
Stack Overflow Sunsetting Documentation - ingve
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-documentation/
======
jon889
Ever since StackOverflow started closing strictly off topic questions that
were interesting and still related to programming (closed as not constructive,
or locked and marked as having "historical significance" such as
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1995113/strangest-
langua...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1995113/strangest-language-
feature)) the sense of community there pretty much disappeared. There's not
much incentive for knowledgable people to visit a site that is boring, and now
StackOverflow seems to contain a lot more questions asked by noobs (I've done
this about subjects I don't know) that go unanswered.

The same also goes for questions that are almost duplicates. Or are basically
but have been inactive so you want to get further information. And when
interesting discussions get moved to chat. The whole place is just boring and
too heavily controlled. I"m not surprised something that required community
failed there.

~~~
shagie
A core problem for Stack Overflow is the lack of people willing to curate
material. Its not an easy job and is quite thankless.

Its possible to have a site that is a mashup of /r/programming,
/r/programmerhumor and /r/learnprogramming (and a few others) all on one site.
Though when all of those things are together on one site it makes the job of
the people trying to curate it impossible.

Sure, Strangest language feature is interesting... and it has 320 visible
answers when it was locked. Is it useful? It might be interesting, but it is
impossible to remove the crap content from it (go to page 11 and start reading
backwards and saying "is that useful or not?").

Jeff Atwood wrote about this - [https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-
trouble-with-popul...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-
popularity/) . Too much interesting but ultimately not useful stuff gets in
the way of finding useful stuff. This really runs up against the Atwoodian
vision of Stack Overflow ( [https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-
stackoverflow-com/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-
com/) )

> It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of
> collectively increasing the sum total of _good_ programming knowledge in the
> world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system
> you call home. Better programming is our goal.

Interesting stuff and fun stuff may be interesting and fun - but when it gets
in the way of making a site that is a library of good programming knowledge...
something needs to be done about it.

Everything doesn't have to be on Stack Overflow. There are many other sites
that are better suited to discussions and fun things than the format for that
Stack Overflow took as a Q&A site.

It may be boring and heavily controlled... but that unity of vision is
necessary for trying to make it a site that provides material that I need when
I search for how to deal with some programming problem of configuring Spring
Statemachine or whatnot... and then interesting and fun gets in the way of me
doing my job.

~~~
PaulHoule
Lately I have been writing a lot of Python and I am seeing a lot of bit rot in
Stack Overflow lately.

For one thing, it seems almost all the code snippets use "print-without-
parenthesis" from Python 2, so you cannot just cut and paste them into Python
3. It isn't hard to fix this, but it's a clear sign the lights are on and
nobody is home.

The lack of curation is a problem too. Often the first answer is wrong, or
less than optimal. From the viewpoint of somebody looking for answers you
don't really want 10 people's opinion, you want one really good answer.

~~~
tedmiston
You can edit other people's answers to update them or fix this. Most people
are very open to it. I do it regularly if the code isn't linted or if SQL
keywords are lowercase vs uppercase to improve readability for everyone.

~~~
shagie
You can, but there is a very strong "don't modify other people's code; down
vote wrong or not useful answers and provide your own" culture.

This becomes especially noticeable when answers based on an old version of the
language or library no longer work for a newer one.

~~~
tedmiston
I agree if it is fundamentally changing the nature of their code, but
expanding an answer to include a Python 3 solution alongside an existing
Python 2 one is something I've done myself and haven't experienced any issues
with. IMO the most important part is to preserve and extend the original
answer vs re-write it completely.

~~~
rhizome
You don't have to modify, and I never do except to improve readability (read:
eliminate or reduce horizontal scrollbars). It's not unusual to see a good
contributor add an answer to an old question that uses newer syntax or version
features. "The accepted answer is quite old but this question is the top
result for 'javascript arrays' (e.g.), so this is how you do it in ES6."

------
shubhamjain
It's possible to overanalyze the outcome but in my opinion, the reason is
rather simple: search results. In my programming-related searches, I never saw
a result pointing to StackOverflow documentation. Whatever I wanted to know
was already answered in a SO question. Take npm documentation for instance,
which has covered topics like, "Configuring", "Publishing" npm packages [1].

As much as I loathe the state of documentation of some projects, I'd rarely
open a specific website for help - I'll just Google, "publish npm package",
"configure npm package", for which, none of the search results point to a
StackOverflow documentation page.

