12 ms·

StackOverflow unwinding?

101 points by willvarfar 14y ago

Spooky23 14y ago
I like StackOverflow, and contribute heavily to one of the "other" Stack Exchange sites that is busy, but not enough to get out of perpetual beta. The problem that they have is that SO grew very quickly and developed a Usenet-style culture. That's good in that there is alot of good information out there, but bad in the sense that you get all of the assholish behavior that came with Usenet. The other problem that they have is the network of other sites, some of which are very good. The problem there is that they're scaling a model meant for 1,000,000 SO users down to 5,000 users, and it just isn't the same. On a smaller SE site, you cannot wrangle the 5 votes to close some nonsense question written in pidgin english. On SO, a question will be closed in seconds by the vigilantes who roam the site.
thom 14y ago
Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away. I feel a bit like StackOverflow has extrapolated from a huge pent-up demand for decent answers to programming questions, that the world is desperate for Q&A sites on every subject. That does not seem to have been the case.
- nathan_long 14y ago
  Not every subject. They vet ideas for sites based on specificity and the community they can attract. See Area 51 and its guidelines: http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq
- tgrass 14y ago
  I treasure and trust StackOverflow for my programming questions precisely because of the elitist, purifying attitude. I'm confident the answers are vetted and the best has risen to the top. I'm a self-taught programmer with only a few years under my belt, so this resource is valuable. As for the other Q&As...especially the non-engineering ones, this culture is counter productive. In a field like history, the experts are not debating dates and places which are defensible positions, but methodology and theory. Those are discussions and require a little more breathing room than a q&a forum could provide.
  - papsosouid 14y ago
    >I'm confident the answers are vetted and the best has risen to the top. That really doesn't have as much meaning as you think it does. The best answer out of three bad answers is still a bad answer. If they have driven away the people who give good answers, no amount of filtering the leftover bad answers will get you a good answer. I don't see very many experts on stackoverflow. It may be a useful resource for beginners, but as someone more intermediate, I've had no questions answered satisfactorily in the time I've tried using it. And all those questions I ended up getting answered by asking in the appropriate IRC channel. My concern is that more and more open source projects are saying "if you have questions, ask on stackoverflow", but not actually watching for those questions and answering them. When a project has no mailing list, no IRC channel, and says "use stackoverflow" I'm pretty much out of luck for getting help.
    - tgrass 14y ago
      After I wrote that, I realized I had written about experts in History. Any well-studied historian is as much, if not more, interested in historiography as the actual historical record. And I know that programming experts are the same. It is the meta discussions that truly inspire any expert. And being a novice, I am not capable of participating in those programming meta-questions, and certainly I'm not asking them, and consequently wasn't considering them in my comment. Though I should have. The Q&A format likely does not work with any meta discussion.
    - jff 14y ago
      I think it's not just Stackoverflow--in general, experts have better things to do than help Newbie #258349 walk through installing Ruby. After years of watching the same questions get asked over and over, they just decide to give up and go work on something interesting, so you end up with an echo chamber of "bump for answer, I have the same problem", "has this been solved plz send teh codez", "me too".
1123581321 14y ago
I was disappointed by the answers to my last few questions so I'm back to asking on IRC. The answers come more quickly and the format makes clarification and follow up easier and faster. It's also easier for me to look at someone's gist/paste on IRC and give a quick answer.
- projct 14y ago
  IRC is great, but SE-based sites are meant to also help the nth person to ask the question you're seeking, too...
  - 1123581321 14y ago
    I know, and I do feel I am robbing the community in general, but I also don't think I would get my questions answered well at SO. It would be great if someone came up with a way to bring IRC answers into a SO-like site for clean-up.
damian2000 14y ago
StackOverflow is awesome and nothing touches it for quality as far as I'm concerned. But the one thing that annoys me most is the seemingly arbitrary way that posts get deleted by Moderators after they have been closed (but still visible) for a significant period of time. Often they are extremely popular posts with 100k+ views that just disappear in a puff of smoke. FYI: An SO user has recently setup an unofficial archive of deleted SO questions, ranked in order of votes ... http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/124850/unofficial-stack-overflow-deleted-question-archive-now-available http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/124850/unofficial-st...
emw 14y ago
It would be interesting to see empirical data on William Edwards's hypotheses, e.g. "Questions are getting fewer and fewer quality answers. Moderators and 'close this' clickers are getting increasingly narrow." An analysis like this might be feasible with Stack Exchange's API: https://api.stackexchange.com/docs https://api.stackexchange.com/docs.
- NickLarsen 14y ago
  Or you could use the Stack Exchange Data Explorer, http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/queries http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/queries
- pestaa 14y ago
  But the first question is obvious: how do you measure quality? Votes are primarily for popularity, not quality.
  - nathan_long 14y ago
    One way would be "mean time to an accepted answer."
DodgyEggplant 14y ago
They move from Q&A model to a Wikipedia model.
- thom 14y ago
  I don't think this was a particular change in approach, to be honest. From the start they were clear (listening to the early podcasts, at least) that they wanted the site to stand as a reference, and to have each question be the best possible question asking one clear thing, with the best possible answer underneath. Everything else on top of that was gamification to convince people to achieve that. Whether that sort of community becomes degenerate at a certain point is certainly interesting to study, but my intuitive reaction whenever I see a StackOverflow result at the top of some google results is to be joyful, so I feel they've mostly achieved their aims.
nathan_long 14y ago
The OP seems to be saying 1) SO and network is "anti-community", 2) making lots of targeted sites was misguided; they should be broader, and 3) purists are running off real experts. Having listened to many hours of planning and philosophizing on the SO podcast as the site developed, I think the OP misunderstands their approach. 1) They are "anti-community" only in the sense that they don't want content unrelated to the site's topic. They do have moderation, votes for moderators, etc. Everything about the site is geared around getting the best answers and making those searchable, not socializing. 2) This is a tradeoff: too narrow and you won't get enough momentum to keep going; too broad and it's uninteresting. Specificity keeps real experts interested; if you know and love Unix, you'll be much more likely to hang out and answer questions on a Unix site than on a General Computer Stuff site. The whole model depends on keeping experts involved, and if a site is TOO specific to generate enough interest, they kill it. One downside is the inevitable overlap between topics. But I think it's an OK tradeoff. 3) I don't see anything like what he describes. I've been using SO since it was in beta, and I'm still getting good answers to my questions quickly. If there is a rise in militant purists, it's in response to the inevitable influx of newbies and crappy questions, which will happen to any site that gets popular. SO has had this in mind from day 1 and they actively promote community moderation, which is the only scalable approach. I don't mean to sound like an SO apologist, but this post sounds a little too "those guys don't know what they're doing". That's the most common refrain on the internet. The proper response, snarky as it sounds, is "you try doing it better." And it's serious. If you can make a site and cultivate a community better than StackOverflow, I'll be there.
