
The Stack Overflow Age - jnet
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow-age/
======
payne92
SO is definitely a force, but I feel its usefulness has faded from inattention
to the user experience and use cases. For example:

#1. There's a huge "homework problem" (narrow, specific questions that aren't
broadly useful). Consider flagging homework as homework (and excluding it from
searches), trying to divert questioners to other resources before their
question is posted ("this looks like homework..."), and more thinking about
ways to codify the use case. I'd gladly help with homework if there were tools
focused on that (e.g. ability to comment on specific lines of code -- Gooogle
Docs for posted source code, etc.)

#2. There are oddly subjective editorial decisions, such as closing my
question about an API for generating USPS priority mail labels as "off topic":
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5690713/how-to-
programma...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5690713/how-to-
programmatically-generate-usps-priority-mail-labels)

(My view: "is there any API for doing X" is no different than "is there any
method/function for doing X", it's a question of existence, not opinion. But
even then, opinions are often very useful!)

#3. The best answer is often buried under the "accepted" answer. Over time,
highly upvoted answers should drift to the top.

#4. There should be explicit UI support for flagging stale/out-of-date
information. SO has a long tail of information now, and much of it is dated.
It should be super easy to note and see that.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
[2] isn't an example of "subjective editorial decisions"; your question was
off-topic because 'recommendation' questions are prohibited. For that tho,
there's a Stack Exchange sister site:

\- [Software Recommendations Stack
Exchange]([https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/))

I _don 't like_ that 'decision', i.e. to not allow recommendations, but I
understand the reasoning behind it, that recommendation questions are
basically polls. [But isn't everything on which people can vote basically a
poll too? Obviously yes in my opinion.]

~~~
ken
I never understood it, either. By that reasoning, almost any technical
question is an "opinion" question asking for a "recommendation".

For example, pretty much any question about C string handling has many
possible answers, e.g., [1] admits that comparing two strings is "rather
broad" and the various answers there recommend looping over each index and
comparing chars with ==, sscanf, strncmp, regexes, and PEGs. Opinions galore!

But if you want to know the difference between AWS EC2 and EB [2], even though
there's one pretty clear answer, somehow the admins unanimously find the
question to be "primarily opinion-based".

[1]:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16013031](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16013031)
[2]:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25956193](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25956193)

My _hunch_ is that due to the desire for longevity of content, there's a large
unspoken bias in favor of questions about simple programs, and against
questions about remote services (which are more likely to disappear or change,
even though that's not likely to happen with major AWS services), and that the
question closure explanations like "primarily opinion-based" are just a
smokescreen.

~~~
fhood
Also there seems to be no problem with users who submit opinions instead of
answers.

Q: How do I do X extremely specific thing that I need because I have an
unusual case that needs this specific thing.

A (top voted): Why would you want to do X? You shouldn't do that. I clearly
know more about your problem than you do because I assume everyone on here is
a college student and not a developer working with a large mostly static
codebase. You should do Y instead. It is much better.

~~~
nt8eo923nt45
I find this disingenuous. It is a _very_ common scenario that a new user knows
of some way to solve some part of their question (or just thinks they do), and
assumes the best/easiest/fastest/safest/whatever answer involves using that
technique. This is exactly the scenario that Alex Papadimoulis referred to in
his blog post[1] that I have to believe was the inspiration for his site The
Daily WTF[2]:

> "A client has asked me to build and install a custom shelving system. I'm at
> the point where I need to nail it, but I'm not sure what to use to pound the
> nails in. Should I use an old shoe or a glass bottle?" >...[potential
> answers] >b) There is something fundamentally wrong with the way you are
> building; you need to use real tools.

The answerer is often telling the person, what you are trying to do sounds
like a really bad/inefficient/ineffective/whatever solution. The common way to
solve this is Y because of reasons A, B, and C. Are you doing something where
those reasons are not a concern?

[1]
[https://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/408925](https://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/408925)
[2] [http://thedailywtf.com](http://thedailywtf.com)

~~~
fhood
I have no problem with alternate solutions, but for gods sake, at least answer
the original question as well.

