That's smart. Programmers do a lot of searching for examples, there was a recent Google study on the topic. [1]
One of my personal favorites lately has been bropages [2] - it's a crowdsourced set of usage examples for Unix command-line tools. Instead of wading through fifty pages of obtuse manpages or googling for usage, you just use "bro [command]" and you get some working examples.
I have always been a huge fan of http://Readme.io I wish StackOverflow would integrate with some of these existing platforms instead of creating a new one. One of the biggest problems I have with documentation is fragmentation across platforms. I fear StackOverflow adding another platform will add to the fragmentation problem.
That is awesome. I was getting tired of solving problems in Nim for the first time, but felt that SO was too question-y to place them, so I created my own little thing, which of course gets a little Google traffic, but nobody really interacts with:
Names don't matter much. As long as they still have a community willing to shame users for asking a question vaguely similar to one that was asked a few years earlier, then it's all good with me.
On the other hand, it's not a whole lot of fun to google a question and get a thread that's mostly filled with arguments about the validity of the question itself over and over again. I've often wondered why they don't sequester the meta-discussions in a similar fashion as wikipedia.
Either make a post on meta about the problem and provide a solution if you have on how to fix it OR make your own SO with your own rules. I'm really tired of seeing these off topic (whining) comments whenever SO comes up. It's useless and doesn't add anything to the discussion here.
There is an endless supply of new users who need to learn, but only limited patience among senior people to repeat themselves. The "safeguards" put in place against repetition, n00bs, decay, etc, really serve the interests of the users who have stuck around, not the users who need to learn something. Newer users talking about getting a different experience than the original users, and not getting the usefulness that the site's reputation implies, is not simple whining.
Any solution has to have the support of the long-term, high-rep community, but the long-term, high-rep community creates the problem - by sticking around so long, they accumulate influence even as their incentives changed. You can see why meta might have a lot of people who don't think there's a problem at all.
The senior-friendly design of SO ignores the fact that the graveyards are full of indispensible people. One huge change would simply be to age out the users who have been around the longest, or have the highest rep. The newest can (and should) be taught by the slightly-more-experienced who aren't yet jaded by the repetition.
I don't understand your first para. New users don't want to ask questions. They want an answer to their questions, and only if there is no answer they want to ask a question.
SO is not just a question-asking site, it's also a repository of already asked questions.
Many (but admitedly not all) questions closed as dupes make no effort to distinguish themselves from previously answered questions.
(I'm someone who thinks there are problems with some of the SO sites. I'm not a fan.)
Yeah man, screw the users! They're just like customers, they're always the problem! You know, except for the little problem that without customers (or users) the entity either wouldn't exist, or would die.
Was just thinking what it was like to develop before Stack Overflow... and before github... Yikes!
Kudos to the team over at SO to continue to iterate the business.
I do wish they'd add an "out of date" button to flag questions/answers that are no longer relevant or just plain wrong. I think the amount of cruft they're going to deal with in the next 10 years is going to be HUGE.
I have to resort to SO a couple of times a month, so before SO (and other such) it was 95% the same as it is now.
I probably would have found much more use for it in my first year or so as a programmer, but at least from my own experience, once I had familiarity with my tools and libraries, the kind of problems that require digging on the internet aren't the kind easily put into bite-sized Q&A.
Maybe it's different for people who did start with SO available; perhaps they're saving their cognitive load by outsourcing various snippets of information to SO, and I only internalised them because SO wasn't available.
That said, it IS good for more open-ended historical or state-of-the-art type questions; "why did language X adopt this paradigm?" or "how do people producing commercial software go about supporting multiple graphics hardware today?" kind of questions. If I get lucky, there are a handful of people with a real depth of knowledge who can give a valuable overview and insight, but those are a long way from the typical SO question.
I find SO valuable for 'gotcha' types of questions. Update to the iOS9 sdk and now suddenly my build breaks with error-235132. Check SO and find out, yeah there is some flag that now needs to be YES instead of NO.
SO also lets me get by in frameworks and languages without having to know them all super deep. I find it much more useful to spend my cognitive load on algorithmic level or higher architectural level items instead of Spring configuration values or random iOS .plist keys.
Depends on what you're doing, I guess? I do a lot of UI development and I resort to SO almost daily to figure out the edge cases of all the APIs and frameworks.
They can be useful. About six or seven years ago I subscribed to a few perl ones, then I created a rule in Gmail to tag them all with a label and skip the inbox. Never heard from them again.
