“New home page seems like Stack Overflow doesn't allow free use any more”
meta.stackoverflow.com
meta.stackoverflow.com
Second, I'm guessing that revenue from job postings (Careers section) and banner ads did not bring enough money. From what I remember reading, I think SO also had high hopes of the other StackExchange specialty sites using the same Q&A engine would be more successful (i.e. more banner ads, more money, etc) but it turns out they were only a modest impact on revenue. (E.g. MathOverflow is an interesting community with Fields Medal mathematics PhDs but it probably doesn't bring much revenue.)
Therefore, this leaves the "enterprise sales" revenue idea of licensing the Q&A engine to private teams. (Hey, Slack just had their IPO and some companies pay for Gitlab and Github -- so let's push for selling SO Q&A for enterprises.) This monetization pressure leads to using the SO landing page as a giant billboard for their enterprise product. (I'm not making a personal complaint but just observing that they seem to be in a difficult monetization dilemma and their actions to improve their financial situation just irritates the users.)
IMO, I'm skeptical that internal Q&A platforms would actually be useful for companies and I made a previous comment explaining why.[1]
to get SSO, we'd have to start out with the 11$/user/month plan, in my current company(~1000 users) that would mean roughly 132 000$ a year making it a pretty tough sell.
... And lacking the integration with other systems, the enterprise version of SO (and for that matter, teams) really lacks a good price / integration / use pitch.
1) You can always get them cheaper than the list price 2) If it works, the software pays for itself in less than a year
You can always get a tool for low-cost (or even free with open source). Having something that is already used by developers and has a good reputation makes it a pretty easy sale in my book.
As I became responsible for an internal library used company-wide, I pushed for the Q&A site to be our primary means of communication, and would always refer to it after answering questions from people contacting me directly. I saw the same pattern repeat itself for many new hires.
Otherwise I think your observations are spot on.
For a smaller company though, other than as a search tool (previously asked questions) I don't see what advantage it has over just using Slack/Teams etc. in a relevant channel to your question.
Disclaimer: long time Atlassian employee but all words are my own.
The reason is simple: it only supports exact-matching text search _on titles_. There are a host of other usability problems that are so bad that they render a giant negative impact on information retrieval and actively steer Q&A traffic to repetitious and ephemeral tools like Slack.
But the lack of a functional search engine indexing the Q&A content with a high-performing notion of search relevancy is such a show-stopping, egregious defect that even all the other egregious flaws can be ignored by comparison.
It’s not a subjective debate at that point: just a factual defect of such severity that any misguided reports of the tool somehow miraculously being even marginally useful for someone have to be ignored.
I thank my lucky stars that Stack Overflow offers competition to this with a real search engine.
[0]: < https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Questions-for-Confluence/... >
I am on a committee in my workplace that deals directly with Confluence customer support to roll out changes to our internally deployed Confluence & Jira instances, and I know first hand from dealing directly with Confluence that they _intentionally_ only support exact matching _on the titles_ for searching in Questions. Really appalling.
Jira search is useless, you have to use filters and memory of dates to get a set of issues small enough for you to search manually.
The search in Confluence can best be summed up as "Here's a PDF". For some weird reason Confluence can search PDF sort of okay. It's typically not what you want, but because Confluence can search PDFs better than normal Confluence pages, PDFs are what you get in 75% of your searches.
Atlassians continued failure to deliver a half decent search feature in any of their products is fascinating. I honestly don't mind their products, they're fine for our needs, except you can't depend on search.
A major problem is that many deployments of Atlassian products are Server deployments (i.e. not Cloud), which means there's basically the embedded Lucene engine and that's it; anything else starts hurting either performance or deployment options at scale. And most Server customers have a much greater interest in scaling (while keeping servers performant & easy to run) than getting tweaks to search algorithms - in particular many customers refuse to upgrade unless there is a major bug fix or performance boost they're going to get.
On the Cloud side, for better or worse the focus has mostly been on letting people find their work, not find new content they haven't seen before. For example, Confluence's My Work tab (or similar - I forget the exact name), or the search in the cross-product https://start.atlassian.com/ are both useful for getting back to things you've seen before. Hopefully some day we'll finally make some headway on the "I don't know what I'm looking for but I know how to describe my problem" use case.
And just to buck the trend, search works as advertised in the Atlassian product I work on, statuspage.io ;) (but then our search use case is straightforward and rare enough to just use elasticsearch with some minor tweaking).
