
Looking for a new CEO - g3rv4
https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-stack-overflow/
======
peeters
> _One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next
> generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and
> inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for
> people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s
> specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an
> even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers
> often see._

>

> _I care a lot about this. Being a developer gives you an unparalleled
> opportunity to write the script for the future. All the flak that Stack
> Overflow throws in the face of newbies trying to become developers is
> actively harmful to people, to society, and to Stack Overflow itself, by
> driving away potential future contributors. And programming is hard enough;
> we should see our mission as making it easier._

It's good to see that acknowledgement coming from Joel. I wasn't one of those
newbies facing that snark, but as an earlier contributor it was really
depressing to see the general attitude shift from "yeah OK this question's not
the best but it was asked in good faith so I'll answer" to "you're a worthless
human being for wasting our time with imperfection".

~~~
soneca
As a junior developer for two years now, what frustrates me is _not_ the
responses to the questions I ask. I almost never had the urge to ask any
questions, most of them are already asked and answered in a similar enough
form so I can learn from them.

What do frustrates me is how I, as a newbie, am incapable of contributing to
the site.

I can't upvote an answer that was particularly good to my case. Dozens
(literally dozens) of times I clicked to upvote an answer that was just the
right one for my case and it wasn't the accepted or most upvoted answer. Only
to get this as a reply:

\- _" Thanks for the feedback! Votes cast by those with less than 15
reputation are recorded, but do not change the publicly displayed post
score."_

What?? As a junior learning through an answer, I want to contribute it right
away and acknowledge the person who helped it. As well as signalizing to other
people that that answer is a good one. Why my upvote do not count? I don't
understand the reason behind this design decision.

Then I try to comment on the answer to make it explicit how it helped me and I
get:

\- _" You must have 50 reputation to comment"_

This rule at least I kind of understand the logic (avoid spamming, flamewars
maybe?), but it does not make it any less frustrating.

I cannot contribute to the site and to the people that helped me so much at
the beginning of my learning path.

I can Ask, Answer and Edit without any reputation threshold. But those are
precisely what a junior developer will most likely _not_ want to do while
learning the basic stuff through SO.

These design choices made me totally give up of any urge to _participate_ in
SO and I only consult the answers without engaging or recognizing any of the
humans that helped me.

~~~
yroc92
I’ve been a member of stack overflow and programming professionally for over 4
years and still can’t upvote, comment on or answer questions.

~~~
fhbdukfrh
Well, to be blunt is say you've been a consumer of SO. There's nothing wrong
with this but I'd argue that if you don't have 15 rep after 4 years you've
been paid back with the knowledge you've gained.

If you can't find a way to get 50 rep on SO get 200 on any other exchange site
and that will credit you 100

~~~
apple4ever
That's the problem. I've tried to get rep but it's hard. I have a lot to
contribute but no way to do so.

------
no1youknowz
I was pretty into SO back in '13, contributing and asking questions.

I recently posted a question. Here's how it went.

Posted question, gave some urls to documentation, wrote up code example and
asked for help on a specific point.

Downvoted and commented that it wasn't what the rules specified.

Although I didn't find anything wrong with my post compared to said rules, but
adjusted the post. Downvoted again.

Adjusted again and still more downvotes and no helpful comments.

At this point I just deleted the question and sought help elsewhere.

\------

Whereas before you would get your question edited if it wasn't within the
guidelines or perhaps people would not downvote but comment on how you could
be more specific.

Instead it was as if I had to "do the work" for them to understand what was
being asked or do as much as I could so it wasn't taxing for them.

The help I got elsewhere was actually from reddit. Another user actually did
go through my code and the solution was trivial. Being a solo developer and
not having more than 1 pair of eyes can sometimes get you in the weeds.

Now I just use SO for reading and getting hints on what I'm working on myself.
It's good in that respect. It's just a shame it's gotten so toxic. I know from
reading other forums when someone mentions SO, it's just not the same anymore.

I genuinely feel bad for new comers.

~~~
gota
Could you please link to the question? I don't mean to be adversarial but in
the past when I checked the questions people complained were downvoted for no
reason there were indeed reasons. Perhaps the guidelines have subtly changed
since your last experience and we can give you feedback on it.

~~~
albertzeyer
There might have been reasons. But then when you ask for them in the comments
section, people would just answer "you don't need to provide a reason to
downvote". So actually you never learn.

