I'm Stackoverflow user #823 or so and still in the top 4% of reputation, and...I don't get how the narrative has turned against SO.
I visit the site once or twice a day, and probably write two answers per month, which should make a decidedly average user. And for the life of me I could not tell you what people are complaining about?
I still find answers there more often than anywhere else, so whatever is supposedly broken doesn't seem to affect the primary function too much. The imaginary points still mostly point in the right direction. If happened to feel they diverged from perfect meritocracy I would try really hard to care about real problems, instead. Failing that, I would hopefully manage not to complain about it too obnoxiously, fearing it would make me look childish.
And then, much like Github, they seem to have committed the cardinal sin of tech communities of mildly opining that maybe racism or whatever isn't something they personally want to support with their work, which gets them into all kinds of strange arguments with one sort of people who are obviously not racists but just feeling the urge to defend some grand principle they just came up with, like ethics in game journalism.
Github is a very similar example: they single-handedly got millions of people to contribute to open source code, and made working in this ecosystem so much better, compared to source forge and various crappy custom systems that came before it. StackOverflow similarly replaced the most obnoxious, google-spamming, click-baiting, sign-up-to-see-the-answer grifters, and I will forever be thankful for their contribution.
It's a clash of cultures and a power struggle. The "hacker" style people feel that the rug is being pulled out under them and a corporate-style top-down leadership is dictating how they should interact.
Generally, hacker culture is very much against top-down authority and prefers organically grown, community-driven, distributed approach.
It's no surprise that the facebookization of SO is not welcome by them.
The same thing is happening on Reddit, Twitter and other platforms. The Internet is finishing the transformation from Napster, IRC, torrents, enthusiast content and hacking to corporate-sanitized marketing-compatible monetized influencer space. The new focus is engagement metrics, ad placement, brand protection etc. Traditional mainstream TV content is now taking up larger and larger share of online space, same with traditional newspapers.
You have to take this larger context into account. If these people could shut down the web, they'd do it in a whim and forbid anonymity and reverse everything that made the web so popular and drive everything back to cable TV but with likes, followers and shares, of course with a real name policy, with phone and ID confirmation.
This is not about the Thanks button, but a disregard for the community, and top-down dictates.
I think there are multiple issues and it's hard to point them out because everyone talks about what they see from their own point of view.
1) There are certainly power-hungry ego-inflated people killing off questions as duplicates when they aren't duplicate, or labeling things too easily as opinion-based etc. This is often a problem with community efforts, like Wikis and other places where people act like they own the place.
2) On the other hand, you have genuinely low-effort questions that are just pure lazy. Being a novice is normal, everyone started there. But doing at least a minimum of research is expected. Seriously go to the front page and browse the questions from <5 minutes ago. Most is very low effort with no context, just some code from the middle of some software and an error message without saying what they are even trying to achieve. It's not in any shape of form a question that should enter a long term question bank.
3) On the third hand, you have the power grab at StackOverflow by business-minded, MBA type suits, who care more about branding, marketing, and legal CYA than about programming. The project is no longer community driven. They seem to forget that SO's value is derived mostly from the unpaid labor of volunteers and working with the community should be a priority. And this is also a great lesson for all the contributors that sinking enormous amounts of time into a private company's proprietary product, it may not be worth it. At least Wikipedia is guaranteed free and open source and truly community owned. Maybe something similar needs to be created in place of SO.
Number 1 and 2 are what I've personally experienced and believe is what the StackOverflow team means when they say they're working to make the platform more friendly. I've been helping people with all sorts of programming problems on Discord for years, and I've encountered my fair share of people who put absolutely no effort in either their problem or asking a question people can work with, but at no point I've ever felt it was justified to publicly shame them or not be kind. If people are going to go around closing / deleting obviously mediocre questions with copypastas in the comments, is it asking to much to make the copypastas at the very least welcoming?
I actually followed your advice and browsed the recent page on StackOverflow to collect some samples of what I mean. To my (pleasant) surprise, it seems to have changed significantly from when I used the platform regularly. That said, I found this one that's a good example:
Asking homework questions without any other detail is simply unacceptable. Please put more detail, because we are volunteering our time to help you, and if you put in absolutely no effort, then we can't help you.
I wholeheartedly, but why not say "StackOverflow is not a code-writing service. Please post another question with sample of your work, so we can direct you to a solution that'll make you learn in the process"? These types of comments are what made me so anxious to ask back when I started programming, and I think is something everyone will benefit greatly from getting rid of.
