I can't remember if it was Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood who said this, but the analogy they used was Stack Overflow is supposed to be the college, not the quad. There we're plenty of unstructured discussions at the time, very few sites dedicated to the creation and cataloging of information.
I think StackOverflow has always suffered from a deep tension over the fundamental purpose of the website. I was a very heavy user and contributor to the sibling site SuperUser years ago, and connections from that era are the reason I still have the "Jeff Atwood GPU" on a shelf in my closet (I bought it off him in like 2009!). I sometimes think about framing it as a lark. I really liked StackExchange early on, but I think it was very much a victim of its own success in that huge user counts highlighted the basic problem with the Q&A website concept. StackOverflow seems to have hit the same problem even harder.
Here's the contradiction: is StackOverflow a place where you ask a question to get an answer, or a repository of information?
There's a huge desire among a lot of social-adjacent products to be A Repository of Information right now. I'm sure we all remember Slack marketing's insistence that having conversations in Slack ("Discord for Business") somehow becomes documentation because you can search for things. I'm sure we've also discovered that that's utter bullshit in practice, but the "zero effort repository of knowledge" thing clearly sells‚ and now we see posts complaining about people approaching Discord ("Slack for Business") this way.
StackOverflow might actually be the first prominent version? At least an early one. I think before StackOverflow the same kinds of conversations were around "enterprise knowledge bases" which were very much curated and written to an audience of people who want reference material. But those kinds of KBs were a lot of work to keep up, tended to require dedicated technical writers, etc. The most prominent public resources for programming, websites like W3Schools, were known for terrible quality. The equivalent books were expensive. So StackOverflow came along with this promise that a gamified, social Q&A experience, like Yahoo Answers if it was better organized, could become a knowledgebase in a Wiki-like way.
And, well, the experiment failed. The thing is, Q&A users (especially on the Q side) have radically different behaviors and expectations than Wiki editors. People coming to a Q&A site want to ask a question and get an answer. This will naturally lead to the same question getting asked over and over again, anyone who ever used a PHPbb community with a Q&A subforum knows this. It's not so bad on a forum where threads are understood to be somewhat ephemeral and community approaches to the issue varied by topic and community, perhaps better handling some of the nuance around the problem of repeat questions. But StackExchange isn't a forum, it's a resource, and that means the "questions" are supposed to be evergreen, curated references.
Sometime in the very late '00s or very early '10s, StackExchange headquarters settled on their answer: aggressive removal of duplicate and low-value questions. They introduced a new moderation tool that gamified closing questions, sending moderators through a whirlwind queue of allow/destroy decisions that seemed designed to minimize original thought and maximize wrote application of the restrictive policy---with a bias in the direction of "if in doubt, close the question."
From that point it felt like it really became the culture of the websites that the best way to maintain a high-quality information resource is to close as many questions as possible. A good decision from the perspective of creating a curated reference website? Probably so. A good decision from the perspective of running a Q&A website? absolutely not! StackExchange communities became this remarkable phenomenon, Q&A websites that were openly hostile to people asking questions.
I think the contradiction was apparent by 2010, but these things can run on momentum for a very long time. Hell, look at Quora, which has made basically the same mistakes but often in the other direction and is still a fairly major website today despite being just extremely weird and frankly right on par with Yahoo Answers for quality.
Atwood went on to found Discourse, which is extremely popular as a community support/Q&A forum for open source projects but seems to have most of the same problems as SE, just at a smaller scale. But now that it's community specific, you have to make an account on each individual Discourse, and you bet every one of them is going to send you a weekly summary email. Thanks, just what I always wanted.
My employer recently sprung for StackOverflow for Teams, their private offering for businesses. I think everyone's noticed that it hasn't really taken off internally... and I think it's pretty obvious why. No one knows what it's for exactly. If you want to ask a question and get an answer, you post in a team's Slack channel. If you want to record some curated, best-practice information for people to look up later, you put it in the documentation. StackOverflow falls into this uncomfortable in-between that's ostensibly "more curated than Slack, less curated than the docs," and I'm not sure anyone really wanted that? And frankly, it's just another piece of evidence that "It's Searchable" is not a replacement for any information organization at all, just an excuse to keep not hiring anyone to maintain documentation.
> What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.
> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
(note: good is italicized in the original text too)
> I consider stackoverflow one of the best sites of the whole internet, together with wikipedia and a few others.
