The Stack Overflow Age

SO is definitely a force, but I feel its usefulness has faded from inattention to the user experience and use cases. For example:<p>#1. There&#x27;s a huge &quot;homework problem&quot; (narrow, specific questions that aren&#x27;t broadly useful). Consider flagging homework as homework (and excluding it from searches), trying to divert questioners to other resources before their question is posted (&quot;this looks like homework...&quot;), and more thinking about ways to codify the use case. I&#x27;d gladly help with homework if there were tools focused on that (e.g. ability to comment on specific lines of code -- Gooogle Docs for posted source code, etc.)<p>#2. There are oddly subjective editorial decisions, such as closing my question about an API for generating USPS priority mail labels as &quot;off topic&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;5690713&#x2F;how-to-programmatically-generate-usps-priority-mail-labels" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;5690713&#x2F;how-to-programma...</a><p>(My view: &quot;is there any API for doing X&quot; is no different than &quot;is there any method&#x2F;function for doing X&quot;, it&#x27;s a question of existence, not opinion. But even then, opinions are often very useful!)<p>#3. The best answer is often buried under the &quot;accepted&quot; answer. Over time, highly upvoted answers should drift to the top.<p>#4. There should be explicit UI support for flagging stale&#x2F;out-of-date information. SO has a long tail of information now, and much of it is dated. It should be super easy to note and see that.

Stack Overflow is useful at times, and frustrating at others.<p>If you have basically no idea what you&#x27;re doing, or just want an example for something, it can be great.<p>On the other hand, if you try to find an answer about something you&#x27;re really knowledgeable about, the result is often unsatisfactory:<p>Like trying to find the reference documentation to answer some specific question, and the documentation is buried under a lot of SO questions (that usually don&#x27;t answer that question).[1]<p>Or you find someone who asked <i>exactly</i> the question you&#x27;re looking for an answer to, but it either: has no answer, despite being very old, or has been closed due to being &quot;not constructive&quot; or &quot;off topic&quot;.<p>[1]: While I generally prefer the in-language documentation, e.g. Python&#x27;s integrated documentation is often missing notices (deprecation notices, warnings about illogical behaviour, ...) that exist in the web version.

It&#x27;s interesting to see all the negative comments about the SO culture here. I just hadn&#x27;t really noticed it but maybe it is a problem for beginners. I generally find what I&#x27;m looking for and when I post a question I try to research first to avoid spam. Isn&#x27;t that how it&#x27;s supposed to work?

&gt;Instead of putting all the Java programmers in one little forum and all the C++ programmers in another, we dumped everyone together and just let them tag their questions<p>And yet for some reason the site can&#x27;t handle off-topic and pure &quot;answerable by fact&quot; questions on one site? So often I search for something and the top post is an closed off-topic post on SO. I&#x27;ve never even had one of my own SO questions closed as off-topic so it&#x27;s not a personal grudge - I just think the site is very stubborn about this. So many questions and organic search results is a huge signal that they are ignoring.<p>It&#x27;s not like they&#x27;re running a forum were the first page would be polluted with off topic stuff if they allowed it. Their fear of becoming yahoo Q&amp;A has prevented them from filling a need that is there. Often I just want to people&#x27;s opinions on stuff - that&#x27;s mostly why I read HN.

&gt; In the early days of the Internet, before the Web, there was a system called Usenet which created primitive online discussion forums.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t call Usenet groups &#x27;primitive online discussion forums&#x27;; indeed, I rather strongly believe that in most respects Usenet was better &amp; more advanced than current technologies.<p>It was <i>fast</i>. How fast? Really, <i>really</i> fast: every article was already sitting on your local system, so there was no network lag (or just LAN lag, if your local system was on a network). Articles were plain ASCII text: no ads, no images, no JavaScript. The combination of local articles &amp; small articles wins over web pages every day of the week.<p>It was easy to find stuff. While the system was distributed across the world, there was a nice, neat hierarchy. This wins over the Web, which needs a service like Google to be usable. If one wanted to, one could perform full-text search over the entire newsfeed in realtime (James &#x27;Kibo&quot; Parry was famous for this). Imagine being able to grep the Internet!<p>It was decentralised: you could get multiple newsfeeds from multiple sources. You could have site-local newsgroups if you wanted to, or just share certain groups with your peers.<p>It had killfiles. It&#x27;s hard to express, nowadays, how valuable these were. And <i>you</i> were in control, not some unaccountable moderator.<p>A 21st-century version of Usenet, with encryption, authentication &amp; Unicode, and capable of scaling up to 7 billion people, would be just awesome.<p>Web forums are a primitive version of Usenet.

