Five years ago, Stack Overflow launched
blog.stackoverflow.com
blog.stackoverflow.com
Amazing it is only 5 years old, it feels like it has been around forever, I recall coming across it for the first time while still in Canada and thinking 'this is neat'. I never contributed which is really a miss on my part but I try to keep the number of accounts that I have to an absolute minimum and stackoverflow is plenty useful as it is today. I really should do some community service there one of these days, it is only fair.
Hard to imagine that even google could not rescue usenet (or rather, dejanews) from the spam and the trolls.
StackOverflow was definitely a game-changer.
Because it is.
Click through to this recently answered question from Google's search results[1] and scroll down to see the answer. Then open the resulting link[2] in an incognito tab and poof no answer
[1]: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=experts+exchange+%22Troubl...
[2]: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Programming/Languages/Script...
SO would not suffer unduly from letting these not relevant questions be asked and answered anyway. Relevant Questions are like beauty, they are in the eye of the beholder.
That's certainly a claim and it's a claim that the SO folks also make, but I still haven't seen a single piece of evidence that it's true.
I don't greatly love SO (though I like it more than I used to) but there are lots of alternatives that lack SO's irksome limitations (slant.co comes to mind). By now it is obvious that whether you like SO's formula or not, it clearly works.
I think that's where they disagree with you. Stack Overflow aims to keep discussions as minimal as possible and is not the place to weigh the pros and cons of programming language X against that of programming language Y. If you want more information, they cover their take on the issue in great depth on their podcasts (which are great to listen to, regardless).
I like what they've done. By closing all bad questions and a few good questions the site contains only good questions. The obvious downside is that the occasional interesting question is removed, but I think the trade-offs are worth it. And judging by the popularity of the site, I think most everyone else does too, even if they're not consciously aware of it.
But then it got closed on Programmers. O_o
Fortunately that's been the exception not the rule, for me.
So opinion-based questions are explicitly unwelcome on SO. They can collect lots of worthy information in comments, so such questions are usually closed but not deleted.
SO even tried to channel the discussions by developing discourse.org so that interested parties can get a them a discussion forum and continue there :)
Indeed, it seems like every programming question I input on Google gives me a (helpful) StackOverflow post. It and Wikipedia are probably my top two most common results on Google.
I love StackOverflow. However, I think the worst part of Stack Overflow is how hard it is to contribute as a new member. You need to build up reputation points and they can be very hard to get. Questions get 'sniped', answers get deleted or buried, and very often when you help another new user out, they never return to the site to accept your answer. It's very frustrating to take the time to answer a question and not receive any feedback.
That has since earned me 50 rep. This along with a few other bits took me to the 200 threshold which then gives 100 rep across all stackexchange sites. (Enough to upvote/comment.)
But the fact that "newbies" can't contribute what in all honestly is largely going to be misinformation or "me too" answers is also part of the genius, it gives real answers breathing room and keeps spam out.
My question asking has been less successful. I've asked 2 questions, one of which had no response whatsoever, and the other had an answer which answered the question in the community's mind but because I had been slack with my terminology didn't answer the issue I was really having.
For example I randomly answered a question outside of my primary domain because it was a relatively easy issue that I had encountered myself. I have since earned close to 2,000 rep from that simple answer alone and get 20-50 points a week from it despite it being over 2 years old.
On the other hand answers that I spent way too much time researching have hardly attracted any points at all.
Although, those questions that I've poured the most time into and really tried to answer thoroughly are my favorites. Especially if it's something I had to do a bunch of research and/or testing to confirm. The lack of feedback is supplanted by the quenching of the thirst to learn something new. In fact, this quenching is my favorite part of the SE sites.
i'm less sure, but i think answers are getting worse too. it feels like the smarter people have disappeared.
Question-askers benefit the most from this competitiveness, but without a niche it would be really hard to break in. For a little while it seemed like people were starting to treat S.O. activity as a test of your virtue or capabilities as a programmer. Today it seems absurd to judge someone for not having an account. It's just too hard to get started.
I guess it is not just contributing to the common knowledge, but maybe to show off your profile to potential employers or similar?
