
The decline of Stack Overflow - cchubitunes
https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d
======
OtterCoder
This article doesn't even touch the worst problem with SO. Code rot.

Answers are typically out of date and no longer good practice. Some claim that
the ability to edit answers fixes this, but all it does is subvert the
accept/vote functions. You end up with strange "Ship of Theseus" answers where
what is written has nothing to do with what was so highly voted, or what
solved the original problem.

Where SO goes wrong is that they have tried to create a definitive set of
answers in a field where the real answers change yearly, or even monthly.

~~~
Terr_
Right, that also interacts with the game-ification, distorting people's
incentives for answering questions.

If the site's goal is to have one problem solved forever with one top answer,
then whoever manages to secure that top answer wins [0] a kind of dedicated
reputational income stream, indefinitely.

Basically, I think it rewards fast answers over good answers, and rewards easy
popular questions over hard specific ones. I wonder what would happen if there
was a hard limit on how much reputation you could get from a particular
question or answer.

[0] Unless another powerful user changes it into a "community wiki" answer,
which may or may not be fair to do.

~~~
Veedrac
On the contrary, my longer, in-depth answers tend to score much higher (>10x)
than my less in-depth answers; compare

    
    
        https://stackoverflow.com/users/1763356/veedrac?tab=answers&sort=votes&page=1
        https://stackoverflow.com/users/1763356/veedrac?tab=answers&sort=votes&page=16
    

All a reputation cap per answer would do for me is discourage writing good
answers.

------
sytelus
The author of this article certainly don't understand social dynamics and
various competing forces. On producer consumer systems, the ratio of consumers
to producers is often 10X or less. This has been case everywhere from
Wikipedia to Etsy to TV to movies to various blogs. The act of producing
something is many magnitudes more expensive than act of consuming something.
As all biological systems, humans tends to conserve their energy and that's
the root cause of these symptoms.

Second, it is very important for these systems to ensure high quality content
or otherwise consumers would stop consuming and then producers would stop
producing leading to vicious cycle. On large scale systems like Internet,
consumers are saved from quality issues by search engines and you can keep
producing garbage without triggering vicious cycle. However on websites like
SO this is often not the case because they rely on gamification. If you allow
users to quickly accumulate scores in game effortlessly than other users who
have to try much harder for same scores than overall quality would decline.

And no, SO is not in decline by any measure. In fact, SO has firmly
established itself as go to website for vast majority of developers. Some even
say programming is mostly reduced to searching SO these days.

------
Const-me
Not just for new users. I’ve been using SO since 2009, have over 7k reputation
there and 375 answers, but recent changes make me want to stop using it.

The problem I encounter most often, the community tends to closevote hard
questions instead of answering them.

E.g. I recently asked a question on SO, for Linux C API to monitor WiFi signal
strength for the connected network.

10 minutes later it got a vote to close “migrate to superuser”. I immediately
updated the question explaining that I only interested in C API. An hour later
it got closed as offtopic. I flagged to mod, nothing happened. It gathered a
few votes to reopen but not enough to reopen. And now it’s just deleted by
“Community” saying “RemoveAbandonedClosed”.

~~~
Veedrac
Sorry mate. As you might have guessed, Community is a bot. Some quick tips
might help for next time:

* Never, ever, write a question without tagging it with either a language or language-agnostic, though in the latter case you're still better off using a language tag as well. This is basically the only reliable way to get views.

* Try to give people a jump-in point. If your question gets 50 views, which is far from guaranteed, only expect 10 of them have the time to write an answer. If your question isn't approachable to at least one person in your mostly-random panel of 10 people, you're going to suffer for it. Giving people a minimal piece of code massively improves engagement rates.

* State your problem clearly. Your newest revision would likely never have had these problems, but your first revision was not obviously about C APIs, and by then it was too late.

* If your question is just closed and you think you deserve reconsideration, flag it with a custom reason for an actual moderator (rather than just a user with a vote). They're the only people who really have power to reopen fast enough to matter.

* If your question stays closed for a nontrivial amount of time, it's dead unless you post it to Meta (meta.stackoverflow.com) and people reconsider. There are too many questions posted to this site to spare a second glance to closed ones.

In short: be clear, be proactive, and focus on quality from the get-go.

