
Stack Overflow Fatigue - languagehacker
http://robertelwell.blogspot.com/2010/06/stack-overflow-fatigue.html
======
melling
I quit StackOverFlow once they devalued asking questions. No one on the site
seemed to understand that incentivizing people to ask great questions was the
most important thing. The site could have been a great starting point for
learning esoteric topics like Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, Grails, Scala, Lift, Go,
Emacs Lisp, etc.

Basically, in general, you need one good question with 2 or 3 good answers
[yes, some types are better with 100 answers].

"How do I reverse a string in Java?" "How do I reverse a string in Haskell?"
"How do I ... in Haskell?"

The questions could have been linked to build a Rosetta Stone, as well as a
complete beginner's guide to topic X. Actually, it could have been a guide
from beginner to guru.

~~~
farmerbuzz
Are you using the site for reputation or to spread knowledge? If its the
former then you're welcome to leave, if its the latter then why do you care
about reputation?

~~~
eli
The fact that points on SO actually unlock admin and moderation features on
the site gives them real value. I don't care at all about my Reddit karma, but
if it meant I could eventually retitle misleading posts I would.

~~~
sprout
I think that's a place where Wikipedia presents a better model in a lot of
ways. People love to complain about its cliquey admin groups, but the fact is
they're extremely effective at getting quality content out there.

Bottom line, I think, is that forcing people to discuss (not just summarily up
or downvote) is really important to getting meaningful content. It's fairly
easy to see when someone is talking out of their ass, but it's much harder to
get a read on how intelligent an anonymous (or even attributed) vote is.

------
tetha
Disclaimer: This is no flame, and this is no whining. This is my personal
experience with stackoverflow, which may entirely depend on me doing
complicated akward things.

My experience with stackoverflow boil down to these two situations:

I ask a question, write my little heart out to provide context, to provide
things I have tried already and to state my problem, because I don't have
trivial little coding problems I can solve with google (yes, that was
arrogant, I am aware of this.). After I have posted such a question, I usually
get like 3-4 1 line answers and then the question goes dead, because
apparently, the answer to such a question is more complicated.

On the other hand, if I answer a question, I usually look and poke around a
bit in order to provide a good, complete answer to an interesting question.
Once I have posted such a question after like 10 minutes, there are like 3-4
one-line-answers posted already, upvoted already and my answer (which usually
is more accurate and all) is just ignored and stays somewhere in the middle.

Joining these two experiences together, I have moved on to use groups and
certain IRC-channels, as these are more helpful for nontrivial questions.

~~~
archangel_one
I agree entirely - I've had exactly the same experiences. I think both of them
boil down to the site suffering from it's own success.

This seems to be fundamentally because once one reasonably correct answer
picks up an upvote or two, it often snowballs into picking up many more
because future visitors won't add other answers of their own and just upvote
that. This leads to there being a significant reward for getting your answer
in first - more so than for it to be complete (or, in some cases, correct) -
so users aim to answer as fast as possible. As their user base has grown, that
time threshold has gone down, and the quality of many of the answers follows
it.

I don't know what the answer to that is though - maybe there's not one.

~~~
mistermann
I also agree....almost a year ago this problem was actually discussed on the
SO podcast (people doing the instantaneous one liner reply in order to get
upvotes asap, the problem somewhat originated from a blog post someone did one
specific ways to game the SO rep system).

I have a similar problem in that I ask questions that are generally "harder"
and don't often have a perfectly black and white answer, but I'll get a few
"little effort" answers and then they go dead, and I am left with a poor
answer acceptance ratio. If I ever eventually figure out a question, I always
go back and answer it myself, so really I'm trying to do the right thing as I
am a big believer in the site, but I think it misses subtleties like this.
It's not particularly easy, but I think they could improve things to stop
gaming of the system.

~~~
eru
> It's not particularly easy, but I think they could improve things to stop
> gaming of the system.

Or put another way, they just change the mechanics, so that the gaming the
system means doing the right thing.

------
CWuestefeld
I'd like to be answering questions there to provide a service, but I'd also
like to receive recognition for it. But it seems like that's no longer
possible, at least not at a level of tradeoff that's acceptable to me.

For one thing, I always try to provide a _tested_ answer, but doing so means
that someone frequently jumps in front of me, scoring the reputation. In many
of these cases I can see that the answer provided might be conceptually
correct, but wasn't actually tested, because there are typos in the code.
Thus, it appears that the incentives are skewed away from providing the
highest-quality answers.

