Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

hackernoon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 304 posts

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#251

Post by shagie »

Mithaldu wrote: post #247
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 could at the very least make it your mission statement to provide correct answers, and remind all of your moderators of this, instead of having them maintain the "spirit of the poster" on answers that are wrong and on locked questions.

Alas, all attempts at answering a question are deemed valuable by some contingent of the active user and diamond moderation base. Correct has nothing to do with it.

There is no mechanism for removal of incorrect answers other than the person being too embarrassed having it still visible and deleting it.

One has to hope that the best and correct answers get up voted.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#252

Post by grkvlt »

speedkills wrote: post #227
grkvlt wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, before SO, you had sites like 'Expert Sex Change' (expertsexchange.com) which would purport to answer your question, but gray/blur out the actual text. They then required payment to expose the answers, which often turned out to be non-existent. On the other hand, I've had a lot of success with SO, both asking and answering, and while there are occasions where I find questions closed as duplicates or off-topic,…

I always remember scrolling down past the blurred out section and reading the actual answers without signing up. I wonder how many people ending up getting past that old school dark pattern.

Could you? I thought they didn't make the answers available, and just always showed the grayed out text even if there was no real answer after you paid up? There were several incarnations of the site though, and of course I may well be mis-remembering, it was a long time ago...

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#253

Post by keithnz »

tedmiston wrote: post #73

> However, a 2013 study has found that 77% of users only ask one question, 65% only answer one question, and only 8% of users answer more than 5 questions. Is this actually a problem? I've always viewed Stack Overflow as a "write once, read many" community. For top questions, it looks kind of like Quora. Checking my own stats: I've been a member for 7 years, asked 4 questions, and given 45 answers while reaching ~86k…

I've asked 88 questions, answered 992, rep 28k, reach of over 2 million people.

But, my coworkers, use SO all the time, and don't even have an account.

Most of the issues are with people trying to participate with low quality questions and answers, it can feel like a negative experience, but that's only a tiny fraction of people in the scheme of things. High frequency noise that won't make it to where it becomes useful.... search results. While it isn't a perfect system, it's results are great. If you feel burnt by SO, just don't take it personally, keep participating .... or not, if you really don't like it, go contribute on forums in a more casual non curated manner.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#254

Post by emodendroket »

Frankly I'm tired of reading these pieces. For one thing, they always focus on being mean to new users, which in my opinion isn't the problem. My biggest complaint about Stack Overflow is that you get the same amount of points for answering an easier question or a hard one, so complex questions languish while "please write a regex for me" questions get five answers in half an hour.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#255

Post by gregmac »

shagie wrote: post #249
gregmac wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the stance on duplicates needs to be relaxed, with some filters/tools to help prevent higher rep users from seeing them during normal use. For example, don't show high rep users questions from low rep ones. Let other low rep users answer the question independently. It encourages participation. Let the site link duplicates together, but in a symbiotic way (even show highly voted answers from other questions as…

So you want low rep users who don't understand the expected quality for the site to be answering questions while the high rep users who are familiar with the duplicates and expectations are prevented from helping? Preventing high rep users from answering _good_ questions from low rep users means Jon Skeet and Eric Lippert won't see them and be able to give their often spectacular answers. You're suggesting cheating l…

Not prevented, just not shown by default. But yes, let the low rep users answer low rep users questions. Make the site feel like it did to new users today like it did to today's high rep users five years ago.

The site should discourage really obvious exact slates with suggestions.. But if someone has a small variation, let them ask it and get a specific answer.

Unless the question gets many upvotes, high rep users don't see it anyway, so who does it hurt?

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#256

Post by [deleted] »

shagie wrote: post #249
gregmac wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the stance on duplicates needs to be relaxed, with some filters/tools to help prevent higher rep users from seeing them during normal use. For example, don't show high rep users questions from low rep ones. Let other low rep users answer the question independently. It encourages participation. Let the site link duplicates together, but in a symbiotic way (even show highly voted answers from other questions as…

So you want low rep users who don't understand the expected quality for the site to be answering questions while the high rep users who are familiar with the duplicates and expectations are prevented from helping? Preventing high rep users from answering _good_ questions from low rep users means Jon Skeet and Eric Lippert won't see them and be able to give their often spectacular answers. You're suggesting cheating l…

[deleted]

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#257

Post by user5994461 »

shagie wrote: post #249
gregmac wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the stance on duplicates needs to be relaxed, with some filters/tools to help prevent higher rep users from seeing them during normal use. For example, don't show high rep users questions from low rep ones. Let other low rep users answer the question independently. It encourages participation. Let the site link duplicates together, but in a symbiotic way (even show highly voted answers from other questions as…

So you want low rep users who don't understand the expected quality for the site to be answering questions while the high rep users who are familiar with the duplicates and expectations are prevented from helping? Preventing high rep users from answering _good_ questions from low rep users means Jon Skeet and Eric Lippert won't see them and be able to give their often spectacular answers. You're suggesting cheating l…

> How many more answers to How do I fix a null pointer exception in Java ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) do you want to have on the site?

Honestly. You're looking at a non-problem here.

The endless stream of trivia questions is rivalled 10 times by the furry of downvotes and closing.

Beginners who dare asking questions like that are welcomed so badly that they usually don't dare coming back.

On the other hand. Blocking professionals who have the solution because they don't have 100 points is a real issue. Same for having 5 years old outdated answers appear on top of the list, even though the next more recent answers have proportionally more points (when accounting for time).

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#258

Post by lokedhs »

grkvlt wrote: post #252
speedkills wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always remember scrolling down past the blurred out section and reading the actual answers without signing up. I wonder how many people ending up getting past that old school dark pattern.

Could you? I thought they didn't make the answers available, and just always showed the grayed out text even if there was no real answer after you paid up? There were several incarnations of the site though, and of course I may well be mis-remembering, it was a long time ago...

Yes you could. I'm not sure it always worked that way. My guess is they added that after being dropped by Google once Googlebot got smart enough to know you were hiding content.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#259

Post by EpicEng »

PretzelFisch wrote: post #223
EpicEng wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm sure you'll have the same experience elsewhere. Once a site like SO gets large enough to be really useful to a lot of people you're going to also have to deal with an influx of the type of users you don't like. I don't know how you solve that problem.

Not if you have to pay for an account and you put your real identity behind your questions and answers.

Good luck getting a large number of users to hop on that bandwagon.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#260

Post by EpicEng »

marcosdumay wrote: post #121
EpicEng wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm sure you'll have the same experience elsewhere. Once a site like SO gets large enough to be really useful to a lot of people you're going to also have to deal with an influx of the type of users you don't like. I don't know how you solve that problem.

> I don't know how you solve that problem. Not replacing it with a single site, with a single community and centralized moderation can help a lot.

But you can't control that, it could only happen organically, and, well, it hasn't.
Post reply on HN