
The decline of Stack Overflow (2015) - abaschin
https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d#.6m40xdc9p
======
Latty
People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best
resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully
curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used
to have before.

Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people
understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but
they are working on that (a lot of the more hostile rule enforcement tropes
are banned and filtered against), and it's a hard problem.

SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good. If you want to
kill it, please go ahead and solve the issue of explaining to users how to
contribute quality content and getting them to take that in instantly.

I used to contribute a lot, which tapered off as I had other things filling my
time. Towards the end though, the help vampires were getting to me, and I
understand why people are harsh towards new users in some situations, it's an
easy trap to fall into. Trying to fix that problem by stopping the curation of
the content is insane, however. That's a fast route to going from some people
being turned away to having no decent content.

~~~
reitanqild
> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best
> resource by a mile.

I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit
of biting you for no apparent reason all the time.

> People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated
> environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to
> have before.

People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the
same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have
been going on.

Edit: broaden answer with first quote and answer.

~~~
jerf
"People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the
same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have
been going on."

It wasn't bullying so much as low-quality content. It is quite likely you
didn't have this problem, as I didn't very often either. If you know where to
go, help has always been available for many
languages/runtimes/environments/etc., and generally that help still is
available today. If you know the right IRC channels, the right forums, the
right mailing lists, the right other resources, you can get great, high-
quality help.

However, prior to SO if you just poked your query into Google you ran a decent
risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads, locked behind
obtaining accounts (to get your email for spam) if not outright paywalls, or
expertsexchange. And this was more true for beginners; I didn't encounter this
stuff while looking up an error message resulting from an obscure combination
of hardware under Linux, I encountered this stuff while trying to refresh my
memory about some particular Javascript intricacy.

Yes, it really was bad for a lot of people. SO is still an improvement
inasmuch as while the community may rub some people the wrong way, at least
the answers are still there for free, uncluttered, and generally of high
quality for the most-commonly searched things.

~~~
marcosdumay
My pre-SO experience was similar to yours, but things change, and alternative
forums improved a lot.

I'm not saying there's any generic forum better than SO out there. But they
are not that far behind anymore.

~~~
ambicapter
Well, competition has a way of motivating people to do better :)

------
sklivvz1971
Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow.

What people don't understand is that SO serves literally _all_ developers. No
matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce
moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People
complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are
elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the community.

After a few years, I've heard it all.

~~~
user5994461
> Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow.

In that case, I have a serious question for you: What's your plan for
refreshing the site on the long term?

Lemme explain. The "community" is actively closing new questions as
"duplicate" if anything similar is already present.

At the same time, the old answer (that all duplicates are redirecting to) is
often locked down for various reasons. The blocking prevents to update or add
new answers.

Currently, many major questions are redirecting to one of the first answers
from 3-6 years ago, when the site was relatively new. The provided answers are
rotting over time.

How do you intend to prevent that?

~~~
sklivvz1971
> How do you intend to prevent that?

Very very few posts are actually uneditable at all, and editing is open to all
users (some need approval).

If a post is locked _and_ outdated it's likely that the question was locked
_because_ it was the kind of question that does not provide long-lasting
answers (for example a software recommendation list).

~~~
winteriscoming
Given that a voting system is in place, why not let the duplicate stay open
and just mark it as a duplicate and link it to the other thread? People who
don't like the new thread can down vote it and people who do want to
contribute meaningful replies can still do and be upvoted if it adds value.

I don't see how this might affect SEO in any bad way than the current scheme
does.

~~~
shagie
Fragmentation of knowledge. The SO model tries to get the answers in one place
so the people who search first find the answer in one place.

If duos were open, the you'd have to look in all the places first to find the
best answer. And then you might as well skip that step and ask another
question rather than search.

Try searching a forum or /r/javahelp or the like for an answer. See how many
results you have to hit before you find an answer that works for you. Then
reconsider the value of closing and pointing people at the duplicate question.

------
dismantlethesun
I've found that if you go to Stackoverflow for a fast-moving topic like
Javascript, the first answer isn't correct in modern terms. The next set of
answers, without check marks, are likely more correct.

So you have to read the entire page to get a glimpse of the truth.

This can be bad if you're just looking for an immediate solution, however for
learning its fantastic because it shows you a recorded history of how things
evolved over time in a framework.

~~~
hjnilsson
I think the crusade against duplicates worsens this problem. If duplicates
were more accepted, it would both make it more welcoming for newcomers to ask
questions, and encourage people to update the answers to old questions (by
answering the new questions).

~~~
x1798DE
I don't totally understand why people worry so much about your question being
marked as a duplicate. Questions marked as duplicates are not deleted and
still show up in search results - the reason why duplicates are still kept
around after being marked is because they sorta _want_ duplicate questions on
the site, because every person is going to state their query in slightly
different language, and you want people searching using different terms to end
up in the same place.

Most of the time if your question is mostly a duplicate but the other question
(or its answer) is missing some critical factor, then you can appeal and say,
"I don't think this is a duplicate of <x> because <y>" (or modify your
question with the stipulation that the answer solve the critical factor) and
the duplicate marking will be removed.

The other thing is, even when questions get marked as duplicates or closed,
half the time I _still_ see them accumulating their own answers, so really,
what's the big issue?

~~~
DanBC
If you ask a question and it genuinely has been answered elsewhere a friendly
note "I think your question is answered here [url], is there anything that
isn't answered by that question?" is useful. But "duplicate of [url]" often
links to a question that has enough differences to not be a dupe. It's
hostile, and it's a sign that incentives are out of alignment.

~~~
x1798DE
But just telling someone the answer might be available somewhere else doesn't
direct future traffic to the canonical question, which is the entire point of
the "marked as duplicate" flag. If your question gets marked as duplicate and
the question it's a duplicate of is a _different_ question, it is not very
hard to get it "re-opened". Maybe people don't know that this is true, but I
think the main people having problems with questions marked as duplicates are
new users where you've had very little time to educate them about what it
means to have your question marked as a duplicate (basically, not much). Even
if you made the "marked as duplicate" flag less obtrusive or whatever,
politely saying, "Your question may have an answer at <url>" probably will get
interpreted as "RTFM", and called user-hostile as well.

