The decline of Stack Overflow (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

hackernoon.com

322 pointsabaschin293 comments

People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before.

Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on that (a lot of the more hostile rule enforcement tropes are banned and filtered against), and it's a hard problem.

SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good. If you want to kill it, please go ahead and solve the issue of explaining to users how to contribute quality content and getting them to take that in instantly.

I used to contribute a lot, which tapered off as I had other things filling my time. Towards the end though, the help vampires were getting to me, and I understand why people are harsh towards new users in some situations, it's an easy trap to fall into. Trying to fix that problem by stopping the curation of the content is insane, however. That's a fast route to going from some people being turned away to having no decent content.

>SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good.

While I'd say this is currently true, answers on SO tend to stick around for a long time, and the 'marked as duplicate'-heavy behavior means that even if the best practice to solving a given problem changes, the top SO google result won't. While this isn't a _huge_ problem right now, with the way the site is set up I only see it getting worse, to the point that some years down the line I imagine many SO answers will either cease to be relevant or push people down the wrong path when solving a problem.

Marked as duplicate and closed for being too broad are annoying. Often, the "duplicate" is actually a different question with a different answer and many of the too broad ones are not too broad, can be answered easily, and can make it easier than reading 10 other threads and pulling the needed information from each.

I now try to see if Stack Overflow has an answer and if I am not able to really understand what is going on, I don't bother to post a question because I hate how the 'keepers' pounce on you. Instead I find an SME by networking within my org and get it answered

Highly upvoted answers are usually converted into "wiki entries", so that they can evolve, extend and restructure with time. It somehow alleviates the problem, as long as the both sides (asking and answering) care to actually update it.

I'm skeptical that happens very often.

The only wiki answers I've seen have been hugely popular with dozens of answers and hundreds of votes. Maybe it happens outside of that, but it's definitely not how it "usually" works, IME.

Most of the questions I see on SO have maybe 0-5 answers, and the average number of votes is something like 2. If you're lucky there's an accepted answer and/or an answer with a clear majority of votes. I've even seen cases where the accepted answer is wrong, while a more upvoted answer is correct.

SO could be the internet's technical manual if good answers were properly organised and maintained - if the point of providing answers was to document 'how to do programming' and you could only close a duplicate by explaining how to documented answer applies. But the incentive is get in fast, answer and move on to the next question.

That was the idea behind tag-wikis at one point ( see http://stackoverflow.com/tags/scala/info ) and was the utopian ideal of what Documentation would become.

Organizational and writing skill don't necessarily correlate well to programming skill. And when one adds gamification to that allowing for material curated by the masses without the corresponding community investment by those who _do_ have that skill set... well.

You can edit the top answer or post a new answer, I have got 50 odd votes from adding asp.net's encryption/decryption methods that were added in 3.5 to old .net encryption questions.

I've done it on a few other answers too, if the top answer seems clunky or inelegant, I tend to dig a bit deeper to see if there's a better way.

Also, scrolling down a bit in the answers you usually find new ways of doing something as answer 3 or 4. Just upvote it. Or edit the answer into the top answer.

You can. Most people can't. As the site gets aggressive against newcomers and old timers decide they have better things to do, there will be less and less people available edit them.

And don't think those editions are as high quality as the ones that come by the official channel, where literally anybody in the world with the needed knowledge can reply, and there is a robust process for vetting.

Besides, despite any theoretical possibility, people mostly do not edit old SO answers. There are exceptions, but outdated answer mostly stay there.

I'm an incredibly lazy programmer, I remember nothing, it's simply not worth it imho. I hate man pages and specs and generally reading boring tech docs. I hate memorising stuff.

I Google incredibly basic stuff like how to read files, how to read a web page (something that changes every 5 months in .Net), hell, even basic jQuery functionality.

The difference is that I have the knowledge deep down, I just use SO and Google as a prompt. I know the correct answer as soon as I see it. I get exposed to a lot of basic answers on SO, and generally they're right.

SO is generally good and is not suffering the problem you or the OP claim.

The site isn't aggressive against newcomers, it's aggressive against bad form questions/answers. Which is usually, it is true, done by newcomers because they don't know how to make a good form ones. This is a social problem which is very hard to solve - how to make people produce high quality content without discouraging them too much when they produce low quality. Some people would be annoyed and leave. But I think SO found a model that largely works - at least for the most of my questions, I found pretty good answers. For some, I found none, but neither did I find answers in any other place.

> it's aggressive against bad form questions/answers

You're absolutely wrong in that case. Particularly answers being "good" or "correct" is not part of the mission statement; and the rules reject fixes of questions by default for not being "in the spirit of the poster".

All SO aims for is having the most questions/answers. Nothing else.

That wasn't my experience. In fact, this:

> All SO aims for is having the most questions/answers. Nothing else.

Is demonstrably false. If that were the only aim, questions would never be closed and there would be no need for a moderation system. They fact that they do have moderation system and do police questions and answers is the proof that quality is part of the equation.

That just weeds out the questions that would make SO look obviously bad.

It does nothing to affect the quality of answers that look ok, but are actually problematic. And in those cases "spirit of poster" always trumps correctness.

> You can edit the top answer or post a new answer

Nope you can't.

- You'll be blocked if your edit is not "in the spirit of the originally post(er)".

If you only have to add a separate and standalone paragraph at the end on a newer subfeature (like your asp example), it's generally fine.

If you have to rewrite one of the main paragraph, the reviewers will systematically reject your edit.

Typically, that means that there is no way to update an obsolete post when the tools or best practices have changed, because it's considered major changes diverging from the original author.

- Combine that with the aggressive policy of closing and locking down questions, and it's impossible to post a new separate answer on most of the questions.

Absolutely this. I ran into the issue today where somebody had posted an ambiguous answer. Mods rejected edits to clarify, the user themselves said "it's not ambiguous to me", and the question itself is locked.

I agree.

For the first time in a while, I've picked up a language I have not used for almost 15 years.

Google is helping immensely, and I've been shocked at how often (>95%) of the time the first result is SO, and that answer is perfect. So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open.

It might not be perfect, though I'd say it's the best by a massive margin.

Sorry, but I disagree. While, yes, I've found that Google searches often led me to answers on SO, I've also lost count of the number of times Google has decided that a question on a StackOverflow page was the MOST RELEVANT to the question I was asking, but SO mods had put a big, fat stamp at the top from moderators announcing that THEY weren't going to permit anyone to answer it.

I don't know how many times I've scanned down a SO page hoping, hoping, hoping that someone managed to smuggle in the answer to my question before the red guards noticed and put a stop to it.

Google simply wants to find the best answer it can to my question, while StackOverflow would rather try to find reasons to prevent it being answered.

I don't want a forum where answering my question is a last resort, and their highest priority is finding a justification for not only not answering, but actually preventing anyone else who was willing to answer from answering.

What we need is a developer forum that is totally open to questions, but with the amazing addition of Google-like search to do ranked prioritization of all answers instead of old-fashioned red guards to prevent answers they didn't like from ever existing, whether you needed those answers or not. You could ask anything you wanted, as long as you were polite, and the worst that could happen would be that your question would be re-tagged (ex: that's actually a DELPHI question, not PASCAL language, because it's not about the language.)

People would then be free to answer or not, as they wished, with votes for answer quality and links to other answers that add to the quality measures. They could express opinions (horrors! opinions from people with experience that you lack! who would EVER want that) or quote the docs, or insert a link to another answer that (in their opinion only) probably answers your question, too, but they do so without preventing anyone else from going ahead and offering their own answer.

Google manages to sort through an entire web full of comments that are "possible duplicates" or "primarily opinion based" and it's amazingly useful. A mini version of that is what we need for software Q%A.

A thousand times yes. Stack Overflow has such a high page rank, that closed questions are often at the top of Google Search results. Keeping closed questions available for Google to find is a massive waste of time. On the Google result page it looks like this is exactly the right question -- but just like Experts Exchange, the page doesn't tell you the solution.

If Stack Overflow really wanted to make life easier for people, they would delete closed questions, or move them to a directory that is excluded from search engines. Closed questions are basically bait-and-switch for searchers; they show the question, but don't have an answer.

I always Google with the timeframe set to "last year"

What's the quickest way to do that?

Search Tools button->Last Year

The biggest problem for me is which SO site to search. If I've a problem with a bit of bash script to control KDE on Ubuntu then is that Superuser, Unix, SO, AskUbuntu, or ... I don't understand why the site is split up in that manner.

So whilst I'll often choose an SO site I can't use their search.

Try "KDE notifications from bash scripts" for example. Google will show that there are answers on SO and Unix.stackexchange - searching at AskUbuntu (I use Ubuntu with KDE on top) will return zero results and won't even suggest results from other SO sites. SO itself has the best result but seems the least appropriate of the silos to place that search in.

Then there's having to register at each of the different sites on the network. The siloing of the site is PITA IMO. The only reason to do it this way I can think of is to separate computing resources, it seems there are probably better ways around that issue too? Why not a unified site with hierarchical tags such that you can choose a tag as a preferential search term?

This is my problem too, why did SO decide to split the site into so many silos?

I have 10+ memberships at Stack Exchange network most of them math/programming related and it seems so silly.

Sure, keep the multiple brands if that is what your investors want but make it searchable and taggable across sites.

Often I will see a question posted on main SO that would have been perfect by the Stack Exchange rules on some other stack exchange site.

Instead it just gets closed and whoever asked must feel quite dispirited of asking again.

Yes, fragmentation is a real problem. Can be probably solved by integrating the search indexes to some measure without integrating the sites themselves. It's not easy, but it can be done IMHO.

There is already an integrated search. Google. Seriously, SO would be foolish to try and do what Google already does better.

> So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open.

with all due respect but SO search isn't quite stellar.

Yes, SO search is average quality. Therefore I add site:stackoverflow.com to all my google searches.

My SO experience is similar to yours.

I find it to be a great resource if someone has already answered your question, especially if I find it via Google. As for asking questions, it's a bit off-putting to be immediately downvoted without explanation, and to not get a single answer.

Point is, it's good resource to free-ride but not actively participate.

That's basically the point of the site. I think SO's owners are ok with this trade off.

FWIW it wasn't always like this. I have a lot of points on SO mostly acquired about 5 years ago. Back then SO was a much friendlier, and much more interesting place to participate in. I haven't actively participated in about 3 years or so.

I've always thought this described it best: SO is a great place to find answers to your questions, but SO is a terrible place to ask questions.

It's more that it turns out that asking questions is hard.

Anyone who has had to work with others in tech knows the kind of crap you get. They don't give you the stack trace, they say 'I get an error' without giving the error message, they just say 'it doesn't work', it's not clear what they want, they post a screenshot of half a stack trace, etc...

