
The decline of Stack Overflow - doppp
https://medium.com/@johnslegers/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d
======
marcfowler
I don't know whether it's because of the type of questions I've ever asked on
there, but I've found it to be excellent, and I always get my questions
answered perfectly.

The attitude on there seems to be slightly terse, but, it is designed and
really focussed on Q&A, not discussion. So I don't know that I really agree
with the criticism of it.

~~~
zamalek
> I've found it to be excellent, and I always get my questions answered
> perfectly.

That's debatable. I used to be a fairly regular contributor. Fairly often I'd
get beaten to the answer by the guy "who types in the minimal amount to be
correct." The asker would then immediately tick the answer instead of waiting
for my answer which has a great deal more information (important caveats,
alternative approaches, pros/cons). Incomplete information is a smaller
concern, though.

The greater concern is the knowledgeable person who "who types in the minimal
amount to be correct, leaving out crucial information resulting in actually
incorrect information." The type of information you can easily discredit with
a simple CLI application, or the type of information that blows up in the fact
of 100 requests/sec. It has a green tick mark next to it.

That green tick mark is never going away - the asker has long since left the
website. The answerer is never coming back because he has his karma points and
will ignore any and all comments you make pleading for him to correct it
(remember: you can't make meaning-altering edits to answers.

That's the crux of it. S/O has some great insightful information but also has
some downright dangerous garbage, dangerous amounts of which has a green tick
next to it. The gamification fixed the human troll-like tendencies (for a
while) but brought out another dangerous trait: the ability to do almost
anything (lie, half truths, rush jobs) in order to get imaginary internet
points.

~~~
DanBC
There are badges for answers that score highly but which do not get accepted.

~~~
zamalek
Which is fine were I to care less about _correctness:_ rewarding the person
who answered correctly does nothing about the green tick on the incorrect or
incomplete answer. The gamification was a device to improve the quality of the
content on the website, which worked _really_ well until human nature found
the path of least resistance.

The badge is an acknowledgement of a problem/bug in the design of the game,
not a fix.

~~~
lfowles
If it's any consolation, as a regular reader, I rarely look for the answer
with the green checkmark. I read through the top X answers until I find one
that answers the question in terms I can understand. Perhaps a better fix is
to mark the question as Answered, rather than mark a Specific Answer.

------
scriptproof
When I do a search, 9 out of 10 questions that are useful to me were closed as
off topic. Fortunately they are not deleted. I confirm also the bias toward
new users: I once registered to provide an answer which was missing to a
question. Someone, an older user, modified my answer and deleted a part of it,
so it then looked rather dumb. Obviously it was downvoted. I never came back.

~~~
catnaroek
Yes, that's a problem: Old users with high reputation abusing their power to
edit other people's questions and answers.

Personally, I find it distasteful when somebody other than the question or
answer's original author makes a substantial edit. Edits by third parties
ought to be to fix typos, fix bad code formatting, improve clarity and the
like.

~~~
Latty
One of the main points of the editing system is to fix the biggest problem
with Q&A sites before SO - outdated information. Editing other's posts means
that content can get updated, even if the original poster isn't around to
curate it.

Everyone I've heard hating on StackOverflow are people asking or answering,
who have ownership over their questions and dislike the rules or way the site
works. The reality is that SO knows 99% of it's users never register and are
reading answers, not asking or answering questions.

The reason SO is a great resource is that the rules create an environment that
doesn't allow cruft to build. Yes, that puts off some people, that's a worthy
trade in my mind. I'd rather have good content than more content.

~~~
catnaroek
> the biggest problem with Q&A sites before SO - outdated information

Post a new answer.

> ownership over their questions

As long as my name is attached to a Q|A, and my reputation is the one that is
affected by its up and downvotes, I feel I have the right to control what the
Q|A says.

> dislike the rules or the way the site works

I like the site's premise: Contribute questions and/or answers, and earn
reputation if the community judges them to be good. What I don't like is that
other people can affect my reputation by changing what I said. It's even more
distasteful if the one who asked the question has also posted an answer. If
the question wasn't clear, the first thing one should do is ask the OP to
clarify. Only if the OP for some reason can't (e.g., if his English skills are
lacking), then could the question be edited by a third party.

~~~
Latty
People reading the answers are more important than those answering - there are
a lot more of them. Sure, people answering provide the valuable content, but
most are not put off by the editing as you seem to be - if an edit is made, it
is clearly marked that it has happened and can be reverted if wrong. The
answers are wiki-like, and that makes the content better.

You may not like it, but why would StackOverflow change their system to make
the content work to please a tiny minority of their community? It's a bad idea
that would make the site worse.

------
btbuildem
My main issue with SO is the mods who close questions as "off topic" or "not
fitting the site" (~), DESPITE a question having a ton of upvotes and solid
answers, with comments pleading to not close it.