I pretty much quit about two weeks ago. I spent time formulating an answer [1]
that was entirely correct, so by the time I posted it there were three other
answers there, but they relied on special cases rather than being generally
correct. One person upvoted my answer, but almost immediately, someone else
downvoted it. The only thing I can imagine is that one of the "competing"
answerers wanted to ensure that his mostly-correct answer was listed above my
completely correct one, so he could score points from readers that hadn't yet
seen my reply that explained why special care was needed.

If my diligent work is going to be devalued like that, then I don't see the
point in investing more time in it.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2975588/selecting-a-
range...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2975588/selecting-a-range-with-
two-fields/2975740#2975740)

~~~
codingthewheel
I agree, because this kind of thing is very common. I'd have taken it a step
further: if you provide an answer to a question, you shouldn't be allowed to
downvote other answers to the same question. And if you downvote an answer to
a question, you're not allowed to post an answer to that question. So get rid
of conflicts of interest, and always allow people to upvote other answers,
whether they've provided an answer or not.

~~~
archangel_one
I disagree; I've done that before when I've answered a question, because I
felt another answer had appeared which was incorrect or misleading.

For example, I answered one question about some kind of 2d sorting issue -
another answer popped up which was both incomplete (it only dealt with the 1d
case, which was trivial) and incorrect (it claimed to run in linear time, but
was blatantly using a nlogn sort). I felt that a downvote was the right thing
to do - but that does rely on the honesty of the users, and it sounds like
that's often lacking.

~~~
mistermann
I disagree also (re: I'd have taken it a step further: if you provide an
answer to a question, you shouldn't be allowed to downvote other answers to
the same question.)

There's definitely a problem here and something needs to be done, but that's
not the solution.

I wonder if something like displaying answers on newly asked questions, but
locking voting for <x> minutes (where x=???), and total_answers < <y> wouldn't
stop the answer sniping in its tracks and give people willing to put the
proper amount of work into writing an answer an equal footing.

SO has proven that the community for some reason is more than willing to spend
vast amounts of energy helping others in exchange for "karma", but from what
I'm reading lately, they are somewhat in danger of letting the golden goose
die (or, a lot of the golden gooses). It'll still be a great site, but it
could be a lot better if they tightened some of these problems up. I think
they might be focusing on other things now though.

------
nickelplate
The problem with StackOverflow is that it doesn't allow discussions, and as
long as that will be the case I only see it working for general, domain-
agnostic questions. If you have questions about the dark corners of
C++/C#/Java, or how to best apply a design pattern, then chances are SO has
something for you. As we level up as developers we gravitate relatively
quickly towards specific domains. And a community of domain experts will not
last long if it explicitly forbids extended discussions. The best online
programming communities (e.g. gamedev, ltu, ompf, and the gold standard,
flipcode (r.i.p.) ) are home to domain experts who enjoy discussing, debating
and basically shooting the breeze with each other. This is what ultimately
makes people stick around.

~~~
mistermann
> And a community of domain experts will not last long if it explicitly
> forbids extended discussions.

Totally agree, but this kind of interaction is explicitly what the SO team
seems to be against, and for just SO itself, I agree. A legitimate
justification for this is that people get into discussions which takes time
away from input into the Q&A aspect of the site.

However, as you said, some problems or topics _require_ a discussion, not
singular statements upvoted or downvoted. I think SO can do just fine without
discussions, but the stackexchange platform will be sorely lacking if they
don't support a discussion "mode", but from what Jeff Atwood has said, at
least as I interpret it, he seems to see no need for this mode at all, and
thinks the stackexchange engine _should_ eventually replace all phpBB boards
out there. To me, this is insane, but this is how I interpret what he says,
unless I've missed something.

------
dasil003
No matter what they had done the luster would have worn off. The badge system
just makes the whoring and the impossibility of ever attaining certain badges
more obvious.

Every online community must go through a maturation process where excitement
wanes and moderation waxes. At some point the curation of content becomes of
primary importance.

Arguably they could have built a longer lasting community with Wikipedia style
participation, but it certainly wouldn't have grown as fast, and maybe never
would have gotten traction at all, so it's hard to make a retroactive
critique.