I've used their jobs platform on both sides (as a developer looking for work and as a hiring manager) and, regarding job postings at least, I suspect you're right. I've had very limited success with it. And yet it's my favorite platform for hiring or job-searching as a developer. I like it much more than Indeed which, to my chagrin, has proven more effective.
It's free for people looking for jobs and IIRC around $500 - $1500/mo for companies looking to post a listing or two. It still baffles me that it does not have more uptake. I spoke with a room full of about 80 new developers at a code academy recently and asked how many of them used it. There weren't more than 2 or 3 hands.
I suggested to our Sales rep that the hostile reception a lot of first-time question-askers encounter probably isn't doing them any favors. (SO has introduced new features to address this problem.)
Their Marketing team also footgunned themselves, at least as far as our company was concerned. When it came time to extend our first contract, our Sales rep asked if I'd like some t-shirts for our team. I said sure. He said send me your sizes. So I polled my team of 12 and sent him the sizes. He came back and told me that a Marketing Director or someone said there was a new limit of 4. I said, "Hey, you asked me and I got a team full of devs looking forward to a t-shirt. Can you send me one for each?" He said he'd check but came back and said the person calling the shots was firm. They sent the 4 t-shirts. I delayed renewing our subscription 3 or 4 months as a result. We gave them another shot in the future at one of the lower levels. But those shirts would have paid for themselves the moment they sent them.
I still don't know what the Marketing side was thinking. It ended up making me more attentive about paying for the platform. If they had sent the t-shirts, I probably would have just let the subscription ride and continued paying it even if we didn't have an active listing up. Instead, I only renewed when we needed to fill a new position. I'd say it taught me a valuable Sales or Marketing lesson, but isn't this common sense?
Alas, the platform itself continued to perform so weakly in supplying candidates to our postings that I have discontinued using it all together, even though I still recommend young developers sign up and use when looking for jobs.
I think SO deserves to succeed so hopefully the private Q&A will boost revenues.
I've been a developer for 10+ years and won't use it. I tried it on a whim a couple years ago and my GitHub wasn't cool enough for them so they told me "thanks but no thanks" so I've never looked again, and probably never will (my Github remains uncool, with no sign of that ever changing).
I bounced off SO itself for similar reasons, and my lack of participation there probably contributed to their rejecting me. Sign up, find question, have useful comment to make (no good for a full answer, but great clarifying comment on another) get told "sorry you can only post questions and full answers and nothing else until you've spent tons of time giving us free content" and was like "LOL OK [logout]".
Let's see what comes first: rep 50 or the next new email.
Given demain transfers, this would be a straight-up security hole miles wide.
I also find that there seems to be a cadre of "answerers" who jump on new questions and then get pissy when you don't mark their answer correct because it doesn't actually answer the question. Your normal question will start getting negative votes suddenly at that point.
I also simply find SO quite a lot less useful than it used to be. They don't have a good solution to the "stale answer"--this was correct 5 years ago but is now completely obsolete and incorrect. SO is really only useful for things that appeared in the last year or that haven't changed in the last 10 years.
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.
Stack Overflow is a vehicle for resume improvement and comparison. Someone with 631 rep must certainly be better than someone with 239 rep. It sets a clear goal for how you measure up against the competition. Remeber to up vote your friends from college too.
Now that you've got a job as a contractor, your project manager is trying to find you contracts and up your billable rate... sending out your resume. He's asking you to get your reputation to over 2000 so the resumes can be marketed as "in the top 10% of Stack Overflow Users" or something like that. Everyone else in the office too. The easiest way to do that is to up vote all your co-workers and make trivial edits (guaranteed two rep and can't be down voted).
Documentation was a bonanza! Just add a few words, toss some code and as long as it is a "substantial edit" the reputation will roll in.
This is even more important for those people trying for the elusive remote jobs that get listed on the side of every Stack Overflow page and attach the profile of the person with it.
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How much of that is accurate? I have no idea. Its a story of a hypothetical social group at Stack Overflow that isn't interested in Spolsky vision or the Atwood vision of what the site should be.
It's also a site that has people who try to make a community site and feel that an upvote is the same as a like on Facebook. Make people feel better by up voting their posts (especially if they are down voted).
There's also the "FreELance" where people get a job for beer money and then post every single problem they have to Stack Overflow.
