It's undeniable that the original intent of Stack Overflow is as you described; both Jeff and Joel have been very explicit about why they launched Stack Overflow and what its intended purpose was.

But Jeff left over 10 years ago and Joel was never very involved in the day-to-day operations. Since Jeff left things have been rather directionless; for a long time many Stack Overflow employees disagreed about lots of things and the net result was that ... nothing ever changed.

There's still many people who subscribe to this view of Stack Overflow, but also many who don't. In my own rant about Stack Overflow[1] I complained that these sort of useful questions being downvoted or closed.

In the end, this lack of direction results in a weird mish-mash site where different people are operating under different assumptions about what the "correct" behaviour ought to be, and it leaves everyone unhappy.

[1]: https://www.arp242.net/stackoverflow.html

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.

That tension existed in the announcements for the sites...

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...

> 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.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

> 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)

And the history of this question: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/timeline (note revision 1: https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1 )

For the backstory, when there was just Stack Overflow (and not the network of Stack Exchange sites), there was a large contingent of people who wanted Stack Overflow just for programming problems (and not programmer-related questions, like business concerns, conceptualizing, or lists like these).

So the early Stack Overflow population separated everything into "Programming Related" (on-topic) and "Not Programming Related" (off-topic) questions. When Stack Exchange 2.0 launched (allowing people to suggest new sites), one of the sites that launched in the first wave was "Not Programming Related" which was intended to house all the fun stuff that was now off-topic on Stack Overflow.

Turns out, having a free-for-all site doesn't work, and the quality was all over the place. So it was retuned into being a site for questions about being a programmer or acting as programmer (so, business or conceptual questions answerable by programmers)—which captured 85-90% of the quality questions on the new site—to Stack Overflow's concrete programming (questions specifically about implementation): hence the name, Programmers.SE.

> There’s an even longer list of things that really belong on the new Programmers Stack Exchange, which appears to be degrading into fairly stupid water-cooler nonsense, and could benefit from an infusion of more meaty subjects, like these proposals ...

This lead to the six subjective guidelines ( http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su... ) and its enforcement notice ( https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/q/350 )

An early history of this is recapped at https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144

From the moderator and curator side... it's not at all enjoyable being a volunteer trying to keep the site on track. Combine this with the difficulty of fitting those questions to the framework... and the only people who wanted those questions were the people who randomly stopped by to answer about farting in the cubicle or naming of a cat or ask about the patron saint of programming. No lasting community formed around the questions, no one wanted to moderate or curate them... and so both the company and the people who curated the site got a rather strong "no opinion based questions" stance.

It is much easier to draw a clear line that is "too strict" and curate that line than it is to not have that line and have many judgement calls depending on who is looking at the post today.

While we can probably agree that the following questions are certainly over the line...

Farting in the cubicle: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4954... ; example answer: http://i.stack.imgur.com/Qvcqx.png

Naming of cats: https://i.stack.imgur.com/VI92W.png

Patron saint of programming: https://i.stack.imgur.com/PV1tN.png

where do you put "what is the best php framework?" or "should I work for a company that does porn?" or "should I work at SCO?"

This isn't saying there isn't a place for such questions - just that the Q&A framework that SO uses provides a poor medium for such questions and there are other places for people who want to ask those questions to ask them.

But that's the whole point of StackOverflow. Right on the about page is their mission statement:

    Ask questions, get answers, no distractions

    This site is all about getting answers. 
    It's not a discussion forum.
    There's no chit-chat.

Why? Because the answer is inherently subjective. It's open to interpretation and flame wars. In a year, it will also be obsolete.

Compare that to a trivial question, like: How do you create a while loop in C++03?

Which is incredibly basic, yet will always have 1 correct answer that will then be added to SO's vast knowledge base.

There's also the great side effect of StackOverflow then becoming a place for real-world problems for actual practicing programmers rather than a debate forum. The "best Javascript framework" might sound like a great topic for you, but it's also indicative that you haven't actually started any work on a project, compared to, say a person trying to figure out how to do two-way binding in Knockout.js. I'd much rather have a site full of real-world issues that are getting solved than a site dedicated to theory-based bickering.

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"

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.

Stack Overflow works best when there is a well defined problem that can be reproduced and you are a specific answer rather than guidance for how to proceed or a tutorial.

If someone needs to come back to a question to answer comments and work through it, SO becomes more and more difficult to use in that format. AN important thing to remember is that it isn't the right site for every question (and trying to use it as such will run into those intentional design choices made at the very start to make it difficult to use for certain types of questions).

I like my information well-ordered, grouped, focused and easy to search. Slack is a waterfall I just can't stand. (plus the emojis, am I too old for those?)

And Jeff always proclaimed that the purpose of the site is a very pragmatic one. To be a source of help for the specific professional community. Not a place to meet your buddies and hang out.

And there's a place for both. Personally, I like that StackOverflow stays away from too much social interaction and focuses on providing valuable technical content.

Lengthy discussions can be interesting, but they don't solve problems. They're not useful. Therefore, Stack Overflow is not the right place for them.

Actually they even have a place for discussions: a chat feature that can be linked to from any question.

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.

1. The Answers market is in a land grab mode

David argued that just because they had a home run in one niche, it didn't mean that they will have success in another niche.

I disagree. The brilliance of Stack Overflow (SO) is that they've come up with a product that takes flows with how the internet works. People type questions into search engines constantly. And, Google gives a high page rank to sites that provide frequently updated, quality content on a specific topic. Stack Overflow has nailed that, and because of that, a large percentage of their search traffic is organic. Stack overflow, has also solved a big problem that Yahoo answers has, which is reputation and trust.

