
What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? - ingve
https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-to-be-when-it-grows-up/
======
jrochkind1
One challenge not discussed here is when an accepted and highly voted answer
_used_ to be a good answer, but no longer is in later versions of whatever
software/platform/library is discussed. This is also something that gets worse
over time, like the uniqueness problem.

I think it's worse than the uniqueness problem, multiple duplicate _good_
questions/answers don't actually harm, misguide, or delay anyone looking for
an answer; one _wrong_ one does.

And of course, if you try to ask a question again because you think the old
one might be outdated (if you were _sure_, you wouldn't have to ask probably),
it'll likely get closed as a duplicate. :)

~~~
geezerjay
> One challenge not discussed here is when an accepted and highly voted answer
> _used_ to be a good answer, but no longer is in later versions of whatever
> software/platform/library is discussed.

That's not a big problem. Questions and comments can be edited by other users,
which includes adding and altering tags that reflect software versions.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Editing someone else's question or answer (comments can't be edited by others)
is a very aggressive move and not something that anyone other than a handful
of very experienced / high rep users are likely to do very often. And it is
far from a perfect solution either.

Editing an answer substantially upsets the entire up/down vote system, as well
as the comments. A better system would be something like question/answer
versioning. In general it's a problem that has received far too little effort.

~~~
geezerjay
> Editing someone else's question or answer (comments can't be edited by
> others) is a very aggressive move and not something that anyone other than a
> handful of very experienced / high rep users are likely to do very often.

Do you really believe that adding a tag with a version number to a post is
something that can be classified as a very aggressive move, particilarly if
it's an old post?

~~~
InclinedPlane
Please be serious, you know that's not what is meant by editing old answers in
the context of "stack overflow is more like wikipedia than anything else". The
implication is wholesale change of the entire content of the answer (or
question). Which fundamentally breaks how stack overflow works, and is why
it's not something that happens very often.

------
kauffj
StackOverflow being a wiki is at substantial odds with the way answers are
selected.

If StackOverflow is a wiki, then the best answer to a question should be
determined by the community, not the asker, and needs to be able to evolve and
change over time.

However, StackOverflow simultaneously insists questions can't be duplicated
while making answer selection immutable and controlled by the asker. This
results in a suboptimal experience.

Here is an example question highlighting this:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/884177/how-can-i-
determi...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/884177/how-can-i-determine-
what-font-a-browser-is-actually-using-to-render-some-text)

I currently have the best answer to the question "How can I determine what
font a browser is actually using to render some text?". The answer I gave was
the best answer in 2010. Things have changed a lot since then, and my answer
is no longer the best one on that page.

_But no one can change the best answer, which is insane!_ As a result, you see
best answers to old questions being turned into community wikis edited to
include better answers in the thread, rather than those answers being
selected.

~~~
codinghorror
That's mostly a perk for the question asker. Nobody (that I know of) stops
reading at the first answer, because there are usually multiple good ways to
solve any problem in programming. And if the accepted answer has a fraction of
the upvotes of the answer just under it.. that's another strong signal to
"keep scrolling"

~~~
dantiberian
People definitely stop reading after the first answer, especially if it looks
like a reasonable solution. It is a very common experience for me, where I
won't realise that there is a much better rated answer below the accepted one,
especially if the top answer is long enough so that the second one isn't
visible without scrolling.

From a UX perspective, you want to put the most relevant information at the
top. The votes of all Stack Overflow users gives a far greater signal than the
one 'accepted' flag from the asker.

This is one of my biggest pain points with Stack Overflow.

~~~
codinghorror
There's zero evidence that people stop reading at the first answer. Otherwise
no other answers would have any upvotes, and you can see that's not the case.

~~~
dantiberian
I'm not saying that every single person stops reading at the first answer,
just that people drop off over the page, and in my personal experience (and
talking with others), it is common to miss that there are higher ranked
answers below the accepted one.

------
PudgePacket
I've used stackoverflow for years and have never heard it put like that.

"Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a
discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are
not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by _how
many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over
time_."

Personally I would have been much more understanding of the process of using
stackoverflow if I knew this, and so would many of the people who get stung
expecting an answer to _their_ question.

In reality the user is contributing their question to the community, not
asking a question in the traditional sense. That's my take anyway.

