Well said. Especially during the early years, I always found the signal/noise ratio of SO to be head and shoulders above anything on the web.
In part, due to a lot of their subtle UI and reputation choices. Really well designed.
Massive scale may at one point break that, but another cause may be found in the change of tone by the team behind SO. They're on the "inclusive" train now.
Don't get me wrong, being inclusive is good, but there's a difference between somebody being a beginner or not proficient in English, and somebody being plain lazy.
This "softening" I do not consider a good development. I prefer the tough love approach that weeds out garbage from good stuff. If that mechanism is compromised, its unique value is lost.
At the beginning of StackOverflow there was a very strong opinion held by the founders, particularly Jeff Atwood, that the longevity of a site was determined by the signal to noise ratio. The emphasis at the outset was to eliminate as much noise as possible. Automated systems were put in place that went way too far, in my opinion. The whole Chat system was put into place to get comments off the main pages. Even though Jeff Atwood hasn't been at the company for years, the philosophy still seems very entrenched.
Good description. And the site owner may have decided that trade-off works well for them - they are not incompetent or evil just because a few niche but noisy users have a moan.
Wow. Hard to see how you move the needle on making SO more welcoming when so much of the behavior is in the larger community. I suppose there may be some software changes that could help.
But I wish the next CEO luck, and appreciate what Joel and the team have brought into the world.
Complaints about SO remind me of the Louis CK bit about WiFi outage on airplanes. "Everything is AMAZING and no one is happy." SO is a miraculous effort that took a mob of people and harnessed the best aspects of their social nature to build the best Q&A site ever seen. But it's a little annoying sometimes to people with Copenhagen morality love to have on it. SO tram knows this of course and they make a lot of UI tricks to be very friendly and gamified. The site was designed by a world class product manager and it really shows. (It's one of the biggest and best Microsoft/ASP/.Net(!) sites on the internet, especially for non-Microsoft content!). The parts where they aren't perfect
(like the ego burn of getting a question closed) are highlighted by contrast to the rest of the experience.
It's easy to ignore singular questions like this. It's harder to ignore such questions when they compose 99% of the content source you're interested in, without ignoring the entire source - including the 1% of signal you care about. We are certainly running out of mental bandwidth all the time, even if you aren't counting them as bits.
This sort of community moderation exists in an attempt to proactively ensure a high signal to noise ratio (SNR), by discouraging noise. While it's an entirely valid stance to say they're overreacting and that the ratio is fine, that there's no slippery slope, etc., here's another viewpoint:
I don't read from the raw Stack Overflow firehose of posts. It doesn't even have a 1% SNR to me. Higher SNR sources (searches, specific links from my communities) will occasionally take me there, but as a primary source of information I don't even think of consulting it. I took a stab at participating in one of the far more niche subtopics - gamedev, relevant to me both professionally and unprofessionally - and still found it didn't have a high enough SNR to hold my interest beyond gathering a few hundred internet points. I found myself ignoring the majority of these sorts of questions, and quickly progressed to the natural conclusion of ignoring the site entirely.
And that's fine: Not everything is for everyone. But there are presumably those who still participate in the site directly who would prefer to remain doing so, yet find the SNR low enough to be pushing their own tolerances.
I guess a bit of benevolent dictatorship is required in keeping the signal/noise ratio high by one/small set of HN folks.
I guess there isn't a single solution, any community site needs to keep adapting to:
1. the raising competence of the current user base &
2. the wave of new users
I remember, during the early days of Joel on Software, we used put up Job descriptions, and Joel used to send folks emails and dissuade them from doing so -- and now he a nice money spinner with JoS job board.
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?
SO is definitely the best there’s ever been IMO. I’ll repeat myself a bit and say that I think the reason platforms like that are dying is because many people don’t want to make any effort and the expectation you try to be a good contributor is a negative for them.
I bet 50% of the problems I’ve ever had were self solved by trying to build an example that showed exactly what issue I was having.
This. I think SO is a great resource, and it has helped me answer countless programming questions. However, I participate less and less these days because there is a small group of overzealous users who have come to view themselves as the saviors of software development. The way they treat newcomers, and people who make innocent errors, is just not acceptable to me. I believe strongly that a community like SO can be run in a more user-friendly manner (literally, more friendly to users) -- and still be just as successful and useful as a resource of programming knowledge. I'm sorry to see SO going in the other direction.
I wasn't a fan of Oink from the beginning. On its first use I was able to like such arbitrary things like my own T-shirt, or a piece of gum on the floor. I knew right then this was going to get way too noisy and it did.