As for point 3, thanks for clarifying. I agree that dumping knowledge on a proprietary product isn't exactly a good thing, but the perspective of the business people can at least be understood now that they're selling it as a Q&A engine for private teams / companies. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing, but your previous comments made me think it was some sort of conspiracy theory :)
> I don't get how the narrative has turned against SO
We win friends by being compassionate, empathetic, supportive, and nurturing; by applying gentle correction. Leading by example. Helping each other up. Leading from the front.
I was a manager of a high-performance team; made up of people that knew a lot more than I did, and I kept us together, working as a tightly-coupled unit, for decades. I have some prior art in carrots over sticks.
One of the big problems, these days, is that documentation is just awful. People think that "more is good." That's not true at all. It just means that the SNR is much lower, and we waste time, reading irrelevance. We are also under a lot of pressure to get results fast. No time to look stuff up. Start coding.
Finding answers, in an efficient manner, is a real pain.
SO is a marvelous idea, and I totally support it. Ironically, I suspect that the "gamification" that has made it so successful, is also contributing to the issues it is facing. I do not have the answer. I think removing the gamification would also destroy the utility of the site.
I love SO. It is a big "go to" for me, and I have also asked twice as many questions than I have provided answers. I think that I ask very good questions. Sometimes, I'm wrong, and I don't mind finding that out. I become right by being wrong, and learning differently.
But people seem to be terrified to ask questions. I have no idea why. I am constantly asking questions; even "stupid" ones.
Reading some of the meta conversations, and seeing so many high-score members with single-digit question counts, says a lot. Whenever there is an election, my principal coefficient is the candidates' question count. I don't want to vote for people that think asking questions is something to be ashamed of.
I have over 35 years of shipping software. I have a great deal of knowledge and experience; far more than many folks on SO, but I also am constantly trying out new stuff that I don't know how to do. That makes me a n00b, all the time (I write about that, here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...). I don't always know the best places to look for answers, and appreciate RTFM responses.
What I don't appreciate, is some person telling me that the fact I didn't watch some well-known (to them) video, or read some well-known (to them) article, makes me a "lesser person," or (an SO fave), "lazy" (anyone that actually knows me, knows that "lazy" is not a word that can be applied to me). I appreciate being directed to the video or article, but the nasty sauce is not a condiment that I prefer.
UPDATE: I removed some stuff from this response that was probably not necessary to the conversation, and would not be constructive. I hope someone was taking notes. That's how we do it.
Comments
I'm Stackoverflow user #823 or so and still in the top 4% of reputation, and...I don't get how the narrative has turned against SO.
I visit the site once or twice a day, and probably write two answers per month, which should make a decidedly average user. And for the life of me I could not tell you what people are complaining about?
I still find answers there more often than anywhere else, so whatever is supposedly broken doesn't seem to affect the primary function too much. The imaginary points still mostly point in the right direction. If happened to feel they diverged from perfect meritocracy I would try really hard to care about real problems, instead. Failing that, I would hopefully manage not to complain about it too obnoxiously, fearing it would make me look childish.
And then, much like Github, they seem to have committed the cardinal sin of tech communities of mildly opining that maybe racism or whatever isn't something they personally want to support with their work, which gets them into all kinds of strange arguments with one sort of people who are obviously not racists but just feeling the urge to defend some grand principle they just came up with, like ethics in game journalism.
Github is a very similar example: they single-handedly got millions of people to contribute to open source code, and made working in this ecosystem so much better, compared to source forge and various crappy custom systems that came before it. StackOverflow similarly replaced the most obnoxious, google-spamming, click-baiting, sign-up-to-see-the-answer grifters, and I will forever be thankful for their contribution.
The part where they try to paint "being nice" as a bad thing pretty much tells the kind of discourse this person wants to have.
It's a clash of cultures and a power struggle. The "hacker" style people feel that the rug is being pulled out under them and a corporate-style top-down leadership is dictating how they should interact.
Generally, hacker culture is very much against top-down authority and prefers organically grown, community-driven, distributed approach.
It's no surprise that the facebookization of SO is not welcome by them.
The same thing is happening on Reddit, Twitter and other platforms. The Internet is finishing the transformation from Napster, IRC, torrents, enthusiast content and hacking to corporate-sanitized marketing-compatible monetized influencer space. The new focus is engagement metrics, ad placement, brand protection etc. Traditional mainstream TV content is now taking up larger and larger share of online space, same with traditional newspapers.
You have to take this larger context into account. If these people could shut down the web, they'd do it in a whim and forbid anonymity and reverse everything that made the web so popular and drive everything back to cable TV but with likes, followers and shares, of course with a real name policy, with phone and ID confirmation.
This is not about the Thanks button, but a disregard for the community, and top-down dictates.
I don't understand what any of this has to do with people not being insufferable assholes on a platform.