[1]:
[https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/node.js/482/npm#t=20...](https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/node.js/482/npm#t=201708030832143778881)

~~~
touristtam
I'll one step further: it is the first time I hear about SO's Documentation.

~~~
stordoff
Same here. I've been googling around Django _a lot_ over the last few months
(first time using Python for anything web-based, and first time setting up
anything more complicated than just nginx/Caddy on the server in a long time,
so I had a lot of questions).

I probably ended up on SO hundreds of times in that period, and never once saw
Documentation mentioned (I _may_ have technically seen it in the nav bar, but
just seeing "Documentation" in that context I'm going to assume it is
documentation _for_ SO and just ignore it).

E: Forgot to mention, even reading the title of this post my initial thought
was that it was documentation relating to the sunsetting of SO (which sounded
crazy).

~~~
tedmiston
Django is a weird case too because the official docs are so good and also
offer very good tutorials. And the Two Scoops book is such an invaluable
reference too. Reading both would put you in the position where you won't
really need SO for Django questions.

~~~
stordoff
Definitely, the official docs are fantastic. A lot of the SO use came from
having a solution based on the docs, but wanting to check I wasn't missing a
prefered/recommended way to do it, or being fairly sure something would be a
Django built-in but not finding it (so SO was a bridge from how I was
describing something to where it was in the official docs).

------
dmitriid
Color me not surprised at all

Besides the obvious reason, not showing up in search results, there is another
glaringly obvious one. Well, obvious to anyone except Stackoverflow: their
documentation site is horrible.

There was no structure to the docs, no way to create structure or promote
relevant parts of the documentation.

Let's open Python docs. Right now it looks like this:

\- Getting started with Python Language

\- Incompatibilities moving from Python 2 to Python 3

\- List comprehensions

\- List comprehensions

\- Common Pitfalls

\- Generators

\- Classes

\- String Formatting

\- Functions

...

Yes, there are two `List Comprehensions`. I mean, wat.

As you go into each "Chapter", they all consist of random sections, and the
table of contents (called Topic Outline) helpfully hides all links to all
sections saying something like "13 more examples" that you have to click to
expand.

And the list of problems just goes on and on and on. All of these issues have
been raised numerous times and dismissed out of hand by SO developers.

~~~
Ajedi32
Sounds to me like they didn't really dismiss those issues, they just didn't
have the resources to fix them.

> Unfortunately, we can't afford to work on the problem at the moment. While
> we have an exceptional team of engineers, there just aren't enough of them
> to support all the projects Stack Overflow is working on.

~~~
dmitriid
That actually did dismiss it quite a few times until the realisation finally
dawned on them in May this year[1]. By then it was already too late.

I won't be able to find all the discussions that were happening right around
the time it left the private alpha/beta. They were quite heated.

[1] [https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/349410/tearing-
down...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/349410/tearing-down-the-
structure-of-documentation)

------
bluetomcat
I participated in creating content for SO Documentation on the C language and
shortly after its inception I was convinced that it is going nowhere. Too much
emphasis was put on "examples" and many low-reputation users saw this as an
opportunity for gaining easy reputation points. Most of the examples were poor
and short without any insight on the underlying concepts. There was no
incentive for quality content because every topic had to have only a short
introduction and a gazillion "examples".

The whole format was just wrong, very wrong.

------
staticelf
I think in order to have a succesful project like this, you must allow it go
through a longer span of the passage of time. People need to create new
projects, write docs for it etc. It felt like SO Documentation was pretty much
invisible and now they are just shutting it down.

However, I didn't really see the need for it anyway since most larger projects
already have their own documentation and don't want to host it on a third
party site. Smaller projects just have some examples on the readme. So who is
SO Documentation targeted for?

I think a good use case for SO Documentation could be writing tutorials and
guides on how to setup stuff. How to install stuff etc.

~~~
icebraining
There's a need for a middle term. For example, many Python libraries have docs
on PythonHosted, like
[https://pythonhosted.org/PyQRCode/](https://pythonhosted.org/PyQRCode/)

Providing a shared space where people can contribute to something like that
without having to make a PR and push a release to PyPI could be useful.

------
davidsong
I edited some examples written in Python to tidy them up and make the page
PEP-8 compliant, so it actually serves as a good example of Python code. My
edit was rejected for being too trivial, and after that I never used
Documentation again.

------
maaaats
I wonder how the reputation affected how it all played out. Lots of people
threw in minor edits, irrelevant topics etc. in hunt for the insane amount of
reputation it offered. After a few weeks the reputation gain was tuned down,
but what happened the first days is kinda set in stone. The structure, topics
etc., all which is hard to change without a concentrated and directed effort
from a lot of people.

