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What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

blog.codinghorror.com

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Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#11

Post by superflyguy »

Flimm wrote: post #8
dudul wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really good observation. A lot of very highly ranked answers no longer apply, and still they are very visible due to their score. If the idea is to be the "wikipedia of programming", I wonder if "votes" are enough. Should there be an active initiative to prune stupid/bad questions? Revisit old answers?

It's actually worse than that. The accepted answer by the OP is pinned to the top forever (or until OP changes his or her mind, which is often never), no matter how many downvotes the pinned answer collects.

Possibly just need to reduce every answer's score a little every month to favour answers which are actively being voted up more recently.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#12

Post by crdoconnor »

debacle wrote: post #7
k__ wrote: post #5

When I wrote my bachelor thesis about democratic methods in online communities, I found out that all these crowd-sourced sites had one major problem. When they start, senior players in their field of work laugh at them because they don't have much content. So they try to get as much as possible, trying to get as many new creators on board as they can. Later, when they have grown enough, the senior players in the fiel…

Being a community manager is a thankless, unrelenting assault on your confidence and emotional and social stability. The social Internet's linchpin has almost always (since as long as I can remember) been that it requires a certain kind of person to be an unpaid community manager (by any name), and nearly every site you visit (wikipedia, stackoverflow, reddit, etc) makes use of these nonployees.

This is similar to almost all unpaid positions which require dirty work and give you a bit of power.

The people who do them end up being people who volunteer to be "paid" with the opportunity to go on a power trip.

I've not had experience of it myself, but I've heard from some people who have worked at high profile charities that a similar thing happens there.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#13

Post by superflyguy »

faitswulff wrote: post #9

I found the conclusion rather disappointing: > What should Stack Overflow be when it grows up? Whatever we make it, together. It's more of a historical overview than a vision for the future.

I got bored of scrolling through it. I know it's just someone's blog but I'm always a little surprised when grown-ups use stupid little cartoons and memes.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#14

Post by [deleted] »

PudgePacket wrote: post #4

I've used stackoverflow for years and have never heard it put like that. "Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time ." Personally I would have been much more…

[deleted]

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#15

Post by yAnonymous »

crdoconnor wrote: post #3

Judging by the number of answers I see which were valid and good answers in 2011 and are horrendously outdated now, it's not just grown up, it's grown long in the tooth.

Try to update one of those outdated answers and your changes will be removed, because the original author has more internet points.

The amount of circle jerking on Stack Overflow is stunning.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#16

Post by PunchTornado »

superflyguy wrote: post #13
faitswulff wrote: post #9

I found the conclusion rather disappointing: > What should Stack Overflow be when it grows up? Whatever we make it, together. It's more of a historical overview than a vision for the future.

I got bored of scrolling through it. I know it's just someone's blog but I'm always a little surprised when grown-ups use stupid little cartoons and memes.

Memes can convey powerful messages just as much as words.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#17

Post by jmuguy »

On any given day when I'm being really productive I try to go back and count the number of tabs I have open on SO. I certainly enjoy watching my rep go up from the one time I answered a VueJS question when it was still kind of new but really I don't think I could do my job without the site. The amount of negativity that gets thrown towards it is really ridiculous.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#18

Post by pg_bot »

faitswulff wrote: post #9

I found the conclusion rather disappointing: > What should Stack Overflow be when it grows up? Whatever we make it, together. It's more of a historical overview than a vision for the future.

That's appropriate considering Jeff hasn't worked there for more than half the life of the company. Stack Overflow is a piece of software that I would consider complete. I hope their future is just more of the same. Sure there will be small improvements to be made over time, but the radical days of product changes are far behind. I'm going to guess that in 10 years the site will still be recognizable to anyone who uses it today.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#19

Post by neuland »

PudgePacket wrote: post #4

I've used stackoverflow for years and have never heard it put like that. "Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time ." Personally I would have been much more…

Given this though, is the question / answer format really suiting the purpose?

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#20

Post by gonational »

I’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 enormous ego.

This is what happens when you raise massive amounts of money for what is a simple question and answer site and you have to find some kind of philosophically transcendent exclamation of what it is that you have created. 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”.

Stack overflow is and always was a question and answer site. To attempt to take credit for the following value of search results containing stack overflow questions that have already been answered that sound like what you’re asking is to take credit for search engines and to take credit for your users’ hard work.

That last bit doesn’t surprise me at all, given that Jeff’s post ends with an insulting meme that implies we are a dumb mob.

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