I think there are multiple issues and it's hard to point them out because everyone talks about what they see from their own point of view.
1) There are certainly power-hungry ego-inflated people killing off questions as duplicates when they aren't duplicate, or labeling things too easily as opinion-based etc. This is often a problem with community efforts, like Wikis and other places where people act like they own the place.
2) On the other hand, you have genuinely low-effort questions that are just pure lazy. Being a novice is normal, everyone started there. But doing at least a minimum of research is expected. Seriously go to the front page and browse the questions from <5 minutes ago. Most is very low effort with no context, just some code from the middle of some software and an error message without saying what they are even trying to achieve. It's not in any shape of form a question that should enter a long term question bank.
3) On the third hand, you have the power grab at StackOverflow by business-minded, MBA type suits, who care more about branding, marketing, and legal CYA than about programming. The project is no longer community driven. They seem to forget that SO's value is derived mostly from the unpaid labor of volunteers and working with the community should be a priority. And this is also a great lesson for all the contributors that sinking enormous amounts of time into a private company's proprietary product, it may not be worth it. At least Wikipedia is guaranteed free and open source and truly community owned. Maybe something similar needs to be created in place of SO.
Number 1 and 2 are what I've personally experienced and believe is what the StackOverflow team means when they say they're working to make the platform more friendly. I've been helping people with all sorts of programming problems on Discord for years, and I've encountered my fair share of people who put absolutely no effort in either their problem or asking a question people can work with, but at no point I've ever felt it was justified to publicly shame them or not be kind. If people are going to go around closing / deleting obviously mediocre questions with copypastas in the comments, is it asking to much to make the copypastas at the very least welcoming?
I actually followed your advice and browsed the recent page on StackOverflow to collect some samples of what I mean. To my (pleasant) surprise, it seems to have changed significantly from when I used the platform regularly. That said, I found this one that's a good example:
I wholeheartedly, but why not say "StackOverflow is not a code-writing service. Please post another question with sample of your work, so we can direct you to a solution that'll make you learn in the process"? These types of comments are what made me so anxious to ask back when I started programming, and I think is something everyone will benefit greatly from getting rid of.
As for point 3, thanks for clarifying. I agree that dumping knowledge on a proprietary product isn't exactly a good thing, but the perspective of the business people can at least be understood now that they're selling it as a Q&A engine for private teams / companies. I don't think that's necessarily a good thing, but your previous comments made me think it was some sort of conspiracy theory :)
> I don't get how the narrative has turned against SO
We win friends by being compassionate, empathetic, supportive, and nurturing; by applying gentle correction. Leading by example. Helping each other up. Leading from the front.
I was a manager of a high-performance team; made up of people that knew a lot more than I did, and I kept us together, working as a tightly-coupled unit, for decades. I have some prior art in carrots over sticks.
One of the big problems, these days, is that documentation is just awful. People think that "more is good." That's not true at all. It just means that the SNR is much lower, and we waste time, reading irrelevance. We are also under a lot of pressure to get results fast. No time to look stuff up. Start coding.
Finding answers, in an efficient manner, is a real pain.
SO is a marvelous idea, and I totally support it. Ironically, I suspect that the "gamification" that has made it so successful, is also contributing to the issues it is facing. I do not have the answer. I think removing the gamification would also destroy the utility of the site.
I like the idea of the SO Story. Here's mine: https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall
I love SO. It is a big "go to" for me, and I have also asked twice as many questions than I have provided answers. I think that I ask very good questions. Sometimes, I'm wrong, and I don't mind finding that out. I become right by being wrong, and learning differently.
But people seem to be terrified to ask questions. I have no idea why. I am constantly asking questions; even "stupid" ones.
Reading some of the meta conversations, and seeing so many high-score members with single-digit question counts, says a lot. Whenever there is an election, my principal coefficient is the candidates' question count. I don't want to vote for people that think asking questions is something to be ashamed of.
I have over 35 years of shipping software. I have a great deal of knowledge and experience; far more than many folks on SO, but I also am constantly trying out new stuff that I don't know how to do. That makes me a n00b, all the time (I write about that, here: https://medium.com/chrismarshallny/thats-not-what-ships-are-...). I don't always know the best places to look for answers, and appreciate RTFM responses.
What I don't appreciate, is some person telling me that the fact I didn't watch some well-known (to them) video, or read some well-known (to them) article, makes me a "lesser person," or (an SO fave), "lazy" (anyone that actually knows me, knows that "lazy" is not a word that can be applied to me). I appreciate being directed to the video or article, but the nasty sauce is not a condiment that I prefer.
UPDATE: I removed some stuff from this response that was probably not necessary to the conversation, and would not be constructive. I hope someone was taking notes. That's how we do it.