Stack Overflow is documentation, not Q&A

I find these days that the answers I'm looking for are increasingly answers that have snuck in during the brief period before questions are flagged as duplicates. For most original questions, the top ten posts are so old that they are no longer relevant.

StackOverflow would be so much better if questions that were flagged as duplicates were not closed for further answers. Flagging a question as a duplicate should be an advisory, not a death knell.

There's also a huge problem with questions that are not duplicates being flagged as duplicates, because there's no penalty for editors being wrong, and no easy way to appeal that decision. Determining whether an answer is a really duplicate often involves close reading of both the original and the new question -- something that seems not to happen in the majority of cases. The problem is compounded because editors have a direct incentive to flag non-duplicates as duplicates. And so, the quality of answers continues to decline.

As a concrete example, my StackOverflow account has accumulated about 5,000 points for an answer I wrote for Android 7 that describes diagnostics that were changed in Android 8. Nevertheless, it continues to accumulate about 100 points a month even today. I can't be bothered to fix it, because it would involve significant research. The contents of the diagnostic results aren't documented. I had to go to Android source to figure out what was actually being reported. And it's not a topic that particularly concerns me at present. If someone were to go to the trouble of analyzing Android 14 sources to update my post, I doubt they would ever be able to overcome the very significant number of upvotes my answer over the last 8 years.

>Maybe it’s the fate of all Q&A sites to eventually become documentation sites. If you answer the question “correctly” once, why bother repeating yourself?

You have misunderstood the editorial intent of Stack Overflow because it was always meant to be "documentation" more than a service to answer any questions including repeated/duplicated questions. This misunderstanding isn't your fault because most people visiting that site misunderstand it.

I wrote a previous comment citing co-founder Jeff Atwood's reasoning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21115438

StackOverflow seemed to be "more helpful" in the beginning because the volume of content (aka "documentation") was still being seeded and built out by the new questions. Being helpful was a side effect of the site not having much content.

But now that there's a ton of content, a new question is more likely to be cross-referenced to a previous answer and therefore "Closed as duplicate" or some other reason. Yes, that seems a little rude and "unhelpful". And people don't realize that's the way Stack Overflow is designed to work.

EDIT to also add comment from co-founder Spolsky: "In our equation, we are a community of people writing answers that will be read by hundreds or thousands of people. Ours is a project more like wikipedia" from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3656581

People also forget that answers are not set in stone. Answers are editable - if an answer needs to be updated for the latest version of a framework, or it’s been obsoleted, just add that to the answer! Low-rep users can suggest edits, while higher-rep users can just go in and edit them. Its not uncommon to see the top answer have an edit pointing at another answer for some newer version.

Centralizing around a single deduplicated answer also has a major benefit: multiple answers can gather on a single question. It’s not always the case that one particular answer works for everyone, so try different answers and see what works (and upvote the ones that do work!)

Tech changes (faster now than ever). This will allow newer answers to float to the top and make older questions more obviously replaceable, providing space for beginners to ask questions better couched in today's problem/solution space.

Personally, I find so many of the package-specific answers for Python are out of date. They don't work and/or are not written to current best practice.

Finding the right nonprofit structure to handle this need is difficult. And you could always end up like Wikipedia instead, which seems to spend 90% of its donations on things other than its operations, and yet cries that it will shut down if you don't donate your next latte (but I don't drink lattes...).

It was a response to searching the internet trying to find a solution to your problem, ending up with a forum thread with three pages of discussions, and the OP coming back with "nvm i figured it out", but no solution. It was always about long-term documentation. Go read some of Jeff and Joel's old stuff from 2008-2009; it uses exactly those kind of examples.

And stuff like this:

> I think repetition of answers is healthy.

Yeah ... try answering questions for a few months and come back to me on that. I was never on Stack Overflow to be an unpaid tutor, to "teach the next generation", or to be a free debugger-as-a-service. Most people aren't.

And no doubt Stack Overflow is far from perfect, and that at times people interpret the rules (far) too strictly, but this is the same ol' bollocks that's been doing the rounds since 2008, mostly propagated by people who have rarely spent any time answering questions.

It depends on open source docs being poor so noobs need experts to educate them. But it does not place a burden on the experts to improve the original docs.

For example, Python peps and standard library docs are often painfully and needlessly laborious, such that it's often easier to just read the code. Similarly, the git manual is written to induce episodes of acute madness.

The SO solution? Read a thousand piecemeal SO answers, get the job done in a slapdash way, get paid. Don't worry about the inaccessibility, waste, and exponentially accruing technical debt of the whole enterprise.

Priests of this cult often avoid reading the docs, and never pick up the responsibility to improve the awful docs.

The SO high priests will gladly regurgitate their knowledge like mother birds, often in writing as bad as upstream docs. Typically defending and normalizing the inaccessible upstream docs.

It's an accessibility nightmare.

You end up with millions of inefficient and insular tidbits whose sum is somehow less than the whole. It's designed to make users dependent, rather than free them.

It feels like there was a time where SO could have become more. But doing so would have lessened use reliance on SO, and required answerers to improve upstream docs. They chose to be self contained and derivative, rather than transformative to upstream projects.

It will be dismantled.

Now SO has so much entropy that it's only good for AI reprocessing into docs for upstream projects.

Thankfully much of SO knowledge is now bundled into LLMs. So getting actually legible docs is usually as easy as pasting the project docs and asking for an organized and straightforward docs.

The challenge I see is closing the loop and ensuring upstream docs improve. The culture of inaccessibility is too entrenched for SO to do this - the org's revenues would have to collapse. But AI can work to the advantage of an accessibility focused upstart. They can liberate, mobilize and reintegrate the captive knowledge of the SO corpus. They can push it back into open source project docs.

And in cases where upstream prefers bad docs? The upstart should fork the project and take responsibility for project accessibility.

1. Moderators were already getting out of control. They had decided among themselves that questions without a provable answer needed to be purged from the site despite them having clear value. A question like "Should I use Java or C++ for X?" can have an answer like "These are the benefits of each and things you should consider". By 2010, that was an automatic "closed, not constructive".

2. Users didn't understand what was and wasn't a duplicate. Two questions may sound simimlar but one important detail can ccompletely change the answer.

3. SO had its most value when all the information was current but as time goes on answers become no longer current and I didn't know how that would be handled. A correct answer in Java 7 might be incorrect in Java 14. I believe this is still handled haphazardly and is a huge problem with, say, Android;

4. The system rewards low-hanging fruit and pretty much discourages any complex question or answer. A complex but legitimate question might be closed as being too specific. It's less likely to find an answer and fewer people understand the answer so won't upvote it (or, worse, will upvote the wrong answer that sounds right).

5. It suffers the problem that all sites do that require users to effectively to rank answers (be that with upvote/downvote, liking or whatever) and that is that people vote for what they like, not what it is correct. Post an objective question about an issue in C++ and a provably correct answer that is perceived to be negative of C++ will attract downvotes from C++ devotees. This applies to SO, reddit, social media sites, HN, etc. This is a pretty negative experience for the answerer.

Forums suck because they're time-ordered. SO's big value was that answeres were net vote ordered so the top answer was often (but not always) the best and/or correct.

I wouldn't necessarily call SO "documentation". "Ossified opinion" would be more accurate in a lot of cases.

But now just regular search and experience is just enough to resolve most of the questions and not to deal with the arrogance of some folks on SO.