What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
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What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
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Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#2A place for people to put other people down for seeking help?
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#3Judging by the number of answers I see which were valid and good answers in 2011 and are horrendously outdated now, it's not just grown up, it's grown long in the tooth.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#4I've used stackoverflow for years and have never heard it put like that.
"Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time."
Personally I would have been much more understanding of the process of using stackoverflow if I knew this, and so would many of the people who get stung expecting an answer to their question.
In reality the user is contributing their question to the community, not asking a question in the traditional sense. That's my take anyway.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#5When I wrote my bachelor thesis about democratic methods in online communities, I found out that all these crowd-sourced sites had one major problem.
When they start, senior players in their field of work laugh at them because they don't have much content. So they try to get as much as possible, trying to get as many new creators on board as they can.
Later, when they have grown enough, the senior players in the field laugh at them because they have mostly garbage content. So they try to increase the quality of their content.
The problem here is, now they accumulated a vast mass of creators who love the site, but only a fraction of them creates quality content.
They unleash a task force of moderators on them that kick out the low-quality creators, which improves quality, but bad for the morale of the whole community.
Wikipedia did this and Stackexchange does this too.
I think, instead of alienating existing creators by deleting their content, they should simply make high quality content more visible.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#6Judging by the number of answers I see which were valid and good answers in 2011 and are horrendously outdated now, it's not just grown up, it's grown long in the tooth.
That's a really good observation. A lot of very highly ranked answers no longer apply, and still they are very visible due to their score.
If the idea is to be the "wikipedia of programming", I wonder if "votes" are enough. Should there be an active initiative to prune stupid/bad questions? Revisit old answers?
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#7When I wrote my bachelor thesis about democratic methods in online communities, I found out that all these crowd-sourced sites had one major problem. When they start, senior players in their field of work laugh at them because they don't have much content. So they try to get as much as possible, trying to get as many new creators on board as they can. Later, when they have grown enough, the senior players in the fiel…
Being a community manager is a thankless, unrelenting assault on your confidence and emotional and social stability.
The social Internet's linchpin has almost always (since as long as I can remember) been that it requires a certain kind of person to be an unpaid community manager (by any name), and nearly every site you visit (wikipedia, stackoverflow, reddit, etc) makes use of these nonployees.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#8Judging by the number of answers I see which were valid and good answers in 2011 and are horrendously outdated now, it's not just grown up, it's grown long in the tooth.
That's a really good observation. A lot of very highly ranked answers no longer apply, and still they are very visible due to their score. If the idea is to be the "wikipedia of programming", I wonder if "votes" are enough. Should there be an active initiative to prune stupid/bad questions? Revisit old answers?
It's actually worse than that. The accepted answer by the OP is pinned to the top forever (or until OP changes his or her mind, which is often never), no matter how many downvotes the pinned answer collects.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#9I found the conclusion rather disappointing:
> What should Stack Overflow be when it grows up? Whatever we make it, together.
It's more of a historical overview than a vision for the future.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#10Judging by the number of answers I see which were valid and good answers in 2011 and are horrendously outdated now, it's not just grown up, it's grown long in the tooth.
The only questions I've seen constantly outdated are web dev related. More stable technologies like C/C++/python seem to have up to date answers most of the time (purely anecdotal).