
StackOverflow unwinding? - willvarfar
http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/25426541504/stackoverflow-unwinding
======
spolsky
None of the actual metrics of the site bear this out. I don't know what
"myspacing" is, and "floundering" is pretty subjective, but in terms of actual
measurable things, we have more questions asked, more questions answered, more
people active on the site, more sites with more activity and most metrics are
up about 100% in the last year. Some of the things that we track pretty
closely (like number of users who ask or answer 5 times monthly) are steadily
growing.

~~~
strictfp
What about measuring number of upvotes on questions closed as not constructive
/not about programming? I get the feeling that the technical questions are
getting saturated, and that the community moved towards more soft issues
(management, people skills etc). But soft issues get rejected. Perhaps start
softie-programmer.com? At least do something other than closing them.

~~~
codinghorror
Well, there is:

<http://programmers.stackexchange.com/> \-- for conceptual, no-source-code
whiteboard programming questions

<http://workplace.stackexchange.com/> \-- for questions about general
professional workplace issues that aren't specific to programming

And of course the rest of the sites at

<http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic>

I'll be the first to tell you that our Q&A engine isn't necessarily effective
at every topic. It's primarily effective at technical-ish topics where there
can be somewhat definitive answers backed by a bit of research. That's still a
pretty big chunk of the world, e.g.:

[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-
su...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/)

~~~
TylerE
My fundamental problem with that approach is that I don't want to read 5
sites. I want to read _1_ site with the content I want on it.

The ghettoization of stack-exchange was a mistake. Give me an interface more
like reddit - let me pick which areas I want to see questions from, all merged
on to one page.

~~~
cruise02
Here you go <http://stackexchange.com/questions>

Click the "Filtered Questions" link at the top to customize it.

~~~
TylerE
Hrrm, that's a start. Any way to get this in the SO theme? I like that lot
more than the SE layout.

~~~
cruise02
No, I don't think I've ever seen any official support for customizing themes.
There is the Hot Dog theme for SO
(<http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/34939/1288>) that you might be able to use
as a starting point for a custom user theme.

~~~
TylerE
Sorry, should have been more clear. What I really meant was having things like
the score, number of answers, etc, in nice big numbers next to the question.

~~~
cruise02
Oh, not on the official site. I don't think that page is updated in real time,
so the vote counts would be off by quite a bit for the hottest questions on
each site. You might find an app on <http://stackapps.com/> that uses the API
though.

------
debacle
The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard
questions don't get answered at all, in most cases.

I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever
it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or
has been answered insufficiently.

The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic
fashion - quality questions with quality answers get closed because they are
slightly subjective, which completely obliterates the community feeling.

~~~
buro9
With communities in general (not explicitly referencing SO here), I've always
felt that moderators are their own worst enemies.

They dictate the terms of use through enforcement. It's not fun to use
something until you find that you aren't allowed to.

The best tools do not limit their usage patterns, and communities adapt and
evolve to make these tools solve their problems.

These aren't always the same problems that the creators of the system or
moderators intended to be solved.

So moderators kill the potential utility of a tool.

One of those potentials (now referring back to SO) is the unification of
people with a shared interest in a programming language or knowledge domain.

Without community, why should a user invest in it?

So I assert (overly simplistically) that moderators kill communities.

~~~
spolsky
And yet, Stack Overflow gets 7000 questions a day, and manages to maintain a
very high quality compared to sites with less moderation.

The very moderation which detracts from the community feeling is what's
keeping the quality of the site up and helping create a valuable permanent
resource on the Internet, which is our primary goal. Like Wikipedia, strict
rules are what lead to a valuable artifact. Stack Overflow's rules and values
are not intended to create a warm and cuddly discussion area for long-winding,
far-reaching conversations, social networking, and "community" whatever that
means. They are intended to create a body of precise questions and answers
which are peer-reviewed, editable, and high-quality that you can search with
Google.

~~~
TylerE
Is the quality of the site being kept up, though?

Questions certainly feel "worse" than they did 2 years ago when I first
started following SO.

Way more "homework" or "newbie south-east Asian programmer asking for THE
CODEZ" type questions than there ever was back in the day.

I'm not really sure how you fix that, although slightly raising the barrier to
entry (perhaps require they at least pick a username?) might help reduce the
"drive bys" who ask a poor question, and never accept an answer.