Prolog is an extremely small niche. Most of the questions are pretty basic and from students. I don't like seeing students being told odd things about Prolog, with a dismissive air of "Prolog makes no sense, you just have to feed it this nonsense to make it go." So another part of my motivation is to keep this sad religion alive and inviting. Haskell has a much larger community of people working very hard to make it inviting.
The hiring angle probably works better for other niches. Every Java EE question is answered by BalusC. I imagine that pays dividends for his consulting: he's the most helpful guy in that area and I'd hire him in a second if I were in charge of that kind of thing.
My experience: it is still possible to come in an hour and beat the quick answers, although I agree with the other comments about the rep being somewhat unpredictable.
Still, to ask a question you have to have only 1 rep point. A really good question or two can get you 100-200 rep in just a few hours. Try it if when you have a good question at hand.
This is definitely not rocket science, it's just 5-6 minutes honestly spent to research and write down the answer.
Usually longer and more thoughtful answers get a constant barrage of upvotes, though.
We'll get you sorted out.
Part of it is that it seems that within a year, the good questions were pretty much answered. It's notable that in the first year, especially the first six months, the site was carefully curated and had a friendly feel to it.
In the present SO, answering questions has become a matter of getting your low-quality answer to a low-quality question out extremely quickly or having some pretty obscure technical knowledge (even then, you're going to get karma only for obscure knowledge, not for a quality answer). And, yeah, I suppose you game things by creating a question similar to an existing high karma question (and this stuff also lowers average site quality too since the best answers kind of hide within ten similar questions).
Further, SO ironically turns out to be much useful when you Google than when you ask your own questions - questions beyond a given difficulty go wanting even if you give a high Karma reward. It seems the smart answers just skim for simplistic questions rather than spending time on any hard questions.
It seems like SO is now just kind of a low-quality-question fest because they've got a troove of good answers from their first year of existence.
I mean, one can claim hn has declined but any decline in hn is a thousand times less than the way StackOverflow has tanked as a site (but it's still great for googling all the good answers from yesteryear. When you're doing that, take note of the answer's dates, btw, I believe that it revealing).
I know I'm an idiot for running random code, but I'll save you the suspense - it prints "rm -fr" but doesn't run it, and then prints a message berating you for running it, and insults the Q&A site.
There are less broadly-interesting new questions in areas of established technology, but that's fine: there's less need for new questions in areas that the site already serves well. Stack Overflow is not having any trouble getting good questions about new technology as it becomes out.
No, not really, not in a density that makes it worth it from anyone. I mean I looked hard at several points for question answerers as well as attempting to be one. You yourself admit the place broken by the end of your post.
The obvious thing is that good answers that involve effort on the part of the answerer generally don't get you anything like the appropriate Karma.
Even more, SO actually reduced the amount of Karma you could get by asking questions so there's nothing to distinguish good questions from crap questions.
Meanwhile, if you actually manage to answer or document some tricky, obscure thing, then often it never gets enough traffic to earn much reputation. Mine is still pretty low, but my highest-rep answer is a one-liner, telling somebody that Mercurial can't track files outside of the repository root directory structure. Meanwhile, an actual challenging, obscure answer, like the one on running ASP.NET with C++ dlls (hint: avoid if at all possible) gets very little.
Asking good questions helps too, but I usually find it faster to look it up or figure it out myself than to format a decent question and wait for responses.
So if you leave a good answer on something basic and simple, you have provided utility to far more people than if you are leaving a detailed answer to an obscure question.
This, incidentally, is what's lacking in the IRC channels of open source projects. In an IRC channel, questions that are not hard enough get ignored because they are not interesting to the experts in the channel.
So the IRC channel is good if you are hacking on the core, while SO is good if you are just trying to get something done, and the technology in question is a small part of your entire stack.
Coming from a more traditional forum, I originally expected questions that had a highly-upvoted or "marked" answer to essentially be over and done with - the majority of people will already have read the thread, so relatively few new votes will come in...
...But after five years, I've had ample opportunity to realize this is a flawed way to look at threads - questions - when the vast majority of readers come in via Google in the months and years following its asking.
Being quick on the draw can be fun, but being useful is what nets you the most attention long-term. Folks with real problems tend to keep reading until an answer actually solves them. And the race is not always to the swift...
So you could just post answers to problems you debugged on your own and then search SO for a similar question and add your answer. Over a period of time, you'd be surprised when your answers gain votes organically.
