I think they've identified a major problem with the site, and I wish them luck changing it.
I was a very early user of Stack Overflow, and racked up a bunch of karma long ago, but I fairly quickly felt pushed out. I felt that the site became less useful as a place for me to get answers, and I felt that it became much less welcoming as a place for me to answer questions. Much of that revolved around the increasingly militant gatekeeping and arcane rules the community adopted.
Nowadays, I mostly run across Stack Overflow when someone links a fascinating question thread which will - invariably - be locked for being the "wrong" kind of content. (Because of course it is.)
It is a bizarre, broken community, and one I don't think is meeting its original goals. (And I say that as someone who had what was, back in the day, a pretty high score.)
Most of this is just a symptom of Stack Overflow being too successful. It was good when it was just a few thousand good/nice people. Now that it has critical mass, you have to deal with the rest of the people. I doubt that the problems are going to be solved by having good people leave.
I was a very early stackoverflow user. I was excited and loved the idea. I still think it's a great idea, but I've come to abhor the police state moderation culture. To directly answer your question, yes, I completely agree that something has gone horribly wrong. I've forgotten more incidents than I can remember, but a few points I do remember: many good questions are closed; I've had questions hidden by people who (by their own admission) did not understand the tech being asked about but decided incorrectly the question was a duplicate; and I've seen some harmful cultural values widely supported on the meta pages.
My general impression is that some moderators seem to think of themselves as the gatekeepers to a promised land of knowledge, and the unwashed masses are just trying to ruin their pristine gardens, and must be aggressively pushed back. The truth is that stackoverflow can only exist because people like both receiving and giving help with their expertise. The site would be much better if it put this benevolence at its core rather than the guarded-perfect-garden model.
Stack Overflow destroyed a lot of its social capital and pissed off its own community in the wake of the Monica Cellio affair a little under 2 years ago. (This one was touched off by the Judaism Stack Exchange moderators asking questions about pronoun policy, but ended up with basically every community involved up in arms, including many in their LGBTQ+ community.)
One hopes the new owners will do a better job of managing community relations. It will be difficult for them to do worse.
Imo Stack Overflow has absolutely been destroyed by the moderators. I was (and still am) in the top ~%0.80 of users[1] but no longer contribute to the site (I stopped ~6 years ago) because of the moderators. It has been an absolute shitshow of closing questions that shouldn't be closed, anally-retentive nitpicks which intimidate new users, the essential nuking of the community wiki (even prior to the official deprecation), bad answers being upvoted, good answers being deleted, and so on.
The whole "community moderator" thing ended up being a popularity contest where typical nitwitted social climbers ended up injecting themselves in every single minor conflict on the site just to score visibility points come community voting time.
On top of this, SO is also dying as it has no real viable way of cleaning up or deprecating old answers, and if new ones are asked, they are closed in favor of the old (outdated) ones. Slowly, reddit and language forums/mailing lists are becoming more and more valuable as Stack Overflow becomes more and more of a trash heap. It sucks because I really really loved Stack Overflow, but it just broke my heart one too many times.
Stackoverflow was a major improvement over forums and mailing lists when it first came out: centralized, clean and easy to use, and the content was up to date. Additionally, the early users generally already pretty savvy, or at least motivated to learn and make quality contributions. Now a decade on, much of the content is stale, accumulating reputation has become a goal in and of itself, and the culture has become weirdly cult-like. There no longer seems to be the same shared purpose or sense of community and respect.
In many ways, the site still is designed for the early days. Take stale answers and questions for example. I can't even count the number of times I've clicked on a stack overflow link in the search results only to find that the accept answer is some horrendously unnecessary jquery snippet. This problem needs to be addressed if the site is to continue being a valuable resource
As Jon identifies though, the bigger problem is culture. I quite like his proposed covenant and wish more users would take it to heart. It's also interesting to think how design could promote the covenant. Some quick ideas:
- Provide a question template: "this is what I am trying to do and why", "this is what I have tried", "this is what is not working".
- Better way to ask for clarification on a question or answer. Comments are too overloaded in their current implementation.
- Require users explain why they are voting to close an issue (more than the general categories already provided)
- Provide a section for "I have a problem but don't even know what question to ask"
- Provide more UI reminders that users are human.