Now, though, if I have a perl question, my first step is just searching my email. After years of aggregating, it's got some solid answers.
For me, it was the usenet, and specifically comp.lang.c and comp.arch.embedded. It was quite entertaining and useful, but that was way before it become Google groups and the spammer bots discovering it.
before SO/github there was usenet and good quality books, but then again we didn't have a new framework to learn every day, personally once I bought my O'Reilly X/Motif series I was set for quite some time!
> so depreciating questions isn't as likely as someone coming around and updating the answers
True, but I think it would be helpful for two reasons:
a. Someone looking for an answer might not realize it is out of date.
b. It would help surface questions that do need updating. You statement presupposes someone actually finds the out of date info. A button would help SO bring all those items to a single location.
>It would help surface questions that do need updating.
This is the biggest issue with out of date answers. No one is browsing old questions when they already know the answer. They are browsing because they have the same problem and they got there through search. The user can leave a comment in that question but that won't really bring any attention to the issue. This can lead to the question being asked again and then quickly closed because it is a duplicate of the question with the outdated answer. That serves to worsens mod/user relationships regarding duplicates that has already been brought up in this thread.
Actually, I think a search engine's capability directly adds value to SO. Even, before SO, there were different forums and searching (Google and before that alta vista) could help you find at least a few answers, though not as comprehensive as SO in some respects.
Reading between the lines, it seems to confirm a change in business model.
To paraphrase: "Turns out software for running Q&A sites isn't that hot a property, but having access to a large part of all the world's programmers is"
Serious question - do many people here actually use anything other than Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Power User?
I occasionally get and click on a Google result for the photography stack exchange, but I've rarely clicked on any results for the other Exchange sites for my non-technical searches.
Workplace questions often get linked from stackOverflow, but nearly all of those are in a context of developers. It really seems like much of the rest of the stackExchange isn't that popular outside of developers who have an account through SO.
Depends on the technology. If you use AIX or DB2, you can often only find answers on other sites, because most of the posters are using more popular open-source / free tech like Linux or MySQL.
I personally avoid any website related to Stack Overflow unless the rest of relevant search results point to content farms.
After many years of dealing with the hostility of SO, I feel that the effort to dig a bit in blogs, forums or mailing lists is less than the effort you have to do with dealing with SO's redirect loop: Off-topic question, Wrong stack overflow site, Duplicate question, Screw you because I got the reputation, etc.
That redirect loop usually ends up in an old question because some short sighted moderator couldn't tell the difference between the question 5 years in the past, than the question today.
This will probably get downvoted into oblivion but ...
I have a kind of love hate relationship with SO.
I love that I get answers. I hate that I spend so much time writing answers and then see SO make bank from my work.
I've probably spent over 1000 hours writing answers on SO. Most of that time is spent writing working samples for answers. In fact http://webglfundamentals.org was started because of answers I wrote on SO where it they seemed too long for SO.
But, now there's this feeling of conflict where for every answer I have on webglfundamentals.org I really just want to paste a link to the article there on SO when it's relevent. But, SO frowns on that. So, I have to basically give SO all my content and work for free [or ignore it]. I supposedly get some kind of benefit from their gamification rep which I can show on my resume or something but conversely it feels like a treadmill that I must keep running on or lose my rep. It's become an unpaid responsibility.
To be clear it's not just webglfundamentals.org. It's any tech blog post period. I feel like an SO gets more popular they just suck up all content. Why write anything tech on my blog when 99% of the people looking for an answer will go to SO first? So it's become a negative influence for me in a way. Because no one is going to look anywhere but SO I feel less compelled to write tech articles.
Sorry for the rant. Maybe there's a solution? Maybe I've just got a bad POV. Like I said I certainly appreciate the other answers. Random brainfart, maybe like Youtube they should pay contributors? Yea, that will never work but something just feels wrong to me at moment. Also it isn't about the money really. I can't really put my finger on it.
I too have a lot of complex feelings about Stack Overflow. I appreciate it as a resource, but I also worry about what it incentivizes and why and how it incentivizes them. Your example is great: why is it that complicated questions with complicated answers you cannot just link to existing, well written how to article. Some of my best resources have come from such links that could only be appended as comments to the question, so they don't benefit from as much Rep gain as an answer, nor can they be marked as the "accepted" answer, when often they are the best answer...
