Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20%
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However, perhaps that wasn't their focus. My impression is the Q&A site was supposed to be mostly a gateway to their other services, and for that to work, the Q&A part simply had to be "good enough". It's an interesting strategy that perhaps didn't work out quite the way they had hoped it would.
Edit: Just to check if moderation policies have changed since I last looked, I did a quick search for questions containing the phrase "pros and cons". As unfortunately expected, practically all of the questions are closed: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=pros+and+cons
On one of the sister sites to SO, there's a post about pros and cons on their meta - https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... - such questions are often a moderation headache when you get the inevitable spam and the poor quality answers of "I can't believe anyone didn't mention XYZ".
Look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15142/what-are-the-pros-... and start reading through and consider the one that starts out with "@Keith" responding to a different answer or "A SQL stored proc doesn't increase the performance of the query" being the entirety of the answer.
Such questions, when left open can get awful answers that are difficult to clean up.
Have you considered that there are sites with as laser like of a focus on pros and cons as SO maintains on Q&A? https://www.slant.co is one such site. https://www.slant.co/topics/607/~best-java-ides https://www.slant.co/topics/440/~best-nosql-databases-for-we... and so on.
I wish Stackoverflow would buy https://slant.co and just point people to that site for opinions.
This is also something I don't like, but I wonder if they went on, if the website would become another place for flamewars - something that happens a LOT when you have low moderation.
They may be interesting to read. They may be popular. But most of the time by page 2 and even worse at page 5, it’s crap. And that crap requires an excessive amount of community moderation work to keep clean and try to avoid having more people add answers to the bottom of page 7 that are already stated 6 times on previous pages.
If the moderation tools are less powerful than the popularity keeping it there, there isn’t much reason to moderate.
And thus the culture by those who shovel crap daily to try to shut down opinion based questions early - so they don’t have to do more work later.
Every attempt I’ve seen at an opinion oriented SE alternative has failed to get sufficient expert answering. It’s not fun as a ${Lang} expert to have a newbie argue with you regularly about some feature or design choice.
One thing I've noticed, that drives me crazy, is people demanding more information in response to a question, without any intention of using that information to help find an answer. Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. I don't mean to suggest that more details aren't useful, only that it isn't helpful in any way to ask for more information if you don't intend to follow up. (Perhaps that could be improved by allowing those sorts of requests to be sent privately, and without any chance of generating points?)
> With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming.
The "build a library" being the key part. Vague questions aren't that useful in building the library in particular because lacking the necessary information, they can have too many unhelpful answers. Thus the focus on the problem with example demonstrating the problem (so the next person with the problem can verify that it is their problem or not) that gets answers.
Furthermore, you appear to be under a misunderstanding of how the stack overflow reputation system works.
> Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details.
No one gets points for comments. At all. The voting on comments is purely for visibility ranking of helpful and constructive aspects to the post they are on... and nothing else. No points.
The reason that people ask those clarifying questions is to make sure that they are answering the right question and aren't wasting their time on trying to answer something that turns out to not be the problem. Say someone asks how to do XYZ in C++... and the person gives an answer for C++17... and then the OP comes back and says "sorry, I'm using turbo C++ and that doesn't work." Instead a comment asking "what version of C++ are you using" up front to make sure that the person asking the question gets the correct answer rather than something that is unhelpful.
There is no private messaging on Stack Overflow, probably for the same reason there's none on HN. It increases the moderation workload and possibility of bullying in private. I'd hate to be Jon Skeet if there was private massing. Furthermore, having it be a comment presents the information in public (including the clarification) so that if someone else has the problem they can read the comments and be aware that something may not work in their situation even if parts of the questions match. ("You didn't include a version of C++ in this and it appears to be a very old version, could you update the question with the version you are using?")
If that is truly their goal (and I don't doubt that it's at least a hope) then they should go ahead and remove all the vague questions from their database, or at least flag them so they don't show up in web searches. After all, who's using Google to find unsolved, vague problems?