As an aside, my only experience with having a question marked as a duplicate
happened on a sister SE site - it was my first post there, I asked a question,
then after posting I found the answer in one of the "related questions" links
on the sidebar. I answered my own question with a link to the other question
and a description of the answer I found there, then flagged my own post as a
duplicate. Both the question _and_ answer were highly upvoted.

~~~
DanBC
> it is not very hard to get it "re-opened".

I'd be interested to see some statistics. I strongly suspect that when most
newbies are told to fuck off that they do, in fact, fuck off.

~~~
x1798DE
I don't disagree with that assessment, per se, but I don't think much can be
done about it. The message doesn't say, "Fuck off, you worthless loser", it
says (taken from the site), "This question has been asked before and already
has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please
edit this question to explain how it is different or ask a new question." The
fact that you interpret this as "fuck off" more or less proves my point that
_anything_ hinting at, "Maybe the answer can be found here" will be
interpreted by new users as "fuck off".

As for statistics, you may be able to find some by querying the data explorer:
[https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new](https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new)

I suspect it would be difficult to (automatically) distinguish between
instances where a user was discouraged by the message and instances where the
user's question was answered at the link. Perhaps the fraction of instances
where the question was edited after being marked as a duplicate, then re-
opened, is an OK metric for how willing a given community is to re-open
questions.

~~~
shagie
That was examined in this post -
[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266844](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266844)

Might be interesting to see more recent statistics, but it still gives an
idea.

------
makecheck
While StackOverflow is still an outstanding resource, they never really solved
the “why bother?” problem for the really difficult subjects.

Your choices are: answer a trivial JavaScript question and get a million
points, or spend an hour painstakingly explaining a hard problem for maybe one
point (where, half the time, the original submitter doesn’t even bother to
“accept” your answer so you lose even _that_ small point boost).

There needs to be some scaling factor. For example: if the number of questions
_anywhere_ on a certain topic is quite small then popular answers in that area
could receive more credit; or, perhaps individual _parts_ of a post could be
voted on to increase value (say, you see a really detailed example so you
“tip” that answer for taking the time to write it all out).

~~~
greenhatman
You can use bounty for difficult, niche or obscure questions.

[http://stackoverflow.com/help/bounty](http://stackoverflow.com/help/bounty)

------
tedmiston
> However, a 2013 study has found that 77% of users only ask one question, 65%
> only answer one question, and only 8% of users answer more than 5 questions.

Is this actually a problem?

I've always viewed Stack Overflow as a "write once, read many" community. For
top questions, it looks kind of like Quora.

Checking my own stats: I've been a member for 7 years, asked 4 questions, and
given 45 answers while reaching ~86k people [1]. My karma is not super high at
936. However, I've gleaned so much value from the SO community (and saved so
much time), that these numbers only begin to scratch the surface.

Using these numbers as metrics doesn't reflect the value of SO's knowledge
base. I don't think Stack Overflow is on the decline at all.

[1]:
[http://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/tedmiston?tab=profile](http://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/tedmiston?tab=profile)

~~~
keithnz
I've asked 88 questions, answered 992, rep 28k, reach of over 2 million
people.

But, my coworkers, use SO all the time, and don't even have an account.

Most of the issues are with people trying to participate with low quality
questions and answers, it can feel like a negative experience, but that's only
a tiny fraction of people in the scheme of things. High frequency noise that
won't make it to where it becomes useful.... search results. While it isn't a
perfect system, it's results are great. If you feel burnt by SO, just don't
take it personally, keep participating .... or not, if you really don't like
it, go contribute on forums in a more casual non curated manner.

------
drinchev
Well can we just think the other way around.

StackOverflow is a community driven website for a society that is used to
follow rules and be disciplined.

Nowadays, the popularity of the website put it in a bad position. Handling
millions of impolite, pseudo-developers, who've heard that it can help them
with their problem.

In other words the community and popularity changed, not StackOverflow. And no
it's not dying, it's just working! Sorry for some of us that remember the
times where questions were mostly high-quality, but I don't think there is a
way to prevent collateral damage in this case.

I prefer to read "opinionated question", instead of 10 paragraphs about a
problem that in the end is unsolvable by logical decision.

------
cezarywojcik
On the opposite end of the "new user" perspective that is trying to ask a good
question, as someone who is seeking to sometimes answer questions, it is
pretty hard to actually find a good question. The vast majority of the
questions I run into _are_, in fact, duplicates, poorly
worded/incomprehensible, far too broad, etc. (one example that has stuck with
me is "how do I install HTML/JavaScript on my computer?").

Though perhaps there are good, legitimate questions out there, it is also
conceivable that some frustrated new users think that their question is
appropriate for SO when it is not. This most often happens, from what I've
seen, in the "far too broad" category. Just looking at SO right now, for
example, I saw a question that was asking how to pass data on an iOS app from
one place to another. In that user's mind, he/she has probably been trying to
figure out the basics of making an iOS app, and this seems a legitimate
question. However, this is an incredibly broad architecture/design question.
SO isn't a resource to hand-hold you when you're learning something new. It's
a resource for asking specific questions when you can't find the solution
anywhere else (and you've actually tried).

~~~
kwhitefoot
> SO isn't a resource to hand-hold you when you're learning something new.
> It's a resource for asking specific questions when you can't find the
> solution anywhere else (and you've actually tried).

Why not? A lot of people need help, why not just politely point them in the
right direction. Or if you feel that that is beneath you just ignore them.

If someone asks a question like "Which is the best tool for solving problem x"
they question is closed with a note saying that is has been closed because it
will only attract opinion based answers. Well that is exactly what the
question was asking for, an opinion from someone who might know better than
the person asking the question.

I would much rather have the supercilious answers removed. I have in mind the
ones that instead of answering the question simply tell you that you shouldn't
approach the problem that way at all even when the person asking has made it
clear that they have no choice in that (corporate choice of platform, IDE, DB,
etc., for instance).

~~~
wnoise
> Why not?

Well, that's not the problem the site owners were trying to solve, and it
appears that trying to solve it would impact what they are trying to do.

------
V-2
> _Someone at Hacker News expressed a common experience for many programmers
> (experienced or not) when trying to participate on Stack Overflow._

Okay...

> _4 — Respond to comment about a missing semicolon that got deleted when I
> was cutting /pasting/formatting my code. (Despite the error msg making it
> clear that the missing semicolon isn’t the issue)_

Who cares. I would just ignore this.

> _Duplicate answer person complains that their entry was posted first. I
> advise them that the timestamp indicates the other poster was first and they
> reply that it is a time zone bug._

Yes, very "common experience" ;) Anyway, who cares? I wouldn't waste my time
on such an idiotic argument at all

> _10 — Check back one more time and see that someone has downvoted my
> question_

> _11 — Email the mods to get the downvote removed_

Oh for the love of God, who cares??? So it got downvoted, big deal, why do you
need to bother the mods about it... (Did you wonder how they can get cranky
sometimes?)

Some people really should chill out, or consider themselves lucky for having
way too much free time on their hands

~~~
shagie
If someone grabs the code to try to reproduce the error and gets unrelated
sytanx errors, that's their time wasted. The comment about the error helps
others from wasting their time too... until the problem is fixed.

