6 ms·

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 measurabl

by 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.
    - codinghorror 14y ago
      We do listen to the people! No other site gives so much power to regular users, up to and including moderator elections. The problem with listening to the people too much is that popularity becomes the most important metric, with predictable results: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popularity/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul... It's a balancing act. What people actually want, and what they think they want, are often two different hings.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - wpietri 14y ago
        Listening to people is entirely different than electing moderators. Nobody here is complaining that you aren't serving insiders. But I do see a lot of grumbling from people who feel like they have been forced out. In the link, you seem to be basically making a slippery slope argument. I am sure a lot of people agree that they don't want a sea of memes. But a lot of reasonable people feel you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. A modestly subjective question like "What are the relative merits of frameworks X, Y, and Z?" is not anything like a rage comic. Neither is a reasonable discussion on programming mistakes. Your "opportunity cost" argument strikes me as entirely wrongheaded. You pretend there are only two things people can do in the world: subjective questions and the objective ones. Your worry that a topic expert is spending 10 minutes on something he enjoys rather than the thing you want him to do is paternalistic and controlling. Every real community bonds not just over the practical stuff, but the fun stuff. It's as if you're saying that Golden Gate Park should be removed because those people should be out picking up trash or working to pay taxes.
        codinghorror 14y ago
        I'm saying that Golden Gate Park is not the same as your office building, or school campus. I don't begrudge the park the right to exist, but places of learning aren't places of pure entertainment, at least not in the Stack Exchange worldview.
- DanBC 14y ago
  People have different expectations from a Q&A site. SO is pretty rigid about what they want. That's a good thing - their servers, their rules. Firm guidelines allow users to find either post useful questions, or find some other site. Except, that's not what happens. Someone asks a question that's a lousy fit for the SE format; and people like it, and upvote it and answer it and the answers get upvotes. Then some mod comes along and closes it, and there's a bunch of negative feeling. SO is huge, and needs constant tending to keep it useful. Cool urls don't change, but when Mark Pilgrim (who has a gajillion urls over SE) leaves the Internet there's a gajillion urls that need to be found and changed. (No, I have no idea why a site run by programmers, for programmers, can't kludge together a script to search for and replace urls.) That's one small example. There are plenty of other examples. Then there's the "problem" of duplicate answers. Ideally, there would be one great question, with a bunch of answers, with the best answer being upvoted most and the answer most fitting being accepted. But very few people searches before asking, and all the tags are not useful, so there are a lot of duplicates. That could be okay, except the dupes are usually worse quality than one great question. And the answers lose quality over time - there's only so many times that someone is going to write a great answer. Then the gamification is broken on some of the sites. You start off almost unable to make any contribution, and people with low scores do not get the upvotes. (This guy with a million votes must know what he's talking about, UPVOTE.) In theory you could concentrate on an obscure segment. In practice not much on SO is obscure because there are so many users. The fragmentation is a bigger problem, I think. I want to ask a question about linux software, on my Ubuntu install. Already there are two different SE's I could ask on. There could be more depending on the software. This is a more vicious form of the duplicates problem. The proliferation of SEs into ever more niche segments is okay, I think. They either sink or swim. Lousy for you if you've invested time and effort into something that sinks. There is definitely a niche for a subjective version though. All those questions that peope love to ask, and answer. ("What's your favorite monspace font?" "What are your 3 most important programming pearls of wisdom?" "What book did you find most useful when you started, and what is most useful today?" etc etc. Obviously, versions of these questions exist in reddit and /prog/ and news:comp.* and etc etc. FWIW I love the SE sites, and I love the fierce moderation. I've disagreed with it at times, and certainly with the cold way it gets implemented. But I'm glad SE exists. I just wish I knew a where I could ask different questions and have them seen by a huge crowd of clueful users.
adventureful 14y ago
I noticed that according to Quantcast your uniques is flat for the last four months or so (about 15m per month roughly). The flatline is pretty dramatic on a three year scale. Is there an expectation that growth will pick up?
- kmontrose 14y ago
  Stack Overflow always experiences a "summer lull", typically starting around March or April. Our best guess is lots of people taking vacations offsetting growth, on the 3 year graph you'll notice growth resumes sometime around September every year. I honestly don't care* too much about it, we're in the business of quality questions and answers; traffic is a side effect, not a goal. (Disclaimer, SE Inc. Employee etc. etc.) *Provided it's high enough to pay the bills naturally, which isn't that hard to do.
