The decline of Stack Overflow
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The decline of Stack Overflow
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow
#2Needs [2015].
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow
#3“Closed as not a question”. “Tell us what you tried first. Nothing? Unacceptable!”
I think they should have had a little more vision. I’ve closed two accounts. Now I only use my current account when absolutely necessary. I think I asked over 200 questions in my first two accounts. At one point I was trying to throw down breadcrumbs while learning elisp.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2170528/writing-hello-wo...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264286/generating-a-qui...
StackOverFlow could have been the best place to learn any topic.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow
#4Re: The decline of Stack Overflow
#5This article doesn't even touch the worst problem with SO. Code rot.
Answers are typically out of date and no longer good practice. Some claim that the ability to edit answers fixes this, but all it does is subvert the accept/vote functions. You end up with strange "Ship of Theseus" answers where what is written has nothing to do with what was so highly voted, or what solved the original problem.
Where SO goes wrong is that they have tried to create a definitive set of answers in a field where the real answers change yearly, or even monthly.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow
#6I mean, yes, all the issues pointed out here are real problems that I wish they would address.
On the other hand, and, more importantly, no! Remember what the world was like before SO? It has been remarkably successful at its stated goal of putting expertsexchange and random terrible phpbb forums six feet under. And despite its flaws I don't think anyone would wish for the world that it replaced.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow
#7The author of this article certainly don't understand social dynamics and various competing forces. On producer consumer systems, the ratio of consumers to producers is often 10X or less. This has been case everywhere from Wikipedia to Etsy to TV to movies to various blogs. The act of producing something is many magnitudes more expensive than act of consuming something. As all biological systems, humans tends to conserve their energy and that's the root cause of these symptoms.
Second, it is very important for these systems to ensure high quality content or otherwise consumers would stop consuming and then producers would stop producing leading to vicious cycle. On large scale systems like Internet, consumers are saved from quality issues by search engines and you can keep producing garbage without triggering vicious cycle. However on websites like SO this is often not the case because they rely on gamification. If you allow users to quickly accumulate scores in game effortlessly than other users who have to try much harder for same scores than overall quality would decline.
And no, SO is not in decline by any measure. In fact, SO has firmly established itself as go to website for vast majority of developers. Some even say programming is mostly reduced to searching SO these days.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow
#8A few years ago I felt like I should contribute something back to SO (having used it plenty of times for research), but somehow I got routed into a "gotcha" UX where the site would repeatedly tell me that my previous action was against the rules. It felt like being trained via shock collar. I certainly appreciate the goal of maintaining quality in questions and answers, but I hope there are better ways of getting there than what I saw.
Note that the experience I have didn't appear to be human-initiated: I understood it as an automated "feature" of the site itself, a sort of guided initiation process. Maybe that process trained some people a bit too well?
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow
#9Not just for new users. I’ve been using SO since 2009, have over 7k reputation there and 375 answers, but recent changes make me want to stop using it.
The problem I encounter most often, the community tends to closevote hard questions instead of answering them.
E.g. I recently asked a question on SO, for Linux C API to monitor WiFi signal strength for the connected network.
10 minutes later it got a vote to close “migrate to superuser”. I immediately updated the question explaining that I only interested in C API. An hour later it got closed as offtopic. I flagged to mod, nothing happened. It gathered a few votes to reopen but not enough to reopen. And now it’s just deleted by “Community” saying “RemoveAbandonedClosed”.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow
#10Not just for new users. I’ve been using SO since 2009, have over 7k reputation there and 375 answers, but recent changes make me want to stop using it. The problem I encounter most often, the community tends to closevote hard questions instead of answering them. E.g. I recently asked a question on SO, for Linux C API to monitor WiFi signal strength for the connected network. 10 minutes later it got a vote to close “m…
Sorry mate. As you might have guessed, Community is a bot. Some quick tips might help for next time:
* Never, ever, write a question without tagging it with either a language or language-agnostic, though in the latter case you're still better off using a language tag as well. This is basically the only reliable way to get views.
* Try to give people a jump-in point. If your question gets 50 views, which is far from guaranteed, only expect 10 of them have the time to write an answer. If your question isn't approachable to at least one person in your mostly-random panel of 10 people, you're going to suffer for it. Giving people a minimal piece of code massively improves engagement rates.
* State your problem clearly. Your newest revision would likely never have had these problems, but your first revision was not obviously about C APIs, and by then it was too late.
* If your question is just closed and you think you deserve reconsideration, flag it with a custom reason for an actual moderator (rather than just a user with a vote). They're the only people who really have power to reopen fast enough to matter.
* If your question stays closed for a nontrivial amount of time, it's dead unless you post it to Meta (meta.stackoverflow.com) and people reconsider. There are too many questions posted to this site to spare a second glance to closed ones.
In short: be clear, be proactive, and focus on quality from the get-go.