~~~
codinghorror
All true, and far more real a risk. That's why we now (as of about 6 months
ago) require registration to ask questions, for example.

------
memset
Closing questions - no, _deleting_ questions - really really grinds my gears.

Nothing is more frustrating than finding a google result to SO, clicking
through, and arriving at a 404. Nothing is more frustrating that searching for
that great answer I read last year and not being able to find it because the
question has been deleted. These are often questions that have been kicking
around for 4 years, and, well, gone.

Of course, if you have enough SO points, then you probably don't care whether
you've deleted a question, you can still see them.

While we're at it, SOers have always been, and are increasingly... well,
jerks! If you are a new programmer, then of course your question will have
incomplete information, because _you don't know how to ask a good question
yet_. So stop downvoting into oblivion, please, and give people a little bit
of time to acclimate and improve their question before closing.

I am in the top 10% of SO users as measured by points (lol.) What can I do, as
a community member and hacker, to fix these things?

~~~
justinhj
Due to this problem I think the site would be much more useful if the deleted
posts just had a red warning at the top like wikipedia. "this question was
flagged for being funny" "a little off topic" let the user decide if he wants
to look or not. Buyer beware.

------
Karunamon
The thing that drove me away from the entire Stack* series of sites was the
heavy-handed "doesn't fit the format" (read: mod doesn't like it) question
closings for no good reason. I've honestly _lost count_ of the number of times
that valid questions with well spoken, informative answers were shut down due
to this nonsense.

(The other was how much of a pain they make it to get started if you're new -
one can look at the comments here and see that those kind of shenanigans are
mostly unnecessary)

When you're killing off high-quality content because it "doesn't fit the
format", perhaps the format needs to change.

~~~
gizzlon
Example? Haven't noticed this..

~~~
Karunamon
It's kind of hard to provide examples because the question disappears once
this happens. There's a link to an example in this thread.

------
damian2000
StackOverflow is awesome and nothing touches it for quality as far as I'm
concerned. But the one thing that annoys me most is the seemingly arbitrary
way that posts get deleted by Moderators after they have been closed (but
still visible) for a significant period of time. Often they are extremely
popular posts with 100k+ views that just disappear in a puff of smoke.

FYI: An SO user has recently setup an unofficial archive of deleted SO
questions, ranked in order of votes ...
[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/124850/unofficial-
st...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/124850/unofficial-stack-
overflow-deleted-question-archive-now-available)

------
ErrantX
_I guess any sufficiently large ‘community’ (there’s not a community on Stack
Exchanges, of course; they are fairly anti-community) ends up attracting those
wanting to curate the resource and purify it, until those competent to answer
and help have had their fill and no longer feel welcome?_

This was my experience as a contributor (one of the top 10) to Literature SE.
The mods were very harsh and basically killed the site (or at least drove off
most of us contributors).

Both question and answer quality declined dramatically in tandem with the rise
of "rules".

Months later I was still in the top 10 contributors. Answers had declined to
single sentences.

Now I logged in and noticed it has been closed down (and much of the content
migrated to SciFi SE) due to lack of participation. I am not surprised.

At least some of my answers will survive.

(here's one early question where it was poorly asked, we wrote some good
answers and worked with the questioner to focus the question -
[http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/16106/what-are-
the-...](http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/16106/what-are-the-anti-
church-messages-in-the-his-dark-materials-trilogy/16107) This attitude
disappeared within very short time)

~~~
nathan_long
It's possible that the site floundered and closed because it just wasn't a
good fit for the StackExchange model. Literature doesn't strike me as a field
where there are obvious right answers.

~~~
minikites
There are plenty of right answers and more than plenty of wrong answers.
Literature and other "soft" fields are not so different from math and science.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jFQR2FUEm4>

\---------------

Right, so we study math for the twin reasons of wanting to learn mathematical
language and wanting to understand our place in the universe, which turns out
to be precisely why we also study literature: to learn about language and to
understand our place in the universe. Which by the way, Hank, gets to the
thing that make me angriest in the entire world, which is when people say that
there is only one right answer in math, but that every answer is equally
correct in literature.

First off, there is often more than one correct answer in math, and secondly
NOT EVERY ANSWER IS EQUALLY CORRECT IN LITERATURE!

For instance, Hank, if you think that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a
pro-slavery novel, you’re wrong! You’re as wrong as you are if you think that
the square root of four is strawberries!

\---------------

~~~
nathan_long
Like you, I strongly reject the idea that literature means anything and
everything the reader wants it to. Nobody really believes that, even if they
say they do. Just try interpreting the English professor's exam directions
however you like and see what happens.