As there is a taboo of modifying someone else's code, this is best done with a
comment and hope the OP will fix it.

~~~
V-2
Yeah, well, that's a good point too. That's another possibility.

At any rate, whether the reason for someone to point out a missing semicolon
is because they couldn't run the code straight away, or only because they
didn't bother to read the question carefully - I fail to see why either
scenario would be specific to StackOverflow and its peculiar community.

Surely on any QA site in existence you could come across someone acting on
either of these possible reasons??

------
mhomde
I'm a bit divided about Stack Overflow. On one hand side it's simply one, if
not the best, resource for programmers. On the other hand it's become somewhat
toxic and counterproductive. The better you become as a programmer the less
value you derive from it. The true niche experts are less and less to be found
(ie Product/Project -owners and Microsoft/Google/Apple etc -employees) and the
other replies will often be exasperating mixture of trying to give answers
they've googled or complain about some meta-aspect of the question.

Any community that reaches a certain size will face unique problems and I
think Stack Overflow has some of the same problem as reddit does: you have to
be very careful on how you give power to users. Power corrupts and becomes a
goal/game in itself. Karma/power is a great incentive in the beginning of a
community, but can become destructive in the long run. That some programmers
have a certain type of personality is probably not helping either.

There seems to be many småpåvar on Stack Overflow that loves to wield the
small amount of power they've accrued without actually contributing that much.
On the other hand you have to enforce rules and curation to keep quality up.

It's a very fine balance and hard to get right. It's mostly about human
psychology and incentives. I think there's some tweaks they could do to
improve things but I also understand that from their perspective why change
something that works?

The danger is that the true experts stop helping/answering questions on Stack
Overflow because they find the community becoming too toxic. Might turn into a
downwards spiral until there's mostly trolls and newbies left.

~~~
teach
> The better you become as a programmer the less value you derive from it.

This has been my experience exactly. I'd been coding for 20+ years before
Stack Overflow even existed. I nevertheless find many good answers on SO via
Google searches.

But virtually all of my _questions_ are either downvoted to oblivion or closed
as "duplicates". I spend hours trying to solve the problem myself and spend
even more time reducing the problem to the smallest reproducible test case
before asking.

And then some moderator closes as a duplicate because it looks similar enough
to some other question he's seen before. It's incredibly frustrating, to the
point that I've stopped participating at all other than to upvote good
answers.

~~~
mhomde
Yeah, it can be very frustrating :(

------
Dowwie
I disagree with this. SO helped me with Python, Postgres, and SQL countless
times.

If we are going to consider the value of SO, I would argue that it is a
_cornerstone_.

~~~
marcosdumay
I've found the Postgres docs almost always more informative, clearer, and more
correct than anything I find on SO. The only exceptions are for "how can I
achieve this goal" questions, instead of the much more common "how can I
implement this idea" ones.

Most useful info about Python from SO are pointers to the official docs in
content-free answers. What is very valuable, because the docs are hard to
navigate, but not what is expected.

About Haskell, C, or Perl, I currently ignore SO links, it's just less bother
to go to the next result, and way more likely to get something useful.

But for Javascript, .Net, MS SQL, and a lot of other random stuff, SO is
unbeatable.

------
sylvinus
What most people fail to understand (but was explained very well by Joel in
some talks) is that SO is primarily optimized for Google & read-only users
just looking for the answer to a common issue. By that metric they are
extremely successful.

Many things people complain about are deliberate design choices that actually
made SO popular in the first place.

~~~
reitanqild
AFAIK SO was wildly popular before the current behaviour.

------
superJimmy64
There are obvious exceptions however I have come to understand the greatness
that is SO. All that is needed is a well-thought question with a little bit of
work to show on the side.

I have a theory about why many complain about SO (please don't comment about
this line, there are obviously exceptions):

There has been a ridiculous sense of entitlement with the growth and recent
appeal of tech jobs in the past 5 years.

All this crap about "trolling" getting out of hand, not enough diversity (THE
FIELD WAS PRIMARILY FILLED WITH NERDS OFTEN LACKING ANY SOCIAL SKILLS, no one
else wanted to look or hang out with "that guy who is good with computers")
etc.

It's a field that was mainly driven out of the desire and enjoyment that would
be had messing around on CPU's. Therefore most of the good ones (among the
diluted masses of "experts" nowadays) spent a great deal of time on these
things. I'm not surprised that somebody would get pissed off if another came
around and started asking for the answers to things without any real effort or
drive being shown.

SO will forever be a poor resource for the huge incoming population of coders.

------
inanutshellus
I found myself a little incensed _at_ this article, rather than by it. Yup,
there are limits on new users' privileges. Yes, there are users that play The
Reputation Game. Yes, there are many questions that don't get answered to
one's satisfaction. Yes, there are trolls. Yes, there are disillusioned users.
Yes, yes, yes.

Even so, I also find all of this to be Perfect-As-Enemy-of-Good whinging.
Instead it could've been a plea full of suggestions. A Call To Action!

So let's do that now, though I may come off as a prick here because I kinda
think all of this whining is the _real_ problem of the internet.

> The privilege limits

IMHO they're are rational and reasonable, but your specific use-case was about
new folks not being able to leave comments. So how could we solve this?
Perhaps new users ought to be able to, but only the author'd be able to see
them. When either the Q or A author upvoted it, it'd become visible to the
world?

> Troll responses to your bad/incorrect/misleading answer

That sounded like a bummer. You know you can flag these comments already so...
punish these bad actors in the provided way and move on.

> Respond to comment that says my question is a duplicate (it’s not, which I
> clarify to avoid “closed as duplicate”) > [...] > Another issue with this is
> that duplicates show up despite the crotchety moderators complaining about
> it.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. It's casual, usually-helpful internet
folk doing their (usually) altruistic best to help. Most of the time, this
works great. Blog posts like this point out the exception, and are valuable,
and they're very enticing clickbait. But when they offer only boo-hoo's and no
ah-hah's, move on.