I'm guessing the reason that they are interested in rapidly expanding SO to other markets, is Joel sees that this is how the internet currently works and SO has a 6-9 month lead on them in terms of technology and answer site savvy. It's a good time to exploit that, in my opinion.

David also suggests via straw man argumentation that people typing questions like "How to make swedish meatballs" isn't a market worth chasing. You'd have to ask the people at the Food Network that. Joel might be interested in licensing a "Food Overflow" to the Food Network's set of web sites. Or, perhaps he would be interested in setting up a "Home Repair Overflow" for Home Depot. Or, a "Car Repair Overflow" to Napa Auto Parts. Speaking of which, my 2003 caravan is acting up, and I'd kill for a "Car Repair Overflow".

2. Stack Overflow is like Starbucks

Just because David can't see a reason for Stack Overflow to spend money doesn't mean that Joel cant. SO has grown from zero to 6 million monthly unique visitors in 18 months with a staff of 6 people. I'm guessing that Joel is interested in adding dozens or hundreds of niche specific SO sites. And, yes, if he is going to chase that option, then he needs a lot of capital to hire.

3. Stack Overflow wants to get on Techcrunch

Ummm. No. Read Joel's post. That's not what Joel said. Again, another straw man by David. Joel said that he was interested in publicity. Publicity != Tech Crunch. Publicity can also mean attention from old media outlets like television shows, and newspapers. And, answers site benefit particularly well from media attention and publicity. One of the big reasons that SO was a success was because Jeff and Joel's blogs were so popular. If SO can get some media attention in other markets, I'd wager could see explosive growth for other verticals as well.

David dispariaged expanding SO to other niches by suggesting that SO was going after kids interested in how to find 3 gold rings in Zelda. I'm guessing that Joel is more interested in the consumer that asks "How do I change the alternator on my 2003 Dodge Caravan". Someone asking that question ooking for advice on changing an alternator in a 2003 Caravan, is going to be in the market to purchase that alternator. Advertisers pay a premium to reach people at that point in the sales funnel.

4. The investor will give you advice, connections, and introductions

David has the balls to give Joel hell for raising money in order to get advice? 37 Signals took money from Bezos to "get his advice". I'm just flat out calling bull shit on that one. I'm really sick of 37 Signals guys talking out of both sides of their mouths about this subject. They really have no room to talk on this one.

And, yes, investors often do have connections that young entrepreneurs can use. I have a number of friends in funded startups that have gotten introductions to airline executives, banking executives, CFO's of large consumer product companies because they found investors that had experience in those industries. It might not be an issue for 37 Signals, because they are sell ebooks, chat and TODO lists to Rails Developers, but if your business has anything to do with medium to large businesses, then the introductions come in really handy.

5. Taking money means big exit or IPO

"I don't know if you heard, but IPO markets aren't all that interested in eyeball companies without the numbers to back them up". Fog Creek makes $1 million a year on a job board that he advertises on his blog. 37 Signals also makes a bunch of money off their job board. There are more ways to monetize eyeballs than just advertising. SO is already doing that.

And, Silicon Valley is full of people that have made a bunch of money off of big exits or IPO's. Have you looked at the real estate market in the area? One of the reasons that it's so high, is because Google's first 1000 employees were all millionaires. Yahoo, Ebay, HP, Intel, Cisco, Sun, Oracle... Living here, you're surrounded by people that have made a killing off of options. Living in Chicago, you'd never see that, so I can see where David's myopia comes from.

The IPO market isn't over, and the merger and acquisition market is warming up. The last 10 years of financial and real estate hubris are collapsing before our eyes, and investors are going to be looking for places to make big returns again. It's just a matter of time before companies like Facebook, Yelp or Twitter IPO, and I'd be wiling things in the tech world will begin to look a lot different. Also, there's a bunch of companies in the economy that laid off a lot of people and they are now sitting on tons of cash. Those companies are going to be interested in growing, and acquisitions are a very nice way to do that.

A founders chances of getting a large company to look at her startup as a potential acquisition are better if they have already been valued at $10 million post money, than if it's 4 guys in their garage with a website. There's a reason that Del.icio.us took investment before they got picked up by Yahoo.

6. Taking VC will make your company successful

Joel said that taking VC makes sense if it meant you could grow the company and the founder wasn't interested in self aggrandizement. Joel has written a number of times that one of the problems that he saw with a self funded company, is that his employees don't have a huge upside potential. Upside can be shared with employees via options and an IPO. A quick acquisition for $6 million based on 3x annual revenues... not so much to share with employees.

I don't get the impression that Joel is doing this because he wants the money personally.

So, hypothetically, things like recommendations would be a bad fit for Stack Overflow as the "what is the best library to use for developing Java applications" has moved from Apache Struts to other things.

And "what is the best blog to read to get an understanding of Python" would change every year and the new posts would get buried at the bottom...

Unless you're appending "... in July of 2023" to all the questions this month.

If you want something that is more ephemeral in its nature... wouldn't Reddit or Lemmy or Discord be a better choice for that type of question?

They've achieved a lot, but if you look at that diagram of what stackoverflow is supposed to be you'll see it's still not that. It's very much not wiki-like, and it's very much not blog-like. And part of the reason to support those aspects was to provide precisely the experiences that I've found lacking, such as being able to use the site as a general education resource (like wikipedia).

What? That's not good enough? Look at the graph. That's what it's about.