The other issue is, even when the reason is given, sometimes you would not
agree with that. E.g. sometimes people claim it's a duplicate, although they
are not deep enough into the topic to really tell, and then the question gets
closed. Or people claim is subjective, while in fact objective answers are
possible. Or many other things.

~~~
everfree
Do people really comment this? I've never seen anyone comment anything along
the lines of "you don't need to provide a reason to downvote" on a question
they are downvoting. I would probably call them out and/or flag a mod if I saw
it. Is this a very recent thing?

That being said, I agree that Stack Overflow has a duplicate issue.

~~~
albertzeyer
Yes, I have seen that a few times. E.g. some own question:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9945648/](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9945648/)
Or another one, which recovered now:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9946322](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9946322)
(Initially votes were all negative, but over time more and more positive votes
came.)

------
uberman
There is a fundamental problem with StackOverflow and I don't know they (a new
CEO) can fix it.

Many "new users" of the service view (or want to view) SO as a "question and
answer" site similar to ask.com or Quora. I don't think this is unreasonable
at all as even Google will suggest that SO is one of the most popular question
and answer sites on the web.

This flies in the face of the desire of SO leadership, many of its moderators
and, the "old guard" to have the site be a curated programming resource akin
to Wikipedia. This is also not unreasonable.

The rub comes with SO desire to invite questions to be answered rather than
soliciting tutorials or documentation akin to how Wikipedia works. SO even had
a failed attempt at exactly this (SO Documentation) a year or two ago.

In essence, they (SO) want the benefits of both models while not recognizing
the irreconcilable conflict. New users find the community hostile and
belittling, seasoned users find questions condescendingly trivial and
repetitive.

I look forward to seeing what their new CEO's vision is. Cultural change is
hard though.

~~~
w-m
On top of that, the QA style is simply not a good fit for helping "new users",
as you put them.

If you are just starting out with programming, you don't have a feeling for
what constitutes a good question that people can effectively answer. As of a
couple days ago, StackOverflow now tries to guide you into putting in the
relevant parts of the question with a wizard. But still a very high percentage
of questions is just lacking the information to make the question answerable.

Even if you have lots of patience and work with the user (through comments on
the question and edits) to shape the question into something that can be
answered, the format is still bad:

You can now write an answer, but depending on the problem, the user may still
need some help understanding parts of it. Or they have trouble using the code
in their program.

Now a discussion in the comments of the answer starts, but in the comments you
can't really write any code. Or you keep editing the answer with new
information. Or ask the user to write a new question, referencing the old one,
but it's a mess.

The point is, helping people to learn new things is a discussion. You need to
probe them for what they understood, and where they need more help. It's a
back-and-forth. And StackOverflow is completely unfit to provide this.

It's great for people who have gathered enough knowledge to clearly identify
their problem. But it's awful for newcomers.

I'm also interested to see how this develops, it's definitely not an easy task
to solve.

~~~
MuffinFlavored
I'm a senior software engineer with 10+ years experience who has never had a
problem getting a job at any company.

I've had 10-20 times where I've wanted to contribute on a SO question/answer
(that I have no doubt who have benefitted somebody else) but I don't have
enough reputation to comment...

The industry qualifies me as worth good enough, but SO doesn't?

~~~
tedmiston
You can write questions & answers before you gain the comment privilege.
(Everyone can write answers.)

[https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/create-
posts](https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/create-posts)

One or two successful answers is enough to unlock the comment privilege.

~~~
LocalPCGuy
To this point, a large portion of the SO rep I have is from one or two single
answers I posted.

------
chadash
It always saddens me a bit when I see companies looking to hire outside
executives rather than promoting from within. You promote someone to CEO and
that opens up a slot for someone to replace that person, and then the next
person and so on. As an employee, since I often don't see this, it makes me
feel like I ought to move to a different company if I want to move up.

Now there are cases where hiring an outsider makes sense. Perhaps you are
bringing in someone with experience to run a fast-growing company and no one
internally has that experience. Or you are hiring a new CFO for a tech startup
and there just isn't a large pool of people to promote internally to that
specific position. But given that stack overflow is a tool made by developers
and aimed large _at_ developers--and a mature company--it would be nice to see
someone rise through the ranks from a developer position at the company to
replace the CEO.

~~~
moate
As many people have pointed out: The value here might be getting someone who's
able to change the company culture and focus.

Stack currently feels like an attempt to be the worst parts of both Wikipedia
and Ask.com. They need to do a better job at something, and everyone will have
an opinion about what the fix is, but it feels like they need a change.

That said, hiring a developer to run Stack sounds weird to me. If anything,
I'd think you need a communications/publishing person since the goal is
collecting, archiving and distributing data. Maybe an archivist or librarian
even.

