The decline of Stack Overflow
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The attitude on there seems to be slightly terse, but, it is designed and really focussed on Q&A, not discussion. So I don't know that I really agree with the criticism of it.
That's debatable. I used to be a fairly regular contributor. Fairly often I'd get beaten to the answer by the guy "who types in the minimal amount to be correct." The asker would then immediately tick the answer instead of waiting for my answer which has a great deal more information (important caveats, alternative approaches, pros/cons). Incomplete information is a smaller concern, though.
The greater concern is the knowledgeable person who "who types in the minimal amount to be correct, leaving out crucial information resulting in actually incorrect information." The type of information you can easily discredit with a simple CLI application, or the type of information that blows up in the fact of 100 requests/sec. It has a green tick mark next to it.
That green tick mark is never going away - the asker has long since left the website. The answerer is never coming back because he has his karma points and will ignore any and all comments you make pleading for him to correct it (remember: you can't make meaning-altering edits to answers.
That's the crux of it. S/O has some great insightful information but also has some downright dangerous garbage, dangerous amounts of which has a green tick next to it. The gamification fixed the human troll-like tendencies (for a while) but brought out another dangerous trait: the ability to do almost anything (lie, half truths, rush jobs) in order to get imaginary internet points.
The badge is an acknowledgement of a problem/bug in the design of the game, not a fix.
As I said, my experience could very well be based on that I've only asked something like 5 questions on there, all very specific, which is really the kind of question perfectly suited for a site like that.
SO's many levels of reputation that give you additional abilities, I think, made the whole process happen faster. It got the site ramped up and turned into a reliable resource faster, and it also let people create their fiefdoms of influence where they wall out new users faster.
Personally, I find it distasteful when somebody other than the question or answer's original author makes a substantial edit. Edits by third parties ought to be to fix typos, fix bad code formatting, improve clarity and the like.
Everyone I've heard hating on StackOverflow are people asking or answering, who have ownership over their questions and dislike the rules or way the site works. The reality is that SO knows 99% of it's users never register and are reading answers, not asking or answering questions.
The reason SO is a great resource is that the rules create an environment that doesn't allow cruft to build. Yes, that puts off some people, that's a worthy trade in my mind. I'd rather have good content than more content.
Post a new answer.
> ownership over their questions
As long as my name is attached to a Q|A, and my reputation is the one that is affected by its up and downvotes, I feel I have the right to control what the Q|A says.
> dislike the rules or the way the site works
I like the site's premise: Contribute questions and/or answers, and earn reputation if the community judges them to be good. What I don't like is that other people can affect my reputation by changing what I said. It's even more distasteful if the one who asked the question has also posted an answer. If the question wasn't clear, the first thing one should do is ask the OP to clarify. Only if the OP for some reason can't (e.g., if his English skills are lacking), then could the question be edited by a third party.
You may not like it, but why would StackOverflow change their system to make the content work to please a tiny minority of their community? It's a bad idea that would make the site worse.
Why is StackOverflow polluting Google with content its moderators deem "not appropriate for the website"?
Do you realize how many times I've had a question, googled it, and the #1 result was "StackOverflow - offtopic, closed"?
Other than that, it remains a great resource and I use it on a daily basis.
Preventing dilution and keeping focus was one important point. One consequence was being rigorous with off-topic questions, the founding of the "sister sites" (first the Trilogy SO, SF and SU then StackExchange) was another.
There was much debate about what should be considered on-topic and off-topic back then. I remember the discussion about HTML and LaTeX quite vividly[1].
All of this discussion was terribly tiring but on the other hand it was good because SO was different from other communities in the sense that people tried to stay focused.
I think there is still good intention behind the strictness, but I agree that the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
[1] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12918/can-we-have-a-...
There is a reason SO has excellent results on Google - the content is carefully curated so that it's timeless, and editing allows it to get updated where it needs to be. Yes, sometimes good (at the time) content gets discarded, but that's the nature of it.
If you want that kind of stuff, do it somewhere more transient.
If cleaning up irrelevant questions can't be automated, how about having a "this is no longer relevant" button appear a few months after the post has been answered? Or having a [subjective] tag that has an expiration date on being indexed on Google.
Now that the bad ideas are out of the way, let's hear some others.
Trying to make SO a jack of all trades will degrade the quality of the content and make the site worse - the whole reason that it's the good source of content it is is because of these restrictions.
This is nothing new. Established communities eventually become gated communities, with guards and dogs and sneers for the barbarians at the gates.
Stack Overflow has become a place where idiot savants who know the ins and outs of specific technologies and have fast typing skills compete with each other for upvotes and reputation. Intuition, analogies and humor aren't appreciated. Only raw, pedantically precise technical content. As a result, Stack Overflow has become the giant sink where all programming knowledge that will be irrelevant in less than five years eventually lands. Programming wisdom, however, has to be found elsewhere.
What makes me the most sad about this state of affairs is that things weren't always this way. When Stack Overflow had just been created, the community was genuinely interested first and foremost in helping each other. Of course, we felt joy when others upvoted and accepted our answers, but we weren't desperate for those upvotes. We sometimes took the time to write elaborate questions and write elaborate answers, because our primary aim was to solve actual programming problems, not just watch our reputation increase at the fastest rate possible.