> No one gets points for comments. At all. The voting on comments is purely for visibility ranking of helpful and constructive aspects to the post they are on... and nothing else. No points.
I see. I didn't realize that. They do get the number but I guess it doesn't "persist" throughout the site. Good to know. Though, then I guess I don't understand what their motivation is to respond with useless comments.
> Instead a comment asking "what version of C++ are you using" up front to make sure that the person asking the question gets the correct answer rather than something that is unhelpful.
That's OK, I guess, but it seems to be counter to the idea of building a library. Rather than have a set of answers that may address the question for various versions of C++, you have a question and zero answers (because the person asking for details disappeared). That's the reality, anyway.
In any case, it wouldn't even have to be a private message. Simply having a "needs more detail" checkbox that hides the question (from Google et al) until the detail is added would be enough to improve the SO experience.
Reputation changes happen from: * Upvote on a question you asked (+5) * Upvote on an answer your provided (+10) * Accepted answer you provided (+15) * Accepted edit (+2) * Down vote on a question you asked (-2) * Down vote on an answer you provided (-2) * Down vote you gave on an answer (-1); yes down voting other peoples answers costs you points. * Receiving a bounty (+varies) * Giving a bounty (-varies)
Thats it. Nothing about comments. Nothing about closing questions.
The comments aren't necessary useless. They are often trying to help the person asking the question write a better question that can get a better answer. If the comment truly is useless, it should be flagged to be removed (and that won't give or cost anyone any points).
Guessing at the answer isn't that helpful. You've got no idea if it solved the problem or not. The next person to find it with search won't know if it solved the problem or not either. So instead of one question with an answer that did, you've got a question that has a dozen guesses... and you've got to go through and figure out which one works for you in your environment. Might as well have searched a forum and paged through all the guesses there.
Questions that don't have any answers eventually get removed by the system. https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006 describes the criteria.
> If the question is more than 30 days old, and ... > has −1 or lower score > has no answers > is not locked
> If the question is more than 365 days old, and ... > has a score of 0 or less, or a score of 1 or less in case of deleted owner > has no answers > is not locked > has view count <= the age of the question in days times 1.5 > has 1 or 0 comments
The "needs more detail" is often part of the close reason. The question is closed not as a "you did bad" but rather as a "don't try to guess at an answer until this is cleared up"
> Questions seeking debugging help ("why isn't this code working?") must include the desired behavior, a specific problem or error, and the shortest code necessary to reproduce it in the question itself. Questions without a clear problem statement are not useful to other readers. See: How to create a Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example.
> Please clarify your specific problem or add additional details to highlight exactly what you need. As it's currently written, it’s hard to tell exactly what you're asking. See the How to Ask page for help clarifying this question. If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.
The hides from google, again, is the "this is how SO makes its advertising impression money." The reason given often is the "breaks the internet." If people linked to the closed question from outside that link becomes a 404. I'm skeptical on that being the only reason as I noted the advertising impression dollars there. I personally believe that maintaining poor quality material, no matter how many people link to it, is damaging to the brand and sets a poor example for what people asking questions expect. And thus, when they do catch the eye of someone who has an Atwoodian (quality above all else, delete the stuff that doesn't contribute) philosophy of quality on the site, it becomes a poor user experience for everyone involved. And as Jeff isn't there and Joel is CEO, the emphasis is different.
I say Atwoodian there - thats following the call of:
> It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
The Spolskyians are following the call of:
> What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.
Its shifted a bit from those original calls to people to contribute... but you can see a profound difference in the emphasis between those different calls for contributors. Then give https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/02/22/are-some-questions-too... a read and look at the editor history of https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions
The thing I'm trying to say there is the "why don't these questions get hidden from google" gets an "its complicated" and goes to the top of the company and its founder about what is appropriate for the site and not. Its not something easily done or decided.