ArbitraryLimits 14y ago
I'm curious whether you track any metrics that try to distinguish questions and answeres posted simply for the information, vs those posted mainly to gain online reputation?
breck 14y ago
I use StackOverflow more than ever. It has been indispensable in building our new product. I've rarely run into a problem in the past 6 months that wasn't solved on StackOverflow.
strictfp 14y ago
What about measuring number of upvotes on questions closed as not constructive /not about programming? I get the feeling that the technical questions are getting saturated, and that the community moved towards more soft issues (management, people skills etc). But soft issues get rejected. Perhaps start softie-programmer.com? At least do something other than closing them.
- evincarofautumn 14y ago
  programmers.stackexchange.com is for more subjective issues related to software development, but things are still expected to follow the Q&A format.
- codinghorror 14y ago
  Well, there is: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ -- for conceptual, no-source-code whiteboard programming questions http://workplace.stackexchange.com/ http://workplace.stackexchange.com/ -- for questions about general professional workplace issues that aren't specific to programming And of course the rest of the sites at http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic I'll be the first to tell you that our Q&A engine isn't necessarily effective at every topic. It's primarily effective at technical-ish topics where there can be somewhat definitive answers backed by a bit of research. That's still a pretty big chunk of the world, e.g.: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su...
  - TylerE 14y ago
    My fundamental problem with that approach is that I don't want to read 5 sites. I want to read 1 site with the content I want on it. The ghettoization of stack-exchange was a mistake. Give me an interface more like reddit - let me pick which areas I want to see questions from, all merged on to one page.
    - codinghorror 14y ago
wpietri 14y ago
As far as measuring the sort of thing people are talking about: How has your Net Promoter Score changed? Do you do surveys with questions like, "How disappointed would you be if Stack Overflow went away tomorrow?" How does attrition of users with at least 3 upvoted answers look over time? I wouldn't expect the metrics you mention to capture the sort of user satisfaction issues, and I could see the above numbers not showing a problem because general growth is masking specific issues. I'm sure you can name quite a number of products whose quality decline started well before popularity peaked.
- codinghorror 14y ago
  perhaps, but the underlying post is remarkably light on actual metrics and details -- or even specific examples -- of what quality decline means.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    Sure. It's his blog. Providing you with hard evidence to drive your product design process isn't his job. It's yours.
    - codinghorror 14y ago
      He provided no evidence. Do some science, don't waste everyone's time with unsubstantiated opinions. That's actually what Stack Exchange is about, so it's not surprising I guess that there's this impedance mismatch. If you want to just have a bunch of opinions, take it to Quora.
      - wpietri 14y ago
        So you get to set the rules for what appears not only on Stack Exchange, but some guy's own blog? I'd love to see your explanation for that. If you want to see if he has evidence, try asking him. And not in a "it's your job to argue with me" way. Call him up on the phone, ask open questions, and then listen to the answers without being demanding or dismissive like you are here. That's a pretty basic product management skill. If it's something you're not familiar with, plenty of people teach classes. I know the Luxr folks do a good job, for example.
3pt14159 14y ago
Most of the easy answers are solved, so that is part of it. Maybe the OP is partially getting bored what with over 19k of karma. As an aside, I have to say spolsky that SO has made a real, measurable impact on my life. The number of times I type my query site:stackoverflow.com into google is higher than any other site.
fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
But do you think he has a point about over-specializing? Is there an optimum level of just enough specialization?
sohels 14y ago
SO should get a noble prize for changing so many developers' lives in so many ways.
sireat 14y ago
My current pet peeve is with Google routinely returning first ten positions for SO answers, of which two or three are spot on, but rest of the list could have been better served by independent blogs which appear on page 3 or 5. Granted this is Google's algorithm's fault not SOs problem. There is no reason to give a single site the first n listings no matter how authoritative it has become (and SO is very authoritative now).
- cruise02 14y ago
  This is a legitimate issue. We'd prefer to just have one canonical resource for each question asked. We do try to help Google out by merging duplicate questions together when we can, but with 3.5 million questions to review some topics can get out of control.
willvarfar 14y ago
(blog author) Howdy Joel, its really quality not quantity and my subjective opinion of the appeal of the site(s). Why did you shut down the old JoS forum?

