4 ms·

I'm not sure what problems you're hoping they'll solve. I think the biggest problem with Stack Overflow is the endless stream of low-quality questions. It's har

I'm not sure what problems you're hoping they'll solve. I think the biggest problem with Stack Overflow is the endless stream of low-quality questions. It's hard to find interesting, helpful-to-others questions among all the "do my homework for me" type questions, repeats, poorly-worded unresearched posts, etc. That only gets worse as more people use it. I used to moderate, and got sick of it because it's not rewarding to wade through all the garbage. I don't know how they're going to grow the business and improve the quality at the same time. My biggest concern is that they'll ruin it with ads. Historically, Stack Overflow has had some of the least-offensive advertising, to the point that I didn't even need an adblocker (although lately I do). They're going to want to monetize it for a return on their investment, and that can only lead to bad things.

bachmeier 5y ago
> I'm not sure what problems you're hoping they'll solve. I can think of a few (not that this hasn't been discussed to death already): How to properly moderate a site like that. How to keep answers updated. How to keep answers updated without mods shutting things down due to duplication. A lot of html and JS questions are garbage in 2021 but there's no way to improve the situation without mods screaming "duplication". How to allow for answers that are more than just what you'd find in the documentation. A lot of the value of the site came in the first few years, when you were allowed to expand on your answers and provide useful information. The amount of new value created by SO is decreasing rapidly. One final one is that they need to stop worrying about low-quality questions. That's the only problem they've tried to solve in the last decade, and it's already solved by upvoting and search.
fleddr 5y ago
Well said. Especially during the early years, I always found the signal/noise ratio of SO to be head and shoulders above anything on the web. In part, due to a lot of their subtle UI and reputation choices. Really well designed. Massive scale may at one point break that, but another cause may be found in the change of tone by the team behind SO. They're on the "inclusive" train now. Don't get me wrong, being inclusive is good, but there's a difference between somebody being a beginner or not proficient in English, and somebody being plain lazy. This "softening" I do not consider a good development. I prefer the tough love approach that weeds out garbage from good stuff. If that mechanism is compromised, its unique value is lost.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  This is why I keep going back. I'm afraid it will get worse with this but it may be just entropy of existence as a web service. It's inevitably doomed to mediocrity and replacement by a new hotness.
zwieback 5y ago
The two biggest problems I'd like to see solved: 1) low-quality questions ("do my homework", etc.) 2) over-zealous moderators closing things they don't like With the vast data SO accumulated maybe some kind of deep network thing? I'm a DNN skeptic but would love to be proven wrong in this case. If someone could extract a quality metric and then add a bot that prompts users to improve the question we'd be a long way towards getting higher quality content.

bachmeier 5y ago

> I'm not sure what problems you're hoping they'll solve. I can think of a few (not that this hasn't been discussed to death already): How to properly moderate a site like that. How to keep answers updated. How to keep answers updated without mods shutting things down due to duplication. A lot of html and JS questions are garbage in 2021 but there's no way to improve the situation without mods screaming "duplication". How to allow for answers that are more than just what you'd find in the documentation. A lot of the value of the site came in the first few years, when you were allowed to expand on your answers and provide useful information. The amount of new value created by SO is decreasing rapidly. One final one is that they need to stop worrying about low-quality questions. That's the only problem they've tried to solve in the last decade, and it's already solved by upvoting and search.

fleddr 5y ago

Well said. Especially during the early years, I always found the signal/noise ratio of SO to be head and shoulders above anything on the web. In part, due to a lot of their subtle UI and reputation choices. Really well designed. Massive scale may at one point break that, but another cause may be found in the change of tone by the team behind SO. They're on the "inclusive" train now. Don't get me wrong, being inclusive is good, but there's a difference between somebody being a beginner or not proficient in English, and somebody being plain lazy. This "softening" I do not consider a good development. I prefer the tough love approach that weeds out garbage from good stuff. If that mechanism is compromised, its unique value is lost.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
This is why I keep going back. I'm afraid it will get worse with this but it may be just entropy of existence as a web service. It's inevitably doomed to mediocrity and replacement by a new hotness.

zwieback 5y ago

The two biggest problems I'd like to see solved: 1) low-quality questions ("do my homework", etc.) 2) over-zealous moderators closing things they don't like With the vast data SO accumulated maybe some kind of deep network thing? I'm a DNN skeptic but would love to be proven wrong in this case. If someone could extract a quality metric and then add a bot that prompts users to improve the question we'd be a long way towards getting higher quality content.