Again, it's a constant trade off where you are balancing the asker's needs with the thousand people who find this via Google, and the people answering the question.

Did you eventually find out why you were downvoted?

Not really, but I did eventually get upvoted.

> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile.

I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time.

> People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before.

People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on.

Edit: broaden answer with first quote and answer.

"People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on."

It wasn't bullying so much as low-quality content. It is quite likely you didn't have this problem, as I didn't very often either. If you know where to go, help has always been available for many languages/runtimes/environments/etc., and generally that help still is available today. If you know the right IRC channels, the right forums, the right mailing lists, the right other resources, you can get great, high-quality help.

However, prior to SO if you just poked your query into Google you ran a decent risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads, locked behind obtaining accounts (to get your email for spam) if not outright paywalls, or expertsexchange. And this was more true for beginners; I didn't encounter this stuff while looking up an error message resulting from an obscure combination of hardware under Linux, I encountered this stuff while trying to refresh my memory about some particular Javascript intricacy.

Yes, it really was bad for a lot of people. SO is still an improvement inasmuch as while the community may rub some people the wrong way, at least the answers are still there for free, uncluttered, and generally of high quality for the most-commonly searched things.

My pre-SO experience was similar to yours, but things change, and alternative forums improved a lot.

I'm not saying there's any generic forum better than SO out there. But they are not that far behind anymore.

Well, competition has a way of motivating people to do better :)

That was far more the nature of Google at the time though. ie effectively broken.

The years immediately pre-SO were the height of the 5 page adsense spam site. Put anything into google and you ran a decent risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads.

I don't know that "the complete mess" is just about bullying and vile content, but more the horrible issues of signal to noise and the inability to filter out irrelevant responses. Forums, email lists, and Google Groups still have so many ill-informed and irrelevant non-sequitur responses crowding out the few pearls of wisdom.

My pet peeve is when you're trying to read an existing entry instead opening a new topic and half of the entries have extremely vague titles like "How do I do this?" and "Can someone help with problrm plz?" and I have to make the dreaded decision between reading all of them or risk skipping one that's actually relevant. Even when moderators could fix it, they usually don't. I always fix this in projects I maintain.

Stackoverflow has at least a semblance of a bozo filter, that forces people asking questions to put in a tiny bit of effort describing their problem.

Compare with the complete shitshow you can still see on some of the survivors of the old era, like tomshardware, Msdn, and others.

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, they are pretty rare. I frequent the Java, Docker, Kubernetes, jclouds and similar categories, and they are generally very good.

It may be down to the choice of topic? Perhaps PHP and .NET have more first-time users, and a lower quality of questions? I don't know; although since the SO data is all freely available [1] it might make a nice research project to discover [2] what causes these questions to be closed!

[1] https://archive.org/details/stackexchange [2] https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/540597/ov...

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.

Or just "View Source" and there was the raw text of the answer...

What Experts Exchange had going for it was a lot of corporate-domain programming knowledge, stuff like COBOL and IBM Visual Age that are basically unknown on Stack Overflow.

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.

Eventually, Google threatened to delist them if they didn't provide the content somewhere on the page.

> if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying

You certainly never visited c.l.p.m back in the day, or you'd know exactly how bad the alternative could get.

I wonder how many people Abigail alone drove away from perl?

Who was Abigail? and is c.l.p.m the perl.misc newsgroup?

Yes, and Abigail was one of the more notorious posters for terrorising people with what she considered to be "wrong" lines of discussion.

Bullying? I'm not sure if you are trying to say SO has bullying (it doesn't - yes, newcomers have their questions rejected a lot - turns out asking good questions is hard. Saying this is bullying is like saying that it's bullying not to publish every author's book), or that you really thing bullying was the problem I was referring to in the past.

It wasn't, the issue was the content was useless. To find anything you had to wade through pages of off-topic stuff, and try to get a sense of the value of the given answers. It was terrible. That and the paywalling and other stuff that used to go on.

It's like Github... It's so good people forgot what it was like before. Seriously, go check out the swamp that is sourceforge...

So many of the useful answers are closed. A lot of the stuff from google etc. are from 2009-2011. It seems like now most of people are a bunch of assholes trying to be elitists.

It's especially irritating when these elitist types clearly don't know as much as they think they do.

seems like a good outlet for nerdy power fantasies.

> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before.

I don't know, I've always felt that the apparent decline in usefulness came from the strict curation (and I do insist on the word "apparent"). In the past the site felt more natural to me as a big hodge-podge of various technology related topics. Questions came from various aspects of the tech world, whether they related to sys admins (e.g. linux configs, installations, scripting, etc), super users (e.g. text editors and other tools), programming languages (e.g. how to use a library or language feature), comp sci (e.g. algorithms), databases, or even networking. To me it all kinda related to how we all use the set everyday. Then came what I can only describe as over-categorization. Instead of relying on the machine to search stuff for us, they split the content into specific websites and changed their standard of what's relevant or less so (which is why you have closed questions that thousands of users still find useful). Google figured this out years ago with gmail, don't waste time organizing, just search. Case in point, how many people actually search any of the stackexchange websites directly? I'd bet that most users get there from google. And it's not unusual to be searching for a topic that intersects with any two or more of these communities. But none of them will refer to any other to tell you that the topic has a related thread in a sibling community. Only google gives you a clue, because it looks at it as the afore-mentioned hodge-podge.

It's not to say that the site didn't need any curation, I just think it somehow became a bit too systematic and oblivious of our instinct as human users. I also have the strong suspicion that people who feel that SO is declining are way off, but I doubt that the rise (if any) of its relevancy has much to do with the heavy handed curation.

Agreed. Quote from the original article:

> The consequence thereof is that many good questions not only get closed before anyone is able to respond, but that many of them end up vanishing into oblivion for eternity after merely 9 days.

Yes, any cutoff time has the downside that you lose posts. But it's not like SO makes rules for no reason. Where's the discussion of the problem that that rule is solving? How do we know they're not worse than this problem?

> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile.

For anything involving Linux, the Arch wiki is light-years ahead. It's not even a close competition.

I mean, I'd argue they are doing very different things. The Arch wiki is a collection of full topics that give you an overview of the thing as a whole. SO is a collection of q&a. I find that I need the former much more than I need the latter when it comes to managing my system, and that's probably just the nature of the task at hand. Generally I want to perform a complete task, and having a guide through that means I'm unlikely to encounter a specific problem of the type that SO is good at answering.

Also, the way in which Arch is as a system makes it less likely you have that kind of problem. Because you install and configure everything yourself, there is less 'magic' that is likely to go wrong in a way you don't know how to begin fixing it.

The SO is in decline. And decline is caused by its own success.

- The SO was great because answers for noob questions where hard to find. At this point of time (thanks to SO and their knowledge database) there are so many other resources to get these noob questions answered or they are already answered. And some of these other resources are updated to reflect the most recent technology changes while SO answers are static.

- Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering.

- People who got reputation and they are moderator (they made SO successful) do not know what they do not know.

> Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering.

I can't speak for others, but in my case it is not for lack of interest. I don't have enough 'reputation' to be allowed to answer questions and am too busy to find earning it a good use of my time.

>I don't have enough 'reputation' to be allowed to answer questions

You don't need reputation to ask or answer questions, so this is FUD.

Well, it was when I tried to do it and I haven't gone back to check if it changed. Busy, remember?

So probably mistaken, but hardly FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).

You have never needed reputation to answer a question on SO.

Most actual experts don't have the time or interest to amass points on some website. Just like with Reddit moderators, the type of person that is willing to devote a substantial amount of time to rule over an Internet fiefdom often has some personality problem. Add to this the fact that Asperger-like personalities are quite common in the IT field to begin with.

> - Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering.

I suspect part of the reason they're not interested in answering is because a difficult question requires a lot more work to likely get less points as a result. Meanwhile, answering a ton of easy questions can be done quickly and gets more points over on Stack Overflow in the same time frame.

That and yeah, lots of people who could answer your question would rather be doing something that pays the bills or helps them instead.

> I suspect part of the reason they're not interested in answering is because a difficult question requires a lot more work to likely get less points as a result.

I have to admit I have fallen into this myself on both sides.

The (now) rare times I browse the site to find questions I can answer, when I run across one like this, its usually by a low rep user, so I think "hmm, I'll spend fifteen or twenty minutes sharing this, get maybe one or two upvotes, and if I'm lucky the original person will accept the answer" and usually deem it not worthwhile. Partly this is because the correct answer is often "don't do it that way, you should do x then you can do z and completely avoid your problem instead" which understandably people don't like to hear.

What evidence do you have that SO is in decline?

No evidence. Just observation based on unscientific measurements. I could be very much wrong.

It's probably the same evidence that causes people to say Hacker News is in decline, the internet is in decline, society as a whole is in decline. Occasionally those predictions are right, but usually they're not.

At the same time, it's sometimes a good idea to pay attention to qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) analysis, since certain abstract concepts like culture can only be analyzed that way.

>help vampires

What is that?

People who cannot be bothered to cover the simplest basics of a topic on their own. It's usually hard to explain anything to them because anywhere you try to start from they will need you to explain that topic first, and on, and on. If you ask them "what do you understand" in an attempt to join them in some common frame of comprehension, they look at you with a blank stare and reply "what do you mean". That's how they drain you of your life energy. Help vampires.

SO is also full of opposites: answer vampires. You put efforts into formulating your very specific question, correcting for english language rules, provide working examples only to see bunch of "we never did it like that, you do not need that" answers from old-boys that think they know everything. Ofc, if someone solved that issue the same way, he will show up and put his saving comment, but those beards form the community, force newcomers to think The Right Way.

SO is great to search for snippets and tl;drs, though. Reference manuals fail to contain tl;drs way too often, and that was fixed, thanks SO.

And just to add another layer to your observation: the effect you describe is accelerated depending on the technology or programming language if those things are specific to the question. So, for instance, if it's a Perl-related question (we never did it this way, there's 3,827 other ways to do it and your answer is not one of them so I'm voting to close) the Soup Nazi-ism is gonna be worse than, say, a TCP/IP question.

Essentially, someone who asks continual questions and who seems unwilling to do any work, research, or to put any effort into learning on their own. Overview is here:

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampi...

A common variation is someone who asks a reasonable question, gets an answer, then repeatedly modifies/extends the original question, or who asks a long series of follow up questions n comments. This variation is described here:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/258279/1441122

Help vampires are people who suck the life out of those who answer questions. They ask questions without bothering to think about it themselves, often without enough information to actually answer the question well. These types of questions are frustrating to answer, and lead to people assuming the worst of new users who ask bad questions unintentionally.