However, you must admit that there is _some_ subjectivity involved in
literature. Maybe no more than in programmers.stackexchange. But that has the
benefit of spillover from StackOverflow, where the right answer proves itself
by _executing correctly_.

~~~
minikites
That's an interesting point and I agree with what you say for a simple
question and answer. But there may be just as much subjectivity in the "right"
answer for a complicated problem.

What if it compiles but gives erroneous results? What if it compiles and gives
correct results, except for a certain day of the year? (see
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4128208>). What if it compiles and runs
and always gives the correct results no matter what, but isn't as efficiently
written as it could be?

------
nathan_long
The OP seems to be saying 1) SO and network is "anti-community", 2) making
lots of targeted sites was misguided; they should be broader, and 3) purists
are running off real experts.

Having listened to many hours of planning and philosophizing on the SO podcast
as the site developed, I think the OP misunderstands their approach.

1) They are "anti-community" only in the sense that they don't want content
unrelated to the site's topic. They do have moderation, votes for moderators,
etc. Everything about the site is geared around getting the best answers and
making those searchable, not socializing.

2) This is a tradeoff: too narrow and you won't get enough momentum to keep
going; too broad and it's uninteresting. Specificity keeps real experts
interested; if you know and love Unix, you'll be much more likely to hang out
and answer questions on a Unix site than on a General Computer Stuff site. The
whole model depends on keeping experts involved, and if a site is TOO specific
to generate enough interest, they kill it. One downside is the inevitable
overlap between topics. But I think it's an OK tradeoff.

3) I don't see anything like what he describes. I've been using SO since it
was in beta, and I'm still getting good answers to my questions quickly. If
there is a rise in militant purists, it's in response to the inevitable influx
of newbies and crappy questions, which will happen to any site that gets
popular. SO has had this in mind from day 1 and they actively promote
community moderation, which is the only scalable approach.

I don't mean to sound like an SO apologist, but this post sounds a little too
"those guys don't know what they're doing". That's the most common refrain on
the internet.

The proper response, snarky as it sounds, is "you try doing it better." And
it's serious. If you can make a site and cultivate a community better than
StackOverflow, I'll be there.

~~~
tgrass
"love it or leave it" is only a proper response in a regime that seeks to
protect the status quo.

~~~
nathan_long
OK, perhaps I was a bit harsh. But there is already a very active place to
discuss how SO should do things; it's called meta.stackoverflow.com. This
discussion has been going on for years.

It's great to try to influence it, but as time goes on, the chances decrease
that a newcomer has a point that hasn't been considered. That's just life. You
don't see HN changing its format every week; newcomers adjust.

And if someone does have a good point, and it's not being considered, as we
say, "fork it." The public Q&A data is available, or you could start from
scratch.

~~~
tgrass
HN frowns on the single sentence comment that does nothing but concur, so
there ought to be an upvote which a parent can give that says, I agree, nice
retort, I modify my concern and cheers, mate.

------
thom
_Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-
to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the
architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely
missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a
song and listen to it right away._

I feel a bit like StackOverflow has extrapolated from a huge pent-up demand
for decent answers to programming questions, that the world is desperate for
Q&A sites on _every_ subject. That does not seem to have been the case.

~~~
tgrass
I treasure and trust StackOverflow for my programming questions precisely
because of the elitist, purifying attitude. I'm confident the answers are
vetted and the best has risen to the top. I'm a self-taught programmer with
only a few years under my belt, so this resource is valuable.

As for the other Q&As...especially the non-engineering ones, this culture is
counter productive. In a field like history, the experts are not debating
dates and places which are defensible positions, but methodology and theory.
Those are discussions and require a little more breathing room than a q&a
forum could provide.

~~~
papsosouid
>I'm confident the answers are vetted and the best has risen to the top.

