While I respect the degree of technical expertise you can get on SO, I am very much convinced this is a failed experiment which will slowly collapse on itself. And I think that because the organization of the site is completely at odds with it’s professed goal.
SO is not really a forum, because time is supposed to be irrelevant : a 12 years old answer takes precedence over a question asked now, failing to consider that, maybe, the context of this question has changed. Its ridiculous, especially in the context of software engineering.
On the other hand, it’s not a library either : a library is a collection of book, which are relatively self-contained knowledge systems. And in practice, the SO answers are not self-contained. They merely answer a specific point, with no guaranteed coherence from one to another, so a beginner cannot use them to build a broad understanding of a subject.
To take the analogy of the Cathedral and the Bazar, I am under the impression that SO members are trying to build a cathedral out of the stone sold by hundred of bazaar people, and refuse to see that fact that all stones all having different sizes and dimensions is maybe kind of a problem when you build a cathedral.
Failed experiment? SO is by far the best source for tech questions. It’s wildly successful.
I agree, but I think this issue is fixable and doesn’t invalidate the whole concept
I’m surprised at how negative the reaction to SO is here! It just takes a while to get the site, which unfortunately doesn’t work if you jump right in without lurking. If you ask questions the moment you run into trouble, you kind of project a disrespect for the answerer’s time by not trying to solve it yourself first. If you ask as a last resort and list what you’ve tried, people are waayy nicer, even if your question sucks.
I think the real problem is that people’s expectations aren’t properly primed going in. The site could do a much better job about that. If you ask only as a last resort, you end up solving most of your problems yourself, and SO is REALLY good at helping you do that, in a way that leaves most other sites in the dust, in my opinion.
It just takes a while to get the site, which unfortunately doesn’t work if you jump right in without lurking.
I don’t really think that’s the problem here. It’s pretty clear that people answering most questions just want to be contrarian. Here’s a question I asked earlier this year (not on SO, but I’ve had the same exact problem on SO years ago) where I detailed literally everything I tried and instead of reading the post, the answerer literally said:
To be candid, this is much to lengthy and broad to follow. When you get the wait cursor (the spinning beachball of death), it means that the system is waiting for something before it can move on. It could be from either RAM or your disk or another application. Before you start taking drastic steps, boot into Safe Mode and see if the problem persists.
If they had literally read even a quarter of the way through the post they would have seen that I had already done what they suggested. It’s clear the problem is with the platform. Not the people asking the questions.
In fact if you look back at most of my questions you’ll find a majority of them not answered. Not because I didn’t provide enough information, but because SO rewards tagging and closing questions rather than answering the actually difficult questions. And because of that it’s just better to have a billion questions that get closed than answer a single question that might take more than a few minutes, even if that question comes with an example project to show the problem at hand
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I’m curious as to what reward you believe that people are getting from closing questions?
there’s a bunch of badges for things that can only be accomplished by flagging.
You also get the nice ‘feeling’ of clearing your queue. The faster you do that the better you feel. It’s literally all rewards for putting as little effort in to get as much ‘reward’ as possible.
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With over 1000 rep on Stack Overflow, you should have access to the First Posts and Late Answers review queues where you can get an idea of well, give it a try to see what’s in there. There’s a fair bit of people trying to sneak links into new answers to old questions (Late Answers) that having another set of eyes on would help catch before they get too far. Likewise, there’s a lot of posts to First Posts where someone could help a new user and take the time to help them make their question better… or if it isn’t a good fit for the Q&A format of Stack Overflow flag it for closure.
Those queues were the ones I’m talking about. SO rewards clearing your queue of 40 per day for each queue (maybe that’s different if you have more rep).
Without the gamification of the badges, the participation in community moderation and curation of the material would likely be even less active.
I very much doubt that. Forums for helping others existed for decades before SO and even now a lot of stuff has moved to discord, Reddit, Zulip, and slack and they still have moderation and most people actually get answers to their questions.
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I think the issue is that, as a new dev, you also have no idea where to go for the type of help you need, and SO is always at the top of the search results. I’ve found that discord servers are better for helping newbies because it allows more experienced users to interactively teach them how to ask questions and how to read documentation. Handing someone a URL and saying “look it up” is pretty helpful for a newbie, but that’s discouraged on SO since answers are much more permanent and links degrade over time.