Other than that, it remains a great resource and I use it on a daily basis.

~~~
Latty
The main issue is that a lot of the 'off-topic' rules are focused around
content that doesn't work on SO. It doesn't work because it's time based -
asking 'What is the best IDE for X?' is subjective and changes over time. Yes,
that list of answers might be useful and interesting right now, but over time,
it becomes more and more outdated and eventually, downright misleading.

There is a reason SO has excellent results on Google - the content is
carefully curated so that it's timeless, and editing allows it to get updated
where it needs to be. Yes, sometimes good (at the time) content gets
discarded, but that's the nature of it.

If you want that kind of stuff, do it somewhere more transient.

~~~
joeyespo
With so many people visiting SO for exactly these kinds of valuable answers, I
believe SO should embrace them instead of the ongoing battle of rejecting
them.

If cleaning up irrelevant questions can't be automated, how about having a
"this is no longer relevant" button appear a few months after the post has
been answered? Or having a [subjective] tag that has an expiration date on
being indexed on Google.

Now that the bad ideas are out of the way, let's hear some others.

~~~
Latty
Rejecting them works better. Those questions can be answered on other sites
that are more suited to a discussion format and won't end up floating on
search results despite being out of date like SO's will.

Trying to make SO a jack of all trades will degrade the quality of the content
and make the site worse - the whole reason that it's the good source of
content it is is because of these restrictions.

~~~
joeyespo
Outright rejection hurts the long-term though. People will go elsewhere to ask
valuable questions, which will slowly degrade the quality by having fewer and
fewer valuable questions asked. We're seeing this happen now.

------
terrywilcox
If you think Stack Overflow hates new users, go look at Usenet in the early
90's. RTFM was the polite response to new users. Asking a question was an
invitation for abuse.

This is nothing new. Established communities eventually become gated
communities, with guards and dogs and sneers for the barbarians at the gates.

~~~
mooreds
Which beget new communities, which become established, and so on and so on.

------
catnaroek
I'll transcribe what I said on Reddit
([https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3cafkp/is_stac...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3cafkp/is_stack_overflow_overrun_by_trolls/cstqf7l)):

Stack Overflow has become a place where idiot savants who know the ins and
outs of specific technologies and have fast typing skills compete with each
other for upvotes and reputation. Intuition, analogies and humor aren't
appreciated. Only raw, pedantically precise technical content. As a result,
Stack Overflow has become the giant sink where all programming knowledge that
will be irrelevant in less than five years eventually lands. Programming
_wisdom_ , however, has to be found elsewhere.

What makes me the most sad about this state of affairs is that things weren't
always this way. When Stack Overflow had just been created, the community was
genuinely interested first and foremost in helping each other. Of course, we
felt joy when others upvoted and accepted our answers, but we weren't
_desperate_ for those upvotes. We sometimes took the time to write elaborate
questions and write elaborate answers, because our primary aim was to solve
actual programming problems, not just watch our reputation increase at the
fastest rate possible.

When did Stack Overflow go wrong? I can't give a precise time frame, but there
were some clear signs:

1\. When people started to care enough about reputation that they'd focus on
answering _trivial questions_ that were likely to be upvoted by lots of
newbies. The most obvious example of this was Jon Skeet's rise to prominence.

2\. When people started to care enough about reputation that they'd flame
other people's answers to death for very minor technical inaccuracies. By all
means point at the mistake, but do it _so that it gets fixed_ , not so that
the OP hopefully accepts your answer and not someone else's.

3\. When Stack Overflow started giving users privileges on the basis of their
reputation: the right to close questions, the right to edit other people's
questions and answers (used sparingly, this can be useful, e.g., to rewrite
questions more clearly; but this feature has been grossly abused), and even
the right to _comment_ on other people's questions and answers.

4\. No doubt countless others.

Can this situation be remedied? Probably, if the community wants it. Sadly,
not everyone has an equal say on Stack Overflow, and the ones with the most
power are, for obvious reasons, in favor of the status quo.

~~~
hobarrera
A fix around this devolution we've seen might be to make badges and reputation
private: you only see your own.

This way, the "require reputation for certain actions" can be kept around, but
those who are there only for the competition would be less motivated to
participate that those who legitimately want to help.

------
pc2g4d
I agree SO has a problem with treatment of well-meaning new users. Could be
improved. However, I will say that in spite of that, I have had some excellent
experiences there. Sometimes I encounter a difficult issue that I simply
cannot resolve on my own, and I want to ask people more expert than I how to
resolve it. If I'm careful in how I write up the question then I find that
over time I generally get useful answers. It's a great way of reaching others
working in the same teeny-tiny niche that I am.

So there are problems, but still many good things happening there.

------
nobleach
I don't find SO so bad. What I do hate is everyone complaining about SO. Yes,
it violates the "teach a man to fish principle"... but seriously? Are we all
so stuck in "well, I had to learn it, so I'm not sharing it with you" syndrome
land?