Good to see Joel is blogging a bit more these days. I know a lot of people disagree with a lot of what he says, but he always has points of view worth discussing, in my opinion.

It&#x27;s too bad the culture of SO turned out the way it did. I was eager and happy to use it early on but was quickly disillusioned and it&#x27;s my last resort to turn to if I have questions these days.

A few months ago I wanted to learn jq really well but unfortunately I didn&#x27;t really know where to start and couldn&#x27;t find much of what I would call well written documentation so I decided to train myself by contributing an answer to every reasonable jq question on StackOverflow.<p>I found many of the newbie restrictions off-putting and if I wasn&#x27;t there with the specific goal in mind to improve my own skills by helping others with their real problems I probably would have just left immediately like I&#x27;m sure many others have. Getting involved in the pettiness of the self-appointed there isn&#x27;t worth the time.<p>I stopped contributing when my free time evaporated after changing jobs. I might go back to StackOverflow when things settle down but I feel like I know jq well enough now, my experiment has run its course and for me to learn more I&#x27;m going to have to spend some time working on the jq internals and going into deeper questions then SO can handle.

<i>And, also: we’re just a few weeks away from launching Stack Overflow Teams, the biggest upgrade to Stack Overflow ever, so that’s going to be really cool.</i><p>Ah that explains firing up the old blog editor again content marketing ftw!

Reading this thread makes it feel like stackoverflow has become the new PHP. You can&#x27;t even say something positive about it before hell breaks loose.<p>It is really really useful. Actually it is indispensable. It got so many things right, just think about the world before Stackoverflow.<p>But the few things it gets wrong, people make it seems like it breaks everything else. Yes, it sucks. Most of the time I can&#x27;t find an answer, I am frustrated. When i ask on Stackoverflow and the question gets closed or just marked as duplicate, i get even more frustrated.<p>Does it mean it sucks as a whole? Hell no. We gotta be grateful for the good part, and help fix the bad parts.

&gt; One of the biggest such forums was called Experts Exchange.<p>By what metric? I don’t know anybody who was actually subscribed there (although they must have existed). Instead, people were using various other forums that were free. Some of these forums were absolutely huge, both in terms of number of users, and by the number of questions&#x2F;discussions.<p>Experts Exchange started dominating Google search results, true. But I always thought this was merely due to SEO trickery, not because they were actually widely used.<p>Truth be told, I would be hard pressed to even call it a “forum” — typical forums (bulletin boards) functioned very differently.

The Pedant Police make Stack Overflow very difficult to use.

I think Stack Overflow is great and it&#x27;s helped me a lot in the past, but I&#x27;m not sure how useful it&#x27;ll be in the future. I&#x27;ve been learning Elm the past few weeks and have noticed a lack of good SO questions and answers on it. It&#x27;s a smaller community, but I also think many people go to the Elm Slack channel to ask their questions, which they get in realtime.<p>Not sure if that&#x27;s just an Elm thing. A language specific Slack is useful in the moment (probably moreso than SO) because you get a real time answer and can ask follow ups etc, but I can&#x27;t help but think there&#x27;s a ton of knowledge&#x2F;people asking similar questions that is just disappearing into the ether. Makes picking things up harder for more people long term.

Stack Overflow (and the Stackexchange network as a whole) is the second most important website on the internet (after Wikipedia). Thank you Joel for this.

Ah yes, old expert sexchange and scrolling to the bottom for answers....