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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

#901

Post by Shog9 »

junon wrote: post #846
Shog9 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There was some of that for sure; sites that were all but designed to be attractive nuisances and took near-heroic efforts to moderate at all, with little chance of not causing a lot of drama.

OTOH, topic-specific sites like Mathematics, MathOverflow, Physics, even small ones like Home Improvement or Seasoned Advice... Managed to collect a lot of good stuff: common niche questions with good answers that have a good chance at staying relevant for a long time to come.

In a sane world, a few relevant ads on these sites would be enough to fund them for decades. But that appears to be another area where Google kinda shit the bed.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#902

Post by troyvit »

Man after reading some of the comments and looking at the graph I have learned a lesson. I went to SO all the time to find answers to questions, but I never participated. I mean they made it hard, but given the amount of benefit I gained I should've overcome that friction. If I and people like me had, maybe we could have diluted the moderation drama that others talk about (and that I, as a greedy user, never saw). Now it's a crap-shoot with an LLM instead of being able to peruse great answers from different perspectives to common problems and building out my own solution.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#903

Post by zahlman »

matt_kantor wrote: post #790
rendaw wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a great policy. I don't think anyone wants duplicate questions. The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates. I'd say 9/10 times I find a direct match for my question on SO it's been closed as offtopic with links to one or more questions that are only superficially similar. There are other problems that they don't even try to address. If 10 people ask the same question, why does…

> The problem is moderation marking unrelated questions as duplicates. This problem isn't directly solvable (what counts as a "duplicate" is inherently subjective, and therefore mistakes/differences of opinion are inevitable). I think a deeper problem is that once a question becomes closed (for any reason), it's unlikely that it'll ever be reopened. The factors behind this are social (askers interpret close votes as…

> and technical (there's no first-class feature for askers to contest closure

It's not quite that bad: when the OP edits the question, there is a checkbox to assert that the edit resolves the reason for closure. Checking it off puts the question in a queue for reconsideration.

However, there's the social problem (with possibly a technical solution) that the queue is not as discoverable as it ought to be, and provides no real incentive; the queues generally are useful for curators who work well in a mode of "let's clean up problems of type X with site content today", but not for those (like myself) who work well in a mode of e.g. "let's polish the canonical for problem Y and try to search for and link unrecognized duplicates".

Given the imbalance in attention, I agree that reopening a question should have lesser requirements than closing it. But better yet would be if the questions that don't merit reopening, weren't opened in the first place. Then the emphasis could be on getting them into shape for the initial opening. I think that's a useful frame shift: it's not that the question was rejected; rather, publishing a question basically always requires a collaborative effort.

The Staging Ground was a huge step forward in this direction, but it didn't get nearly the attention or appreciation (or fine-tuning) it deserved.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#904

Post by zahlman »

shagie wrote: post #731
zahlman wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This manifested as the war of "closed, non-constructive" on SO. Some really good questions were killed this way because the moderators decided on their own that a question had to have a provable answer to avoid flame wars. Please point at some of these "really good" questions, if you saved any links. (I have privileges to see deleted questions; deletion is normally soft unless there's a legal requirement or somethi…

I believe that this tension about what type of questions was baked into the very foundation of StackOverflow. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... > What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to…

> As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left.

Just to make sure: I always got the impression that Atwood was the one who wanted to keep things strictly on mission and Spolsky was the one more interested in growing a community. Yes? I do get the impression that there was a serious ideological conflict there; between the "library of detailed, high-quality answers" and the, well, "to every question" (without a proper understanding of what should count as a distinct, useful question that can have a high-quality answer). But also, the reputation gamification was incredibly poorly thought out for the "library" goal (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356/the-stack-ex...). And I suspect they both shared blame in that.

A lot of it was also ignored for too long because of the assumption that a) the site would just die if it clamped down on everything from the start; b) the site would naturally attract experts with good taste in questions (including maybe even the ability to pose good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Dixer questions) before the beginners ever cleared the barrier of trying to phrase a proper question instead of using a forum.

(Nowadays, there are still small forums all over the place. And many of them try to maintain some standards for the OP. And they're all plagued with neophytes who try to use the forum as if it were a chat room. The old adage about foolproofing rings true.)

Around 2014 is when the conflict really seems to have boiled over (as new question volume was peaking). Notably, that also seems to be when the dupe-hammer was introduced (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254589).

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#905

Post by zahlman »

lelanthran wrote: post #877
zahlman wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No; remarks like that have been vanishingly rare. The less-rare uses of "you fucking moron" or equivalent generally come from the person who asked the question, who is upset generally about imagined reasons why the question was closed (ignoring the reason presented by the system dialog). In reality, questions are closed for reasons described in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 , which have been careful…

> It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work"). This explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's goals were misaligned to humans. Pr…

Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.

That is not a reason for fishing instructors to give up. And it is not a reason why the facility should hand out fish; and when the instructors go to town and hear gossip about how stingy they are, it really just isn't going to ring true to them.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#906

Post by wpietri »

pasc1878 wrote: post #856
wpietri wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? It's a perfect example of the problem. In college, I worked tech support. My approach was to treat users as people. To see all questions as legitimate, and any knowledge differential on my part as a) the whole point of tech support, and b) an opportunity to help. But there were some people who used any differential in knowledge or power as an opportunity to feel superior. And often, to act that way. To think o…

The point here is you worked tech support so you were paid to answer user questions. However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?