~~~
torstenvl
I think this is a good observation, but I still don't think it completely
explains the hostility on SO, which quite often seems like an even more
hostile and juvenile version of certain Linux distro mailing lists. It
honestly seems like most of SO is people screaming "RTFM n00b!" and downvoting
questions into oblivion.

~~~
crispyambulance
Yeah, it's a big turn-off.

I think the game-ification of SO (in the form of badges, scores, privileges
and rules) attracts personalities who crave that shit and don't see any
problem with being harsh and dismissive to others that don't follow the rules
(as they see them).

Regardless of how much SO may say that it's about "the community" rather than
the individual, it BECOMES personal when an individual has a genuine problem
and gets treated like crap.

The whole stack-exchange scene has become an incredibly weird place to ask a
question. I find value in it and use it everyday, but I dread asking a
question there.

~~~
gaius
_that don 't follow the rules (as they see them_

The rules are exactly what is gamified via the points and badges system. You
can’t fault anyone for responding to the incentives they are given, when
explicitly set out by the site owners via that system.

The personalities attracted by it are the ones that made it successful, by
design. Otherwise it would be just another Yahoo Answers. The “rules” only
changed _after_ those contributors had made it a success. Some of those people
apparently feel it was a “bait and switch”.

~~~
crispyambulance

        > You can’t fault anyone for responding to the incentives they are given, when explicitly set out by the site owners...
    

Oh yes you can!

I remember stackoverflow in the early days and it was useful from the
beginning. Sure, there were always some persnickety zealots who acted as self-
appointed police "protecting" the community from subjectivity and duplicate
questions with all the sensitivity of a clock-maker wearing oven mitts.

In the last 5-6 years, however, it has been overrun with such strange
behavior. One can't simply ask a question unless it meets an unreasonably high
standard-- and even then perfectly good questions get slapped down for no
reason at all.

~~~
gaius
SO literally gives you a reward in the form of a badge for your profile the
more you flag questions! They give you a badge for downvoting, a badge for
editing... The root cause for all these behaviours lies with whoever dreamt up
those badges and chose what to award them for.

~~~
yifanl
Worse than the badges is that the more points you have, the more features you
get on SO.

Which could be a positive (it certainly makes sense that the most engaged
people should be the community moderators), but when combined with how points
are earned, it would naturally lead to weirdness like the swaths of
downvoting, reporting and totally unnecessary grammar edits.

~~~
wool_gather
There's a (fairly low) lifetime limit on receiving points for edits. Once
you've earned the editing privilege, you no longer earn points. And you lose a
point if you downvote an answer.

------
cletus
Wow, time flies (for both the age of SO and how long since Jeff was involved).

So I'm onboard with the concept of SO as Wikipedia. Fine. Weirdly I see no
mention of some of the bigger problems (as I see them). And what's weird about
these problems is they were completely foreseeable by anyone who paid the
tiniest bit of attention to Wikipedia.

1\. TMS (Toxic Moderator Syndrome). You have askers, answerers and moderators.
All have their purpose but they are not equal.

\- People who ask questions mainly derive value from SO by getting answers to
their problems and this is how it should be (and the karma system reflects
this).

\- People who answer questions. This is where most of the value is derived
from.

\- Moderators. While cleaning up the site has value it should be recognized
that this is a utility function. The karma system reflects this but any system
like this seems to attract a certain kind of personality who embodies the
principle that "those who can, do; those who can't, moderate".

Look at any highly ranked answer (or question) and you'll see a litany of
questionable edits (which eventually rob the answerer of any karma when that
question or answer gets 30+ edits and goes "community"). I don't have a
problem with this kind of pedantry.

What I do have a problem with is closing of using questions because of a
culture that has decided completely on its own what qualifies as acceptable
content for the site. Anyone who has used SO more than a few times will have
come across useful questions that don't have mathematically provable correct
answers and are closed as off-topic.

It's like the SO mods feared flamewars that never happened and in the process
created an equally bad (if not worse) situation.

2\. Accepted answers that are wrong (or were right but are now wrong). Why
can't these be edited?