~~~
craftyguy
> The value here might be getting someone who's able to change the company
> culture and focus.

Are there many (or any?) cases of this having a long-term effect on a
company's culture/focus? I know it's the most-advertised reason for hiring an
outside CEO, but I couldn't find any examples of a company's culture changing,
and staying changed for years/decades, as a result of doing so.

~~~
moate
IDK. Probably? Best I can do is give up an article about why CEOs turn over
(and more frequently now than previously). Changing culture can be hard, but
is possible.

[https://www.strategy-
business.com/article/20306?gko=bfb5b](https://www.strategy-
business.com/article/20306?gko=bfb5b)

------
lultimouomo
I was curious if they would have been listing the job on their own platform.

They don't: [https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-
overflow#jobs](https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies/stack-overflow#jobs)

~~~
baud147258
I like how they are calling their helpdesk people "Junior Technology
Concierge"

------
umvi
There are a couple types of people:

\- Those who were "burned" asking questions on SO and have a grudge against it
now (mainly people just starting out in programming)

\- "Lurkers" who mainly just drive by from Google links and don't ever ask
questions

\- Experienced programmers with accounts that mainly lurk, occasionally ask or
answer a question, and never really have problems with the site

\- Power users with crazy high rep who who are extremely pedantic and patrol
their favorite communities too zealously and aggressively, and often
unsympathetically

I like to think the vast majority of people are in categories 2 and 3 and are
very satisfied with the quality and utility of SO.

The problem is that:

\- category 1, while a minority, is extremely vocal about their displeasure
with the site and so that gets a lot of attention

\- category 4 types tend to exacerbate category 1 types

\- category 4 though also does a very good job keeping the site clean,
accurate, well-edited, etc.

Moderation is a thankless, tedious job, and the people most willing to do it
might have other undesirable personality qualities unfortunately.

~~~
tedmiston
> Moderation is a thankless, tedious job, and the people most willing to do it
> might have other undesirable personality qualities unfortunately.

I'm sorry you feel this way. I donate my time to occasionally moderate on SO
to help people learn and become better programmers. In my experience, the vast
majority of mods quietly help like this asking nothing in return.

~~~
umvi
I could very well be wrong. I've never been a mod myself; maybe the bad ones
just stand out. It's certainly noticeable on certain subreddits when the good
mods are slowly displaced by power tripping bad mods.

------
ProAm
SO is like Amazon, I don't like using it, I don't want to use it, but its so
big it's unavoidable. The culture on SO is pretty bad, while it might be
better than the Q&A sites of yesteryear it's not a lot better.

~~~
jessriedel
It's not just a bit better, it's miles away the best. Likewise for Wikipedia,
which is unparalleled at its job and also has lots of negative culture. I'd
challenge you to find a community-generated and community-run site that is a
tenth as big/successful as either of those but is substantially more
welcoming.

In other words: the problem is probably not with anything particular to
StackOverflow or Wikipedia, the problem is with human beings. That's not to
claim that a new website with new rules/structure couldn't arise that was even
bigger yet more welcoming -- there's no reason to think the insights that
drove StackOverflow are optimal -- but just that it will require further
innovations in how communities are structured.

~~~
ProAm
I disagree. The old sites while sometimes had wildly varying answers, so does
SO, especially in newer technologies that change frequently (React, etc...)
you'll find answers that are 6 months old but out of date and new questions
get closed pointing to the old ones. And the culture on the old sites was
never as vile as SO is.

I won't be sad when the next gen Q&A comes around to fix the problems SO
introduced, just like when SO came around to fix the issues of the other
sites.

~~~
jessriedel
Your opinion that the quality of programming answers available was roughly as
good before StackOverflow as after is very uncommon.

