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The Stack Exchange model is a bit weird, looking at it now... The inherent evolutive nature of the tech business makes things obsolete so quick that it's hard f

The Stack Exchange model is a bit weird, looking at it now... The inherent evolutive nature of the tech business makes things obsolete so quick that it's hard for some of the answers to be correct for an extended period of time. Of course, I'm referring mainly to the StackOverflow, and other SE's like DBA. Very few good questions have received the love required to keep them relevant, and even then, the accepted answer is generally correct only for a setup that is so far behind in time it has now been superseded by a completely new set of tools and technologies. With the ones that do receive new answers, you still have an issue of visibility, they just hang in a lower position in the thread, and because the vote system mainly works with novel answers, the incentive to actually correct or update the knowledge on an old question is removed. This mechanic is probably just fine for stuff like the Language SEs or even code golf, but for for technical questions, especially for dev related stuff, the system has proven to have aged like milk.

paol 3y ago
I think the initial design principles of Stack Overflow - basically that the balance of incentives will determine the outcome - is still sound. And the initial years of the site showed the people in control were very smart and thoughtful about structuring and fine tuning the incentives. The problem is that fine tuning (and occasional restructuring) needs to be an ongoing process, and it has stopped. It feels like the original creators left and the site has been coasting on auto-pilot for a few years now. That's what worries me about the future of SO. It was an enormous improvement over what came before (in fact was created as a reaction to the horrible status quo - expertsexchange anyone?). But if it's left to continue to wither it will eventually become like those sites.
- biorach 3y ago
  > The problem is that fine tuning (and occasional restructuring) needs to be an ongoing process, and it has stopped. This is exactly it. SO is ossifying. Plus a small number of power users have final say on things like e.g. duplicate status, with no way of revising their decision. The usefulness of the site is slowly decreasing and it's a shame
  - pelagicAustral 3y ago
    I think the measure for fine-tuning as an ongoing process was to let the communities grow and maintain themselves organically based on the knowledge and experience of power-users, but what happened is that instead of letting the wisdom cascade for generations they ended up with opinionated, gatekeeping cliques. So not quite an idyllic ancient fantasy realm of unlimited knowledge, but instead thunderdome status on most SEs
davnicwil 3y ago
I agree but it needn't inherently be this way, I think it's mostly influenced by the incentives of the site. Asking questions about X very specific thing on Y very specific version of Z specific technology should have answers that can be correct forever, as well as being very searchable. However, the setup of the site is such that questions like that aren't rewarded, for all the reasons we are familiar with. Instead effort and attention tend to funnel towards very generic, high level, sometimes even tech agnostic questions that accrue hundreds to thousands of upvotes and orders of magnitude more views. Unfortunately for these, the 'right' or most appropriate answers of course very much moreso change in time.
pxtail 3y ago
> Very few good questions have received the love required to keep them relevant Some questions receive so much of the love that it brings really wild ideas to casual reader's mind - what would happen if software involved in the question would be changed? Wouldn't it bring joy and collectively insane amount of saved time? Like this question with 13.8m views - let's assume 5min for every viewer, ~131 years collectively. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-do-i-undo-the-most-recent-local-commits-in-git https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-do-i-undo-the...

paol 3y ago

I think the initial design principles of Stack Overflow - basically that the balance of incentives will determine the outcome - is still sound. And the initial years of the site showed the people in control were very smart and thoughtful about structuring and fine tuning the incentives. The problem is that fine tuning (and occasional restructuring) needs to be an ongoing process, and it has stopped. It feels like the original creators left and the site has been coasting on auto-pilot for a few years now. That's what worries me about the future of SO. It was an enormous improvement over what came before (in fact was created as a reaction to the horrible status quo - expertsexchange anyone?). But if it's left to continue to wither it will eventually become like those sites.

biorach 3y ago
> The problem is that fine tuning (and occasional restructuring) needs to be an ongoing process, and it has stopped. This is exactly it. SO is ossifying. Plus a small number of power users have final say on things like e.g. duplicate status, with no way of revising their decision. The usefulness of the site is slowly decreasing and it's a shame
- pelagicAustral 3y ago
  I think the measure for fine-tuning as an ongoing process was to let the communities grow and maintain themselves organically based on the knowledge and experience of power-users, but what happened is that instead of letting the wisdom cascade for generations they ended up with opinionated, gatekeeping cliques. So not quite an idyllic ancient fantasy realm of unlimited knowledge, but instead thunderdome status on most SEs

davnicwil 3y ago

I agree but it needn't inherently be this way, I think it's mostly influenced by the incentives of the site. Asking questions about X very specific thing on Y very specific version of Z specific technology should have answers that can be correct forever, as well as being very searchable. However, the setup of the site is such that questions like that aren't rewarded, for all the reasons we are familiar with. Instead effort and attention tend to funnel towards very generic, high level, sometimes even tech agnostic questions that accrue hundreds to thousands of upvotes and orders of magnitude more views. Unfortunately for these, the 'right' or most appropriate answers of course very much moreso change in time.

pxtail 3y ago

> Very few good questions have received the love required to keep them relevant Some questions receive so much of the love that it brings really wild ideas to casual reader's mind - what would happen if software involved in the question would be changed? Wouldn't it bring joy and collectively insane amount of saved time? Like this question with 13.8m views - let's assume 5min for every viewer, ~131 years collectively. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-do-i-undo-the-most-recent-local-commits-in-git https://stackoverflow.com/questions/927358/how-do-i-undo-the...