It's a particular concern given they are exploring a "Documentation" site designed for such long form answers and presumably there will be more answers on the main page of the form "see this example of this Documentation page" and it will be interesting to see if some of the Rep systems and moderation policies adjust with that. On the flipside the Documentation site as proposed still encourages people to (re)create content that could exist elsewhere for Rep points and maybe to the detriment of useful community sites or existing documentation sites. Some of that will be wait and see as they move forward into the project, of course.
Finally, in a slightly different direction, as a somewhat unsuccessful game designer in a past life, I spent a lot of time thinking about point systems and incentive systems, and it's hard not to evaluate Stack Overflow's Rep through some of those filters. From those respects, Stack Overflow Rep is not bad, but sometimes concerning, largely in part from a reactionary position on myself that the "gamification" of the world is largely a bad thing, incentivizing in people sometimes the worst OCD tendencies and disincentivizing thoughtfulness or creativity. Stack Overflow Rep is definitely OCD incentivizing.
I had interviewers ask me about my Stack Overflow Rep, and for one thing its not hard to find, and for second thing many of my points are actually elsewhere in the Exchange network, which can be fun to explain. But it's also easy for me to worry what in fact they are really asking about if they are interested in such an arbitrary metric, as well known and "extensive" as it may be... (Particularly in a world of employers that forbid social media participation entirely, which would include things like Stack Overflow.)
I guess I don't really understand this at least with respect to bothering to change the name. I'd try to draw a parallel to what Google did in becoming Alphabet but that doesn't seem to be a congruent situation.
The organization of the company around developers as core users makes sense. Not sure if a name change is supposed to do much for the average developer in caring about their product offerings more or less.
It's kind of a reverse Alphabet situation: doubling down on (and returning to) the brand people actually know/trust (Stack Overflow/Google) over the brand people only met if they got involved in some meta-discussions (Stack Exchange/Alphabet), even as they continue to diversify.
I'm not sure whose is the better approach. I think the name change has a bigger impact on Alphabet (the shareholder shuffle, trying to get greater focus on "side projects" outside of the Google core search products) than it will on Stack Overflow. Certainly Stack Overflow doesn't seem to be doing it for outside shareholders, it seems like they are simply doing it to help coalesce their own corporate identity and how they talk about it amongst themselves. It might not directly impact the average developer in caring about their product offerings, but maybe it will help lead communications internally for them in making those product offerings better and selling those product offerings to themselves as important/core to their future. I certainly wish them luck in that case that the name change will indeed benefit their cultural stability and future.
The closest example I can probably give is that of Basecamp. They were formerly known as 37signals, and IIRC, they changed their name to Basecamp because it's their most well-known product, among other reasons.
Experts Exchange was the SO before SO and it was so bad, so bad that I can imagine it was one of the reasons SO was built in the first place. When the Exchange name appeared I cringed because it always reminded me of the worst QA UX in history, sitting on IRC was better. Glad it went away.
I still remember this "trick", where you just had to go at the extreme bottom of the page to see the comments that were hidden only a few scrolls above. Never understood why.
Despite this trick, I don't remember finding any solution to my issues on this website.
This is actually a function built in by Google originally to help newspapers etc. It's called "first page free". News sites want their content to be indexed by Google so they can get search traffic, however, Google does not want to send users to a login page, so they compromised Google will index content that is normally blocked by a pay wall in exchange the publication is required to show the full content of that page to any visitor from Google. If you try navigating to another set of answers it will probably require to you login unless you go back to Google and search for it.
It used to be Expert Sex Change. After some time they realized their folly, and fixed it by hyphenating the domain as well as redirecting from ExpertSexChange to the Experts-Exchange.
I was always confused by the difference between the two, even thought they might be different entities. This will minimize confusion in the future, glad to see the change.
Interesting, I hadn't even noticed it renamed... I always kept calling it stackoverflow. I noticed the name "exchange" in URLs, but thought that was related to sub-stackoverflows like "math"
EDIT: After reading the article more properly I see it's about company name, not website name. Still, not deleting my comment as it exemplifies the confusion the naming gave
Does this mean I can get a proper programming-centric Stack Overflow app for my phone now? I installed the Stack Exchange app thinking it would be a fun way to see random programming questions now and then. Instead, 99% of the time it's questions like, "Was the Emperor always a Sith".
It seems like a good place to put stuff that isn't a question.
[1] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/303865/warlords-of-d...