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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?

#31

Post by k__ »

debacle wrote: post #7
k__ wrote: post #5

When 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.

Sure, but mostly policy is the problem here.

Instead of

"Hunt down bad content and delete it!"

they should use

"Hunt down good content and promote it!"

Why not create a premium version of the product that features only chosen content?

Creators can do what they always did and maybe they're even motivated to become "premium creators".

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#32

Post by fabian2k »

manigandham wrote: post #23

There are definitely problems with outdated content. SO + Google seems to be particularly bad at finding accurate answers without cross-referencing several different posts all linking to each other, combined with forced immutability and the difficulty of some changes. Some other sites like Quora have a full question "merge" feature which SO needs, it would cut down the duplicates and allow a single question thread to…

SO has a "merge questions" feature, but it's rarely used. It is only available to elected moderators, and it's quite dangerous because it's not reversible without assistance from SE staff.

One major problem is that merging two very similar questions that are about the same concept would still end up with answers that seem out of place because they address a slightly different version of the question.

Most cases should be solved by closing as duplicate, as that will create a link to the canonical answer. Anonymous users will also be automatically redirected to the canonical answer if there are no answers present on the duplicate.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#33

Post by EADGBE »

I'm still getting a bit of a humble brag out of this.

But thanks for the shout out, for all my contributions on SO. It's amazing, I really feel like an indispensable cog now. /s

However, keeping Documentation[1] would have really accelerated the progression of SO. But whatever... I don't run it.

This really isn't all for ourselves though; the Stack Exchange community is more impressive to me. I really enjoy the Parenting, Money and Music SE's.

[1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d...

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#34

Post by duxup »

debacle wrote: post #7
k__ wrote: post #5

When 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.

"Being a community manager is a thankless, unrelenting assault on your confidence and emotional and social stability."

Oh man I volunteered to moderate on a large gaming related forum ages ago. The amount of BS you deal with along with personal attacks and etc is pretty high. I never felt emotionally upset by it as I felt you had to maintain an even keel .... but it certainly is not a job for everyone and the rub is the folks who WANT to do it the most are often the worst at it. Being a good moderator is not a skill everyone has, but it's also not valued in any real way by most communities / companies.

Really the most frustrating aspect were the non trouble users who seemed to go to bat for the folks who were truly bad actors because of some perceived injustice (lie)... and all the meta that goes into that.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#35

Post by cdoxsey »

umvi wrote: post #10
crdoconnor wrote: post #3

Judging 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).

Lately I've been working with c++ and, at least in my experience, as a developer who's native tongue isn't c++, many of the answers have failed to keep up with the radical changes in the language in the last 10 years. Post-17 C++ is completely different from pre-11 C++.

That said there's usually an answer further down the page with a more up to date solution, it's just not the accepted or most popular one.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#36

Post by sureaboutthis »

dudul wrote: post #6
crdoconnor wrote: post #3

Judging 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?

Then you vote to close the question. It may take a while but, eventually, it will be deleted. Just yesterday, I closed three or four such questions in a brief visit.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#37

Post by crispyambulance »

torstenvl wrote: post #21
PudgePacket wrote: post #4

I'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…

I think this is a good observation, but I still don't think it completely explains the hostility on SO, which quite often seems like an even more hostile and juvenile version of certain Linux distro mailing lists. It honestly seems like most of SO is people screaming "RTFM n00b!" and downvoting questions into oblivion.

Yeah, it's a big turn-off.

I think the game-ification of SO (in the form of badges, scores, privileges and rules) attracts personalities who crave that shit and don't see any problem with being harsh and dismissive to others that don't follow the rules (as they see them).

Regardless of how much SO may say that it's about "the community" rather than the individual, it BECOMES personal when an individual has a genuine problem and gets treated like crap.

The whole stack-exchange scene has become an incredibly weird place to ask a question. I find value in it and use it everyday, but I dread asking a question there.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#38

Post by michaelbuckbee »

gonational wrote: post #20

I’m gonna catch some flak for this... Listening to Jeff try to describe what stack overflow is and the “fundamental misunderstanding” by all of us millions of unwashed masses is amazing. It’s also a bit like listening to a muskox describe why it decided to grow long hair after so much time in the snow; IOW, a complete and total lack of understanding of emergence and a rewriting of history at the behest of Jeff’s enor…

IDK, Jeff (edited) explicitly calls out that they were lucky and the they do not deserve all the credit for SO.

"I am honored and humbled by the public utility that Stack Overflow has unlocked for a whole generation of programmers. But I didn't do that.

You did, when you contributed a well researched question to Stack Overflow.

You did, when you contributed a succinct and clear answer to Stack Overflow."

You did, when you edited a question or answer on Stack Overflow to make it better.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#40

Post by [deleted] »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #38
gonational wrote: post #20

I’m gonna catch some flak for this... Listening to Jeff try to describe what stack overflow is and the “fundamental misunderstanding” by all of us millions of unwashed masses is amazing. It’s also a bit like listening to a muskox describe why it decided to grow long hair after so much time in the snow; IOW, a complete and total lack of understanding of emergence and a rewriting of history at the behest of Jeff’s enor…

IDK, Jeff (edited) explicitly calls out that they were lucky and the they do not deserve all the credit for SO. "I am honored and humbled by the public utility that Stack Overflow has unlocked for a whole generation of programmers. But I didn't do that. You did, when you contributed a well researched question to Stack Overflow. You did, when you contributed a succinct and clear answer to Stack Overflow." You did, whe…

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