- tgrass 14y ago
  "love it or leave it" is only a proper response in a regime that seeks to protect the status quo.
  - nathan_long 14y ago
    OK, perhaps I was a bit harsh. But there is already a very active place to discuss how SO should do things; it's called meta.stackoverflow.com. This discussion has been going on for years. It's great to try to influence it, but as time goes on, the chances decrease that a newcomer has a point that hasn't been considered. That's just life. You don't see HN changing its format every week; newcomers adjust. And if someone does have a good point, and it's not being considered, as we say, "fork it." The public Q&A data is available, or you could start from scratch.
compay 14y ago
So many questions are already authoritatively answered that there's a much higher bar for new users to contribute. And without new users coming in and participating, there's a feeling of stagnation. I'm not yet convinced they're at an impasse but I personally don't know how I would solve that problem.
- nathan_long 14y ago
  I'm not sure it's a problem. If every PHP question you want to answer is already answered, hooray! Google solves your problems instantly. The PHP section is stagnant, but it's still helping people. The supply of answers scales down to the demand. Meanwhile, some people start switching to Node or something else, and a new wave of Q&A starts on that. Rinse and repeat.
ErrantX 14y ago
I guess any sufficiently large ‘community’ (there’s not a community on Stack Exchanges, of course; they are fairly anti-community) ends up attracting those wanting to curate the resource and purify it, until those competent to answer and help have had their fill and no longer feel welcome? This was my experience as a contributor (one of the top 10) to Literature SE. The mods were very harsh and basically killed the site (or at least drove off most of us contributors). Both question and answer quality declined dramatically in tandem with the rise of "rules". Months later I was still in the top 10 contributors. Answers had declined to single sentences. Now I logged in and noticed it has been closed down (and much of the content migrated to SciFi SE) due to lack of participation. I am not surprised. At least some of my answers will survive. (here's one early question where it was poorly asked, we wrote some good answers and worked with the questioner to focus the question - http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/16106/what-are-the-anti-church-messages-in-the-his-dark-materials-trilogy/16107 http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/16106/what-are-the-... This attitude disappeared within very short time)
- nathan_long 14y ago
  It's possible that the site floundered and closed because it just wasn't a good fit for the StackExchange model. Literature doesn't strike me as a field where there are obvious right answers.
  - ErrantX 14y ago
    Well; maybe. But SciFi SE survives - and that would seem to have a similar issue :)
    - excuse-me 14y ago
      But a much bigger audience with the SO crowd
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - minikites 14y ago
Karunamon 14y ago
The thing that drove me away from the entire Stack* series of sites was the heavy-handed "doesn't fit the format" (read: mod doesn't like it) question closings for no good reason. I've honestly lost count of the number of times that valid questions with well spoken, informative answers were shut down due to this nonsense. (The other was how much of a pain they make it to get started if you're new - one can look at the comments here and see that those kind of shenanigans are mostly unnecessary) When you're killing off high-quality content because it "doesn't fit the format", perhaps the format needs to change.
- gizzlon 14y ago
  Example? Haven't noticed this..
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    It's kind of hard to provide examples because the question disappears once this happens. There's a link to an example in this thread.
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    Here's a recent one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138086 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138086
- jcastro 14y ago
  Stackexchanges have policies set by their commununity on each corresponding meta site. Mods don't really set policy they enforce it, and most "Is this kind of question ontopic here?" style scope-adjusment can be done on meta.
  - dwc 14y ago
    I understand the "meta is murder" argument, and it's a tough and deadly problem. But I don't think splitting the meta into a separate site is the answer. You end up with a very strange self selection problem, where the "meta" community isn't very representative of the community at all.
debacle 14y ago
The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases. I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently. The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions with quality answers get closed because they are slightly subjective, which completely obliterates the community feeling.
- buro9 14y ago
  With communities in general (not explicitly referencing SO here), I've always felt that moderators are their own worst enemies. They dictate the terms of use through enforcement. It's not fun to use something until you find that you aren't allowed to. The best tools do not limit their usage patterns, and communities adapt and evolve to make these tools solve their problems. These aren't always the same problems that the creators of the system or moderators intended to be solved. So moderators kill the potential utility of a tool. One of those potentials (now referring back to SO) is the unification of people with a shared interest in a programming language or knowledge domain. Without community, why should a user invest in it? So I assert (overly simplistically) that moderators kill communities.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - specialist 14y ago
    A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
  - spolsky 14y ago
    And yet, Stack Overflow gets 7000 questions a day, and manages to maintain a very high quality compared to sites with less moderation. The very moderation which detracts from the community feeling is what's keeping the quality of the site up and helping create a valuable permanent resource on the Internet, which is our primary goal. Like Wikipedia, strict rules are what lead to a valuable artifact. Stack Overflow's rules and values are not intended to create a warm and cuddly discussion area for long-winding, far-reaching conversations, social networking, and "community" whatever that means. They are intended to create a body of precise questions and answers which are peer-reviewed, editable, and high-quality that you can search with Google.
recursive 14y ago
My opinion on SO is apparently in the minority around here. I find the content on SO to generally be of high quality, and in most cases, I agree with what moderation I see. Most questions I see that get closed seem like requests for extended discussions. I actually believe that SO works better on questions that have verifiable answers. As for my questions, I've asked 42, and gotten good answers to most of them.
- cocoflunchy 14y ago
  I think you mistyped here: 42 is the answer, not the question.
  - mihaifm 14y ago
    :)) yep, clearly a mistake
napolux 14y ago
I've heard the same rants in any of the usenet groups I used to partecipate. :)
chaostheory 14y ago
Can anyone post specific examples of "stackoverflow unwinding"? I didn't see any in the article.
adventureful 14y ago
