Stack Overflow Fatigue

http://robertelwell.blogspot.com/2010/06/stack-overflow-fatigue.html

by languagehacker • 16 years ago

100 58 16 years ago

robertelwell.blogspot.com

melling3• 16 years ago

I quit StackOverFlow once they devalued asking questions. No one on the site seemed to understand that incentivizing people to ask great questions was the most important thing. The site could have been a great starting point for learning esoteric topics like Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, Grails, Scala, Lift, Go, Emacs Lisp, etc.

Basically, in general, you need one good question with 2 or 3 good answers [yes, some types are better with 100 answers].

"How do I reverse a string in Java?" "How do I reverse a string in Haskell?" "How do I ... in Haskell?"

The questions could have been linked to build a Rosetta Stone, as well as a complete beginner's guide to topic X. Actually, it could have been a guide from beginner to guru.

farmerbuzz• 16 years ago

Are you using the site for reputation or to spread knowledge? If its the former then you're welcome to leave, if its the latter then why do you care about reputation?

bad_user• 16 years ago

Can't it be both?

Gaining reputation points is a wonderful short-term incentive for contributing. Otherwise why waist time instead of working on something fun? (and good answers take a lot to write)

mmacaulay3• 16 years ago

Reputation and other points systems are designed to attract people because it's like a game - in fact, this very site uses it!

Obviously there's the problem of people "gaming the system" to earn more reputation and you do whatever is possible to prevent that, but there's no reason why people can't be there for both the reputation points game AND to spread knowledge. The problem now for Stack Overflow (as I see it) is that it's reached a level of saturation where it's difficult to do either.

eli• 16 years ago

The fact that points on SO actually unlock admin and moderation features on the site gives them real value. I don't care at all about my Reddit karma, but if it meant I could eventually retitle misleading posts I would.

philh• 16 years ago

He cares about incentivizing people to ask great questions, and some people see reputation as an incentive. Therefore he cares about reputation.

edit: to clarify, I mean he cares about how reputation is handled, not necessarily about his own reputation.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

When I found it, StackOverflow seemed like a good "portfolio" site. The goal wouldn't be to answer the most possible question but answer and ask questions which would give a potential employer some idea concerning my skill, knowledge and preferences. But having at least 1k+ Karma seemed like a reasonable part. I was annoyed with question-Karma reduction since it seemed to cut into that goal, even if my Karma never actually went back below 1k.

petercooper• 16 years ago

Do you have a job for money or to feel satisfied and useful? If it's the former, then you can't complain about being made to do menial work or how you're treated. If it's the latter, then you can't complain about being underpaid. Because, yeah, life is full of false dichotomies like yours ;-)

j_baker• 16 years ago

I still post questions on SO, but only because there simply isn't any other place to get answers to some questions I have. It wouldn't have annoyed me so much except there seemed to be so little complaint when this change was made.

Perhaps if there were a competitor that had as much interaction, I wouldn't post there.

mmacaulay3• 16 years ago

Right on the money.

I was there in the (relatively) early days where it was exciting to ask and answer questions and contribute to the site, while scoring points(!)

Nowadays I often encounter SO links while googling things, and it has certainly become a great resource in that sense. But I rarely have a need to ask questions there anymore as everything is covered, and trying to answer questions isn't worth the effort for similar reasons.

As new technologies emerge, I can see there being waves of increased activity as those topics are explored, and if you're one of those people on the forefront of said technology I could see it bringing back some of the original charm.

carson• 16 years ago

I have become a little discouraged at how stale some of the posts have become. I have run into Google searches that give me results where the accepted answer is now wrong. Sometimes the posts have devolved into multiple new answers that are correct but have very few upvotes. In some cases the newer answers are rants on how the original answer is wrong.

I do think there is still room for SO to grow with newer technology that comes out. SO became a great resource for iPhone development and I think that can still happen.

What would probably help is a purge of some sort. I'm not sure how they would go about it but I don't think just re-tagging will work I think they need to flush some of the stuff out.

michael_dorfman2• 16 years ago

I don't think a purge would get to the root of the problem, which is an incentive system that rewards adding early answers, rather than editing existing answers.