That really doesn't have as much meaning as you think it does. The best answer
out of three bad answers is still a bad answer. If they have driven away the
people who give good answers, no amount of filtering the leftover bad answers
will get you a good answer.

I don't see very many experts on stackoverflow. It may be a useful resource
for beginners, but as someone more intermediate, I've had no questions
answered satisfactorily in the time I've tried using it. And all those
questions I ended up getting answered by asking in the appropriate IRC
channel. My concern is that more and more open source projects are saying "if
you have questions, ask on stackoverflow", but not actually watching for those
questions and answering them. When a project has no mailing list, no IRC
channel, and says "use stackoverflow" I'm pretty much out of luck for getting
help.

~~~
jff
I think it's not just Stackoverflow--in general, experts have better things to
do than help Newbie #258349 walk through installing Ruby. After years of
watching the same questions get asked over and over, they just decide to give
up and go work on something interesting, so you end up with an echo chamber of
"bump for answer, I have the same problem", "has this been solved plz send teh
codez", "me too".

------
mtrn
A couple of points (from a top 0.47% user, but that's not why I'm on SO):

* imagine googling for a programming questions and be stuck in 2008 - I don't want to go back

* imagine researching a wittgenstein paper - do you need philosophy.stackexchange.com - probably not; the numbers show, that SO's still the metrics vanguard - I think the demand for the niche sites is certainly there, but large communities have formed around traditional forum sites - and people are happy with that - so there is no pressing need to switch to the new format

* concerning questions - it has been a phenomenon since the beginning, that the simplest answers (C-C C-V the docs) got the most upvotes - interesting hard questions don't earn you much reputation, if that's what you're after - I still get a lot of upvotes for year-old answers, which everybody could have written, while the answers I invested hours in remain relatively untouched; but the main value for me comes from learning by answering questions: try to bring your point across in a few words, collect useful references and show working code - it's like a daily workout equivalent in the tech field

* open questions: I'm trying to make it a habit to answer one hard, unanswered, maybe older question each week - because it's true, the "reputation clock cycle" leaves a lot behind...

* moderation: most moderators have been long around - and I can somehow guess, in which tags a person is active, because I likely saw their comments, answers, flags already a couple of times - can't really blame them for closing a lot of questions - it's hard; if you can, sift through <http://stackoverflow.com/tools/flagged> and you might know what I mean

* tldr: SO rocks if you're a programmer, for other SE sites YMMV; unsatisfied with closed questions? reopen them or discuss it on meta - it's not possible that moderators don't make mistakes and it's not true, that you can't at least try to discuss specific issues; unsatisfied with unanswered hard questions: find one and write up something great

~~~
jofer
You put it quite eloquently:

>"...The answers I invested hours in remain relatively untouched; but the main
value for me comes from learning by answering questions..."

More than anything else, that's what keeps me coming back to stackoverflow.
Most of the questions I've spent the most time on get little attention, but I
learned quite a lot from answering them.

------
evincarofautumn
I disagree with the author on a few points. The branching out of Stack
Exchange has been _excellent_ —I’m mostly active on English (14k), SO (9k),
and Programmers (6k), but I often browse the other sites to pick up useful and
interesting information _that I would never have come across_ if it weren’t
for that diversification. Where else can I stumble across juicy morsels about
mathematics, or TeX, or any of several languages I don’t speak—all in one
place?

I find the idea that Stack Exchange is anti-community laughable. The chat
system is excellent and has relieved a lot of the tension between contributing
to the site and just having fun meeting people who share your interests. I
know a lot more about my fellow language enthusiasts, C++ programmers, and
Haskellers than before. And more people read my blog and watch my YouTube
videos now. I call that a win.

So: the last time I asked a good question on SO? Last month. The last time I
gave a good answer? This week. The system still works from my point of view.
And I’m one of the guys who actively edits questions so they _don’t_ get
closed for stupid reasons—moderation isn’t restricted to just moderators.

------
recursive
My opinion on SO is apparently in the minority around here. I find the content
on SO to generally be of high quality, and in most cases, I agree with what
moderation I see. Most questions I see that get closed seem like requests for
extended discussions. I actually believe that SO works better on questions
that have verifiable answers. As for my questions, I've asked 42, and gotten
good answers to most of them.

~~~
cocoflunchy
I think you mistyped here: 42 is the answer, not the question.