3\. What to do with all that VC money. This never made sense to me but this
was in the era where some (VCs mainly it seems) thought that Q&A sites like
Quora were going to be the next unicorns (I never did and still don't).

This has led to side businesses like SO recruiting, which I never thought was
going to go anywhere because if you say contributions to the site were a
useful signal in hiring (which I'll accept as valid), last I looked at this (a
few years ago) only some ~25,000 with non-trivial amounts of karma. That's not
a sufficient market and pales in comparison to, say, Github repos as a signal.

4\. How to handle stale information. I still see no solution to this.

I really do wonder what went into Jeff bailing 2 years in (assuming he wasn't
pushed out). Joel still seems to be plugging away, which is a bit weird given
he's done much better out of, say, Trello.

There's honestly nothing magic about SO. It's just fairly simple software with
a clean UI that came about at a time where the alternative was the giant trash
heap that was and is EE. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely useful.

~~~
codinghorror
> How to handle stale information. I still see no solution to this.

Since you're down with "SO as Wikipedia" surely you can find the edit button
on every answer and question.. which works even in incognito mode when you are
not logged in?

~~~
explainplease
Have you ever tried editing answers as not-Jeff? It's rarely a pleasant,
rewarding experience, and usually a waste of one's time. Rep-farming wonks run
the place and will mindlessly shoot down thoughtful edits.

------
k__
When I wrote my bachelor thesis about democratic methods in online
communities, I found out that all these crowd-sourced sites had one major
problem.

When they start, senior players in their field of work laugh at them because
they don't have much content. So they try to get as much as possible, trying
to get as many new creators on board as they can.

Later, when they have grown enough, the senior players in the field laugh at
them because they have mostly garbage content. So they try to increase the
quality of their content.

The problem here is, now they accumulated a vast mass of creators who love the
site, but only a fraction of them creates quality content.

They unleash a task force of moderators on them that kick out the low-quality
creators, which improves quality, but bad for the morale of the whole
community.

Wikipedia did this and Stackexchange does this too.

I think, instead of alienating existing creators by deleting their content,
they should simply make high quality content more visible.

~~~
debacle
Being a community manager is a thankless, unrelenting assault on your
confidence and emotional and social stability.

The social Internet's linchpin has almost always (since as long as I can
remember) been that it requires a _certain kind_ of person to be an unpaid
community manager (by any name), and nearly every site you visit (wikipedia,
stackoverflow, reddit, etc) makes use of these nonployees.

~~~
duxup
"Being a community manager is a thankless, unrelenting assault on your
confidence and emotional and social stability."

Oh man I volunteered to moderate on a large gaming related forum ages ago. The
amount of BS you deal with along with personal attacks and etc is pretty high.
I never felt emotionally upset by it as I felt you had to maintain an even
keel .... but it certainly is not a job for everyone and the rub is the folks
who WANT to do it the most are often the worst at it. Being a good moderator
is not a skill everyone has, but it's also not valued in any real way by most
communities / companies.

Really the most frustrating aspect were the non trouble users who seemed to go
to bat for the folks who were truly bad actors because of some perceived
injustice (lie)... and all the meta that goes into that.

~~~
pavel_lishin
My favorite moments from moderating a _small_ , semi-private video-game
related board:

\- an administrator completely shutting the board down overnight because of a
_romantic encounter_ that went down poorly.

\- a prolific troll - who finally finally got enough of his accounts, sub-
accounts, and sock puppet accounts banned that he effectively lost access to
the site - texting me late at night demanding an explanation for why he was
banned.

\- people being outraged that we asked them to donate a small amount of money
(somewhere around a hundred dollars, collectively) to help run the server,
then offering to run it on their spare computer in their basement

\- discovering that due to a relatively unknown feature of PhpBB, we had a
whole _secondary parasite community_ that didn't show up in user
registrations, and that had a whole private forum set up that nobody else on
the board was aware of. It was like opening up a basement closet and
discovering that it's a secret night club.

~~~
duxup
Oh man 2 and 3... I know those feels.

I hate the word "entitlement" because I think it gets used wrong a lot, but oh
man folks perspective when it comes to the internet ... a lot of that. Users
just feel it should be free and even a minute of downtime and they want
answers, about a gaming forum (god help them if they just went to play games
for a bit).