One of Joel's stated goals in the early days was that the answers would converge, Wikipedia-like, toward some Platonic ideal-- but the system in place doesn't encourage that.

wisty• 16 years ago

Neither does Wikipedia, but at least Wikipedia doesn't have "cold" articles.

marbletiles• 16 years ago

Yep, it's a huge problem: the pervasive rating system constantly needs fresh eyes on things to keep it accurate, so old questions don't get updated votes. To compound that, if you're a newcomer arriving via Google, you can't down vote.

So you, the freshest pair of eyes on the page, can see an out-of-date error, but can't correct it or comment on it. All you can do is leave another answer, which is doomed to sit at 0 votes.

dasil003• 16 years ago

No matter what they had done the luster would have worn off. The badge system just makes the whoring and the impossibility of ever attaining certain badges more obvious.

Every online community must go through a maturation process where excitement wanes and moderation waxes. At some point the curation of content becomes of primary importance.

Arguably they could have built a longer lasting community with Wikipedia style participation, but it certainly wouldn't have grown as fast, and maybe never would have gotten traction at all, so it's hard to make a retroactive critique.

In any case though, Stack Overflow still has a fundamentally a great user experience. It's not a growth business, but there will always be new tech, and I don't see the community drying up.

michael_dorfman2• 16 years ago

No matter what they had done the luster would have worn off.

I'm not sure this is necessarily the case, because, as you write:

At some point the curation of content becomes of primary importance.

Which is why they need to find a way to build an incentive system that properly rewards "Wikipedia-style participation".

That's a tough nut to crack, but I certainly hope that they've got some folks working on it, now that they've got the VC money in place.

hazmattron• 16 years ago

I find that Google is a great way to access the information on Stack Overflow, even as a participating member of the community. When I'm looking for an answer to a question, often a Google search will return the Stack Overflow post most relevant - helpful when there are many similar posts on a given topic.

markmywords• 16 years ago

Yes, it leads to better results than using the Stack Overflow search.

mistermann7• 16 years ago

If SO was smart they would write an advanced search form that basically just translates into google compatible syntax and forwards it to google (assuming there are no legal issues with this.) Are there legal issues with this, is this a violation of the google TOS??

CWuestefeld2• 16 years ago

I'd like to be answering questions there to provide a service, but I'd also like to receive recognition for it. But it seems like that's no longer possible, at least not at a level of tradeoff that's acceptable to me.

For one thing, I always try to provide a tested answer, but doing so means that someone frequently jumps in front of me, scoring the reputation. In many of these cases I can see that the answer provided might be conceptually correct, but wasn't actually tested, because there are typos in the code. Thus, it appears that the incentives are skewed away from providing the highest-quality answers.

I pretty much quit about two weeks ago. I spent time formulating an answer [1] that was entirely correct, so by the time I posted it there were three other answers there, but they relied on special cases rather than being generally correct. One person upvoted my answer, but almost immediately, someone else downvoted it. The only thing I can imagine is that one of the "competing" answerers wanted to ensure that his mostly-correct answer was listed above my completely correct one, so he could score points from readers that hadn't yet seen my reply that explained why special care was needed.

If my diligent work is going to be devalued like that, then I don't see the point in investing more time in it.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2975588/selecting-a-range...

codingthewheel• 16 years ago

I agree, because this kind of thing is very common. I'd have taken it a step further: if you provide an answer to a question, you shouldn't be allowed to downvote other answers to the same question. And if you downvote an answer to a question, you're not allowed to post an answer to that question. So get rid of conflicts of interest, and always allow people to upvote other answers, whether they've provided an answer or not.

archangel_one2• 16 years ago

I disagree; I've done that before when I've answered a question, because I felt another answer had appeared which was incorrect or misleading.

For example, I answered one question about some kind of 2d sorting issue - another answer popped up which was both incomplete (it only dealt with the 1d case, which was trivial) and incorrect (it claimed to run in linear time, but was blatantly using a nlogn sort). I felt that a downvote was the right thing to do - but that does rely on the honesty of the users, and it sounds like that's often lacking.

netmau5• 16 years ago

I've used SO from time to time but have only participated when I came across a question I thought I could add value to with my perspective. I've never really kept up with the point system.