~~~
ProAm
To be fair how people learn on the internet has changed too and I fully admit
that. Prior to SO you had to read quite a bit of answers that were close but
not quite what you were looking for, but by going through that process of
reading you learned quite a bit more as to how things worked, what the
language/software/hardware was trying to do and I feel as a result grasped a
deeper understanding to the problem and technology you were using. Now,
questions and answers are much more specific and thus create a much more of a
copy and paste environment where people just get stuff in and hope it works
without really learning the how and why. Part of that is because the need for
programmers over the past 20 years has grown to such an extent people really
don't care as much about the quality of work as long as it sort of works. They
needed a programmer with a pulse and will fix poor quality work later because
they need to ship now. Hardware also vastly outpaced the programs in
performance so doing things in a less than best manner wasn't as evident. Just
a generational/era thing.

SO definitely tried to reinvent the 'manual' for many years, which was silly
when there was already a manual to read.

~~~
scott_s
I feel the opposite: SO posts are often the launching-off point for me to find
the even more detailed stuff. Your feeling that things were somehow better
when they were worse, is I feel, misguided. Developers learning answers to
specific questions allows them to be better faster.

~~~
ProAm
I guess to each their own, I can see both sides but more often I see
developers stopping after a copy/paste from SO, and still have no better
understanding to how things work.

------
kareemm
Talk about increasing shareholder value!

The result of:

(num_person-hours_saved_by_SO * num_of_developers_in_world * dev_hourly_rate)

must be staggering. I'm sure companies around the world can point to SO for a
non-trivial percentage of bottom line revenue.

And forget about the bean counters for a sec: as a DEV, SO saves so much pain
that I have no idea what I did before it came to be.

SO is truly doing God's work (and I'm not a religious man).

~~~
yes_man
> The result of: (num_person-hours_saved_by_SO * num_of_developers_in_world *
> dev_hourly_rate) must be staggering. I'm sure companies around the world can
> point to SO for a non-trivial percentage of bottom line revenue.

There's also a negative effect on global developer skillset when developers
don't have to dig deeper into things or read documentations because they can
just find a working example from SO. Although Stackoverflow still probably has
a positive net effect for global skill of developers regardless. But a
developer who learns from the bottom up will most likely outperform a
developer who relies on finding working solutions from SO in the long run. And
while a company prefers to have a solution right now for monetary reasons, the
quality of developers the global workforce has in the same long run dwindles
when the primary goal is to save developer hours "right now". Again
highlighting that I still do consider SO a net positive, just that it is not a
flat out black and white hours saved function

~~~
ryandrake
> There's also a negative effect on global developer skillset when developers
> don't have to dig deeper into things

I consider “being able to resourcefully look up the answer to your question” a
critical developer skill, regardless of whether that answer comes from an
online forum or page 254 of the official spec or finding the right academic
paper. Having a nice searchable online resource contributes positively to this
developer skill!

------
pier25
I was quite active in SO around 2013 and still have a decent reputation there.

I rarely ask and answer questions anymore because 99% of the times the
question is already there with a number of answers. In many cases those
answers have been updated to reflect changes in the times (browser APIs,
languages, etc) which is awesome.

I've suffered from its toxicity a number of times, but that hasn't been my
dominant experience. All in all it's a super useful tool. I guess a lot of
programmers don't remember what it was like before SO, with vague forum
threads that never got to the point.

------
nlawalker
Is there something that SO can do to further segment the site and/or the
question pool without making it too hard to use or driving too many questions
into total invisibility?

The problem with SO as I see it is that every question is part of the same
pool of questions, only differentiated by topic tags. Every question is held
to the same standards. This is a contrast to the actual people who use the
site: askers and answerers are all using, looking for and expecting a huge
variety of different approaches and responses, and have wildly varying levels
of experience.

Reddit's subreddits completely transforms the site for people who use them -
people who browse the front-page have an entirely different experience and
different expectations from those who curate. I wonder if there's something
similar SO can do.

~~~
everfree
Stack Overflow is like Reddit's equivalent of /r/programming. There are tons
of other Stack Exchange sites on everything from Cooking to Electrical
Engineering to Role-playing, I encourage you to check them out.

That being said, it's true that they all use the same approach: Concise
questions and answers without any extra discussion.

------
billfruit
While SO has been a great resource over the years, a significant concern as I
see now is the too rapid churn in many topics like various JS frameworks,
android development, etc, where things are moving fast, accepted answers are
frequently obsolete and have become misleading or wrong, and I have not come
across mechanisms to handle this situation.

Also a fragmentation into multiple subject sites also isn't a great idea IMHO,
now for some categories for example you have to think of cross-posting to get
maximum responses.