The one thing I've noticed is I've switched from being a contributor to a consumer of information. I'm not sure if it's selfishness, or just that the easy questions have all been answered. I wonder if this is part of any larger trend.
(Really only 5 years? Unbelievable.)
Why didn't usenet take off on the Internet? I was wondering the same thing.
There are countless other examples where well-researched, popular and in some way contributing questions were shot down because they are unfit for SO.
And as others have pointed out, most karma comes from answers to popular questions, which rewards generic questions which probably have tons of similar answers across the Internet. Domain specific answers however are less awarding.
I cope with that in my way. I ask the questions and treat fairly all who answer / comment, but I hold myself back when I see a question I know the answer to. Why would I answer and help SO? I really hope some alternative arises so I can share my knowledge there, but until then I will just try to survive with SO. And what "if all did that"? Well, I guess the alternative would come much sooner. I wouldn't be unhappy about it, far from it.
Yeah SO is going the way of Wikipedia wrt rule nazi, trigger happy editors, it's very frustrating. Especially since many of those 'editors' have gotten much of their brownie points from farming them through answering 'soft' questions with popular answers, asking beginner-level but popular questions etc. When you look at the profiles of those voting for closing in cases like the one you cite, you very often see that their domain knowledge is very limited.
I've been sort of active on the site since the very beginning which has led me to have a few thousand points there. To my big frustration, a large part of them come from two answers: one in which I recommended the K&R for learning C, and another how to use the @ operator in PHP to suppress warning messages. I'm a bit disheartened every time I get yet another vote for those answers.
Anyway, what I was going to say was that I get the impression that when I ask or answer a question from that account (with several thousand points and active for 5 years), I'm treated differently than people on new accounts with few points, even when their question is worded exactly the same way I'd do it. It feels like bullying by low-quality users who through grinding stumbled upon editing powers. It certainly (mostly) stopped me from contributing a year or 2 ago; not even so much for the morality of it, but more the overall idea that a site run by the distinctly mediocre (even if there are a few very high quality contributors) just doesn't give me great confidence in the quality of what is on there.
Of course this is a widely documented phenomenon with any UGC (hey there's a buzzword we haven't heard since 2009!) site after it hits a certain critical mass, we just have to look at the very site we're reading now...
However my biggest problem with SO is actually that it is narrow in scope, but due to its success other (broader reaching) sites don't have enough users. I still hope they will change their policies to allow broader (still well-researched) questions, but I am not holding my breath.
However, I really wish someone would build and maintain a "Stack Overflow" for open-ended discussion. It'd basically be a classic forum (in terms of content) but with a different layout.
Your mileage may vary
Therefore, "hear".
Spammy marketing tactics? Sure. Is SO better? Absolutely. But in the process of building SO, Jeff and company have basically trashed EE's name, and after seeing EE from the inside I'm one of the rare few who don't think EE is evil incorporated.
EE also had teams working on improving the question/answer experience long before SO came around. I'd agree that SO is better now, but to say "no value added" is applying a blanket statement that isn't true.
EE's business model ended up losing out in the long term, but that's all that really happened. The characterizations and generalizations made about EE are pretty silly when you take a hard look at it.
However I ended up letting my experience lapse, and I lost my VIP status and from then on I was bummed. If you aren't a VIP I couldn't imagine ever paying to see the answers.
If you were a VIP then the experience on EE was similar to SO.
However, it would still be interesting to have another tab, say "Discussion", where people could shoot arguments and the best ones could still be upvoted. So, yes, there wouldn't be "one best answer", but it would still be fun to read the best answers.
Where else to discover why date pickers don't always properly show up[1] or why the default printer doesn't stay in sync in VB6[2].
Discussions would quickly drown out the real content and it would degrade. I love the fact that from the start SO has been about real answers to real problems.
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12633471/mvc4-datatype-da...
[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/695784/how-do-you-recogni...
My reaction is - you don't. What's becomes more helpful than reading discussions about what $FRAMEWORK1 is better than $FRAMEWORK2 (that inevitably are not supposed to end) is to stop discussing and build yourself.
Not trying to compete with SO, but we think those questions need a home, and share eterm's view that maybe they're not a good fit for SO's format.
