
What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community - ArmandGrillet
https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/07/18/building-community-inclusivity-stack-overflow/
======
fortran77
Here's my Stack Overflow user hostile experience. I asked a question as to
_why_ some very well-used and robust database implementations, as a matter of
"principle", don't have auto-increment fields. There must be a reason for it,
like it violates the purity of a relational database, etc., but I'm not sure
how or why.

This question was quickly edited/changed by someone else to "How do you do
AUTO_INCREMENT in Oracle". And then it was marked as a duplicate and quickly
closed.

I never asked a question on Stack Overflow again.

~~~
yulaow
The entire fact that a moderator can decide what you really wanted to ask even
if you are clear that's not the question you want to ask, is, honestly,
ridiculous.

~~~
oauea
Then you haven't seen how many poorly written questions there are. Would you
rather have your question outright deleted?

~~~
na85
You're implying that there's no middle ground between "moderators unilaterally
edit your question, including substantial semantic changes" and "question
deletion".

I find that simultaneously troubling and, given my experiences on SE,
unsurprising from someone whom I assume is a SE mod. If that's the position
that most moderators take, no wonder it's such a caustic place.

~~~
oauea
Not an SO moderator. I've answered a few questions over the years, and I've
browsed the new queue. I suggest you do the same before forming an opinion.

~~~
na85
No thanks. The SO community made it very clear they aren't interested in
having me be a part of it.

------
olooney
It's hilarious how self aware they are about the newbie experience[1] while at
the same time having engineered an system that reinforces and enables all of
those behaviors.

Stack Overflow doesn't care about helping users get answers to their
questions; they care about creating a Google-indexed repository of high-
quality questions and answers. These two aren't the same because of the
concept of a "high" or "low" quality question. If you go to a consultant (or
even a helpful fellow employee) with an vague, ill-formed question with a lot
of specific detail about your exact context and problem they'll help you
through it. Stack Overflow doesn't give a shit. No one is going to waste time
giving you a nuanced answer to a complex real-world situation; nor is it with
their time to cross-examine you to find out what your real question is. That
would be both time consuming and unrewarding - unrewarding because it will
help at most one person. No one else will care about your specific situation,
so your ceiling is at most one upvote. If you want that kind of help, you have
to pay for it, in one form or another. Unfortunately, most new users ask a
question about something their genuinely confused about in a topic area
they've just started to learn. Big mistake. Such questions were already asked
5 years ago and you'll get closed as a duplicate, or your confusion will be
interpreted as cluelessness and closed as unclear. You'll get a ton of
downvotes in either case.

I like stack exchange; I have a few thousand points on two different sites. I
enjoy answering questions, or even just seeing what kinds of questions are
being asked, and of course use it almost hourly when googling for different
problems. I rarely ask a question though, and usually regret it when I do. But
at this point let's just admit it's basically just a wiki with a psuedo-Q&A
gimmick.

[1]:
[https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/avINNb1_Dg2h6QfDRJOpnWVFWu...](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/avINNb1_Dg2h6QfDRJOpnWVFWuokOdxXr_6t97G2jiy-
LCbxSrBT8uP5Vs8rWacOnr2za8uPjAhGddAXkMWjipaNOMugKdYv34TtH2PtZ0veQ1S61-QhwaRBLkMjqPLNLaFr8tg)

~~~
airstrike
> Stack Overflow doesn't care about helping users get answers to their
> questions; they care about creating a Google-indexed repository of high-
> quality questions and answers.

I'll add that experienced Stack Overflow _users_ don't care about helping
other users. They care about badges and reputation, which is a proxy for
helping users but not quite the same.

So to me it's more like a wiki with a pseudo-Q&A gimmick with a LinkedIn-
meets-github-repository-activity-bragging aspect to it, which is particularly
inviting to people who like taking down others and feeling intellectually
superior, even if that means telling someone that their question is stupid –
which means breaking a rule that is essentially the cornerstone of any other
Q&A setting.

~~~
indigochill
>even if that means telling someone that their question is stupid – which
means breaking a rule that is essentially the cornerstone of any other Q&A
setting.

Although I'm sure that happens, the site is explicitly designed to be a
pseudo-wiki (Jeff counted Wikipedia as one of its inspirations), so if you ask
a question that's too specific to your use case (i.e. that other users will
not be able to put into practice) or a matter of opinion, then there's a
legitimate reason to close it as not an appropriate question for Stack
Overflow. Most other Q&A settings, such as Quora, are not trying to be pseudo-
wikis, so these questions make more sense for those contexts.

For example, if you asked, "Should I use MySQL or SQLite", that's not a great
question for Stack Overflow. You might instead ask, "What are the key
differences between MySQL and SQLite" which can then provide the insight to
answer your original question as well as help other users.