- Tag questions by new users with "new asker".
- Automatically remind new users of good etiquette, such as: 'Don't forget to accept the correct answer'
- Add explanations to downvotes (again, something besides comments)
- Show new users examples of good/bad questions and answers and explain why before throwing them in the deep end
The obstacle is that solving these problems will require changing the site in a way that would break the existing reputation system and piss off many prolific users.
The bigger question I have: so Stackoverflow is bad, but what is the better alternative?
Their reputation system is the worst. I'm by no means a power user, but I've asked and answered some questions on the main overflow site. If I go to any of the subforums I have to start over with a reputation of zero and "re-earn" privileges. No thanks.
Another problem is their aggressive pruning of questions. There have been dozens of times where I've found something relevant via google and found the question was locked for being off-topic or opinion based.
Yeah honestly I feel like it has gotten a lot worse since I was using it actively maybe 8-10 years ago. It seems to have moved towards a lot of people playing the karma game, and trying to focus on every flaw rather than trying to answer the question and give help. Nowadays, I usually try to find a community or forum directly related to the specific subject I'm working on.
However, it's hard to tell if the quality has actually changed, or whether it's just more geared towards novice programmers and I'm just not asking the type of questions that get help on the platform anymore.
Many of the culture problems with SO are a result of poor or outdated site design and moderation tooling -- and the high-rep users are aware of this and have been pushing for better tools for years. Unfortunately, the company has been neglecting the Q&A site and focusing instead on money-making products like Jobs and Teams. Over the past few years, Stack Overflow has launched several new products (Documentation, Developer Stories, Teams, etc.) and UI redesigns (which were often usability disasters, see [0] and [1]).
Meanwhile, the moderation tools (downvotes, close votes, etc.) have not scaled well and are now woefully inadequate and inefficient. Requests for improved tooling have been silently ignored for years (see [2]) -- for example, an absolutely trivial request to re-word one sentence in the review queue guidance ([3]) was unimplemented for several years (and its eventual implementation was really just a token effort from the staff when tensions between the staff and the community were at an all-time high).
Believe me: SO users know the site is not functioning well, and we've been doing everything we can to try to fix it (some users even create bots and userscripts to work around the site's deficiecies). However, there's only so much we can do without the cooperation of the staff. Tensions have been escalating over the past few years, and there's a lot of mistrust and cynicism on all sides between the company, the site's "power users," and new users. At this point, many of the power users are tired of fighting an uphill battle and have reached the point of giving up ([4]).
Fortunately, there have been some encouraging signs recently: over the past few months, the company has finally started to implement some of the much-needed features we've been requesting for years ([5]). Hopefully these efforts will continue -- we'll just have to wait and see.
I'm Stackoverflow user #823 or so and still in the top 4% of reputation, and...I don't get how the narrative has turned against SO.
I visit the site once or twice a day, and probably write two answers per month, which should make a decidedly average user. And for the life of me I could not tell you what people are complaining about?
I still find answers there more often than anywhere else, so whatever is supposedly broken doesn't seem to affect the primary function too much. The imaginary points still mostly point in the right direction. If happened to feel they diverged from perfect meritocracy I would try really hard to care about real problems, instead. Failing that, I would hopefully manage not to complain about it too obnoxiously, fearing it would make me look childish.
And then, much like Github, they seem to have committed the cardinal sin of tech communities of mildly opining that maybe racism or whatever isn't something they personally want to support with their work, which gets them into all kinds of strange arguments with one sort of people who are obviously not racists but just feeling the urge to defend some grand principle they just came up with, like ethics in game journalism.
Github is a very similar example: they single-handedly got millions of people to contribute to open source code, and made working in this ecosystem so much better, compared to source forge and various crappy custom systems that came before it. StackOverflow similarly replaced the most obnoxious, google-spamming, click-baiting, sign-up-to-see-the-answer grifters, and I will forever be thankful for their contribution.
I saw this earlier and it is amusing that the entire thread acts as a perfect example about what is crap with Stack Overflow these days.
Loads of comments and replies, basically being in denial that there is any sort of problem, telling us why it is better this way, and why it shouldn't change. Not addressing (or even acknowledging) the problem any way.