As for the prolific troll thing, one site I worked (well volunteered) was a
popular commercial gaming site back in the day. Threats, fake accounts
claiming to be lawyers, etc. The site made money and all and had some really
dedicated trolls. One they actually took legal action against. I assumed it
was just some kid with too much time. Turned out to be a dude in his 40s....
in fact many of the most dedicated trolls turned out to be adults. Kinda
shocking to me at the time as I was younger then and just assumed they'd be
young dumb kids like me...

~~~
pavel_lishin
Wow, _actual_ legal action? I suppose I should feel lucky, things never got
that far.

~~~
duxup
Yeah I was surprised they even did it, not just legal action, but legal action
in another country. But that company did have a presence there....

The handful of actual legal actions never were well known, it was amusing as
the dedicated trolls talk big about every perceived injustice or slight or
straight up lie they would make. Even posting on other sties about it.

But the only legal actions I was aware of, word never got out. I suspect when
it gets real they get quiet fast, or their lawyer tells them to shut up.

------
dragontamer
There was an online game I used to play called "Utopia" (closely related to
Earth: 2025). It was structured in "seasons", where every 3 to 6 months, the
game would reset from scratch.

I think Stack Overflow would benefit from a similar reset cycle. Perhaps users
/ badges / moderators can remain the same between seasons, but every 5-years
or so, just reset the entirety of StackOverflow.

That means:

1\. Making "old StackOverflow" read-only. The goal being, these answers may be
stale and no longer relevant.

2\. Migrate "fresh" stuff over to the next season. Say, everything within the
past year is assumed to be fresh-enough to continue to the next season. This
is automatic.

3\. Users would only have to worry about duplicates within the current season.

4\. Referencing an "old season" of StackOverflow is encouraged. If an old
answer is still relevant, then you can ask / answer it in the new season.
Provide badges for this easy job so that the community can easily push and
"renew" the data to ensure it remains relevant.

5\. Historical answers can remain archived. There's a lot of answers which are
important for history's sake, but changing the text to be relevant for today's
programmers may lose the history of some answers. As such: a historical
archive of what programmers thought was best in 2013 is best left alone, but
"new answers" which reference the old post + updates with new recent
developments would provide context. IE: "Don't use std::shared_ptr<> with
new[] in C++" (correct in 2013, but incorrect after C++ 2017, which allows
shared_ptr<int[]> to use the correct delete[] operator in these cases).
Documenting the history and changes of languages is important too!

\--------

Yes, StackOverflow is a lot like Wikipedia. But unlike Wikipedia, the tech
world is incredibly fast paced. Answers for Java 1.4 are likely irrelevant in
today's world.

I dunno, maybe 5-years is too long, or maybe not often enough. But some
"season" cycle would be a good rebirth / renewal period for the website.

~~~
wool_gather
Intriguing. I like this idea...and I say that as someone who's spent quite a
lot of time posting well-recieved answers.

------
jmuguy
On any given day when I'm being really productive I try to go back and count
the number of tabs I have open on SO. I certainly enjoy watching my rep go up
from the one time I answered a VueJS question when it was still kind of new
but really I don't think I could do my job without the site. The amount of
negativity that gets thrown towards it is really ridiculous.

------
melling
Before I did a couple of rage quits on StackOverFlow, I wanted it to be the
definitive place for learning any computer topic from the beginning through
advanced topic, especially esoteric topics. You could easily build the
ultimate learning guide given enough questions, linking, etc.

I spent quite a bit of time on elisp questions. For example:

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

I think I had close to 200 questions at one point.