The author says "There's a plateau you hit there where you either have to devote way too much time to help other people do their work, or you just fall out of it." Do your points devalue over time somehow? Is there inflation in the user permissions you get with rep? Or is it just that you have to jump the shark to get the first answers in as they are far more valuable than later answers/editing answers?

languagehacker• 16 years ago

The plateau doesn't have to do with the points, but rather the content. If you're going to give an answer that's worthwhile, it would be nice to recognition for it. If you want recognition, you have to go after questions that haven't been answered. A lot of those are basically doing other people's work, and not really question-answering.

mmacaulay3• 16 years ago

Is there inflation in the user permissions you get with rep?

Yes. http://stackoverflow.com/faq#reputation

nickelplate• 16 years ago

The problem with StackOverflow is that it doesn't allow discussions, and as long as that will be the case I only see it working for general, domain-agnostic questions. If you have questions about the dark corners of C++/C#/Java, or how to best apply a design pattern, then chances are SO has something for you. As we level up as developers we gravitate relatively quickly towards specific domains. And a community of domain experts will not last long if it explicitly forbids extended discussions. The best online programming communities (e.g. gamedev, ltu, ompf, and the gold standard, flipcode (r.i.p.) ) are home to domain experts who enjoy discussing, debating and basically shooting the breeze with each other. This is what ultimately makes people stick around.

mistermann7• 16 years ago

> And a community of domain experts will not last long if it explicitly forbids extended discussions.

Totally agree, but this kind of interaction is explicitly what the SO team seems to be against, and for just SO itself, I agree. A legitimate justification for this is that people get into discussions which takes time away from input into the Q&A aspect of the site.

However, as you said, some problems or topics require a discussion, not singular statements upvoted or downvoted. I think SO can do just fine without discussions, but the stackexchange platform will be sorely lacking if they don't support a discussion "mode", but from what Jeff Atwood has said, at least as I interpret it, he seems to see no need for this mode at all, and thinks the stackexchange engine should eventually replace all phpBB boards out there. To me, this is insane, but this is how I interpret what he says, unless I've missed something.

telemachos• 16 years ago

My SO pet peeve was authors who answer nearly all questions in their field with "I discuss this in Chapter 5 of Volume 4 of my Everything You Need to Know About Everything series. In stores now."

mkramlich3• 16 years ago

And of course the flip side of that point is a lot of people's questions ARE already answered somewhere, often in books, if somebody just cared to get off their a-- and go look for it, spend time reading and investing in their own education. I've seen thousands of questions asked on the Internet where the asker could have answered it themselves by putting in a little more common sense effort, upfront.

The RTFM phenomenon.

mistermann7• 16 years ago

True enough, but with the number of technologies a developer is "required" to know these days, I have a bit of trouble buying the RTFM argument (unless it is referring to freely available, easily searchable help docs on the vendor/author website). The the amount of technologies I use on a day to day basis, it's literally impossible for me to RTFM on all of them, especially if by RTFM you mean read a book on the technology (not to mention, which book should I read....figuring that out can take an hour. And is reading just one book sufficient?)

gbhn• 16 years ago

The Stack Overflow goal is to build the "FM" in a search-friendly way that speaks directly to specific questions.

For myself, I like the site, and sometimes have problems it helps with, but too seldom for it to become a go-to resource. I think there are lots of people in situations for whom it can be indispensable in that way, though.

mkramlich3• 16 years ago

I've also noticed there's this phenomenon I'll call Reverse India Off-Shoring:

1. western companies hire Indian engineers off-shore because they're cheaper and yet equivalent, supposedly

2. online forums flooded with barely readable questions by folks with Indian names where the thing being asked about is so simple and basic that it basically amounts to "would someone please do my job for me? k thx." How do I print a string. How do I write data to disk. How do I install Apache. Etc. That level of question.

I've seen that 100's of times in the last few years. It's alternatingly both funny and infuriating.

jrockway• 16 years ago

Wait, you didn't finish.