------
aepiepaey
Stack Overflow is useful at times, and frustrating at others.

If you have basically no idea what you're doing, or just want an example for
something, it can be great.

On the other hand, if you try to find an answer about something you're really
knowledgeable about, the result is often unsatisfactory:

Like trying to find the reference documentation to answer some specific
question, and the documentation is buried under a lot of SO questions (that
usually don't answer that question).[1]

Or you find someone who asked _exactly_ the question you're looking for an
answer to, but it either: has no answer, despite being very old, or has been
closed due to being "not constructive" or "off topic".

[1]: While I generally prefer the in-language documentation, e.g. Python's
integrated documentation is often missing notices (deprecation notices,
warnings about illogical behaviour, ...) that exist in the web version.

~~~
Ajedi32
Yes, once you start asking _really_ difficult questions that require in-depth
knowledge of a niche topic to answer SO becomes less useful, since the pool of
people who know enough to actually answer your question is too small.

In cases like that I usually just end up answering my own question later,
after I've figured it out by other means.

~~~
klenwell
This is actually one of the use cases I really like. I'll often deliberately
add a question with an answer if I think it is something I'll use again in
future and is not found somewhere else obvious on the web.

------
zwieback
It's interesting to see all the negative comments about the SO culture here. I
just hadn't really noticed it but maybe it is a problem for beginners. I
generally find what I'm looking for and when I post a question I try to
research first to avoid spam. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?

~~~
Someone1234
I cannot help but read "beginners" in a derogatory tone. Or at the very least
a way to hand-wave away the unhealthy atmosphere that has formed at SO.

It is definitely a problem for people with low SO Reputation since others can
come along and edit their posts completely changing the context and meaning,
and seem more brave to bully low rep users (e.g. delete/dup their posts).

I have fairly high SO Rep from way-back-when, and all I seem to use that for
is undoing others abusive mod actions (like de-dupping something that points
to a completely different programming language or framework). But it isn't a
community I care to take part in much these days, too toxic.

Back in my day SO existed exactly to help beginners. Now they want to be "the
Wikipedia of programming questions." So be it, but none of us have to stick
around to help form their little out of date empire of desert.

~~~
klenwell
For my last two jobs, I've created a new SO account for that job. I'm a pretty
experienced user with decent reputation on my main account. I think I'm a
pretty good question writer. I do my research beforehand, pay attention to
niceties like formatting and grammar, and try to provide the right amount of
context.

My first couple questions almost immediately get downvoted without
explanation. Comparable questions from my main account rarely if ever face
this prejudice. If I sign in on my main account and reverse the mystery
downvotes, I'm usually good from that point on.

I feel a little dirty doing it. Other the hand, WTF is wrong with some of
these SO users?

I work with few young developers and students who have reported similar
issues. On my teams, I often encourage devs to share their questions once
their posted just so we can counter this kind of crap and, if they're new,
they can actually scrounge enough reputation to do basic stuff like upvote
questions and answers.