~~~
mihaifm
:)) yep, clearly a mistake

------
chrislomax
I don't generally have a problem on StackOverflow. The last few questions I
have asked have been quite high level and not been asked before and they tend
to get some good answers / guesses.

I find that a well structured question gets some good answers, I find a lot of
people leaving their question open to interpretation and people cannot be
bothered to ask the same old questions because the poster has neglected to be
specific in their question.

I find a lot of people use it being lazy as well, most questions are simply
part of the language / subject they are asking about but they cannot be
bothered to read up on it. They would rather ask insanely simple questions to
get other people to provide an answer for it.

------
Spooky23
I like StackOverflow, and contribute heavily to one of the "other" Stack
Exchange sites that is busy, but not enough to get out of perpetual beta.

The problem that they have is that SO grew very quickly and developed a
Usenet-style culture. That's good in that there is alot of good information
out there, but bad in the sense that you get all of the assholish behavior
that came with Usenet.

The other problem that they have is the network of other sites, some of which
are very good. The problem there is that they're scaling a model meant for
1,000,000 SO users down to 5,000 users, and it just isn't the same. On a
smaller SE site, you cannot wrangle the 5 votes to close some nonsense
question written in pidgin english. On SO, a question will be closed in
seconds by the vigilantes who roam the site.

------
1123581321
I was disappointed by the answers to my last few questions so I'm back to
asking on IRC. The answers come more quickly and the format makes
clarification and follow up easier and faster.

It's also easier for me to look at someone's gist/paste on IRC and give a
quick answer.

~~~
projct
IRC is great, but SE-based sites are meant to also help the nth person to ask
the question you're seeking, too...

~~~
1123581321
I know, and I do feel I am robbing the community in general, but I also don't
think I would get my questions answered well at SO.

It would be great if someone came up with a way to bring IRC answers into a
SO-like site for clean-up.

------
tucson
Google, Wikipedia and StackOverflow/StackExchange are my favorite "creations"
on the Internet.

But StackExchange has been a big disapointment for me. No big traction on the
StackExchange sites, and moderators constantly closing questions without
providing better alternatives. It's really a turn-off. (StackOverflow is still
great though).

------
jiggy2011
I think there is a general problem with Q&A/Forums in general.

I will generally only ever go to a website to ask a factual question if I
cannot easily find the answer myself either from documentation or
experimentation. If I ask a question on Q&A it's because the answer is not
forthcoming , this may be because my entire approach to the problem is wrong
or maybe I'm doing something that only a handful of people would ever want to
do. In that case I am relying on the right people actually seeing my post
which would have low odds, so I am better served using dedicated
forums/newsgroups for the library in question.

So this really leaves opinion based questions as the best things to ask, which
don't seem to be encouraged on SO and the format of correct/wrong doesn't work
there so well anyway.

Another issue is that I'm usually asking questions related to work things that
I am doing, and while I can easily justify using time that I am paid by
someone else to ask questions it is less easy to justify spending work time
answering other people's questions in order to gain rep.

Also giving a good answer to many questions involves showing sample code , or
digging back into something I did a while ago so it's not really something I
can do in 2 minutes. So this means I either have to answer questions somewhat
covertly or wait until I get home by which time I may well have other things
to do.

------
emw
It would be interesting to see empirical data on William Edwards's hypotheses,
e.g. "Questions are getting fewer and fewer quality answers. Moderators and
'close this' clickers are getting increasingly narrow." An analysis like this
might be feasible with Stack Exchange's API:
<https://api.stackexchange.com/docs>.

~~~
pestaa
But the first question is obvious: how do you measure quality? Votes are
primarily for popularity, not quality.

~~~
nathan_long
One way would be "mean time to an accepted answer."

------
niels_olson
I disagree. I recently picked up pyparsing, and in trying to understand (I'm
not a comp sci major), I made an account on stackexchange. The author of
pyparsing answered my question. I'm sold.

~~~
martmarc
Wait until said author or the author of another tool / API enters in an
argument with one of the elected moderator and gets banned: you're going to be
"unsold". This is _precisely_ what this discussion is about: it's about
obviously knowledgeable SO users that are getting more and more pissed off by
the behavior of these "close-trigger-happy" moderators. And this is relatively
new: it wasn't anywhere near as bad two years ago on SO. The one thing that
prompted me to leave is twice I spend time answering a question only to see
the whole thread getting deleted: this is a waste of _my_ time (I don't care
about the b*llshit reason invoked by those overzealous mod to close the
question: I care about my time spent helping people being lost). I'm not
bringing anything anymore to a "community" that is so prone on wasting their
user's time.

