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Whither Stack Overflow

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Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#41

Post by danmaz74 »

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…

> make SO relevant again

Curiosity: is there any more relevant alternative?

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#42

Post by tjl »

arciini wrote: post #14

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…

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.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#43

Post by jasonm23 »

CannisterFlux wrote: post #13

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 a…

You want a nice misty buff.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#44

Post by [deleted] »

CannisterFlux wrote: post #13

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 a…

[deleted]

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#45

Post by pwdisswordfish »

duaneb wrote: post #31
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?

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

...and where petty factionalism (among other factors) led to the creation of, say, /r/math, /r/maths, /r/askmath, /r/askmaths, /r/learnmath, /r/mathematics, /r/badmathematics... and so on for every topic you can think of.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#46

Post by dredmorbius »

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?

Well, it might put the fear of God into programmers, which wouldn't be all bad.

And the fear of computers into God, perhaps.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#47

Post by dredmorbius »

Animats wrote: post #34

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.

"Now you have two problems."

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

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#48

Post by dredmorbius »

debaserab2 wrote: post #8

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)…

NB, but your experience reflects mine. Though on a different system.

I remember discovering Usenet and how amazing it was. Not only isn't it what it once was, but what it once was leaves some things to be desired.

I remember discovering Slashdot and how amazing it was. ...

I remember discovering Wikipedia and how amazing it was. It's actually still pretty good, but the manipulators, idiots, and politics are brain-numbing and/or blood-chilling.

I remember discovering University and how amazing it was. It's actually still pretty good, but the manipulators, idiots, and politics are brain-chilling and/or blood-numbing.

I remember discovering books and experts and scientific articles and documentary series and ... Lots of stuff.

Some of it's still good. Some of it now strikes me as painfully stupid. Often it's not so much the answers that aren't known but the questions. Or we discover there are black swans and have to toss a bunch of priors. Or the words and moralities on which The Elders based everything on have changed beyond recognition. Or The Elders' message has been so distorted by a game of Telephone run a few millennia too long. Every generation or two, everyone seems to toss everything out (especially the good stuff I worked so hard on) and start making basic mistakes from scratch again.

That other system is called life. SO is a lot like life.

Understanding is hard, it doesn't transfer well, the Guardians of the Knowledge start seeing the primary goal as Guardianship rather than Knowldging.

Then something comes along and grinds everything into the dust and it's built up again and a new generation of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young'uns comes along and discovers an invaluable resource.

So it goes.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#49

Post by Drdrdrq »

alixaxel wrote: post #26
endgame wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition, the reputation model is actually incentivising the wrong thing. Answering some simple question that many people see will give you an answer that gets upvoted to the double or even triple digits. Answering something hard and well might only get a handful of votes if it's a niche topic. (disclosure: 11K rep, mostly on tools like make, autofoo and cmake.)

I once thought of a potential solution where the number of reputation you would gain would be directly derived from the number of tag-experts who saw the question (and did not provide an answer). But maybe this would lead to it's own problems too.

Bounty somewhat alleviates this problem, but only partially... Maybe there should be an option to "tip" good answers, where (part of) the tip would be taken from your own score?

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#50

Post by Drdrdrq »

CannisterFlux wrote: post #13

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 a…

> 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?

I try to look at it the other way around. My memory is not that good and I might encounter the same problem again a few years later... Wouldn't it be nice if I found a nicely articulated answer on SO? :) That has actually happened to me more than once.

I myself stopped being active (as in: chasing the score) when a question I put a lot of effort in and was actually important to me got shut down because "we don't do library recommendations here". It wasn't the first time either, but that straw broke the camel's back. Now I just take care of myself when I need something and ignore the rest of the circus. (5k+)

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