I do see where they're coming from though. The reputation system was supposed to balance this out. Kind of like social news websites where people submit tons of links. Somehow through upvoting things become relevant no longer noisy and I'm pretty sure that's what Oink was going for. It was all very well designed.
I think a lot of people who used it didn't treat it that way. They treated it as another review site, which it also was. But treating it that way makes it such a chore to "build" and so eventually we all lost the point of it all.
I agree to a lot of this, despite the criticisms being seen as cliche.
I've found the reddit programming communities to be more helpful as a user, even though finding similar enough content is difficult. Further, I've noticed reddit and blogs edging in on SO's Google results. I wonder if this will be the trend.
SO has been great for so long because the content was trustworthy. The trolls are removing that edge.
I invested a lot of effort into SO early on and came to the same conclusion. I mostly avoid even viewing the site now the same way I avoid viewing w3schools, but when I do happen to click in I’m astonished to see edits to 10+ year old answers that are often superfluous or just plain wrong. And lots of comments on similar answers that are perfectly well meaning but have no context of how the relevant technologies have changed in that time.
But none of that is why I find SO offputting. In theory that’s how it’s supposed to operate. What I find offputting is that despite all these edits and comments the general quality of a given SO page has become a much more visually noisy version of the hyphenated website its creators used to mock. Just absolutely bad advice on bad questions with no citation to be seen.
At some point the volume of activity overtook the will or competency to moderate and it just became a Reddit skin.
I find it odd that you even consider it's a problem. It's odd to hear a founder consider a site growing a problem.
The metrics to handle the "problem" should have been addressed during the conception stage of the site. I would be surprised if simple administration could fix the trend.
This. SO gets a lot of flack for stuff these days, and it falls into two camps - one camp is 'they hate fun', 'they close my questions', where people want to reduce the quality of the content on SO, and one is the 'the content isn't perfect' camp that complains about stuff like this.
It reminds me of the 'wikipedia can be wrong!' crowd - yes, that's inherant to the format. Yes, you are going to need to check things you read there, yes, your 20 page essay about why you are the best person in the world is going to get deleted.
Every time I see a critisism of SO, I tend to see someone who would make the site worse or is misusing the site. Not saying SO is perfect - more can be done to help those people become good contributors or users, but SO is very well designed, and the quality of the content is really very good.
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.
When I was active on SO I did often see unwelcoming behaviour. Closing questions as being dupes or offtopic, with no explanatory comments, was the most common thing. Infuriating too (and not only to new users) was the proliferation of bad edits, clearly undertaken by clueless people to try and amass points.
More of an irritant to me was the generally noisy and poor-quality content. I will only follow links to SO now in areas where I know enough to be able to filter for quality myself (usually it's wanting). From my perspective, the gamification schtick is a failure.
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.
There seems to be a recent tendency where web-based business that wish to make changes to their platforms cite lack of inclusiveness for the main reason for the change.
SO is a trash fire. For everyone, not "women", not "people of color", not "people without color", not "groups". Everyone.
It's an openly hostile place where mods close questions unrelated to their expertise based on the whims of those in private chat rooms while belittling the questioner with those "your question was closed because X" explainer boxes.
It would be refreshing if they just said something like "We've realized that SO is a hostile place, and it's not better if you just happen to be a white man."
If you read their change list, nothing there has anything to do with "identity". It's just a list of very small tweaks.
As a longtime contributor and moderator on SO this is, unfortunately, very true. The community has always been toxic, being a newbie on SO requires a really thick skin or being willing to withstand a lot of abuse to use the site (if you're asking new questions).
The fact that there's very no off topic also makes it nearly impossible to "build" a community out of the site as well, it's all too focused on just questions and answers and I feel no need to go back to talk to anyone because I've never met anyone at SO while I made many longtime friends in other forums.
It also saddens me that SO has killed all these smaller and more or less insular communities, i see very little movement on the old mailing lists and forums that are still up, all questions moved to SO in a way or another (even for non-English speaking communities) so I'm not sure if the site has been positive for the tech community in general.
I had so much coaching and help from people in the local and regional communities I was a part of when I was in college and later starting my career and now there's nothing like it around anymore because SO sucked all the oxygen around them. Not sure where i'd be if I was starting right now.
In part, due to a lot of their subtle UI and reputation choices. Really well designed.
Massive scale may at one point break that, but another cause may be found in the change of tone by the team behind SO. They're on the "inclusive" train now.
Don't get me wrong, being inclusive is good, but there's a difference between somebody being a beginner or not proficient in English, and somebody being plain lazy.
This "softening" I do not consider a good development. I prefer the tough love approach that weeds out garbage from good stuff. If that mechanism is compromised, its unique value is lost.
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