~~~
eitland
> You might instead ask, "What are the key differences between MySQL and
> SQLite" which can then provide the insight to answer your original question
> as well as help other users.

I'm pretty sure if you ask that exact question, an even if nobody has asked it
before so it isn't a duplicate, someone will find _some_ reason to shoot it
down.

~~~
xigency
Even worse, it was obliterated:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3630/sqlite-vs-
mysql](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3630/sqlite-vs-mysql)

And the reason: closed as not constructive by Kev Feb 28 '13 at 13:12

~~~
eitland
I cannot even see it :-/

~~~
shagie
You can find it in the Wayback machine:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20140327041948/https://stackoverf...](http://web.archive.org/web/20140327041948/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3630/sqlite-
vs-mysql)

Note that as time went on, it became one liners and anecdotes... and everyone
has their own anecdote of what the differences are and how important those
differences are to that person... and that leads to discussions and page
finding the answer you're looking for on page 40 of the answers somewhere deep
in the comments of an answer.

That wasn't the goal of Stack Overflow.

------
xigency
One big problem as a Stack Overflow viewer who comes from Google is that many
times the top result for a search leads to a question/answer that is a dead
end. The question is valid but it is closed because it was asked on the wrong
website (Stack Overflow vs. Stack Exchange), it's too subjective, it's a
duplicate, etc. Or the question is downvoted and there are no useful answers.

Another issue which comes about from the overzealous duplicate tagging is that
not all software engineering questions last forever. If someone is asking how
something works in C89 and gets the best answer, and then someone else asks
the same question five years later, the answer will be the same. But if it is
a question about JavaScript or new C++ or Python, then answers can get stale
pretty fast. One workaround the community uses is taking those questions that
are top hits or top quality and keeps editing them year after year. But that
only works for the high profile questions and answers. The policy hurts the
site overall.

~~~
closetohome
My favorite is the recursive "just google this" answer in a thread that's the
top search result on Google.

~~~
contras1970
that's not accepted as a good answer on SO. do you have any examples?

------
rossdavidh
A really good post, and good point, but I also want to add that the first
thing I thought when I saw the title was: "I don't think Stack Overflow should
think of itself as a community".

In fact, SO is fantastic, the best ever at what it does, by far. It does what
it does, really well. When it started, I occasionally asked or answered
questions; now I don't, and it has nothing to do with community (good or bad).
It's because, you know, all my questions are already asked on there, and
answered, often multiple times.

This doesn't mean there won't be more questions that need asking, as of course
there will for new technologies especially. It means that the ratio of users
to questions has risen exponentially, so that the % who need to do _anything_
on SO has dropped.

You want the typical newbie experience? It's this: 1) types question into
Google 2) clicks on link to SO 3) may have to repeat steps 1-2 a couple times
4) finds answer to their question 5) goes away

There is nothing in this that resembles "community". Like wikipedia, there may
be a core group of ultra devoted users who keep adding new content. And you
know what? That's ok. Perfect, even. The problem with SO's community, is that
it's thought of as a community.

The worst thing they could do with SO, is try to make it a community. We
already have Facebook and Twitter, and they didn't turn out so well. We don't
have another substitute for Stack Overflow, if they try to turn it into a
social network.

------
gota
> "Newbie Experience" picture

+

> Over the next few quarters, we’re going to be taking a step back and re-
> evaluating how we deliver feedback to users about their questions. We want
> to make sure people are getting necessary feedback without feeling called
> out or publicly embarrassed.

My bet: they'll keep the mechanisms exactly the same and hide from the newbie
user the information that their question has been flagged for closing, marked
as a duplicate, etc., and show a 'temporary ghost score' capped at zero.