~~~
umvi
I would like to see more effort in this area. "volatile" tags (like JS) should
auto mark popular questions as "stale" after a while and shuffle them back
into the question queue so that people can either provide up-to-date answers
to affirm that the answers aren't stale and are still relevant

------
sremani
>> ASP.NET MVC technology on a real website without too much of a disaster.
(In fact .NET has been a huge, unmitigated success for us

No matter what other's esp. those in start up world say, .NET stack delivers
value in spades, and it has only improved with .net core.

~~~
jchw
Big fan of the C# language, but honestly until .NET Core a lot of us simply
had to ignore it. I think MS was counting on it for selling Windows as a
platform at a time and I'm sure that worked to a degree but it probably didn't
do the long term trajectory of .NET any favors.

Luckily so far even with some missteps the .NET Core launch has been great. My
only complaint is that debugging needs to work outside of Microsoft editors.
Jetbrains has their own implementation, but I find it annoying that there is
no CLI tool, and I also recall a licensing snafu that broke debugging in Rider
for a while...

------
_hardwaregeek
I've stopped using StackOverflow too much, although it's probably more because
of my particular development needs. Namely, StackOverflow breaks down if you
need an answer about something reeeally specific, say a bug in a particular
library. This is especially exacerbated in ecosystems without centralized,
large libraries, like Rust, as well as in ecosystems that are fairly new, like
Rust.

Now, I don't think StackOverflow should necessarily address this, as this
problem is a little niche. But I do think it might get a little less niche as
developers move off the gigantic monolith library paradigm (jQuery, Boost,
etc.). Maybe there should be a way to sync GitHub issues with StackOverflow
(although each side has incentive to keep the user on their end). Or maybe
there should be a way of pinging important people in the ecosystem. It's nice
to @ someone in a GitHub issue if you know who has the solution to your
problem.

------
mooreds
Wow. Hard to see how you move the needle on making SO more welcoming when so
much of the behavior is in the larger community. I suppose there may be some
software changes that could help.

But I wish the next CEO luck, and appreciate what Joel and the team have
brought into the world.

------
samfisher83
I answered a question and got downnvoted for answering a newbie question.

~~~
throwaway23787
I asked a newbie question recently as I was working with an unfamiliar
programming language (EDIT: and could not find an answer to the question
already on the site).

I got nothing but comments, where one was an actual answer, and the rest were
condescending and often technically incorrect.

I made use of the answer, and deleted the question, in order to clear the
downvotes from my own (top 20%) account.

I guess the proper strategy for answering noob questions is to put the content
in a comment where (I think) it cannot be downvoted.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Why delete because of downvotes? I'm a top 8%, and my top karma producer is an
answer that is technically wrong, but is useful to some people. It's fun
watching the fighting upvotes/downvotes. It's currently at +124 / -58. But an
upvote is worth +10, a downvote -2, so...

~~~
throwaway23787
It was net negative (1 downvote, no upvotes), and the first comment was
someone "schooling" me on an account with my actual name on it, which I don't
particularly want as part of my public presentation.

EDIT: Actually looking back it was just the one person with the condescending
response, but the comment got two upvotes.

~~~
bryanlarsen
At least on HN, nothing attracts upvotes faster than a bad downvote. I know
myself if I see a grey comment that I don't think should be grey I upvote it
even in cases I wouldn't otherwise upvote. But that grey comment would have
been shown to a bunch of people...

------
pkamb
The most annoying thing about Stack Overflow for me is the multiple account
system for every site on the Stack Exchange network.

I have thousands of points of reputation on Stack Overflow. Why can am I not
allowed to edit posts or cast open/close votes on SuperUser or WebApps or
AskDifferent?

Many of these sites are esentially the same site and rules and user base, but
with slightly different topics. Some questions would fit on any of the sites,
and it's down to the random Google search you followed as to which site you
end up loading.

I'll essentially never be able to gain the rep needed on the non-SO sites,
even the bigger tech ones that have tons of crossover with Stack Overflow.