Without any guidance from SO corporate as the final arbitrator of culture, nor the tools for the core group (see "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy") to clearly define the boundaries that exist, the only tool that people have to get people who have a differing philosophy for what the site should be is rudeness. Compound this with far more things for the core group to curate and moderate (trying to keep it from becoming, in their minds, Yahoo Answers)... and, well, you've got Stack Overflow of today.
Of that amount, the jobs product brings in close to 70% of the revenue.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-st...
I suspect your challenges with using jobs has to do with scale. It is competing with other companies that are spending a lot more, thus getting served up more in searches and thus generating more impressions.
Your comments about marketing though...yeah, that is daft. Swag costs next to nothing.
Actually, as per 2018 We Are Developers conference, Joel mentioned the Careers section (Talent) was making them the most money: https://invidio.us/watch?v=oUzUo8Jre8s @ 4m40s
If you have a product people really like but it doesn't seem like people are aware of it and want to encourage more adoption, you go looking for places to advertise... but the people most likely to want a internal version of SO are the people using SO. That means the obvious place to advertise is on Stack Overflow.
I think it's a bit overboard to make it the focus of the home page rather than a secondary focus. But the homepage can change. It's already changed once.
Lots of companies make the centerpiece of their homepage their big new product. When Teams is better-known, it probably won't need to be so obviously marketed.
I think what makes this so jarring is that the first use of the homepage is for a specific reason rather than to talk about SO's primary purpose. If the page talked about how to ask/answer (something like a short version of the tour page) before it mentioned the other things (Teams, Jobs, etc) would that have been okay?
I don't generally find the homepage to be a stellar introduction to SO.
Downvotes are the digital tantrum.
On the main sites, downvoting means "this is a bad question or answer" or "this answer is incorrect".
On the meta sites, downvoting means "I disagree with this".
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow#secti...
From the Fortune article:
> Today, the company announces a new $40 million Series D round of funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and existing investors Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and Index Ventures participated. Stack Overflow, founded in 2008, has raised a total of $70 million in venture funding. The company did not disclose its valuation or revenue, but said it is not profitable.
> Currently, Stack Exchange earns a third of its revenue from an advertising product that allows companies like Microsoft market its products to developers. With this new funding, Stack Exchange will invest more heavily in its Careers products, which include job listings and a candidate search database. Clients pay anywhere from $495 for a 30-day job posting to thousands of dollars for annual job postings.
> ...
> The 200-person company will also use the capital to release its site in Japanese, Russian, and Spanish and invest in expanding its Q&A community. Currently, the majority of its users are located in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.
>Joel Spolsky: "Most of the goal of raising VC would be to create, partner with, and/or buy StackOverflow-like communities for other fields." -- from https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/39565
So 2019's intensified advertisement for enterprise sales of StackOverflow Teams looks aligned with what JS said back in 2010. I also see that Crunchbase lists subsequent funding rounds in 2011,2013,2015. I don't know if JS's pitch deck was the same investment thesis to the subsequent VCs or not.
If so, I really don't get the problem. Has anyone without a SO account ever gone to their home page to try to look up an issue? Surely it's overwhelmingly more common to just search for an issue directly in a search engine and check the SO links in the results if they turn out to be relevant.
And right now, visiting https://stackoverflow.com/ in a private browsing window, I still see a search bar right at the top. I really have no idea what anyone could have a problem with here.
> You're alienating the product that makes you big. But that's okay, all companies do that eventually, giving rise to the competition that appeals to the alienated user base.
Tschallacka is right, it seems the be part of the normal lifecycle of most online sites/apps. Perhaps SO's expiration date is near, for those users who made it popular enough to be "ruined" by the devs.
Anywho, seems it's time to look at federating Q&A.
I wouldn't be that surprised if they introduced a "pro user, only $7,99 per month" package in 2020 that gives some small perks ("your questions cannot be downvoted", "add a 100 points reward to three questions per month", "animated avatar", "special highlighting of your very important questions").
I'm no economist, but this precept is obvious nonsense in the sense that nothing can grow indefinitely. And so things are subsumed by other things which therefore grow, or they morph into things that can continue to grow indefinitely.
SO is morphing into some other thing -- a quasi social/hiring/Q&A/team thing. Something, no doubt, that they can more easily monetize.
And since SO raised 68M$, it's the path it has to take
I'm sure there are little teams of product managers and marketers just brimming with enthusiasm about it, but I have nothing but fatigue for these things anymore. It's not innovation, it's just more suckling at the enterprise teat.