It seemed inevitable that 95% (some very high %) of StackOverflow was destined to be little more than an archive, leaving a very stagnant system as the speed of activity & build out slowed to a crawl. Large, highly active development technology doesn't change every day. PHP has been around for 15 plus years, Python for 20 years. And those are two of most popular. How many questions can ultimately be asked about PHP or Python, before you wipe out the radical majority of possible and important questions? Obviously languages like that evolve, but not very quickly once they hit a certain point in their life cycle. As you saturate the big segments, you're going to naturally bleed off user excitement and interest. Stack will continue on, getting tons of traffic because their answers will remain extraordinarily valuable, but the ratio for the amount of new content in relation to existing content will continue to accelerate toward Stack being mostly an answers archive. That guarantees the stagnation of their community (perhaps leaving small pockets of excitement around new, lesser adopted tools). Haven't communities like Wikipedia followed curves like this? Once you max out all the English topics (for example), then it's an update approach with a smaller number of new topics coming in. Net result ultimately being a lot less overall new content being added in relation to the existing base (demanding a peak in overall community activity). Wikipedia isn't nearly as exciting as it once was, several years ago, when the rate of build-out and topic addition was staggering. The wild west eventually becomes a boring suburb.
- nathan_long 14y ago
  "That guarantees the stagnation of their community" Not from my perspective. I'm a Rails developer, and between our continuously evolving platform, the proliferation of gems, and my changing projects, I've always got new questions. Meanwhile, new technologies keep appearing to become the New Hotness.
  - adventureful 14y ago
    Here's why it guarantees overall stagnation (not necessarily on a specific topic): Let's say you have 10 super segments, eg: PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript, etc. Once you build those out to a high degree, reasonably the amount of new content possible in relation to existing content, will plunge. Then if you add a new language that becomes popular and mass adopted, the best you can hope for is perhaps an addition of 5% to 10% to your content base. It all becomes modestly incremental, and the excitement overall is guaranteed to fall in that environment. Ruby can be hopping as a subset, but the likelihood the whole thing will be is vastly reduced once the overall build-out slows. What's left to be excited about in the PHP section, once you've answered 97% of what is important about the language? How many ways can someone ask about error reporting?
chrislomax 14y ago
I don't generally have a problem on StackOverflow. The last few questions I have asked have been quite high level and not been asked before and they tend to get some good answers / guesses. I find that a well structured question gets some good answers, I find a lot of people leaving their question open to interpretation and people cannot be bothered to ask the same old questions because the poster has neglected to be specific in their question. I find a lot of people use it being lazy as well, most questions are simply part of the language / subject they are asking about but they cannot be bothered to read up on it. They would rather ask insanely simple questions to get other people to provide an answer for it.
jiggy2011 14y ago
I think there is a general problem with Q&A/Forums in general. I will generally only ever go to a website to ask a factual question if I cannot easily find the answer myself either from documentation or experimentation. If I ask a question on Q&A it's because the answer is not forthcoming , this may be because my entire approach to the problem is wrong or maybe I'm doing something that only a handful of people would ever want to do. In that case I am relying on the right people actually seeing my post which would have low odds, so I am better served using dedicated forums/newsgroups for the library in question. So this really leaves opinion based questions as the best things to ask, which don't seem to be encouraged on SO and the format of correct/wrong doesn't work there so well anyway. Another issue is that I'm usually asking questions related to work things that I am doing, and while I can easily justify using time that I am paid by someone else to ask questions it is less easy to justify spending work time answering other people's questions in order to gain rep. Also giving a good answer to many questions involves showing sample code , or digging back into something I did a while ago so it's not really something I can do in 2 minutes. So this means I either have to answer questions somewhat covertly or wait until I get home by which time I may well have other things to do.
soupboy 14y ago
It is interesting that some of these same criticisms have been applied to Wikipedia and the reasons remain the same too
memset 14y ago
Closing questions - no, deleting questions - really really grinds my gears. Nothing is more frustrating than finding a google result to SO, clicking through, and arriving at a 404. Nothing is more frustrating that searching for that great answer I read last year and not being able to find it because the question has been deleted. These are often questions that have been kicking around for 4 years, and, well, gone. Of course, if you have enough SO points, then you probably don't care whether you've deleted a question, you can still see them. While we're at it, SOers have always been, and are increasingly... well, jerks! If you are a new programmer, then of course your question will have incomplete information, because you don't know how to ask a good question yet. So stop downvoting into oblivion, please, and give people a little bit of time to acclimate and improve their question before closing. I am in the top 10% of SO users as measured by points (lol.) What can I do, as a community member and hacker, to fix these things?
- justinhj 14y ago
  Due to this problem I think the site would be much more useful if the deleted posts just had a red warning at the top like wikipedia. "this question was flagged for being funny" "a little off topic" let the user decide if he wants to look or not. Buyer beware.
- kanamekun 14y ago
  Wikipedia editors can also come across as jerks. A lot of new members get turned off and end up leaving the community... this happens even more often with female editors. On the one hand, it's wonderful that both SO and Wikipedia are "well-kept gardens": http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ On the other hand, at some point both communities struggle with being inclusive and welcoming. Maybe Joel is right though, and the two goals are mutually exclusive? I personally hope that they're not, but don't have any examples to point to that are successful on the level of Wikipedia or StackOverflow.
tucson 14y ago
Google, Wikipedia and StackOverflow/StackExchange are my favorite "creations" on the Internet. But StackExchange has been a big disapointment for me. No big traction on the StackExchange sites, and moderators constantly closing questions without providing better alternatives. It's really a turn-off. (StackOverflow is still great though).
spolsky 14y ago
None of the actual metrics of the site bear this out. I don't know what "myspacing" is, and "floundering" is pretty subjective, but in terms of actual measurable things, we have more questions asked, more questions answered, more people active on the site, more sites with more activity and most metrics are up about 100% in the last year. Some of the things that we track pretty closely (like number of users who ask or answer 5 times monthly) are steadily growing.
- Roboprog 14y ago
  You need to look into somehow adding a "question age" increment to answer point values. That seems to be the biggest legitimate recurring issue in the discussion. Otherwise, the system seems to be working as intended.
- andrewcooke 14y ago
  so why are so many people convinced otherwise? most posts here are from people apparently tired of so. if you're only measuring positives, what are you missing that explains the negatives? it's understandable being defensive. but maybe that reflex is causing you to miss something? [edit: also, how do you measure evaporative cooling?]
  - chavesn 14y ago
    One possible explanation: People here, generally speaking, like a community that is about the people. Aside from meta.stackoverflow, Stack Overflow's model makes that difficult. That's ok, because Stack Overflow is not a social network - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/128552/143601 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/128552/143601
    - wpietri 14y ago
