Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

StackOverflow unwinding?

williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 210 posts

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#171

Post by codinghorror »

wpietri wrote: post #163
codinghorror wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

perhaps, but the underlying post is remarkably light on actual metrics and details -- or even specific examples -- of what quality decline means.

Sure. It's his blog. Providing you with hard evidence to drive your product design process isn't his job. It's yours.

He provided no evidence. Do some science, don't waste everyone's time with unsubstantiated opinions.

That's actually what Stack Exchange is about, so it's not surprising I guess that there's this impedance mismatch. If you want to just have a bunch of opinions, take it to Quora.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#172

Post by codinghorror »

gm wrote: post #151
codinghorror wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nobody is complaining about your moderators, they aren't doing their jobs. Moderators are there to protect the community from itself, as described in http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul... It's a tough job. But if you disagree with the way the moderation works, bring it up on meta, and/or run for the position of moderator in the next election. How many other sites offer either of those opt…

The one thing that drove me away from participating in SO are the moderators. I swear, every time I get a google hit for a highly-relevant, informed discussion on a non-trivial programming topic, it's a question that has been closed by moderators for some stupid excuse. You talk about there being other forums, like programming. or whatever else... Well, moderators should move the question instead of closing it. Why n…

Discussion is not the point of SO, or any Stack Exchange site. See http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su...

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#173

Post by codinghorror »

wpietri wrote: post #164
codinghorror wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do listen to the people! No other site gives so much power to regular users, up to and including moderator elections. The problem with listening to the people too much is that popularity becomes the most important metric, with predictable results: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul... It's a balancing act. What people actually want, and what they think they want, are often two different h…

Listening to people is entirely different than electing moderators. Nobody here is complaining that you aren't serving insiders. But I do see a lot of grumbling from people who feel like they have been forced out. In the link, you seem to be basically making a slippery slope argument. I am sure a lot of people agree that they don't want a sea of memes. But a lot of reasonable people feel you're throwing the baby out…

I'm saying that Golden Gate Park is not the same as your office building, or school campus. I don't begrudge the park the right to exist, but places of learning aren't places of pure entertainment, at least not in the Stack Exchange worldview.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#174

Post by wpietri »

codinghorror wrote: post #173
wpietri wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listening to people is entirely different than electing moderators. Nobody here is complaining that you aren't serving insiders. But I do see a lot of grumbling from people who feel like they have been forced out. In the link, you seem to be basically making a slippery slope argument. I am sure a lot of people agree that they don't want a sea of memes. But a lot of reasonable people feel you're throwing the baby out…

I'm saying that Golden Gate Park is not the same as your office building, or school campus. I don't begrudge the park the right to exist, but places of learning aren't places of pure entertainment, at least not in the Stack Exchange worldview.

The analogy I was making was to the city of San Francisco.

If you want to make an analogy to a place of learning, consider a college campus. People are encouraged to do things there beyond studying. Areas are set aside just for having fun. That kind of community bonding doesn't take away from education; it enhances and supports it.

Also, nobody here is arguing that SO should be a place of pure entertainment. As far as I can tell, that's a straw man. Or perhaps more accurately, the imaginary bogeyman SO is fleeing.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#175

Post by wpietri »

codinghorror wrote: post #170
wpietri wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anybody here complained about wanting off-topic questions? The linked article sure isn't.

Your definition of "on-topic" is not the same as ours, therefore you do want off-topic questions. Saying that our definition of the topic is wrong, does not mean you aren't asking for off-topic questions to be allowed. It's the same thing.

I agree that the definitions are different.

However, look at what you're saying. You've divided the world into us and them. It's you, the defender of the one true definition, versus the ignorant outsider fools. It's utterly close-minded.

It's your bat and ball, naturally, so you're welcome to keep on driving off the people who have different views. But don't go around saying you listen to your users when you talk like this.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#176

Post by TylerE »

codinghorror wrote: post #169
TylerE wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My fundamental problem with that approach is that I don't want to read 5 sites. I want to read 1 site with the content I want on it. The ghettoization of stack-exchange was a mistake. Give me an interface more like reddit - let me pick which areas I want to see questions from, all merged on to one page.

Do you visit only one site on the Internet? I just wonder how far you're willing to go here, because the beauty of the internet, to me, is that there are zillions of sites on lots of different topics.

As time goes on, the number has certainly decreased. Look at how popular rss ands sites like reddit are.

In fact, in terms of my actual daily "rotation" of sites, there are exactly 3: Reddit, HN, and Gmail.

I absolutely want to visit less sites. Stack-Exchange as a product for me would have significantly more value to me as an integrated network, rather than the current mish-mash of partitioned off sites. Let me search all questions, let all questions (in tags I don't have filtered, and of subject areas I've added) appear in my questions list.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#177

Post by nathan_long »

excuse-me wrote: post #60
adventureful wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's why it guarantees overall stagnation (not necessarily on a specific topic): Let's say you have 10 super segments, eg: PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript, etc. Once you build those out to a high degree, reasonably the amount of new content possible in relation to existing content, will plunge. Then if you add a new language that becomes popular and mass adopted, the best you can hope for is perhaps an addition…

Leaving the problem of 100 new questions 90 of which are just dupes of existing PHP/Python answers and nobody can spot and answer the new Ruby ones

They've had a feature for a long time where you can mark which tags you want to see and which you don't.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#178

Post by cruise02 »

wpietri wrote: post #165
cruise02 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the moderators on Stack Overflow. It's not my goal to stamp out any sign that SO is a social network, but I do want to prevent it from turning into Yahoo! Answers. Some level of moderation is necessary to maintain quality. Just because some users want to use Stack Overflow to ask off-topic questions doesn't mean we should let them.

Has anybody here complained about wanting off-topic questions? The linked article sure isn't.

From the linked article:

> ...throw out the gazillion-sub-site silliness and broaden allowed topics for discussion.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#179

Post by cruise02 »

TylerE wrote: post #162
codinghorror wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there is: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ -- for conceptual, no-source-code whiteboard programming questions http://workplace.stackexchange.com/ -- for questions about general professional workplace issues that aren't specific to programming And of course the rest of the sites at http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic I'll be the first to tell you that our Q&A engine isn't necessarily effective…

My fundamental problem with that approach is that I don't want to read 5 sites. I want to read 1 site with the content I want on it. The ghettoization of stack-exchange was a mistake. Give me an interface more like reddit - let me pick which areas I want to see questions from, all merged on to one page.

Here you go http://stackexchange.com/questions

Click the "Filtered Questions" link at the top to customize it.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#180

Post by cruise02 »

sireat wrote: post #158
spolsky wrote: post #61

None of the actual metrics of the site bear this out. I don't know what "myspacing" is, and "floundering" is pretty subjective, but in terms of actual measurable things, we have more questions asked, more questions answered, more people active on the site, more sites with more activity and most metrics are up about 100% in the last year. Some of the things that we track pretty closely (like number of users who ask or…

My current pet peeve is with Google routinely returning first ten positions for SO answers, of which two or three are spot on, but rest of the list could have been better served by independent blogs which appear on page 3 or 5. Granted this is Google's algorithm's fault not SOs problem. There is no reason to give a single site the first n listings no matter how authoritative it has become (and SO is very authoritativ…

This is a legitimate issue. We'd prefer to just have one canonical resource for each question asked. We do try to help Google out by merging duplicate questions together when we can, but with 3.5 million questions to review some topics can get out of control.
Post reply on HN