~~~
johnslegers
Yes, my article needs a follow-up that goes in greater detail on the causes of
the issues and suggests some actual improvements.

Point taken. I'll look into that as soon as I find the time for it!

~~~
inanutshellus
I look forward to the follow-up post!

------
tedmiston
To me this reads as if the author is not asking questions in a way consistent
with Stack Overflow's guidelines [1]. They make these guidelines really
explicit and clear in the FAQ.

> _How do I ask a good question?_

> Search, and research

> Write a title that summarizes the specific problem

> Introduce the problem before you post any code

> Help others reproduce the problem

> Include all relevant tags

> Proof-read before posting!

> Post the question and respond to feedback

> Look for help asking for help

However, writing questions in this way where you provide a MCVE, explain
everything you've tried, and relate it to existing questions to help reviewers
is time consuming. It shifts part of the time burden of a good question onto
the asker vs reviewers or early answerers.

As someone who's done many reviews on Stack Overflow, I think following these
guidelines is the best way to not get downvoted or flagged.

[1]: _How do I ask a good question?_ [http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-
ask](http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask)

------
fma
One person has a few bad experience, says it's in decline. I'll counter his
bad experiences with my positive experiences of both asking and answering
questions - and finding more answers there anywhere else.

There - now the universe is back in balance.

------
shagie
Consider this on the "I keep finding closed and interesting questions on SO"
\- the "what is the best linter for PHP" or "What is your favorite cartoon" or
"where is the best place to meet female programmers (for romance)" (ref
[http://i.stack.imgur.com/x9ik2.jpg](http://i.stack.imgur.com/x9ik2.jpg) ) -
why not ask those questions _here_?

If the answer to that is "because that isn't a good place to ask those
questions" or "because HN isn't set up for answering those types of questions"
then consider the possible response of "maybe SO isn't set up for answering
those types of questions well either?"

When there is more noise than signal in a question and answer page, it is
useless. Go dig around
[https://community.oracle.com/community/java](https://community.oracle.com/community/java)
and consider why you don't put site:community.oracle.com in your search (or
for that matter, see how well one can find the answer to an error message in
/r/javahelp). When there are dozens of answers that consist of "try libXyz" it
isn't useful - you're going to have to dig through each of those to see if it
works or not for you... and you might as well have done a google search
instead.

When the questions are "how do you make a triangle with '*'" a dozen times
over in September, those questions need to be closed so they don't waste the
time of people who are trying to find good questions to answer.

------
firefoxd
No,SO is not declining. All the common questions have already been answered.

The main problem is people don't research their problem for more then a minute
before asking a question.

~~~
reitanqild
As someone who sometimes ask non-trivial questions that other people sometimes
find useful I don't think this is the complete answer:

I, and I guess others, can easily hesitate a full day, doing search after
search after search, before asking on SO.

On the other hand SO makes it really simple to create new accounts and ask
questions.

If they really were concerned about answering the same questions again and
again they would implement some basic rules like limiting new users from
asking questions untilntyey had been active for a full day or something.

Weirdly enough it seems people like to complain about the workload while at
the same time refusing to do anything to reduce it.

In fact it is almost as if they enjoy moderating noobs :-|

------
AdrienChey
The article is probably right about some factors that explain the "77% of
users only ask one question". But IMOHO it miss an important one: Most of the
user find answer to their question only by searching.

In fact once you get rejected (by a troll or not) for asking a question that
you would have been able to find on SO, you became more careful before
posting.

Also don't forget that a huge majority of the net user are ghost / read only
:)

------
dustingetz
Point based moderation generates toxicity, hacker news gets toxic too. Stack
Overflow went all in on moderation before they understood the social
consequences of it. There's an opportunity here for a social network with a
moderation system that cares about how it makes people feel and how feelings
impact user generated content.

~~~
clairity
this is a really important point. how do you curate for good content while not
demoralizing contributors?

and it's a more generalized social challenge. in coaching for example, you
need to improve a player's abilities and instincts, which essentially implies
that what they're currently doing is not so great. the easiest people to coach
understand that they are not already perfect. those who are hardest to coach
are those who already believe they are good enough.

for the player, there's a tension between having the self-esteem to assert
yourself while having the maturity to accept criticism. you need to be able to
encourage both behaviors while maintaining a balance between them.

as you point out, the challenge for an online moderation system is providing a
similar balance to users/contributors. the social distance between
contributors and moderators makes it hard not to become defensive.

~~~
shagie
With a dozen exceptions for the diamond (elected) mods, all the moderators are
from the community and got to that point with contributions. Nearly all of the
are still contributing and moderate as part of the process of trying to find
things to answer.

------
okket
(2015)

Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837442](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837442)
(1 year ago, 39 comments)

~~~
wslh
More decline in 2016. Questions are not being answered in general or there are
professionals responders who don't really understand what you are talking
about.

In the other hand there are exciting discussions in the other
*.stackexchange.com sites (e.g. reverseengineering, ethereum).

~~~
tedmiston
I'm not so sure I agree. I've answered a few Python questions this year. Most
of which have gotten several answers pretty quickly. If they didn't get
answers, it was often a question that was a poor fit for Stack Overflow (e.g.,
very specific to a framework, something readily available in the docs).

------
oskarth
> However, a 2013 study has found that 77% of users only ask one question, 65%
> only answer one question, and only 8% of users answer more than 5 questions.
> With this article, I’m exploring the likely reasons for that very, very low
> percentage.

This is a power law distribution. It is to be expected.

------
menacingly
Stack Overflow is useful, but a lot of that usefulness comes from its complete
dominance of search results. By keyword stuffing in the sidebar (and last I
checked the nofollow links) they maintain a strong search presence for
virtually every topic.

So, this position as top tech knowledge hub is sort of artificially propped up
at this point. You type in your query, arrive at a page with something vaguely
like the question you asked, are faced with pedantic flags about how the
question you came to have answered is somehow unfit, and maybe some useful
info. Also maybe some outdated info with real unaccepeted answers below it.

