Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

Post by johansch » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:40 PM UTC

davidism wrote: post #138

johansch wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

....why?

Most comments should end up as an edit to the question or answer, clarifying some point, at which point they can be removed. The Question and Answer are the important things on Stack Overflow, not the communication that went into creating and tuning them. The remaining comments are just fluff, such as "thanks", which can more appropriately (for the site) be expressed as an upvote or accept. Or they're asking a new qu…

Post by Aldo_MX » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:44 PM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #176

mavelikara wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope that at some point Google starts pruning away closed SO questions from its index. That will give the user a better search experience.

I hope that they don't. In fact, that's the worst thing they could do. I have gotten a _lot_ of value from closed SO questions that were high ranked in my Google search results. I don't know what that says about SO's flagging system, but it is what it is, I guess.

Post by Kalium » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:46 PM UTC

darkmighty wrote: post #150

Kalium wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters because people respond to incentives. If what you want to see encouraged is good answers to novel questions, you need a system that rewards that over copy-pasting from documentation. What do you think happens when the two are rewarded equally, but the latter can be done much more frequently per unit of time?

Isn't the incentive to answer those kinds of questions mostly intrinsic? I mean, the interesting questions and answers are more likely to be given exactly because they are so. The extrinsic reward is then complementarily useful for the opposite questions: the ones that are not very interesting but important nonetheless, such as the case of a reference to a cryptic documentation.

Post by lnanek2 » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:53 PM UTC

nhzmju wrote: post #43

troymc wrote: post #28

I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answered. SE got my traffic, but I didn't get my answer. Isn't that broken?

Having read over 5000( yes really ) questions and searched over 100 with Google, that didn't happen once. Just to clarify, SE doesn't always have the question, but it always has the answer. It must be related to the specific field you are searching for; older ones are usually complete. I wouldn't be surprised if a more casual programming field has a larger ratio of closed answers.

Post by sanderjd » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 10:08 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #185

darkmighty wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the incentive to answer those kinds of questions mostly intrinsic? I mean, the interesting questions and answers are more likely to be given exactly because they are so. The extrinsic reward is then complementarily useful for the opposite questions: the ones that are not very interesting but important nonetheless, such as the case of a reference to a cryptic documentation.

Extrinsic motivations displace intrinsic ones. Once you have the magical internet points, the intrinsic motivations fade.