3. Person with onshore job answers the question instead of doing work.

4. That person is deemed useless, and his job is offshored.

The cycle repeats.

tednaleid• 16 years ago

My experience doesn't agree with the OP (though as others have noted, the plural of anecdote isn't data).

From the start in 2008 through now, my reputation curve has been a pretty straight line:

http://stackoverflow.com/users/8912?tab=reputationhistory#ta...

I think it depends on the type of community that you participate in. If you work only in relatively unchanging technologies that everyone else works in (like .NET or Java), the OP is probably right. All of the nooks and crannies are exposed and answered. But if you participate in one of the smaller communities (Groovy, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Io, etc).

I think the number of "niche communities" in the long tail are much larger and more vibrant than the OP supposes. Chances are that it's just the OPs pet technologies that don't get a lot of traffic.

I follow RSS feeds on a number of tags that I find interesting and answer a few questions every week.

russell• 16 years ago

I worked for a for-pay Q&A site a little while back. They had all the incentives of SO and more. For example if you answered half-a-dozen questions a month, you got free access. The reward system. The asker declared how much the question was worth and awarded the points to one or more answerers. Awards could be adjusted by moderators so a better answer could be awarded the points.

There were a large number of categories, added to all the time. An answerer could register as an expert in one or more categories and could become an expert, guru, grand-master, etc. in one or more categories with the badges showing up everywhere.

There was an elaborate email system that kept every one engaged.If you were an expert, you got an email when a question was in one of your areas of expertise. An asker go an email whenever there was an answer of comment to one of your questions.

It appealed to the corporate IT world, but the combination of incentives, communications, and content curation seemed to work quiite well.

CWuestefeld2• 16 years ago

So why don't you do it any more?

mistermann7• 16 years ago

What was the site? Surely not experts-exchange?

zalew• 16 years ago

Games of code golf, "what's your favorite programming comic strip" threads, and "What language should I start learning now" threads made it way too easy to attain points without actually demonstrating real knowledge or expertise.

Actually, such threads are marked as 'community wiki' and there the reputation points aren't counted. The rest of the article is true, I also got tired of SO and mostly only google it.

motters• 16 years ago

Most people's questions about programming problems are going to be somewhere in the middle of the distribution. As time goes on and all the most common questions have been asked, the site is going become increasingly long tail - the dominion of obscurists - and any social/reputational component which it may have once had is going to be reduced.

tetha2• 16 years ago

Disclaimer: This is no flame, and this is no whining. This is my personal experience with stackoverflow, which may entirely depend on me doing complicated akward things.

My experience with stackoverflow boil down to these two situations:

I ask a question, write my little heart out to provide context, to provide things I have tried already and to state my problem, because I don't have trivial little coding problems I can solve with google (yes, that was arrogant, I am aware of this.). After I have posted such a question, I usually get like 3-4 1 line answers and then the question goes dead, because apparently, the answer to such a question is more complicated.

On the other hand, if I answer a question, I usually look and poke around a bit in order to provide a good, complete answer to an interesting question. Once I have posted such a question after like 10 minutes, there are like 3-4 one-line-answers posted already, upvoted already and my answer (which usually is more accurate and all) is just ignored and stays somewhere in the middle.

Joining these two experiences together, I have moved on to use groups and certain IRC-channels, as these are more helpful for nontrivial questions.

archangel_one2• 16 years ago

I agree entirely - I've had exactly the same experiences. I think both of them boil down to the site suffering from it's own success.

This seems to be fundamentally because once one reasonably correct answer picks up an upvote or two, it often snowballs into picking up many more because future visitors won't add other answers of their own and just upvote that. This leads to there being a significant reward for getting your answer in first - more so than for it to be complete (or, in some cases, correct) - so users aim to answer as fast as possible. As their user base has grown, that time threshold has gone down, and the quality of many of the answers follows it.

I don't know what the answer to that is though - maybe there's not one.

mistermann7• 16 years ago

I also agree....almost a year ago this problem was actually discussed on the SO podcast (people doing the instantaneous one liner reply in order to get upvotes asap, the problem somewhat originated from a blog post someone did one specific ways to game the SO rep system).