That said, I'm a huge fan of the site and all the thought that has gone into
the interface. And it looks like admins are doing they're best to deal with
this issue. It seems like one of those eternal struggles against human nature.

~~~
shagie
> If I sign in on my main account and reverse the mystery downvotes, I'm
> usually good from that point on.

That’s the type of thing that will get that account deleted for vote fraud and
sock puppetry. At that point, _all_ of the votes it cast will be invalidated
and all of the people you’ve tried to help by casting upvotes on their
questions in the effort to be nice will lose those votes and that rep.

That will leave a sour taste for many developers and will probably turn many
of them away.

------
grouseway
>Instead of putting all the Java programmers in one little forum and all the
C++ programmers in another, we dumped everyone together and just let them tag
their questions

And yet for some reason the site can't handle off-topic and pure "answerable
by fact" questions on one site? So often I search for something and the top
post is an closed off-topic post on SO. I've never even had one of my own SO
questions closed as off-topic so it's not a personal grudge - I just think the
site is very stubborn about this. So many questions and organic search results
is a huge signal that they are ignoring.

It's not like they're running a forum were the first page would be polluted
with off topic stuff if they allowed it. Their fear of becoming yahoo Q&A has
prevented them from filling a need that is there. Often I just want to
people's opinions on stuff - that's mostly why I read HN.

------
zeveb
> In the early days of the Internet, before the Web, there was a system called
> Usenet which created primitive online discussion forums.

I wouldn't call Usenet groups 'primitive online discussion forums'; indeed, I
rather strongly believe that in most respects Usenet was better & more
advanced than current technologies.

It was _fast_. How fast? Really, _really_ fast: every article was already
sitting on your local system, so there was no network lag (or just LAN lag, if
your local system was on a network). Articles were plain ASCII text: no ads,
no images, no JavaScript. The combination of local articles & small articles
wins over web pages every day of the week.

It was easy to find stuff. While the system was distributed across the world,
there was a nice, neat hierarchy. This wins over the Web, which needs a
service like Google to be usable. If one wanted to, one could perform full-
text search over the entire newsfeed in realtime (James 'Kibo" Parry was
famous for this). Imagine being able to grep the Internet!

It was decentralised: you could get multiple newsfeeds from multiple sources.
You could have site-local newsgroups if you wanted to, or just share certain
groups with your peers.

It had killfiles. It's hard to express, nowadays, how valuable these were. And
_you_ were in control, not some unaccountable moderator.

A 21st-century version of Usenet, with encryption, authentication & Unicode,
and capable of scaling up to 7 billion people, would be just awesome.

Web forums are a primitive version of Usenet.

~~~
tptacek
It was "fast" in the sense you refer to as because it was batshit: every ISP
and Usenet provider was forced to keep a copy of every public message
everybody was reading. In its heyday, running a market-competitive Usenet
server strained commercial storage technology (running an actually-competitive
Usenet server required custom software engineering), and that was with a
userbase a fraction of the size of Reddit.

Of course, it was incredibly slow in a more important sense: the latency with
which you'd see responses to your messages. Your reply had to propagate
through the network of Usenet peering relationships before your counterparty
could see it. Contrast that to "primitive" web message boards, where that
propagation is instantaneous.

But, most importantly: because everyone was keeping a replicated log of
everything anyone had ever sent, _almost nobody had archives_. The only way to
read old forum messages was to... wait for it... go to a web application like
DejaNews.

Software piracy killed Usenet --- binaries made it impossible for a typical
provider (of any sort) to provide full-feed Usenet, which is what customers
demanded, and so everyone gradually migrated to centralized providers. But
even if that hadn't happened, Reddit would have killed Usenet eventually.

(I ran a Freenix-ranked Usenet server in the 1990s for a mid-sized regional
ISP, in part by independently inventing the INN history cache; my love for
NNTP is deep and real.)

------
boffinism
Good to see Joel is blogging a bit more these days. I know a lot of people
disagree with a lot of what he says, but he always has points of view worth
discussing, in my opinion.

~~~
scottinseattle
I think it's really weird that right now both Joel Spolsky and Steve Yegge
started blogging again. Maybe we're about to hit the apocalypse

------
ProAm
It's too bad the culture of SO turned out the way it did. I was eager and
happy to use it early on but was quickly disillusioned and it's my last resort
to turn to if I have questions these days.

~~~
simias
From a "lurker" perspective who often stumbles on SO after a web search it's
really a great resource.

On the other hand I never actually contributed anything to the website...
because it won't let me. One day I stumbled upon a question regarding some
problem I had, the accepted answer had a C code snippet that contained an
error. I thought I'd be a good netizen and decided to create an account to
submit a correction. It turns out that it wouldn't let me make an edit that
was less than 6 character long (why? It was just a one character typo). So I
decided to add a comment pointing it out, hoping that somebody would be able
to fix it for me. You can't comment without a certain reputation threshold.