I guess this is fundamentally where I disagree with SO's staff and/or moderation team. I occasionally find those questions and their answers very useful, when there are answers, and again more useful than the perhaps ideal, specific, and ignored questions that fill the site. When questions get too specific, the only person that might benefit from the reply is the person that posted the question in the first place. At that point it might as well not be part of a public forum.
My favorite SO pages are those that generate multiple replies with different perspectives, and often different languages or at least libraries. Those questions are admittedly usually vague but I think that given the result (many interesting answers from different people) that is a net positive. You might say that the answers given look like guesses, and that'd be completely fair, but there's still value. Certainly more value than an unanswered question abandoned by both the asker and the one person who expressed a small amount of interest.
I do see the difference you're describing (between Atwoodian and Spolskyians) and I can see the merits in both sides. I'm not satisfied with either, but that's more on me than on SO. In any case, I doubt I'm making any unique or new arguments here. I'm mostly just frustrated with SO and Google in general because I almost never find a solution to my problems.
As a sort of aside:
> The key distinction to make here, in my mind, is that all questions are ultimately in service of the people answering them. That is the audience you need to satisfy if you want to have any hope of creating and sustaining a community of peers learning from each other.
That seems to be how you make a site by and for narcissists, or people otherwise interested in hearing themselves talk. It'd be a different story if the answers were paid, I guess, because at least then the motivation would be something more tangible.
To be honest, I probably would have written SO off entirely if I'd seen this comment earlier.
That last comment is more elaborately written in https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... . Read it all, but it concludes with:
> We feel that the world is awash in questions, but not answers. Answers are the real unit of work in any Q&A; system. Therefore, the only logical thing to do is to maximize the happiness and enjoyment of answerers. If this means aggressively downvoting or closing unworthy and uninteresting questions, so be it. Without a community of people willing to answer questions, it really doesn’t matter if there are questions at all, does it?
This was written in the early days of Stack Overflow. I believe the philosophy there was "its easy to get questions." I'm not sure I agree with that... or at least, it is certainly not easy to get well asked questions and separating the well asked form poorly asked questions is an immense undertaking. I don't think the system that SO has has scaled well. That you have trouble finding answers that may exist show that there is too much noise in the system and unless you know exactly what you are looking for it becomes difficult. Try removing too much of the noise and people start complaining about losing internet points.
Aside from the Atwoodians and Spolskyians... there are the Zuckerbergites.
> No, Zuckerberg didn't have anything to do with Stack Overflow. The philsophy of :+1: however, is one that can be seen on Stack Overflow. The web is a social place, and Stack Overflow is too. People you interact with, you up vote. It makes them feel good and you feel good knowing they feel good. No one likes to get a dislike or unfriend on Facebook - and no one likes to get down voted or have their questions closed on Stack Overflow.
And the LinkedIn
> The world is a hard enough place to get a good job. Especially when there are scores of other people trying to that single entry level coding position that opened up and you just got out of college. So, how do you set yourself apart from all the others? You put Stack Overflow on your resume. You provided 200 answers on Stack Overflow! Opps, that one just got deleted.
And the freELance
> Did you know there is a site out there where you can pay money for people to do some work? I haven't gotten job as a programmer yet, but I took a bid on eLance for writing a facebook clone for $200 for some beer money. I know some JavaScript and php... At worst, I don't get it done but have some great material for when I get out of college (or maybe I'll drop out and become self taught on the weekends while answering phones)
All of these are competing for how the community on the site is run. Without direction you get rules and squabbles. The results of this show up in reviews (first post - everyone gets an up vote no matter how poorly written) and close / delete "wars" where people try to remove something seen as cruft and other people try undoing that... and it ends up undeleted and locked (and contributing to the noise that makes it harder for you to get an answer with a google search).
The site that you get when you don't try to have the great answers that arise from good questions, well... https://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index?sid=396545663&link=list
As to the narcissists? Its more of a "the people answering are trying to answer the question once." Its not to hear themselves, but so that programming problems are resolved by searching rather than by asking. Similar to the driving goal of Wikipedia - all knowledge easily available.