~~~
codinghorror
It's not a bad idea, but speculative questions (will anyone _really_ ask
this?) lead down the path of the "documentation" effort which was hugely risky
and eventually got pulled.
[https://stackoverflow.com/documentation](https://stackoverflow.com/documentation)

~~~
melling
No one wants to read documentation.

You want to throwdown enough breadcrumbs from hello world to any topic you
might wish to know to get things done in a language. More of a cookbook.

------
Flimm
I like this blog post, this is the vision of Stack Overflow that I bought into
when I started posting. However, it's hard not to read this blog post as a
diplomatic pushback to the current efforts of SO leaders to make it more
welcoming. Jeff Atwood says that SO is "supposed to involve a healthy kind of
minor [...] anxiety".

This section in particular stands out to me:

> This is why I cringe so hard I practically turn myself inside out when
> people on Twitter mention that they have pointed their students at Stack
> Overflow. What you'd want for a beginner or a student in the field of
> programming is almost _the exact opposite_ of what Stack Overflow does at
> every turn:

> * one on one mentoring * real time collaborative screen sharing * live chat
> * theory and background courses * starter tasks and exercises

> These are all very fine and good things, but Stack Overflow does _NONE_ of
> them, by design.

If this were on the official SO blog, I would be very surprised.

~~~
codinghorror
> not to read this blog post as a diplomatic pushback to the current efforts
> of SO leaders to make it more welcoming

Not at all, at least, that is not my intent. I do feel like the key items
articulated there (SO as wiki, duplicate danger, competitive system of peer
review, for practicing programmers) are not well understood by outsiders and
peripheral members of the community, though.

Note that the Stack Overflow tour (which was and is quite good!) that explains
what Stack Overflow is was perma-demoted to the footer... well, that used to
be true, but actually I just checked now and it's gone altogether? The word
"tour" doesn't appear on the SO homepage in incognito mode, at all. You can
visit "help" (which is in the footer) and then, and only then, will it appear
as a topbar.

[https://stackoverflow.com/tour](https://stackoverflow.com/tour)

------
eberkund
Your score on stackoverflow has always been a weak indicator of
knowledge/community involvement/any other virtuous attribute. This should be
clear to anyone who has browsed upon questions like "How do I perform this
common operation in Git?" or "What Bootstrap class do I use?" and seeing the
accepted 1 liner answer with 1000s of up-votes while at the same time some in
depth answer to a question about operating system internals, database
optimization or <insert complex topic here> has maybe 10 upvotes.

~~~
ndnxhs
That relates to another point in the post that your questions and answers are
scored based on how many other people you helped.

I have a super high rep on the blender stack exchange just because I happened
to ask all of the noob questions when the site was in beta. I still get almost
daily upvotes even though I haven't used blender in years.

------
skohan
I feel like Stack Overflow has gotten less useful to me as a programmer over
the years, and these days I more often find the answers I need on a forum
geared toward whatever technology I have a question about.

I have a hard time telling whether this reflects a change in developer culture
online over the years, or a change in the types of questions I tend to ask as
I have become a more experienced programmer.

~~~
Someone1234
The way SO is moderated encourages out of date information.

For example, if you find a question from 2015, with all out of date answers,
if you ask it again today it will be flagged as duplicate with a link to the
2015 answers and no further discussion is allowed. The older SO gets the worse
the content gets.

They're trying to make a "Wiki site" but in a Q&A format, it doesn't work and
doesn't make sense. Until they realize that their moderation policies are
going to keep driving away questions that would warrant modern/fresh answers.

For example try searching SO but set your Google to only show content from the
last 12 months, the results are simply low quality with half mod-dead. Most of
the good content is from two years ago or more, back before the site switched
from Q&A to "confused Wiki-site."

~~~
codinghorror
Per the wiki comparison, there's an edit button on every answer and question
-- it works even if you're not logged in. Try it!

I'm starting to think that calling the edit button "improve this answer" and
"improve this question" was a mistake..

~~~
ndnxhs
I always had the idea that the edit button was for minor corrections or
clarifications of the post and not to radically change the post itself.

~~~
codinghorror
if the information in the answer is incorrect as of a certain version of the
library / environment, it's perfectly fine for anyone with a web browser to
edit that additional information into the post.

------
faitswulff
I found the conclusion rather disappointing:

> What should Stack Overflow be when it grows up? Whatever we make it,
> together.

It's more of a historical overview than a vision for the future.