Twitter is literally only as good as who you follow. You know the types that deride twitter as "Morons posting what they had for lunch" or similar? The answer is "don't follow people who post moronic food-based tweets".
Treat it more like an RSS feed with incidental two-way communication and you'll have a grand time.
However, I've found its search function useful for tracking breaking news. E.g., you can get to see the perp's mug shot an hour before the world does. Or pull up his LinkedIn before it gets deleted. Or find his Facebook page without doing the spadework yourself. You'll also come across random factoids that you can use to sharpen up your Google searches.
It's also useful for keeping up with certain technical areas. E.g., you can do a search on golang, scan through the results and happen upon stuff you might not come across otherwise.
Using Tweetdeck, I have a few columns set up, one displays everyone I follow, another few which aggregate specific hashtags. Since I work with a specialist piece of .Net software, I can have a column serve only tweets for that area. I had no value in Twitter before this and found out about more stuff relevant to me than through HN or Reddit. It does depend on how you use it, e.g. setting up a #aspnet search would likely yield to many irrelevant results, but follow someone like Scott Hanselman or Jon Skeet and you may learn a few crazy things!
One of the things if feels like people have overlooked in the comments is the power of gamification. I know it's kind of a passe buzzword these days, but StackOverflow really innovated: reputation not just for questions but for everything, badges, bonuses for everything from editing your answers a lot to sticking around for a year. When I started contributing, I was surprised at how "hooked" it felt. I know I should feel a bit ambivalent about this, but it's a big part of the secret sauce that's made it a really effective community.
I had the opposite reaction, that it has not grown outside of its original niche at all.
Also, I think for some stackoverflow, it's not enough to tweak the colors.. Some of them might need a real disruptive tool to make it happen. For instance, the cooking one could have a hardware adapters to be used in the kitchen. Ok, that was a silly example, but I hope you get the idea.
Why would cooking experts or financial pros be drawn to Stack Exchange? They won't be. They'll stick to sites dedicated to those things that possess a very narrow focus, where the quality of content is likely to be higher.
It was an interesting attempt on Stack's part to spread out, but who really thought the end result would be them taking over every category?
Just take a look at Personal Finance / Money. That's a huge category that is very lucrative. Yet they're getting a whopping 5 questions per day for a three year old site, and a mere 7,200 visits per day. Why? Because "money.stackexchange.com" can never be promoted properly as a brand, it can never carry any kind of reputation as a separate product. An average person isn't going to buy into the notion that that site possesses authority on personal financial matters.
http://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/19941/one-foot-in-...
http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1216/what-is-the-...
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/75459/why-do-chim...
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/17578/did-9-11-l...
I prefer if companies and sites focus on becoming the best in their area rather than continually pivoting to seek more eyeballs/profit.
What really helped me out when I was first starting doing web development was that no matter the question, people had the same problem as me -- usually VERBATIM. I can't stress how nice it is to copy and paste something into Google and get back the answer.
On a final note, I encourage everyone to try to give back a little into StackOverflow. I've been going for about 2 years and have around 4 thousand reputation built up, mostly on Rails questions. But at the same time, I'm starting to notice that there are a lot of rookie answers (although this might be a Rails-specific issue)... and this is coming from someone who's still in college and not a full time web dev yet. If you're good, answer a few questions.
I remember at first I was confusing it with Experts-exchange and would avoid clicking to it from Google's results.
"An incredible number of people jumped at the chance to help a stranger"
This. The idea that you are able to help someone across the world in a matter of seconds is incredible. In case of SO, it applies to programming and technology but imagine if we had other SOs that did the same for poverty, hunger, education and world peace. Just a thought!!
Usually I end up posting my code and these people disappear without answering my question.
People seem to be only interested in questions where they can spot missing semi colons and get some easy points.
So, what you need to do is boil your problem down to an essential few lines sufficient to make the bug happen or illustrate what you are trying to do. A lot of times, when you do that, you find your answer along the way.
Sometimes it can be difficult, however. E.g., you may have a race condition that shows up in your actual code but which you can't make happen in your short example. Then you just have to explain your question as best you can.
