
Whither Stack Overflow - opiumfireworks
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/whither-stack-overflow
======
willvarfar
The article casts users as the problem: help vampires, noobs and reputation
collectors.

My strong opinion is that there are other serious issues that the article
doesn't even touch on:

1) the silo model of creating dedicated SE sites. There should have been one
SO for everything. Collaborative filtering etc would have been an infinitely
better direction to go in.

2) the over-moderation by misguided 'defenders' who are too eager to mark
something duplicate or move it to some dead SE site. Here's a group of users
the article doesn't point fingers at, but which I believe is more of a problem
than the noobs!

3) the shelf-life of answers. Almost all the accepted answers are now _wrong_.
Frameworks change, features are added to languages, bugs get fixed. And woe
betide anyone who asks a question afresh hoping to get a new and actually
working solution...

4) that I'm ok with subjective questions. These ought be handled as such,
rather than closed.

There are a gazillion little ways to fix this and make SO relevant again, but
I think the mgmt and 'community' are a big part of the problem, not solution
:(

(disclosure: I have well over 40K rep, most of it on SO)

~~~
Strilanc
> _There should have been one SO for everything._

What could _possibly_ go right about mixing Judaism questions and Christianity
questions into the programming questions?

~~~
willvarfar
Its something I've mulled for years ;)

Here's about collaborative filtering:
[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-
organizing-reddit)

Here's just general SO discontent:
[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/25426541504/stack...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/25426541504/stackoverflow-
unwinding) and
[http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/26580091073/stack...](http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/26580091073/stackoverflow-
humour-underflow)

;)

~~~
reitanqild
The collaborative filtering thing stands out as a really good idea to me.

Anyone here who can say anything about the community size you would need for
something like this to be viable?

------
CannisterFlux
I stopped being really active on SO around the end of 2012. I don't think the
reason was anything from the article. For me it was 2 fold: the rise of
members who criticize _everything_ and the feeling of shouting into a void.

I don't have a good name for these users like help vampires. They seem more
like Harry Enfield's old "Only Me!" character who show up to say "you don't
want to do it like that" without providing anything useful. Post an answer to
something that is tricky and doesn't really have a good solution and within
minutes you'd have a comment saying "that's not the way to do it, the real
solution is for the OP to start over using some other methodology". Often I'd
get an accepted answer, but the comments were just grating. They'd gloss over
the problem to post a rep-safe comment undermining your answer.

Then the other problem I had was I would find a problem that I'd suffered
before asked as a question. It was usually something fairly uncommon. I'd post
an answer, then there'd be nothing. No upvotes, no response from the OP, no
comments... just nothing. I figured if the original askers don't care about
their questions, why should I bother? Eventually from 2012 to 2015 I just
stopped answering at all. I still occasionally visit the site but don't feel
motivated to get involved any more. :-(

~~~
charlesism
I'm with you. As far I'm concerned, Answer Puritans are more harmful than Help
Vampires.

Just as you mention, for most questions on StackOverflow, there is at least
one "Never Do That!" answer. Nobody seems to be aware that users seldom care
enough about the sites the visit to "Read the FAQ" and no matter how many of
them you hunt down and guilt, you will never find them all. The site has so
much moral righteousness, it's kind of like the "Stanford Prison Experiment"
of help sites.

While StackOverflow has many good qualities, it makes the mistake of "blaming
the customer." It's an illusion to think you can improve a site by making
people feel bad. The energy they spend on hunting witches, would be better
spent on ways to fix the quality problem that focus on carrots only.

The problem with addressing question quality by making people feel bad, is
that you're setting yourself up to be (ugh) "disrupted." As soon as someone
finds a way to get the same quality of results without all the pithiness, and
finger pointing, you're at a big disadvantage.

------
debaserab2
Interesting read. Here's how I'd sum up my history with Stack Overflow:

1) SO launched a few years after I graduated college and was an immediate and
invaluable resource to me.

2) I learned more, got in a position to be able to answer some questions, and
started trying to answer questions. Realized there were people on the site
that were much faster than I was at answering (and often more incomplete) and
stopped.

