What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up? • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by gonational » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 1:45 PM UTC

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…

I meant to say Jeff. It’s morning here and my brain wasn’t fully awake. I got the two’s names mixed up.

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

#42

Post by Flimm » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 1:46 PM UTC

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…

I don't think you are giving Stack Overflow's leaders enough credit. There were many Q&A sites before it, but Stack Overflow was much better for the lurkers, and all of that content is licensed under Creative Commons, similar to Wikipedia.

Also, Jeff is not trying to take credit for the users' hard work, I'm a contributor and I don't feel that way, especially after reading this part:

> 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?

#43

Post by neuland » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 1:52 PM UTC

sureaboutthis wrote: post #30

neuland wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given this though, is the question / answer format really suiting the purpose?

It did but there aren't enough mods and knowledgeable users to monitor and police the tremendous inflow of off topic questions and answers.

I guess what I'm trying to say is by either adding features or moving to a different model, they could reduce the flow of duplicate/bad questions and lackluster/mismatch answers.

One area I wish there were more support in is to aggregate all the knowledge that is split across multiple questions. I think this could be helpful for beginners, but also is extremely specific areas as well.

For example, I imagine that a lot of these bad questions come from beginners. So, aggregating answers about common beginner misunderstandings with a library or system into a wiki page. Or, there could be a "getting started" type page that goes over the basic steps and concepts.

This is obviously getting into the business of writing docs for projects that either don't have them or don't have good ones, but it seems from the existence of stack overflow that this is actually necessary.

Then again, there seems to be tons of questions on projects with really good docs and tutorials. So, maybe you're right and it's just that the people asking bad questions / giving bad answers don't read docs.

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

#44

Post by pavel_lishin » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 1:58 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #34

debacle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My favorite moments from moderating a small, semi-private video-game related board:

- an administrator completely shutting the board down overnight because of a romantic encounter that went down poorly.

- a prolific troll - who finally finally got enough of his accounts, sub-accounts, and sock puppet accounts banned that he effectively lost access to the site - texting me late at night demanding an explanation for why he was banned.

- people being outraged that we asked them to donate a small amount of money (somewhere around a hundred dollars, collectively) to help run the server, then offering to run it on their spare computer in their basement

- discovering that due to a relatively unknown feature of PhpBB, we had a whole secondary parasite community that didn't show up in user registrations, and that had a whole private forum set up that nobody else on the board was aware of. It was like opening up a basement closet and discovering that it's a secret night club.

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

#45

Post by Flimm » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 1:58 PM UTC

I like this blog post, this is the vision of Stack Overflow that I bought into when I started posting. However, it's hard not to read this blog post as a diplomatic pushback to the current efforts of SO leaders to make it more welcoming. Jeff Atwood says that SO is "supposed to involve a healthy kind of minor [...] anxiety".

This section in particular stands out to me:

> This is why I cringe so hard I practically turn myself inside out when people on Twitter mention that they have pointed their students at Stack Overflow. What you'd want for a beginner or a student in the field of programming is almost the exact opposite of what Stack Overflow does at every turn:

> * one on one mentoring * real time collaborative screen sharing * live chat * theory and background courses * starter tasks and exercises

> These are all very fine and good things, but Stack Overflow does NONE of them, by design.

If this were on the official SO blog, I would be very surprised.

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

#46

Post by skohan » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 1:59 PM UTC

I feel like Stack Overflow has gotten less useful to me as a programmer over the years, and these days I more often find the answers I need on a forum geared toward whatever technology I have a question about.

I have a hard time telling whether this reflects a change in developer culture online over the years, or a change in the types of questions I tend to ask as I have become a more experienced programmer.

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

#47

Post by debacle » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 2:00 PM UTC

k__ wrote: post #31

debacle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

How would that work with Wikipedia?

You're looking for a solution that aligns with your thesis. You're not going to find one.

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

#48

Post by duxup » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 2:03 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #44

duxup wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

My favorite moments from moderating a small , semi-private video-game related board: - an administrator completely shutting the board down overnight because of a romantic encounter that went down poorly. - a prolific troll - who finally finally got enough of his accounts, sub-accounts, and sock puppet accounts banned that he effectively lost access to the site - texting me late at night demanding an explanation for w…

Oh man 2 and 3... I know those feels.

I hate the word "entitlement" because I think it gets used wrong a lot, but oh man folks perspective when it comes to the internet ... a lot of that. Users just feel it should be free and even a minute of downtime and they want answers, about a gaming forum (god help them if they just went to play games for a bit).

As for the prolific troll thing, one site I worked (well volunteered) was a popular commercial gaming site back in the day. Threats, fake accounts claiming to be lawyers, etc. The site made money and all and had some really dedicated trolls. One they actually took legal action against. I assumed it was just some kid with too much time. Turned out to be a dude in his 40s.... in fact many of the most dedicated trolls turned out to be adults. Kinda shocking to me at the time as I was younger then and just assumed they'd be young dumb kids like me...

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

#49

Post by pavel_lishin » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 2:04 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #48

pavel_lishin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite moments from moderating a small , semi-private video-game related board: - an administrator completely shutting the board down overnight because of a romantic encounter that went down poorly. - a prolific troll - who finally finally got enough of his accounts, sub-accounts, and sock puppet accounts banned that he effectively lost access to the site - texting me late at night demanding an explanation for w…

Oh man 2 and 3... I know those feels. I hate the word "entitlement" because I think it gets used wrong a lot, but oh man folks perspective when it comes to the internet ... a lot of that. Users just feel it should be free and even a minute of downtime and they want answers, about a gaming forum (god help them if they just went to play games for a bit). As for the prolific troll thing, one site I worked (well voluntee…

Wow, actual legal action? I suppose I should feel lucky, things never got that far.

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

#50

Post by manigandham » Mon, Oct 22, 2018, 2:05 PM UTC

fabian2k wrote: post #32

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 shoul…

That never seems to work well in practice.

Most of the time, there are existing answers and "closing as duplicate" leaves up all of them as a separate question thread that just confuses everyone. The links between them and the duplicate message are not intuitive and easily overlooked, leading to an expectation of unfinished answers.

Quora meanwhile has completely reversibility, and allows the community to do it. It's caused some problems but overall has cleaned up many common and repetitive questions.