~~~
niels_olson
I agonize with a similar problem, but I think anyone with a blog will agree
there is a real curatorial challenge there. I know Edward Tufte; he routinely
deletes his own contributions to his own forum, and will not hesitate to
delete material contributed to experts in their fields, often post-
publication.

------
krosaen
I routinely find the question I'm asking has already been answered when
googling, and have rarely had a question go unanswered.

The hard part in my experience when going to try and answer some questions is
it seems like there are more and more questions by inexperienced coders
expecting people to write basic code for them, or not formulating the question
in a way that will be useful to others in the future - instead they're pasting
in their code and asking, "why isn't this working". Instead of, "I would
expect this framework to behave as follows but it's not" it's "Here's 50 lines
of code, why isn't it working?" The only way to answer such questions is to
get their code up and running somewhere, perhaps on a jsfiddle, figure out
what's wrong (often something as trivial as a syntax error), and then tell
them. Doesn't feel very gratifying to do one off debugging on behalf of the
person asking especially if the answer is unlikely to be useful to others in
the future.

------
kamaal
I really follow the ESR's asking questions the smart way guide pretty
seriously(<http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>) and most of my
easy to difficult questions get answered easily without ever asking a
question.

What I really care for is getting answers to tough questions. The problem with
SO is it doesn't aim to be a QA site on the longer run. It aims to be a
database of programming answers site that slowly evolves to solving most
commonly faced programming problems. I don't know if their aim is to be
advertising based revenue site on the longer run.

I ask a question because I want to get help. It has so happened when I
absolutely can't get anything out of the problem at hand. I go on SO and ask a
question, often I've been down voted down to oblivion, then I delete the
question. Because all I see in response is sarcasm, cynicism and attempts by
commenters to prove how big a fool I am.

To me stack overflow looks like site that wishes to attract people who already
know answers to their questions, but want it put in a community wiki kind of
way.

But I do agree that a simple Google search on SO sites, gives you solutions to
most commonly known programming problems. And not just that most commonly
known problems on areas that stack exchange sites deal with. These address
most problems people face daily. Tough problems is a different cup of tea. But
most common problems often get answered and their database seems to be growing
with regards to those problems. And this might also be a great business model
for SO.

SO was the cool new shiny tool, few years back. We all like to play with Shiny
tools. Until something new, and more shiny come along.

These days most of colleagues ping me with interesting answers on quora. I
would be happy with Quora opening their questions for reading without opening
an account.

------
soupboy
It is interesting that some of these same criticisms have been applied to
Wikipedia and the reasons remain the same too

------
compay
So many questions are already authoritatively answered that there's a much
higher bar for new users to contribute. And without new users coming in and
participating, there's a feeling of stagnation. I'm not yet convinced they're
at an impasse but I personally don't know how I would solve that problem.

~~~
nathan_long
I'm not sure it's a problem. If every PHP question you want to answer is
already answered, hooray! Google solves your problems instantly. The PHP
section is stagnant, but it's still helping people. The supply of answers
scales down to the demand.

Meanwhile, some people start switching to Node or something else, and a new
wave of Q&A starts on that. Rinse and repeat.

------
napolux
I've heard the same rants in any of the usenet groups I used to partecipate.
:)

------
pbharrin
IMHO StackOverflow jumped the shark when it started adding karma or whatever
the fuck they call it.

~~~
napolux
That's gamification... :D

------
chaostheory
Can anyone post specific examples of "stackoverflow unwinding"? I didn't see
any in the article.