In any case though, Stack Overflow still has a fundamentally a great user
experience. It's not a growth business, but there will always be new tech, and
I don't see the community drying up.

~~~
michael_dorfman
_No matter what they had done the luster would have worn off._

I'm not sure this is necessarily the case, because, as you write:

 _At some point the curation of content becomes of primary importance._

Which is why they need to find a way to build an incentive system that
properly rewards "Wikipedia-style participation".

That's a tough nut to crack, but I certainly hope that they've got some folks
working on it, now that they've got the VC money in place.

------
mmacaulay
Right on the money.

I was there in the (relatively) early days where it was exciting to ask and
answer questions and contribute to the site, while scoring points(!)

Nowadays I often encounter SO links while googling things, and it has
certainly become a great resource in that sense. But I rarely have a need to
ask questions there anymore as everything is covered, and trying to answer
questions isn't worth the effort for similar reasons.

As new technologies emerge, I can see there being waves of increased activity
as those topics are explored, and if you're one of those people on the
forefront of said technology I could see it bringing back some of the original
charm.

------
tednaleid
My experience doesn't agree with the OP (though as others have noted, the
plural of anecdote isn't data).

From the start in 2008 through now, my reputation curve has been a pretty
straight line:

[http://stackoverflow.com/users/8912?tab=reputationhistory#ta...](http://stackoverflow.com/users/8912?tab=reputationhistory#tab-
top)

I think it depends on the type of community that you participate in. If you
work only in relatively unchanging technologies that everyone else works in
(like .NET or Java), the OP is probably right. All of the nooks and crannies
are exposed and answered. But if you participate in one of the smaller
communities (Groovy, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Io, etc).

I think the number of "niche communities" in the long tail are much larger and
more vibrant than the OP supposes. Chances are that it's just the OPs pet
technologies that don't get a lot of traffic.

I follow RSS feeds on a number of tags that I find interesting and answer a
few questions every week.

------
carson
I have become a little discouraged at how stale some of the posts have become.
I have run into Google searches that give me results where the accepted answer
is now wrong. Sometimes the posts have devolved into multiple new answers that
are correct but have very few upvotes. In some cases the newer answers are
rants on how the original answer is wrong.

I do think there is still room for SO to grow with newer technology that comes
out. SO became a great resource for iPhone development and I think that can
still happen.

What would probably help is a purge of some sort. I'm not sure how they would
go about it but I don't think just re-tagging will work I think they need to
flush some of the stuff out.

~~~
michael_dorfman
I don't think a purge would get to the root of the problem, which is an
incentive system that rewards adding early answers, rather than editing
existing answers.

One of Joel's stated goals in the early days was that the answers would
converge, Wikipedia-like, toward some Platonic ideal-- but the system in place
doesn't encourage that.

~~~
wisty
Neither does Wikipedia, but at least Wikipedia doesn't have "cold" articles.

~~~
sprout
So you think that Wikipedia content gets worse or stagnant over time?
Definitely, I think it's more effective than the SO model.

~~~
rquirk
The WP pages on Chrome or Git only mention major features of those pieces of
software. Features don't change that much. Part of the articles talk about the
historic aspects of the projects, and again the past doesn't really change.

SO tends to go into minute detail on a particular aspect of something, so the
staleness effect is amplified. For example, questions on how to write a Chrome
extension tend to be stale, as do ones on specific features of Git such as
integration with Subversion, or submodule support.

------
scrame
Stack Overflow was a good stab at solving the problem, and the UI execution
was excellent, as well as the promotion of the site by two widely-read
bloggers.

My personal frustration with the site is that their engagement model was a
little too game-like. While reputation and badges might be a good metric for
the quality of the contribution, the actual implementation ended up
reinforcing a base of easy homework questions, and people racing for the
simplest answers.

I found that when asking descriptive questions, that I would quickly get
several one-line answers that pretty much guessed at the answer based on the
title. Even the nuanced answers tended to have answers and explanations that
either ignored the problem or suggested things already asked in the question.

Sticking with the question, I can either comment on an answer, or edit my own
question to address it, or I could comment a response to the comment. Working
this way, I have managed to at least get good leads a few times, but the
really difficult questions ended up being things I had to solve myself.

Lately, though, I find that it pops up in my preliminary googling of a problem
early on, and at least provides better references than generic forums or
experts-exchange.

If they could find a way to make reputation and badges reinforce the _quality_
of the answer, instead of the _response time_ of the answer, and encourage
difficult questions rather than the proliferation of basic questions, and the
attitude that answering the most of them the fastest made you some kind of
"elite" programmer, then I think it could be very powerful.

That being said, when I am tracking down an obscure error or specific
exception, I usually find it on the libraries forum, or a forum with a
narrower focus, but they definitely like the UI polish of SO.

------
telemachos
My SO pet peeve was authors who answer nearly all questions in their field
with "I discuss this in Chapter 5 of Volume 4 of my Everything You Need to
Know About Everything series. In stores now."

~~~
mkramlich
And of course the flip side of that point is a lot of people's questions ARE
already answered somewhere, often in books, if somebody just cared to get off
their a-- and go look for it, spend time reading and investing in their own
education. I've seen thousands of questions asked on the Internet where the
asker could have answered it themselves by putting in a little more common
sense effort, upfront.