At the beginning, the service does all sorts of nice things in order to attract users. These things all cost money, but nobody cares at that stage because they're burning other peoples' money and building the userbase is Priority 1.
Eventually the other peoples' money runs out and the service has to be sustainable on its own. That means it suddenly matters a lot that all those nice things the service did to attract users cost money. The nice things get cut, of course. But the users have all now gotten used to having them, so when they disappear, people start screaming.
As long as we build our businesses around the idea of getting big first and worrying about how to make them sustainable later, this pattern will continue repeating itself.
I wish they would provoke a competitor. The number of stale, useless answers on SO is getting quite large.
I suspect the only way to flush that out is to start a new site.
How many people are investing in new Web 2.0 companies? How many feel that it is a viable business model on its own?
I've seen a dozen attempts at creating a new Stack Overflow (often based on some perceived need that SO isn't providing for - https://www.askquestions.tech was the most recent that I'm familiar with one that was created when two twitter groups clashed).
The challenge is in the curation of the material. Its easy to do when it's small and focused. Unfortunately, in today's world there are some that perceive the curation as being a slight on how they write and their personal identity is tied up in what they write and their own code (I recall one SO user who insisted on writing with the start of the sentence and proper nouns and pronouns being lower case).
I believe that much of the technical world is disappearing into slack and similar. Particular technologies are being answered on Slack where it is understood that there is no history to search and others are disappearing to private invite only communities where the material doesn't need to be curated or moderated because it is only that small social group.
Is the slackhole of knowledge a good thing? Probably not. But it's easier to moderate and curate than having a website with a long tail and a small core group. There is less friction around asking questions or providing answers. People aren't inspired by gamification to the degree that they are on SO. There isn't any resume growth when helping people - and so that incentive is gone. It is just people helping others when they need it.
Personally, I've always felt like SO and their ilk are much better suited with a Wikipedia type model.
What else remains outside "company or non-profit"?
By the way, Quora and Genius are both super useful. I really do not understand what you mean by "lost the battle".
I don't think this is odd at all. I do most browsing in private mode, and I think that should be the default.
Letting every random link I click get added to my URL history is just distraction bait later. Password managers and autofill make it easy to log in when I need to. When I'll need to come back to a page later, it's easy to bookmark.
Persisting cookies and recording every URL clicked is one of those ideas that was neat 10 years ago, but on the modern web it causes more problems than it solves.
The "better but oddball" way today has a way of becoming the "default and therefore common" way tomorrow. It'd only take one person at Apple/Google/Microsoft to change this and every website would update their landing page within the week.
Anyway, what's the overlap between HN and SO? This used to be exactly the sort of thing where replies would say something like "Most non-technical people don't do this" (or some self-deprecating or pejorative synonym for that), except SO is clearly for highly technical people so we're having to try to slice that pie even thinner to keep it from collapsing into a tautology.
I'd wager a ton of money that fewer than 1/1000th of the internet enabled population browses in private modes. I'd guess that the real number is closer to something between 1/10000 and 1/100000.
Why is that? Maybe I use the history in a different way, but I've never encountered that issue.
Indeed, I think many, many people share the same complaint about SO moderation, and this is the best explanation imo. Physician heal thyself!
The problem with the license is just that when it's out there (i.e., one person paid for it) it's out there for everyone else if the paying person decides to release it for free for everybody else.
Also, the bulk of StackOverflow's data is creative commons. A similar argument goes here as for the Linux kernel.
[1] https://perens.com/2017/06/28/warning-grsecurity-potential-c...
This is not unique. Wikipedia's Reference desk[1] allows asking/answering any question by anyone -- even unregistered users.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk
I question your use of "really" here. If it were really that, this wouldn't have happened. As far as I can tell, what it really is is a for-profit business, where the owners are the ones who decide things like what "a reasonable profit" is.
I agree, of course, that this is (somewhat) out of line with their previous ways. But almost any for-profit social site is an elaborate bait-and-switch, where it starts free and lovely and gradually moves in the direction of profit maximization. You'll find veterans of almost every social site saying how it just isn't like the good old days.
If you don't like that, maybe you shouldn't do a lot of free work for people who are making money from it. Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is much more accountable to its community than any for-profit site will be.
Appearing as high in Google search seems impossible, but if the community got behind it this could fix the SE problems once and for all.
There would also be very little traffic, because "the community" are generally the people answering questions and explaining things, they aren't asking questions. Without the people needing help finding the site (Google rankings), nothing happens.
