indeed, we generally recognize that the strength of the Web is based on its interconnections, its inherent ability to draw together different sources of information. [0]: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli... [1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/349513/feedback-for-the-loop-june-2020-defining-the-stack-community https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/349513/feedback-for...
lukeplato 6y ago
PG recently tweeted something relevant to this thought [1] "Twitter is a few people saying interesting things amidst a much larger number saying mean or mistaken things. So are books. But you don't suddenly get sentences from bad books in the middle of reading one of the good ones. Maybe this gets fixed in version 2 of social media. Maybe version 2 is halfway between the randomness of Twitter and the predictability of Substack." [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1290738446059950080 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1290738446059950080
mcintyre1994 6y ago
StackExchange sites feel like sites that you can browse without them trying to get you addicted and trying to stop you leaving. They do have the sidebar which sometimes shows interesting content but it doesn’t feel optimised for addiction or stickiness - more genuine discovery. I’m not sure what sort of advertising they do on other stack exchange sites if any, but sticking to a job board on SO makes it so much more pleasant to read than a social feed throwing random junk products at you every few minutes until you go away.

Dirlewanger 6y ago

Both reddit/SO and say, classic forums, each have their own method of content discovery (reddit/SO always prioritize new items, forums push you to long-running threads), but both have their blind spots. With reddit you can end up with a lot of duplicates because a subreddit's dashboard decays stuff pretty fast based on the frequency of posts. It makes long-running discussion impossible. With forums you can have your long-running discussions, but you sometimes have to wade through page after page to find those specials nuggets of info.

munificent 6y ago
I look at this as a fundamentally hard problem of information design. You have a series of posts to present to a reader. Which posts do you give primacy to? If your reader already knows most of the context and has read the previous posts, then "re-posts" are bad, long-running threads are good, and they just want to see the latest updates. If your reader is coming to the material cold, a "re-post" may be completely new to them, and posts that presume pages and pages of existing context are completely impenetrable. You want to lean towards fresh, short threads. The challenge for designing a forum then is balancing the competing needs of those users. You can make some progress by tracking on a per-user basis which comments they've already seen. Reddit does that (maybe just for gold accounts?) where new comments are blue. That makes it pretty easy to skim through a comment thread and see just the new leaves. But there's still the question of how to sort the threads themselves. It might be interesting if that sorting was also user-specific. Maybe deprioritize threads that you've seen but not interacted with, and prioritize "live" threads that you've participated in and are still changing.

gowld 6y ago

SO is a garden, not a walled garden.

neves 6y ago

I always say that the wonder of the Internet is the collaborative Wikipedia, not Facebook walled garden. Stack Overflow network of sites is another of the great Internet wonders. Non technical people can not grasp how fantastic they are. Younger developers do not imagine a world without SO. As a private company, probably someday they will lost their techno-utopian magic (as Google already lost). It will be a very sad day.

Shog9 6y ago

A couple relevant bits of info about MathOverflow: - The site is operated by Stack Overflow/Exchange, but is owned by MathOverflow, Inc a non-profit corporation[0]. As such, it retains the right to exist independently of the Stack Overflow company - to my knowledge, it is the only public Stack Exchange site for which this is true. - Like all public Stack Exchange sites, authors retain ownership of their work, which is published under a CC-BY-SA license. Regular archives are uploaded to Archive.org and can be obtained there or via Bittorrent[1] In short, not a walled garden, and not Stack Overflow's garden. [0]: https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/969/who-owns-mathoverflow https://meta.mathoverflow.net/questions/969/who-owns-mathove... [1]: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

lifeisstillgood 6y ago
Re: MathOverflow Inc - I had not only not heard of this, but never even considered it was possible :-) Yes, I think I am wrong to use the term walled garden, but it's hard to think of something else. In a "platonic ideal" of the internet everyone would have their own internet connection, and a server and say post their own interesting queries and somehow others would find and answer them. Perhaps search was assumed to solve it all then. But the universe is much more "clumpy" than that so people will gather around certain locations, in nature they are natural oasis. Perhaps we should drop the walled garden idea - gardens, walled or otherwise need tending and upkeep and that passed the ability of one or two people to do in their spare time somewhere around 1991 on usenet. Tending a garden is a costly affair. I think perhaps walled city might be a better term? It implies the "never leaving" which is what facebook seems to aspire to. perhaps a better analogy is "chargeable car parking". :-)
- Shog9 6y ago
  This is yet another one of those situations where the use of a dying metaphor[0] hurts communication; you wall up a garden to protect what is inside from the harsh conditions outside: wind, cold, vermin... The implication is that the people in the garden are delicate flowers who would be destroyed by the conditions on The Greater Internet if they were to be exposed. The antonym to the walled garden is the open garden or field, with hardy plants able to withstand and even thrive in the local atmosphere. They're still cultivated - weeded, fertilized - but there's no need to create a microclimate to just to accommodate them. In this context, Facebook does make some effort toward walling off their gardens, but... As you note, Facebook's primary goal isn't protecting it's dominating - Facebook is just as happy to own major portions of the 'Net in pursuit of this goal, and more than a little reluctant to provide any real protection beyond what is absolutely necessary. Beyond that... We all garden. From little personal websites and blogs, to big community gardens[1] like Wikipedia, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and even Hacker News. We plant, we harvest, we tend these plots, alone or together, but make little effort to isolate them from the larger world - indeed, we generally recognize that the strength of the Web is based on its interconnections, its inherent ability to draw together different sources of information. [0]: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli... [1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/349513/feedback-for-the-loop-june-2020-defining-the-stack-community https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/349513/feedback-for...

lukeplato 6y ago

PG recently tweeted something relevant to this thought [1] "Twitter is a few people saying interesting things amidst a much larger number saying mean or mistaken things. So are books. But you don't suddenly get sentences from bad books in the middle of reading one of the good ones. Maybe this gets fixed in version 2 of social media. Maybe version 2 is halfway between the randomness of Twitter and the predictability of Substack." [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1290738446059950080 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1290738446059950080

mcintyre1994 6y ago

StackExchange sites feel like sites that you can browse without them trying to get you addicted and trying to stop you leaving. They do have the sidebar which sometimes shows interesting content but it doesn’t feel optimised for addiction or stickiness - more genuine discovery. I’m not sure what sort of advertising they do on other stack exchange sites if any, but sticking to a job board on SO makes it so much more pleasant to read than a social feed throwing random junk products at you every few minutes until you go away.