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Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

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Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#841

Post by Aurornis »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #780
mixmastamyk wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best answer so far, too bad way down here.

It still seems a bit too simplistic… no one imagined that Google could behave less than 100% virtuously in the future? Really?

I don’t think there’s anything virtuous or non-virtuous about it. The internet is a big place and search engines aren’t optimized to produce results according to singular sites’ idiosyncrasies.

The obvious flaw in Stack Overflow’s bias toward closing new questions is that over time the best pages are also the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions with enough answers to prevent new content from being added, guaranteeing that they became stale.

Yet at the same time they allowed new questions to be asked and indexed by search engines, but didn’t allow new answers to that new content. So the freshest and most recent content was also the worst.

I don’t see this as a “Google bad” moment. It’s a failure of Stack Overflow in clinging to their oldest content and building rules that made all new posts frustrating and unhelpful.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#842

Post by zahlman »

dxdm wrote: post #795
zahlman wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not the case. Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely. > I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer…

I do not remember any specific examples, but when I still used SO, I've come across many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question. This significantly decreased the utility of clicking on SO links for me…

> many cases personally where a question closely matching a problem I had was closed as a duplicate of another question that asked about a related, but different problem and had an answer that was not appropriate for my problem and the supposedly duplicate question.

Yes.

We consider that duplicate.

Because the point is whether the question is duplicate, not whether the problem is duplicate. The point is not to solve the problem, so it isn't interesting whether the question is "appropriate to" the problem. The point is to give you the information you need.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#843

Post by zahlman »

matkoniecz wrote: post #829
zahlman wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. No, they literally cannot. The only valid targets for closure are existing questions that have an upvoted or accepted answer. The system will not permit the closure (or vote to close) otherwise. If you mean "without writing a direct answer to the new question first", that is the exact point of the system . Literally all you have to do is click the link and read…

>> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. > No, they literally cannot. You missed that people repeatedly closed question as duplicate when it was not a duplicate. So it had answer, just to a different mildly related question. LLM are having problems but they gaslight me in say 3% of cases, not 60% of cases like SO mods.

Please feel free to show examples.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#844

Post by bdangubic »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #713
throw-12-16 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RTFM

TFMs are not a thing anymore. Most of them are merely collections of sparse random dots one might join by sheer luck only, granted no other knowledge of the system being attempted to document.

glad I don’t work at any place that would make a professional write this comment

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#846

Post by junon »

Shog9 wrote: post #456
Aurornis wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. I was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this. The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor…

There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also... For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user in…

> the core assumption remained that there was a never-ending spring of new people feeding the thing.

Hi Shog, hope you're doing well! Just thought this bit was insightful; I can fully believe this was the idea and the motivating factor for a lot of the decisions made seemingly in a vacuum (from the outside).

How much do you think Area51 and the push for the SE network rather than sticking with the Big Three affected things? I always got the impression that they tried to scale into places that ultimately attracted too much noise and overestimated the willingness of (community) moderators to effectively work for free for them to take on the wave of less technical/principled users.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#847

Post by shagie »

dahart wrote: post #816
zahlman wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time.... I’ve also constantly wished that bad answers would get hidden or cleaned out, and that accepted answers that weren’t very good would get more actively changed to better ones that showed up, it’s pretty common to see newer+better answers than the accepted one. O…

Reading the rest of this thread, it sounds like moderation truly was SO’s downfall, and almost everyone involved seems to agree the site became extremely anti-social. Not sure I’ve ever seen the word ‘toxic’ this many times in one thread before. Anyway, that is a good question you asked, one that they didn’t figure out. But if there are enough people to ask questions and search for answers, then aren’t there enough p…

> Moderation should have been aimed squarely at making the site friendly, and community should be moderating the content entirely, for exactly the reasons you point out - mods aren’t the experts on the content.

The community was the ones moderating the content in its entirety (with a very small fraction of that moderation being done by the mods - the ones with a diamond after their name... after all, they're part of the community too). Community moderation of content was crowdsourced.

However, the failing was that not enough of the community was doing that moderation.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-...

Note the "Questions closed" and "Questions reopened".

Compare this to https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/340815/2016-a-year-...

The tools that diamond (elected) moderators had was the "make the site friendly" by removing comments and banning users.

The "some of the answers should have been deleted" ran counter to the mod (diamond mod this time https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/268369 has some examples of this policy being described) policy that all content - every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#848

Post by mvdtnz »

Aurornis wrote: post #336
johnfn wrote: post #210

Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…

> I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor moderation from the beginning. I was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this. The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor…

Quite frankly you are wrong. Jeff and Joel spoke about their goals for very harsh moderation in their podcast while they were still building SO. The moderation from the very beginning was a direct result of the culture they created and it was completely intentional.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#849

Post by tomrod »

matsemann wrote: post #838
tomrod wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners This is the takeaway for myself and so many who have contributed to SO over the years, both questions and answers. Self-reflection as to why a service has become both redundant and a joke is hard, and had SO started in 2019 maybe they'd have relevance. I'm not sure I see what value they bring now or moving forward.

Thinking they didn't keep up with the times or that they should've made changes is perfectly fine. It's the vitriol in some of the comments here I really can't stand. As for me, I also don't answer much anymore. But not sure if it's due to the community or frankly because most low hanging fruits are gone. Still sometimes visit, though. Even for thing's an LLM can answer, because finding it on SO takes me 2 seconds bu…

I encourage you to recognize the statements you see as vitriol instead as brand markers as to how SO is known in the world. It's not a small set of folks who feel as if they were treated unfairly first.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#850

Post by NobodyNada »

zahlman wrote: post #493
shevy-java wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question But the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO questions had no answers. I am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days.

To the extent that moderation ever prevented questions from getting answers, that was by closing them. When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system. The value proposition is getting an answer to a question that is useful to a reasonably broad audience . That very often means a question that someone else asked, the answer to wh…

> When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system.

One of the bigger problems with the site's moderation systems was that 1) this system was incredibly opaque and unintuitive to new users, 2) the reopen queue was almost useless, leading to a very small percentage of closed questions ever getting reopened, and 3) even if a question did get reopened, it would be buried thousands of posts down the front page and answerers would likely never see it.

There were many plans and proposals to overhaul this system -- better "on hold" UI that would walk users through the process of revising their question, and a revamp of the review queues aimed at making them effective at pushing content towards reopening. These efforts got as far as the "triage" queue, which did little to help new users without the several other review queues that were planned to be downstream of it but scrapped as SE abruptly stopped working on improvements to the site.

Management should have been aggressively chasing metrics like "percentage of closed questions that get reopened" and "number of new users whose first question is well-received and answered". But it wasn't a priority for them, and the outcome is unsurprising.

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