~~~
metalliqaz
How is that an improvement to the user? In some ways, it's like a kind of
shadowban. The user's question is effectively dead, but they aren't made aware
of it.

~~~
xboxnolifes
Exactly

------
hpoe
So Jeff Atwood wrote an article about what SO wants to be when it grows up.
([https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-
want-...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-to-be-
when-it-grows-up/))

The answer wasn't a Q&A help site it was a high quality curated wiki of the
best answers and questions. It isn't supposed to be a forum where you come to
ask your one off questions it supposed to be a place where you encounter a
unique technical challenge figure out what the core issue is and then see if
anyone else knows how to resolve the core issue and then have that core issue
answered forever and always.

The one time I asked a Question on SO it was a very positive experience that
went well got answered quickly, but I first had spent thirty minutes
documenting everything checking the actual docs and ensuring I had done my due
diligence before throwing it out there for someone else to answer.

If you aren't willing to put in work to find the answer to your question why
the hell would you expect someone else to.

------
pugworthy
I'm a top 2% on a stack (gamedev), and find it very frustrating when I try to
help the new users with an answer or in comments, and have the other mods come
down on me for trying to help. I've had my fellow mods berate me in comments
for trying to help. "With your reputation you should know better!" was one
comment I got. At least I can still try to be helpful in comments on closed
questions. And I can vote up questions that I see are getting pushed down with
negativity.

To me, a lot of times naive and new user questions are excellent opportunities
for learning, mentoring, and sharing. You have this little moment where you
influence someone in a positive way, make them feel welcome, and maybe put
them on a path to growth as a developer.

------
sgustard
Closed as duplicate:

[https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-
ve...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-
welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/)

------
mushufasa
There totally are good examples ui/ux designs that minimize the emotional
impact of negative feedback. Stack Overflow might take a page from dating
apps. Imagine if Tinder told you all the hot people that rejected you! That's
kindof where SO is now. Instead, Tinder takes a terrible experience
(rejection), hides it, and only shows you the great experiences (acceptance).

The main constraint to work around is that, currently, question pages are
mostly globally public. SO could change that pretty easily. They already have
a lot of the mechanisms.

Like, it could be as simple as only showing downvotes and downvoters if you
are logged in and have enough user 'points.' Otherwise, just show the newbies
the result ('marked as duplicate' etc), and a [-] instead of -7 on the
question tally. So it doesn't feel like a crowd of people yelling at you.

And, what could be really super cool, is if the SO team can auto-recommend
learning materials specific to the programming language/framework/whatever.
Like if I ask a stupid question about Django models, which becomes marked as
duplicate, SO NLP's the question then matches it to the Django docs, which
they've also indexed via NLP.

If there's some reason why you really need to see specific reasons the elite
users decided the question was a duplicate or unclear, SO could use
progressive ui design. Instead of blasting newbies in the face with criticism
on the question page, make them click to reveal why H4x0r69 said your stupid
XSS question confused CSPs and CORS, so the experience is a dialectic rather
than public shaming.

~~~
oauea
Then how would you ever learn? I don't know if you've ever spent time looking
for questions to answer on SO. Before weighing in on the climate, please do
so.

You'll encounter an absolutely shocking amount of utterly stupid questions.
Yes, I know, stupid questions supposedly don't exist. Judge for yourself after
spending an hour looking at the new queue for PHP and JavasScript questions.

Once you've done this, and still think the experience for new users should be
made better, I commend your kindheartedness and patience.

~~~
mushufasa
I'm not suggesting encouraging stupid questions. I'm suggesting that you can
minimize the emotional impact of public shaming to newbies through progressive
ui design, while keeping the same high standards for content. And also auto-
suggesting documentation for newbies exactly so they can learn.

~~~
olooney
Right. "Closed as Duplicate" could be renamed "Great Question! We have an
answer for you over here!" without change in functionality and it would be an
improvement. They could take it further and keep the duplicate as a
"rephrasing" or "alternative statement" of a question - shouldn't it improve
Google search-ability, having several different ways stating a question? And
asking a duplicate question in your own words shouldn't be penalized; it is,
prima facae, both a good and frequently asked question. It would be so _easy_
to make the question-asking experience better for the vast majority of
users... and yet they don't.

------
Kaiyou
I feel like there's an "elite" of old users who are discontent that there are
both people asking questions they don't like and people eager to answer those
questions. If they could just elevate those old users to a different space
where they don't interfere with this asking/answering which is the point of
the site to begin with, everyone would probably be much happier.

~~~
ianmcgowan
It must be a little soul-crushing to be one of the old-time users and seeing
the same questions over-and-over. I think instead of booting those elite
users, SO should have a quarantine (or nursery) where badly-asked/homework/do-
my-job questions can be shunted off to the side instead of closed immediately.
Probably with do-not-crawl robots.txt.

I use SO multiple times a day and sometimes feel the urge to contribute back.
I don't have enough expertise to help with deep problems, but am patient
enough to work a newbie through their bash/awk/sql questions and it's enough
for me to hopefully make one struggling person's day a little better.