~~~
pg_bot
That's appropriate considering Jeff hasn't worked there for more than half the
life of the company. Stack Overflow is a piece of software that I would
consider complete. I hope their future is just more of the same. Sure there
will be small improvements to be made over time, but the radical days of
product changes are far behind. I'm going to guess that in 10 years the site
will still be recognizable to anyone who uses it today.

~~~
codinghorror
Entirely possible .. but I desperately hope that the /ask page is reworked
from the ground up to be a much more engaging sort of dynamic tutorial. Most
of the friction from people colliding with the SO system is on that page, and
it hasn't materially changed since 2011.

------
forrest92
> Stack Overflow is a wiki first

This is such an out of touch statement it's hilarious. Stackoverflow is a wiki
in the same way my dog is a heater.

~~~
gonational
Literally fell out of my my chair and out the office window; had to be
rescued.

+1 thank you for this comment.

------
manigandham
There are definitely problems with outdated content. SO + Google seems to be
particularly bad at finding accurate answers without cross-referencing several
different posts all linking to each other, combined with forced immutability
and the difficulty of some changes.

Some other sites like Quora have a full question "merge" feature which SO
needs, it would cut down the duplicates and allow a single question thread to
become more useful.

~~~
fabian2k
SO has a "merge questions" feature, but it's rarely used. It is only available
to elected moderators, and it's quite dangerous because it's not reversible
without assistance from SE staff.

One major problem is that merging two very similar questions that are about
the same concept would still end up with answers that seem out of place
because they address a slightly different version of the question.

Most cases should be solved by closing as duplicate, as that will create a
link to the canonical answer. Anonymous users will also be automatically
redirected to the canonical answer if there are no answers present on the
duplicate.

~~~
manigandham
That never seems to work well in practice.

Most of the time, there are existing answers and "closing as duplicate" leaves
up all of them as a separate question thread that just confuses everyone. The
links between them and the duplicate message are not intuitive and easily
overlooked, leading to an expectation of unfinished answers.

Quora meanwhile has completely reversibility, and allows the community to do
it. It's caused some problems but overall has cleaned up many common and
repetitive questions.

------
EADGBE
I'm still getting a bit of a humble brag out of this.

But thanks for the shout out, for all my contributions on SO. It's amazing, I
really feel like an indispensable cog now. /s

 _However_ , keeping Documentation[1] would have really accelerated the
progression of SO. But whatever... I don't run it.

This really isn't all for ourselves though; the Stack Exchange community is
more impressive to me. I really enjoy the Parenting, Money and Music SE's.

[1]
[https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-
documentation)

------
crdoconnor
Judging by the number of answers I see which were valid and good answers in
2011 and are _horrendously_ outdated now, it's not just grown up, it's grown
long in the tooth.

~~~
dudul
That's a really good observation. A lot of very highly ranked answers no
longer apply, and still they are very visible due to their score.

If the idea is to be the "wikipedia of programming", I wonder if "votes" are
enough. Should there be an active initiative to prune stupid/bad questions?
Revisit old answers?

~~~
Flimm
It's actually worse than that. The accepted answer by the OP is pinned to the
top forever (or until OP changes his or her mind, which is often never), no
matter how many downvotes the pinned answer collects.

~~~
superflyguy
Possibly just need to reduce every answer's score a little every month to
favour answers which are actively being voted up more recently.

------
gonational
I’m gonna catch some flak for this...

Listening to Jeff try to describe what stack overflow is and the “fundamental
misunderstanding” by all of us millions of unwashed masses is amazing.

It’s also a bit like listening to a muskox describe why it decided to grow
long hair after so much time in the snow; IOW, a complete and total lack of
understanding of emergence and a rewriting of history at the behest of Jeff’s
enormous ego.

This is what happens when you raise massive amounts of money for what is a
simple question and answer site and you have to find some kind of
philosophically transcendent exclamation of what it is that you have created.
Instead of saying “we created yahoo answers for programmers, but with a better
interface”, you come up with something like “We’ve created a valuable resource
for the future of the planet and all the programmers hereafter”.

Stack overflow is and always was a question and answer site. To attempt to
take credit for the following value of search results containing stack
overflow questions that have already been answered that sound like what you’re
asking is to take credit for search engines and to take credit for your users’
hard work.

That last bit doesn’t surprise me at all, given that Jeff’s post ends with an
insulting meme that implies we are a dumb mob.

