The decline of Stack Overflow

https://medium.com/@johnslegers/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d

by doppp • 11 years ago

71 39 11 years ago

medium.com

andrewstuart• 11 years ago

Just post your questions to Reddit.

ProAm• 11 years ago

Or IRC

pm246012• 11 years ago

Yeap to everything the article refers to. I rarely bother with posting a question to SO.

Wikipedia has the same problem.

Basically, the righteous trolls take over - you see this with Homeowner Associations as well.

pm246012• 11 years ago

I see the righteous trolls down voted my opinion :-)

toomuchtodo• 11 years ago

Or perhaps "Yeap to everything the article refers to." didn't add to the conversation.

marcfowler2• 11 years ago

I don't know whether it's because of the type of questions I've ever asked on there, but I've found it to be excellent, and I always get my questions answered perfectly.

The attitude on there seems to be slightly terse, but, it is designed and really focussed on Q&A, not discussion. So I don't know that I really agree with the criticism of it.

zamalek2• 11 years ago

I've found it to be excellent, and I always get my questions answered perfectly.

That's debatable. I used to be a fairly regular contributor. Fairly often I'd get beaten to the answer by the guy "who types in the minimal amount to be correct." The asker would then immediately tick the answer instead of waiting for my answer which has a great deal more information (important caveats, alternative approaches, pros/cons). Incomplete information is a smaller concern, though.

The greater concern is the knowledgeable person who "who types in the minimal amount to be correct, leaving out crucial information resulting in actually incorrect information." The type of information you can easily discredit with a simple CLI application, or the type of information that blows up in the fact of 100 requests/sec. It has a green tick mark next to it.

That green tick mark is never going away - the asker has long since left the website. The answerer is never coming back because he has his karma points and will ignore any and all comments you make pleading for him to correct it (remember: you can't make meaning-altering edits to answers.

That's the crux of it. S/O has some great insightful information but also has some downright dangerous garbage, dangerous amounts of which has a green tick next to it. The gamification fixed the human troll-like tendencies (for a while) but brought out another dangerous trait: the ability to do almost anything (lie, half truths, rush jobs) in order to get imaginary internet points.

DanBC2• 11 years ago

There are badges for answers that score highly but which do not get accepted.

marcfowler2• 11 years ago

Actually I agree with you - good point - I can see why being on the other end (i.e. as the answerer) can be really frustrating, especially as you said, your answer can be 'more' correct with greater detail etc.

As I said, my experience could very well be based on that I've only asked something like 5 questions on there, all very specific, which is really the kind of question perfectly suited for a site like that.

ucho• 11 years ago

All of this sounds like "The decline of Wikipedia". Number of edits and active users keeps falling. Many people tried to find the reason, but maybe it is just natural? It is no longer peak popularity for either page. Also there is always some churn on science/tech related "forums" - same questions/problems are posted over and over - not many people can stand it over long periods of time.

rspeer• 11 years ago

It's certainly the same phenomenon as Wikipedia -- certain users become influential, and some of them use their influence to solidify the way they do things and make the site more like what they want. This often is at odds with what a new user wants because they can't remember being a new user.

SO's many levels of reputation that give you additional abilities, I think, made the whole process happen faster. It got the site ramped up and turned into a reliable resource faster, and it also let people create their fiefdoms of influence where they wall out new users faster.

catnaroek6• 11 years ago

"Focused on Q&A" is a good thing. "Focused on questions whose answers trivially follow from what the documentation says" isn't. Stack Overflow ought to complement the documentation, not replace it.

btbuildem• 11 years ago

My main issue with SO is the mods who close questions as "off topic" or "not fitting the site" (~), DESPITE a question having a ton of upvotes and solid answers, with comments pleading to not close it.

Other than that, it remains a great resource and I use it on a daily basis.

weinzierl• 11 years ago

I was an early member of SO. From the discussions of that time I remember that the founder put a lot of thought into how to build a good community. A community that can last.

Preventing dilution and keeping focus was one important point. One consequence was being rigorous with off-topic questions, the founding of the "sister sites" (first the Trilogy SO, SF and SU then StackExchange) was another.

There was much debate about what should be considered on-topic and off-topic back then. I remember the discussion about HTML and LaTeX quite vividly[1].

All of this discussion was terribly tiring but on the other hand it was good because SO was different from other communities in the sense that people tried to stay focused.

I think there is still good intention behind the strictness, but I agree that the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

[1] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/12918/can-we-have-a-...

TylerH2• 11 years ago

Just because people like a question doesn't mean it is on-topic.