------
DodgyEggplant
They move from Q&A model to a Wikipedia model.

~~~
thom
I don't think this was a particular change in approach, to be honest. From the
start they were clear (listening to the early podcasts, at least) that they
wanted the site to stand as a reference, and to have each question be the best
possible question asking one clear thing, with the best possible answer
underneath.

Everything else on top of that was gamification to convince people to achieve
that. Whether that sort of community becomes degenerate at a certain point is
certainly interesting to study, but my intuitive reaction whenever I see a
StackOverflow result at the top of some google results is to be joyful, so I
feel they've mostly achieved their aims.

------
adventureful
It seemed inevitable that 95% (some very high %) of StackOverflow was destined
to be little more than an archive, leaving a very stagnant system as the speed
of activity & build out slowed to a crawl.

Large, highly active development technology doesn't change every day. PHP has
been around for 15 plus years, Python for 20 years. And those are two of most
popular.

How many questions can ultimately be asked about PHP or Python, before you
wipe out the radical majority of possible and important questions? Obviously
languages like that evolve, but not very quickly once they hit a certain point
in their life cycle.

As you saturate the big segments, you're going to naturally bleed off user
excitement and interest. Stack will continue on, getting tons of traffic
because their answers will remain extraordinarily valuable, but the ratio for
the amount of new content in relation to existing content will continue to
accelerate toward Stack being mostly an answers archive. That guarantees the
stagnation of their community (perhaps leaving small pockets of excitement
around new, lesser adopted tools).

Haven't communities like Wikipedia followed curves like this? Once you max out
all the English topics (for example), then it's an update approach with a
smaller number of new topics coming in. Net result ultimately being a lot less
overall new content being added in relation to the existing base (demanding a
peak in overall community activity). Wikipedia isn't nearly as exciting as it
once was, several years ago, when the rate of build-out and topic addition was
staggering. The wild west eventually becomes a boring suburb.

~~~
nathan_long
"That guarantees the stagnation of their community"

Not from my perspective. I'm a Rails developer, and between our continuously
evolving platform, the proliferation of gems, and my changing projects, I've
always got new questions.

Meanwhile, new technologies keep appearing to become the New Hotness.

~~~
adventureful
Here's why it guarantees overall stagnation (not necessarily on a specific
topic):

Let's say you have 10 super segments, eg: PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript,
etc.

Once you build those out to a high degree, reasonably the amount of new
content possible in relation to existing content, will plunge. Then if you add
a new language that becomes popular and mass adopted, the best you can hope
for is perhaps an addition of 5% to 10% to your content base. It all becomes
modestly incremental, and the excitement overall is guaranteed to fall in that
environment.

Ruby can be hopping as a subset, but the likelihood the whole thing will be is
vastly reduced once the overall build-out slows. What's left to be excited
about in the PHP section, once you've answered 97% of what is important about
the language? How many ways can someone ask about error reporting?

~~~
nathan_long
I don't see anything in this that bodes badly for Stackoverflow, financially
or as a community.

If all the PHP questions are answered, every PHP programmer is now able to
Google and find what they want to SO. That means they 1) learn that SO is the
place for answers and 2) see ads.

2 years from now, when they're working in another language with less
established Q&A, they'll know where to go.

"Excitement overall" really doesn't mean anything here. I don't care how much
or little activity there currently is in the Objective C section because I
don't use Objective C. I'm able to find the info I want and get questions
answered if they're not already there. That's all that matters.

What's going to stop that from happening?

~~~
adventureful
I don't see anything in it that bodes badly for Stack in terms of traffic or
financially either. I never said otherwise. They're dominant and given their
answer base and the value of the content, they're likely to remain so.

I believe overall stagnation in the community is guaranteed however, which is
what the topic rather focuses on.

~~~
nathan_long
Maybe we just aren't talking about the same thing. What does "stagnation in
the community" mean to you?

If it means "overall, people lose interest and stop visiting to ask and answer
questions," I don't see that. I'm not visiting to fill in all the gaps in SO's
content, and feeling disappointed when there aren't many gaps to fill. I'm
running into questions, Googling, and hoping to find my question already
answered.

If I find it and it's not answered, I'll do research and try to answer it
myself. If it doesn't exist, I'll ask. If I find the answer before anyone else
does, I may answer it myself.

I'm not going to stop doing that, and I don't see why anyone else will,
either. What the overall trends are in the site really has no bearing on my
individual participation, so it never feels "stagnant" to me.

Maybe you're imagining users who show up and surf for questions to answer, and
those people are getting bored? That's just not the way I use the site,
though.