~~~
doug1001
so i think the decision to give rep for documentation posts contributed
substantially to its failure. Two reasons why i say this:

(i) (as you mentioned) it encouraged early rep mining by novice devs and in at
least some case, created a top-level structure that i found suboptimal (to say
the least); and

(ii) i think giving rep also provoked the high-rep SO users enough so that
they never went near documentation, and so if docs were going to work, it was
going to be without the same folks who helped build the Q&A. The OP mentions
"New users weren't coming to Documentation" (as consumers) but at least in
part that was because not enough quality content....

~~~
jmiserez
As for (ii): I’m not exactly high-rep with 1.9K rep, but that is pretty
accurate. The rep-mining that went on in the beginning and the resulting
atrocious quality turned me off completely from SO Documentation. I don’t
answer much, but if I do I put in a quite some effort to provide a well-
thought out answer and with Documentation it seemed like that was not
appreciated or wanted anymore. I don’t really care for the rep, but I was
slightly pissed off that you could get massive gains on the main SO site by
posting absolute garbage on Documentation, because for me that felt like SO
had jumped the shark.

------
manigandham
As a few other meta posts said, rename it to "Examples" instead of (official)
documentation and it probably would've done well... but then again, isn't that
what a lot of SO content already is?

I've never wished for better documentation instead of a clear example for my
specific scenario, and it seems the existing site already has that well
covered.

~~~
pmontra
Or "Tutorials".

The link the appropriate examples/tutorials from the pages of related
questions. Then they can leverage their SEO for people's issues and drive
traffic to documentation.

But most people go to SO to find solutions, so it's probably in the nature of
the site to privilege short reads over longer ones. That could change but it
takes time.

------
gravypod
This is slightly off topic, but could be related to this. Does anyone have a
good way to keep programming documentation offline and searchable for all of
the languages and libraries you use? I'm primarily a Python, Java, C,
Assembly, and PHP person. For Assembly I can just keep a copy of the ISA book
but that does not really make it searchable.

Recently I had lost internet and had work that needed to be done. I ended up
having to go to a coffee shop because I knew the name of a few functions I
wanted to use but I didn't remember the calling semantics. I could have just
tried it until it worked but I just took the excuse to go to Dunkin Donuts,
grab a coffee, and work there.

Do they plan to release their Stack Overflow Documentation files? It would be
a good way to start something like this. Make an offline and searchable
version of this dataset with a uniform offline and searchable version of
Python, Java, etc docs.

~~~
thomship
On Mac - [https://kapeli.com/dash](https://kapeli.com/dash) is pretty good.

~~~
cannonedhamster
Found Zeal for linux which uses their docs. This is fantastic thank you.

------
bsder
Speaking of sunsetting: I wish there was a way to sunset a StackOverflow
question as "no longer true" or "superseded by new version".

Rust and Android Studio, for example, are particularly bad about getting
relevant, working current results buried under mountains of not terribly old
stuff that is now deprecated or moot.

~~~
aeorgnoieang
The tried and true way to do this is to either edit one of the best existing
answers to include different solutions for different versions or to create a
new answer with that same info. And you can liberally take from or excerpt the
best existing answers too.

It, of course, may take a long while for a new answer to get upvoted towards
the top.

------
Perceptes
Great example of why you shouldn't rely on a third party service's proprietary
system as the exclusive host of your content.

~~~
icebraining
It was in beta. Relying on it was foolish regardless of whether it was
proprietary.

------
jon_richards
I think the problem is that official documentation is good for 99% of the job.
The other 1% is most easily filled in by searching individual problems, which
usually results in a stack overflow question, never stack overflow
documentation.

My inspiration on how to fix documentation came from Dark Souls messages. In
the game, you can't communicate directly with other players, but you can leave
messages on the floor that may show up in other players' games. The game
intentionally has tricks like fake walls, so messages like "Illusory wall
ahead" are common. You can vote a message positive or negative, affecting how
frequently it shows up in other games. Unfortunately the player base is also
somewhat sadistic, so you often get fake messages (often with another just
behind it saying "Liar ahead").

