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Whither Stack Overflow

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Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#11

Post by willvarfar »

willvarfar wrote: post #7

The article casts users as the problem: help vampires, noobs and reputation collectors. My strong opinion is that there are other serious issues that the article doesn't even touch on: 1) the silo model of creating dedicated SE sites. There should have been one SO for everything. Collaborative filtering etc would have been an infinitely better direction to go in. 2) the over-moderation by misguided 'defenders' who ar…

PS:

anyone want to crack an interesting problem, and earn a bounty in the process?

A few days left and not a single answer on my recent question here: http://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/37102/culling-equi...

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#12

Post by cvs268 »

debaserab2 wrote: post #8

Interesting read. Here's how I'd sum up my history with Stack Overflow: 1) SO launched a few years after I graduated college and was an immediate and invaluable resource to me. 2) I learned more, got in a position to be able to answer some questions, and started trying to answer questions. Realized there were people on the site that were much faster than I was at answering (and often more incomplete) and stopped. 3)…

> "How do I plan an enterprise level web application?"

I think the SO community will often vote to migrate such open-ended/broad questions to http://programmers.stackexchange.com/

or a specific stackexchange site like http://webapps.stackexchange.com/ in this case.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#13

Post by CannisterFlux »

I stopped being really active on SO around the end of 2012. I don't think the reason was anything from the article. For me it was 2 fold: the rise of members who criticize everything and the feeling of shouting into a void.

I don't have a good name for these users like help vampires. They seem more like Harry Enfield's old "Only Me!" character who show up to say "you don't want to do it like that" without providing anything useful. Post an answer to something that is tricky and doesn't really have a good solution and within minutes you'd have a comment saying "that's not the way to do it, the real solution is for the OP to start over using some other methodology". Often I'd get an accepted answer, but the comments were just grating. They'd gloss over the problem to post a rep-safe comment undermining your answer.

Then the other problem I had was I would find a problem that I'd suffered before asked as a question. It was usually something fairly uncommon. I'd post an answer, then there'd be nothing. No upvotes, no response from the OP, no comments... just nothing. I figured if the original askers don't care about their questions, why should I bother? Eventually from 2012 to 2015 I just stopped answering at all. I still occasionally visit the site but don't feel motivated to get involved any more. :-(

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#14

Post by arciini »

The article summarizes a study that "confirms [the authors'] hypothesis as well as the community perception that the system was flooded by content that nobody cared about, while really interesting content was getting rarer" and presents this as a problem to be solved.

I think this is actually not a problem, because most users can still successfully find the answers they need on Stack Overflow.

Here's how I believe I and other users use Stack Overflow. We have a problem. We Google that problem (or occasionally search on Stack Overflow). We usually find a fairly popular (and high-quality) question with a fairly popular answer. We're satisfied by that answer.

The article points out that the number of good questions has remained constant, but the number of bad questions has increased. Maybe there's really a close-to-constant number of good, searchable questions that can be asked at any given time, and the declining average quality is just a result of Stack Overflow's popularity.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#15

Post by cvs268 »

Everything does NOT belong on StackOverflow.

I wish SO highlighted http://stackexchange.com/sites so that people can participate in the respective stackexchange communities where they will be more welcome. I have seen that a lot of good questions on StackOverflow get closed/migrated simply because they are irrelevant on StackOverflow.

A similar analogy would be to think of something that would be gold in the right sub-reddit but controversial/irrelevant on the main reddit page.

StackOverflow encourages constructive Q&A.

The SO community has always aimed to close any questions whose answers will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#16

Post by majewsky »

debaserab2 wrote: post #8

Interesting read. Here's how I'd sum up my history with Stack Overflow: 1) SO launched a few years after I graduated college and was an immediate and invaluable resource to me. 2) I learned more, got in a position to be able to answer some questions, and started trying to answer questions. Realized there were people on the site that were much faster than I was at answering (and often more incomplete) and stopped. 3)…

> I don't use SO as a source of learning anymore other than when API documentation isn't available or sufficient.