So basically if I get it right if you have a new account you can only ask
questions or answer them. Except if like me you only end up on SO from your
search engine and generally end up on already-answered questions (or questions
you don't know the answer to since you're looking for them) then there's
nothing for you to do. I'm sure they must have done a lot of testing to end up
with this system but it basically means that I'll probably never contribute
anything to their website.

~~~
nt8eo923nt45
If I recall, there are actually a number of things you can do to get rep
besides questions and answers. You can edit a post (with more than 6
characters), you can do a review, you can flag a post for moderator attention,
and I think even your first up-vote gives you a point or two. (Some of those
might award badges instead - it's been a long time and the rules sometimes
change.)

I feel like SO can't win no matter what it does. It has some limits, like
requiring at least 6 characters before an edit is deemed useful to stop it
from becoming a breeding ground for "grammar nazis" and other similar types.
If they didn't do that, people would complain it's overrun with grammar nazis
who don't focus on the actual code being posted. Damned if they do, damned if
they don't.

~~~
shagie
Neither review, flag, nor vote give reputation.

The only ways to get reputation is to create content that gets up votes or do
edits that improve the post.

------
jq170727
A few months ago I wanted to learn jq really well but unfortunately I didn't
really know where to start and couldn't find much of what I would call well
written documentation so I decided to train myself by contributing an answer
to every reasonable jq question on StackOverflow.

I found many of the newbie restrictions off-putting and if I wasn't there with
the specific goal in mind to improve my own skills by helping others with
their real problems I probably would have just left immediately like I'm sure
many others have. Getting involved in the pettiness of the self-appointed
there isn't worth the time.

I stopped contributing when my free time evaporated after changing jobs. I
might go back to StackOverflow when things settle down but I feel like I know
jq well enough now, my experiment has run its course and for me to learn more
I'm going to have to spend some time working on the jq internals and going
into deeper questions then SO can handle.

------
marktangotango
_And, also: we’re just a few weeks away from launching Stack Overflow Teams,
the biggest upgrade to Stack Overflow ever, so that’s going to be really
cool._

Ah that explains firing up the old blog editor again content marketing ftw!

------
firefoxd
Reading this thread makes it feel like stackoverflow has become the new PHP.
You can't even say something positive about it before hell breaks loose.

It is really really useful. Actually it is indispensable. It got so many
things right, just think about the world before Stackoverflow.

But the few things it gets wrong, people make it seems like it breaks
everything else. Yes, it sucks. Most of the time I can't find an answer, I am
frustrated. When i ask on Stackoverflow and the question gets closed or just
marked as duplicate, i get even more frustrated.

Does it mean it sucks as a whole? Hell no. We gotta be grateful for the good
part, and help fix the bad parts.

~~~
dnomad
SO sucks for the most part. I've certainly given up on it. It's certainly not
that I think I could do a better job. Managing such a large community is more
than likely a losing game. It's only going to get worse, I suspect, because of
the growing inequality between the old-timers (who don't actually seem that
interested in answering questions but in excessive moderation) and the
newbies. The only hope of SO is devolution: spin out the communities that can
be saved and give them more autonomy. But this will never happen. This means
the site is going to die. There are powerful negative forces aligned against
it. Eventually, even the old timers who've amassed these enormous reps, are
going to start wondering why they devote so much time and energy to making
Joel rich. Wikipedia, at least, is a non-profit foundation.

The interesting thing will be what comes after SO. I'm always struck by the
Ubuntu community which does a much better job providing fast, relevant answers
and support to the community than SO ever did. (The Stack Exchange,
[https://askubuntu.com/](https://askubuntu.com/), is dead. All the exciting
stuff happens elsewhere.) There's also something much more organic; you've got
blogs, wikis, Q&A, chat, and various reddit forums all working together to
serve the community. This seems to me be the future and should scale better
than SO at the end of the day.

------
klmr
> One of the biggest such forums was called Experts Exchange.

By what metric? I don’t know anybody who was actually subscribed there
(although they must have existed). Instead, people were using various other
forums that were free. Some of these forums were absolutely huge, both in
terms of number of users, and by the number of questions/discussions.

Experts Exchange started dominating Google search results, true. But I always
thought this was merely due to SEO trickery, not because they were actually
widely used.

Truth be told, I would be hard pressed to even call it a “forum” — typical
forums (bulletin boards) functioned very differently.

