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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
by 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 agoI 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