The fear that someone is going to copy and paste an SO snippet into production
code on a meaningful app should not even be a real thing. If some hack finds
their way into an important job just by lying their way through the interview
process, and gets by for years simply by asking questions on SO, I say,
"that's incredible, I gotta see this". For the average hacker, just throwing
together some web stuff and needs to know, "how do I open an accordion in
jQuery", I think SO is perfect. I often use it when I feel like I'm totally
not getting the "right way" to do something. (I've asked questions about jRuby
gems, Sencha Touch, Dojo, CouchDB - things I really don't think I'd have
gotten just by reading the docs) But I really don't care if someone else uses
it as their private consultation service... I don't think it's ruining this
industry.

~~~
catnaroek
IMO, the main problem isn't that newbies ask to be given fish. That's okay.
There's no shame in being a newbie. The problem is what the community,
especially the more knowledgeable users, do when confronted with this
situation. Either:

1\. They just give them fish, as requested. Sometimes they argue with each
other, over who gave the best fish.

2\. They angrily say "somebody else has asked for this very same fish before",
and downvote the question into oblivion.

What they almost never do, however, is the right thing: teaching them how to
fish.

~~~
DanBC
It's a bit wierd to complain about people asking for fish when those people
have walked into a fishshop that has a big sign over the door saying "get your
fish here!" with thousands of examples of other people getting fish.

Sure, people shouldn't just yell "fish!", they should ask for a specific fish
and give details of the aquarium / meal, but that's not the same as saying we
should teach them about lines and bait.

------
pm24601
Yeap to everything the article refers to. I rarely bother with posting a
question to SO.

Wikipedia has the same problem.

Basically, the righteous trolls take over - you see this with Homeowner
Associations as well.

~~~
pm24601
I see the righteous trolls down voted my opinion :-)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Or perhaps "Yeap to everything the article refers to." didn't add to the
conversation.

------
cheald
Gosh, this is quite a lot more negative than is warranted, IMO.

StackOverflow's biggest problem is that it's hit saturation; the low-hanging
fruit is all picked (which is good; that knowledge shows up in Google
results), which means that much of the continuing activity on the site is low-
quality questions with the speed hounds competing to be the first to answer a
trivial question to reap reputation. That's unfortunate, but I'm quite sure
how you'd solve that in a product with SO's maturity.

(Side note: Try resetting your tag preferences on SO. You'll find lots of
questions on languages/technologies you don't often use, which can be great
for dipping your toes into less saturated waters, and you might find some
things to learn while you're at it.)

My experience is that SO is a really great grimoire of solutions to specific,
common problems. I get answers from it multiple times per day via Google
(pasting in an error message often results in an SO question which has been
answered satisfactorily, permitting me to rapidly move past the issue), but
I've asked a grand total of 2 questions in my 5.5 years on the site (both of
which I later ended up answering myself after research) - for whatever reason,
it's a poor platform for me to get help when I need it. For that, I generally
turn to IRC or mailing lists specific to the project at hand, because those
come with an interested community built-in.

However, as an answerer, SO is very useful to me. I make it a point to
generally only answer questions that are trivial and boil down to a race; the
interesting ones are the ones that require some research. I get to learn
something while I'm helping someone else out. For example, I recently answered
a question about Ruby's require system as compared to Javascript's, which gave
me the opportunity to get into the source and figure out exactly how Ruby
loads constants and methods from files (answer: It creates an anonymous module
which it then extends Object with).

"SO hates new users"

Well, yeah, by default new users are treated as potential spammers, trolls,
and otherwise unsavory types. There are lots of people who are extremely ready
to poop all over any platform they can find. SO does a pretty damn good job of
making it hard for them to cause significant disruption until they've proven
themselves. There are _lots_ of bad questions on SO. The number of people who
would have their question answered if they'd typed it verbatim into Google
rather than SO is depressingly high. There are an awful lot of help vampires
who are basically just looking for someone else to do their work for them.
Those people make SO worse. The visible impact of these people, though, is
what posts like this see and complain about - moderation is aggressive in an
attempt to stamp out this low-quality content tends to leak into less-bad
questions sometimes, which is unfortunate. (I wish that SO had a "no, this
question doesn't deserve closure" mechanism so that I could nullify a close
vote on a partially-closed question, rather than having to wait for it to be
closed to start a new reopen vote.)

The characterization of the established userbase as "trolls" and " _Führers_
", though, just seems a bit...I don't know, bitter. There is certainly more
than its fair share of overeager moderation on SO, but in general, it does its
job, and it does it better than anywhere else on the internet at the moment
(and remember, SO grew out of a dissatisfaction with ExpertsExchange, so if SO
is failing, there's quite the market opportunity there for someone!) - where
you see "Führers" I see "dedicated contributors and curators" who are directly
responsible for SO having so much quality, well-ranked content. It's certainly
not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than it once was.

At the end of the day, while we can complain about SO aggressively closing
questions, it's still the thing that tons of people find their answers from on
a daily basis, which is pretty hard empirical proof that it's working on a
macro level, even if individuals experience pain with it on a micro level.

~~~
cheald
Whoops - I said I make it a point to answer trivial/race questions; I meant
that I make it a point to NOT answer trivial questions; if I do answer trivial
questions, it's via a small comment on the original post which isn't eligible
for reputation gains. (I'm outside of the edit window for the original comment
now).

------
TylerH
Stack Overflow works by teaching people how to ask good questions. So far all
I see in the article are terrible questions.

------
andrewstuart
Just post your questions to Reddit.

~~~
ProAm
Or IRC