      Well, they don't want Stack Overflow to be a social network. But like Soylent Green, it's made out of people. In SO's case, inconveniently alive people. Humans are inherently social, and the amount of effort SO staff and moderators have to go to trying to stamp that out is a sign that SO really is a social network. I always think it's a bad sign when product designers think they know much better than their users what they want. I think that's what killed Friendster. I think that's why Google Plus is kinda sad and sterile. If you're going to go to all the trouble of making a product for people, I'd rather you listened to them from time to time.
mtrn 14y ago
A couple of points (from a top 0.47% user, but that's not why I'm on SO): * imagine googling for a programming questions and be stuck in 2008 - I don't want to go back * imagine researching a wittgenstein paper - do you need philosophy.stackexchange.com - probably not; the numbers show, that SO's still the metrics vanguard - I think the demand for the niche sites is certainly there, but large communities have formed around traditional forum sites - and people are happy with that - so there is no pressing need to switch to the new format * concerning questions - it has been a phenomenon since the beginning, that the simplest answers (C-C C-V the docs) got the most upvotes - interesting hard questions don't earn you much reputation, if that's what you're after - I still get a lot of upvotes for year-old answers, which everybody could have written, while the answers I invested hours in remain relatively untouched; but the main value for me comes from learning by answering questions: try to bring your point across in a few words, collect useful references and show working code - it's like a daily workout equivalent in the tech field * open questions: I'm trying to make it a habit to answer one hard, unanswered, maybe older question each week - because it's true, the "reputation clock cycle" leaves a lot behind... * moderation: most moderators have been long around - and I can somehow guess, in which tags a person is active, because I likely saw their comments, answers, flags already a couple of times - can't really blame them for closing a lot of questions - it's hard; if you can, sift through http://stackoverflow.com/tools/flagged http://stackoverflow.com/tools/flagged and you might know what I mean * tldr: SO rocks if you're a programmer, for other SE sites YMMV; unsatisfied with closed questions? reopen them or discuss it on meta - it's not possible that moderators don't make mistakes and it's not true, that you can't at least try to discuss specific issues; unsatisfied with unanswered hard questions: find one and write up something great
- Roboprog 14y ago
  Yes, the organization and search-ability is invaluable. Of course most of the content eventually becomes "geologic" as new material is steadily put down at about a steady rate, the rate of "in the last year" material must become a steadily smaller percentage. I found at least one of the newer sites, the Ubuntu S/E, to be quite useful for troubleshooting LTS version 12 just a few days after 12 came out.
- jofer 14y ago
niels_olson 14y ago
I disagree. I recently picked up pyparsing, and in trying to understand (I'm not a comp sci major), I made an account on stackexchange. The author of pyparsing answered my question. I'm sold.
- martmarc 14y ago
  Wait until said author or the author of another tool / API enters in an argument with one of the elected moderator and gets banned: you're going to be "unsold". This is precisely what this discussion is about: it's about obviously knowledgeable SO users that are getting more and more pissed off by the behavior of these "close-trigger-happy" moderators. And this is relatively new: it wasn't anywhere near as bad two years ago on SO. The one thing that prompted me to leave is twice I spend time answering a question only to see the whole thread getting deleted: this is a waste of my time (I don't care about the b*llshit reason invoked by those overzealous mod to close the question: I care about my time spent helping people being lost). I'm not bringing anything anymore to a "community" that is so prone on wasting their user's time.
  - niels_olson 14y ago
    I agonize with a similar problem, but I think anyone with a blog will agree there is a real curatorial challenge there. I know Edward Tufte; he routinely deletes his own contributions to his own forum, and will not hesitate to delete material contributed to experts in their fields, often post-publication.
pbharrin 14y ago
IMHO StackOverflow jumped the shark when it started adding karma or whatever the fuck they call it.
- napolux 14y ago
  That's gamification... :D
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
krosaen 14y ago
I routinely find the question I'm asking has already been answered when googling, and have rarely had a question go unanswered. The hard part in my experience when going to try and answer some questions is it seems like there are more and more questions by inexperienced coders expecting people to write basic code for them, or not formulating the question in a way that will be useful to others in the future - instead they're pasting in their code and asking, "why isn't this working". Instead of, "I would expect this framework to behave as follows but it's not" it's "Here's 50 lines of code, why isn't it working?" The only way to answer such questions is to get their code up and running somewhere, perhaps on a jsfiddle, figure out what's wrong (often something as trivial as a syntax error), and then tell them. Doesn't feel very gratifying to do one off debugging on behalf of the person asking especially if the answer is unlikely to be useful to others in the future.
evincarofautumn 14y ago
I disagree with the author on a few points. The branching out of Stack Exchange has been excellent—I’m mostly active on English (14k), SO (9k), and Programmers (6k), but I often browse the other sites to pick up useful and interesting information that I would never have come across if it weren’t for that diversification. Where else can I stumble across juicy morsels about mathematics, or TeX, or any of several languages I don’t speak—all in one place? I find the idea that Stack Exchange is anti-community laughable. The chat system is excellent and has relieved a lot of the tension between contributing to the site and just having fun meeting people who share your interests. I know a lot more about my fellow language enthusiasts, C++ programmers, and Haskellers than before. And more people read my blog and watch my YouTube videos now. I call that a win. So: the last time I asked a good question on SO? Last month. The last time I gave a good answer? This week. The system still works from my point of view. And I’m one of the guys who actively edits questions so they don’t get closed for stupid reasons—moderation isn’t restricted to just moderators.
kamaal 14y ago
I really follow the ESR's asking questions the smart way guide pretty seriously(http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html) and most of my easy to difficult questions get answered easily without ever asking a question. What I really care for is getting answers to tough questions. The problem with SO is it doesn't aim to be a QA site on the longer run. It aims to be a database of programming answers site that slowly evolves to solving most commonly faced programming problems. I don't know if their aim is to be advertising based revenue site on the longer run. I ask a question because I want to get help. It has so happened when I absolutely can't get anything out of the problem at hand. I go on SO and ask a question, often I've been down voted down to oblivion, then I delete the question. Because all I see in response is sarcasm, cynicism and attempts by commenters to prove how big a fool I am. To me stack overflow looks like site that wishes to attract people who already know answers to their questions, but want it put in a community wiki kind of way. But I do agree that a simple Google search on SO sites, gives you solutions to most commonly known programming problems. And not just that most commonly known problems on areas that stack exchange sites deal with. These address most problems people face daily. Tough problems is a different cup of tea. But most common problems often get answered and their database seems to be growing with regards to those problems. And this might also be a great business model for SO. SO was the cool new shiny tool, few years back. We all like to play with Shiny tools. Until something new, and more shiny come along. These days most of colleagues ping me with interesting answers on quora. I would be happy with Quora opening their questions for reading without opening an account.