Nobody, least of all me, is saying people should work for free. But not being paid to do something you don't want to do is a reason to go do something else, not hang around and be a hostile, superior dick about it, alienating the users.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#907

Post by zahlman »

Shog9 wrote: post #899
zahlman wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, hey, Shog, good to see you doing well. It was a heck of a ride, hmm?

Yes indeed! Glad to see you over on Codidact; I suspect small, bespoke q&a will be the future of the form, at least after Facebook implodes.

Believe me, I'm full of vision (and hope). But it's hard to write stuff when there's so much to write that I can't find a natural starting point, and when the (lack-of-)network effects are so brutal.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#908

Post by HaZeust »

mlinhares wrote: post #384
brunoborges wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario. Take an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product. The documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of "How to delete a produ…

"In this imaginary world where everything is perfect and made to be consumed by LLMs, LLMs are the best tool for the job".

Yeah, old news? It's how it is today with humans.

You SHOULD be making things in a human/LLM-readable format nowadays anyway if you're in tech, it'll do you well with AIs resorting to citing what you write, and content aggregators - like search engines - giving it more preferential scores.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#909

Post by Chaosvex »

bborud wrote: post #787
Chaosvex wrote: post #746

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional? The answer to all of these questions is yes, for the most part. Volunteers are much harder to wrangle than employees and it's much easier for drama and disagreements to flare when there are zero consequences other than losing an unpaid…

Then you have a much darker view of humanity than I have. What you seem to suggest is that because building a community on volunteers is hard it is not worth doing. What makes a community worthwhile is its ability to resolve differences productively. I think that if you replace individual responsibility with transactionality you have neither community nor long term viability or scalability. Then again, we live in tim…

It's because I was involved with a large volunteer-based project that was a literal 24/7/365 operation for several years (dozens of volunteers at any given time and tens of thousands of concurrent users) and can speak first hand as to the differences.

I didn't say it's not worth doing but it will bring challenges that wouldn't exist with employees. Paying people adds a strong motivator to keep toxic behaviour at bay.

Your experiences will heavily depend on the type of project you're running but regardless, you can't hold volunteers, especially online, to the same expectations or standards as employees. The amount of time and effort they can invest will wax and wane and there's nothing you can do about it. Anonymity and lack of repercussions will eventually lead to drama or power struggles when a volunteer steps out of line in a way that they wouldn't in paid employment. There is no fix that'll stop occasional turbulence, it's just the way it is. Not all of your volunteers will be there for the greater good of your community.

Again, that is absolutely not to say that it can't be worth the effort but if you go into it eyes open, you'll have a much better time and be able to do a better job at heading off problems.

I've seen other people express similar opinions to yours and it wasn't until they experienced being in the driver's seat that they understood how difficult it is.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#910

Post by shagie »

wpietri wrote: post #781
closewith wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment sums up everything wrong with Stack Overflow. I strongly suggest you re-read your comments here and self-reflect.

Right? It's a perfect example of the problem. In college, I worked tech support. My approach was to treat users as people. To see all questions as legitimate, and any knowledge differential on my part as a) the whole point of tech support, and b) an opportunity to help. But there were some people who used any differential in knowledge or power as an opportunity to feel superior. And often, to act that way. To think o…

When I worked technical support in college I often worked nights and weekends (long uninterrupted times to work on homework or play games) ... there was a person who would call and ask non-computer questions. They were potentially legitimate questions - "what cheese should I use for macaroni and cheese?" Sometimes they just wanted to talk.

Not every text area that you can type a question in is appropriate for asking questions. Not every phone number you can call is the right one for asking random questions. Not every site is set up for being able to cater to particular problems or even particular formats for problems that are otherwise appropriate and legitimate.

... I mean... we don't see coding questions here on HN because this site is not one that is designed for it despite many of the people reading and commenting here being quite capable of answering such questions.

Stack Overflow was set up with philosophy of website design that was attempting to not fall into the same pitfalls as those described in A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205

Arguably, it succeeded at not having those same problems. It had different ones. It was remarkably successful while the tooling that it had was able to scale for its user base. When that tooling was unable to scale, the alternative methods of moderation (e.g. rudeness) became the way to not have to answer the 25th question of "how do I make a pyramid with asterisks?" in September and to try to keep the questions that were good and interesting and fit the format for the site visible for others to answer.

It wasn't good that rudeness was the moderation tool of last resort and represents a failing of the application and the company's ability to scale those tools to help handle the increased number of people asking questions - help onboard them and help the people who are trying to answer the questions that they want to answer to be able to find them.

The failing of the company to do this resulted in the number of people willing to answer and the number of people willing to try to keep the questions that were a good fit for the site visible.

Yes, it is important for the person answering a question to treat the person asking the question with respect. It is also critical for the newcomer to the site to treat the existing community there with respect. That respect broke down on both sides.

I would also stress that treating Stack Overflow as a help desk that is able to answer any question that someone has... that's not what it was designed for. It acts as a help desk really poorly. It was designed to be a library of questions and answers that was searchable. The questions were the seeds of content, and it was the answers - the good answers - that were the ones that were to stay and be curated. That was one ideal that described in https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

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