I have a similar problem in that I ask questions that are generally "harder" and don't often have a perfectly black and white answer, but I'll get a few "little effort" answers and then they go dead, and I am left with a poor answer acceptance ratio. If I ever eventually figure out a question, I always go back and answer it myself, so really I'm trying to do the right thing as I am a big believer in the site, but I think it misses subtleties like this. It's not particularly easy, but I think they could improve things to stop gaming of the system.

pasbesoin• 16 years ago

In this and other contexts, I've wondered about the viability of stepped intervals. Accumulate responses, and later further responses and votes, behind the scenes, but only update the published thread every 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, or some to-be-determined optimal interval (that might change over time / post age, size, etc.).

hackernews• 16 years ago

I'm curious why Google searches don't turn up higher ranking google group posts. This is where I get almost every question answered. There must be a wealth of info there and I almost always search for the google group, then reenter the question inside groups.

Smaller support communities (IRC, groups) seemed to be the best niche for getting questions answered, and it doesn't appear StackOverflow is seeing that.

richardw• 16 years ago

I agree, same experience. Two thoughts:

1) Karma-seeking individuals are likely going to try find a way to get as much of the good stuff with the least effort. Easier questions will get snapped up.

2) You can still use the system, just offer a karma reward for a good answer.

tetha2• 16 years ago

I just don't see the reward of extra effort anymore. Once I have found the right mailing list (which is not that hard), I can invest exactly the same effort I invest into posting a nontrivial question on stackoverflow and usually I can get far better answers without any extra effort, without having to handle any kind of karma-politics.

barrkel• 16 years ago

The thing that drove me out was uninteresting questions. I wanted an advanced search that filtered questions by minimum asker reputation, but the only operator available filters by maximum asker reputation (i.e. to find newbies).

I then asked for the feature on meta.stackoverflow.com, and folks there perceived I was being elitist and downvoted me to oblivion. So I left.

mistermann7• 16 years ago

> I wanted an advanced search

I agree. SO has advanced search capabilities, but you have to be an uber power user and know all the esoteric switches, which I think is by design, so fanboys can be "leet". There is this page: http://stackoverflow.com/search (which isn't linked from the homepage), but why don't they take the 4 hours to build an advanced search form so people who aren't frickin experts on the SO platform can do advanced searches? I think this is by design.

>I then asked for the feature on meta.stackoverflow.com, and folks there perceived I was being elitist and downvoted me to oblivion. So I left.

Meta is not a particularly friendly place, and this seems to be the only place that Jeff takes guidance from, but I think it has to a certain degree become ineffective as the people that rule meta are super-uber SO users, and it it is a very homogeneous group of users, so genuinely new ideas basically can't enter. Maybe they could, but after the initial rude reception you get with a new idea, most people just can't be arsed and leave, as you did.

scrame• 16 years ago

Stack Overflow was a good stab at solving the problem, and the UI execution was excellent, as well as the promotion of the site by two widely-read bloggers.

My personal frustration with the site is that their engagement model was a little too game-like. While reputation and badges might be a good metric for the quality of the contribution, the actual implementation ended up reinforcing a base of easy homework questions, and people racing for the simplest answers.

I found that when asking descriptive questions, that I would quickly get several one-line answers that pretty much guessed at the answer based on the title. Even the nuanced answers tended to have answers and explanations that either ignored the problem or suggested things already asked in the question.

Sticking with the question, I can either comment on an answer, or edit my own question to address it, or I could comment a response to the comment. Working this way, I have managed to at least get good leads a few times, but the really difficult questions ended up being things I had to solve myself.

Lately, though, I find that it pops up in my preliminary googling of a problem early on, and at least provides better references than generic forums or experts-exchange.

If they could find a way to make reputation and badges reinforce the _quality_ of the answer, instead of the _response time_ of the answer, and encourage difficult questions rather than the proliferation of basic questions, and the attitude that answering the most of them the fastest made you some kind of "elite" programmer, then I think it could be very powerful.

That being said, when I am tracking down an obscure error or specific exception, I usually find it on the libraries forum, or a forum with a narrower focus, but they definitely like the UI polish of SO.

Stack Overflow Fatigue

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