101 points by willvarfar 14y ago

I like StackOverflow, and contribute heavily to one of the "other" Stack Exchange sites that is busy, but not enough to get out of perpetual beta. The problem that they have is that SO grew very quickly and developed a Usenet-style culture. That's good in that there is alot of good information out there, but bad in the sense that you get all of the assholish behavior that came with Usenet. The other problem that they have is the network of other sites, some of which are very good. The problem there is that they're scaling a model meant for 1,000,000 SO users down to 5,000 users, and it just isn't the same. On a smaller SE site, you cannot wrangle the 5 votes to close some nonsense question written in pidgin english. On SO, a question will be closed in seconds by the vigilantes who roam the site.

thom 14y ago

Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away. I feel a bit like StackOverflow has extrapolated from a huge pent-up demand for decent answers to programming questions, that the world is desperate for Q&A sites on every subject. That does not seem to have been the case.

nathan_long 14y ago
Not every subject. They vet ideas for sites based on specificity and the community they can attract. See Area 51 and its guidelines: http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq http://area51.stackexchange.com/faq
tgrass 14y ago
I treasure and trust StackOverflow for my programming questions precisely because of the elitist, purifying attitude. I'm confident the answers are vetted and the best has risen to the top. I'm a self-taught programmer with only a few years under my belt, so this resource is valuable. As for the other Q&As...especially the non-engineering ones, this culture is counter productive. In a field like history, the experts are not debating dates and places which are defensible positions, but methodology and theory. Those are discussions and require a little more breathing room than a q&a forum could provide.
- papsosouid 14y ago
  >I'm confident the answers are vetted and the best has risen to the top. That really doesn't have as much meaning as you think it does. The best answer out of three bad answers is still a bad answer. If they have driven away the people who give good answers, no amount of filtering the leftover bad answers will get you a good answer. I don't see very many experts on stackoverflow. It may be a useful resource for beginners, but as someone more intermediate, I've had no questions answered satisfactorily in the time I've tried using it. And all those questions I ended up getting answered by asking in the appropriate IRC channel. My concern is that more and more open source projects are saying "if you have questions, ask on stackoverflow", but not actually watching for those questions and answering them. When a project has no mailing list, no IRC channel, and says "use stackoverflow" I'm pretty much out of luck for getting help.
  - tgrass 14y ago
    After I wrote that, I realized I had written about experts in History. Any well-studied historian is as much, if not more, interested in historiography as the actual historical record. And I know that programming experts are the same. It is the meta discussions that truly inspire any expert. And being a novice, I am not capable of participating in those programming meta-questions, and certainly I'm not asking them, and consequently wasn't considering them in my comment. Though I should have. The Q&A format likely does not work with any meta discussion.
  - jff 14y ago
    I think it's not just Stackoverflow--in general, experts have better things to do than help Newbie #258349 walk through installing Ruby. After years of watching the same questions get asked over and over, they just decide to give up and go work on something interesting, so you end up with an echo chamber of "bump for answer, I have the same problem", "has this been solved plz send teh codez", "me too".

1123581321 14y ago

I was disappointed by the answers to my last few questions so I'm back to asking on IRC. The answers come more quickly and the format makes clarification and follow up easier and faster. It's also easier for me to look at someone's gist/paste on IRC and give a quick answer.

projct 14y ago
IRC is great, but SE-based sites are meant to also help the nth person to ask the question you're seeking, too...
- 1123581321 14y ago
  I know, and I do feel I am robbing the community in general, but I also don't think I would get my questions answered well at SO. It would be great if someone came up with a way to bring IRC answers into a SO-like site for clean-up.

damian2000 14y ago

StackOverflow is awesome and nothing touches it for quality as far as I'm concerned. But the one thing that annoys me most is the seemingly arbitrary way that posts get deleted by Moderators after they have been closed (but still visible) for a significant period of time. Often they are extremely popular posts with 100k+ views that just disappear in a puff of smoke. FYI: An SO user has recently setup an unofficial archive of deleted SO questions, ranked in order of votes ... http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/124850/unofficial-stack-overflow-deleted-question-archive-now-available http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/124850/unofficial-st...

emw 14y ago

It would be interesting to see empirical data on William Edwards's hypotheses, e.g. "Questions are getting fewer and fewer quality answers. Moderators and 'close this' clickers are getting increasingly narrow." An analysis like this might be feasible with Stack Exchange's API: https://api.stackexchange.com/docs https://api.stackexchange.com/docs.

NickLarsen 14y ago
Or you could use the Stack Exchange Data Explorer, http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/queries http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/queries
pestaa 14y ago
But the first question is obvious: how do you measure quality? Votes are primarily for popularity, not quality.
- nathan_long 14y ago
  One way would be "mean time to an accepted answer."

DodgyEggplant 14y ago

They move from Q&A model to a Wikipedia model.

thom 14y ago
I don't think this was a particular change in approach, to be honest. From the start they were clear (listening to the early podcasts, at least) that they wanted the site to stand as a reference, and to have each question be the best possible question asking one clear thing, with the best possible answer underneath. Everything else on top of that was gamification to convince people to achieve that. Whether that sort of community becomes degenerate at a certain point is certainly interesting to study, but my intuitive reaction whenever I see a StackOverflow result at the top of some google results is to be joyful, so I feel they've mostly achieved their aims.

nathan_long 14y ago

The OP seems to be saying 1) SO and network is "anti-community", 2) making lots of targeted sites was misguided; they should be broader, and 3) purists are running off real experts. Having listened to many hours of planning and philosophizing on the SO podcast as the site developed, I think the OP misunderstands their approach. 1) They are "anti-community" only in the sense that they don't want content unrelated to the site's topic. They do have moderation, votes for moderators, etc. Everything about the site is geared around getting the best answers and making those searchable, not socializing. 2) This is a tradeoff: too narrow and you won't get enough momentum to keep going; too broad and it's uninteresting. Specificity keeps real experts interested; if you know and love Unix, you'll be much more likely to hang out and answer questions on a Unix site than on a General Computer Stuff site. The whole model depends on keeping experts involved, and if a site is TOO specific to generate enough interest, they kill it. One downside is the inevitable overlap between topics. But I think it's an OK tradeoff. 3) I don't see anything like what he describes. I've been using SO since it was in beta, and I'm still getting good answers to my questions quickly. If there is a rise in militant purists, it's in response to the inevitable influx of newbies and crappy questions, which will happen to any site that gets popular. SO has had this in mind from day 1 and they actively promote community moderation, which is the only scalable approach. I don't mean to sound like an SO apologist, but this post sounds a little too "those guys don't know what they're doing". That's the most common refrain on the internet. The proper response, snarky as it sounds, is "you try doing it better." And it's serious. If you can make a site and cultivate a community better than StackOverflow, I'll be there.

