What about all the people who contributed over the years to Stack Overflow? All the people that took time out of their day for years to answer people's questions and keep the site organized. Stack Overflow would be worthless without its contributors.
It seems like Stack Overflow is a company that has figured out a way to profit of the Hacker Ethos of helping people. I guess if you concentrate enough naive volunteers in one space, you can sell their time to someone else.
This is happening a lot lately in Open Source and Tech. Just two examples: Wikimedia's endowment is reaching over 100 million dollars. AWS is making a huge amount of revenue of Redis.
Is there a point when the hacker ethos needs to become more broad? At the very least, we should be considering where we spend our time and for who.
Stack Overflow is a bait-and-switch. They tricked volunteers into writing all their valuable content but now those contributors are finding that the bait of community participation and prestige was just a sham. SO will extract as much value as they can from having the critical mass but without volunteers creating new content (answers) they will soon become a tumbleweed site of people “facing an issue” asking plaintively how to “do the needful” into the vacuum.
I have a hard time feeling sorry for Stack Overflow. They had most developers in the world visiting frequently. They have detailed information on exactly which languages, libraries, toolchains, and platforms those developers use and their pain points. All of their content is given to them for free by volunteers. All of their moderation is done for them for free by volunteers. The only thing they have to serve is text. How can you fail to build a sustainable business on top of that?
Nothing is perfect, Stack Overflow is a great resource online. Of course it has a few quirks and problems, but why try to bring it down by publicly quitting it and seemingly trying to bring others with you. Quietly leave. Making a noise like this leads me to believe the problem is more with you than SO.
Arguments could be made against contributing to...
Helping the homeless,
Open source,
Hacker News discussions,
?
ETC
I'm a bit divided about Stack Overflow. On one hand side it's simply one, if not the best, resource for programmers. On the other hand it's become somewhat toxic and counterproductive. The better you become as a programmer the less value you derive from it. The true niche experts are less and less to be found (ie Product/Project -owners and Microsoft/Google/Apple etc -employees) and the other replies will often be exasperating mixture of trying to give answers they've googled or complain about some meta-aspect of the question.
Any community that reaches a certain size will face unique problems and I think Stack Overflow has some of the same problem as reddit does: you have to be very careful on how you give power to users. Power corrupts and becomes a goal/game in itself. Karma/power is a great incentive in the beginning of a community, but can become destructive in the long run. That some programmers have a certain type of personality is probably not helping either.
There seems to be many småpåvar on Stack Overflow that loves to wield the small amount of power they've accrued without actually contributing that much. On the other hand you have to enforce rules and curation to keep quality up.
It's a very fine balance and hard to get right. It's mostly about human psychology and incentives. I think there's some tweaks they could do to improve things but I also understand that from their perspective why change something that works?
The danger is that the true experts stop helping/answering questions on Stack Overflow because they find the community becoming too toxic. Might turn into a downwards spiral until there's mostly trolls and newbies left.
> Stack overflow is probably responsible for increasing global developer productivity by maybe ~1000x the acquisition price.
And almost every single bit of it is due to community work, not the people inside company. (That is not to say the company is irrelevant - but seeing how consequently stackexchange dropped bricks on everybody's feet two years ago and the community still carried on gives you some perspective on what is keeping the site alive).
The core mission of the system that is stack overflow is in the eye of the beholder. If you ask a army of unpaid volunteers who maintain it or one of the even larger army of contributors who actually provide expert level content for free, I think you'll be a different answer than the C-suite will give you.
The business is a helpful abstraction layered over the top of all these people doing the actual work. It's useful as long as it keeps the lights on. When it stops doing that the community has the right and the responsibility to move the work product of the huge quantity of people actually doing the thing here somewhere else.
A lot of people were only willing to contribute to StackOverflow because of the CC licensing, trusting the knowledge wouldn't be locked up. As a business that depends on vast amounts of volunteer effort they need to balance providing a site where people are willing to contribute against making as much money as they can.
The importance of Stack Overflow cannot be understated. It literally is underpinning every facet of development from front-end to back-end and everything else in-between. I probably visit it at least three or four times a day. Also, you regularly see core contributors and even owners of open source projects answering questions on SO, which is great. The power of Stack Overflow is only hidden from those who probably would never have a reason to use it.
Stack Overflow the company does more than you think. Aside from building and running the software, there's a lot going on behind the scenes to stop abuse and the like.
Stack Overflow wouldn't be a success without its users, but its users also wouldn't be a success without Stack Overflow.