3) Started asking more subjective questions. They got really useful, long,
smart answers from experienced people. Example question: "How do I plan an
enterprise level web application?"

4) Started contributing to SO less and less as the correct SO answer would
often be a top Google hit. 5) Noticed that many of my subjective question
posts were closed or moderated in some way.

6) Tried asking more subjective questions that were immediately closed by
moderators as being too open ended. Got frustrated. Stopped thinking of Stack
Overflow as a place to go to get an expert's opinion.

7) Noticed as I got more experienced that the quality of answers was extremely
variable. Sometimes the most upvoted answer or the answer that was marked
correct either lacked import context/caveat information or conflicted my
firsthand experience with the problem.

I don't use SO as a source of learning anymore other than when API
documentation isn't available or sufficient.

It's an invaluable tool for a junior developer but becomes less and less
useful as a person grows into their career.

~~~
majewsky
> I don't use SO as a source of learning anymore other than when API
> documentation isn't available or sufficient.

The latter point is really important. I use API documentation whenever it is
actually reasonably complete and up-to-date. But with many abysmal
documentations ( _cough_ Rails _cough_ ) I just go straight for SO because the
thing I'm looking for is probably not even documented. Or if not, I won't find
it in there because search is only by class/method name, not by task.

~~~
hsmallbone
I often wish there was a site like SO with a great community around building
task-oriented code-first samples to replace shoddy project documentation.
Often with SO the accepted answer is too specific, outdated or not descriptive
enough but its existence locks out better responses. I would prefer a
canonical, up-to-date wiki answer than strict authorship most of the time.
I've taken a few stabs at building a solution to this problem but I think
finding the right mix is super important.

~~~
majewsky
[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/303865/warlords-
of-d...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/303865/warlords-of-
documentation-a-proposed-expansion-of-stack-overflow/303981)

~~~
hsmallbone
Yes, I am in the beta. Does not seem like it provides much of the topic
hierarchy (beyond 1-2 layers) or ability for long-form content that I would
like. I built this [https://srcbottle.com](https://srcbottle.com) that
approximates what I would like but am still playing around with it.

------
alixaxel
I kinda left SO primarily for how trivial-oriented is has become. Say you
write an answer on how to automatically distinguish images of floorplants from
general pictures; 3 up votes. What is the current content type for JSON(P)?
Hundreds.

The same goes for questions, if you ask something that is moderately
complicated it will go largely unnoticed and unanswered (even if you bounty
the hell out of it).

And then you have the zealous behaviour of some mods, some of them don't even
have the slightest sense of consistency - I've seen extremely helpful
questions with tons of valuable answers being closed as "off-topic" just
because the post was (still) getting a lot of attention. Where as mostly
related questions / answers in another thread (but with much less value in
terms of knowledge) are still alive.

------
Drdrdrq
What is interesting to me is how good their "are any of these questions
similar to yours?" suggestions are. When searching fails, I usually start
asking a question - often just to find a solution without posting it. And if
not, I can still just post the question.

------
arciini
The article summarizes a study that "confirms [the authors'] hypothesis as
well as the community perception that the system was flooded by content that
nobody cared about, while really interesting content was getting rarer" and
presents this as a problem to be solved.

I think this is actually not a problem, because most users can still
successfully find the answers they need on Stack Overflow.

Here's how I believe I and other users use Stack Overflow. We have a problem.
We Google that problem (or occasionally search on Stack Overflow). We usually
find a fairly popular (and high-quality) question with a fairly popular
answer. We're satisfied by that answer.