~~~
Flimm
I don't think you are giving Stack Overflow's leaders enough credit. There
were many Q&A sites before it, but Stack Overflow was much better for the
lurkers, and all of that content is licensed under Creative Commons, similar
to Wikipedia.

Also, Jeff is not trying to take credit for the users' hard work, I'm a
contributor and I don't feel that way, especially after reading this part:

> I am honored and humbled by the public utility that Stack Overflow has
> unlocked for a whole generation of programmers. _But I didn 't do that._

> _You_ did, when you contributed a well researched question to Stack
> Overflow.

> _You_ did, when you contributed a succinct and clear answer to Stack
> Overflow.

> _You_ did, when you edited a question or answer on Stack Overflow to make it
> better.

~~~
tokyodude
> and all of that content is licensed under Creative Commons

it's CA-BY-SA IIRC. In other words if you copied and pasted a snippet from SO
you now need to open source your project (the SA part of CC-BY-SA). I'm
surprised someone hasn't written some ransomware that scans SO for snippets
and compares them to github and starts sending out the "pay up" notices.

~~~
Piskvorrr
_If_ that makes a substantial part of the project. Of course, the meaning of
that is likely to be decided by courts...but if your project literally
consists of 50% recycled SO content, it might suffer from worse issues.
#understatement

------
toddh
Sorry, I'm going to have to close that post as off topic.

------
mark-r
I've found that the policies on StackOverflow are at odds with my motivation
for providing answers. There are two main motivators for me, working on
interesting problems and helping other human beings. The interesting problems
are few and far between, so helping others has to do. As you can see from this
post, the system has been rigged so that the goal of helping the individual is
completely deemphasized to the point where it's actively hostile.

------
sjapkee
This is the world's most famous vim exit guide. It has already fulfilled its
mission.

~~~
marcosdumay
It also has the most authoritative answer about parsing HTML with regular
expressions in a question that isn't about parsing HTML in any general way.

------
pixelmonkey
Might be good enough to be remembered as the site that killed Experts-
Exchange.

------
randomsearch
“SO has probably added billions of dollars of value to the world in increased
programmer productivity.”

No: the voluntary contributions of many skilled programmers, mediated by a
website, has increased programmer productivity. Stack Overflow has captured
and exploited some of the value created, and the contributors have not been
paid.

Skill needed to create SO / Expertise embodied in content provided for free to
SO = approx zero.

Running a big site like SO is hard, but it’s trivial compared to the expertise
required to write the content on SO from scratch.

~~~
codinghorror
This is covered in the blog post, search for "I didn't do that"

------
scarface74
On the development side, I try to stay away from the bleeding edge and I do as
much research as possible, between the two, I’ve never had to ask a technical
question on the Internet.

But, I can see the temptation of giving up soon and just posting on SO. I take
full advantage of the paid AWS support plan. If I spend more than 30 minutes
trying to figure something out, I’ll submit a ticket and wait to chat with
someone. So far, AWS support is batting 100.

I don’t think any of my questions have been easy even in hindsight.

------
wool_gather
Thanks for writing this, Jeff! I was very cheered to see a gentle but firm
defense of SO's mission -- and of the users who make it happen -- this
morning. Doubly so given [the latest nonsense-bomb that SO corp decided to
drop][0] on those users this week.

[0]:[https://medium.com/@cellio/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-
ta...](https://medium.com/@cellio/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-
talk-13bf3f90204f)

~~~
ufmace
Quick summary of that Medium post for everyone - Some unknown people accused a
SE site of... something on Twitter. People got mad about it. A SE employee
weighed in in support of the tweeter. Some other people claim the accusation
of whatever it is is nonsense. And I don't have the slightest idea what
happened or whose side to take.

~~~
wool_gather
> And I don't have the slightest idea what happened or whose side to take

Unfortunately most of those involved are at least a little bit right, and I'm
not sure that we SE users who are upset have concerns that make any sense out
of context. :) They don't have anything directly to do with the original
tweet. I probably shouldn't even have linked the article.