It's a sliding scale. Most people just don't know how to ask a good question initially, but some just don't care. In general, I'd say the 'help vampire' problem is where the asker is looking for the answerer's time, not their help. They want someone to do free work for them, without putting in effort themselves.

I believe this is the origin: http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

Some advice from me to ease your experience on SO:

1. Earn some reputation first in order to see how stuff works from the other side. When you join a new company, you don't come the first day and tell everyone how they're doing it wrong before learning about the project, about the tradeoffs etc. Same here.

Having rep above certain threshold gives you additional privileges (commenting, editing etc.).

Also, when you have a rep over few hundred, I'm more likely to even read your question. Most questions from 0-rep users are very basic same-stuff-again / low-quality questions that are not challenging to answer.

Moreover, when you have some points, you can put a bounty on your question, which means you really want to have a good answer for that and can make a sacrifice, and makes the question stand out (on a separate bounty-enabled-questions page). This gives more incentive to others to look at your question. There's nothing more soul crushing on SO than taking time to write an elaborate answer and getting 0 upvotes, because the guy forgot to upvote or whatever because he doesn't care.

2. It's a misconception that you need to "respond very fast" to the questions to get the rep. Everyone has a different strategy, and well I spent some time a few years ago using this strategy to get some initial reputation. But I stopped some 5 years ago. I almost never play the "fastest gun in the west". I google things that I encounter during my normal daily work, and keep the tab open. If the best answer is not satisfactory, and later I come up with something better, I write it down as a new answer, and perhaps if I found similar problem in multiple SO questions, I put a comment with a cross-link to my answer in other thread.

You really need very little effort to get SO rep as a part of your normal daily work, yet everything I talk to seem amazed "wow how come you have so much rep on Stack!". Just create a damn account, be always logged in, and don't keep your solutions for yourself.

3. Try to put up an exhaustive question, write down a SMALL, reproducible scenario, explore some options yourself (ask yourself "what did I try?"). A lot of newcomers put very vague questions, very little information, it's not fun to ask someone a ten clarifying questions.

4. I felt really bad when I got my first downvote but it was indeed a bad answer, to a different question than the OP asked. I learnt the lesson and I don't read in haste anymore. It's good to be humbled sometimes.

Regarding "closing as duplicate", it's true some mods are too eager, but if it makes sense, I believe dupe questions should be closed - duplication is not good (DRY) and best code is no code, if possible.

I think you are missing the point somewhat by offering up tips and strategies.

For example having a question incorrectly closed as duplicate is one of the big problems, yet you only address it dismissively in a single sentence.

I'm not sure if you were replying to me to give general advice to others, or specific advice to me - I've used SO a lot (50k rep).

In general, you make reasonable points - although it's clear SO could improve here. The new asker experience obviously has problems. Not worth sacrificing question quality to improve on, but I have no doubt there will be ways to help without doing so. (And they seem to be working on it).

The curation is far and away the worst part of SO. So many interesting threads killed for being off topic. I've never seen moderation add a thing to that site. Its success is in its structure and voting. They've done everything in their power to kill that from a moderation angle.

Agreed. Often the questions they kill are the only ones that could possibly be useful to me. I don't need someone to regurgitate the manual/docs for me. I need answers to things like "what is the best ad library to use on Android?" that would have saved me a lot of trial and error and testing to come up with a good result. But "opinion" questions like that are not allowed.

No, it's success is the curation. You just don't understand the site. There is a reason SO persists and is so popular, while so many clones that do exactly the same structure and voting fail miserably.

The 'interesting threads' are exactly the problem. Those are discussions and they don't suit the format. If you want to talk about something, find a forum. SO does not have threads, it has questions and answers, and that is why it's useful.

Turns out people hate wading through pages of outdated discussion. People are forgetting what it was like before SO. Stop expecting SO to be all things to all people - if you want a discussion, go register at a programming forum. SO does what it is trying to do well.

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 community.

After a few years, I've heard it all.

> No matter what choices we make there will be upset people.

Sure, I have no idea what you have to deal with on a daily basis and in the end the content is mostly helpful so you are probably doing it right. But in more than few occasions I have been treated like a dirty beggar/shoplifter/moron/(you name it) for actually asking a question (or answering one)! Yes I need you and yes I owe you a lot - but I don't like you. And I won't root for you when you will be an underdog and when there will be equal alternative I will switch and never look back.

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.

One of the problems with SO, though is that frequently, once you get one ranty idiot tearing a hole into you for being so stupid as to ask a question they have personal problems with, you're stuffed.

Because once it receives one downvote, you'll get pile-on downvotes, particularly if it's an entertainingly abusive rant; which means that nobody will ever see it again. And you can't change the wording and repost, because you know that there will be people who will notice that it's a repost, and then it gets even worse.

You will never get help with that question, because of one ranty idiot.

And if you try to complain, the official response from the moderators is to suck it up and deal [paraphrased slightly].

Not that I'm bitter, or anything.

It has nothing to do with size. The TSA staff in the post communist country where I come from are jerks and they roll their eyes every time someone makes a mistake. But TSA staff at most large international airports is trained to understand that people will make mistakes no matter what and that their role is not to move trays but to help people. SO simply never prioritised helping people over providing them with correct technical answers so it is only natural that some of the mods beehive like knowitall-bully-jerks.

> 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.

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.

I'm not impressed by this response to some very valid criticisms.

> No matter what choices we make there will be upset people.

Of course no matter what you do, people will complain. This doesn't this this a valid reason to dismiss criticism out of hand without engaging with the complaints.

The correct response is to look for ways to address the very real problems that are being brought up in a way that increases the value the site provides to as many of your users as possible.

> Do we allow only english? Do we allow SO in other languages?

Make questions and answers be done in english to avoid fragmentation, but perhaps you need a community translation service to translate valuable questions and answers to other languages to increase the availability of this knowledge to those who don't speak english?

> Do we reduce moderation? Do we keep moderation as is?

Perhaps you can introduce a mechanism to sideline 'help vampire' questions, but still allow new users to build up reputation (currently very hard) by assisting with or improving those questions.

Many of SO's problems do not have simple or easy solutions, that doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to look for them.

I am not dismissing anything, and I am, instead quite worried. I am sorry that you had the wrong impression.

What I meant to say is that handling such a large site is like playing whack-a-mole. Seeing problems popping up is not a symptom of decline. Is a symptom of size.

I hope you're learning some lessons here. When addressing a group of your users who have concerns:

1) Never start out saying "What you don't understand is...". Instead try "Here are some of the challenges we face..."

2) Never say "Im sorry you had the wrong impression...". Instead try "I'm sorry if I miscommunicated..."

I know you are not the PR guy. And it's nice you are here because people do appreciate staff commenting.

Just trying to help you get a better reaction.

Ah, thanks for the clarification.

The site itself may not be in decline, but I am worried it may head the same direction as Wikipedia (successful, but losing active contributors.)

> Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow.

In that case, I have a serious question for you: What's your plan for refreshing the site on the long term?

Lemme explain. The "community" is actively closing new questions as "duplicate" if anything similar is already present.

At the same time, the old answer (that all duplicates are redirecting to) is often locked down for various reasons. The blocking prevents to update or add new answers.

Currently, many major questions are redirecting to one of the first answers from 3-6 years ago, when the site was relatively new. The provided answers are rotting over time.

How do you intend to prevent that?

> How do you intend to prevent that?

Very very few posts are actually uneditable at all, and editing is open to all users (some need approval).

If a post is locked and outdated it's likely that the question was locked because it was the kind of question that does not provide long-lasting answers (for example a software recommendation list).

Surely the better solution would be to say "This was the best answer in 2009. In 2012 there was a new answer."

Also in the era of search engines, does it matter if someone compiles a point in time solution? I've lost track of the number of times I've successfully searched for that entry, only to discover it has been closed as "inappropriate". So frustrating.

Given that a voting system is in place, why not let the duplicate stay open and just mark it as a duplicate and link it to the other thread? People who don't like the new thread can down vote it and people who do want to contribute meaningful replies can still do and be upvoted if it adds value.

I don't see how this might affect SEO in any bad way than the current scheme does.

Fragmentation of knowledge. The SO model tries to get the answers in one place so the people who search first find the answer in one place.

If duos were open, the you'd have to look in all the places first to find the best answer. And then you might as well skip that step and ask another question rather than search.

Try searching a forum or /r/javahelp or the like for an answer. See how many results you have to hit before you find an answer that works for you. Then reconsider the value of closing and pointing people at the duplicate question.

That solution clearly isn't working. You need to come up with something better, or SO is going to become a graveyard of programming best practices from the year 2012.

> editing is open to all users (some need approval).

Technically true, factually false, since correctness of an edit does not trump "spirit of the poster".

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 an aside.. Especially showing this on the old questions).

Votes (or even higher weighting on recent votes) on the question can let the community choose which "duplicate" is best, and this can change over time.

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 low rep users who do a good job of reading the help documentation first from getting the best possible answer... and encouraging people who ask and answer poorly to continue doing so.

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?

> 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).

> Blocking professionals who have the solution because they don't have 100 points is a real issue.

Like I said in another reply, I'm not saying block, just filter by default. Though, perhaps a time limited block would be useful, and solve another problem: experienced users know how to answer quickly, and often do so before new users get the chance to provide one.

Most questions don't get answers. The problem is not users giving excellent, well thought out answers so quickly a new user cannot find something to answer. There are 3M questions without any answer. There are lots of opportunities to provide answers. Most people, however dontnknownhow to write a good question... or for that matter, a good answer.

Look at the newest questions, or triage, or help and improvement queues. There are many more questions than there are answers.

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?

Replying to this, because on SO I don't have enough reputation to reply and say how annoying it is, or describe how the duplicate is different and/or unhelpful.

I get that it's probably the only way to prevent spam comments on a large scale etc, but when see I need to ask 5 questions just to comment on the ones I care about, I don't even bother.

The truth is that you've managed to piss off and alienate a lot of people in pursuit of... something, and when a new community platform gains critical mass, we will take the content and jump ship happily.

To change this, you could try publicly acknowledging the issues, encouraging people (especially moderators) to be less pedantic and nicer, and rolling back some of the most egregious abuse by the little Q&A tyrants.

I don't know what you are on about. I am not pissed off with SO, nor do I know anyone who is, and I certainly have no intention to go somewhere else, especially since there is no saying the same problems will not occur there

Some people in this thread are saying SO's issues are inevitable in a community of that scale, but is it really true? Is it inevitable that two different questions with different answers will be marked duplicates of each other, for example?