tgrass 14y ago
"love it or leave it" is only a proper response in a regime that seeks to protect the status quo.
- nathan_long 14y ago
  OK, perhaps I was a bit harsh. But there is already a very active place to discuss how SO should do things; it's called meta.stackoverflow.com. This discussion has been going on for years. It's great to try to influence it, but as time goes on, the chances decrease that a newcomer has a point that hasn't been considered. That's just life. You don't see HN changing its format every week; newcomers adjust. And if someone does have a good point, and it's not being considered, as we say, "fork it." The public Q&A data is available, or you could start from scratch.

compay 14y ago

So many questions are already authoritatively answered that there's a much higher bar for new users to contribute. And without new users coming in and participating, there's a feeling of stagnation. I'm not yet convinced they're at an impasse but I personally don't know how I would solve that problem.

nathan_long 14y ago
I'm not sure it's a problem. If every PHP question you want to answer is already answered, hooray! Google solves your problems instantly. The PHP section is stagnant, but it's still helping people. The supply of answers scales down to the demand. Meanwhile, some people start switching to Node or something else, and a new wave of Q&A starts on that. Rinse and repeat.

ErrantX 14y ago

I guess any sufficiently large ‘community’ (there’s not a community on Stack Exchanges, of course; they are fairly anti-community) ends up attracting those wanting to curate the resource and purify it, until those competent to answer and help have had their fill and no longer feel welcome? This was my experience as a contributor (one of the top 10) to Literature SE. The mods were very harsh and basically killed the site (or at least drove off most of us contributors). Both question and answer quality declined dramatically in tandem with the rise of "rules". Months later I was still in the top 10 contributors. Answers had declined to single sentences. Now I logged in and noticed it has been closed down (and much of the content migrated to SciFi SE) due to lack of participation. I am not surprised. At least some of my answers will survive. (here's one early question where it was poorly asked, we wrote some good answers and worked with the questioner to focus the question - http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/16106/what-are-the-anti-church-messages-in-the-his-dark-materials-trilogy/16107 http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/16106/what-are-the-... This attitude disappeared within very short time)

nathan_long 14y ago
It's possible that the site floundered and closed because it just wasn't a good fit for the StackExchange model. Literature doesn't strike me as a field where there are obvious right answers.
- ErrantX 14y ago
  Well; maybe. But SciFi SE survives - and that would seem to have a similar issue :)
  - excuse-me 14y ago
    But a much bigger audience with the SO crowd
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- minikites 14y ago

Karunamon 14y ago

The thing that drove me away from the entire Stack* series of sites was the heavy-handed "doesn't fit the format" (read: mod doesn't like it) question closings for no good reason. I've honestly lost count of the number of times that valid questions with well spoken, informative answers were shut down due to this nonsense. (The other was how much of a pain they make it to get started if you're new - one can look at the comments here and see that those kind of shenanigans are mostly unnecessary) When you're killing off high-quality content because it "doesn't fit the format", perhaps the format needs to change.

gizzlon 14y ago
Example? Haven't noticed this..
- Karunamon 14y ago
  It's kind of hard to provide examples because the question disappears once this happens. There's a link to an example in this thread.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  Here's a recent one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138086 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4138086
jcastro 14y ago
Stackexchanges have policies set by their commununity on each corresponding meta site. Mods don't really set policy they enforce it, and most "Is this kind of question ontopic here?" style scope-adjusment can be done on meta.
- dwc 14y ago
  I understand the "meta is murder" argument, and it's a tough and deadly problem. But I don't think splitting the meta into a separate site is the answer. You end up with a very strange self selection problem, where the "meta" community isn't very representative of the community at all.

debacle 14y ago

The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases. I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently. The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions with quality answers get closed because they are slightly subjective, which completely obliterates the community feeling.

buro9 14y ago
With communities in general (not explicitly referencing SO here), I've always felt that moderators are their own worst enemies. They dictate the terms of use through enforcement. It's not fun to use something until you find that you aren't allowed to. The best tools do not limit their usage patterns, and communities adapt and evolve to make these tools solve their problems. These aren't always the same problems that the creators of the system or moderators intended to be solved. So moderators kill the potential utility of a tool. One of those potentials (now referring back to SO) is the unification of people with a shared interest in a programming language or knowledge domain. Without community, why should a user invest in it? So I assert (overly simplistically) that moderators kill communities.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- specialist 14y ago
  A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
- spolsky 14y ago
  And yet, Stack Overflow gets 7000 questions a day, and manages to maintain a very high quality compared to sites with less moderation. The very moderation which detracts from the community feeling is what's keeping the quality of the site up and helping create a valuable permanent resource on the Internet, which is our primary goal. Like Wikipedia, strict rules are what lead to a valuable artifact. Stack Overflow's rules and values are not intended to create a warm and cuddly discussion area for long-winding, far-reaching conversations, social networking, and "community" whatever that means. They are intended to create a body of precise questions and answers which are peer-reviewed, editable, and high-quality that you can search with Google.

recursive 14y ago

My opinion on SO is apparently in the minority around here. I find the content on SO to generally be of high quality, and in most cases, I agree with what moderation I see. Most questions I see that get closed seem like requests for extended discussions. I actually believe that SO works better on questions that have verifiable answers. As for my questions, I've asked 42, and gotten good answers to most of them.

cocoflunchy 14y ago
I think you mistyped here: 42 is the answer, not the question.
- mihaifm 14y ago
  :)) yep, clearly a mistake

napolux 14y ago

I've heard the same rants in any of the usenet groups I used to partecipate. :)

chaostheory 14y ago

Can anyone post specific examples of "stackoverflow unwinding"? I didn't see any in the article.