The article points out that the number of good questions has remained
constant, but the number of bad questions has increased. Maybe there's really
a close-to-constant number of good, searchable questions that can be asked at
any given time, and the declining average quality is just a result of Stack
Overflow's popularity.

~~~
tjl
I know that I was looking for answers on specific Lucene problems and found
multiple questions that were basically the same. There were some good answers
on there, but the questions were closed.

My main issue is that there's a lot of closed questions that probably
shouldn't be.

I also agree with many other comments that there should be far fewer SO sites.
There's no reason why a lot of the technical SO sites related in some way to
programming need to be separate ones.

------
cvs268
Everything does NOT belong on StackOverflow.

I wish SO highlighted
[http://stackexchange.com/sites](http://stackexchange.com/sites) so that
people can participate in the respective stackexchange communities where they
will be more welcome. I have seen that a lot of good questions on
StackOverflow get closed/migrated simply because they are irrelevant on
StackOverflow.

A similar analogy would be to think of something that would be gold in the
right sub-reddit but controversial/irrelevant on the main reddit page.

StackOverflow encourages constructive Q&A.

The SO community has always aimed to close any questions whose answers will
tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references,
or specific expertise.

~~~
rat87
I totally disagree. Back in the day a lot of these questions fit on Stack
Overflow just fine. A lot of the sites are too specific and have to few users
for good answers.

> The SO community has always aimed to close any questions whose answers will
> tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references,
> or specific expertise.

This isn't true back in the day people gave good opinions on things with
subjective answers. Frequently you'd have author of framework A saying whats
pluses and minuses it has and the same for framework B and C. I didn't see any
flamewars. The problem is that they started moderating questions instead of
answers. If you get a bad subjective answer simply remove it with a warning.

~~~
cvs268
> A lot of the sites are too specific and have too few users for good answers.

Thats what! If enough people aren't interested/participating in a particular
stackexchange site, then an open-ended question on StackOverflow is not likely
to generate any canonical answers with proper references from the people
hanging out on StackOverflow.

Also such a question is likely to be too-specific i.e. "ahead of its time" to
be discussed in an open forum without enough people having experienced first-
hand the various nuances involved. Ergo, Fanboyism/Flamewars ensue...

The strict community moderation guidelines on StackOverflow, make it a very
"clean" and informative part of the internet. This is at the cost of few
"borderline-acceptable" questions being closed.

Right now, it appears to be a conscious decision to accept this fact on
StackOverflow.

It would be good to ensure that people who ARE interested in a sub-domain are
aware of he relevant stackexchange sites. Discover-ability and the ease of
browsing/following related tags across the various stackexchange sites could
be easier, so that people can "hang-out" in the relevant sites. Is there a way
to generate unified feed or search for a tag across all sites on
StackExchange? (i don't know. maybe it would help improve participation in the
relevant sites)

~~~
Drdrdrq
I had a schoolmate in high school who believed that every question has an
objective answer. Man, what a pita it was when he set out to find it and
wouldn't let go even after all the others gave up and tried to abort the
discussion...

Sometimes I am looking for subjective answer, because let's face it -
objective one doesn't always exist (if ever). Saying SO is not the correct
site for this is of course a legitimate response, but the feelings it evokes
in me (especially after it replaced myriad of forums where I could have gotten
a better answer) are not very friendly. I deal with it in my own way (not
actively helping others), but it's a shame...

------
cel1ne
Just some thoughts about SO:

* The android section is terrible. The questions are a mixture of people not knowing how to write java code at all mixed with questions of people getting hindered by the terrible SDK. (I develop software in Java for 10+ years and Android still gets me sometimes.)

This situation would be better if it wasn't so easy to shoot yourself in the
foot with the android-SDK, but nothing we can do about that now.

* Sometimes I have in-depth question about libraries which, if I follow the support-instructions, often go like this:

1\. Ask in the chat (ugh, why chat?): I almost never do that, because I need
archivable asynchronous communication not chat.

2\. Ask on the mailing-list if there is one. This goes well in some projects.

3\. Open a github-issue. In overwhelmed projects like react-native, you get
immediately forwarded to SO.

4\. Ask on SO where nobody answers because nobody knows the technical details.

So… The maintainers of projects like react-native often get spammed with
general coding questions of newcomers, which leaves no time for in-depth
questions.

Another problem is that, especially in Android, many answers are not actual
solutions but crude workarounds that work in specific cases and might even
break more stuff in the future. But: "Hey it compiles!".

