Sorry, I'm going to have to close that post as off topic.
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What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
151–160 of 216 posts
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#152Thanks for writing this, Jeff! I was very cheered to see a gentle but firm defense of SO's mission -- and of the users who make it happen -- this morning. Doubly so given [the latest nonsense-bomb that SO corp decided to drop][0] on those users this week. [0]: https://medium.com/@cellio/dear-stack-overflow-we-need-to-ta...
Quick summary of that Medium post for everyone - Some unknown people accused a SE site of... something on Twitter. People got mad about it. A SE employee weighed in in support of the tweeter. Some other people claim the accusation of whatever it is is nonsense. And I don't have the slightest idea what happened or whose side to take.
> And I don't have the slightest idea what happened or whose side to take
Unfortunately most of those involved are at least a little bit right, and I'm not sure that we SE users who are upset have concerns that make any sense out of context. :) They don't have anything directly to do with the original tweet. I probably shouldn't even have linked the article.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#153Wow, time flies (for both the age of SO and how long since Jeff was involved). So I'm onboard with the concept of SO as Wikipedia. Fine. Weirdly I see no mention of some of the bigger problems (as I see them). And what's weird about these problems is they were completely foreseeable by anyone who paid the tiniest bit of attention to Wikipedia. 1. TMS (Toxic Moderator Syndrome). You have askers, answerers and moderato…
You can't really get moderator privileges on SO without first being one of the "People who answer questions".
You can't cast a close vote without having 3,000 reputation. Even just downvoting requires 125 reputation. The _least_ experienced [diamond moderator][1] on StackOverflow has over 19,000 reputation. Reputation is earned, primarily, by answering questions. So your assumption that "moderators" are distinct from the other two categories of users is incorrect.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#154Stack Overflow is still far and away the best site of its kind, but it has stagnated significantly over the last several years. The site runners aren't tackling the big meta problems any longer, and they aren't pursuing innovative solutions either, they're just continuing the status quo into the future.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#155One 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…
This is a major issue. Just last week I had a student make an untrue claim about how something works based on a top ranking Stackoverflow answer. It turns out that the answer is from 2008, and was true back then, but has not been for something like 5 years already.
Stackoverflow badly needs a system for people (moderators?) to be able to 'obsolete' answers, possibly mark them with a highly visible "valid only up to version x.y of 2010" tag or something.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#156Your score on stackoverflow has always been a weak indicator of knowledge/community involvement/any other virtuous attribute. This should be clear to anyone who has browsed upon questions like "How do I perform this common operation in Git?" or "What Bootstrap class do I use?" and seeing the accepted 1 liner answer with 1000s of up-votes while at the same time some in depth answer to a question about operating system internals, database optimization or has maybe 10 upvotes.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#157I’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…
>Instead of saying “we created yahoo answers for programmers, but with a better interface”, you come up with something like “We’ve created a valuable resource for the future of the planet and all the programmers hereafter”.
But StackExchange is incredibly different from a "Yahoo Answers for Programmers". A Yahoo Answers for programmers would be an endless stream of "How is Hello World babby formed?" For all the times I've stumbled on Yahoo Answers, it has almost never helped me solve a problem. StackExchange helps me almost every day, in spite of the fact that I'm not the one asking the question.
Having an environment where contributors compete, askers are held to high standards, and moderators are aggressive can be harsh, but I have yet to see a gentle system that gets quality content out of anonymous volunteers on the internet.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> and all of that content is licensed under Creative Commons it's CA-BY-SA IIRC. In other words if you copied and pasted a snippet from SO you now need to open source your project (the SA part of CC-BY-SA). I'm surprised someone hasn't written some ransomware that scans SO for snippets and compares them to github and starts sending out the "pay up" notices.
Last time I went through some sort of acquisition process, the purchaser had some third party look at the source code looking for stuff as you described to be corrected and this was at least five years ago.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Decay will apply to all answers so it'll still stay at the top of the rankings unless a better answer comes along. Tons of options but better than the static scores we have now.
If a better answer comes along in a question with 20 answers already it probably won't get up to the top anytime soon. If a better answer comes along in a question that is then marked as a repeat of a question that has a worse answer, forget it. At any rate if a better answer comes along it should rise to the top in the matter of <24hrs.
Maybe a good answer won't rise to the top, but it will go up over time. I answered a question 7 years after it was asked, and at this point my answer is #8 out of 59. I can't argue that the 7 above me aren't better.
Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
#160“SO has probably added billions of dollars of value to the world in increased programmer productivity.”
No: the voluntary contributions of many skilled programmers, mediated by a website, has increased programmer productivity. Stack Overflow has captured and exploited some of the value created, and the contributors have not been paid.
Skill needed to create SO / Expertise embodied in content provided for free to SO = approx zero.
Running a big site like SO is hard, but it’s trivial compared to the expertise required to write the content on SO from scratch.