You can be a 20k rep Stack Overflow account, but land on a Stack Exchange
question from Google and it's a complete crapshoot if you'll even be able to
upvote the question.

~~~
KabaKun
> You can be a 20k rep Stack Overflow account, but land on a Stack Exchange
> question from Google and it's a complete crapshoot if you'll even be able to
> upvote the question.

If you have 200+ rep on any one site, you can upvote on any other site
(assuming you didn't spend/lose the rep somehow) if you actually create an
account there. Downvotes require more rep (125), so that requires some
participation on that specific site.

This Association Bonus (100 free rep on all sites as a reward for earning 200
on one) is designed to address a lot of your concerns. It allows upvoting,
flagging and commenting. If you see something that should be closed, you can
flag it for closure to bring it to the attention of users with sufficient rep
to close or indicate non-answers as such so that higher rep users can vote to
delete them.

The system as-is definitely leads to a lot of confusion, though. The
explanation I've heard for the siloing of reputation between the sites is that
reputation is an indication of trust and expertise in using a specific site.
If you know how what's on or off topic on SO, that doesn't necessarily mean
you know what's on or off topic on Puzzling or InfoSec. Each site has slightly
different cultural expectations, and the belief - which maybe should be tested
- is that that expertise doesn't cross between sites.

One part of the problem here is that someone can spend hours using a site and
know what's on topic or what should be deleted or downvoted or closed and
still never have any reputation on that site... and on the other end of that
spectrum, you can find very high rep users who either don't use those
moderation tools or use them incorrectly because they haven't actually taken
the time to understand how the community expects them to be used.

It's a hazy indicator of expertise at best but it's also a relatively low-
effort one to implement. It takes work to balance it and decide what actions
warrant a reputation reward but it's okay. Finding a better/different way to
achieve this indication of expertise and privilege may be worth considering
and may allow users to "test out" in a privilege to earn it without needing a
specific amount of points. This would allow invested users access to
privileges without requiring them to also be expert askers or answerers.

~~~
pkamb
> If you have 200+ rep on any one site, you can upvote on any other site

Yeah that's _if_ you create an account there. Land on a random SE site from
Google or from the Hot Network questions and chances are you don't even have
an account.

The site looks exactly like Stack Overflow, but if I press the upvote button I
get an annoying error and the person who wrote that answer doesn't get any
points.

If I _do_ create an account, every time I infrequently visit that site I'm met
with an annoying banner to "remember to upvote". Despite the fact that I
upvote Stack Overflow questions daily. You can't win.

Editing is the other major place where I feel this annoyance. On Stack
Overflow I edit a ton of posts to correct typos, grammar, code formatting, and
capitalization. But I can't donate my free labor on SuperUser or AskDifferent.
I'm not going to add these minor edits to a review queue. So the sites are
just worse off because of arbitrary site siloing.

> Each site has slightly different cultural expectations, and the belief -
> which maybe should be tested - is that that expertise doesn't cross between
> sites.

I'd very much question that belief. _Maybe_ for the more esoteric sites, but a
good user on Stack Overflow is going to be right at home on SuperUser, Ask
Different, or any of the myriad slightly-different-but-mostly-the-same tech
sites with slightly different focuses.

------
tnolet
I use SO almost daily but boy is that culture toxic. Twitter level toxic. The
new CEO has a tough job ahead.

~~~
umvi
Honestly, I haven't really seen much toxicity lately. Could you link to some
questions asked recently that have toxicity? I mainly hang out in python/c/c++
but even badly written newbie questions still tend to get answers from
friendly users, despite the downvotes.

Unless you are considering the downvotes themselves "toxic"

------
sergiotapia
Where do they go from here? It seems every question has been asked and every
new question has a 50/50 of getting closed by MoDeRaTorS as off-topic.

Gamification probably got them here, but is it a recipe for continued success
or a detriment to StackOverflow?

------
dyarosla
Love the jab at Quora

‘Oh and—hey!—we do not make you sign up or pay to see the answers.’

It’s sad how many companies nowadays do all they can to convert users to
signups/downloads/app installs. Give people the chance to sign up on their own
accord.

~~~
troygoode
It isn't a jab specifically at Quora, it's a jab at what the entire market
looked like before Stack Overflow came along – namely their arch-nemesis at
the time: Experts Exchange.

------
umvi
This is my opinion on what's happening.

New programmers want to learn. However, they want to learn using the path of
least resistance (who wouldn't?). SO is universally known by everyone as the
place where experts gather.