I don't see the problem, since you can jump to the other question, it means all new answers will only happen in one place. Sure it can be improved, but it's not something that bothers me in practice TBH

It seems to me you aree providing a perfect example here:

From what I can see you did not read the post you answered to (Is it inevitable that two different questions with different answers will be marked duplicates of each other, for example?), yet you hand out the answer like the ones we criticise for rubber stamping "duplicate" etc.

It's because I have never actually seen happen, hence I went with what I was familiar with.

Can you see our point now?

Because this is exactly the kind of rubber-stamping that we are talking about: to busy defending the system to actually read what the user tries to ask about/point out.

Absolutely. On the top of that you have very different communities. If you ask a question about something in OCaml or in Javascript your experience will be very different. The only thing I don't like is the new user questions that cannot be answered, usually down voted very fast though.

Subjective moderation is a major problem. You know, some moderator deciding that a question is "off-topic" or "opinion-based" and just closing the thread. It really puts a damper on people's motivation to ask questions or provide answers.

Nearly every SO issue I've viewed over the last few months has been closed as "off-topic" or some other "not welcome here" reason (I don't know what they are). I was joking about it with friends and they said the same. It makes me think of the wikipedia "deletionists" and I wonder what kind of contributions they would be happy with.

You may have heard it all, but what SO has chiefly achieved IMO is to drive users who regularly answer questions away from the site.

If you've a moment to check the data, I'd be curious to see the % of users who answer 5x more questions than they ask, and the same for 10x, 25x, 50x, and 100x. Then look at what their respective activity is in terms of answers provided over time per individual and overall. I'd be surprised if these numbers haven't each dropped significantly in the past 5 years, except perhaps the overall/total activity of high answer:question ratio (but then I'd expect the answer:question ratio to have materially dropped).

What do you mean by "vampires"?

I have an interest in forums, but I'm not familiar with that "category".

Help Vampires are users who incessantly ask simple and/or previously-answered questions and provide nothing of value to the community. Over time, they can drive valuable contributors away.

http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

And here's the meta discussion: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampi...

That post (aside from being overly juvenile) is pure speculation and not backed by any sort of data that would suggest that "help vampires" impact the larger community.

It's an extremely condescending and unprofessional term to refer to your less experienced users. It really betrays the core problem with the SO staff. They've gone moderation mad and see the user base as the enemy.

They are real. The unwillingness or inability to do some basic research or mental flexibility to adjust generic guidelines to their particular case (maybe 1 step out of 5 needs to be skipped!) combined with their persistence makes them quite frustrating and an outsized time consumption.

The guy who only needs a single link to the right tutorial is easy to deal with and makes all sides happy.

The guy who asks a question because he didn't even bother to read the 5-page beginner's tutorial (you know because he comes back after 1-2 minutes) where answer somewhere further down... well... after seeing your 50th or 100th of that kind you just want to yell at them.

Others expect you to fix their pastebinned code for them and do not take prose for an answer. They don't want to understand what's going on and what they did wrong, they just want you to do it for them.

Even if this behavior is real, the term is condescending and I see a ton of speculation about the impact of this type of thing, zero data.

> the term is condescending

It perfectly encapsulates how those people are perceived. They drain the fun out of helping others. Playing language police is unlikely to gain you any more ears from people who feel drained by the vampires.

> ton of speculation about the impact of this type of thing, zero data.

Do you expect them to have a positive impact that would increase if moderation were decreased?

People that post a whole program that does not work and ask the community to fix it for them...

"Give me teh codez..." etc

Ah, thank you.

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.

Do you mean it's only a matter of preference rather than limited resources?

> Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over.

Every moderator on every site will tell you this; without this narrative they wouldn't exist.

Is there any proof that this is the case though? To me SO is super useful with ~20% of great threads killed for being off topic. Voting puts good topic on top, no need for administrator intervention.

The new questions queue (http://stackoverflow.com/questions) should convince anyone that help vampires are real.

Even if not, most experienced answerers regularly see literal copy-pasted homework questions (often several duplicates from different students) and people circumventing question bans to write yet more horrible questions.

Help vampires aren't just real, they're everywhere. If they didn't exist, it wouldn't be necessary to enlist high-rep users to engage in moderation.

Then why don't they just make it just a little bit harder to ask the first question?

Today this is one of the default privileges, and IMO that is asking for work.

What does "a little bit harder" mean? Any reputation requirement is out of the window because it would alienate far too many people from ever contributing. A screening process wouldn't work well because SO already puts too much burden on moderators (which is largely why people end up making rushed moderation decisions).

> What does "a little bit harder" mean?

I'll try to answer below. But I don't think SO can have their cake and eat it to: IMO SO can either set the threshold for asking to non-zero or they could stop complaining about the current torrent of help vampires and low-effort questions.

> Any reputation requirement is out of the window because it would alienate far too many people from ever contributing.

And here is were our opinions differ.

It seems like somehow SO enjoy having a torrent of fresh noobs to correct.

If not, adding just the slightest speed bump to people who just want help with their homework (i.e. you cannot ask a question until your account is 6 hours old or has passed introductory training: look at tags, make a search, visit meta) would likely (IMO) weed out most vampires without affecting the large majority (the read only users) or anyone who is prepared to make any effort to become a contributor.

One must differentiate the SO core user group and SO the company that develops, hosts, and sells advertising.

Almost all of those have zero answers and many have been downvoted. Not sure I'm seeing a problem.

Better UI can make this even less of a problem. Punishing the entire community isn't helpful. See the link to my response to the mod down thread if you want an example of the real problem on SO.

Downvotes and close votes are two sides of the same coin. In the case of help vampires, the two are roughly equivalent. It's still moderation.

On top of what? Help vampires waste answerers time, not readers time. Which is why they vote to close.

No one wants to browse 200 lines of code to find the missing semicolon.

"Help vampires" aka people with a question that's been answered, are only a problem if you don't have proper search tools to show that a question has already been asked (or answered). If you provide those, and people still ask, maybe their question actually is different. If you provide similar question tools for answerers, let them link to the other question/answers but there's no value in closing the question. That's just hostile and kills the opportunity to generate actual content.

Also, let's be real. It's not the marking dupes that's problem it's all the "off topic" closures.

Side note: you work at SO and call your users "help vampires". I think that elitist attitude is a huge part of the problem we're discussing here.

Help vampires: people that ask questions which have no value other than themselves. Duplicate questions are not "help vampires" by any means.

This is a good example of that: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30721824/near-syntax-erro...

Side note: don't pass judgement on stuff or people you don't know. It's quite insulting.

While those telling the user who posted the question wer correct about deleting the comma, this question would have had immensely more value if they had simply said "don't build your query that way". There are many ways to mitigate SQL injections in Java - I would have up-voted any answer that responded with (e.g.) a parameter used query. So to me, this question's answers could in fact make it interesting and valuable.

First of all, if someone wants to answer that, more power to them.

I'm talking about stuff like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/378959/is-there-a-static-...

Good work closing that one!

> Side note: don't pass judgement on stuff or people you don't know. It's quite insulting.

You don't know who I am so I'm not sure why you think I wouldn't know about community management or content generation. I'm simply telling you that calling your users names is insulting. It's good advice not a reason to attack me.

The Q&A format poorly handles the ever growing list of libraries that can do something. A wiki format is better for that. Maybe the documentation / examples that exists now. But sifting through dozens (this was closed before it got there) answers is more noise than signal. People aren't bothered to curate and clean old broken answers in such a format. Try slant.co for such a question instead.

I've found that if you go to Stackoverflow for a fast-moving topic like Javascript, the first answer isn't correct in modern terms. The next set of answers, without check marks, are likely more correct.

So you have to read the entire page to get a glimpse of the truth.

This can be bad if you're just looking for an immediate solution, however for learning its fantastic because it shows you a recorded history of how things evolved over time in a framework.

Its crazy that SO isn't able to spoon fed devs answers to their specific need based on solutions to other people's specific needs. If people would put it in these terms they would realize they should have to read a bit and have to earn their solution to their problem. Frankly, even if the most upvoted answer looks correct I still take the time to read all other answers, comments and perhaps a few other similarly related questions. Perhaps I am unique in this but I also find myself rarely relying on SO first and usually as a last ditch resort for odd scenarios.

SO has consolidated a massive amount of information and is a great resource. People expect too much of words though and should have to do some work themselves.

Agreed. I usually use 'site:stackoverflow.com [[query]]' in Google with search terms limiting pages that have been updated in the last year or so. Filters a lot of the very old answers out which often can send you on a totally wrong direction because the ecosystem has changed so much.

Perhaps SO will end up getting overtaken by a new similar site, not because it is intrinsically better, just because they reset the corpus of answers so the SNR is higher for a while? I imagine SO will become increasingly less useful as their Q&A gets older and older.

> Perhaps SO will end up getting overtaken by a new similar site

It will, and then in 5 or so years we'll be hearing the same complaints about that service.

SO's problem is people, so unless you can come up with a service that removes them you're going to have the same issue.

This is really a much smaller problem if you stick to languages outside the churn'n'burn whizzbang web world. A lot of answers from the Java 1.6 era, or about .Net 3.5, or Python 2.7 are still largely relevant. Best practices in C/C++ have been even more static, aside from a few additions in recent modern standards that few seem to actually use.

C# changed a decent amount since 3.5 to dotnet core, similar to python 2 to 3 which also changed a lot of stuff.

And C++11 is practically a new backwards compatible language compared to legacy C++.

Java is more stable but at the same time it's also the slowest to evolve which is why many developers prefer C# even if it wasn't cross platform in the past - the language was just superior because of how fast it is evolving, considering that at 1.0 they were basically equivalent.

I think the accepted answer causes a lot of problems, I personally think that after 3-6 months it should no longer pin it as the top answer, votes should.

Not sure if it's ever been discussed on meta, I don't understand why they haven't done it already, seems a reasonable solution.

It has been discussed, and fairly recently: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326095/please-unpin-...

I asked that once on Meta, my question got downvoted to an horrifying level (-17 or something) and I ended up deleting it.

I learned afterward Meta downvote don't actually impact your rep but still.

I think the crusade against duplicates worsens this problem. If duplicates were more accepted, it would both make it more welcoming for newcomers to ask questions, and encourage people to update the answers to old questions (by answering the new questions).

I don't totally understand why people worry so much about your question being marked as a duplicate. Questions marked as duplicates are not deleted and still show up in search results - the reason why duplicates are still kept around after being marked is because they sorta want duplicate questions on the site, because every person is going to state their query in slightly different language, and you want people searching using different terms to end up in the same place.