A paper published earlier this year showed that online comments can affect Americans' perceptions of science. In fact, the comments posted on science articles can persuade readers more than the articles themselves. [0]
This got me thinking: every year more people are turning to the Internet for advice about serious subjects — medical advice, technical advice, a basic understanding of science. This fact, combined with the findings about the persuasiveness of comments, suggests that comments are tied to a growing ethical responsibility.
In other words, if you manage a website that deals with, say, health care, science or technology, you have an ethical obligation to a) recognize the potential harm that can result from misinformation in comments; b) take action to minimize that harm and facilitate a productive dialogue.
This brings me to Stack Overflow, which has a responsibility to offer accurate, useful feedback about programming. The stakes can be high, considering that a malicious or misinformed user could easily convince others to execute harmful code.
I think Stack Overflow is an excellent example of how sites can use rewards systems to encourage positive feedback and punish (i.e. downvote) those who disseminate misinformation or off-topic questions. The feedback as a whole seems very focused and accurate.
I hope other sites that offer serious advice will become more aware of their responsibility to solicit accurate comments. Now that we know comments can seriously affect readers' perceptions, it seems that an anything-goes comment form can be unethical. Stack Overflow may be a great role model in this respect.
Having said all that I'm just glad that its there. I remember coding without the internet (and I don't just mean a router failure) and that had its own challenges but SO has got me answers typically with in minutes and now instantly as the Q. base has grown. It's an amazing resource. If they can work out how people can contribute easily again it will be here for years to come.
SO has always helped me a great deal. I remember when I first started going to SO for answers, soon I had an urge to contribute back to the SO community, whatever little I could. I used to work with .net and SQL Server those days, and I used to have Linqpad open and ready right from the morning, looking for questions that I could answer. As soon as I found a question I can answer, I would verify it as quickly as possible and post it. I still remember how annoying it was to get the answer right and to realize someone posted a similar answer just seconds before I did. Good old days.
I feel like this website will outlive Facebook and Twitter. It's such an indispensible tool in my life.
I have definitely hated the attitudes of a lot of people over there and also the unusual closing of questions, but its inarguable that this site is probably one of the most important things on the internet for programmers.
What were SO-coders doing 5 years ago?
I have issues with SO, but I use it almost daily.
This sums up why we use internet.
Congratulations on five years! (it feels like I've known you a lot longer)
And I don't miss them. (Almost.)
The amount of knowledge gained from questions alone is immense. I have answered about 20 questions but I found it a lot less attractive as I'd rather learn new things than recite from memory solutions.
The questions are growingly become more and more strict in terms of moderation and for new comers it's frustrating experience to have your questions closed because existing members like to taunt newbies. I don't see SO taking off anymore, rather finding on news.ycombinator means it has peaked. The very people that flock to SO are shunned for asking questions that are not clear. Rather than aid them, questions are closed. This leaves a very bad taste in a newbies mouth. The massive traffic is from the previous accumulation of users but again the overly zealous moderators have ruined the welcoming community image.
Long ago someone asked about intended meaning vs literal meaning in questions. This received massive amount of downvotes (existing gurus) but I saw this is something critical that SO founders have completely missed.
Remember in Pakistan, during the 1971 war with India. The civilians that have put Bhutto in power have become so alienated from socialist policies of the leader, failing to see that it's the people that put an individual in power. He was ousted by the CIA but it wouldn't have been possible without the general animosity and betrayal from the public.
Isn't that the entire internet?
"Asks dumb question"
Winnuked.
I'm glad someone said it. Before they would at least leave a comment, or ask the user to elaborate or rephrase the question, now they just close. I see so many questions closed INSTANTLY, with no explanation, and most of the time it's not even rightly so.
Of course the vague rule about rules defined by the community allow them to do anything. Once again, moderation has ruined another website.
I don't think anybody likes to taunt newbies. However, people that donate their time to SO want their time to be used efficiently, and usually fixing badly written question is not the most efficient use of one's expert knowledge and time. People want common investment - you invest in good question, they invest in good answer, everybody wins. Of course, newbies may not know what "good question" is, and experts may have seen so many bad questions over their tenure that their temper has been worn thin, thus sometimes misunderstandings happen. But I think approaching it with understanding that it is a common investment, and asker has to invest first to get their investment back with sizeable profit of a good answer may be helpful here.