If answers were paid... that goes down an interesting path for philosophy and motivation. A difficult path for a web site (money is hard to handle) and motivation (you're only putting $0.05 on this question, we'll, I'll give you $0.05 of my time. "This can't be processed by a regular expression." - poor answers to poorly paid questions)
EDIT: To clarify that a bit, I am interested in what the upsides are except for possibly saving some money. An orderly shutdown usually seems preferable to me over quickly killing the process, for both sides.
For larger companies with layoffs beyond a threshold, they employer must give 60 days notice. I think they can instead give 60 days severance.
The Stack Overflow layoffs are 60 people and 20% of their workforce, and so wouldn't (even at a single site) be subject to the WARN Act’s 60-day notice requirement.
Does that kind of situation still confer protections in Germany? If so, how do German manufacturing companies manage to not go bankrupt? Do all the companies subscribe to huge insurance pools?
If there are ten employees you need to cut, shouldn't they be cut based on either their recent performance, or a completely random method?
Maybe it's putting lipstick on a pig, maybe it's fairness.
Layoffs (mass dismissal) are very hard, because usually it means the whole region has economic problems, and those that get laid off are especially vulnerable - because they almost by definition work in a sort of dying industry/trade.
No, because layoffs are position-based. If it's a performance related cull then that's not the same as redundancies. If you want to get rid of people like that then you need ironclad documentation and/or to provide generous packages.
When I was made redundant a decade ago in the UK I got:
- week's "consultation period" during which the ranking process for who would be made redundant was explained
- pay in lieu of month's notice
- (optional on behalf of the employer) three month's pay for signing away my right to sue for wrongful dismissal
The only situation in which employees can really lose out is if the company goes bankrupt in which case they are at risk of losing their last paycheque.
> Per Chapter 4, Part 4, Sections 1400-1408 of the Labor Code, WARN protects employees, their families, and communities by requiring that employers give a 60-day notice to the affected employees and both state and local representatives prior to a plant closing or mass layoff. Advance
The layoff that I was part of in '09 in California (Netapp, ~500 employees let go, about 6% of staff) had two different groups in the IT side of the house:
A. Out the door now. B. Pick your brain for some time.
The out the door now were let go immediately, though they were on payroll for 60 days. They weren't allowed in the building, but they were technically still employees. Severance package followed the 60 days.
The pick your brain group which I was part of were still allowed in and we worked. We had 30 days to sign a "increase pay and pick brain from Feb until July" or out the door with 30 days left on the WARN (if I remember it correctly). Come July, the 60 day window kicked in and then the severance package.
I am of the understanding that this approach isn't unusual with tech companies.
We know nothing about severance, job assistance, etc. You can't really infer anything about this subject from that tweet.
That's how it's done in sane countries because notice periods are proscribed by law. And no, it does not lead to people vandalizing their workplace.
In "sane countries" you can have people stop working immediately as long as you pay them. That's really all the notice period is for, it has nothing to do with continued responsibilities.
Tech company severance packages are usually pretty ok, I would bet stack overflow is giving packages that would be just fine in other countries.
From the https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow, the first round was from 2010 - 7 years ago. USV will like to get their exit soon.
- week ahead if he or she was employed for less than month - month ahead if he or she was employed for less than three years - three months ahead if he or she was employed for more than three years
This goes both ways however, as employee has to notify his employeer on same basis that he or she quits. This introduces amount of games to recruitment process, where company frequently not only has to make bet by deciding to hire somebody, but also make sure that they'll wont be outbid during the three months that have to pass for person to change employeer
In the US, it's just assumed that the ex-employee will be as malicious as possible and so it's best to get rid of them fast as possible.
Think of it more like a severance package and it makes more sense.
The employee to give him some time to find a new job (he is entitled to some days off during these 3 months to interview).
The employer to (at least theoretically) force the employee to still work to prepare a handover, docs, etc.
