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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?

#51

Post by manigandham »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #26

One challenge not discussed here is when an accepted and highly voted answer _used_ to be a good answer, but no longer is in later versions of whatever software/platform/library is discussed. This is also something that gets worse over time, like the uniqueness problem. I think it's worse than the uniqueness problem, multiple duplicate _good_ questions/answers don't actually harm, misguide, or delay anyone looking fo…

Remove the entire concept of "accepted" answers and let votes decay or be withdrawn, along with scoring the rankings using time as an additional input.

Quora has recently introduced secondary voting mechanisms where answers will randomly have a "is it still relevant" toggle for users to continue providing signal beyond the initial vote.

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

#52

Post by [deleted] »

Flimm wrote: post #42
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…

[deleted]

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

#53

Post by duxup »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #49
duxup wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I was surprised they even did it, not just legal action, but legal action in another country. But that company did have a presence there....

The handful of actual legal actions never were well known, it was amusing as the dedicated trolls talk big about every perceived injustice or slight or straight up lie they would make. Even posting on other sties about it.

But the only legal actions I was aware of, word never got out. I suspect when it gets real they get quiet fast, or their lawyer tells them to shut up.

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

#54

Post by k__ »

debacle wrote: post #47
k__ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, this isn't sanely doable with the current state.

I mean what should they do?

Write two pages for every article, one where everyone could write and one where moderators accumulate the quality content?

That won't scale.

Maybe they need a VCS based approach, that merges only quality content but keeps all low-quality content in dead-end branches.

I don't know what the solution would be, but the current approach is sub-optimal. Not because it's not nice to delete the work of people, but because they don't motivate people to do a better job.

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

#55

Post by gonational »

Flimm wrote: post #42
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…

Stack overflow was instrumental in my early programming career, because without it I would have had to read entire volumes of information to solve simple problems in some cases.

The issue that I have is the attempt to pretend to have guided the course more than was the case. SO was a Q&A with a tremendous UX, and the users used it to help each other. That’s it.

Even this nonsense of “gamification” is just ego-driven marketecture. Up and down voting has been a staple of the Internet for a long time. Voting up an answer is not gamifying it. The only thing even remotely game like about SO is that each question can have just one selected “corrct” answer... which is also basically the case on most Q&A sites, including yahoo answers.

Also, the extent to which Jeff and Joel attempted to curate this process is the exact extent to which the process tended to get in our way; deleting questions because they are “off-topic”, even though hundreds of people up vote them and want to know the answer, etc.

These are the decisions that ruined SO for manny developers.

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

#56

Post by awkward »

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…

The two main pillars of the stack overflow experience as a contributor:

- Gameify all metrics to an absurd degree, using gold-star-sticker style incentives for every given interaction type.

- Take the metrics a seriously as possible, creating a baroque network of norms and code that a user is always, somehow, in violation of.

So if it gets upvoted too much, it SHOULD be flagged as community wiki. There was a long discussion where users were complaining about answers that were posted too fast, preventing the complainers from getting points. If you misclick, then retract it, you can't vote again. Why? Because users were downvoting everyone who competed with them to float their answer to the top, then retracting.

The overall culture the site has a deep aspect of working the referees as much as possible, and the extreme hands on nature of how they regulate people's Fake Internet High Scores is to blame for it.

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

#57

Post by kauffj »

StackOverflow being a wiki is at substantial odds with the way answers are selected.

If StackOverflow is a wiki, then the best answer to a question should be determined by the community, not the asker, and needs to be able to evolve and change over time.

However, StackOverflow simultaneously insists questions can't be duplicated while making answer selection immutable and controlled by the asker. This results in a suboptimal experience.

Here is an example question highlighting this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/884177/how-can-i-determi...

I currently have the best answer to the question "How can I determine what font a browser is actually using to render some text?". The answer I gave was the best answer in 2010. Things have changed a lot since then, and my answer is no longer the best one on that page.

_But no one can change the best answer, which is insane!_ As a result, you see best answers to old questions being turned into community wikis edited to include better answers in the thread, rather than those answers being selected.

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

#58

Post by irrational »

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.

"it requires a certain kind of person"

So, is it kind of like if you desire to be a politician (or any position of power), you are definitely not the kind of person who should be a politician?

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

#59

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by elboru »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #26

One challenge not discussed here is when an accepted and highly voted answer _used_ to be a good answer, but no longer is in later versions of whatever software/platform/library is discussed. This is also something that gets worse over time, like the uniqueness problem. I think it's worse than the uniqueness problem, multiple duplicate _good_ questions/answers don't actually harm, misguide, or delay anyone looking fo…

Actually I've rarely considered duplicate questions as a bad thing, I like to open a bunch of related questions (usually a couple of them tagged as "duplicates") and check which one fits my problem better.
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