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

Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

data.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

861–870 of 1001 posts

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#861

Post by m-schuetz »

zahlman wrote: post #524

For those who have historically wondered about or objected to "moderation" (people usually mean curation here; as the overwhelming majority of the actions they're talking about are not performed by moderators ) on Stack Overflow, here's a hand-picked list of important discussions from the meta site explaining some policy basics: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758 Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late…

Some of the comments in these links are hilariously elitist. They are actively embracing a hostile environment, especially towards newcomers, but how do they expect to grow and maintain a community when they are scaring users away?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#862

Post by oofbey »

martin-t wrote: post #580
oofbey wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree there was some natural slow down as the corpus grew - the obvious questions were answered. But if the community was healthy, that should not have caused growth to stop. New technologies get created all the time, each starting with zero SO questions. (Or Google releases v2.0 which invalidates all answers written about v1.) SO just stopped being fun for me. I wish more systems would use their point systems thou…

I think about better voting systems all the time (one major issue being downvote can mean "I want fewer people to see this", "I disagree", and "This is factually wrong" and you never know which. But I am not sure if SO's is actually that good, given it led to this toxic behavior. I think something like slashdot's metamoderation should work best but I never participated there nor have I seen any other website use anyt…

Arstechnica used to have different kinds of upvotes for "funny" vs "insightful" - I forget exactly all of them. But I found it awesome. I wanted to and could read the insightful comments, not the funny ones. A couple years back they redid the discussion system and got rid of it. Since then the quality of discussion has IMHO completely tanked.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#865

Post by gessha »

sky2224 wrote: post #344
0xfaded wrote: post #225

I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g... I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations. People used to reach out to me all the time with…

This is a perfect example of an element of Q&A forums that is being lost. Another thing that I don't think we'll see as much of anymore is interaction from developers that have extensive internal knowledge on products. An example I can think of was when Eric Lippert, a developer on the C# compiler at the time, responded to a question about a "gotcha" in the language: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8899347/10470363 Devel…

I believe the community has seen the benefit of forums like SO and we won’t let the idea go stale. I also believe the current state of SO is not sustainable with the old guard flagging any question and response you post there. The idea can/should/might be re-invented in an LLM context and we’re one good interface away from getting there. That’s at least my hope.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#866

Post by JazCE »

As one of my good friends pointed out back in 2012, most people don't know how to ask questions[0].

I'm feeling a bit sorry for zahlman in the comment section here, they're doing a good job of defending SO to a comment section that seems to want SO to bend to their own whims, no matter what the stated aims and goals of SO really were. There does seem to be a lot of people in the comments here who wanted SO to be a discussion site, rather than the Q&A site that it was set out to be.

I do think it's very unfair of many of you who are claiming SO was hostile or that they unfairly closed questions without bringing the citations required. I'm not saying at all that SO was without it's flaws in leadership, moderators, community or anything else that made the site what it was. But if you're going to complain, at least bring examples, especially when you have someone here you could hold somewhat accountable.

The problem is, you still see a lot of it today, whether it's in IRC channels, Discord chats, StackOverflow or GitHub issues. People still don't know how to ask questions:

* [1] * [2] * [3]

[0]: https://blog.adamcameron.me/2012/12/need-help-know-how-to-as... [1]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10670 [2]: https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui/issues/10649 [3]: https://github.com/usebruno/bruno/issues/6515

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#867

Post by zahlman »

NobodyNada wrote: post #850
zahlman wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 questio…

Yes.

The "on hold" change got reversed because new users apparently just found it confusing.

Other attempts to communicate have not worked because the company and the community are separate entities (and the company has more recently shown itself to be downright hostile to the community). We cannot communicate this system better because even moderators do not have access to update the documentation. The best we can really do is write posts on the meta site and hope people find them, and operate the "customer service desk" there where people get the bad news.

But a lot of the time people really just don't read anyway. Especially when they get question-banned; they are sent messages that include links explaining the situation, and they ask on the meta site about things that are clearly explained in those links. (And they sometimes come up with strange theories about it that are directly contradicted by the information given to them. E.g. just the other day we had https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/437859.)

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#868

Post by shagie »

dahart wrote: post #857
shagie wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> every attempt at answering a question - is valid and should remain. Yeah this is describing a policy that seems like it’s causing some of the problem I’m talking about. SO’s current state today is evidence that not every attempt at answering a question should ‘remain’. But of course it depends on what exactly we mean by that too. Over time, valid attempts that don’t help should arguably be removed from the default…

That would entail a significant redesign of the underlying display engine... and an agreement of that being the correct direction at the corporate level.

Unfortunately, after Jeff left I don't think there was that much upper management level support for "quality before quantity" After the sale it feels like it was "quantity and engagement will follow" and then "engagement through any means". Deleting and hiding questions or answers that aren't high quality... really would mean making most of the site hidden and that wouldn't help engagement at all.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#869

Post by darubedarob »

Stackoverflow bureaucracy and rule mongering are insane. I recommend participation just to behold the natives in their biom. Its like a small european union laser focused on making asking snd answering a question the largest pain point of a site that is mainly about asking and answering questions.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#870

Post by llbbdd »

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…

The "nuh uh" attitude also helps explain the usage graph drop. "The users simply wanted the wrong thing than what the site is for" is also something
Post reply on HN