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The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

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Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#141

Post by mekoka »

Latty wrote: post #3

People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…

> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before.

I don't know, I've always felt that the apparent decline in usefulness came from the strict curation (and I do insist on the word "apparent"). In the past the site felt more natural to me as a big hodge-podge of various technology related topics. Questions came from various aspects of the tech world, whether they related to sys admins (e.g. linux configs, installations, scripting, etc), super users (e.g. text editors and other tools), programming languages (e.g. how to use a library or language feature), comp sci (e.g. algorithms), databases, or even networking. To me it all kinda related to how we all use the set everyday. Then came what I can only describe as over-categorization. Instead of relying on the machine to search stuff for us, they split the content into specific websites and changed their standard of what's relevant or less so (which is why you have closed questions that thousands of users still find useful). Google figured this out years ago with gmail, don't waste time organizing, just search. Case in point, how many people actually search any of the stackexchange websites directly? I'd bet that most users get there from google. And it's not unusual to be searching for a topic that intersects with any two or more of these communities. But none of them will refer to any other to tell you that the topic has a related thread in a sibling community. Only google gives you a clue, because it looks at it as the afore-mentioned hodge-podge.

It's not to say that the site didn't need any curation, I just think it somehow became a bit too systematic and oblivious of our instinct as human users. I also have the strong suspicion that people who feel that SO is declining are way off, but I doubt that the rise (if any) of its relevancy has much to do with the heavy handed curation.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#143

Post by Veedrac »

exstudent2 wrote: post #137
Veedrac wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new questions queue ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions ) should convince anyone that help vampires are real. Even if not, most experienced answerers regularly see literal copy-pasted homework questions (often several duplicates from different students) and people circumventing question bans to write yet more horrible questions. Help vampires aren't just real, they're everywhere. If they didn't exist, it wouldn'…

Almost all of those have zero answers and many have been downvoted. Not sure I'm seeing a problem. Better UI can make this even less of a problem. Punishing the entire community isn't helpful. See the link to my response to the mod down thread if you want an example of the real problem on SO.

Downvotes and close votes are two sides of the same coin. In the case of help vampires, the two are roughly equivalent. It's still moderation.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#145

Post by vram22 »

rodgerd wrote: post #104
reitanqild wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time. > People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. People keep saying that and I keep wo…

> if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying You certainly never visited c.l.p.m back in the day, or you'd know exactly how bad the alternative could get. I wonder how many people Abigail alone drove away from perl?

Who was Abigail? and is c.l.p.m the perl.misc newsgroup?

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#146

Post by maaaats »

samastur wrote: post #113
tlogan wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SO is in decline. And decline is caused by its own success. - The SO was great because answers for noob questions where hard to find. At this point of time (thanks to SO and their knowledge database) there are so many other resources to get these noob questions answered or they are already answered. And some of these other resources are updated to reflect the most recent technology changes while SO answers are st…

> Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering. I can't speak for others, but in my case it is not for lack of interest. I don't have enough 'reputation' to be allowed to answer questions and am too busy to find earning it a good use of my time.

>I don't have enough 'reputation' to be allowed to answer questions

You don't need reputation to ask or answer questions, so this is FUD.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#147

Post by ijafri »

Glad someone brought it up., I had guessed it was only the case with me., it's still a great resource to 'search' answers., but posting your own... only would lead you to humiliation with down-votes.

What I had guessed and stopped posting any question, that they only want to answer anything that's general... not 'specific' at least at this point, i still use SO a lot but only search for possible answers, I have never dared again after being trolled and downvotes.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#148

Post by ddebernardy »

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #34

Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the comm…

You may have heard it all, but what SO has chiefly achieved IMO is to drive users who regularly answer questions away from the site.

If you've a moment to check the data, I'd be curious to see the % of users who answer 5x more questions than they ask, and the same for 10x, 25x, 50x, and 100x. Then look at what their respective activity is in terms of answers provided over time per individual and overall. I'd be surprised if these numbers haven't each dropped significantly in the past 5 years, except perhaps the overall/total activity of high answer:question ratio (but then I'd expect the answer:question ratio to have materially dropped).

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#149

Post by DanBC »

discreditable wrote: post #96
Eupolemos wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "vampires"? I have an interest in forums, but I'm not familiar with that "category".

Help Vampires are users who incessantly ask simple and/or previously-answered questions and provide nothing of value to the community. Over time, they can drive valuable contributors away. http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

And here's the meta discussion: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampi...

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#150

Post by smcl »

enraged_camel wrote: post #88
sklivvz1971 wrote: post #34

Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the comm…

Subjective moderation is a major problem. You know, some moderator deciding that a question is "off-topic" or "opinion-based" and just closing the thread. It really puts a damper on people's motivation to ask questions or provide answers.

Nearly every SO issue I've viewed over the last few months has been closed as "off-topic" or some other "not welcome here" reason (I don't know what they are). I was joking about it with friends and they said the same. It makes me think of the wikipedia "deletionists" and I wonder what kind of contributions they would be happy with.
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