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

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

#141

Post by ProAm »

gortok wrote: post #19

Unfortunately, Tech Crunch labels Stack Exchange as a 'forum'. It's not. A Forum is for hanging out and sharing. It may have information you need, it may not. You will spend a lot of time scrolling through useless material finding it. Or even worse: http://xkcd.com/979/ Stack Exchange will not waste your time. You have a much higher chance to find the answer you're looking for. In short, while Forums and Stack Exchan…

> SE works to ensure finding information is easy and painless, whereas a forum does not.

SE is trying to create create technical manuals one extremely directed question and one specific answer at a time. There is nothing wrong with discussion around questions or topics, especially if it helps to clarify anything being discussed. It seems like the moderators think there is only one way to ask or question a topic, whereas in reality people learn in different ways. Having multiple discussion points is helpful, the cream will rise to the top with votes. Duplicates shouldn't be closed either, there is value in seeing the same question answered in a different manner especially when both answers are correct. SO and SE has gotten so bad it's my last resort these days, I turn to Reddit before asking questions there and that is embarrassing to say.

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

#142

Post by gildas »

belorn wrote: post #125
gildas wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post a technical question about how to make your single page application crawlable, if it includes the word "SEO", there are great chances it will be closed. Some examples: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21044302/make-ajax-loaded... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26298780/how-to-make-ajax... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14887710/ajax-deep-linkin... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21785074/seo-with-si…

"how can you get the most SEO results out of a one page website" "Is there any way to dynamic generate content without affecting search engine indexing and ranking" "Is there anything I can do to make google crawl my website" "Is it safe to pre-load 4 website into one page without search engines interpreting it as misleading" If you are a programmer who do not work at google, it is impossible to answer. If a co-worke…

For your information, the Google specification [1] is implemented in google, bing, msnbot, yandex, pinterest and mail.ru bots. Making the solution compatible with the other bots is a matter of adding 2 lines in the server configuration.

[1] https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/...

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

#143

Post by pc86 »

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.

As stated, this happens almost entirely with (a) questions that could be considered opinion-based (up to discussion whether these belong on SO, SO's stance is they do not); (b) specific long-tail questions that may have very precise or specific answers.

Googling 100 things (which is not a lot) is not likely to return more than 1 or 2 of these at most. It's rare that I hit this but I've seen it a dozen or so times at least. Most of the time it's a question that has been heavily upvoted with a heavily upvoted (and accepted) answer.

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

#144

Post by Kalium »

seizethecheese wrote: post #110
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?

It seems like the solution is to instead of close non-novel questions, just make them not award points.

I think this would be an excellent solution. Combine it with some semantic similarity analysis, and the vast majority of newbie questions could be replaced with "Here's a link to a pre-written answer that almost certainly addresses what you want".

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

#145

Post by pc86 »

davidism wrote: post #129
jshen wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if the question is closed and there are no existing duplicates, then the question itself doesn't have much value." Not fitting the guidelines of SO and not having much value are two very different things. Are you sure you meant the latter?

They don't have much value to Stack Overflow, obviously, otherwise they would have remained opened and been voted up on Stack Overflow.

I think the point is these often are upvoted questions[1] with thought out answers. In fairness, I would argue the question I just referenced doesn't "belong" on SO as it's pretty clearly based in opinion. But if I Google "simple django rich text editor" and this is the first result, I would argue it does bring value to SO by bringing me onto the site.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4674609/looking-for-a-ric... (not my find, posted in another comment on this thread)

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

#146

Post by mavelikara »

jordanpg wrote: post #70
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?

There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-…

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.

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

#148

Post by EpicEng »

Kalium wrote: post #133
EpicEng wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rewarded with what; internet points? How about rewarding the far larger portion of its userbase, i.e., the sector that doesn't care about upvotes, with information? Yes, I am in the former camp if I have to chose one. SO has become far too heavy handed an "noob hostile". I have been around since the beginning and am in the top 0.16% of users and I can't stand how stringently some adhere to the formal and informal gui…

Ultimately, the site depends utterly on the internet points people. Without them there is only noobs asking questions, and they leave without people answering. So, yes. Internet points.

That's a fair point. It's not my motivation for being active, but I assume it is for most, and it is an effective carrot. I would just like the balance to be tipped a little back in the direction of the consumers of the site.

I'm not suggesting we leave obviously terrible questions open, it's the borderline posts that get me. Interesting questions which may not have a black and white answer, but would still encourage discussion/opinions which would be useful to people down the road. I know "it's not a discussion site", but sometimes there are gray areas and it's useful to have the opinions of experts on the pros and cons of certain approaches/technologies/whatever.

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

#149

Post by EpicEng »

Kalium wrote: post #134
EpicEng wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I can find the answer I am after more quickly by searching and finding a hit on SO than I would by grepping documentation, how is that not providing value?

Now balance it against the more important questions that are unanswered or even unasked because SO becomes a place where there's no point to that. It's not as simple as that.

I'm not sure I follow you. How does erring on the side of leaving a question open leave more questions unanswered or unasked?

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

#150

Post by darkmighty »

Kalium wrote: post #105
sanderjd wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This viewpoint only makes sense if you subscribe to the (very silly) ideas that there are a limited number of internet points available and that they matter. Why does it matter to you which people are being rewarded for what?

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.
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