~~~
reitanqild
Worth noting:

I always just scrolled to the very bottom of the page to see the answers on
EE.

This might not have worked in the start (I don't know) but as far as I can
remember it worked.

I think they did this intentionally because google would ban them otherwise.

~~~
simias
IIRC they changed their approach several times and I think for a while you
wouldn't have access to the answer at all until they changed it to what you
describe (answer buried at the bottom of the page). I assume they settled on
that format for the reason you mention, Google would have ended up removing
them from their results if they kept cheating.

------
clavalle
The Pedant Police make Stack Overflow very difficult to use.

~~~
booleandilemma
I don’t think so. They try to keep it a question and answer site, not a
question and opinion site.

~~~
maxxxxx
I have tried to ask questions two times in the last few months and the
responses were pretty much "if you don't know what you are doing you should
hire an expert" or "why would would anyone do such a thing?". I definitely
didn't feel very welcome and will stop posting there. It seems most questions
that get answers are very simple and straightforward ones. Difficult stuff
doesn't get discussed.

~~~
baud147258
Perhaps in the first case the question you asked was too broad compared to the
standard expected for SO questions? Or too precise to be of use to anyone
else?

~~~
maxxxxx
The question was pretty broad but I think discussing it would have been very
valuable for quite a few people. What bothered me were the snide responses. At
minimum they should have stayed quiet or explained that SO doesn't deal with
this kind of question.

~~~
aw3c2
> discussing

SO is not for discussion!

~~~
Someone1234
Until it is.

Ironically most of the more helpful SO google results are helpful exactly
because of the discussion/updates that took place in the comment chain under
an answer from ten years earlier.

> Guys how do I filter an array in JavaScript?!

>> Use XYZ

>>> XYZ works, but it doesn't work in IE5

>>>> If you're on IE10 or above you can use ABC instead of XYZ, it is cleaner!

>>>>> Hey guys, change this {} to this {}, makes it faster on mobile!

~~~
shagie
The indents there suggest a threaded discussion that looks more like a 1 on 1
chat or threaded discussion board.

Wouldn’t one of those resources be a better place to hold such a discussion?

~~~
sosborn
In the best (and rarest) examples of SO, those comments percolate into the
accepted answer as edits (and marked as such).

------
peacetreefrog
I think Stack Overflow is great and it's helped me a lot in the past, but I'm
not sure how useful it'll be in the future. I've been learning Elm the past
few weeks and have noticed a lack of good SO questions and answers on it. It's
a smaller community, but I also think many people go to the Elm Slack channel
to ask their questions, which they get in realtime.

Not sure if that's just an Elm thing. A language specific Slack is useful in
the moment (probably moreso than SO) because you get a real time answer and
can ask follow ups etc, but I can't help but think there's a ton of
knowledge/people asking similar questions that is just disappearing into the
ether. Makes picking things up harder for more people long term.

~~~
SahAssar
That's the problem with platforms like slack, the question is decoupled from
the answer and it usually isn't archived in a searchable way. The next person
googling that question will have to ask it again instead of just looking up
the answer.

------
amai
Stack Overflow (and the Stackexchange network as a whole) is the second most
important website on the internet (after Wikipedia). Thank you Joel for this.

------
cortesoft
Ah yes, old expert sexchange and scrolling to the bottom for answers....