I'm not aware of another site that so heavily depends on content it itself
seems to consider unworthy, siloed into so many vaguely overlapping sub-sites

------
ams6110
Sounds very much like the wikepedia problem: a bunch of long-term members
working as mods don't have patience for new people and are hostile to people
who aren't already in the club.

------
kjhughes
None of the Stack Overflow moderation irritations matter to me in the end.

All that really matters to me is that SO has employed a reputation system that
provides a strong quality signal for answers to questions that I have. This
allows me to quickly assess the quality of any given answer based upon the
reputation of the answerer and the upvotes that the answer has received.

All other SO problems, including any aggravations encountered while trying to
give back to that community, are relatively insignificant.

------
johnslegers
FYI, I'm the author of that article. I initially published it in July 2015,
when it got ±65,000 views in two days. I republished it @ Hackernoon this
weekend at their request, which resulted in ±125,000 additional page views,
bringing the total page views of the article since its publication in 2015 to
±245,000. The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other
articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the
same frustrations.

On SO, I currently have 11,914 rep 9 gold badges, 66 silver badges and 73
bronze badges. I've posted 492 answers and 6 questions (that haven't been
deleted). I've been programming since 1999 and I've worked as an IT
professional since 2006, and my experience ranges from PHP and JS to SAP and
PL/SQL. I also released my own open source frontend framework and several
other open source projects on Github. So I know how to program and understand
many of SO's intricate workings!

Those rare times I'm stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to
find any useful answer on SO. My questions either get no answers at all or
downvoted and/or closed (for arbitrary reasons) by people who clearly lack the
experience to even remotely understand what I'm talking about.

During my time on SO, I've been bullied by 20+k users several times and even
got a temporary ban by one of them moderators for no other reason but pointing
out that another user was acting like "a little Hitler"... in a private
conversation with moderation.

Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member
of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most
privileged segments of its membership.

Considering the popularity of my article, I'm considering writing a follow-up
and go in greater detail on my experiences with SO and how SO could be
improved. However, I'm quite busy these days, so it may take a while before it
actually gets published... if it ever gets published.

Nevertheless, these are my 5 cents I'd like to add to this interaction...

~~~
debacle
> Those rare times I'm stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to
> find any useful answer on SO.

That's because when you get stuck, it's on non-trivial, sometimes edge case-y
things. When most others get stuck, it's because they are doing something
obviously wrong or have a common issue.

I have the same problem. I've asked <5 SO questions, but many of them have
been last resort, "Lets see if the Internet knows" type of scenarios.
Generally those aren't nearly as rewarding or easy to answer.

------
emodendroket
Frankly I'm tired of reading these pieces. For one thing, they always focus on
being mean to new users, which in my opinion isn't the problem. My biggest
complaint about Stack Overflow is that you get the same amount of points for
answering an easier question or a hard one, so complex questions languish
while "please write a regex for me" questions get five answers in half an
hour.

------
achikin
I've answered 21 questions, got upvotes on 15 answers, 3 answers accepted by
owners, asked 2 questions by myself and both were upvoted. I have no idea what
these people in the article are talking about. SO is super friendly and super
helpful.

~~~
reitanqild
You never found a super-useful question that mods had tried to kill?

~~~
achikin
Here it is[1]. I've answered it six months after the first time I came across
it. It is so specific that some people considered it nonprogramming and tried
to close it. Am I complaining? No. For me, the main purpose of SO is to share
specific programmer's knowledge that is not covered by documentation and can
only be obtained by experience. The only way to share the knowledge is to
communicate with the other people, and sometimes you get rejected this way or
the other if you failed to communicate your problem or solution clearly.
Taking into consideration the amount of help I've got from SO and the
satisfaction from watching my answers being upvoted, I'm ok with being
rejected from time to time.

[1][http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3326955/remove-usb-
host-c...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3326955/remove-usb-host-
controller-driver-from-linux/4864315#4864315)

~~~
shagie
Looking at its history (
[http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3326955/revisions](http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3326955/revisions)
) one can see all of the closes and reopens. This question has not been
closed. And it might have been a better question to ask on SuperUser (or now
Unix and Linux) instead.

Just because it is something that can be done in the process of debugging
doesn't make it a programming question (the question "how do you edit a file"
is not a programming question - even if the file is named "hello.c").

------
TheHippo
I'm apparently in the top 0.54% for this year. Whoever says SO hates new user
have never used the moderation tools and read the stuff new users write on
this page.

------
yladiz
Sure, Stack Overflow kind of sucks sometimes and people are sometimes really
up their own asses about things being exactly _right_ and having a question
worded explicitly, but it is by far the best resource for programmers to find
help from other programmers due to its ubiquitousness in the programming
community. I haven't found any other alternatives better; Quora isn't useful
for programming questions (a general Q&A/opinion style question is better
suited for Quora, but not "What's wrong with my code?"), and I wouldn't use
ExpertsExchange. Are there any other notable places to ask these kinds of
questions?

So it sucks, but there's no resources to replace it. You might not like it and
because it's not something that you have to help with you are free to stop
contributing (e.g. you can't just say, "I don't like this, I'm going to stop
working on it" at work), but why not help everyone and contribute, either to
Stack Overflow or by making a new, better resource, rather than being grumpy
and only helping your pessimistic self feel better?

An aside: The header image lags considerably when I scroll (on Safari 10)...
Why isn't it just a static image on the page, and have JS to detect when the
aspect ratio changes on a page level rather than an image level?

------
obj-g
I worship SO like the all-knowing deity it is, but I don't love it. It's a
cruel god, like that of the Old Testament. I've never contributed to the site,
though I've used it for years, and I never will -- simply because it's too
arcane and silly and I don't wish to play the reputation game just to leave a
simple comment or whatever. When a new god appears, I'll surrender completely.

------
hellofunk
A bizarre problem I have had on SO is that, after years of gaining reputation
into the 5 digits, now if I ask a question on a topic that is new to me, I
often get the response that I should know better if I have a high reputation.
It's weird. If I have my colleague ask the same question, a guy with much less
reputation, the answers are helpful. It's as if the quality of the question is
judged by how much the asker must already know. Which is ridiculous if you
explore a lot of different technologies.

Then there are genuine trolls who, despite massive reputation, seem to have
the sole goal of proving everyone wrong. It's also weird.