The RTFM phenomenon.

~~~
mistermann
True enough, but with the number of technologies a developer is "required" to
know these days, I have a bit of trouble buying the RTFM argument (unless it
is referring to freely available, easily searchable help docs on the
vendor/author website). The the amount of technologies I use on a day to day
basis, it's literally impossible for me to RTFM on all of them, __especially
__if by RTFM you mean read a book on the technology (not to mention, which
book should I read....figuring that out can take an hour. And is reading just
one book sufficient?)

------
zalew
_Games of code golf, "what's your favorite programming comic strip" threads,
and "What language should I start learning now" threads made it way too easy
to attain points without actually demonstrating real knowledge or expertise._

Actually, such threads are marked as 'community wiki' and there the reputation
points aren't counted. The rest of the article is true, I also got tired of SO
and mostly only google it.

------
barrkel
The thing that drove me out was uninteresting questions. I wanted an advanced
search that filtered questions by minimum asker reputation, but the only
operator available filters by _maximum_ asker reputation (i.e. to find
newbies).

I then asked for the feature on meta.stackoverflow.com, and folks there
perceived I was being elitist and downvoted me to oblivion. So I left.

~~~
mistermann
> I wanted an advanced search

I agree. SO _has_ advanced search capabilities, but you have to be an uber
power user and know all the esoteric switches, which I think is by design, so
fanboys can be "leet". There is this page: <http://stackoverflow.com/search>
(which isn't linked from the homepage), but why don't they take the 4 hours to
build an advanced search form so people who aren't frickin experts on the SO
platform can do advanced searches? I think this is by design.

>I then asked for the feature on meta.stackoverflow.com, and folks there
perceived I was being elitist and downvoted me to oblivion. So I left.

Meta is not a particularly friendly place, and this seems to be the only place
that Jeff takes guidance from, but I think it has to a certain degree become
ineffective as the people that rule meta are super-uber SO users, and it it is
a very homogeneous group of users, so genuinely new ideas basically can't
enter. Maybe they _could_ , but after the initial rude reception you get with
a new idea, most people just can't be arsed and leave, as you did.

------
netmau5
I've used SO from time to time but have only participated when I came across a
question I thought I could add value to with my perspective. I've never really
kept up with the point system.

The author says "There's a plateau you hit there where you either have to
devote way too much time to help other people do their work, or you just fall
out of it." Do your points devalue over time somehow? Is there inflation in
the user permissions you get with rep? Or is it just that you have to jump the
shark to get the first answers in as they are far more valuable than later
answers/editing answers?

~~~
languagehacker
The plateau doesn't have to do with the points, but rather the content. If
you're going to give an answer that's worthwhile, it would be nice to
recognition for it. If you want recognition, you have to go after questions
that haven't been answered. A lot of those are basically doing other people's
work, and not really question-answering.

------
russell
I worked for a for-pay Q&A site a little while back. They had all the
incentives of SO and more. For example if you answered half-a-dozen questions
a month, you got free access. The reward system. The asker declared how much
the question was worth and awarded the points to one or more answerers. Awards
could be adjusted by moderators so a better answer could be awarded the
points.

There were a large number of categories, added to all the time. An answerer
could register as an expert in one or more categories and could become an
expert, guru, grand-master, etc. in one or more categories with the badges
showing up everywhere.

There was an elaborate email system that kept every one engaged.If you were an
expert, you got an email when a question was in one of your areas of
expertise. An asker go an email whenever there was an answer of comment to one
of your questions.

It appealed to the corporate IT world, but the combination of incentives,
communications, and content curation seemed to work quiite well.

~~~
CWuestefeld
So why don't you do it any more?

~~~
mistermann
What was the site? Surely not experts-exchange?

------
motters
Most people's questions about programming problems are going to be somewhere
in the middle of the distribution. As time goes on and all the most common
questions have been asked, the site is going become increasingly long tail -
the dominion of obscurists - and any social/reputational component which it
may have once had is going to be reduced.

------
hazmattron
I find that Google is a great way to access the information on Stack Overflow,
even as a participating member of the community. When I'm looking for an
answer to a question, often a Google search will return the Stack Overflow
post most relevant - helpful when there are many similar posts on a given
topic.

~~~
markmywords
Yes, it leads to better results than using the Stack Overflow search.

~~~
mistermann
If SO was smart they would write an advanced search form that basically just
translates into google compatible syntax and forwards it to google (assuming
there are no legal issues with this.) Are there legal issues with this, is
this a violation of the google TOS??

~~~
eru
My gut feeling is that Google would probably be pretty ok if you just generate
some (very specific) links to their search.

If you scrapped their results and embedded them into your page, that might be
a different story. (They wouldn't like it.)

