Many of the culture problems with SO are a result of poor or outdated site design and moderation tooling -- and the high-rep users are aware of this and have been pushing for better tools for years.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.
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?
The problem is that the people who originally headed the community and drove the site have checked out. That means that the very serious institutional and design problems related around the community moderation features of SO are not going to get fixed, they're just going to be gamed by the people with the most effort and free time. There are very few checks and balances on abuse of power at SO, even though that's where you need them the most. The assumption is that users with high enough rep will simply be more polite, logical, and kind, without any sort of agenda to propel. That, of course, was a naive assumption which is slowly blowing up in their faces, if they notice.
Meanwhile, nobody at the top cares because Jeff has moved on and everyone else just cares about site traffic and ad revenue (or at least that's my impression).
Stack Overflow has really forgotten how to engage with the community and especially so with the community of moderators. These moderators are not getting paid. It is a huge amount of volunteer effort they put as hobby. SO should express a lot of gratitude for these moderators who keep SO in sane condition. But SO has been bringing one policy change after another without getting the full support of this community. I think it started with CoC changes that required everyone to become overly polite which many users and moderators did not really agree with. The recent debate on gendered pronouns has frankly been a real mess done in haste and without transparency. If SO does not fix their ways of engaging with the community, I am afraid more and more moderators are going to leave this place.
I've been with SO since the very early days when Joel and Jeff were very involved. In the first few years, I visited daily because it was like a community of developers working together to help each other in a professional yet cheerful fashion. Now that Joel and Jeff aren't as involved (if at all), its like the focus of the site has changed. As many have said, moderators appear too stringent. So much to the point of removing value from the site. Removing value removes users. I now rarely visit SO because it doesn't feel like a group of developers wanting to help it's community. Asking a question has almost become a provocation of hostility from either moderators or 'answerers'. There are many controls to limit the asker. Perhaps controls should be put in place to limit negative answerer sentiment or moderator dominance or SO could lose it's place in the developer community.
I'm currently in the top 0.86% overall on Stack Overflow, even though I haven't been actively contributing since shortly after college (2015ish). I've always thought about writing this kind of blog post, but I think it's just pointless.
SO, over the past decade, has been destroyed by power-hungry admins. These admins are (1) not technically competent, (2) not politically astute, and (3) do not have the best of the community in mind. Simply put, they're power hungry online weirdos that just want to be "in charge" of a community. I've witnessed this dozens of times, and there have been many (many) controversies concerning SO admins. After a few run-ins that rubbed me the wrong way, I no longer contribute. I feel that SO has become the new "Experts Exchange" or "Yahoo Answers" -- ironically, exactly what they were trying to replace.
Yeah, the CEO nailed the problem 5 years ago and tried to fix it. The community was having absolutely none of it - meta overflow more or less had a collective “are we so wrong? no, it’s the questionmakers who are wrong…” and then went right back to it.
What do you do with the fact that your core contributors are toxic manchildren who love the ability to push buttons at people for daring to ask a question? Build something new where they’re not the core contributors.
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.
People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before.
Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on that (a lot of the more hostile rule enforcement tropes are banned and filtered against), and it's a hard problem.
SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good. If you want to kill it, please go ahead and solve the issue of explaining to users how to contribute quality content and getting them to take that in instantly.
I used to contribute a lot, which tapered off as I had other things filling my time. Towards the end though, the help vampires were getting to me, and I understand why people are harsh towards new users in some situations, it's an easy trap to fall into. Trying to fix that problem by stopping the curation of the content is insane, however. That's a fast route to going from some people being turned away to having no decent content.
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.)
One point I'm surprised this article didn't include was hostility towards users and mods from SO staff. I wander into Meta stackexchange on occasion and it's shocking how often the top threads are full of well reasoned posts from established users being ignored or bulldozed by SO employees.