This image has never rung more true to me then when interacting with so many
"power" users:
[http://i.imgur.com/Oy6mA.jpg?fb](http://i.imgur.com/Oy6mA.jpg?fb)

~~~
oliwarner
Never feel afraid to take people to task for stupid comments, if only to point
out that their comment only managed to waste both your time.

I completely agree with you though. I find I have to be very defensive with my
question asking these days. I spend time explaining what I've searched for.
You still get people telling you it's so obvious a monkey could have found it,
but there's generally less talk of me being lazy. Just stupid.

FWIW I'm a moderator on another big SE site and I try to put those sorts of
people in their place. It's completely counter productive to be so combative
with question-askers... But some people just want to moan.

------
jawarner
Similar community problems happened on Wikipedia. Give many users moderation
power, and they'll each enforce their own view of what the site should be.

------
mbroshi
It's funny, because many of the points made about SO in this article remind me
of my experiences with HN. My first couple of comments were downvoted, as I
did not yet know the HN etiquette and unspoken rules of discourse, and that
can be pretty discouraging for newcomer. I'm still pretty reticent to comment
for fear of being downvoted.

There is also the familiar rush to be the first to post some news story, which
is almost impossible.

All that said, I've had extremely overall positive experiences on both SO and
HN. The breadth of collective expertise and depth of comments on both sites is
really awe-inspiring. I view the strict rules of engagement as a feature, not
a bug.

------
executesorder66
What we need instead of SO is a wiki similar to the Arch wiki, but for all IT
related troubleshooting problems.

Instead of removing "duplicate questions" we can just refine the details of
that section of the wiki with more information.

~~~
Gracana
The c2.com wiki is a nice alternative in this space. It's not quite what
you're describing, but I think it's worth checking out of your after a
general-software-stuff wiki.

------
tomc1985
A large portion of my rep comes from questions I wrote that were (considerably
later) marked "closed", for various reasons. All of them continue to
accumulate thousands of views and the occasional point or two... that's never
made much sense. Kind of a statement on how nonsensical StackOverflow's
become.

It feels almost like the variables in their little machine are out of tune. If
they scaled back the free privileges and hire some trained moderators they
could probably clean things up a bunch.

------
throw2016
There is an air of arrogance in SO that is unpleasant. Help is supposed to be
about being open, friendly and relaxed, not arcane rules, criterias and
deciding you know best.

If experts are uptight and arrogant the desire to learn quickly vanishes.
Being friendly does not preclude being firm.

I have noticed many questions being closed in an arbritrary manner and worse
in a mean spirited way. The first may be ok but the second is simple
unacceptable. Who are all these people on power trips and why does SO allow
it?

~~~
DanBC
> why does SO allow it?

If you know the right incantation you can bring it up on meta and maybe
they'll filter it out.

Or maybe people will downvote you and yell at you.

[http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/172758/what-have-
you...](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/172758/what-have-you-tried-
epidemic)

------
ijafri
Glad someone brought it up., I had guessed it was only the case with me., it's
still a great resource to 'search' answers., but posting your own... only
would lead you to humiliation with down-votes.

What I had guessed and stopped posting any question, that they only want to
answer anything that's general... not 'specific' at least at this point, i
still use SO a lot but only search for possible answers, I have never dared
again after being trolled and downvotes.

------
kozikow
I recently replied to SO question with a "New feature have been added that
supports your use case: link" that was genuinely solving a problem.

Reply got removed by a moderator saying that I need to describe solution and
can't just provide the link. I didn't bother. Currently the only answer
suggests sub-optimal solutions and I am not replying to SO questions again.

It felt like a land grab - it wouldn't help the questioner, but it would help
SO, by bringing more data to their platform.

------
nicholassmith
I'm a top 4% user for the year apparently, I've asked 40 questions & posted
318 answers. SO is a minefield.

It's an excellent resource and I've found so much value out of it, but the
moderation is hyper-aggressive at times and often duplicate marks are for old
behaviour in old libraries. I think it needs a clean sweep at some stage,
leaving the current content but drop everyone back to 0.

------
exabrial
It's the best resource by a mile, but the site is filled with grumpy people!

~~~
mwfunk
I guess I always figured those things were strongly related (in the causation
sense, not just the correlation sense).

------
notacoward
Every user that has high karma/reputation/whatever on a site - including this
one - should be forced to experience it from a noob's perspective once in a
while. It can be a real eye-opener, as the experience for the in-group and the
out-group can be almost _totally_ different. How many times have even regular
users of a site - not just noobs - pointed out a problem only to be downvoted,
harassed, or even banned by the "senior users" who don't see the problem
precisely because they are so senior? They're like the "senior architects" on
a software project, who no longer contribute actual code (or novel opinions on
this side of the analogy) but always sit in judgment of others'. I guess it's
a universal human tendency, but the point is that karma systems should be
designed to _attenuate_ it instead of reinforcing it.

------
erikpukinskis
When I first started trying to post and vote, I had the same experience: why
is this web site trying to prevent me from using it? Ohh. They're trying to
gamify answering programming questions. Ain't nobody got time for that.

But then a year or so later I logged in and somehow I had cleared all of the
caps without having really done anything. I guess some comments or voted on
some things and some stuff got voted up. Regardless all of the sudden I could
just do whatever I wanted.

Doesn't seem like the incentives are set up right, at least anecdotally in
this case. The reward I received was not connected to any sort of earnest
attempts at helping the site out. Those were rebuffed. And now I guess I can
contribute, but I spent a good while thinking of Stack Overflow as a read-only
site that I'm not really in the habit of thinking that way.

------
Safety1stClyde
There is a problem with giving moderation powers to entrenched individuals who
are not experts.

I've seen this on the English language stack exchange, the Japanese language
stack exchange, the Physics stack exchange, and on stack overflow. The people
who are there on the site gathering points and up and down voting aren't
necessarily experts, and in many cases they're amateurs or people who know
something about one thing, yet have moderation powers over things they really
don't know about.

The same applies to the dustier corners of Wikipedia, where entrenched non-
experts often reduce articles to the level of their own ignorance. Since
nobody is getting paid for their participation in these sites, it's hardly
surprising that these people end up predominating.

------
ourmandave
A lot of SO people down vote a new users question with the intention of
removing the down vote once it's improved.

 _But the person getting down voted to hell doesn 't know that!_

They just see a community telling them to _go to hell_.

Think they'll stick around to read the friendly guide lines?