~~~
chasedehan
The fact that you need "tips" to make a question answerable is part of the
problem.

~~~
Veedrac
If people's time was an abundant free resource, sure.

------
neurotrace
Are we really digging up this thing again? It uses inflammatory language,
cherry-picks interactions from the site, and overall shows that the author
doesn't understand what it takes to create and maintain a high quality
knowledge resource.

Who here has not used Stack Overflow at least a time or two for bits of
information? Do a lot of newer users submit low quality questions? Yes. Do
they get corrected on how to interact with the site and have their questions
deleted or redirected? Yes. If no such measures were in place, Stack Overflow
would become as useless as every other Programming Q&A forum out there. The
highly specialized ones do well for that area, the more general ones fall
apart when you're trying to get direct, accurate information.

This was a poorly written article when it came out and it still is today.

------
tonteldoos
I wanted to reply to some questions below, but realised I've got more
touchpoints than any single one of them.

Every now and again, I go through spurts of activity where I try and
contribute to SO with reviews, comments, edits and answers (rep a bit below
2k). Two things happen every time I do this:

1\. While there are lots of 'please do my homework' questions by new users,
every now and again someone will post a question where they are genuinely
trying to get their head around a concept as a new programmer, even though the
question doesn't necessarily meet the MVP requirements, or could be seen as
too broad or off-topic. I try and engage in the comments section, and quite
often, it turns out to be a viable (but poorly asked) question, worthy of a
good answer. The amount of aggressive downvotes, abusive comments, etc in
these cases by other users (new and old) is absolutely astounding.

2\. When I post answers, I try and tailor them to the OPs level, so it might
not be 'by the book' accurate, but will explain the basic concept and offer a
possible solution. For some reason, especially on C/C++ based questions, any
answer that is not referencing the C/C++ standard and absolutely factually
correct and accurate in terms of terminology, etc, will get aggressively
downvoted, or destroyed in comments. What this has done, is to effectively
stop me from even attempting answers in these categories.

So, yes, there are lots of 'bad' questions and 'bad' answers, but generally
the voting and moderation system works. However, I think that 'older' users
are as much to blame for some of the issues on the site, as new users who come
there to have their homework questions done.

------
melling
“Closed as not a question”. “Tell us what you tried first. Nothing?
Unacceptable!”

I think they should have had a little more vision. I’ve closed two accounts.
Now I only use my current account when absolutely necessary. I think I asked
over 200 questions in my first two accounts. At one point I was trying to
throw down breadcrumbs while learning elisp.

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2170528/writing-hello-
wo...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2170528/writing-hello-world-in-
emacs)

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264286/generating-a-
qui...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264286/generating-a-quiz-in-
emacs-lisp)

StackOverFlow could have been the best place to learn any topic.

~~~
AznHisoka
“that sounds like a homework question!!!”

I wish I was doing homework instead of struggling with an arcane production
issue!

------
bigjimmyk3
A few years ago I felt like I should contribute something back to SO (having
used it plenty of times for research), but somehow I got routed into a
"gotcha" UX where the site would repeatedly tell me that my previous action
was against the rules. It felt like being trained via shock collar. I
certainly appreciate the goal of maintaining quality in questions and answers,
but I hope there are better ways of getting there than what I saw.

Note that the experience I have didn't appear to be human-initiated: I
understood it as an automated "feature" of the site itself, a sort of guided
initiation process. Maybe that process trained some people a bit too well?

~~~
jazoom
I tried to use it about 4 years ago and submit helpful answers etc. Apparently
I did something wrong and I couldn't submit anything. It was a very hostile
introduction.

Over the last 4 years there have been numerous times I would have contributed
a valuable answer but since I don't have a working account I cannot.

No, I'm not interested in wasting my time trying to get my account working. I
don't care about SO "reputation".

------
pedalpete
The interesting dynamic I've found when I post to SO lately (which I'll admit
has been rare over the last few years) is I so often get a comment about "how
can somebody who has X points on SO ask a question like this", as if the
accumulation of points, because I've been on the platform for a while and some
of my questions or answers have gathered a lot of points does not mean I can't
still struggle with what other people consider simple bits of code.

The community itself it seems has become hostile, and therefore I personally
don't want to post questions just to be berated for not knowing the answer.

I also think SO is so focused on the simpler questions. This is my code, it
isn't working, can you help me fix it. I once asked a question which was more
of an architecture problem, no clear answer, but I thought "maybe" it could
get some discussion going which would lead to the answer. Nope, SO isn't
interested in getting into the larger questions which could help you learn and
progress. Keep it to simple errors or maybe help find the right algorithm.

The usefulness decreases over time as we become better developers if SO can't
lead us to asking larger questions.

------
flavio81
I come from the RTFM generation. S.O. never appealed to me, since I usually
read the documentation of the libs/APIs/products I'm using.

Call me snob or whatever, but I'd rather rely on official (or good,
comprehensive third-party) documentation. And if the product is open-source,
you'd better ask the creators/maintainers and then contribute to improve the
original documentation, for the greater good.

------
lukev
I mean, yes, all the issues pointed out here are real problems that I wish
they would address.

On the other hand, and, more importantly, no! Remember what the world was like
before SO? It has been remarkably successful at its stated goal of putting
expertsexchange and random terrible phpbb forums six feet under. And despite
its flaws I don't think anyone would wish for the world that it replaced.

------
mcknz
see also
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576124)

and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837442)

------
tabtab
What's the alternative? It's far from perfect, but has no significant
competition yet.

------
bgun
Needs [2015].