Maybe I've just happened to look on bad days but I have the strong impression that SO is a platform that I absolutely don't want to get more invested in, despite a lot of interesting and knowledgable posters. It reminds me to the disdain Reddit has been showing towards its power users lately.
An established platform can get away with that sort behavior for a while, but is utterly toxic to its longterm quality and growth.
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.
It's unrealistic to say that the community folks are a perfect replacement for you and Joel being engaged because they too are engaged. That may be so, they may be more engaged than you ever were, but that's only half the equation. They don't have the authority and power that you did. It's not their baby, they're just baby sitters. They can't make sweeping changes because they think it's a good idea. They can't easily change the featureset of the system to support something they want. They have to go through a long process of getting buy off from folks for features, and then waiting until they're implemented.
When was the last time a major feature change happened with the software? It's unrealistic to imagine that there hasn't been a need for change and that the tools that were necessary for managing the community, say, 4 years ago are precisely identical to the ones that are needed today. That implies the community hasn't changed or that the tools were somehow perfect. Both are very unlikely.
Discipline is completely beside the point here. Of course good Q&A sites need discipline, and that loops back to authority figures exercising their powers (mods, admins, etc.) And sure there are people who will complain that SO is a harsh place and they just want to have fun. But that fails to address the many very well founded criticisms of the mod community on SO that numerous people have made, especially concerning abuse of power and twisting the site toward a different vision than it launched with. Imagine a sheriff making a statement that police brutality is justified because criminals exist.
Spammers exist, and low quality questions are a menace, but that doesn't stop the problems with stack overflow from being real.
Moreover, it's all too easy to fall into the complacency trap of saying that SO still has significant value to a lot of people, is still hugely popular, etc. That doesn't indicate that SO is fine, it merely shows that it might not be too late to fix the serious systemic and endemic problems it has. If you were to look at some magical graph of the "successfulness" or "popularity" of stack overflow over time, the point where things "went wrong" would not be at the peak. It wouldn't even be at the inflection point where things went from accelerating upwards to accelerating downwards. It would be before that, when the conditions that caused the inflection point to occur were in effect.
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.
I've been using SO since it's inception, several years ago. But with the whole moderator thing, the switch to a ridiculous buzzword homepage, and all the damn bullshit corporate speak, my trust in SO is at an all time low.
How did it get here from the straight-talking, community-orientated feel it used to have under Spoelsy and friends?
I feel like the moderation culture of Stack Overflow became toxic and counterproductive years ago. It's like the worst parts of Wikipedia, but squared. Just endless arguments over what is or isn't a duplicate or is or isn't relevant, while every interesting question somehow ends up closed, good answers are downvoted, and spam drifts to the top.
I'm sure everyone involved actually wants the site to be useful and pleasant, but somehow the actual result is the exact opposite.
That being said, I don't think the culture or moderation has got worse recently, so I suspect the traffic decline is either a change in Google's algorithms or the impact of ChatGPT (or both).
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.
> 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.
Stack Overflow has been trying VERY aggressively to monetize the site lately. In just the past 12 months:
- They’ve backpedaled on their formerly strict ad policy, now allowing animated ads [0] and trackers [1], and their quality control has become very poor [2].
- They changed the homepage to market their new SaaS product instead of the Q&A site [3]
- They replaced their CEO (who was a cofounder) with a new one who they described as “ someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth enterprise software company very quickly” [4]
- They fired and defamed a well-liked and well-respected volunteer moderator without cause, in a misguided attempt at virtue signaling, and refused to make any attempt to rectify their mistakes until the moderator in question got a lawyer [5]
- They fired/laid off two longtime and very well-respected Community Managers (employees whose job was to manage and work alongside with community) [6]
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.
If you're interested in reading some more of the history behind this, there's an excellent analysis at https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777.
[0]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/349118/3476191 [1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191
[2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/285889/258777 [3]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/332546/3476191
[4]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386324/3476191
[5]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/08/20/upcoming-on-stack-over...
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