------
DrNuke
It's natural that complex, evolving organisms have more and more entropy but
their decline, as for what you HNers are saying here, is due to the
unavoidable predominance of more and more web-idiots, mostly coming from 3rd
and 4th world countries, which I however understand in full: they are looking
for recognition as human beings in a global world, guidance to make their
talents work and opportunities in richer environments while starting from
nothing. It's the same reason a lot of web-idiots, me among them, are writing
here on HN from 1st and 2nd world countries. That said, noise is reduced by
stricter filters or by changing the definition of noise and your attitude
towards it. Your choice.

------
a3n
I've idly wondered how I could restrict queries to questions that have been
closed as too <whatever> or not enough <whatever>, as those are often the most
interesting and educational items, even if they don't answer my specific
question.

~~~
wool_gather
[http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/218999/hig...](http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/218999/high-
scoring-questions-that-have-been-closed-as-being-out-of-scope)

Also, I'm pretty sure Google picks up the text in the close banner, so you
could do a search that includes a term for the reason you're interested in.

------
rodgerd
The complaint is essentially describing how it's turned into Wikipedia, where
the author is describing a space where "working the rules" is more important
than trying to achieve the goal those rules are meant to enable.

------
monksy
I'm the author of the SKH/SO article (Link was right here:
[https://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-i...](https://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-
is-a-difficult-community-to-participate-in/))

So far. I still haven't participated in SO very much. For the most part it
isn't even worth asking a question. (It's a good thing and a bad thing) Also I
have noted that they try to prevent you from deleting. After you click that
submit button it's their property apparently.

------
k__
For most of my bugs I switched to read the source on Github. Works better for
me

------
bootload
_" 77% of users only ask one question, 65% only answer one question, and only
8% of users answer more than 5 questions."_

Old SO user, started during the beta (user:2092), never asked a question. I
don't bother with SO because a) sub-standard login (oauth), b) the time to
answer a question correctly with sufficient details means it eats into time I
can do other things; c) SO mods/response are mostly arseholes.

I also hate how original authoritative documentation is drowned out on google
with crappy code examples or empty questions, locked, down voted or ignored.

------
WhitneyLand
Interesting that one of the people called out as ruining SO may be in prison
for some scary sex/murder fantasies/photos involving minors.

Is this the same guy?

[http://www.thenewscenter.tv/home/headlines/Belpre-
Sentencing...](http://www.thenewscenter.tv/home/headlines/Belpre-
Sentencing.html)

[http://stackoverflow.com/users/237838/andrew-
barber](http://stackoverflow.com/users/237838/andrew-barber)

------
rhapsodic
I won't dispute any of the criticisms of Stack Overflow, but in its defense
I'll say that life as a developer in the Stack Overflow era is much easier
than it was in the pre-SO era. You could find solutions to your problems
online back then, but it took a lot more work. Now, I enter a question or some
keywords into Google, click the top SO result, and more often than not, find a
well-written and complete answer to my question. I hope that doesn't go away.

------
nojvek
I've some very bad experiences with stack overflow. They are very hostile
towards new users and the 50 point system that doesn't allow commenting is
very absurd. If I ask a question, I should be able to comment for a
clarification right?

I wonder if they ever A/B test their point system. I only use stack overflow
when Google points me to it.

I think SO can do a much better job at making users actually ask/answer
questions rather than just use it as a read only site.

~~~
wool_gather
You can comment on your own posts and on answers to your own questions
regardless of your points.

------
chain18
It seems like many people are talking only about their experiences as users
looking for answers and not from the perspective as a user answering
questions.

------
tomrod
I agree to a lot of this, despite the criticisms being seen as cliche.

I've found the reddit programming communities to be more helpful as a user,
even though finding similar enough content is difficult. Further, I've noticed
reddit and blogs edging in on SO's Google results. I wonder if this will be
the trend.

SO has been great for so long because the content was trustworthy. The trolls
are removing that edge.

------
jimjimjim
stack overflow is one of the best dev resources available.

do people not remember the dark days before trying to unblock the answers in
expert sexchange?

~~~
gdulli
For more than a decade before SO existed I was searching the internet and
successfully finding answers to questions. There were good sites and bad sites
then, good sites and bad sites now. SO didn't change anything. If it didn't
exist the information would still be out there and searchable through other
sites.

Usenet/DejaNews (pre-acquisition) were my favorite incarnation but there's
never been a time that the makeup of sites at the time didn't result in the
right information being easy to get.

~~~
jimjimjim
true, the info has always been there. what SO bought was ux. kind of like
slackhq being valued at a bil even though irc/chat has been around for
decades. and yep, usenet was great especially for older languages like c.

more recently searching in safaribooksonline.com has become my first step.

------
godelski
One interesting issue with the duplicate answers is that if you notice later a
typo in your answer and edit it you get pushed to the bottom of the answer
stack, despite having the first answer. This seems like an issue SO could
solve to help contributors. I doubt many abuse the system to completely
rewrite an answer and stay on top.

~~~
shagie
In what ordering do you see this feature? Votes, active, or newest. Answers
that have the same score are randomly ordered when sorting by votes.

~~~
godelski
What I've noticed it on it like this example. Post quick answer to simple
question. Someone comments on my post pointing out a really simple typo. Fix
typo, answer sorts to the bottom of the stack of answers of the save vote
number. It always seems to go to the bottom and not a random order, at least
in my experience.

------
twblalock
It sucks when questions answered five years ago are considered the final word
on the topic, and newer questions about the same topic are marked as
duplicates.

I want to know the best way to solve the problem in 2016, not five years ago.
In that time, we've gone from Java 6 to Java 8, almost everything in the
JavaScript world has changed, etc.

------
soyiuz
I think a part of SO's problem is its size. There are many other smaller
communities in the Stack Exchange network that seem to be more friendly. The
size of SO prevents it from becoming a community as such, which manifests in
the lack of shared norms and ethics which can then be meaningfully enacted in
practice.

~~~
johnslegers
philosophy.SE is much smaller than SO and the problem is actually far worse
over there.

Due to the inherent subjectivity of even what qualifies as philosophical, the
mostly Judeo-Christian moderation over there bullies everyone into oblivion
for no other reason but disagreement with their ignorant worldview.

------
pknerd
Couldn't agree more! The way SO is being moderated, soon it's gonna be next
_Expert Exchange_. IYKWIM

------
bsder
The bigger problem I have with SO is that it's answers are _static_ \--they
are stuck in amber for eternity.

This is not fine for something like Rust which has changed significantly
within the last year or two. Many of the highest voted answers are now _WRONG_
, but there is no way to dislodge them.