Though that has more to do with their community & content than their structure. Of course, SO's structure is part of the reason for its community/content (though I personally believe Atwood & Spolsky's star status was more important), but just copying that isn't going to get a similar site a lot of users or quality content.
That's true, but feels very specific still for a whole site. Imagine if stackoverflow itself was on that specific a topic area. It would have never got big originally.
Spolsky says that the easiest way he's heard people explain the difference between Stack Overflow and old fashioned forums is that when you go to Stack Overflow, the right answer is at the top of the page. That's a charming way to put it and it's sure to be interesting to see the team that's assembled take a shot at building that kind of experience around other kinds of topics.
Now THAT is an elevator pitch: Stack Overflow is just like old fashioned forums, only when you go to Stack Overflow, the right answer is at the top of the page.
This comes up now and again on HN. Essentially, StackOverflow is a great site. It's premise was a free, frictionless, focused Q&A site and it was made possible by the wide audiences of Atwood and Spolsky. Atwood focused more on something that went between obscene OCD and just dogma. I think what wasn't realized after the beginning of SO was that SO became a success despite Atwood's ideology, not because of it. I think Joel realized it, just based on the podcasts, but since Atwood was doing most of the work, "whatever." The big problem came in with the ideology becoming enmeshed with the culture and the high council of Meta being sort of a sycophantic keeper of the faith. Basically, any question or answer or anything that might, some day, remotely look like a "discussion" (gasp) on SO is rigidly stamped out by the religious police. You could say this is hyperbole, but just use it for awhile. Heck, google any technical question and probably SO will be the first hit but that question will be marked "Closed, not conforming to the ideology of Atwood" or something like that to the point of being comical.
It's even more farcical when you consider the abject snobbery SO has toward the "other Q&A sites." That has been there from the beginning, and to be sure many of the criticism of those sites are well deserved. But, SO has deeper problems, in some ways, particularly with the zealotry, but it is masked by the fact that there are so many technical people still on SO or, even if many have left, they have gathered such a large corpus that they will remain the big kid on the block.
But at least they are trying to address it, if only at a surface level.
I believe that Stack Overflow belongs to a time when VCS was the exception rather than the rule, codebases were scattered across many different providers, discussions took place on dedicated channels or mailing lists, documentation was scarce and of poor quality, and tooling was limited to the most essential. All this added friction to any form of shared knowledge of being built by the general public.
It's hard to overstate how monumental Stack Overflow was even 10 years ago. I remember being in University and dreading my computer graphics classes because SO didn't have answers for a lot of those questions at the time.
"... a working template that they could use to base Stack Overflow on: Usenet. Usenet has been around for almost 30 years now, and newsgroups like comp.lang.c++ are still active and full of experts discussing a wide variety of topics. But no, Jeff and Joel would rather make an Ajaxy shithole with no reason to draw true experts in. ..."
It's not great to see an example of the Nerd bully at work. Anonymous, negative and probably wrong.
This is a bogus article. Why? Well firstly you can't gauge the writer? Who has written this? They have an opinion but everyone has opinions. So what is the meat of the writers idea:
"Usenet is an active hive of technical
users who know all the right answers"
Usenet is an example of a broken model. Sure you can ask a question and get an answer. You might get 50. So how do you work out who's is right and the best? Force of personality? Discussion? By the time you have followed this discussion the noise/sig has diluted the answer possibly for the person who asked the question. What about others who ask the same question 5 years down the line? Where is the knowledge trapped? How are the experts identified? What you get is a unfocused threaded discussion arguing the merits of proposed solutions punctuated by the random Star Trek pun or maybe a lame Simpsons joke.
The ideas behind Stack Overflow are worth looking at. Forget who is doing it. Don't like Joel or Atwood, Fine. But finding answers to specific questions, finding good answers, evaluating responders and filtering the best results and preserving them is a worthy idea. The filtering of information and building the reputations of users who contribute is proving to be a real problem. Something to look at a bit closer.
The questions and answers might be crap at the moment. But maintaining that an archaic system is the best way to do things is making a statement about the writer.
> "It seems to basically be the hosting ground for answers to hard factual questions answered in most documentation/materials elsewhere"
That's exactly what StackOverflow is meant to be.
I feel like I'm the only one who appreciates what StackOverflow is trying to achieve here - to be the place to document hard, solid facts - nothing more. If I wanted to read commentary and opinions on programming, there's always HN or Slashdot.