by spolsky 14y ago

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.
  - codinghorror 14y ago
    We do listen to the people! No other site gives so much power to regular users, up to and including moderator elections. The problem with listening to the people too much is that popularity becomes the most important metric, with predictable results: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popularity/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul... It's a balancing act. What people actually want, and what they think they want, are often two different hings.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - wpietri 14y ago
      Listening to people is entirely different than electing moderators. Nobody here is complaining that you aren't serving insiders. But I do see a lot of grumbling from people who feel like they have been forced out. In the link, you seem to be basically making a slippery slope argument. I am sure a lot of people agree that they don't want a sea of memes. But a lot of reasonable people feel you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. A modestly subjective question like "What are the relative merits of frameworks X, Y, and Z?" is not anything like a rage comic. Neither is a reasonable discussion on programming mistakes. Your "opportunity cost" argument strikes me as entirely wrongheaded. You pretend there are only two things people can do in the world: subjective questions and the objective ones. Your worry that a topic expert is spending 10 minutes on something he enjoys rather than the thing you want him to do is paternalistic and controlling. Every real community bonds not just over the practical stuff, but the fun stuff. It's as if you're saying that Golden Gate Park should be removed because those people should be out picking up trash or working to pay taxes.
      - codinghorror 14y ago
        I'm saying that Golden Gate Park is not the same as your office building, or school campus. I don't begrudge the park the right to exist, but places of learning aren't places of pure entertainment, at least not in the Stack Exchange worldview.
DanBC 14y ago
People have different expectations from a Q&A site. SO is pretty rigid about what they want. That's a good thing - their servers, their rules. Firm guidelines allow users to find either post useful questions, or find some other site. Except, that's not what happens. Someone asks a question that's a lousy fit for the SE format; and people like it, and upvote it and answer it and the answers get upvotes. Then some mod comes along and closes it, and there's a bunch of negative feeling. SO is huge, and needs constant tending to keep it useful. Cool urls don't change, but when Mark Pilgrim (who has a gajillion urls over SE) leaves the Internet there's a gajillion urls that need to be found and changed. (No, I have no idea why a site run by programmers, for programmers, can't kludge together a script to search for and replace urls.) That's one small example. There are plenty of other examples. Then there's the "problem" of duplicate answers. Ideally, there would be one great question, with a bunch of answers, with the best answer being upvoted most and the answer most fitting being accepted. But very few people searches before asking, and all the tags are not useful, so there are a lot of duplicates. That could be okay, except the dupes are usually worse quality than one great question. And the answers lose quality over time - there's only so many times that someone is going to write a great answer. Then the gamification is broken on some of the sites. You start off almost unable to make any contribution, and people with low scores do not get the upvotes. (This guy with a million votes must know what he's talking about, UPVOTE.) In theory you could concentrate on an obscure segment. In practice not much on SO is obscure because there are so many users. The fragmentation is a bigger problem, I think. I want to ask a question about linux software, on my Ubuntu install. Already there are two different SE's I could ask on. There could be more depending on the software. This is a more vicious form of the duplicates problem. The proliferation of SEs into ever more niche segments is okay, I think. They either sink or swim. Lousy for you if you've invested time and effort into something that sinks. There is definitely a niche for a subjective version though. All those questions that peope love to ask, and answer. ("What's your favorite monspace font?" "What are your 3 most important programming pearls of wisdom?" "What book did you find most useful when you started, and what is most useful today?" etc etc. Obviously, versions of these questions exist in reddit and /prog/ and news:comp.* and etc etc. FWIW I love the SE sites, and I love the fierce moderation. I've disagreed with it at times, and certainly with the cold way it gets implemented. But I'm glad SE exists. I just wish I knew a where I could ask different questions and have them seen by a huge crowd of clueful users.

adventureful 14y ago

I noticed that according to Quantcast your uniques is flat for the last four months or so (about 15m per month roughly). The flatline is pretty dramatic on a three year scale. Is there an expectation that growth will pick up?

kmontrose 14y ago
Stack Overflow always experiences a "summer lull", typically starting around March or April. Our best guess is lots of people taking vacations offsetting growth, on the 3 year graph you'll notice growth resumes sometime around September every year. I honestly don't care* too much about it, we're in the business of quality questions and answers; traffic is a side effect, not a goal. (Disclaimer, SE Inc. Employee etc. etc.) *Provided it's high enough to pay the bills naturally, which isn't that hard to do.