So why do newbies choose to ask questions on SO? Ultimately because they see
it as the path of least resistance to accomplishing their goal of [learning,
homework, etc.]:

\- Why read a book on C++ when you just need to know how to do that one
specific thing and an expert could give you a targeted response?

\- Why wrestle for hours with compiler messages when an expert can solve it in
2 seconds?

\- Talking to your teacher or professor is scary, vulnerable, and the very
thought might make you anxious. Much more comfortable to ask an internet
stranger!

\- Homework is due tomorrow, it's too late to ask the teacher for help! Time
to ask SO, there's no time for anything else.

\- My programming school/teacher/course is complete garbage. Or I'm attempting
to self-learn without formal courses. Time to lean on SO as a crutch to help
me through.

However, this is a problem because it creates a power dynamic. Professionals
want to help and get help from other professionals. Throw newbies in the mix
and they are essentially a parasite - they want help from professionals and
can't give anything back (yet).

Honestly, I think one solution is to put asking questions behind a paywall or
rep wall. People can still read everything for free, but to ask a question you
need to either pony up or be a contributing member of the community. This
would make a lot of newbies reconsider asking a question on SO because it's
like: "Hmm, I guess I could ask SO as a last resort, but maybe... I could put
in a few more hours of effort or ask my teacher, which are free" This in turn
would significantly reduce low effort newbie burden on the community and
encourage the newbies to visit the sources of knowledge they ought to be going
to in the first place.

This is all based on my own anecdotal observations, but I never asked a
question on SO until I was a working professional. I used SO all the time in
school, but read only - I leaned on my high school teacher and college TAs
mainly when I needed help.

~~~
detaro
I think to a degree it's also: Stack Overflow killed many of the other spaces
you could have asked for help before. Hand-holding a beginner is easier if you
can go back-and-forth, e.g. in a forum, but those mostly died out because lots
of traffic went to SO (also a general shift away from forums in general, but I
believe SO vastly accelerated that for programming topics).

~~~
hashhar
There's still Reddit and I find it helpful when debugging stuff or tryin to
bounce around ideas.

~~~
detaro
I never really got into reddit for "deep" stuff, but makes sense that some
communities like that are around.

------
paddy_m
Can someone explain glitch.com to me. I looked at the website and I don't have
a clue what it does or why it would be useful? It looks like some meme game.

~~~
anildash
From a developer perspective, Glitch is a full-stack coding environment that
lives in the browser and allows realtime simultaneous code editing with
automatic instant deployment. You can run any stack, but we've optimized for
easily deploying Node apps, and any app you see on the site, you can "remix" —
which clones the entire stack of that app and gives you your own, instantly
deployed, copy of the app. The code editor does a lot of smart things like
having a super-friendly revision tracking system (called "Rewind") that lets
you just slide back a timeline slider if you want to go back to a past commit,
but under the hood, it's just regular git.

There's also a social network built around those apps, so you can make
collections of apps you want to use, or projects you want to refer to for your
own work. And we're working to build a Teams product so you can use all those
code collaboration features at work and integrated with your other tools.

Finally, there's a capability that's kind of complementary to what Stack
Overflow does, which is that you can "raise your hand" (click on the emoji of
the person with their hand raised) right in the code editor in Glitch, and
it'll allow people to come in and help you with your code in realtime. There's
more to it, but that's what it does today.

~~~
paddy_m
Thank you.

------
yazaddaruvala
The biggest problem with SO now is the volume of content. This ends up
trickling into all parts of the community which demands perfection from both
the question asker and answerer.

I really hope the SO team is successfully able to move from un-versioned,
free-form text based Q&A into an API documentation++ platform.

Ideally a documentation platform that helps drive good debate and eventually
consensus.

~~~
Karunamon
They tried and gave up on precisely that idea.

[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-
documentation)

------
xtracto
We need an improved version of StackOverflow that factor age of a reply
(decaying points or something) and that groups similar answers with for same
questions but at different dates.

Several times when I search for something (say, how to do X in Ionic) I find a
reply that is old and does not apply to the current version of the library.

~~~
tedmiston
The "Active" sort tab feature on answer pages is meant to address this
problem.

------
bradenb
Part of me thinks that they should just archive SO as it is now (making it
accessible and read-only from a specific secondary location) and just reset
stackoverflow.com. I know a lot of programming problems are timeless, but many
are not. Seems like hitting reset every few years could be useful.

------
ykevinator
Stack overflow is a 50/50 gamble. You either get help or some self righteous
jerk flags your question and tells you youre stupid. I hope the new CEO fixes
this. Their brand equity is really bad but you use them because you don't have
that many options.