My programming journey started more than a decade before Stack Overflow came into existence, but Stack Overflow-style forums were always a very big part of it, so the concept is certainly not new to me.
I've found some utility in the site when I want to see a quick API reference example from a popular library, but find most of the content to be not particularly interesting to me at this stage. I have found that there is minimal content in the subjects I am interested in today, with more dead ends than answers, leaving very little draw to the site for me.
Based on my own history, I feel like if I had started programming when Stack Overflow was an available resource I would still be at the stage where the kind of content on the site would be incredibly fascinating. I used to eat that stuff up like it was going out of style. But at some point you start to see the same patterns and it all begins to feel repetitive, even if the names have changed.
Perhaps people with longer programming histories simply outgrow Stack Overflow? I still turn to it once in a while, but don't see it as the incredible resource many others seem to.
>I wish more people understood that the goal of Stack Overflow is not "answer my question" but "let's collaboratively build an artifact that will benefit future coders". Perhaps SO could be doing more to educate people about this. -Jeff Atwood
But the way to built that knowledge base is by answering peoples questions because the questions people ask indicate what is relevant to answer.
This is the blog post on which Joel Spolsky announced stackoverflow.com, in which he made the case for its need in the market of online resources for programmers. I think he was right, and since then, he's stayed right. Maybe it could be improved if the right someone were to tweak it in just the right way - but I'd be wary of attempts to do so.
I thought the primary goal of Stack Overflow was to crush Experts Exchange — that’s what Joel and Jeff said in the podcasts they published while SO was being built. I figured everything else it achieved was gravy.
I appreciate the author's opinions overall, so this is a nitpick of just one of his core arguments. I think he is inverting the value of certain kinds of questions. To me, Stack Overflow is valuable primarily for the simple answers to simple questions, and secondarily for the complex answers to hard questions.
As a software developer well into my second decade of professional experience, I maintain a small number of technologies at what you might call an expert level. These technologies shift in and out of focus depending on what my current projects are.
When I complete a project and don't use the technology for more than a year or so, I've found that I forget all of the nitty gritty stuff and remember all the big conceptual stuff.
For example, I recently returned to Java after several years of disuse. All the bit conceptual stuff that was really hard for me to pick up initially, like polymorphic behavior, multithreading, etc., was still there. The easy but nit-picky stuff was all gone. I'd forgotten when boxing happens and doesn't happen, the behavior of equals in reference vs value types, even where I'm supposed to put certain syntactic elements. Simple questions on StackOverflow to the rescue!
As another example, I did a large project involving SVG in the early 2000's and got to the point where I knew as much as there was to know about it. I recently did a quick one-off project that utilized SVG, and I found that I'd retained the big conceptual ideas, such as the behavior of the coordinate system, the hierarchy of shapes, viewports, groups, etc., but I'd totally forgotten a huge laundry list of practical nitty-gritty things about actually making an SVG experience work.
In the Java example I was embarking on a large project, so I hit the books and re-taught myself to fish again, because it was quite worth my time investment to start from the fundamentals and work my way back up. In the SVG example, I literally just wanted to do something in an afternoon, and I knew SVG could do it, and I wasn't going to do any SVG work after that. Hitting the books and teaching myself to fish in that scenario would have been a waste of time. So I plowed through and was helped immensely by the simple-question simple-answer Stack Overflow scenario.
Then there's a whole list of technologies that I really don't have the brain-space to keep abreast of, but I still need to use. For example I am not an expert at shell scripting, but on occasion I need to write one. Back to Stack Overflow and the simple answers to simple questions.
Before Stack Overflow I wouldn't have been in the dark--as a long-time Internet community member, I would have gone through the usual: find the right community with the most helpful people, hope the community has a search engine or is well indexed by Google, read through long lists of replies without a voting system or assessment of quality, rinse-repeat. Stack Overflow speeds that process up immensely.
The answer wasn't a Q&A help site it was a high quality curated wiki of the best answers and questions. It isn't supposed to be a forum where you come to ask your one off questions it supposed to be a place where you encounter a unique technical challenge figure out what the core issue is and then see if anyone else knows how to resolve the core issue and then have that core issue answered forever and always.
The one time I asked a Question on SO it was a very positive experience that went well got answered quickly, but I first had spent thirty minutes documenting everything checking the actual docs and ensuring I had done my due diligence before throwing it out there for someone else to answer.
If you aren't willing to put in work to find the answer to your question why the hell would you expect someone else to.
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