~~~
bboreham
That question already has an answer here:
[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326095/please-
unpin-...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326095/please-unpin-the-
accepted-answer-from-the-top)

(Actually many answers. But no resolution.)

------
StreamBright
I am not sure why but I am very luck with StackOverflow, almost always. It
might be due to the fact that I ask detailed questions that are 99% of the
time valid questions and I am using languages that has welcoming nice
community and usually not extremely popular so trolling is minimal.

------
thewhitetulip
I have learned Go language on my own and have written an introductory book on
it, but never once did I find help on SO, it was always on Reddit. Somehow
reddit community was so helpful that I didn't have to go to SO, didn't even
think of going there!

------
kwhitefoot
I think some people on SO should ponder the adage:

There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.

------
prirun
I posted once on SO. The response was shitty enough that I would never post
again.

------
throwaway1974
Has everyone forgotten "Sexperts Exchange" ? SO is very much useful

------
kwhitefoot
I think SO should ponder the old saying:

There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.

------
djfm
the question about "this" really _is_ dumb

------
gjvc
Just buy (and read) a book :-)

------
justinlardinois
I don't really agree with this article's assessment.

If your question isn't clear, it's not possible to get good answers. If your
question is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology you're
using, the best possible answer is "You're fundamentally misunderstanding the
technology you're using."

Stack Overflow encourages users to edit other people's questions for clarity
and formatting, which I think is helpful for a lot of new users that don't
know how the site works yet. And my experience has been that when there isn't
enough information in a question, you tend to get comments asking for more,
which is productive.

I do agree that Stack Overflow can be a bit daunting for new users, especially
because you're not allowed to comment right off the bat. I believe the
threshold is 50 reputation, which can be hard to get early on, because
questions get answered so quickly on Stack Overflow that it's hard to find
questions that still need an answer.

------
Cozumel
SO is an invaluable resource but I don't ask questions because of the
hostility there, plus a lot of times in thinking about a question to phrase it
properly I end up answering it myself.

But one of the major problems that I see there are the people who comment
solely for the sake of commenting, it seems like they must get paid by the
word they comment so much and it's never helpful, always snarky and
irrelevant.

------
employee8000
The one thing missing from most sites is the meta-evaluating of the mods, the
way slashdot had. That was one of the more innovative things about slasdot
back in the day.

It would randomly ask users how accurate a mod was for a particular mod that
he or she made. I'm supposing that if enough people voted against the mod,
their mod would be reversed and privileges removed.

Places like Reddit and SO need this in order to control the mods themselves.

------
fbreduc
I've never been a user of SO, i don't find it useful except really obscure
stuff; I always reach for docs first and those usually have my answer, and
typically a better answer.. There are many occasions when co-workers will come
and say "LOOK HERE's THE SO ANSWER THE GOLDEN KEY" and that answer many times
was just wrong.. or half the time didn't apply at all to what was happening

------
CrocODundee
Let's be honest, Stack Overflow and that network of sites has been in decline
for years. Sadly it has turned into a vast and wide content farm and SEO ploy
that is full of search spam and and users who copy/paste material from
legitimate sources. To top it off, Stack Overflow uses "nofollow" on the
outbound links to make sure the true source of material gets no credit in the
eyes of Google, Bing, etc. Rinse and repeat for years, and spammers have taken
over the asylum, with some trolls for good measure too, and that's
unfortunately much of Stack Overflow today.

How did this happen?

In short, they appeared to receive preferential treatment from Google after
complaining very publicly and loudly about not ranking at the top of search
results. Ever since then they have widely dominating search results for any
vaguely related technical query. Ironically, at that point in time their
primary complaint was about other content farms scraping _their_ content.

[https://blog.codinghorror.com/trouble-in-the-house-of-
google...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/trouble-in-the-house-of-google/)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-qa-quora-may-be-
tur...](http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-qa-quora-may-be-turning-down-
billion-dollar-offers-but-its-still-losing-to-this-guy-2011-2)

>> JS: All of these sites that go to Stack Overflow, scrape our content, and
reprint it with garbage ads, Google Adsense-encrusted pages.They're basically
producing worse versions of our pages and they use these slimy SEO techniques,
so they actually rank higher than us.

>> For a long time, we were getting enormous complaints from our own users
that they'd search on Google and they'd find Stack Overflow content that had
been stripped from its useful form but SEO'd like crazy and encrusted in ads
and thrown up willy-nilly. And these sites were getting a lot of traffic. So
that was his complaint and of course he phrased it in this larger frame of "Is
Google losing their edge, etc. etc.?"

>> BI: It got a lot of attention. Do you think Google's doing a good job of
fixing this sort of problem?

>> JS: They fixed it. They called us up at the time and said, "Thank you for
bringing that up. You have lit a fire under the team that is supposed to be
working on that problem that has not been delivering."

Matt Cutts, then the head of Google Web Spam, posted to Hacker News about this
to "fix" the problem of sites outranking Stack Overflow.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286)

What seemed like newly preferential treatment directly impacted hundreds of
other sites that lost huge volumes of their traffic to the newly crowned king-
of-search Stack Overflow. For example:

[https://www.daniweb.com/digital-media/digital-
marketing/sear...](https://www.daniweb.com/digital-media/digital-
marketing/search-engine-strategies/news/459242/stackoverflow-stole-all-our-
search-traffic)

>> As many of you know, DaniWeb was hit by a Google algorithm update back in
November 2012 and we lost about 50% of our search traffic. In investigating
the issue, I discovered that DaniWeb, in addition to most other programming
forums out there, all lost their google traffic to StackOverflow.

That, in turn, perpetuated the reposting/scraping activity and blatant spam
posts to the StackOverflow network, since the site network ranks dominantly in
every vaguely related query. Now years later, an even larger volume of
material on Stack Overflow is not original content and doesn't even pretend to
be. It's absolutely littered with copied/pasted content and blatantly
spammy/promotional posts from around the web.

From the outside looking in, it appears that Stack Overflow has become exactly
what they once actively complained about.

------
fiatjaf
I'm for more hostility. There should be more difficult to ask questions, there
are way too much people asking idiot questions there. Allowing this makes the
site worse for people who really have important questions.