 _frustrated_

~~~
Drdrdrq
Hey, really, you find Android SDK terrible? Genuinly curious, which parts? I
have written my share of Java (though I wouldn't consider myself a hardcore
Java programmer) and I found Android... logical, well documented and in
general a delight to work with (well, apart from Eclipse and sloooooow
emulators).

~~~
cel1ne
It's gotten better, but check my comments from some time ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329034)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9476547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9476547)

Generally: bad inheritance, bad separation of concern, unidiomatic java (I
think much of it was automatically converted from C++), overcomplicated
classes and just so many wtf-moments I had.

Example: You want to store state.

1\. In standard activities you have this really nice method
"onSaveInstanceState" where you can save state to a "Bundle". And "onCreate"
where you are handed a bundle to restore. You write the logic for doing that
and should be done.

2\. Then you learn that "onSaveInstanceState" isn't actually called when
stopping an app, only when rotating the screen, so you have to save your state
elsewhere. In onStop for example, sounds nice.

3\. onStop doesn't take a "Bundle". Hm… ok let's see save it to disk.

4\. Oh, Bundle isn't meant to be serialised because the internal format is
allowed to change, so you have to write serialisation again after all. Ok,
"Bundle" is out. Let's use json and be done with it.

5\. But for some reason it sometimes doesn't work. Turns out "onStop" only
sounds like it's being called when your app stops. It's actually not
guaranteed to be called, so you have to use "onPause".

This is just one example of many where things could be more aptly named,
better documented and so on.

~~~
Drdrdrq
Thanks for the explanation. I guess I never even looked at the names of these
callbacks because I just followed the app lifecycle diagram - yeah, I agree,
the names could be much better.

~~~
cel1ne
Well nothing in the diagram here says anything about onStop being not
guaranteed:

[https://developer.android.com/training/basics/activity-
lifec...](https://developer.android.com/training/basics/activity-
lifecycle/stopping.html)

------
aaron695
Whats more interesting is every other overflow doesn't work at all ( Except
the original 3, perhaps mathematics and specialised server fault ones like
Ubuntu )

It's just not replicate-able outside of the world of computers.

And it not because these other fields don't have solid answers, it just seems
it's to hard to get consensus on what they are.

There is a best way to cook an egg, it's not subjective, but fked if cooking
overflow can work it out.

------
doug1001
a well-written summary of a paper by Ivan Srba and Maria Bielikova of Slovak
University of Technology, published this week IEEE Software. from the Vice
article, near the end:

> Stack Overflow's talent for self-regulation is really, truly impressive and,
> sure, results in some dickishness, but asking bad or lazy questions is its
> own kind of dickishness. It would be a shame to see it erode further.

------
_pmf_
Like Wikipedia, it's users vs. bureaucrats now. I actually dislike the "edit
queue" that appears at the top of the profile; I'd rater opt out of
participating in this patronizing crap completely.

------
kennethh
Do Stackoverflow use ML learning algorithms to filter out duplicate questions
answers? Perhaps this could reduce some of the problems listed in this
article?

------
Animats
Stack Overflow needs to be front-ended by an AI which tries to find an
existing answer to the question. There are sites which have keyword systems to
do this, but it's time to move beyond that and have something with minimal
intelligence.

~~~
dredmorbius
"Now you have two problems."

(Though there's some sense to that, yes.)

------
dang
We changed the baity title to the one encoded in the URL, often a good place
to look for something more neutral.

Better still would be to change the URL to the paper the article reports on,
but it doesn't seem to be accessible online.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'll leave you to ponder whether or not HN wishes to officially link directly
to Sci-Hub.

That said, those willing to thumb their noses at paywalled science may do so
here:
[http://31.184.194.81/http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleD...](http://31.184.194.81/http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=7412622)

~~~
dang
I think that degree of anthill-overturning would be past prudent.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's the first two words of that response I appreciate most.

The proposal was considerd. Rejected, but considered.