What happens in practice depends on the case : these 3 months may be shortened via a mutual agreement, the employer may force the employee not to come to work (but still pay him) and other arrangements are possible.
Note: I am American, and most states are aren’t “right-to-work” meaning you can quit at a moment’s notice, but it’s common courtesy to give 2 weeks notice.
The term "right to work" has nothing to do with employment status. It's political branding for laws that forbid mandatory union membership. It's a pretty effective union busting tool and has contributed to the decline of organized labor as a political force.
I think you're confusing it with "at will" employment.
I think it's fair to say teachers have the right to be teachers without joining a teachers' union. I don't think enforcing that right "contributes to the decline" of unions. Organizational models should be able to handle that sort of freedom to choose.
To me, the question is why unions don't innovate in their organizational models and policies so that giving employees freedom to choose is moot?
I don't think it's part of an American social contract that you would be forced to tangibly support candidates who have (by some accounts) immoral positions on abortion or immigration (to pick to polarizing issues).
Often times, especially in IT, when people are let go, it's often important for security reasons just to have them stop working immediately, and that worker is still going to get his salary.
When employees quit, it's not 3 months mandated, that's just the limit. You just work out your transition with your employer. Most job changes usually happen within just a few weeks.
Anyone can quit at a moments notice, for any or no reason at all. For the sake of one’s colleagues and reputation it is widely considered good practice to give no less than 2 weeks notice, though this is merely custom.
Responsibilities go both ways.
No one can "force" you to continue working somewhere, of course, but you may lose compensation for extra vacation time and could be liable for financial damage you cause for your employer. But I've never actually heard about that being an issue.
It's very common to just mutually agree to part ways right away.
And of course there are provisions both ways that allow immediate termination, like gross negligence from the employee or the employer not paying out your salary.
Of course many companies find that it's not flexible enough for them, so they abuse the system and illegally hire low qualified workforce as "independent contractors" on civil contracts instead of work contracts. Search for "zero hour contracts" for UK, but it's rampant also in Poland, Italy and other countries where unions are not strong and employees' rights guaranteed by law are not enforced.
If you look closely at US startups you'll usually find the founders and senior staff are on "notice required" contracts of several months.
Modern slavery is things like confiscating the passports of your immigrant workers so they can't escape.
- You can do it in mutual agreement (see below).
- You can quit directly but you generally forgo any company benefits (like build up bonuses) and you might/most likely not have rights to state-supported unemployment benefits (70% of your last paycheck).
As an employer:
- You can either in mutual agreement (in which case the employee usually also keeps his/her rights since the contract does not end abruptly).
- By court order but this usually requires extensive documentation on malpractice of the employee.
Notice time usually is at least 1 full month in most cases, can be shorter if the employment is not time-fixed or by agreement. All notices are for both employer and employee.
I do not know exactly but if you have build up "vacation days" you usually cannot use those in your last month and forgo those, unless you agree with your employer in some sort of scheme. "Going in sick" will get you reported in which case a investigator will check you out and you most likely will forgo your sickness benefits. (I've had this once already, but not for contract finalization but reporting it really late. The guy was very surprised to see someone actually sick when he checked it out so I guess abuse happens often.)
There are some contract termination clauses (money mostly) in some contracts I've seen but as far as I know they are not enforceable in any way (since that equals servitude by power). Thinks like immediately handing back lease-cars and laptops under force of fine are though.
Yes, but at least California courts have found these "garden leave" provisions in contracts are not enforceable. [1]
As for the rest of the United States, I'm not sure, but it seems like somewhat unsettled law as such notice requirements are quite rare in the US.
1. " And it turns out that companies also cannot require their employees to provide any specific length of notice, even when they offer to compensate them at 100% of their salary and benefits for the duration of the notice period. California courts have found these mandatory provisions to be an unenforceable restraint, as well." https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/understanding-californi...
Most worker rights, in the end, become a matter of how much money they'll pay you to leave if they want you to leave.