adventureful 14y ago

It seemed inevitable that 95% (some very high %) of StackOverflow was destined to be little more than an archive, leaving a very stagnant system as the speed of activity & build out slowed to a crawl. Large, highly active development technology doesn't change every day. PHP has been around for 15 plus years, Python for 20 years. And those are two of most popular. How many questions can ultimately be asked about PHP or Python, before you wipe out the radical majority of possible and important questions? Obviously languages like that evolve, but not very quickly once they hit a certain point in their life cycle. As you saturate the big segments, you're going to naturally bleed off user excitement and interest. Stack will continue on, getting tons of traffic because their answers will remain extraordinarily valuable, but the ratio for the amount of new content in relation to existing content will continue to accelerate toward Stack being mostly an answers archive. That guarantees the stagnation of their community (perhaps leaving small pockets of excitement around new, lesser adopted tools). Haven't communities like Wikipedia followed curves like this? Once you max out all the English topics (for example), then it's an update approach with a smaller number of new topics coming in. Net result ultimately being a lot less overall new content being added in relation to the existing base (demanding a peak in overall community activity). Wikipedia isn't nearly as exciting as it once was, several years ago, when the rate of build-out and topic addition was staggering. The wild west eventually becomes a boring suburb.

nathan_long 14y ago
"That guarantees the stagnation of their community" Not from my perspective. I'm a Rails developer, and between our continuously evolving platform, the proliferation of gems, and my changing projects, I've always got new questions. Meanwhile, new technologies keep appearing to become the New Hotness.
- adventureful 14y ago
  Here's why it guarantees overall stagnation (not necessarily on a specific topic): Let's say you have 10 super segments, eg: PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript, etc. Once you build those out to a high degree, reasonably the amount of new content possible in relation to existing content, will plunge. Then if you add a new language that becomes popular and mass adopted, the best you can hope for is perhaps an addition of 5% to 10% to your content base. It all becomes modestly incremental, and the excitement overall is guaranteed to fall in that environment. Ruby can be hopping as a subset, but the likelihood the whole thing will be is vastly reduced once the overall build-out slows. What's left to be excited about in the PHP section, once you've answered 97% of what is important about the language? How many ways can someone ask about error reporting?

chrislomax 14y ago

I don't generally have a problem on StackOverflow. The last few questions I have asked have been quite high level and not been asked before and they tend to get some good answers / guesses. I find that a well structured question gets some good answers, I find a lot of people leaving their question open to interpretation and people cannot be bothered to ask the same old questions because the poster has neglected to be specific in their question. I find a lot of people use it being lazy as well, most questions are simply part of the language / subject they are asking about but they cannot be bothered to read up on it. They would rather ask insanely simple questions to get other people to provide an answer for it.

jiggy2011 14y ago

I think there is a general problem with Q&A/Forums in general. I will generally only ever go to a website to ask a factual question if I cannot easily find the answer myself either from documentation or experimentation. If I ask a question on Q&A it's because the answer is not forthcoming , this may be because my entire approach to the problem is wrong or maybe I'm doing something that only a handful of people would ever want to do. In that case I am relying on the right people actually seeing my post which would have low odds, so I am better served using dedicated forums/newsgroups for the library in question. So this really leaves opinion based questions as the best things to ask, which don't seem to be encouraged on SO and the format of correct/wrong doesn't work there so well anyway. Another issue is that I'm usually asking questions related to work things that I am doing, and while I can easily justify using time that I am paid by someone else to ask questions it is less easy to justify spending work time answering other people's questions in order to gain rep. Also giving a good answer to many questions involves showing sample code , or digging back into something I did a while ago so it's not really something I can do in 2 minutes. So this means I either have to answer questions somewhat covertly or wait until I get home by which time I may well have other things to do.

soupboy 14y ago

It is interesting that some of these same criticisms have been applied to Wikipedia and the reasons remain the same too

memset 14y ago

Closing questions - no, deleting questions - really really grinds my gears. Nothing is more frustrating than finding a google result to SO, clicking through, and arriving at a 404. Nothing is more frustrating that searching for that great answer I read last year and not being able to find it because the question has been deleted. These are often questions that have been kicking around for 4 years, and, well, gone. Of course, if you have enough SO points, then you probably don't care whether you've deleted a question, you can still see them. While we're at it, SOers have always been, and are increasingly... well, jerks! If you are a new programmer, then of course your question will have incomplete information, because you don't know how to ask a good question yet. So stop downvoting into oblivion, please, and give people a little bit of time to acclimate and improve their question before closing. I am in the top 10% of SO users as measured by points (lol.) What can I do, as a community member and hacker, to fix these things?

justinhj 14y ago
Due to this problem I think the site would be much more useful if the deleted posts just had a red warning at the top like wikipedia. "this question was flagged for being funny" "a little off topic" let the user decide if he wants to look or not. Buyer beware.
kanamekun 14y ago
Wikipedia editors can also come across as jerks. A lot of new members get turned off and end up leaving the community... this happens even more often with female editors. On the one hand, it's wonderful that both SO and Wikipedia are "well-kept gardens": http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism/ On the other hand, at some point both communities struggle with being inclusive and welcoming. Maybe Joel is right though, and the two goals are mutually exclusive? I personally hope that they're not, but don't have any examples to point to that are successful on the level of Wikipedia or StackOverflow.

tucson 14y ago

Google, Wikipedia and StackOverflow/StackExchange are my favorite "creations" on the Internet. But StackExchange has been a big disapointment for me. No big traction on the StackExchange sites, and moderators constantly closing questions without providing better alternatives. It's really a turn-off. (StackOverflow is still great though).

spolsky 14y ago

None of the actual metrics of the site bear this out. I don't know what "myspacing" is, and "floundering" is pretty subjective, but in terms of actual measurable things, we have more questions asked, more questions answered, more people active on the site, more sites with more activity and most metrics are up about 100% in the last year. Some of the things that we track pretty closely (like number of users who ask or answer 5 times monthly) are steadily growing.

Roboprog 14y ago
You need to look into somehow adding a "question age" increment to answer point values. That seems to be the biggest legitimate recurring issue in the discussion. Otherwise, the system seems to be working as intended.
andrewcooke 14y ago
so why are so many people convinced otherwise? most posts here are from people apparently tired of so. if you're only measuring positives, what are you missing that explains the negatives? it's understandable being defensive. but maybe that reflex is causing you to miss something? [edit: also, how do you measure evaporative cooling?]
- chavesn 14y ago
  One possible explanation: People here, generally speaking, like a community that is about the people. Aside from meta.stackoverflow, Stack Overflow's model makes that difficult. That's ok, because Stack Overflow is not a social network - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/128552/143601 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/128552/143601
  - wpietri 14y ago
    Well, they don't want Stack Overflow to be a social network. But like Soylent Green, it's made out of people. In SO's case, inconveniently alive people. Humans are inherently social, and the amount of effort SO staff and moderators have to go to trying to stamp that out is a sign that SO really is a social network. I always think it's a bad sign when product designers think they know much better than their users what they want. I think that's what killed Friendster. I think that's why Google Plus is kinda sad and sterile. If you're going to go to all the trouble of making a product for people, I'd rather you listened to them from time to time.