Most of the time if your question is mostly a duplicate but the other question (or its answer) is missing some critical factor, then you can appeal and say, "I don't think this is a duplicate of <x> because <y>" (or modify your question with the stipulation that the answer solve the critical factor) and the duplicate marking will be removed.

The other thing is, even when questions get marked as duplicates or closed, half the time I still see them accumulating their own answers, so really, what's the big issue?

If you ask a question and it genuinely has been answered elsewhere a friendly note "I think your question is answered here [url], is there anything that isn't answered by that question?" is useful. But "duplicate of [url]" often links to a question that has enough differences to not be a dupe. It's hostile, and it's a sign that incentives are out of alignment.

But just telling someone the answer might be available somewhere else doesn't direct future traffic to the canonical question, which is the entire point of the "marked as duplicate" flag. If your question gets marked as duplicate and the question it's a duplicate of is a different question, it is not very hard to get it "re-opened". Maybe people don't know that this is true, but I think the main people having problems with questions marked as duplicates are new users where you've had very little time to educate them about what it means to have your question marked as a duplicate (basically, not much). Even if you made the "marked as duplicate" flag less obtrusive or whatever, politely saying, "Your question may have an answer at <url>" probably will get interpreted as "RTFM", and called user-hostile as well.

As an aside, my only experience with having a question marked as a duplicate happened on a sister SE site - it was my first post there, I asked a question, then after posting I found the answer in one of the "related questions" links on the sidebar. I answered my own question with a link to the other question and a description of the answer I found there, then flagged my own post as a duplicate. Both the question and answer were highly upvoted.

> it is not very hard to get it "re-opened".

I'd be interested to see some statistics. I strongly suspect that when most newbies are told to fuck off that they do, in fact, fuck off.

I don't disagree with that assessment, per se, but I don't think much can be done about it. The message doesn't say, "Fuck off, you worthless loser", it says (taken from the site), "This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please edit this question to explain how it is different or ask a new question." The fact that you interpret this as "fuck off" more or less proves my point that anything hinting at, "Maybe the answer can be found here" will be interpreted by new users as "fuck off".

As for statistics, you may be able to find some by querying the data explorer: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new

I suspect it would be difficult to (automatically) distinguish between instances where a user was discouraged by the message and instances where the user's question was answered at the link. Perhaps the fraction of instances where the question was edited after being marked as a duplicate, then re-opened, is an OK metric for how willing a given community is to re-open questions.

That was examined in this post - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266844

Might be interesting to see more recent statistics, but it still gives an idea.

I've found that if I acknowledge the duplicate (which is very easy considering when you post a new question it shows you similar posts) and state a reason it doesn't work any more (even if that is just, "has anything changed?") it rarely gets flagged as a dupe.

I'm not sure what the right answer is but I agree duplicate answers allow me to garner different perspectives or approaches to the same problem. This can be very helpful as you might be missing a simple parameter that makes the checked answer not correct in your situation.

While StackOverflow is still an outstanding resource, they never really solved the “why bother?” problem for the really difficult subjects.

Your choices are: answer a trivial JavaScript question and get a million points, or spend an hour painstakingly explaining a hard problem for maybe one point (where, half the time, the original submitter doesn’t even bother to “accept” your answer so you lose even that small point boost).

There needs to be some scaling factor. For example: if the number of questions anywhere on a certain topic is quite small then popular answers in that area could receive more credit; or, perhaps individual parts of a post could be voted on to increase value (say, you see a really detailed example so you “tip” that answer for taking the time to write it all out).

You can use bounty for difficult, niche or obscure questions.

http://stackoverflow.com/help/bounty

> Your choices are: answer a trivial JavaScript question and get a million points, or spend an hour painstakingly explaining a hard problem for maybe one point (where, half the time, the original submitter doesn’t even bother to “accept” your answer so you lose even that small point boost).

I don't agree with this, there are long winded answers with a massive amount of points and/or bounty awarded to them. The problem you describe exists in any market, majority of an audience will always go for a low hanging fruit. That's why the few who answer those complicated questions are usually subject matter experts and sit in the >1% of SO.

There's a lot of people that don't care about points or badges.

They like to answer questions for the challenge or to learn the language themselves.

And they are being actively discouraged.

I usually answer the difficult questions because I've been googling how to do the same thing, found an unanswered SO question and eventually worked out how to do it myself. May as well post the answer.

have a counterexample: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-it-faste...

> 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 people [1]. My karma is not super high at 936. However, I've gleaned so much value from the SO community (and saved so much time), that these numbers only begin to scratch the surface.

Using these numbers as metrics doesn't reflect the value of SO's knowledge base. I don't think Stack Overflow is on the decline at all.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/tedmiston?tab=profile

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.

I have asked 0 questions, given 0 answers, and reached 0 people, giving an overall Reputation of 101 (the 100 bonus coming from activity on MathOverflow).

That being said, I probably hit StackOverflow at least once a month for my job, and if I'm working on a personal side project it's probably more like once an hour.

Well can we just think the other way around.

StackOverflow is a community driven website for a society that is used to follow rules and be disciplined.

Nowadays, the popularity of the website put it in a bad position. Handling millions of impolite, pseudo-developers, who've heard that it can help them with their problem.

In other words the community and popularity changed, not StackOverflow. And no it's not dying, it's just working! Sorry for some of us that remember the times where questions were mostly high-quality, but I don't think there is a way to prevent collateral damage in this case.

I prefer to read "opinionated question", instead of 10 paragraphs about a problem that in the end is unsolvable by logical decision.

On the opposite end of the "new user" perspective that is trying to ask a good question, as someone who is seeking to sometimes answer questions, it is pretty hard to actually find a good question. The vast majority of the questions I run into _are_, in fact, duplicates, poorly worded/incomprehensible, far too broad, etc. (one example that has stuck with me is "how do I install HTML/JavaScript on my computer?").

Though perhaps there are good, legitimate questions out there, it is also conceivable that some frustrated new users think that their question is appropriate for SO when it is not. This most often happens, from what I've seen, in the "far too broad" category. Just looking at SO right now, for example, I saw a question that was asking how to pass data on an iOS app from one place to another. In that user's mind, he/she has probably been trying to figure out the basics of making an iOS app, and this seems a legitimate question. However, this is an incredibly broad architecture/design question. SO isn't a resource to hand-hold you when you're learning something new. It's a resource for asking specific questions when you can't find the solution anywhere else (and you've actually tried).

> SO isn't a resource to hand-hold you when you're learning something new. It's a resource for asking specific questions when you can't find the solution anywhere else (and you've actually tried).

Why not? A lot of people need help, why not just politely point them in the right direction. Or if you feel that that is beneath you just ignore them.

If someone asks a question like "Which is the best tool for solving problem x" they question is closed with a note saying that is has been closed because it will only attract opinion based answers. Well that is exactly what the question was asking for, an opinion from someone who might know better than the person asking the question.

I would much rather have the supercilious answers removed. I have in mind the ones that instead of answering the question simply tell you that you shouldn't approach the problem that way at all even when the person asking has made it clear that they have no choice in that (corporate choice of platform, IDE, DB, etc., for instance).

> Why not?

Well, that's not the problem the site owners were trying to solve, and it appears that trying to solve it would impact what they are trying to do.

> Someone at Hacker News expressed a common experience for many programmers (experienced or not) when trying to participate on Stack Overflow.

Okay...

> 4 — Respond to comment about a missing semicolon that got deleted when I was cutting/pasting/formatting my code. (Despite the error msg making it clear that the missing semicolon isn’t the issue)

Who cares. I would just ignore this.

> Duplicate answer person complains that their entry was posted first. I advise them that the timestamp indicates the other poster was first and they reply that it is a time zone bug.

Yes, very "common experience" ;) Anyway, who cares? I wouldn't waste my time on such an idiotic argument at all

> 10 — Check back one more time and see that someone has downvoted my question

> 11 — Email the mods to get the downvote removed

Oh for the love of God, who cares??? So it got downvoted, big deal, why do you need to bother the mods about it... (Did you wonder how they can get cranky sometimes?)

Some people really should chill out, or consider themselves lucky for having way too much free time on their hands

If someone grabs the code to try to reproduce the error and gets unrelated sytanx errors, that's their time wasted. The comment about the error helps others from wasting their time too... until the problem is fixed.

As there is a taboo of modifying someone else's code, this is best done with a comment and hope the OP will fix it.

Yeah, well, that's a good point too. That's another possibility.

At any rate, whether the reason for someone to point out a missing semicolon is because they couldn't run the code straight away, or only because they didn't bother to read the question carefully - I fail to see why either scenario would be specific to StackOverflow and its peculiar community.

Surely on any QA site in existence you could come across someone acting on either of these possible reasons??

I'm a bit divided about Stack Overflow. On one hand side it's simply one, if not the best, resource for programmers. On the other hand it's become somewhat toxic and counterproductive. The better you become as a programmer the less value you derive from it. The true niche experts are less and less to be found (ie Product/Project -owners and Microsoft/Google/Apple etc -employees) and the other replies will often be exasperating mixture of trying to give answers they've googled or complain about some meta-aspect of the question.

Any community that reaches a certain size will face unique problems and I think Stack Overflow has some of the same problem as reddit does: you have to be very careful on how you give power to users. Power corrupts and becomes a goal/game in itself. Karma/power is a great incentive in the beginning of a community, but can become destructive in the long run. That some programmers have a certain type of personality is probably not helping either.

There seems to be many småpåvar on Stack Overflow that loves to wield the small amount of power they've accrued without actually contributing that much. On the other hand you have to enforce rules and curation to keep quality up.

It's a very fine balance and hard to get right. It's mostly about human psychology and incentives. I think there's some tweaks they could do to improve things but I also understand that from their perspective why change something that works?

The danger is that the true experts stop helping/answering questions on Stack Overflow because they find the community becoming too toxic. Might turn into a downwards spiral until there's mostly trolls and newbies left.

> The better you become as a programmer the less value you derive from it.

This has been my experience exactly. I'd been coding for 20+ years before Stack Overflow even existed. I nevertheless find many good answers on SO via Google searches.

But virtually all of my questions are either downvoted to oblivion or closed as "duplicates". I spend hours trying to solve the problem myself and spend even more time reducing the problem to the smallest reproducible test case before asking.

And then some moderator closes as a duplicate because it looks similar enough to some other question he's seen before. It's incredibly frustrating, to the point that I've stopped participating at all other than to upvote good answers.

Yeah, it can be very frustrating :(

You may find A Group Is It's Own Worst Enemy an interesting read http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem... - the things to design for and the things one must accept speak to some of your thoughts.