------
shady-lady
I think the 2018 Strange Loop talk "The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan
Czaplicki hits on some things which SO should adopt. relevant screengrab:
[https://imgur.com/a/5xMRvtf](https://imgur.com/a/5xMRvtf)

full talk at [https://youtu.be/o_4EX4dPppA](https://youtu.be/o_4EX4dPppA)

------
InclinedPlane
Stack Overflow is still far and away the best site of its kind, but it has
stagnated significantly over the last several years. The site runners aren't
tackling the big meta problems any longer, and they aren't pursuing innovative
solutions either, they're just continuing the status quo into the future.

------
petraeus
Pretty obvious answer similar to what google does, show alternative views and
account for vote inflation.

e.g. if you get 1000 upvotes in position 1 those are worth less than 750 votes
in position 2 because its expected that users will lean towards the first
answer presented

------
0x445442
I think the need for, or at least the level of reliance on, a site like Stack
Overflow is an example of how utterly messed up the "profession" is compared
to other engineering and non-engineering professions.

~~~
badosu
That's not a fair comparison, the level of diversity in ways to solve or
diagnose a problem are much bigger in the software engineering world.

Where in a typical engineering profession you would have a somewhat defined
checklist on how to diagnose an issue and a proven method to fix it, in
software engineering you have a million possibilities: "\- Did you check x? -
Was this nth specific step for this specific framework followed? etc.."

It's messy because the problem space can't be as easily enumerated.

------
ianamartin
The thing I think will be most interesting to understand in retrospect is how
much of a filter the SO community has been in terms of blocking and shaping
the generation of programmers who've started out since it has become the go-to
site for help.

University degrees act as a filter to a certain extent. And many fields have
courses at the beginning that are designed to weed out people who are not
going to be successful in later coursework. And the result of that filter is a
certain homogeneity people that make it through that filter and become
successful.

The internet has done a really fascinating end-run around the university
filter, and has been described as an an equalizing mechanism in society. But
filters and enforced similarities are things that spontaneously emerge from
societies--even anonymous ones on the internet.

While it's true that SO doesn't claim to be a learning resource for beginners,
most google searches lead there, and that's a real part of its function no
matter how much the managers claim it shouldn't be. And the response that
beginners get is clear: conform or get out.

I think the social tide in the work place is moving against that kind of
attitude. Developers are no longer quite the magical group of secretive
wizards that they used to be, and the sort of Linus-style kind of treatment of
people who aren't completely on it isn't really tenable in business situations
anymore. A lot of the jobs that I _want_ to apply for are more and more
frequently focusing on being a good colleague, not just a good programmer.

I think SO has two obvious directions it can take. The first is to allow the
core contributors to continue to lay down the law and remain, shall we say,
aloof and concerned primarily with maintaining their fiefdoms while gradually
shrinking in relevance and contributions. And the other is to, well, not
basically.

I don't think either one of those is actively bad. There is value in
maintaining the strict order that SO does. But that value comes at a cost.
There's a high barrier to entry right now for being an influencer on SO, and
that's good if you want to remain the authoritative place to find good
answers. It's bad if you want a next generation of leaders to come in and
replace the ones who are currently at the top when they wander off to do other
things.

I remember reading a story about what happens when you listen too much to how
people use your product, and the example case was Excel. It was supposed to be
a spreadsheet. But Microsoft--ever the leader at market research--figured out
very quickly that people were using it for almost everything but spreading
sheets! And Microsoft--also the leader at getting product decisions massively
wrong--decided to make Excel do pretty much everything instead of developing a
separate product to fill those use cases. And now we're at a point where Excel
does basically everything, and getting people to not fucking use it for
everything is almost impossible.

So yeah. They need to keep a tight focus.

An interesting counterexample is EvE online. For almost 2 decades now, the
games has had a reputation for being hardcore, elite pvp. The weak need not
apply. Piracy, scamming . . . being the bad guy in every way is not only
allowed, it's encouraged. That community filters itself very effectively.
Whining about what's fair or not just makes you more of a target. People farm
new player tears as much as they farm space dollars. And it shows. CCP Games
has had a tremendously difficult time staying relevant in the MMORPG world and
in the last couple of years has been forced to make sudden changes that really
disrupted the existing community in an effort to appeal to new players. Nobody
really wins there.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the next decade. It's a
legitimately difficult management challenge, and I'm not convinced that it's
possible to avoid what seems to be the inevitable rise and decline cycle of
all social networks.

