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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?

#111

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

crispyambulance wrote: post #37
torstenvl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the heat of the moment I’ve had to delete comments because I got so upset at that kind of over the top rules lawyering. I’m not quite ready to burn my SO bridges, even if 90% of my usage is read only.

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

#112

Post by fweespeech »

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…

> 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.

This is correct.

As someone who has run forums for a number of years, I can honestly say I've fired 70% of the volunteers for exactly that reason. They wanted to impress their clique and use the power. In reality, it is more about using that power as little as possible except for things that might create a legal issue. (i.e. DMCA)

The other 30% I got rid of were due to activity. (i.e. Would go inactive for 30+ days without notice)

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

#113

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#114

Post by debacle »

irrational wrote: post #58
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.

"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?

The altruistic people who genuinely want to help tend to be squeezed out of the system by the power hungry authoritarians. See: pretty much every communist revolution ever.

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

#115

Post by DougWebb »

Someone1234 wrote: post #77
irrational wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I have really started noticing this exact problem. Every answer (usually from closer to 2010) I have looked at is recommending using jQuery, even though there are perfectly fine ways of doing it without jQuery in 2018. I've taken to looking the dates of answers and ignoring any that date from more than 2-3 years in the past.

If you still support IE11 very little has changed in the last 2-3 years. JQuery is still king. Companies that support large enterprise or government absolutely require IE11 support, since these places are required to use it due to exclusive e.g. Java Applets/Flash/ActiveX, etc. Microsoft's decision to drop those technologies from Edge was kind a mixed bag. From a security perspective it was the right decision. But it…

It's not just a requirement to use old plugins. There are still serious drawbacks to upgrading from Win7 to Win10, and Edge is not available on Win7, while IE11 is available on Win10 (because Edge wasn't viable yet when Win10 was pushed out.) So the Win7 users that won't use FF/Chrome are stuck with IE11, and many Win10 users continue using IE11 for various reasons. (Familiarity, corporate policy, plugins, etc.)

I think Microsoft has made a mistake by stopping the addition of standards-compliant features to IE11. They should keep supporting it and modernizing it until the userbase has moved to Win10 on its merits, instead of trying to use IE11's aging as a lever to force Win10 adoption.

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

#116

Post by gonational »

toddh wrote: post #96
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 SO strategy from the start was SEO driven, specifically so Google would pick up SO content. It worked like a charm. Sites before them were closed to Google or hid answers, so it was an important strategy and key differentiator. Maybe today you go directly to SO to search like you go directly to Amazon for product search, but at the time being open and leveraging Google was genius.

I mean, stating “Google will index our answers! We should avoid duplicate content.” is about as transcendent as calling “select the best answer” a form of “gamification”.

Again, stack overflow is just a better UX for the already proven Q&A model that’s worked for ages.

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

#117

Post by fweespeech »

skohan wrote: post #46

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.

> a change in the types of questions I tend to ask as I have become a more experienced programmer.

That is probably 50% of it. I find myself using google to solve problems about once a day these days.

When I first started, it was easily 5-10x that.

> I have a hard time telling whether this reflects a change in developer culture online over the years

SO no longer really tolerates hard questions that an experienced programmer asks.

For the past 4 years, every question I've had that I couldn't find the answer to I've had the question closed or the answers being badly flawed. Admittedly, my sample size is only ~12 questions.

The reason for this is they really, really want to restrict the playing field to questions that are jr to mid-level with clear, math/code correct answers.

When you get into more complex problems, there is usually trade-offs involved that cause moderators to close questions. (i.e. How do you X as securely as you can while still enabling Y use case that breaks the most secure option available? This isn't ideal obviously but the trade off is acceptable.)

The other problem is this discourages answers for "new" stuff because they'll often close questions as duplicates even if you are asking about Version 8 and the answer from 2 years ago is about Version 7. The problem is, if you are experienced, you already know how to solve answers for Version 7 (because you've used it for 2 years) while Version 8 is new.

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

#118

Post by trowawee »

neuland wrote: post #43
sureaboutthis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lo…

They tried that[1], and it didn't work out for them.

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

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

#119

Post by manigandham »

EGreg wrote: post #76
manigandham wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No. Instead make the “Accepted” moniker have people do “Seconded” for whatever latest version it still works for. And then the newest users can come and see based on the LATEST version which is the most upvoted answer.

That's just another "vote" then. What's the point of having answers with a vote and a second if people will just do both?

The issue is that relevancy has a time-component, so there needs to be way to age scores as well to make sure the best answer for that time period is at the top.

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

#120

Post by EGreg »

manigandham wrote: post #119
EGreg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Instead make the “Accepted” moniker have people do “Seconded” for whatever latest version it still works for. And then the newest users can come and see based on the LATEST version which is the most upvoted answer.

That's just another "vote" then. What's the point of having answers with a vote and a second if people will just do both? The issue is that relevancy has a time-component, so there needs to be way to age scores as well to make sure the best answer for that time period is at the top.

If there are no new versions, or the new versions have had a tiny uptake, then old answers are relevant!
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