Latty4• 11 years ago

The main issue is that a lot of the 'off-topic' rules are focused around content that doesn't work on SO. It doesn't work because it's time based - asking 'What is the best IDE for X?' is subjective and changes over time. Yes, that list of answers might be useful and interesting right now, but over time, it becomes more and more outdated and eventually, downright misleading.

There is a reason SO has excellent results on Google - the content is carefully curated so that it's timeless, and editing allows it to get updated where it needs to be. Yes, sometimes good (at the time) content gets discarded, but that's the nature of it.

If you want that kind of stuff, do it somewhere more transient.

joeyespo2• 11 years ago

With so many people visiting SO for exactly these kinds of valuable answers, I believe SO should embrace them instead of the ongoing battle of rejecting them.

If cleaning up irrelevant questions can't be automated, how about having a "this is no longer relevant" button appear a few months after the post has been answered? Or having a [subjective] tag that has an expiration date on being indexed on Google.

Now that the bad ideas are out of the way, let's hear some others.

catnaroek6• 11 years ago

I'll transcribe what I said on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3cafkp/is_stac...):

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.

hobarrera• 11 years ago

A fix around this devolution we've seen might be to make badges and reputation private: you only see your own.

This way, the "require reputation for certain actions" can be kept around, but those who are there only for the competition would be less motivated to participate that those who legitimately want to help.

scriptproof• 11 years ago

When I do a search, 9 out of 10 questions that are useful to me were closed as off topic. Fortunately they are not deleted. I confirm also the bias toward new users: I once registered to provide an answer which was missing to a question. Someone, an older user, modified my answer and deleted a part of it, so it then looked rather dumb. Obviously it was downvoted. I never came back.

catnaroek6• 11 years ago

Yes, that's a problem: Old users with high reputation abusing their power to edit other people's questions and answers.

Personally, I find it distasteful when somebody other than the question or answer's original author makes a substantial edit. Edits by third parties ought to be to fix typos, fix bad code formatting, improve clarity and the like.

Latty4• 11 years ago

One of the main points of the editing system is to fix the biggest problem with Q&A sites before SO - outdated information. Editing other's posts means that content can get updated, even if the original poster isn't around to curate it.

Everyone I've heard hating on StackOverflow are people asking or answering, who have ownership over their questions and dislike the rules or way the site works. The reality is that SO knows 99% of it's users never register and are reading answers, not asking or answering questions.

The reason SO is a great resource is that the rules create an environment that doesn't allow cruft to build. Yes, that puts off some people, that's a worthy trade in my mind. I'd rather have good content than more content.

fsk• 11 years ago

My attitude is that, if they're going to close a question as offtopic, then put it in your robots.txt for Google to exclude that page.

Why is StackOverflow polluting Google with content its moderators deem "not appropriate for the website"?

Do you realize how many times I've had a question, googled it, and the #1 result was "StackOverflow - offtopic, closed"?

nobleach• 11 years ago

I don't find SO so bad. What I do hate is everyone complaining about SO. Yes, it violates the "teach a man to fish principle"... but seriously? Are we all so stuck in "well, I had to learn it, so I'm not sharing it with you" syndrome land?

The fear that someone is going to copy and paste an SO snippet into production code on a meaningful app should not even be a real thing. If some hack finds their way into an important job just by lying their way through the interview process, and gets by for years simply by asking questions on SO, I say, "that's incredible, I gotta see this". For the average hacker, just throwing together some web stuff and needs to know, "how do I open an accordion in jQuery", I think SO is perfect. I often use it when I feel like I'm totally not getting the "right way" to do something. (I've asked questions about jRuby gems, Sencha Touch, Dojo, CouchDB - things I really don't think I'd have gotten just by reading the docs) But I really don't care if someone else uses it as their private consultation service... I don't think it's ruining this industry.

catnaroek6• 11 years ago

IMO, the main problem isn't that newbies ask to be given fish. That's okay. There's no shame in being a newbie. The problem is what the community, especially the more knowledgeable users, do when confronted with this situation. Either:

1. They just give them fish, as requested. Sometimes they argue with each other, over who gave the best fish.

2. They angrily say "somebody else has asked for this very same fish before", and downvote the question into oblivion.

What they almost never do, however, is the right thing: teaching them how to fish.

DanBC2• 11 years ago

It's a bit wierd to complain about people asking for fish when those people have walked into a fishshop that has a big sign over the door saying "get your fish here!" with thousands of examples of other people getting fish.