It has been an idea for me for a while to create a site where
- questions are answered
- and useful answers rewarded.
Note there is no "good" in front of questions, and answers are rated by their usefullness, primarily to the person asking the question and secondary to everyone else, not by how well they conform to a site script.
In particular, if someone wants to ask what JavaScript framework should I choose in 2020 and someone finds it worth answering and the asker of the question likes the answer, then: Fine!
Duplicate questions? Fine! Answering by pointing to a previous question? Fine! Answering again without mentioning the previous question? Fine!
It should be a site for people wanting to ask or answer questions, not a site for people who want to be mods.
Now, since that would be the purpose of the site and not something abstract like: make a repository of everything we know, all these questions and answers will be fine.
There should also be some inflation or maybe even better "karma tax" so both accounts and questions lose something like 10% (or a dynamically calculated percent) of their value each year, so we aren’t stuck with "Top JavaScript libraries for 2019" on top of the lists forever.
Another thing I would consider is making it harder to create accounts as soon as possible.
Yes, the moderators are often vilified instead of praised but this gives a false impression that an alternative Q&A site with different mechanics (i.e. no moderators) would be superior.
The "game theory incentives" problem with your proposal is that the desirable experts who answer the questions benefit from the strict moderation.
Almost every proposed Q&A alternative to SO prioritizes the question askers and underestimates the answerers.
These 2 perspectives contradict each other:
(1) Moderators are useless: The question askers just want to ask their question. There are no "stupid questions". They don't care that their question is a duplicate. Therefore, the mods are just a-holes on a power trip and just get in the way.
(2) Moderators make the site usable: (Unpaid) experts with some spare time to answer questions don't want to wade through duplicate questions or do someone else's homework assignment disguised as a Q&A, etc. The mods aggressively filter out as much junk as possible to keep the expert answerers from abandoning the site.
When discussing "platform economics", economists often like to identify the "constrained supply" because that dictates where to prioritize efforts. In Uber, the constrained supply is the drivers, not the passengers. In dating apps, the constrained supply is women, not men. In a Q&A website, the constrained supply is the expert answerers and not the question askers. (This matches our intuition that generating new questions is "easy" and a larger population can ask them but answering questions is "hard" and therefore it's a smaller population that can do it.)
Therefore, the mods make the site a little better for the people answering the questions.
Another economics thinking framework is Frédéric Bastiat's "seen vs unseen":
- What's seen : a question gets "closed as off-topic". This action is very visible. It feels like an insult to the question asker and adds to the perception that SO is unwelcoming to newbies.
- What's unseen: cleaned up questions make the queue a little more sane for experts willing to spare time looking for (hopefully interesting) unanswered questions to answer. This positive effect on the queue is invisible. It's not easy for experts to comment on moderator actions they don't see because that's the whole point: filter the queue down to something more manageable and make it less annoying for the answerers.
If you deliberately optimize a new Q&A website for the question askers (i.e. no mods) at the expense of the contributors answering the questions, the experts will avoid it. That leads to a hypothetical website with less answers and lower quality answers. That will make it less popular with the question askers which is opposes the goal of making the site better for those seeking good answers to their questions.
While Im pretty sympathetic to the “RTFM” style rules, the one that really annoys me is the prohibition on question that will elicit answeres which are opinion based. It appears to me that experts often love to answer such questions. I don’t see how this fits into your framework of making things better for the answeres. Would you disagree?
{begin}
4.) And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.
This is an inverse value to scale question. Think about your Rolodex. A thousand contacts, maybe 150 people you can call friends, 30 people you can call close friends, two or three people you'd donate a kidney to. The value is inverse to the size of the group. And you have to find some way to protect the group within the context of those effects.
Sometimes you can do soft forking. Live Journal does the best soft forking of any software I've ever seen, where the concepts of "you" and "your group" are pretty much intertwingled. The average size of a Live Journal group is about a dozen people. And the median size is around five.
But each user is a little bit connected to other such clusters, through their friends, and so while the clusters are real, they're not completely bounded -- there's a soft overlap which means that though most users participate in small groups, most of the half-million LiveJournal users are connected to one another through some short chain.
IRC channels and mailing lists are self-moderating with scale, because as the signal to noise ratio gets worse, people start to drop off, until it gets better, so people join, and so it gets worse. You get these sort of oscillating patterns. But it's self-correcting.
