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Whither Stack Overflow

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Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#31

Post by duaneb »

Strilanc wrote: post #17
willvarfar wrote: post #7

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 ar…

> There should have been one SO for everything. What could possibly go right about mixing Judaism questions and Christianity questions into the programming questions?

There are other options like the subreddit model, where the users define and moderate the divisions themselves.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#32

Post by 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.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#33

Post by tlogan »

willvarfar wrote: post #7

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 ar…

From the point of view of person who uses SO just to find solution, incorrect answers are the biggest problem. It seems that "you don't know what you don't know" does not compute with many people involved in answering SO.

But that kinda make sense: at the beginning, SO was great because answers for noob questions where hard to find. At this point, there are so many other resources to get these noob questions answered or they are already answered. Now, people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#34

Post by 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.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#35

Post by ajdlinux »

Strilanc wrote: post #17
willvarfar wrote: post #7

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 ar…

> There should have been one SO for everything. What could possibly go right about mixing Judaism questions and Christianity questions into the programming questions?

I don't have a problem with separate Stack Exchange sites for topics that are fairly separate, but I do have an issue with the sheer number of computing-related sites - the difference between StackOverflow and Programmers.SE, for example, is a bit arbitrary.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#36

Post by anexprogrammer »

willvarfar wrote: post #7

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 ar…

I used to spend quite a bit of time on SO and OnStartups.

I haven't contributed to any of their sites since the ridiculous deletion of OnStartups due to the opinion of one moderator (If I remember correctly, which is vague now). I don't care that I lost half my rep. Some people had put really lengthy, researched, answers and a valuable resource was just rm'd.

There's far too many silos. Sure separate maths from games from Java. You have a tech question, is it webmaster, server fault, super user, or what? Seems like there's a very slim chance of getting it right first time. Sometimes it's the remit of several but none seem to want it. Or get marked as duplicate when it's fundamentally different to the marked duplicate.

Some of the subjective questions have attracted the best, or most useful, answers. Even when they've survived years they still sometimes get deleted.

Stack Exchange isn't worth the effort any more.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#37

Post by 1_listerine_pls »

Strilanc wrote: post #17
willvarfar wrote: post #7

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 ar…

> There should have been one SO for everything. What could possibly go right about mixing Judaism questions and Christianity questions into the programming questions?

They could use tags and machine learning. Have you been to Quora lately? they are a good example.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#38

Post by rat87 »

cvs268 wrote: post #15

Everything does NOT belong on StackOverflow. I wish SO highlighted 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 su…

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.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#39

Post by cvs268 »

rat87 wrote: post #38
cvs268 wrote: post #15

Everything does NOT belong on StackOverflow. I wish SO highlighted 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 su…

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…

> 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)

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#40

Post by pwdisswordfish »

borispavlovic wrote: post #22
Strilanc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There should have been one SO for everything. What could possibly go right about mixing Judaism questions and Christianity questions into the programming questions?

Is this a problem with wikipedia.org? Imagine both of these sets of questions tagged as `religion` and you have a common source for all people interested generally in any religion.

Are you kidding me?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Index/Ca...

Also, there's a very good reason "the dramaboards" are called that.

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