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.
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.
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
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?
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...
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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.
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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 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.
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.
Nobody wants to be angry. Nobody wants it to be like this.