mtrn 14y ago

A couple of points (from a top 0.47% user, but that's not why I'm on SO): * imagine googling for a programming questions and be stuck in 2008 - I don't want to go back * imagine researching a wittgenstein paper - do you need philosophy.stackexchange.com - probably not; the numbers show, that SO's still the metrics vanguard - I think the demand for the niche sites is certainly there, but large communities have formed around traditional forum sites - and people are happy with that - so there is no pressing need to switch to the new format * concerning questions - it has been a phenomenon since the beginning, that the simplest answers (C-C C-V the docs) got the most upvotes - interesting hard questions don't earn you much reputation, if that's what you're after - I still get a lot of upvotes for year-old answers, which everybody could have written, while the answers I invested hours in remain relatively untouched; but the main value for me comes from learning by answering questions: try to bring your point across in a few words, collect useful references and show working code - it's like a daily workout equivalent in the tech field * open questions: I'm trying to make it a habit to answer one hard, unanswered, maybe older question each week - because it's true, the "reputation clock cycle" leaves a lot behind... * moderation: most moderators have been long around - and I can somehow guess, in which tags a person is active, because I likely saw their comments, answers, flags already a couple of times - can't really blame them for closing a lot of questions - it's hard; if you can, sift through http://stackoverflow.com/tools/flagged http://stackoverflow.com/tools/flagged and you might know what I mean * tldr: SO rocks if you're a programmer, for other SE sites YMMV; unsatisfied with closed questions? reopen them or discuss it on meta - it's not possible that moderators don't make mistakes and it's not true, that you can't at least try to discuss specific issues; unsatisfied with unanswered hard questions: find one and write up something great

Roboprog 14y ago
Yes, the organization and search-ability is invaluable. Of course most of the content eventually becomes "geologic" as new material is steadily put down at about a steady rate, the rate of "in the last year" material must become a steadily smaller percentage. I found at least one of the newer sites, the Ubuntu S/E, to be quite useful for troubleshooting LTS version 12 just a few days after 12 came out.
jofer 14y ago

niels_olson 14y ago

I disagree. I recently picked up pyparsing, and in trying to understand (I'm not a comp sci major), I made an account on stackexchange. The author of pyparsing answered my question. I'm sold.

martmarc 14y ago
Wait until said author or the author of another tool / API enters in an argument with one of the elected moderator and gets banned: you're going to be "unsold". This is precisely what this discussion is about: it's about obviously knowledgeable SO users that are getting more and more pissed off by the behavior of these "close-trigger-happy" moderators. And this is relatively new: it wasn't anywhere near as bad two years ago on SO. The one thing that prompted me to leave is twice I spend time answering a question only to see the whole thread getting deleted: this is a waste of my time (I don't care about the b*llshit reason invoked by those overzealous mod to close the question: I care about my time spent helping people being lost). I'm not bringing anything anymore to a "community" that is so prone on wasting their user's time.
- niels_olson 14y ago
  I agonize with a similar problem, but I think anyone with a blog will agree there is a real curatorial challenge there. I know Edward Tufte; he routinely deletes his own contributions to his own forum, and will not hesitate to delete material contributed to experts in their fields, often post-publication.

pbharrin 14y ago

IMHO StackOverflow jumped the shark when it started adding karma or whatever the fuck they call it.

napolux 14y ago
That's gamification... :D

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

krosaen 14y ago

I routinely find the question I'm asking has already been answered when googling, and have rarely had a question go unanswered. The hard part in my experience when going to try and answer some questions is it seems like there are more and more questions by inexperienced coders expecting people to write basic code for them, or not formulating the question in a way that will be useful to others in the future - instead they're pasting in their code and asking, "why isn't this working". Instead of, "I would expect this framework to behave as follows but it's not" it's "Here's 50 lines of code, why isn't it working?" The only way to answer such questions is to get their code up and running somewhere, perhaps on a jsfiddle, figure out what's wrong (often something as trivial as a syntax error), and then tell them. Doesn't feel very gratifying to do one off debugging on behalf of the person asking especially if the answer is unlikely to be useful to others in the future.

evincarofautumn 14y ago

I disagree with the author on a few points. The branching out of Stack Exchange has been excellent—I’m mostly active on English (14k), SO (9k), and Programmers (6k), but I often browse the other sites to pick up useful and interesting information that I would never have come across if it weren’t for that diversification. Where else can I stumble across juicy morsels about mathematics, or TeX, or any of several languages I don’t speak—all in one place? I find the idea that Stack Exchange is anti-community laughable. The chat system is excellent and has relieved a lot of the tension between contributing to the site and just having fun meeting people who share your interests. I know a lot more about my fellow language enthusiasts, C++ programmers, and Haskellers than before. And more people read my blog and watch my YouTube videos now. I call that a win. So: the last time I asked a good question on SO? Last month. The last time I gave a good answer? This week. The system still works from my point of view. And I’m one of the guys who actively edits questions so they don’t get closed for stupid reasons—moderation isn’t restricted to just moderators.

kamaal 14y ago

I really follow the ESR's asking questions the smart way guide pretty seriously(http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html) and most of my easy to difficult questions get answered easily without ever asking a question. What I really care for is getting answers to tough questions. The problem with SO is it doesn't aim to be a QA site on the longer run. It aims to be a database of programming answers site that slowly evolves to solving most commonly faced programming problems. I don't know if their aim is to be advertising based revenue site on the longer run. I ask a question because I want to get help. It has so happened when I absolutely can't get anything out of the problem at hand. I go on SO and ask a question, often I've been down voted down to oblivion, then I delete the question. Because all I see in response is sarcasm, cynicism and attempts by commenters to prove how big a fool I am. To me stack overflow looks like site that wishes to attract people who already know answers to their questions, but want it put in a community wiki kind of way. But I do agree that a simple Google search on SO sites, gives you solutions to most commonly known programming problems. And not just that most commonly known problems on areas that stack exchange sites deal with. These address most problems people face daily. Tough problems is a different cup of tea. But most common problems often get answered and their database seems to be growing with regards to those problems. And this might also be a great business model for SO. SO was the cool new shiny tool, few years back. We all like to play with Shiny tools. Until something new, and more shiny come along. These days most of colleagues ping me with interesting answers on quora. I would be happy with Quora opening their questions for reading without opening an account.