Ahh, Shirky is always good, thanks for the link

I disagree with this. SO helped me with Python, Postgres, and SQL countless times.

If we are going to consider the value of SO, I would argue that it is a cornerstone.

I've found the Postgres docs almost always more informative, clearer, and more correct than anything I find on SO. The only exceptions are for "how can I achieve this goal" questions, instead of the much more common "how can I implement this idea" ones.

Most useful info about Python from SO are pointers to the official docs in content-free answers. What is very valuable, because the docs are hard to navigate, but not what is expected.

About Haskell, C, or Perl, I currently ignore SO links, it's just less bother to go to the next result, and way more likely to get something useful.

But for Javascript, .Net, MS SQL, and a lot of other random stuff, SO is unbeatable.

I find some topics are much better than others on SO. It's pretty useful for Python and SQL, from my experience.

What most people fail to understand (but was explained very well by Joel in some talks) is that SO is primarily optimized for Google & read-only users just looking for the answer to a common issue. By that metric they are extremely successful.

Many things people complain about are deliberate design choices that actually made SO popular in the first place.

AFAIK SO was wildly popular before the current behaviour.

There are obvious exceptions however I have come to understand the greatness that is SO. All that is needed is a well-thought question with a little bit of work to show on the side.

I have a theory about why many complain about SO (please don't comment about this line, there are obviously exceptions):

There has been a ridiculous sense of entitlement with the growth and recent appeal of tech jobs in the past 5 years.

All this crap about "trolling" getting out of hand, not enough diversity (THE FIELD WAS PRIMARILY FILLED WITH NERDS OFTEN LACKING ANY SOCIAL SKILLS, no one else wanted to look or hang out with "that guy who is good with computers") etc.

It's a field that was mainly driven out of the desire and enjoyment that would be had messing around on CPU's. Therefore most of the good ones (among the diluted masses of "experts" nowadays) spent a great deal of time on these things. I'm not surprised that somebody would get pissed off if another came around and started asking for the answers to things without any real effort or drive being shown.

SO will forever be a poor resource for the huge incoming population of coders.

I found myself a little incensed at this article, rather than by it. Yup, there are limits on new users' privileges. Yes, there are users that play The Reputation Game. Yes, there are many questions that don't get answered to one's satisfaction. Yes, there are trolls. Yes, there are disillusioned users. Yes, yes, yes.

Even so, I also find all of this to be Perfect-As-Enemy-of-Good whinging. Instead it could've been a plea full of suggestions. A Call To Action!

So let's do that now, though I may come off as a prick here because I kinda think all of this whining is the real problem of the internet.

> The privilege limits

IMHO they're are rational and reasonable, but your specific use-case was about new folks not being able to leave comments. So how could we solve this? Perhaps new users ought to be able to, but only the author'd be able to see them. When either the Q or A author upvoted it, it'd become visible to the world?

> Troll responses to your bad/incorrect/misleading answer

That sounded like a bummer. You know you can flag these comments already so... punish these bad actors in the provided way and move on.

> Respond to comment that says my question is a duplicate (it’s not, which I clarify to avoid “closed as duplicate”) > [...] > Another issue with this is that duplicates show up despite the crotchety moderators complaining about it.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. It's casual, usually-helpful internet folk doing their (usually) altruistic best to help. Most of the time, this works great. Blog posts like this point out the exception, and are valuable, and they're very enticing clickbait. But when they offer only boo-hoo's and no ah-hah's, move on.

Yes, my article needs a follow-up that goes in greater detail on the causes of the issues and suggests some actual improvements.

Point taken. I'll look into that as soon as I find the time for it!

I look forward to the follow-up post!

To me this reads as if the author is not asking questions in a way consistent with Stack Overflow's guidelines [1]. They make these guidelines really explicit and clear in the FAQ.

> How do I ask a good question?

> Search, and research

> Write a title that summarizes the specific problem

> Introduce the problem before you post any code

> Help others reproduce the problem

> Include all relevant tags

> Proof-read before posting!

> Post the question and respond to feedback

> Look for help asking for help

However, writing questions in this way where you provide a MCVE, explain everything you've tried, and relate it to existing questions to help reviewers is time consuming. It shifts part of the time burden of a good question onto the asker vs reviewers or early answerers.

As someone who's done many reviews on Stack Overflow, I think following these guidelines is the best way to not get downvoted or flagged.

[1]: How do I ask a good question? http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask

One person has a few bad experience, says it's in decline. I'll counter his bad experiences with my positive experiences of both asking and answering questions - and finding more answers there anywhere else.

There - now the universe is back in balance.

Consider this on the "I keep finding closed and interesting questions on SO" - the "what is the best linter for PHP" or "What is your favorite cartoon" or "where is the best place to meet female programmers (for romance)" (ref http://i.stack.imgur.com/x9ik2.jpg ) - why not ask those questions _here_?

If the answer to that is "because that isn't a good place to ask those questions" or "because HN isn't set up for answering those types of questions" then consider the possible response of "maybe SO isn't set up for answering those types of questions well either?"

When there is more noise than signal in a question and answer page, it is useless. Go dig around https://community.oracle.com/community/java and consider why you don't put site:community.oracle.com in your search (or for that matter, see how well one can find the answer to an error message in /r/javahelp). When there are dozens of answers that consist of "try libXyz" it isn't useful - you're going to have to dig through each of those to see if it works or not for you... and you might as well have done a google search instead.

When the questions are "how do you make a triangle with '*'" a dozen times over in September, those questions need to be closed so they don't waste the time of people who are trying to find good questions to answer.

No,SO is not declining. All the common questions have already been answered.

The main problem is people don't research their problem for more then a minute before asking a question.

As someone who sometimes ask non-trivial questions that other people sometimes find useful I don't think this is the complete answer:

I, and I guess others, can easily hesitate a full day, doing search after search after search, before asking on SO.

On the other hand SO makes it really simple to create new accounts and ask questions.

If they really were concerned about answering the same questions again and again they would implement some basic rules like limiting new users from asking questions untilntyey had been active for a full day or something.

Weirdly enough it seems people like to complain about the workload while at the same time refusing to do anything to reduce it.

In fact it is almost as if they enjoy moderating noobs :-|

> All the common questions have already been answered.

This is true if there are no new languages or frameworks.

> The main problem is people don't research their problem for more then a minute before asking a question.

This has been true since the beginning of time. However, it does feel that the responses on SO have gotten more trollish over time.

Try asking questions involving obscure or complex programming problems for which no previous questions exist.

Try getting ANY answer at all.

So the next step is to add AI to answer duplicates automatically?

The article is probably right about some factors that explain the "77% of users only ask one question". But IMOHO it miss an important one: Most of the user find answer to their question only by searching.

In fact once you get rejected (by a troll or not) for asking a question that you would have been able to find on SO, you became more careful before posting.

Also don't forget that a huge majority of the net user are ghost / read only :)

Point based moderation generates toxicity, hacker news gets toxic too. Stack Overflow went all in on moderation before they understood the social consequences of it. There's an opportunity here for a social network with a moderation system that cares about how it makes people feel and how feelings impact user generated content.

this is a really important point. how do you curate for good content while not demoralizing contributors?

and it's a more generalized social challenge. in coaching for example, you need to improve a player's abilities and instincts, which essentially implies that what they're currently doing is not so great. the easiest people to coach understand that they are not already perfect. those who are hardest to coach are those who already believe they are good enough.

for the player, there's a tension between having the self-esteem to assert yourself while having the maturity to accept criticism. you need to be able to encourage both behaviors while maintaining a balance between them.

as you point out, the challenge for an online moderation system is providing a similar balance to users/contributors. the social distance between contributors and moderators makes it hard not to become defensive.

With a dozen exceptions for the diamond (elected) mods, all the moderators are from the community and got to that point with contributions. Nearly all of the are still contributing and moderate as part of the process of trying to find things to answer.

> moderation system that cares about how it makes people feel

Definitely something that's very much needed. But I don't think anyone knows what it would look like and what the distribution of emotional labour would be.

(2015)

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837442 (1 year ago, 39 comments)

More decline in 2016. Questions are not being answered in general or there are professionals responders who don't really understand what you are talking about.

In the other hand there are exciting discussions in the other *.stackexchange.com sites (e.g. reverseengineering, ethereum).

I'm not so sure I agree. I've answered a few Python questions this year. Most of which have gotten several answers pretty quickly. If they didn't get answers, it was often a question that was a poor fit for Stack Overflow (e.g., very specific to a framework, something readily available in the docs).

Yeah, I know I've engendered some unjust vitriol with SO questions (got referred to Hackers - same thing), where the question was non-nonchalantly labeled as polling - and I knew it wasn't because I'd spent hours going through Google Scholar and the ACM databases. But my elaboration only angered someone with a 10K ref who could downvote me all day long.

Another article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4131462 Even older, lots of comments :)

Doesn't get old.

SO is so amazingly useful that I'd like to upvote discuss it weekly if it would result in either SO getting fixed or someone making a better one.

I imagine the better/next one would be build around an AI that learns from users in order to answer to users, all through a chat-like interface. No up/downvote or moderation needed, the AI determines by interacting with the users what is useful and correct, and what is not.

> 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. With this article, I’m exploring the likely reasons for that very, very low percentage.

This is a power law distribution. It is to be expected.

Stack Overflow is useful, but a lot of that usefulness comes from its complete dominance of search results. By keyword stuffing in the sidebar (and last I checked the nofollow links) they maintain a strong search presence for virtually every topic.

So, this position as top tech knowledge hub is sort of artificially propped up at this point. You type in your query, arrive at a page with something vaguely like the question you asked, are faced with pedantic flags about how the question you came to have answered is somehow unfit, and maybe some useful info. Also maybe some outdated info with real unaccepeted answers below it.

I'm not aware of another site that so heavily depends on content it itself seems to consider unworthy, siloed into so many vaguely overlapping sub-sites

Sounds very much like the wikepedia problem: a bunch of long-term members working as mods don't have patience for new people and are hostile to people who aren't already in the club.

None of the Stack Overflow moderation irritations matter to me in the end.

All that really matters to me is that SO has employed a reputation system that provides a strong quality signal for answers to questions that I have. This allows me to quickly assess the quality of any given answer based upon the reputation of the answerer and the upvotes that the answer has received.

All other SO problems, including any aggravations encountered while trying to give back to that community, are relatively insignificant.

FYI, I'm the author of that article. I initially published it in July 2015, when it got ±65,000 views in two days. I republished it @ Hackernoon this weekend at their request, which resulted in ±125,000 additional page views, bringing the total page views of the article since its publication in 2015 to ±245,000. The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations.