You're being a little condescending and are not exactly making a good comparison. Stackoverflow was (is?) a really cool company and website, and as far as I knew they were making a reasonable profit. Consider that they allow visitors to post questions and answer, edit other people's questions and answers, and even query the database for any info that's public (e.g. not user passwords, but pretty much anything else), all without having an account. That's unique.The moderation model (that it's based on reputation except for a few elected members) is also also very unique. It's really a site by programmers for programmers, moderated by everyone who spends time there. Having them change the site completely, solely for making more profit, is unexpected. It would be similar to Linux announcing that the kernel will have a license fee from now on - you can be snarky about the cows and the grain, and indeed the kernel project is of huge value so it would make sense from a commercial perspective, but the kernel becoming paid and stackoverflow using annoying UI patterns are both not in line with their previous ways.
Solving problems for random people on StackOverflow helps them (the user, the corporation, and StackOverflow) make cash while not compensating you, and it also requires relevant knowledge and effort to communicate concisely and correctly.
On the other hand, people on Hacker News, Facebook, Tumblr, /. and so on don't actually have to know anything, and their contributions only make money for the host company, and barely so in some cases. Reddit, as an example, isn't really profitable because of its average user.
I contribute to similar things, myself, pretty frequently, but let's not pretend like social media and collaborative knowledge projects are completely equivalent and that effort spent is transitive.
At this point, I have no desire to participate in or help stackoverflow. The attitudes there are such hostile, elitist garbage, where someone is incapable of asking a question, because it will instantly be closed by the mods. God forbid they are a newbie to the site. Responses essentially amount to go RTFM.
I would really like to see what Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, the original creators of Stack Overflow, have to say about the current state of affairs. Their business model was recruiting by identifying people with specific skills, and it was effective. I hired and was hired that way.
(They sold it years ago to a South African private equity venture and made the pile of money they deserved.)
Stack Overflow has become a place where idiot savants who know the ins and outs of specific technologies and have fast typing skills compete with each other for upvotes and reputation. Intuition, analogies and humor aren't appreciated. Only raw, pedantically precise technical content. As a result, Stack Overflow has become the giant sink where all programming knowledge that will be irrelevant in less than five years eventually lands. Programming wisdom, however, has to be found elsewhere.
What makes me the most sad about this state of affairs is that things weren't always this way. When Stack Overflow had just been created, the community was genuinely interested first and foremost in helping each other. Of course, we felt joy when others upvoted and accepted our answers, but we weren't desperate for those upvotes. We sometimes took the time to write elaborate questions and write elaborate answers, because our primary aim was to solve actual programming problems, not just watch our reputation increase at the fastest rate possible.
When did Stack Overflow go wrong? I can't give a precise time frame, but there were some clear signs:
1. When people started to care enough about reputation that they'd focus on answering trivial questions that were likely to be upvoted by lots of newbies. The most obvious example of this was Jon Skeet's rise to prominence.
2. When people started to care enough about reputation that they'd flame other people's answers to death for very minor technical inaccuracies. By all means point at the mistake, but do it so that it gets fixed, not so that the OP hopefully accepts your answer and not someone else's.
3. When Stack Overflow started giving users privileges on the basis of their reputation: the right to close questions, the right to edit other people's questions and answers (used sparingly, this can be useful, e.g., to rewrite questions more clearly; but this feature has been grossly abused), and even the right to comment on other people's questions and answers.
4. No doubt countless others.
Can this situation be remedied? Probably, if the community wants it. Sadly, not everyone has an equal say on Stack Overflow, and the ones with the most power are, for obvious reasons, in favor of the status quo.
Yes, I try to help people on StackOverflow whenever I can. But it's not the same feeling of trying to make meaningful progress so that you won't be ashamed to have nothing to show the next weekend you meet your hacker friend for a gaming session.
I think stackoverflow is more than just sum of it parts. Solutions presented there are not just provided by experts, they are reviewed by experts, and if someone has a better solution, it has a really high chance to boil to the top. Portion of experts will recognize that and adopt superior solution. This will keep driving code quality and standards of participants up.
Or at least so my reasoning goes. So to answer the question, I believe it had done much more than that - stackoverflow drove people to improve their technical knowledge, and that is priceless.
It seems like Stack Overflow is a company that has figured out a way to profit of the Hacker Ethos of helping people. I guess if you concentrate enough naive volunteers in one space, you can sell their time to someone else.
This is happening a lot lately in Open Source and Tech. Just two examples: Wikimedia's endowment is reaching over 100 million dollars. AWS is making a huge amount of revenue of Redis.
Is there a point when the hacker ethos needs to become more broad? At the very least, we should be considering where we spend our time and for who.
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