The latter point is really important. I use API documentation whenever it is actually reasonably complete and up-to-date. But with many abysmal documentations (cough Rails cough) I just go straight for SO because the thing I'm looking for is probably not even documented. Or if not, I won't find it in there because search is only by class/method name, not by task.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#17

Post by Strilanc »

willvarfar wrote: post #7

The article casts users as the problem: help vampires, noobs and reputation collectors. My strong opinion is that there are other serious issues that the article doesn't even touch on: 1) the silo model of creating dedicated SE sites. There should have been one SO for everything. Collaborative filtering etc would have been an infinitely better direction to go in. 2) the over-moderation by misguided 'defenders' who ar…

> There should have been one SO for everything.

What could possibly go right about mixing Judaism questions and Christianity questions into the programming questions?

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#18

Post by reitanqild »

willvarfar wrote: post #7

The article casts users as the problem: help vampires, noobs and reputation collectors. My strong opinion is that there are other serious issues that the article doesn't even touch on: 1) the silo model of creating dedicated SE sites. There should have been one SO for everything. Collaborative filtering etc would have been an infinitely better direction to go in. 2) the over-moderation by misguided 'defenders' who ar…

My thoughts as well. Wish someone would create that site.

Will be happy to try to contribute.

There is so much SO got correct that I think just changing a few rules could work as long as we could manage to get the word out.

As managed above silos probably makes more problems than they solve (partially because of the moderators but I guess the silos should go away anyway).

Same goes for strict rules about what belongs (Case in point: question about inter-company WAN traffic being rejected on networking because site guidelines says something about "inside corporate networks"). Rules about what does not belong (acceptable content) should be OK as long as they don't prevent technical questions from being asked and answered.

A way to deprecate answers (and a way for viewers to "flag" them as "still useful".)

And yes, a way to handle subjective questions. (Quora already has a grip of this only their IMO insane policy of sharing my every click on the site made it unusable for me and a number of others.)

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#19

Post by CannisterFlux »

willvarfar wrote: post #7

The article casts users as the problem: help vampires, noobs and reputation collectors. My strong opinion is that there are other serious issues that the article doesn't even touch on: 1) the silo model of creating dedicated SE sites. There should have been one SO for everything. Collaborative filtering etc would have been an infinitely better direction to go in. 2) the over-moderation by misguided 'defenders' who ar…

On 2 and 3 - this is dead right.

As an example of 3) Here's a question that has an accepted answers that is wrong http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7635013 - it's regarding x86, x86_64 and x32. Since x32 was new/unknown at the time, a lot of the answers say "x32 doesn't exist".

And for 2) here's an answer http://stackoverflow.com/a/26522110 that is/was true at the time of writing - a nasty little bug in the Android NDK causes math library functions to not get linked in on pre-lollipop devices if you state you are using android platform 21 and ndk 10c. Two rules lawyers are spouting off about how the poster should post a new question or leave a comment. They are in over their heads. The comments are out of context and come across as patronizing. It is also now an example of 3) since all the tech involved is pretty old in Android terms.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#20

Post by willvarfar »

Strilanc wrote: post #17
willvarfar wrote: post #7

The article casts users as the problem: help vampires, noobs and reputation collectors. My strong opinion is that there are other serious issues that the article doesn't even touch on: 1) the silo model of creating dedicated SE sites. There should have been one SO for everything. Collaborative filtering etc would have been an infinitely better direction to go in. 2) the over-moderation by misguided 'defenders' who ar…

> There should have been one SO for everything. What could possibly go right about mixing Judaism questions and Christianity questions into the programming questions?

Its something I've mulled for years ;)

Here's about collaborative filtering: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...

Here's just general SO discontent: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/25426541504/stack... and http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/26580091073/stack...

;)

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