And then my favorite pattern is from MetaFilter, which is: When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page. "Someone mentions us in the press and how great we are? Bye!" That's a way of raising the bar, that's creating a threshold of participation. And anyone who bookmarks that page and says "You know, I really want to be in there; maybe I'll go back later," that's the kind of user MeFi wants to have.
You have to find some way to protect your own users from scale. This doesn't mean the scale of the whole system can't grow. But you can't try to make the system large by taking individual conversations and blowing them up like a balloon; human interaction, many to many interaction, doesn't blow up like a balloon. It either dissipates, or turns into broadcast, or collapses. So plan for dealing with scale in advance, because it's going to happen anyway.
{end}
---
Stack Overflow had one of its principles that you could find things easily - right there on the top of the answers. However, with opinions, everyone has them. Furthermore, people vote on how much they like the opinion rather than how useful it is. This means that:
1. You're going to have lots of posts. Consider "What is the single most influential book every programmer should read? " - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/ . It has 214 answers. How many of those are duplicates? How much of that is noise? That question was locked in 2012, consider how much more there would be there today... and how much less useful it will be as you go through it.
2. Curation becomes difficult. The value proposition of Stack Overflow is that its curated (by the community). As such questions grow, they become more and more difficult to curate.
3. There is no "right" answer. The answer you are looking for has just as much of a chance of showing up on the last page than the first.
4. The discussions that happen around opinions - Stack Overflow intentionally made discussions hard to have (see the Group quote above). Consider how often you find the answer to a technical code problem by searching Google and finding Quora or Reddit as the top result.
There are better formats for providing opinions and polling a group. Whats more, many of the people who are providing answers are there because it doesn't allow that format of question. There are many other sites that do (and encourage) that niche of Q&A - Stack Overflow doesn't need to fill the role of every type of Q&A.
One of the Stack Exchange sites has "Why was my question closed or down voted?" with an answer that links to several other resources https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/a/6491
I agree that questions seeking opinions are valuable. I'll attempt to explain why opinions are discouraged and then I'll offer up my idea of how they can be added.
The "Q&A" aspect of Stackoverflow is widely misunderstood. From what I've read from SO's creators (Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood), they intended a "wikipedia" style authoritative site that was seeded with questions. But not just with any kind of question; only questions with objective answers. Yes, opinions are also valuable but they discourage it because they invite endless discussion and they thought the best place for that was Slashdot/Reddit/HN. Therefore, the ideal question had an objective authoritative answer instead of triggering debate, controversy, and meta-commentary. To add to the issue, the question's "discussion" eventually degrades into arguments with low signal-to-noise ratio. (Fyi if you didn't know: some mods tried to move "opinion questions" to "programmers.stackexchange.com" but that triggered a meta discussion discouraging that[0].)
All that said, I agree that many experts would enjoy providing their opinions on SO and question askers would also benefit from reading them. For opinion-based questions to avoid the problems mentioned in the previous paragraph, SO would have to put restrictions such as... only users with a certain karma threshold (e.g. 10k+) could answer them, and only if the question got a high amount of votes (e.g. 200+) which broadcasts to the community that members are desperately seeking quality opinions. Another rule might be the an answerer must also provide the opposing view to try and minimize bias. Whatever the mechanism, the game theory and secondary effects must be considered so trolls don't degrade the site.
If that was pursued, StackOverflow would be surrendering the original ideal of "no opinion questions"... but on the other hand, they could also embrace it with a new slogan: "Yes, opinion-based questions are subjective but with our tough rules, StackOverflow has the best collection of high-quality opinions anywhere on the web."
I'd like to see some good ideas on how to handle opinion-based questions.
[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/73382/please-stop-u...
This has the questions are answered and useful questions are rewarded. There is certainly no "good" criteria on the questions. Duplicate questions are fine and moderation is minimal at best.
Part of the reason that these answers don't come up in search results is because "good" is not a criteria for asking.
I'll also point to https://www.askquestions.tech which was created as a "lets make something that doesn't have the moderation or [perceived] toxicity of Stack Overflow."
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Consider also reading:
* Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism ( https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-kept-... ) / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4058818
* A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy ( http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html ) / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460624
I agree with you that opinion based questions are valuable as long as they have experts’ opinions (and while there isn’t a perfect way to rank expertise, I think reputation is a good enough proxy for it).
> There’s an even longer list of things that really belong on the new Programmers Stack Exchange, which appears to be degrading into fairly stupid water-cooler nonsense, and could benefit from an infusion of more meaty subjects, like these proposals ...