Maybe SO needs some way to direct those who “don’t get the site” to a more chat-room like community where they can get their very common questions answered quickly rather than posting a duplicate question that no one wants to take the time to fully explain in a single answer.
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I base my opinion here on my experience with the Python discord, which is probably one of my favorite haunts these days. It excels at helping newbies, of which there are many each day, because their questions are quick to answer and can be handled almost instantly by any decently experienced active user. It’s the more specific or advanced questions that languish there, because it’s less likely that someone experienced with that particular domain will happen to be online. It doesn’t need to concern itself with archival quality because no one expects answers to be referenced later.
So I think both types of communities can play to their strengths without diminishing their quality. The chat rooms can answer the simple, open ended questions that don’t bring value to SO’s database of knowledge, and the more complex and advanced questions can have a better chance of being seen and answered with valuable insight on SO.
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Yeah I think redirecting new potential users is something the higher ups at SO would recoil against, even though it’s valid. I wonder if that’s why they’re pushing AI so much, to retain new programmers until they have problems worth asking humans.
Stack Overflow is in an impossible situation. You can’t both be a good meeting-place for experts and a good place for novices to get expert advice and an advertising venue. Those things have fundamentally incompatible requirements.
Any two of them, maybe.
You can’t both be a good meeting-place for experts and a good place for novices to get expert advice and an advertising venue.
I don’t agree. There is no clear cutout between what means to be an expert and a novice. What content you’re exposed to is the output of the service’s support for user profiling and search. It is simply not possible to get rid of an important subset of your customer base without causing false positives and generate ill-will. Finally, we should keep in mind that yesterday’s novice is today’s expert.
Finally, we should keep in mind that yesterday’s novice is today’s expert.
That I would strongly disagree with, at least with regards to Stackoverflow. My experience with novice programmers is that the majority of them go to Stackoverflow to get copy/paste solutions to rather trivial problems. They don’t go there to learn but rather the opposite, they are looking for shortcuts. Their ideal Stackoverflow experience would be " I have this problem, please someone write the code for me…". On Stackoverflow, this is at least frowned upon. ChatGPT however cares little about your motivation.
In my opinion, the downfall of Stackoverflow was inevitable and also pretty much warranted.
Reddit managed.
That boat sailed off into the sunset a really long time ago.
Whatever comes next should consider not starting by talking down to new users.
Source: I’m still pissed about a ten year old bug that threw out my helpful answer after I composed it because I didn’t have enough bullshit Internet points.
A decade later it doesn’t really feel like SO has fixed their fundamentally “asshole to new contributors” vibe.
I’m glad someone else contributes, but I can’t be arsed myself. And honestly, it doesn’t look like the staff at SO really care.
So I expect the current SO cohort will eventually age out and something new, with a new vibe, will replace it. I hope it has pokemon memes.
If that new thing is polite, I might contribute there.
Pro tip: I’m at least twice as likely to contribute to the next thing if they revive the domain ExpertSexChange.com.
I’ve been on SO for around 10 years - I’m still not allowed to upvote good answers.
Fuck you, stack
One of the key points nailed it.
There’s way too many new questions. And frankly, new users do ask questions that are answered already. But the other problem - it’s difficult to know how to ask the good questions. Because novices don’t know what they’re asking for. Which also means, they don’t know what to search for.
But worse there’s a gamified part to it. Badly written questions don’t get much points. So even if you help, you aren’t acknowledged unless the question asker is active. So you get weird ass questions like “How do I install Tailwind on Windows?” And you try your best to understand what they mean, spend half an hour on an answer, for them to reply “No” or worst, ghost you.
It makes it weird as a community because on one end, you want to help them. But on the other end, because of SO’s own set of rules, you are limited to how. SO encourages new questions, they are badly written, experts feel like their time is being wasted because of the lack of response, experts become bitter. While the the bulk score chasers only go after extremely hot questions that have 20+ answers already. There are still jQuery answers (a pretty outdated framework from 10+ years ago) that get incredible activity, only because that’s where the points are, compared to more modern tooling.
Source: I’m apparently a top 10% contributor (?) because a few of my answers from 2011-2015 hit the top page and are highly upvoted. Also guessing it’s not hard to be in the top 10% because I’m not at all active, just been answering questions on SO for like a decade.
SO sucks.
