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

blog.codinghorror.com

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

#121

Post by jessriedel »

Someone1234 wrote: post #74
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Remove the entire concept of "accepted" answers and let votes decay or be withdrawn, along with scoring the rankings using time as an additional input.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.

Instead of decay, you could just embrace the concept of vote inflation. If a site continues to get more popular the number of votes (in both directions) will grow in proportion to that. It is normally a problem, but in this case could be an asset.

It seems like the rate of site growth and the rate at which you expect answer value to age are independent, so it would be surprising if they were approximately the same and cancelled. And at the very least, SO popularity has to plateau at some point (if it hasn't already).

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

#122

Post by mapgrep »

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…

When he writes about ohw StackOverflow is first and foremost a wiki, he is offering a solution to this situation.

In the original vision of StackOverflow, that accepted and highly voted answer would be converted into a wiki. Then when it gets stale, it would be revised.

Not saying they do a good/bad job of this, just that, that's how it was supposed to work. And ya it would be totally frustrating as a new contrib because if the canonical answer was not converted to wiki yet, you can't really contribute.

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

#124

Post by yifanl »

gaius wrote: post #107
crispyambulance wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t fault anyone for responding to the incentives they are given, when explicitly set out by the site owners... Oh yes you can! I remember stackoverflow in the early days and it was useful from the beginning. Sure, there were always some persnickety zealots who acted as self-appointed police "protecting" the community from subjectivity and duplicate questions with all the sensitivity of a clock-maker wearing…

SO literally gives you a reward in the form of a badge for your profile the more you flag questions! They give you a badge for downvoting, a badge for editing... The root cause for all these behaviours lies with whoever dreamt up those badges and chose what to award them for.

Worse than the badges is that the more points you have, the more features you get on SO.

Which could be a positive (it certainly makes sense that the most engaged people should be the community moderators), but when combined with how points are earned, it would naturally lead to weirdness like the swaths of downvoting, reporting and totally unnecessary grammar edits.

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

#125

Post by marcosdumay »

sjapkee wrote: post #82

This is the world's most famous vim exit guide. It has already fulfilled its mission.

It also has the most authoritative answer about parsing HTML with regular expressions in a question that isn't about parsing HTML in any general way.

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

#126

Post by WorldMaker »

DougWebb wrote: post #115
Someone1234 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I believe the mistake is the same one that dates back to IE7/8 in that enterprise customers are at all given the option to always load intranet sites in "compatibility mode". It's really stupid that because of an Oracle-enforced GPO policy every time I try to open most of my company's intranet sites in Edge, GPO policy pops it into a new IE11 window, and corporate-enforced IE11 add-in pops it into a new Chrome window. This is madness, and there's no way for me locally on my machine to tell Windows that no I don't care about the GPO policy, I really just want to open it in Edge and skip the other two browsers entirely.

I do think a mistake was that IE11 was included at all in Windows 10 to appease corporations, instead of just ripping off that particular band-aid. But doubling down on it and allowing corporations to default to nothing but IE11 via group-policy is the biggest mistake. GPO footguns like that are why corporate America can't have nice things, and I'm increasingly of the opinion that it's time Microsoft started dropping footguns from GPO.

(Also, note that the root problem in this particular workplace remains Oracle and their web apps that are stuck in IE6 worst practices but cost millions of dollars each year to continue to operate. Oracle is the real villain here.)

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

#127

Post by wool_gather »

yifanl wrote: post #124
gaius wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO literally gives you a reward in the form of a badge for your profile the more you flag questions! They give you a badge for downvoting, a badge for editing... The root cause for all these behaviours lies with whoever dreamt up those badges and chose what to award them for.

Worse than the badges is that the more points you have, the more features you get on SO. Which could be a positive (it certainly makes sense that the most engaged people should be the community moderators), but when combined with how points are earned, it would naturally lead to weirdness like the swaths of downvoting, reporting and totally unnecessary grammar edits.

There's a (fairly low) lifetime limit on receiving points for edits. Once you've earned the editing privilege, you no longer earn points. And you lose a point if you downvote an answer.

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

#128

Post by toddh »

gonational wrote: post #116
toddh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Easy to say in hindsight. But that's not how it worked previously.

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

#129

Post by ant6n »

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…

A related issue: the best answer may have a link to the documentation, which may rot. Now people will down-vote the answer because broken link.

This could happen if somebody asks how to do something using some library. If the library actually has a builtin facility to solve the problem, but then the answer gets down-voted due to documentation link rot; then another answer explaining how to built that facility from scratch may become the 'best' answer, even though the re-implementation of existing library functionality is a bad idea.

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

#130

Post by mixmastamyk »

manigandham wrote: post #51
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.

I don't mind the Accepted label, however they are sorted at the top by default. They probably should change that to "sort by votes," so the best answer can change over time.
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