Yes, one could--theoretically--fight back and not accept the money, but that only means you'd be a pariah in the company. What's the point of staying if the company wants you to leave and offers you a package? Take the money and get a new job in a couple weeks...
Besides, I doubt Poland has arbitration clauses, so the workers would be free to sue. It would not be pleasant to stay in that job either way as you correctly pointed out though.
That said, I'm not sure if it's true or effective, but having worked at Stack Overflow for years I'm pretty sure this was done to spare overall misery.
My point is that we don't know the details, a tweet is way too short.
Labor seeks regulations that makes it difficult to be suddenly terminated. The primary downside is that companies are reluctant to hire employees.
The general counter argument is that if you make it difficult for companies to terminate employees, then companies will search for alternate mechanisms to sustain profitability. For example, instead of terminating an employee, the company might reduce executive pay, or pass the increased expenses on to customers.
Again, I agree with you.
Well that won't happen.
Apart from a few cases where executives agree to take all their compensation in equity to rescue a failing business, they tend to pay themselves first, sometimes at the cost of the long term health of the business. Philip Green / BHS is the example that comes to mind.
I think you’d have to show examples where a company:
1. Was not allowed to fire employees,
2. Executives did not take a pay cut,
3. The company continued to do well.> it had found that “the main purpose of the sale of BHS was to postpone BHS’s insolvency to prevent a liability to the schemes falling due while it was part of the Taveta group of companies ultimately owned by the Green family, and/or that the effect of the sale was materially detrimental to the schemes.”
IE, Green underfunded the pension scheme in order to pay himself several hundred million pounds, and then sold the company off to escape liability for it. He "voluntarily" paid back £363 million in order to end an investigation that might have resulted in him being jailed.
While the employer can take legal action and sue them, proving that someone is sick is rather difficult (and frowned upon by most judges). There are many cases where my mother's employer could have easily proven that (because witnesses same him partying or there are even pictures online where he partied on that day) but it is generally not worth it because a trail is more expensive then paying one month's pay and also not worth the time and overhead.
Not everyone takes work very seriously, unfortunately, which makes the process suck for everybody. When my mother's boss has an opportunity to fire them eithout notice (because they are late or caught steeling), he generally does that, which is super unfair for the employees who would have worked until their very last.
Correct. Remember ROLES are made redundant, not people. If the role no longer exists then by definition there's nothing to handover.
If there is a handover then there better also be a big chunk of cash to the departing worker in return for waiving the right to sue, because if there isn't, it's tribunal time.
(Disclaimer: I work @ Indeed, but I've seen friends quickly hired using Prime.)
StackOverflow Sunsetting Documentation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14917765
Why I think they targeted the wrong market:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12399438
tl;dr:
- it doesn't make sense to donate open-source docs to an offsite corporate service that might shut down
- also, the very common complaint that SO has poor moderation, groupthink doesn't work for docs like it does for one-topic answers
We weren't really interested in their google juice, all we wanted was their actual functionality. Some non-stackoverflow domain would have been fine.
It just seemed like a missed opportunity on their end. I don't think we were the only company asking for this kind of service...
Good times - having to write a huge authentication / middleware layer to make sure everything is correct.
https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise
Edit: while interesting, this (private internal instance for your team) is not what johansch is after (separate public instance dedicated to your product, for your users)
Still no solution for a company wanting to host a public stackoverflow instance for some product.
I've never personally seen a thriving Get Satisfaction instance. So maybe I'm being a little too hard on them. But I must've come across a hundred of them. I don't believe it's a well designed product.
I wonder: How would people feel if they went the Wikipedia way? It's obviously a very beneficial site, but not as widely applicable as Wikipedia. I personally prefer the Wikipedia model of being ad-free and having no additional product and doing a fundraising drive every so often. PBS as well.
That said, I certainly think given the audience of SO that there are several opportunities for them, so it'll be interesting to see what works.