If a question has a few hundred upvotes, and gets closed by one moderator because it is off topic/ not constructive in his opinion, then the site is failing (in this instance) at what it claims to be good at.
I should clarify myself - I'm not affiliated with Stack Overflow, I'm just an engaged user that saw parallels between the article and the recent discourse about how the community should be moderate itself.
That aside, I agree with your sentiment - SO is my newest favorite site, and I, too, hope that Jeff & company are able to keep the site open for a long time. Once you go Stack you never go back.
> A core problem for Stack Overflow is the lack of people willing to curate material. Its not an easy job and is quite thankless.
Are you serious? Whenever a community allows for more-or-less self-appointed authority figures, they ALWAYS emerge, as they are drawn to the perceived power.
Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, etc. They all have their toxic "lawyers". Users who have passed a certain threshold of "points", or else are simply willing to invest the time to squat on a topic, and enjoy abusing the power to delete or revert contributions from others.
To a certain degree it's probably a good thing, as the sites would be overrun by trolls without them. But they also tend to calcify the culture after a few years, and drive down any incentive for new contributors to step in.
StackOverflow's core problem isn't a lack of people willing to edit questions or vote-to-close. It's core problem is that it's been at least 5 years since I last felt like reading or answering any open questions, or even posting any new questions of my own, and I don't think this sentiment is uncommon.
Also one of the answers on that question was deleted by an employee (! — itself an unusual event) for satirically opposing the change. More information here.
1. Not enough people vote on questions or answers.
We know this because of the metrics of people who visit a page vs. those that vote vs. those that comment.
I used to know these metrics since I was a Stack Overflow community elected moderator, but no longer have access to them since I resigned in October of last year: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427/16587
Anyway, the goal of this change is to reduce the number of 'thanks' comments left (and to hopefully make people feel like Stack Overflow is more than 'just' a Q&A site, that it has, itself, a personality that is welcoming); but the problem is that it doesn't address -- and indeed may even exacerbate the issue with not enough people voting.
Voting is what helps ensure bad questions are tended to, good questions are rewarded, and good answers are rewarded (and as a positive reinforcement mechanism for people to post more answers).
If people aren't voting, the Q&A model breaks down rather quickly. Which is Bad™.
The hypothesis against is if people have reactions, why would they need to vote?
Naturally, the people in the community who depend on votes to help their work (the curators) are pretty pissed off that at best this will distract from tackling the issue, and at worst will actively disrupt trying to fix the issue.
There has been a tendency over the past year or so especially for Stack Overflow (The company) to not listen to its curators (it's been going on for much longer than that, but came to a head a year ago); and this is another instance in a long series of instances where at best Stack Overflow (the company) is tone deaf to the issues its community faces.
StackOverflow became such a hostile place...
I posted a question on serverfault and got such awful awful treatment. I wish so at least I could take back the questions and answers I posted over the years. It really shouldn't belong to such a bad organization. I really feel bad about this.
I wouldn't be very surprised to find that many others share the same feelings.
This is a prime example of why Stack Overflow is well past its prime.
It started out as a community built to help others, but as the comments indicate they've gown into bitter, self obsessed reputation point hunters.
Heaven forbid someone new come in and ask a question without having gone to the very edge of the internet first because the mods and the user community there would rather close the question - with no comments - rather than help the new person or even just point them in the right direction.
Well, that mechanism has not worked well. Especially, someone with a large reputation point appears to be exempt and there exists elitism amongst it's members.
Largely, Stackoverflow has now become something like wikipedia, just an index of questions and answers with zealous moderators and elitists and no longer a community.
I believe the thinking is that what's wrong with it is that over time it tends to attract flamewars and downvotes which are not useful to people searching for answers to their questions.
I was a very early user of Stack Overflow, and racked up a bunch of karma long ago, but I fairly quickly felt pushed out. I felt that the site became less useful as a place for me to get answers, and I felt that it became much less welcoming as a place for me to answer questions. Much of that revolved around the increasingly militant gatekeeping and arcane rules the community adopted.
Nowadays, I mostly run across Stack Overflow when someone links a fascinating question thread which will - invariably - be locked for being the "wrong" kind of content. (Because of course it is.)
It is a bizarre, broken community, and one I don't think is meeting its original goals. (And I say that as someone who had what was, back in the day, a pretty high score.)
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