This lead to the six subjective guidelines ( http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su... ) and its enforcement notice ( https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/q/350 )
An early history of this is recapped at https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144
From the moderator and curator side... it's not at all enjoyable being a volunteer trying to keep the site on track. Combine this with the difficulty of fitting those questions to the framework... and the only people who wanted those questions were the people who randomly stopped by to answer about farting in the cubicle or naming of a cat or ask about the patron saint of programming. No lasting community formed around the questions, no one wanted to moderate or curate them... and so both the company and the people who curated the site got a rather strong "no opinion based questions" stance.
It is much easier to draw a clear line that is "too strict" and curate that line than it is to not have that line and have many judgement calls depending on who is looking at the post today.
While we can probably agree that the following questions are certainly over the line...
Farting in the cubicle: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4954... ; example answer: http://i.stack.imgur.com/Qvcqx.png
Naming of cats: https://i.stack.imgur.com/VI92W.png
Patron saint of programming: https://i.stack.imgur.com/PV1tN.png
where do you put "what is the best php framework?" or "should I work for a company that does porn?" or "should I work at SCO?"
This isn't saying there isn't a place for such questions - just that the Q&A framework that SO uses provides a poor medium for such questions and there are other places for people who want to ask those questions to ask them.
Nobody wants to be angry. Nobody wants it to be like this.
I've always felt like the owners of SO have had good intentions, and for the most part felt like I trusted them.
But there are now some worrying signs - first they allowed obtrusive ads onto SO, and now this looks like a PI data-grab. Clamouring for PI is always worrying, because it means that PI has value to them - but why?
this is when a site start compromising its stated morals. not out of greed, but out of necessity.
...so we'll remove a useful home page and replace it with a marketing junk page which confuses everyone.
No wonder there's no progress on moderation tools and the new ask question page has just been rolled out /s
Yet another reason to share your knowledge on a blog you control and not give your invaluable content over to someone else’s business.
Do these kids of communities all become just crowdsourced content farms in the end?
At the smaller companies I've worked for the only filtering was of the big, distracting sites like Facebook.
Pretty sure all those JavaScript ninja hackers they'd hired were a little baffled that they hire hackers but don't let them view nasty hacker pages...
Then again Inknow a number of people who have the SO scores on their CVs
To ask a question you have to log in, but that's standard practice. Am I missing something?
Posting a question there has been pointless for years. I also dont think I've seen any answers there via duckduckgo useful to me in a long time. I dont think I'd even notice if it disappeared tomorrow. (I am not a web dev btw)
Isn't that mainly because it's already been answered? (Apart from new tags) I've got dozens of questions on my SO account, but it's been quite a while since I wrote one now.
High ranked mod/troll types, who seem to spend all day there trying to get more karma for some reason, constantly cruise for new questions. They dont know much about programming in general, and have zero knowledge of my specialist field for example. If they see a question that superficialy resembles or shares certain keywords with another one they will close it as being answered already (pretty much acting like particularly dumb bots) even if it has nothing to do with the existing question, or if the existing question is massively out of date and irrelevant because of updates to the software in question.
Some of my own questions followed that route, without being dupe questions and while being a code-based success or fail state. The closure of tickets is detrimental to the site, but somehow, it's still worth asking a question.
The picture was much different when I started out, and I feel like StackOverflow is still an invaluable resource for juniors/mid-levels or for those transitioning to an unfamiliar technology.
If you look at https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing - the license that it points to is http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
A 2010 wayback http://web.archive.org/web/20100701152609/http://stackoverfl... links to 2.5
While a 2011 wayback links to 3.0 http://web.archive.org/web/20110703111023/http://stackoverfl...
A blog post from 2011 on attribution required : http://web.archive.org/web/20110717145827/http://blog.stacko... - that links to 2.5
The current blog post - https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/25/attribution-required/ links to 3.0
The 2.5 license : http://web.archive.org/web/20100630092909/http://creativecom...
> A new version of this license is available. You should use it for new works, and you may want to relicense existing works under it. No works are automatically put under the new license, however.
IANAL reading of this suggests that posts from 2010 should be under 2.5 and post from whenever the 2.5 to 3.0 change was made would be under 3.0. Unfortunately, this isn't made clear on the posts themselves (or the site).
(Since answer authors retain the copyright to their answers and edits.)
That's not to say that SO isn't playing an extremely valuable role in helping to collect that knowledge and organize the community. Community management is hard. I do want SO to make money, I want the devs to be successful, I think they should be compensated for their work.