~~~
umvi
> Stack overflow is a 50/50 gamble

Only when asking questions.

I find in my work I read/use 100 questions or more for every 1 question I ask.
SO is amazing 99% of the time, and a bit of a gamble that 1% of the time when
you have a specific question you couldn't find resources on.

~~~
linuxftw
Yeah, as someone who has never asked a question, I can generally find what I'm
looking for without much effort.

So, from a 'drive users from google search' perspective, the current
moderation model must be working quite well.

I have little sympathy for questions asked by complete beginners. SO is
probably not the best place for that kind of thing.

~~~
moate
>>I have little sympathy for questions asked by complete beginners. SO is
probably not the best place for that kind of thing.

Welcome to the problem (as I see it) with SO! As someone who was a complete
beginner during the modern age of SO, I can tell you that it sure helped me
get into my current career (which is not coding related whatsoever) by driving
me away from the profession. "Who the fuck wants to work with assholes like
this"?

Was I asking stupid questions? Of course! Does anyone on SO owe me anything?
Not even a tiny bit! But this is a cultural choice. If this is what you want,
then it's doing exactly what it's supposed to. But many people don't want
this.

If I go to a library, the librarians will help me to the best of their
ability. That doesn't mean they teach me French, but at least show me where
the French books are. More often the tone from a comment was "lol, gtfo n00b
or get gud m8" which is unhelpful. Rarely was I getting a suggestion of a
resource that could help me answer the question I was posing. "RTFM" isn't
useful if you don't know what that manual even is.

There's all sorts of people with all sorts of personal stories about their
experience with the SO community, ranging from "I wouldn't be the CTO of my
company if not for them" to "I will never work in this industry again". I'm
not saying I'm right, or that things need to bend to me. I'm just putting a
perspective out there.

~~~
hashhar
SO has always explicitly stated that it aims to be a repository of knowledge.
And since theres no site which offers the kind of help you mention (which
involves discussion, going back and forth, trying some code, discussing again,
trying new code and reaching aha moment) it all goes to SO as well. Reddit
will help you much better for that usecase.

~~~
moate
I'm bowing out of this, as I wasn't trying to have a discussion. SO was not
helpful to me. I hate it and the coding community so much I left the industry
as I was starting out. My story is not unique, and other people have also been
driven out by this culture. This is my personal story. That's all it was.

Ya'll have fun.

~~~
umvi
You say you hate the coding community so much yet you like hanging out on HN?
HN is the essence of the coding community! Hackers sharing cool stuff with
each other.

Please don't judge the entire coding community based on a bad experience with
SO zealots. We aren't all mean, I promise :)

------
aboutruby
Stack Overflow is such a mess I prefer helping people on Reddit / Discord /
Slack nowadays.

SO is becoming read-only in my opinion.

------
gesman
Hopefully new CEO will tame some of the extremist mafia moderators and
reopened interesting discussions and questions.

------
0x262d
if late capitalism ruins stack overflow I swear to god I will throw a fit
online

more seriously, this is a real concern, a super useful communal website with
really high traffic is ripe for commodification.

------
dramm
All submitted resumes will be put on hold for five days and then deleted. :-)

------
blub
The idea that SO is "educating" anyone is laughable. It's mostly the place
where one gets information about poorly documented APIs.

What's especially repulsive to me is how well trained SO users are, spending
many minutes nicely formatting their questions and answers for those worthless
internet points.

~~~
Kaveren
This is a very cynical way to look at it. Some people may just like helping
people and sharing knowledge, and maybe they've also received help themselves
and want to give back to the community. I don't think this is repulsive.
There's many great questions that aren't about undocumented APIs. Take this
[0] for example.

As a side benefit, I'm sure the active contributions can give contributors
something to show to prospective employers.

[0] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53452713/why-is-2-i-i-
fa...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53452713/why-is-2-i-i-faster-
than-2-i-i-in-java)

~~~
kkarakk
i got question banned for 10 downvotes spread across 3 questions-2 of which
are still unanswered but have been "edited for grammar". not one comment as to
why the downvotes. stack is little more than a toy for answering
straightforward questions now