When did Stack Overflow go wrong? I can't give a precise time frame, but there were some clear signs:
1. When people started to care enough about reputation that they'd focus on answering trivial questions that were likely to be upvoted by lots of newbies. The most obvious example of this was Jon Skeet's rise to prominence.
2. When people started to care enough about reputation that they'd flame other people's answers to death for very minor technical inaccuracies. By all means point at the mistake, but do it so that it gets fixed, not so that the OP hopefully accepts your answer and not someone else's.
3. When Stack Overflow started giving users privileges on the basis of their reputation: the right to close questions, the right to edit other people's questions and answers (used sparingly, this can be useful, e.g., to rewrite questions more clearly; but this feature has been grossly abused), and even the right to comment on other people's questions and answers.
4. No doubt countless others.
Can this situation be remedied? Probably, if the community wants it. Sadly, not everyone has an equal say on Stack Overflow, and the ones with the most power are, for obvious reasons, in favor of the status quo.
This way, the "require reputation for certain actions" can be kept around, but those who are there only for the competition would be less motivated to participate that those who legitimately want to help.
So there are problems, but still many good things happening there.
The fear that someone is going to copy and paste an SO snippet into production code on a meaningful app should not even be a real thing. If some hack finds their way into an important job just by lying their way through the interview process, and gets by for years simply by asking questions on SO, I say, "that's incredible, I gotta see this". For the average hacker, just throwing together some web stuff and needs to know, "how do I open an accordion in jQuery", I think SO is perfect. I often use it when I feel like I'm totally not getting the "right way" to do something. (I've asked questions about jRuby gems, Sencha Touch, Dojo, CouchDB - things I really don't think I'd have gotten just by reading the docs) But I really don't care if someone else uses it as their private consultation service... I don't think it's ruining this industry.
1. They just give them fish, as requested. Sometimes they argue with each other, over who gave the best fish.
2. They angrily say "somebody else has asked for this very same fish before", and downvote the question into oblivion.
What they almost never do, however, is the right thing: teaching them how to fish.
Sure, people shouldn't just yell "fish!", they should ask for a specific fish and give details of the aquarium / meal, but that's not the same as saying we should teach them about lines and bait.
Wikipedia has the same problem.
Basically, the righteous trolls take over - you see this with Homeowner Associations as well.
StackOverflow's biggest problem is that it's hit saturation; the low-hanging fruit is all picked (which is good; that knowledge shows up in Google results), which means that much of the continuing activity on the site is low-quality questions with the speed hounds competing to be the first to answer a trivial question to reap reputation. That's unfortunate, but I'm quite sure how you'd solve that in a product with SO's maturity.
(Side note: Try resetting your tag preferences on SO. You'll find lots of questions on languages/technologies you don't often use, which can be great for dipping your toes into less saturated waters, and you might find some things to learn while you're at it.)
My experience is that SO is a really great grimoire of solutions to specific, common problems. I get answers from it multiple times per day via Google (pasting in an error message often results in an SO question which has been answered satisfactorily, permitting me to rapidly move past the issue), but I've asked a grand total of 2 questions in my 5.5 years on the site (both of which I later ended up answering myself after research) - for whatever reason, it's a poor platform for me to get help when I need it. For that, I generally turn to IRC or mailing lists specific to the project at hand, because those come with an interested community built-in.
However, as an answerer, SO is very useful to me. I make it a point to generally only answer questions that are trivial and boil down to a race; the interesting ones are the ones that require some research. I get to learn something while I'm helping someone else out. For example, I recently answered a question about Ruby's require system as compared to Javascript's, which gave me the opportunity to get into the source and figure out exactly how Ruby loads constants and methods from files (answer: It creates an anonymous module which it then extends Object with).
"SO hates new users"
Well, yeah, by default new users are treated as potential spammers, trolls, and otherwise unsavory types. There are lots of people who are extremely ready to poop all over any platform they can find. SO does a pretty damn good job of making it hard for them to cause significant disruption until they've proven themselves. There are lots of bad questions on SO. The number of people who would have their question answered if they'd typed it verbatim into Google rather than SO is depressingly high. There are an awful lot of help vampires who are basically just looking for someone else to do their work for them. Those people make SO worse. The visible impact of these people, though, is what posts like this see and complain about - moderation is aggressive in an attempt to stamp out this low-quality content tends to leak into less-bad questions sometimes, which is unfortunate. (I wish that SO had a "no, this question doesn't deserve closure" mechanism so that I could nullify a close vote on a partially-closed question, rather than having to wait for it to be closed to start a new reopen vote.)
The characterization of the established userbase as "trolls" and "Führers", though, just seems a bit...I don't know, bitter. There is certainly more than its fair share of overeager moderation on SO, but in general, it does its job, and it does it better than anywhere else on the internet at the moment (and remember, SO grew out of a dissatisfaction with ExpertsExchange, so if SO is failing, there's quite the market opportunity there for someone!) - where you see "Führers" I see "dedicated contributors and curators" who are directly responsible for SO having so much quality, well-ranked content. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than it once was.
At the end of the day, while we can complain about SO aggressively closing questions, it's still the thing that tons of people find their answers from on a daily basis, which is pretty hard empirical proof that it's working on a macro level, even if individuals experience pain with it on a micro level.