I wish someone would make a browser extension that just allowed you to place
little notes on webpages and vote on other peoples' notes. So many
documentation problems could be solved with a simple "change <X> to <Y> to
make this example work". Documentation maintainers could then just look at the
notes on their page to see what they needed to change, instead of waiting for
people notifying them of the problem in an official bug report or periodically
checking stack overflow looking for issues.

------
norswap
As someone else said: search results.

But also I never saw a link ON Stack Overflow point to said documentation. I
wasn't even consciously aware of it, even though I must have seen the announce
when it launched.

Really, I don't know why they needed so much firepower on that anyway. Just a
glorified wiki + maybe paying some good known documenters to kickstart the
site with a few very high quality guides would have been enough to get the
ball rolling (given internal promotion).

------
bandrami
Unfortunately StackOverflow hasn't aged well over the past few years, mostly
because of way, way, way overzealous killing of "duplicate" questions. (IMHO,
if it's not literally a word-for-word retyping of a previously answered
question, it's not a duplicate.) But whatever the theoretical merits of it,
this no longer works now that every system is following the CADT release
model. A question that was answered perfectly well 18 months ago requires a
completely different answer today, but the re-asking of that question today
gets squelched with visitors being pointed to now-obsolete answers.

------
exception_e
I was very skeptical about this early on. IMO, documentation is best left
close to the code. Collaboratively editing is what git and project wikis are
for (esp in open source).

------
duskwuff
Good. About time.

Good writing needs to be organized from the top down. Stack Overflow's
Documentation tried to create documentation from the bottom up, and the result
was predictably a jumbled mess.

This outcome really shouldn't have come as a surprise. Other projects have
tried and failed to crowdsource documentation before -- Wikimedia's WikiBooks
is a prime example.

------
trey-jones
I'm glad they're being so open and honest about what the problems are and the
reasoning behind the decision. I was excited about Documentation when it was
announced. It sounded cool. But I've never used it.

I guess contributing to full "improved" documentation with examples is
actually a lot more work than just answering someone's question.

------
dgregd
After hours of bug hunting I can spend a few minutes to share my solution on
SO. Documentation writing is so much different task. Additionality for many
people English is a foreign language.

------
iamthepieman
i am an infrequent but consistent user of stack overflow. I used to answer
questions before my area of expertise became riddled with 0 vote questions. I
still go there to get answers especially on technology that's new to me. I
even participate in moderator elections and the yearly surveys.

So while I'm not a power user, I use Stack Overflow and yet I was not aware of
Documentation until I read this sunset notification.

------
executesorder66
Damn. This was the closest thing I have found so far, to something like the
Arch wiki, but for general sysop/devs.

------
midnitewarrior
I've never heard of this site, nor have I seen it in any search results. Now
that I look at it, it looks very useful! I may have used it if I had known
about it.

Perhaps get a better marketing department?

------
omegote
I've just written a well formed question in stack overflow and within the
first minute it already had a downvote and a comment questioning the wording.
In order to avoid a worse hit in my karma I've deleted if. It's a shame what
stack overflow has become. I wish they could get some stats on how quickly new
questions are downvoted to Oblivion by big users (I'd rather not give names
but I'm sure you know some). Dictatorship.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Some tags in particular seem very hostile, I guess because they get a lot of
bad/noob questions, so the people answering are primed to interpret questions
uncharitably. I’m one of those people with a knack for language-lawyering, so
the [c++] tag used to be my favourite, but the hostility has driven me away
from contributing in recent years.

Nowadays I mainly hang out on the [haskell] tag because it attracts
interesting questions and people seem willing to put in some effort to
understand and improve an unclear question rather than downvoting and
dismissing it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a mistake to conflate _having
points_ with _deserving power_. It creates divas at best, and oligarchy at
worst. Moreover, it creates disproportionate influence: a downvoter with 10K
points spends 0.0001% of their rep to remove 5% of yours if you only have 40.

------
fidz
I find starting something is easier than closing / shutting it down. We know
several metrics to start something. Demand, high chance of success in the
future, niche market, etc. But how do you think about shutting down something?
I mean, how to distinguish "failure", "must struggle a little bit more", and
"buying more time"?