ArbitraryLimits 14y ago

I'm curious whether you track any metrics that try to distinguish questions and answeres posted simply for the information, vs those posted mainly to gain online reputation?

breck 14y ago

I use StackOverflow more than ever. It has been indispensable in building our new product. I've rarely run into a problem in the past 6 months that wasn't solved on StackOverflow.

strictfp 14y ago

What about measuring number of upvotes on questions closed as not constructive /not about programming? I get the feeling that the technical questions are getting saturated, and that the community moved towards more soft issues (management, people skills etc). But soft issues get rejected. Perhaps start softie-programmer.com? At least do something other than closing them.

evincarofautumn 14y ago
programmers.stackexchange.com is for more subjective issues related to software development, but things are still expected to follow the Q&A format.
codinghorror 14y ago
Well, there is: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ -- for conceptual, no-source-code whiteboard programming questions http://workplace.stackexchange.com/ http://workplace.stackexchange.com/ -- for questions about general professional workplace issues that aren't specific to programming And of course the rest of the sites at http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic I'll be the first to tell you that our Q&A engine isn't necessarily effective at every topic. It's primarily effective at technical-ish topics where there can be somewhat definitive answers backed by a bit of research. That's still a pretty big chunk of the world, e.g.: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su...
- TylerE 14y ago
  My fundamental problem with that approach is that I don't want to read 5 sites. I want to read 1 site with the content I want on it. The ghettoization of stack-exchange was a mistake. Give me an interface more like reddit - let me pick which areas I want to see questions from, all merged on to one page.
  - codinghorror 14y ago

wpietri 14y ago

As far as measuring the sort of thing people are talking about: How has your Net Promoter Score changed? Do you do surveys with questions like, "How disappointed would you be if Stack Overflow went away tomorrow?" How does attrition of users with at least 3 upvoted answers look over time? I wouldn't expect the metrics you mention to capture the sort of user satisfaction issues, and I could see the above numbers not showing a problem because general growth is masking specific issues. I'm sure you can name quite a number of products whose quality decline started well before popularity peaked.

codinghorror 14y ago
perhaps, but the underlying post is remarkably light on actual metrics and details -- or even specific examples -- of what quality decline means.
- wpietri 14y ago
  Sure. It's his blog. Providing you with hard evidence to drive your product design process isn't his job. It's yours.
  - codinghorror 14y ago
    He provided no evidence. Do some science, don't waste everyone's time with unsubstantiated opinions. That's actually what Stack Exchange is about, so it's not surprising I guess that there's this impedance mismatch. If you want to just have a bunch of opinions, take it to Quora.
    - wpietri 14y ago
      So you get to set the rules for what appears not only on Stack Exchange, but some guy's own blog? I'd love to see your explanation for that. If you want to see if he has evidence, try asking him. And not in a "it's your job to argue with me" way. Call him up on the phone, ask open questions, and then listen to the answers without being demanding or dismissive like you are here. That's a pretty basic product management skill. If it's something you're not familiar with, plenty of people teach classes. I know the Luxr folks do a good job, for example.

3pt14159 14y ago

Most of the easy answers are solved, so that is part of it. Maybe the OP is partially getting bored what with over 19k of karma. As an aside, I have to say spolsky that SO has made a real, measurable impact on my life. The number of times I type my query site:stackoverflow.com into google is higher than any other site.

fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago

But do you think he has a point about over-specializing? Is there an optimum level of just enough specialization?

sohels 14y ago

SO should get a noble prize for changing so many developers' lives in so many ways.

sireat 14y ago

My current pet peeve is with Google routinely returning first ten positions for SO answers, of which two or three are spot on, but rest of the list could have been better served by independent blogs which appear on page 3 or 5. Granted this is Google's algorithm's fault not SOs problem. There is no reason to give a single site the first n listings no matter how authoritative it has become (and SO is very authoritative now).

cruise02 14y ago
This is a legitimate issue. We'd prefer to just have one canonical resource for each question asked. We do try to help Google out by merging duplicate questions together when we can, but with 3.5 million questions to review some topics can get out of control.

willvarfar 14y ago

(blog author) Howdy Joel, its really quality not quantity and my subjective opinion of the appeal of the site(s). Why did you shut down the old JoS forum?