Personally I'd be more interested in seeing StackOverflow branch out. What have they done these past few years? It seems like StackOverflow has remained stagnant, yet they have so much potential.
The complaints I see are usually related more to thinking that they really shouldn't need to spend so much (the FY17-18 plan for expenses is $76.8M [2]), and that their fundraising drives always make it seem like they're on the brink of death when they actually have a huge amount of money in the bank.
[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
[2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia...
SO is too big to go for a Wikipedia style model unless they strip off just the core SO part and relevant engineers and make only that part donation based. And I'd guess the other 90% would end up in layoffs anyway.
Can you elaborate? Do you mean the other stack exchange sites like Photography, Gardening, Software Engineering, etc.? Or the careers site, or something else entirely? I'm only aware of the Stack Exchange network and careers.
[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=File%3A2014...
Edit: Reminds me of the situation of SoundCloud (company offering a service loved by their consumers, still can't monetize enough to satisfy investors, let alone cover the costs (huge headcount))
Seeing this post also made me realize I have no clue how the company makes money.
Here's a crazy idea: what if Stackoverflow developed a search engine for developers? Usually I get to Stackoverflow posts through Google but perhaps Stackoverflow can provide a better experience by doing code specific web crawling.
It's just something people say they do online to feel good.
- Ad-blocker users skew young and wealthy.[1] The developer community as a whole also skews young and wealthy.
- If you are aware of the existence of ad-blocking technology, you probably use it.[2]
- Via comparison with other sites, you can also make some extrapolations. Take IGN - not a perfect proxy, but a reasonable one, with a core audience that is probably fairly demographically similar to the core audience for most developer-oriented sites. Approximately 40% of their traffic was using ad-blockers in 2015.[3] A Wired statement posted in 2016 has 20% of their traffic using ad-blockers.[4]
- Anecdotal evidence: every dev I've worked with has at least one ad-blocker installed. The vast majority of dev-adjacent people I've worked with - PMs, technical writers, designers - have ad-blockers installed.
Put it together and I think it makes a fairly compelling case that techies are the last audience on earth you'd want to orient your online marketing towards. I used to hope that something like The Deck[5], which was explicitly targeted towards "web, design & creative professionals", would be a good solution to this, and I even permitted their ads on Metafilter, but they shut down last year, presumably because they just weren't making enough money. They did everything that people claimed they wanted: the ads were unobtrusive, mostly text and optimized images, they didn't engage in tracking, they didn't sell user data (as far as I know), and they still couldn't make it work.
1. https://marketingland.com/ad-blocker-usage-highest-among-key... people-and-high-earners-143546
2. https://digiday.com/media/survey-80-percent-know-ad-blocking...
3. http://adage.com/article/digital/websites-hit-hardest-ad-blo...
4. https://www.wired.com/how-wired-is-going-to-handle-ad-blocki...
Your first link messes up though. Seems to be the correct link, but got cut off somehow. In case you don't or can't correct it anymore, it's: https://marketingland.com/ad-blocker-usage-highest-among-key...
Also, thanks for fixing that link.
I find the one bad actor excuse to be just that. Another rationale or excuse.
So yeah I think the people just don't want any ads at all. Just like if I showed people how to block Spotify ads on their desktop and on how to do it on rooted android or iPhones, many people would stop paying Spotify. I don't tell my friends about these things for moral reasons, but it's just adding on to the point. People by and large will go with what's convenient. A simple app that can block Spotify ads will do for them. While jailbreaking would be too inconvenient.
"Adblock users in the US are 1.5x as likely to have a bachelor’s degree than the average American adult, increasing to 3x as likely among 18-24 year olds. Pronounced adblock usage among college-age respondents points to campuses as a major vector for adblock adoption."
Personally, I think being online without ad-blockers, VPN, and AV is like having public, unprotected sex with strangers.
Now it is understood that when I click on an ad for a widget and buy the widget it is easy to tell. However if I see an ad for a widget, and next week buy that widget the ad probably worked even though it is muck harder find a cause/effect relationship.