Sure, people shouldn't just yell "fish!", they should ask for a specific fish and give details of the aquarium / meal, but that's not the same as saying we should teach them about lines and bait.

terrywilcox• 11 years ago

If you think Stack Overflow hates new users, go look at Usenet in the early 90's. RTFM was the polite response to new users. Asking a question was an invitation for abuse.

This is nothing new. Established communities eventually become gated communities, with guards and dogs and sneers for the barbarians at the gates.

mooreds• 11 years ago

Which beget new communities, which become established, and so on and so on.

cheald2• 11 years ago

Gosh, this is quite a lot more negative than is warranted, IMO.

StackOverflow's biggest problem is that it's hit saturation; the low-hanging fruit is all picked (which is good; that knowledge shows up in Google results), which means that much of the continuing activity on the site is low-quality questions with the speed hounds competing to be the first to answer a trivial question to reap reputation. That's unfortunate, but I'm quite sure how you'd solve that in a product with SO's maturity.

(Side note: Try resetting your tag preferences on SO. You'll find lots of questions on languages/technologies you don't often use, which can be great for dipping your toes into less saturated waters, and you might find some things to learn while you're at it.)

My experience is that SO is a really great grimoire of solutions to specific, common problems. I get answers from it multiple times per day via Google (pasting in an error message often results in an SO question which has been answered satisfactorily, permitting me to rapidly move past the issue), but I've asked a grand total of 2 questions in my 5.5 years on the site (both of which I later ended up answering myself after research) - for whatever reason, it's a poor platform for me to get help when I need it. For that, I generally turn to IRC or mailing lists specific to the project at hand, because those come with an interested community built-in.

However, as an answerer, SO is very useful to me. I make it a point to generally only answer questions that are trivial and boil down to a race; the interesting ones are the ones that require some research. I get to learn something while I'm helping someone else out. For example, I recently answered a question about Ruby's require system as compared to Javascript's, which gave me the opportunity to get into the source and figure out exactly how Ruby loads constants and methods from files (answer: It creates an anonymous module which it then extends Object with).

"SO hates new users"

Well, yeah, by default new users are treated as potential spammers, trolls, and otherwise unsavory types. There are lots of people who are extremely ready to poop all over any platform they can find. SO does a pretty damn good job of making it hard for them to cause significant disruption until they've proven themselves. There are lots of bad questions on SO. The number of people who would have their question answered if they'd typed it verbatim into Google rather than SO is depressingly high. There are an awful lot of help vampires who are basically just looking for someone else to do their work for them. Those people make SO worse. The visible impact of these people, though, is what posts like this see and complain about - moderation is aggressive in an attempt to stamp out this low-quality content tends to leak into less-bad questions sometimes, which is unfortunate. (I wish that SO had a "no, this question doesn't deserve closure" mechanism so that I could nullify a close vote on a partially-closed question, rather than having to wait for it to be closed to start a new reopen vote.)

The characterization of the established userbase as "trolls" and "Führers", though, just seems a bit...I don't know, bitter. There is certainly more than its fair share of overeager moderation on SO, but in general, it does its job, and it does it better than anywhere else on the internet at the moment (and remember, SO grew out of a dissatisfaction with ExpertsExchange, so if SO is failing, there's quite the market opportunity there for someone!) - where you see "Führers" I see "dedicated contributors and curators" who are directly responsible for SO having so much quality, well-ranked content. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than it once was.

At the end of the day, while we can complain about SO aggressively closing questions, it's still the thing that tons of people find their answers from on a daily basis, which is pretty hard empirical proof that it's working on a macro level, even if individuals experience pain with it on a micro level.

cheald2• 11 years ago

Whoops - I said I make it a point to answer trivial/race questions; I meant that I make it a point to NOT answer trivial questions; if I do answer trivial questions, it's via a small comment on the original post which isn't eligible for reputation gains. (I'm outside of the edit window for the original comment now).

pc2g4d• 11 years ago

I agree SO has a problem with treatment of well-meaning new users. Could be improved. However, I will say that in spite of that, I have had some excellent experiences there. Sometimes I encounter a difficult issue that I simply cannot resolve on my own, and I want to ask people more expert than I how to resolve it. If I'm careful in how I write up the question then I find that over time I generally get useful answers. It's a great way of reaching others working in the same teeny-tiny niche that I am.

So there are problems, but still many good things happening there.

TylerH2• 11 years ago

Stack Overflow works by teaching people how to ask good questions. So far all I see in the article are terrible questions.

The decline of Stack Overflow

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