~~~
Kaiyou
Those aren't the only types of questions being hunted down. It's gotten really
bad. Also, it's just natural that most questions are repeated. Every year
there's a new generation needing to ask those same questions. Looking back
doesn't always work, as technology moves to fast, last years advise can
already be obsolete.

I think part of the problem is that those old users think of the place as
something for eternity, when in reality it's transient. Repeating questions is
desirable. Instead of closing the new questions as duplicates, it should be
occasion to retire the old question. Sure, there are some answers that still
hold true 10 years later, but how is the one looking for an answer supposed to
know that?

------
AcerbicZero
I have a somewhat different intepretation of the value StackOverflow provides.
To me, part of what makes SO useful is the somewhat inconsistent, but still
fairly obvious, requirement to do significant personal research, before asking
a question. If a Here, let me google that for you link to the top result
answers a users question, shouldn't there be some sort of negative feedback to
cull those types of questions from the platform?

My point is, by discouraging behavior that the community is "generally"
opposed to, SO helps in ways beyond just answer questions. That said, if they
can make it a little nicer to ask a question, without losing the core value
they provide (IMO - quality questions & quality answers), then by all means
lets give it a try.

~~~
olooney
Sometimes. I once asked how to find the "successor" of a floating point
number. I _had_ Googled this, in several different ways in fact, looking for
phrases like "smallest floating point number strictly larger than", "next
nearest IEEE 754 float" and so on, but I hadn't hit the magic combination of
words that would bring up the correct answer. My question was flagged as a
duplicate of this one:

> [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10160079/how-to-find-
> nea...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10160079/how-to-find-nearest-
> next-previous-double-value-numeric-limitsepsilon-for-give)

Which is a _terrible_ way of phrasing that question. "next/previous double
value?" "like numeric_limits::epsilon but for given number?" "Quite self
explanatory?" I didn't - and couldn't have - found this question via Google
because it doesn't actually _ask_ the question it purports to - it makes vague
allusions to it and hopes the other party will know what they mean. The page
would be much improved from a better question with a precise technical
description of the exact problem asked because then the page would actually
contain the keywords that people would be looking for. But stack overflow, by
design, believes that the One True Way to ask a question is the way it was
asked first, and that everything subsequent is a duplicate and should be
closed.

------
gsliepen
Stack Overflow is a huge community and they want to keep the quality of both
the questions and the answers high. If they wouldn't downvote low quality
questions, then the search function would degrade significantly. So newbies
will always have a good chance of having a negative experience, even if it's
done in the most respectable way with constructive criticism. I'm not sure
much can be done against that, except perhaps better preparing first time
question askers by having them go through a short tutorial before they can ask
a question, or having first-time questions handled differently from regular
ones (ie, only visible to moderators, so they don't attract too many negative
comments from regular users).

------
leepowers
One issue is moderation vs answering. Users interested in moderating questions
are more prominent than users looking to actually answer questions.

1) Grace period. For new questions (and especially for new users) - add a
grace period where the downvoting, closing questions, and voting to close are
all prohibited. Could be 4 to 24 hours - some optimal window where questioners
can read comments, clarify their question, add/revise code examples, etc.
Getting downvoted or closed is an extremely toxic experience and tends to
position the well for all questioners, be they newbies or veterans.

2) As an answerer I also need a way to watch a question and see if it improves
over time. So when I provide feedback in a comment, or flag/watch a question,
I need a historical view of all my threads.

Right now the experience is upvote or downvote right away, proffer an answer
right away, vote to close or otherwise flag right away; there's too much
immediacy in the interface. It feels like a churn. And churn is a game that
appeals to rule enforcers (moderators).

3) Chat. A bad question may be intrinsically bad - incoherent and confused and
unanswerable by anyone. Or a question may be bad in context.

SO is like email. It's asynchronous and creates a conversation history. In
this context a good question is direct, concise, and descriptive.

Many questioners approach SO like it was a chat. They need to ask several
small questions before they can formulate a real question. They need an
informal conversation (chat) to set up a well structured, intelligible
question (email). Many users are looking for help through the whole process:
exploration > formulation > resolution. SO is optimized for the last step and
ruthlessly moderates out the antecedent steps.

SO already has a chat at
[https://chat.stackoverflow.com/](https://chat.stackoverflow.com/) \- but
usage seems sparse. Instead of "vote to close" being the only option for bad
questions, maybe recategorize them instead. "Send to chat" or "Request for
comments" to flag a question that needs help getting to an answerable state.

------
wvenable
I have never participated in StackOverflow. In the early years, it was because
they didn't allow logins except through Google/Facebook. And then it was
because as an experienced developer with answers, I can provide value to the
site but I don't have enough "reputation" to anything useful. I have to do a
bunch of meaningless crap to earn the privilege of doing anything useful.

Most of you probably don't have this problem because you've long contributed
to Stackoverflow. But the user experience isn't just hostile to newbies asking
questions but also really anyone who hasn't been contributing for a long time.