Thus we need to keep reminding people that clicks are rarely the point of ads. The point is the sale. Radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, park benches, bill boards (and many more) all have advertisements. The people who place those ads believe they drive sales long term - and they have statistical data to back that up. All of that data came without a single click.
An old news article said they only get ~33% from banner ads. Most revenue comes from from job listings:
Good to see them back to a focus. I guess hiring could be a good cash cow but all of the sub communities are a bit much.
I have a question that I was my own answer on. It was pretty obscure (pageant/cygwin specific) and when I finally found the answer I cited the 2 sources I used hoping it would save others time in the future with an easier google than what I went through
The most popular answers and questions tend to be new things in popular SDK's. The unanswered things are deeper problems in existing API's. You either get an answer in a very short term by multiple people or nothing at all.
I remember a few technologies that officially said something like "support is provided through custom stackoverflow tags", but it didn't bring more functionalities.
A company trying to launch its new technology (i can imagine asp.net core for example) could have an associated community channel to talk about it, with automatic links from tags. That would be a nice addition.
My limit was the "Time to take a stand incident" when Joel effectively dictated that the developer community of StackOverflow must agree with the statement.
> Carving up the world into ... nations ... is both morally repugnant and frankly stupid
The follow up of mods keeping the post open, backing it up and enforcing that idea on other questions really hammered home the idea that StackOverflow belongs to them, regardless of whatever they might say.
There was no room for nuance, just an American-centric political orthodoxy you must follow or aren't welcome.
[1]https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take...
Here is the full quote:
>It’s impossible not to see the parallel: the only way to build a successful world today is to allow the contributions of everyone. Carving up the world into us vs. them, building walls, and demonizing religions, nations, and refugees is both morally repugnant and counterproductive, and it goes so much against the spirit of Stack Overflow that as a community we must speak out.
Whereas, Joel dictated that if you supported "carving up the world" you were against the sprit of Stack Overflow, no matter how that might impact you as a non-American.
Is anyone archiving them and making the archives available in any useful way?
[1] Source: [2002] https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buys-remaining-deja-com-bus...
Maybe I was better off in that I was getting my distro (Slackware) along with the giant 'Linux for dummies' book in which it was included. It still never got me far enough to be able to remove my Windows partition.
Getting a Winmodem to work in Linux was possibly, but not exactly easy. I couldn't afford a better modem at the time, so I just kept hacking away at it and booting back into Windows and searching the web to try to figure it out. This was 1996 or so; there was far less information on the web than there is today, and search engines weren't exactly great at finding what you needed.
I think I finally got online from Linux after a week or two. :)
I printed-out both of those over a long period on the work printers, using the reverse side of single-sided pages recovered from the paper recycling bins. And then settled in for a weekend...
I still remember choosing to include AX.25 in the kernel because it seemed like a cool thing with which I'd want to experiment at some point. Never got around to it!
Also I was a teenage nerd with lots of time for home computing.
On the flip side, back then most of the programs I was writing could fit on a few screens and had almost no external dependencies besides libc and the C book was the SO for libc.
That's not to say that SO doesn't bring value. It has nice tagging and discoverability through search engines, good moderation, and an achievement and reputation system that encourages people to make quality contributions. But the days before it existed weren't so dark.
StackOverflow was such a welcome relief to this site and Atwood also wrote about expertsexchange in a blog post.
> I never appreciated how easy Experts-Exchange makes it for us. They are almost universally loathed. We don't just have a rival, we have a larger than life moustache-twirling, cape-wearing villain to contrast ourselves with.
Source: [ 2009 ] https://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch-enemy/
-The failure of the documentation (which failed for various reasons)
-VCs who want their return on their precious dollars.
So sorry to hear this. My thoughts to everyone, it is a very difficult day.
I actually like people outside my country reminding my fellow citizens that we do have it pretty bad and it is in our power to change it if we decide to do that one day. The message might eventually soak in after some decades have passed.