On SO, I currently have 11,914 rep 9 gold badges, 66 silver badges and 73 bronze badges. I've posted 492 answers and 6 questions (that haven't been deleted). I've been programming since 1999 and I've worked as an IT professional since 2006, and my experience ranges from PHP and JS to SAP and PL/SQL. I also released my own open source frontend framework and several other open source projects on Github. So I know how to program and understand many of SO's intricate workings!

Those rare times I'm stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to find any useful answer on SO. My questions either get no answers at all or downvoted and/or closed (for arbitrary reasons) by people who clearly lack the experience to even remotely understand what I'm talking about.

During my time on SO, I've been bullied by 20+k users several times and even got a temporary ban by one of them moderators for no other reason but pointing out that another user was acting like "a little Hitler"... in a private conversation with moderation.

Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most privileged segments of its membership.

Considering the popularity of my article, I'm considering writing a follow-up and go in greater detail on my experiences with SO and how SO could be improved. However, I'm quite busy these days, so it may take a while before it actually gets published... if it ever gets published.

Nevertheless, these are my 5 cents I'd like to add to this interaction...

> Those rare times I'm stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to find any useful answer on SO.

That's because when you get stuck, it's on non-trivial, sometimes edge case-y things. When most others get stuck, it's because they are doing something obviously wrong or have a common issue.

I have the same problem. I've asked <5 SO questions, but many of them have been last resort, "Lets see if the Internet knows" type of scenarios. Generally those aren't nearly as rewarding or easy to answer.

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.

I've answered 21 questions, got upvotes on 15 answers, 3 answers accepted by owners, asked 2 questions by myself and both were upvoted. I have no idea what these people in the article are talking about. SO is super friendly and super helpful.

You never found a super-useful question that mods had tried to kill?

Here it is[1]. I've answered it six months after the first time I came across it. It is so specific that some people considered it nonprogramming and tried to close it. Am I complaining? No. For me, the main purpose of SO is to share specific programmer's knowledge that is not covered by documentation and can only be obtained by experience. The only way to share the knowledge is to communicate with the other people, and sometimes you get rejected this way or the other if you failed to communicate your problem or solution clearly. Taking into consideration the amount of help I've got from SO and the satisfaction from watching my answers being upvoted, I'm ok with being rejected from time to time.

[1]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3326955/remove-usb-host-c...

Looking at its history ( http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3326955/revisions ) one can see all of the closes and reopens. This question has not been closed. And it might have been a better question to ask on SuperUser (or now Unix and Linux) instead.

Just because it is something that can be done in the process of debugging doesn't make it a programming question (the question "how do you edit a file" is not a programming question - even if the file is named "hello.c").

I'm apparently in the top 0.54% for this year. Whoever says SO hates new user have never used the moderation tools and read the stuff new users write on this page.

Sure, Stack Overflow kind of sucks sometimes and people are sometimes really up their own asses about things being exactly right and having a question worded explicitly, but it is by far the best resource for programmers to find help from other programmers due to its ubiquitousness in the programming community. I haven't found any other alternatives better; Quora isn't useful for programming questions (a general Q&A/opinion style question is better suited for Quora, but not "What's wrong with my code?"), and I wouldn't use ExpertsExchange. Are there any other notable places to ask these kinds of questions?

So it sucks, but there's no resources to replace it. You might not like it and because it's not something that you have to help with you are free to stop contributing (e.g. you can't just say, "I don't like this, I'm going to stop working on it" at work), but why not help everyone and contribute, either to Stack Overflow or by making a new, better resource, rather than being grumpy and only helping your pessimistic self feel better?

An aside: The header image lags considerably when I scroll (on Safari 10)... Why isn't it just a static image on the page, and have JS to detect when the aspect ratio changes on a page level rather than an image level?

I worship SO like the all-knowing deity it is, but I don't love it. It's a cruel god, like that of the Old Testament. I've never contributed to the site, though I've used it for years, and I never will -- simply because it's too arcane and silly and I don't wish to play the reputation game just to leave a simple comment or whatever. When a new god appears, I'll surrender completely.

A bizarre problem I have had on SO is that, after years of gaining reputation into the 5 digits, now if I ask a question on a topic that is new to me, I often get the response that I should know better if I have a high reputation. It's weird. If I have my colleague ask the same question, a guy with much less reputation, the answers are helpful. It's as if the quality of the question is judged by how much the asker must already know. Which is ridiculous if you explore a lot of different technologies.

Then there are genuine trolls who, despite massive reputation, seem to have the sole goal of proving everyone wrong. It's also weird.

This image has never rung more true to me then when interacting with so many "power" users: http://i.imgur.com/Oy6mA.jpg?fb

Never feel afraid to take people to task for stupid comments, if only to point out that their comment only managed to waste both your time.

I completely agree with you though. I find I have to be very defensive with my question asking these days. I spend time explaining what I've searched for. You still get people telling you it's so obvious a monkey could have found it, but there's generally less talk of me being lazy. Just stupid.

FWIW I'm a moderator on another big SE site and I try to put those sorts of people in their place. It's completely counter productive to be so combative with question-askers... But some people just want to moan.

Similar community problems happened on Wikipedia. Give many users moderation power, and they'll each enforce their own view of what the site should be.

It's funny, because many of the points made about SO in this article remind me of my experiences with HN. My first couple of comments were downvoted, as I did not yet know the HN etiquette and unspoken rules of discourse, and that can be pretty discouraging for newcomer. I'm still pretty reticent to comment for fear of being downvoted.

There is also the familiar rush to be the first to post some news story, which is almost impossible.

All that said, I've had extremely overall positive experiences on both SO and HN. The breadth of collective expertise and depth of comments on both sites is really awe-inspiring. I view the strict rules of engagement as a feature, not a bug.

What we need instead of SO is a wiki similar to the Arch wiki, but for all IT related troubleshooting problems.

Instead of removing "duplicate questions" we can just refine the details of that section of the wiki with more information.

The c2.com wiki is a nice alternative in this space. It's not quite what you're describing, but I think it's worth checking out of your after a general-software-stuff wiki.

A large portion of my rep comes from questions I wrote that were (considerably later) marked "closed", for various reasons. All of them continue to accumulate thousands of views and the occasional point or two... that's never made much sense. Kind of a statement on how nonsensical StackOverflow's become.

It feels almost like the variables in their little machine are out of tune. If they scaled back the free privileges and hire some trained moderators they could probably clean things up a bunch.

There is an air of arrogance in SO that is unpleasant. Help is supposed to be about being open, friendly and relaxed, not arcane rules, criterias and deciding you know best.

If experts are uptight and arrogant the desire to learn quickly vanishes. Being friendly does not preclude being firm.

I have noticed many questions being closed in an arbritrary manner and worse in a mean spirited way. The first may be ok but the second is simple unacceptable. Who are all these people on power trips and why does SO allow it?

> why does SO allow it?

If you know the right incantation you can bring it up on meta and maybe they'll filter it out.

Or maybe people will downvote you and yell at you.

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/172758/what-have-you...

Glad someone brought it up., I had guessed it was only the case with me., it's still a great resource to 'search' answers., but posting your own... only would lead you to humiliation with down-votes.

What I had guessed and stopped posting any question, that they only want to answer anything that's general... not 'specific' at least at this point, i still use SO a lot but only search for possible answers, I have never dared again after being trolled and downvotes.

I recently replied to SO question with a "New feature have been added that supports your use case: link" that was genuinely solving a problem.

Reply got removed by a moderator saying that I need to describe solution and can't just provide the link. I didn't bother. Currently the only answer suggests sub-optimal solutions and I am not replying to SO questions again.

It felt like a land grab - it wouldn't help the questioner, but it would help SO, by bringing more data to their platform.

I'm a top 4% user for the year apparently, I've asked 40 questions & posted 318 answers. SO is a minefield.

It's an excellent resource and I've found so much value out of it, but the moderation is hyper-aggressive at times and often duplicate marks are for old behaviour in old libraries. I think it needs a clean sweep at some stage, leaving the current content but drop everyone back to 0.

It's the best resource by a mile, but the site is filled with grumpy people!

I guess I always figured those things were strongly related (in the causation sense, not just the correlation sense).

Every user that has high karma/reputation/whatever on a site - including this one - should be forced to experience it from a noob's perspective once in a while. It can be a real eye-opener, as the experience for the in-group and the out-group can be almost totally different. How many times have even regular users of a site - not just noobs - pointed out a problem only to be downvoted, harassed, or even banned by the "senior users" who don't see the problem precisely because they are so senior? They're like the "senior architects" on a software project, who no longer contribute actual code (or novel opinions on this side of the analogy) but always sit in judgment of others'. I guess it's a universal human tendency, but the point is that karma systems should be designed to attenuate it instead of reinforcing it.

When I first started trying to post and vote, I had the same experience: why is this web site trying to prevent me from using it? Ohh. They're trying to gamify answering programming questions. Ain't nobody got time for that.

But then a year or so later I logged in and somehow I had cleared all of the caps without having really done anything. I guess some comments or voted on some things and some stuff got voted up. Regardless all of the sudden I could just do whatever I wanted.

Doesn't seem like the incentives are set up right, at least anecdotally in this case. The reward I received was not connected to any sort of earnest attempts at helping the site out. Those were rebuffed. And now I guess I can contribute, but I spent a good while thinking of Stack Overflow as a read-only site that I'm not really in the habit of thinking that way.

There is a problem with giving moderation powers to entrenched individuals who are not experts.

I've seen this on the English language stack exchange, the Japanese language stack exchange, the Physics stack exchange, and on stack overflow. The people who are there on the site gathering points and up and down voting aren't necessarily experts, and in many cases they're amateurs or people who know something about one thing, yet have moderation powers over things they really don't know about.

The same applies to the dustier corners of Wikipedia, where entrenched non-experts often reduce articles to the level of their own ignorance. Since nobody is getting paid for their participation in these sites, it's hardly surprising that these people end up predominating.

A lot of SO people down vote a new users question with the intention of removing the down vote once it's improved.

But the person getting down voted to hell doesn't know that!

They just see a community telling them to go to hell.

Think they'll stick around to read the friendly guide lines?

It's natural that complex, evolving organisms have more and more entropy but their decline, as for what you HNers are saying here, is due to the unavoidable predominance of more and more web-idiots, mostly coming from 3rd and 4th world countries, which I however understand in full: they are looking for recognition as human beings in a global world, guidance to make their talents work and opportunities in richer environments while starting from nothing. It's the same reason a lot of web-idiots, me among them, are writing here on HN from 1st and 2nd world countries. That said, noise is reduced by stricter filters or by changing the definition of noise and your attitude towards it. Your choice.