~~~
apple4ever
Exactly this. There have been numerous occasions I could answer a question or
at least add some helpful information. But I couldn’t because I didn’t have
enough reputation, with no helpful way to get it.

I think they have it backwards. They should prioritize answering questions and
adding comments, not asking questions.

------
partlysean
What I find deeply frustrating and unhelpful on Stack Overflow are answers
that don't offer a solution but instead give reasons why the OP shouldn't be
doing what they're doing in the first place. Q: How can I do this in jQuery?
A: You don't need jQuery. You should be using vanilla JS for that. Q: How can
I hide scrollbars using CSS? A: That's bad UX and you shouldn't be doing that
in the first place.

The lack of regard for the context of the problem the OP is trying to
solve/trust that they have their reasons and project constraints for doing so
is annoying and disrespectful.

------
oarabbus_
The best questions on Stack Overflow are, without fail, those marked as "not a
good fit for Stack Overflow"

~~~
metalliqaz
this. I used to write long screeds about my latest experience or why I didn't
like how it worked there, but no more. Now I just say, "my most productive
experiences at SO were on questions that would never be allowed today."

------
svat
Over the years, I have spent a fair bit of time on Stack Overflow and other
Stack Exchange sites (at the moment, 816 answers and 70 questions, across the
sites), in many of the sites from their early days. What I find happening on
multiple sites, repeatedly, is similar to what I've seen on many other online
communities like Wikipedia etc:

1\. It starts as a community of people eager to share their knowledge, help
people, etc.

2\. Initially, the small community of users scours every (or a large fraction
of) new questions that come in, jumping at opportunities to help (and perhaps
also demonstrate their expertise etc: it feels good to answer a question well,
like disposing off a level of a video game or whatever).

3\. Over time, as many users come in, the community develops its own norms of
what's good and bad, its own in-jokes and in-group markers / shibboleths, etc.

4\. At some point, the number of new user actions that come into view becomes
too much for one user to manage. Somewhat overwhelmed, and given their
overdeveloped “connoisseur” tendencies at distinguishing between good and bad
questions ([https://xkcd.com/915/](https://xkcd.com/915/)), they tend to look
for shortcuts to dispose of questions (“this question is bad because ____”).
Any question that does not match the in-group standards of a good question can
easily be disposed off instead of engaging with them. It is easy to forget
that these standards are somewhat arbitrary, and often not even encoded well
anywhere... and even if they were, new users won't read it anyway. It is also
easy to forget one's original motivation and purpose, of helping others.

The end result is that new users asking their questions in what way seems
natural to them (remember Sturgeon's law) almost uniformly have a bad
experience, though from the perspective of the regular answerers of the site,
they are continuing to answer good questions at the same rate.

I have not had a bad experience asking my questions; I'm pretty sure I can
still go to one of these sites, ask a question, and have it be well-received,
but that's because I know the norms, the superficial things that make a
question look like a good question “worthy” of being answered. But whenever I
look at say Stack Overflow (the oldest, biggest site, and by far the worst
offender in this regard), I see many horrifying instances of a new user's
question being “rejected” for trivial reasons, when in the old days we'd have
helped the asker improve the question and worked harder to extract the “pearl”
inside the question.

(My last phrase reminded me of the title of a post from 2011:
[https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-
pearls-...](https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-
sand/) which ends with:

> Therefore, the only logical thing to do is to maximize the happiness and
> enjoyment of answerers. If this means aggressively downvoting or closing
> unworthy and uninteresting questions, so be it.

I think this was the right choice to make at the time, and if Stack Exchange
Inc in order to make the sites more welcoming ends up making the sites a less
fun place for answerers there won't be much of value left, but still there's a
lot that can be done to understand why otherwise initially well-intentioned
answerers end up behaving this way over the course of years, and finding ways
to keep answerers on the site without regularly crushing those seeking
answers.)

------
bluedino
Now I want to know what the controversial new policy was.

------
hathawsh
Hostility is an issue that has plagued every major discussion board, comment
