Comment by morningsam
1 day ago
That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer.
Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details.
It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment". Overeager marking of questions as duplicates, e.g. despite the equivalence between two situations being non-obvious (e.g. someone asks about data type A, and it turns out that it's a subtype of B for which an answer that applies to both exists; that should not be a duplicate, the fact that it's a subtype is the answer!). Endless other decisions like that, which wouldn't have taken any extra effort to implement correctly.
One feature they could've built that would have taken effort but also greatly helped against the common newbie complaint of "hostility" would've been a "newcomer track", which would've been more forum-like and guided them towards either formulating a good question or seeing that's it's already answered. In the latter case, some of the keywords that came up during this process should've been fed back into SEO so that future newbies would become more likely find the answer via a search engine despite using clumsy terms. I think they tried a simpler and worse version of this idea towards the end with "staging ground" but by then it was too late.
> Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment"
Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.
Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.
And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.
> And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.
It's validating to see that I wasn't wrong in my assessment. The comments and takes under the post which showed the drop in traffic was eye opening. That website was just a walking corpse if they weren't seeing the plain truth and spinning the drop in traffic as a good thing, because apparently it meant that they were not getting stupid questions anymore and those were going to AI now.
Not realizing the kind of mind share loss here. The next generation of developers aren't going to go through a phase where they rely on SO.
My favorite thing was how for half the stuff I Googled, the top result would be a StackOverflow reply telling me to Google it.
Yep, or the top 10 hits on Google all pointing to a "duplicate" that didn't have the answer (or even the same question). Such a squandering of discoverability it's hard to even fathom who thought that was a good idea.
From my perspective it wasn’t death by a thousand cuts, it all comes back to just one cut: an over-reliance on volunteer moderators. If they paid staff to run their communities, they could have issued a simple “don’t be a dick or we’ll fire you” rule. But because they relied on volunteers, they had to cater to those volunteers to keep them. And the volunteers drove the site into ruin to make it a better experience for moderators.
The entire gamification was great in the beginning but ended up working against them rather than for. It should have evolved into something else.
Yes. There were far too many people with nothing to contribute doing useless (or actively harmful) busywork to earn points.
Are you referring to edits? If so, I haven't seen that, and certainly not as a notable issue on the site. Instead, I think I saw closer to the opposite - edits to questions or answers that fixed typos, pointed out that an answer's linked app had been down for years, etc. were often rejected.
Same on Reddit. Every gamification triggers Goodhart's Law and has a lifespan.
Off topic, closed.
> would've been a "newcomer track"
It's there now. Too late I guess. https://stackoverflow.com/help/what-is-staging-ground
>Staging Ground is available to two different types of users on Stack Overflow: > > - Users who are asking their first questions > - Users who want to review and offer guidance on newcomers’ posts
It looks a little different, like a "learn to use stack overflow correctly" type spot. I think what newbies want (I would have loved when I started out) is a "why is my code broken" type spot.