I've idly wondered how I could restrict queries to questions that have been closed as too <whatever> or not enough <whatever>, as those are often the most interesting and educational items, even if they don't answer my specific question.

http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/218999/hig...

Also, I'm pretty sure Google picks up the text in the close banner, so you could do a search that includes a term for the reason you're interested in.

The complaint is essentially describing how it's turned into Wikipedia, where the author is describing a space where "working the rules" is more important than trying to achieve the goal those rules are meant to enable.

I'm the author of the SKH/SO article (Link was right here: https://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-i...)

So far. I still haven't participated in SO very much. For the most part it isn't even worth asking a question. (It's a good thing and a bad thing) Also I have noted that they try to prevent you from deleting. After you click that submit button it's their property apparently.

For most of my bugs I switched to read the source on Github. Works better for me

"77% of users only ask one question, 65% only answer one question, and only 8% of users answer more than 5 questions."

Old SO user, started during the beta (user:2092), never asked a question. I don't bother with SO because a) sub-standard login (oauth), b) the time to answer a question correctly with sufficient details means it eats into time I can do other things; c) SO mods/response are mostly arseholes.

I also hate how original authoritative documentation is drowned out on google with crappy code examples or empty questions, locked, down voted or ignored.

Interesting that one of the people called out as ruining SO may be in prison for some scary sex/murder fantasies/photos involving minors.

Is this the same guy?

http://www.thenewscenter.tv/home/headlines/Belpre-Sentencing...

http://stackoverflow.com/users/237838/andrew-barber

I won't dispute any of the criticisms of Stack Overflow, but in its defense I'll say that life as a developer in the Stack Overflow era is much easier than it was in the pre-SO era. You could find solutions to your problems online back then, but it took a lot more work. Now, I enter a question or some keywords into Google, click the top SO result, and more often than not, find a well-written and complete answer to my question. I hope that doesn't go away.

I've some very bad experiences with stack overflow. They are very hostile towards new users and the 50 point system that doesn't allow commenting is very absurd. If I ask a question, I should be able to comment for a clarification right?

I wonder if they ever A/B test their point system. I only use stack overflow when Google points me to it.

I think SO can do a much better job at making users actually ask/answer questions rather than just use it as a read only site.

You can comment on your own posts and on answers to your own questions regardless of your points.

Worse than that, I used to be very knowledgeable about a topic and having not played the game and not scored any points, it was too frustrating to answer questions there.

The unfortunate thing is that people often see it as the github of project support, and choose to go there to ask questions rather than a project's mailing list.

It seems like many people are talking only about their experiences as users looking for answers and not from the perspective as a user answering questions.

I agree to a lot of this, despite the criticisms being seen as cliche.

I've found the reddit programming communities to be more helpful as a user, even though finding similar enough content is difficult. Further, I've noticed reddit and blogs edging in on SO's Google results. I wonder if this will be the trend.

SO has been great for so long because the content was trustworthy. The trolls are removing that edge.

stack overflow is one of the best dev resources available.

do people not remember the dark days before trying to unblock the answers in expert sexchange?

For more than a decade before SO existed I was searching the internet and successfully finding answers to questions. There were good sites and bad sites then, good sites and bad sites now. SO didn't change anything. If it didn't exist the information would still be out there and searchable through other sites.

Usenet/DejaNews (pre-acquisition) were my favorite incarnation but there's never been a time that the makeup of sites at the time didn't result in the right information being easy to get.

true, the info has always been there. what SO bought was ux. kind of like slackhq being valued at a bil even though irc/chat has been around for decades. and yep, usenet was great especially for older languages like c.

more recently searching in safaribooksonline.com has become my first step.

One interesting issue with the duplicate answers is that if you notice later a typo in your answer and edit it you get pushed to the bottom of the answer stack, despite having the first answer. This seems like an issue SO could solve to help contributors. I doubt many abuse the system to completely rewrite an answer and stay on top.

In what ordering do you see this feature? Votes, active, or newest. Answers that have the same score are randomly ordered when sorting by votes.

What I've noticed it on it like this example. Post quick answer to simple question. Someone comments on my post pointing out a really simple typo. Fix typo, answer sorts to the bottom of the stack of answers of the save vote number. It always seems to go to the bottom and not a random order, at least in my experience.

It sucks when questions answered five years ago are considered the final word on the topic, and newer questions about the same topic are marked as duplicates.

I want to know the best way to solve the problem in 2016, not five years ago. In that time, we've gone from Java 6 to Java 8, almost everything in the JavaScript world has changed, etc.

I think a part of SO's problem is its size. There are many other smaller communities in the Stack Exchange network that seem to be more friendly. The size of SO prevents it from becoming a community as such, which manifests in the lack of shared norms and ethics which can then be meaningfully enacted in practice.

philosophy.SE is much smaller than SO and the problem is actually far worse over there.

Due to the inherent subjectivity of even what qualifies as philosophical, the mostly Judeo-Christian moderation over there bullies everyone into oblivion for no other reason but disagreement with their ignorant worldview.

Couldn't agree more! The way SO is being moderated, soon it's gonna be next Expert Exchange. IYKWIM

The bigger problem I have with SO is that it's answers are static--they are stuck in amber for eternity.

This is not fine for something like Rust which has changed significantly within the last year or two. Many of the highest voted answers are now WRONG, but there is no way to dislodge them.

That question already has an answer here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326095/please-unpin-...

(Actually many answers. But no resolution.)

I am not sure why but I am very luck with StackOverflow, almost always. It might be due to the fact that I ask detailed questions that are 99% of the time valid questions and I am using languages that has welcoming nice community and usually not extremely popular so trolling is minimal.

I have learned Go language on my own and have written an introductory book on it, but never once did I find help on SO, it was always on Reddit. Somehow reddit community was so helpful that I didn't have to go to SO, didn't even think of going there!

I think some people on SO should ponder the adage:

There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.

I posted once on SO. The response was shitty enough that I would never post again.

Has everyone forgotten "Sexperts Exchange" ? SO is very much useful

I think SO should ponder the old saying:

There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.

the question about "this" really is dumb

Just buy (and read) a book :-)

I don't really agree with this article's assessment.

If your question isn't clear, it's not possible to get good answers. If your question is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology you're using, the best possible answer is "You're fundamentally misunderstanding the technology you're using."

Stack Overflow encourages users to edit other people's questions for clarity and formatting, which I think is helpful for a lot of new users that don't know how the site works yet. And my experience has been that when there isn't enough information in a question, you tend to get comments asking for more, which is productive.

I do agree that Stack Overflow can be a bit daunting for new users, especially because you're not allowed to comment right off the bat. I believe the threshold is 50 reputation, which can be hard to get early on, because questions get answered so quickly on Stack Overflow that it's hard to find questions that still need an answer.

SO is an invaluable resource but I don't ask questions because of the hostility there, plus a lot of times in thinking about a question to phrase it properly I end up answering it myself.

But one of the major problems that I see there are the people who comment solely for the sake of commenting, it seems like they must get paid by the word they comment so much and it's never helpful, always snarky and irrelevant.

The one thing missing from most sites is the meta-evaluating of the mods, the way slashdot had. That was one of the more innovative things about slasdot back in the day.

It would randomly ask users how accurate a mod was for a particular mod that he or she made. I'm supposing that if enough people voted against the mod, their mod would be reversed and privileges removed.

Places like Reddit and SO need this in order to control the mods themselves.

I've never been a user of SO, i don't find it useful except really obscure stuff; I always reach for docs first and those usually have my answer, and typically a better answer.. There are many occasions when co-workers will come and say "LOOK HERE's THE SO ANSWER THE GOLDEN KEY" and that answer many times was just wrong.. or half the time didn't apply at all to what was happening

Let's be honest, Stack Overflow and that network of sites has been in decline for years. Sadly it has turned into a vast and wide content farm and SEO ploy that is full of search spam and and users who copy/paste material from legitimate sources. To top it off, Stack Overflow uses "nofollow" on the outbound links to make sure the true source of material gets no credit in the eyes of Google, Bing, etc. Rinse and repeat for years, and spammers have taken over the asylum, with some trolls for good measure too, and that's unfortunately much of Stack Overflow today.

How did this happen?

In short, they appeared to receive preferential treatment from Google after complaining very publicly and loudly about not ranking at the top of search results. Ever since then they have widely dominating search results for any vaguely related technical query. Ironically, at that point in time their primary complaint was about other content farms scraping their content.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/trouble-in-the-house-of-google...

http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-qa-quora-may-be-tur...

>> JS: All of these sites that go to Stack Overflow, scrape our content, and reprint it with garbage ads, Google Adsense-encrusted pages.They're basically producing worse versions of our pages and they use these slimy SEO techniques, so they actually rank higher than us.

>> For a long time, we were getting enormous complaints from our own users that they'd search on Google and they'd find Stack Overflow content that had been stripped from its useful form but SEO'd like crazy and encrusted in ads and thrown up willy-nilly. And these sites were getting a lot of traffic. So that was his complaint and of course he phrased it in this larger frame of "Is Google losing their edge, etc. etc.?"

>> BI: It got a lot of attention. Do you think Google's doing a good job of fixing this sort of problem?

>> JS: They fixed it. They called us up at the time and said, "Thank you for bringing that up. You have lit a fire under the team that is supposed to be working on that problem that has not been delivering."

Matt Cutts, then the head of Google Web Spam, posted to Hacker News about this to "fix" the problem of sites outranking Stack Overflow.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286

What seemed like newly preferential treatment directly impacted hundreds of other sites that lost huge volumes of their traffic to the newly crowned king-of-search Stack Overflow. For example:

https://www.daniweb.com/digital-media/digital-marketing/sear...

>> As many of you know, DaniWeb was hit by a Google algorithm update back in November 2012 and we lost about 50% of our search traffic. In investigating the issue, I discovered that DaniWeb, in addition to most other programming forums out there, all lost their google traffic to StackOverflow.

That, in turn, perpetuated the reposting/scraping activity and blatant spam posts to the StackOverflow network, since the site network ranks dominantly in every vaguely related query. Now years later, an even larger volume of material on Stack Overflow is not original content and doesn't even pretend to be. It's absolutely littered with copied/pasted content and blatantly spammy/promotional posts from around the web.

From the outside looking in, it appears that Stack Overflow has become exactly what they once actively complained about.

I'm for more hostility. There should be more difficult to ask questions, there are way too much people asking idiot questions there. Allowing this makes the site worse for people who really have important questions.

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