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The exact opposite happened, contrary to this often repeated meme. Both SO and Wikipedia became what they were because of their strict moderation and RTFM-impli

The exact opposite happened, contrary to this often repeated meme. Both SO and Wikipedia became what they were because of their strict moderation and RTFM-implied attitude. It's what drove professionals like me to the site. I'm just a regular user BTW, but it felt like SO people were my peers. But SO (the company) wanted it to be more accessible, easier for newbies, "nicer", there was a huge uproar over them publicly blasting a moderator over a disagreement on a unilaterally imposed new code of conduct, and recently they even (again unilaterally) effectively reverted the ban on LLM-generated content. This has been going on for years, and moderators have less power than they ever had. Imho this whole thing started much earlier, I think it was 2017 when they tried the SO documentation project and let everyone keep their rep where I first thought they had jumped the shark. The company has been on a bender for the last few years, and high-ish rep users like me just don't see the value in answering anymore. With recent blog posts it seems even more clear that they are on the direct path to enshittification, against their own actual users and moderators. Recently it feels like all the actual professionals have left and what remains are "students" asking low effort questions in bad faith while an army of spambots tries to pounce on these. While this means boosted engagement numbers short-term, it spells death of the site long-term. SO cannot survive on low quality spam, even if other sites (like Reddit) may be able to.

throwaway290 3y ago
Agreed. If anything, the problem of SO is that it's not evolving strict measures fast enough to stay relevant. There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time, and obviously there are not enough people to moderate all of it. The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far.
- shagie 3y ago
  > There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time, There's a question on meta from a decade ago about what the Roomba (automatic deletion scripts) should be deleting. One of the answers had a bit of point in time information: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/262077 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/262077 > How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question. The Java NPE question is https://stackoverflow.com/q/218384 https://stackoverflow.com/q/218384 It now has 10,339 linked to it. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 That makes it harder to find the original source, more difficult for google to chase, and clusters results. > The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far. Which upper management has been working against by encouraging a reduction of those barriers, disincentivizing people from moderating and curating, and trying to grow engagement from people asking questions.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Mistake I think. Because more and more facts are already covered by existing answers and more and more noobs (no judgement just fact we've all been there and I am still a noob in many regards) come into the industry as computing becomes more popular worldwide, it's unscalable unless the focus shifts towards getting people to find existing questions and answers instead of reducing SNR by asking and answering the same questions again and again in worse ways.
    - shagie 3y ago
      The scalability problem is indeed at the core of Stack Overflows woes. When it was small, it was easier to handle the questions of the day, guide new users, handle the "fun" questions (and answers) in a way that wasn't off-putting, and generally be a smaller community. As SO grew, it lost control of the culture that had been established there before (much like Usenet (different thread)) and became a place for people to do hit and run questions - drop their question, come back later, get the answer and move on. The majority of the users of the site had moved from "community of people sharing information - asking and answering" to "new users without any cultural attachment asking a question and not remaining." The core group culture became more defensive of their ideals... and lots of friction between management wanting more engagement and new users just wanting people to answer their question ("if you don't like the question, just move on" being a frequent refrain). From A Group is its own worst enemy: > 2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most." > The core group on Communitree was undifferentiated from the group of random users that came in. They were separate in their own minds, because they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn't defend themselves against the other users. But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy. > Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this. Because if the software doesn't allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so. As the software didn't allow sufficient and proper moderation and curation tooling, the way that the the core group expressed itself was the more negative and ultimately toxic approaches. Snark and rudeness are the moderation tools of last resort. A Group continues with: > 3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in. The current goals of upper management being advertising and engagement are not in alignment with the goals of the original founders (as idealistic as they were) and what remains of the core culture. https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ > It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. Note that good is italicized in the above quote and is present in the original. --- Getting people to be able to find existing questions and clean up the SNR of the content out there on SO would improve it... but that would likely make a lot of lines go down rather than up (deleting 10,000 duplicates of one question would show up). Trying to get Stack Overflow back to a scalable model doesn't further the engagement and upper management goals directly. Instead, they're focused on more engagement... with not unexpected responses. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/425532 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/425531 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/425530

throwaway290 3y ago

Agreed. If anything, the problem of SO is that it's not evolving strict measures fast enough to stay relevant. There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time, and obviously there are not enough people to moderate all of it. The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far.

shagie 3y ago
> There's a constant stream of duplicate and low effort junk that gets only stronger over time, There's a question on meta from a decade ago about what the Roomba (automatic deletion scripts) should be deleting. One of the answers had a bit of point in time information: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/262077 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/262077 > How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question. The Java NPE question is https://stackoverflow.com/q/218384 https://stackoverflow.com/q/218384 It now has 10,339 linked to it. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 That makes it harder to find the original source, more difficult for google to chase, and clusters results. > The original idea is great, but like any other place it needed to evolve barriers as userbase skyrockets and it mostly failed to do that so far. Which upper management has been working against by encouraging a reduction of those barriers, disincentivizing people from moderating and curating, and trying to grow engagement from people asking questions.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  Mistake I think. Because more and more facts are already covered by existing answers and more and more noobs (no judgement just fact we've all been there and I am still a noob in many regards) come into the industry as computing becomes more popular worldwide, it's unscalable unless the focus shifts towards getting people to find existing questions and answers instead of reducing SNR by asking and answering the same questions again and again in worse ways.
  - shagie 3y ago
    The scalability problem is indeed at the core of Stack Overflows woes. When it was small, it was easier to handle the questions of the day, guide new users, handle the "fun" questions (and answers) in a way that wasn't off-putting, and generally be a smaller community. As SO grew, it lost control of the culture that had been established there before (much like Usenet (different thread)) and became a place for people to do hit and run questions - drop their question, come back later, get the answer and move on. The majority of the users of the site had moved from "community of people sharing information - asking and answering" to "new users without any cultural attachment asking a question and not remaining." The core group culture became more defensive of their ideals... and lots of friction between management wanting more engagement and new users just wanting people to answer their question ("if you don't like the question, just move on" being a frequent refrain). From A Group is its own worst enemy: > 2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most." > The core group on Communitree was undifferentiated from the group of random users that came in. They were separate in their own minds, because they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn't defend themselves against the other users. But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy. > Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this. Because if the software doesn't allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so. As the software didn't allow sufficient and proper moderation and curation tooling, the way that the the core group expressed itself was the more negative and ultimately toxic approaches. Snark and rudeness are the moderation tools of last resort. A Group continues with: > 3.) The third thing you need to accept: The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. This pulls against the libertarian view that's quite common on the network, and it absolutely pulls against the one person/one vote notion. But you can see examples of how bad an idea voting is when citizenship is the same as ability to log in. The current goals of upper management being advertising and engagement are not in alignment with the goals of the original founders (as idealistic as they were) and what remains of the core culture. https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ > It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. Note that good is italicized in the above quote and is present in the original. --- Getting people to be able to find existing questions and clean up the SNR of the content out there on SO would improve it... but that would likely make a lot of lines go down rather than up (deleting 10,000 duplicates of one question would show up). Trying to get Stack Overflow back to a scalable model doesn't further the engagement and upper management goals directly. Instead, they're focused on more engagement... with not unexpected responses. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/425532 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/425531 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/425530