section, and social network. I applaud any network that makes a real effort to
manage the hostility. It is a very difficult problem to manage, since people
rarely intend to sound hostile, yet most readers assume the worst.

My sister leaves Facebook every few months because she perceives there's too
much hostility there, then rejoins again a few months later to see what's
going on in the family. I see most of the posts and comments she sees, and I
can see why she thinks people might be belittling her, so I don't blame her.
I'm glad she doesn't try to get into technical discussions where the
appearance of hostility can be far worse.

------
sonofgod
I think this is an important lesson for an awful lot of online communities --
in a public forum* some mild, warranted criticism is then published to your
friends and they are then encouraged by the algorithm to put in their
tuppence-worth. Should any of those be inclined to comment -- perhaps less
sensitively, slightly more inflammatory -- then the cycle begins anew, with
more fuel added to the fire.

* Mostly looking at Twitter and Facebook with their explicit "engagement means my friends will see this" algorithm

------
ProAm
SO's problem was they wanted to a community that rewrote manuals and
documentation, rather than be a community that helped programmers answer
problems.

That created a problem that has snowballed and is probably to big to ever
really fix now. It is caustic, its not user friendly (even to users with
experience).

------
contras1970
this reads a bit like a parody of the all-inclusive movement. the first half
of the article chronicles how she took offence where none was offered, and
instead of "my bad", there's a whole 'nother half of it talking about
"improving the way people give each other feedback".

as others have suggested, (part of) the issue is with the nature of the site
itself. we can talk about elitism, seniors shitting on "noobs", whatever. the
truth is, there's all walks of people on SO. there's a continuous barrage of
bare-naked prompts for "do my homework for me", there's a continuous barrage
of "(i don't even know which side is up, but) what's wrong with this
gymnastics equipment i'm using?" questions. if you're any kind of regular in
that kind of environment, you'll eventuaatlly get exhausted. the only way they
can improve the site for "beginners", however ill-defined that term is,
covering both the blatant homework cheaters and honest learners, is to limit
engagement by force. "you seem burnt out, you can't post comments or answers
for a week. come back when you're in a better mood." that seems like a sure-
fire way to drive away their knowledge pool and ultimately their revenue
stream. another way is to rate-limit the crappy input, but that doesn't seem
to be what the article is hinting at at all.

for all the bitching about how toxic SO is, this is not my personal
experience. however, that doesn't mean i think the format of the site has
merit. IMO, if you want to fix the experience for honest neophytes, you need
to enable dialogue. a newbie asks a ill-posed question, a senior points out
the misconceptions, asks for clarifications. the newbie comes back with more
information, improved followup. senior is finally in position to provide a
red-meat answer.

i just described a mailing list, and that's a format you cannot sell with the
kind of margin SO has been raking in. they _could_ ditch their programmers and
employ a bunch of writers to collate the wisdom of various product-specific
mailing lists into an encyclopedia, but they're not interested. i understand
that, it'd be a hell of a pivot. but if they push on catering to the lowest
common denominator, they're doomed.

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altereds
For me SO has been useful when I search on google and the 1st result is a
similar question on the platform. Almost never get the answers on stack
overflow, but I find alternate ways to search on google for the answers that I
need, which is often found on other sites. With the focus on questions and
phrasing , the site has become an useful resource to find ways to rephrase
your questions, but very rarely find the required answers on the site.

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lofikrom
Does Stack go the way of Yahoo answers at some point? The former has served me
on countless assignments/reports, hope it remains useful.

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dlphn___xyz
HN is far more hostile than stack overflow :)

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metalliqaz
I think that's hyperbolic. I find HN to be slightly more forgiving. However,
it does surprise me how hostile HN can be to a bit of humor.

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pugworthy
Yes. Also, you don't always see people asking, "Hey I don't quite understand
what you mean with this comment - can you clarify?" Instead there's a tendency
to just down vote.

