StackOverflow unwinding?
williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com
StackOverflow unwinding?
1–10 of 210 posts
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#2I like StackOverflow, and contribute heavily to one of the "other" Stack Exchange sites that is busy, but not enough to get out of perpetual beta.
The problem that they have is that SO grew very quickly and developed a Usenet-style culture. That's good in that there is alot of good information out there, but bad in the sense that you get all of the assholish behavior that came with Usenet.
The other problem that they have is the network of other sites, some of which are very good. The problem there is that they're scaling a model meant for 1,000,000 SO users down to 5,000 users, and it just isn't the same. On a smaller SE site, you cannot wrangle the 5 votes to close some nonsense question written in pidgin english. On SO, a question will be closed in seconds by the vigilantes who roam the site.
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#3Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.
I feel a bit like StackOverflow has extrapolated from a huge pent-up demand for decent answers to programming questions, that the world is desperate for Q&A sites on every subject. That does not seem to have been the case.
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#4I was disappointed by the answers to my last few questions so I'm back to asking on IRC. The answers come more quickly and the format makes clarification and follow up easier and faster.
It's also easier for me to look at someone's gist/paste on IRC and give a quick answer.
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#5StackOverflow is awesome and nothing touches it for quality as far as I'm concerned. But the one thing that annoys me most is the seemingly arbitrary way that posts get deleted by Moderators after they have been closed (but still visible) for a significant period of time. Often they are extremely popular posts with 100k+ views that just disappear in a puff of smoke.
FYI: An SO user has recently setup an unofficial archive of deleted SO questions, ranked in order of votes ... http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/124850/unofficial-st...
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#6It would be interesting to see empirical data on William Edwards's hypotheses, e.g. "Questions are getting fewer and fewer quality answers. Moderators and 'close this' clickers are getting increasingly narrow." An analysis like this might be feasible with Stack Exchange's API: https://api.stackexchange.com/docs.
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#7They move from Q&A model to a Wikipedia model.
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#8It would be interesting to see empirical data on William Edwards's hypotheses, e.g. "Questions are getting fewer and fewer quality answers. Moderators and 'close this' clickers are getting increasingly narrow." An analysis like this might be feasible with Stack Exchange's API: https://api.stackexchange.com/docs .
Or you could use the Stack Exchange Data Explorer, http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/queries
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#9They move from Q&A model to a Wikipedia model.
I don't think this was a particular change in approach, to be honest. From the start they were clear (listening to the early podcasts, at least) that they wanted the site to stand as a reference, and to have each question be the best possible question asking one clear thing, with the best possible answer underneath.
Everything else on top of that was gamification to convince people to achieve that. Whether that sort of community becomes degenerate at a certain point is certainly interesting to study, but my intuitive reaction whenever I see a StackOverflow result at the top of some google results is to be joyful, so I feel they've mostly achieved their aims.
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#10It would be interesting to see empirical data on William Edwards's hypotheses, e.g. "Questions are getting fewer and fewer quality answers. Moderators and 'close this' clickers are getting increasingly narrow." An analysis like this might be feasible with Stack Exchange's API: https://api.stackexchange.com/docs .
But the first question is obvious: how do you measure quality? Votes are primarily for popularity, not quality.