Comment by zahlman
1 day ago
Atwood and Spolsky were quite explicit, on multiple occasions, about what they wanted the site to be. That vision was not compatible with having a site with millions of users and millions of questions, because the masses simply aren't interested in the kind of interaction that the vision required. They may not have understood this at the time. But it's clear that the early community attempted a lot of gatekeeping, much of it misguided in the details (you want lots of questions that address beginner-level problems, because most people in a field are beginners at any given time for any given field, so that's what's most useful) but directionally correct (most of the time, you don't want the question that a beginner asks, because the beginner is not adept at asking useful questions and lacks the perspective needed for a proper Q that allows for presenting a useful A).
The intent was very much to build a library. It's literally on the tour page at the top:
> Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed, high-quality answers to every question about programming.
That is not something inserted by people on the meta site. We literally did not have access to make that kind of change. Believe me, there are so many other things we would have fixed if it had been made possible.
Most of the important policy was established around 2013 or 2014 and those are the dates of the most important posts on meta that get brought up again and again (and used as duplicate targets, and cited in arguments). That was also right around when site activity was peaking. Atwood and Spolsky didn't leave until the acquisition in 2019.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-exchange/
Jeff had stepped away in 2012.
While there was some lingering activity in 2013 and 2014, it was way down from when he was part of the company. https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/1/jeff-atwood?tab=answe...
I would suggest this marked a change from an "Atwoodian" philosophy of curation to a "Sploskian" philosophy.
From https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
(emphasis in original)
to
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...
With the change in direction that all questions were acceptable ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/23/strange-and-madden... see also https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/timeline and note revision 1 and the action on September 17, 2011 )... I believe it was then that the shift to reducing the curation actions that people can take.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2013/06/25/the-war-of-the-closes/ was the start of it - a year after Jeff left.
I believe that Joel was responsible for the direction of Stack Overflow from 2012 to 2019... including the "direction" of those policies of 2013 and 2014. The "every question can be fixed" and "every answer should remain if it was an attempt to answer the question" stem from his philosophy.
However, (again, I believe) that is what ultimately contaminated Google's search and you were more likely to hit a duplicate ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) than the correct answer because of the lack of culling of duplicates and the golden dup hammer making that the path of least resistance for closing a question if it was slightly related.