To close something seems like not trivial.

------
Chris2048
I think documentation writers should aim to supersede SO questions, and maybe
add the question content near the content in the docs.

e.g

Q: what is foo?

A: foo is Y : <example>

The doc writers can then put above into docs, along with form of original
question ("what is foo"), such that the SO page is no longer needed.

Through such a mechanism, SO could improve official docs rather than just be a
Q&A repository..

------
EADGBE
It was promising, but they really didn't give it enough time to take off.
That's sad.

There's plenty of libraries out there that could benefit from something like
Documentation.

~~~
shagie
There are certainly libraries out there that could do with better docs.

However, documentation written by people trying to get fake internet points
with no skill at technical writing (even such things as the property
capitalization of 'i' or running a spelling check on the non-code) increased
the amount of work done by people trying to make great documentation beyond a
tolerable threshold.

As the corporate goal of Documentation was to increase new user conversion,
this additional work was overlooked for quite some time until it was
recognized that the vast majority of the content was damaging the Stack
Overflow brand and even discouraged the people who were trying to provide
answers on the main site.

------
bluetwo
When I heard about the documentation project I was excited, but when I went to
use it I was sad. They really didn't know how to build instructional systems.

------
johnnyRose
This was an idea which sounded great on paper, but was doomed from the
beginning. As mentioned in the post, most users lack the confidence to
contribute to something called "Documentation," even though the idea seemed
closer to "Examples of Documented Features."

It's always sad to see an idea with such potential fail (not that the
experience lacked value), but I think they made a good choice pulling the
plug.

------
meri_dian
I love SO, but the danger with it replacing documentation for developers is
that the temptation always exists to just copy and paste code from SO without
actually understanding the nuts and bolts of why the code works. SO should
complement documentation, not replace it.

------
leksak
One thing that irked me was the vast number of topics. A lot of them were
unfit for the format

------
tarr11
>>> In order to hire more people, we need to make more money.

Feels like that's the crux of it right there. A lot of the problems in this
thread could have been fixed, with time, focus and money. But if there's no
path to profitability...

------
Chris2048
Perhaps the actual Q&A side of things could have been collapsed into "agents"
that showed you the relevant content in the documentation?

Shame this ended..

------
trumbitta2
This is the first time ever I hear about the service. I guess there was still
a market to be found, after all.

------
fusiongyro
Documentation was a bad idea. The only problem Documentation might solve is
that Stack Exchange Inc has a bunch of developers and they have to keep them
busy doing something. All the thrashing and weird incentives and bullshit
flows from this truth: the users and community don't need anything like this
Documentation.

------
iamjk
That was quick...

------
aaron695
> We still think Stack Overflow Documentation is a good idea

I personally think it's a bad idea. It's what users think they want rather
what they'll use.

The classic RTFM is a classic because humans don't want to and won't. They
just want a direct colloquial answer, cause human. AKA classic SO

~~~
emodendroket
That doesn't cut it if you want to learn to use something you know nothing
about though.

~~~
shagie
Look at the organization of the python documentation. Consider how useful that
is for learning how to program in python.

Then go out and get an actual book, targeted at your experience level for
programming. Do you need a bunch of tutorials? Or just a language reference?

Without a reasonable investment of volunteer curators for the material, the
SODocs will never be as good as the focused material.

There was too much focus on making it so everyone could contribute with not
enough focus on the workload of the people who knew the material, tried to
invest time into curating it and ultimately gave up under a deluge of people
just there for the rep.

~~~
emodendroket
To be clear, I don't mean to claim that the Stack Overflow docs are currently
a good answer. I just mean that Stack Overflow Q&A is designed to answer
narrow, specific questions, not broad ones like "how can I write a program in
Python?"

------
torrent-of-ions
"To sunset" is the worst verb I've seen a long time. Why not just
"discontinue" or "phase out"?

~~~
artursapek
It's meant to soften the blow. Sort of how startups say "we're ending our
journey" instead of "we're going out of business".

------
alexanderbisc
I exactly don't know whether automated suggest edits is best. I am not sure
that most of the edits will be of good quality.

------
sriram_iyengar
Sad ! Learnt a lot from it though.

~~~
fusiongyro
Really? What topic did you learn a lot about from SO Documentation?

------
shp0ngle
Well, that didn't last long :/