But products that are built on (what I would call) the commons are in a weird place. I'm cognizant of the fact that most of SO's value comes from the fact that ordinary people contribute to it without any compensation, and that part of the reason ordinary people contributed to it in the first place was because the developers were able to capitalize on a kind of social spirit.
That's not to say that SO is wrong here. TBH, I don't think advertising your own products on a home page is crossing any reasonable line, particularly when most people are getting to SO from search engines anyway. But I do want to push back a little bit against the idea that SO created something magical out of the ether. (Not that I think you're saying that, or trying to say that).
SO is essential only because the devs were able to get ordinary people to give up large swaths of information, for free. And part of the reason they were able to do that was because they projected a kind of business style that resonated with those people. Would SO be as successful today if it had run ads with trackers in them from the beginning? I don't know where the line is, but there has to be some degree of give-and-take, or there's no point in complaining when that same community decides, "nah, we don't think we want to give you free information any more."
I wonder how much revenue it generates?
EDIT: Answering my own question:
Their cheapest package (which allows max 1 job ad at any time) is around $7,500/year. They have 5572 jobs advertised right now, so I guess it's pulling in 30-41M a year.
All stackoverflow has to do is to bite the bullet and officially turn into what most of its users consider it as anyway - The wikipedia of programming.
I disagree. I'm of the opinion that it's useful only if you're doing something you've no clue about and also don't want to gain a clue about. It's no surprise, then, that WWW garbage is typical, since it's poorly documented and a ''living standard'' and other nonsense.
If you're like me and use real languages with real standards and good books available, you're probably not going to need something such as this. I've never asked a question there and I've never needed to look at a Common Lisp question and answer; I don't think there are many Common Lisp questions and answers in general, actually. Similarly, I don't see these for APL, either. I don't believe it's a coincidence that these languages are well-documented and encourage understanding to use.
Meanwhile, ''Why does JavaScript do this?'' or ''I can't get my CSS to do this in Safari.'', sure, I can see that.
Even if you are lucky to use a language where the official documentation is very good, there’s still a chance that you run into some issue that isn’t covered by it or is out of scope. My personal example is an issue installing a third-party Python library on a certain macOS version. I wouldn’t expect this to be in the official docs considering it’s a bug in the OS (more specifically where the unofficial package manager puts C libraries), but it’s still an issue that’s preventing me from getting stuff done.
StackOverflow had an unanswered question about it, and similar questions (with answers) for other libraries. With those answers I was able to solve my problem and post an answer to that original library. It’s still earning upvotes 2 years later suggesting it’s being useful to quite a few people.
There’s also the issue where you have to work with languages where documentation isn’t ideal or the behaviour is implementation-dependent (JavaScript and CSS come to mind). In a perfect world we would have one authoritative source for docs and all implementations would follow it. We’re not in a perfect world, so the next best thing is a site where new people can ask questions and people experienced with the issue at hand can share their knowledge.
>There’s also the issue where you have to work with languages where documentation isn’t ideal or the behaviour is implementation-dependent (JavaScript and CSS come to mind).
I already agreed that JavaScript and CSS are good languages for Stack Overflow.
4850 for CL
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/common-lisp
5798 for Lisp
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lisp
6786 for Scheme
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/scheme
Other languages: 90K Scala, 1.5M Java, 1.8M Javascript, 1.5k Smalltalk, 10k Prolog, 1.6k Ada, 235k Swift, 1.2M Python, 1.3M C#
Many companies are currently using Slack for this, but then your search terms have to be precise to reveal what you’re looking for. And if you’re on the free plan, your data will eventually get deleted.
Obviously this doesn’t affect the free product.
Comparing it to slack, I believe, is a apples to oranges. Slack isn't a knowledge management system and was never meant to be.
Yes, apples and oranges with Slack. But if you’ve ever found yourself searching Slack for some piece of knowledge from a colleague then you’ve used it for that off label use case.
It would be tricky to do it well and proper, but perhaps they could introduce monetary rewards for question. Take a cut of transactions, pass on cash to recipients. Could obfuscate the % of the cut by using tokens or similar.
I've definitely received answers so good I'd have paid for them! I've also had questions that were difficult enough to warrant attaching a real monetary bounty.
Perhaps another angle would be something like CodeMentor. A system where you could pay someone to mentor you, but buying from a user profile backed by the credibility of answering questions on the subject at hand.