What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community

Here's my Stack Overflow user hostile experience. I asked a question as to _why_ some very well-used and robust database implementations, as a matter of "principle", don't have auto-increment fields. There must be a reason for it, like it violates the purity of a relational database, etc., but I'm not sure how or why.

This question was quickly edited/changed by someone else to "How do you do AUTO_INCREMENT in Oracle". And then it was marked as a duplicate and quickly closed.

I never asked a question on Stack Overflow again.

It's hilarious how self aware they are about the newbie experience[1] while at the same time having engineered an system that reinforces and enables all of those behaviors.

Stack Overflow doesn't care about helping users get answers to their questions; they care about creating a Google-indexed repository of high-quality questions and answers. These two aren't the same because of the concept of a "high" or "low" quality question. If you go to a consultant (or even a helpful fellow employee) with an vague, ill-formed question with a lot of specific detail about your exact context and problem they'll help you through it. Stack Overflow doesn't give a shit. No one is going to waste time giving you a nuanced answer to a complex real-world situation; nor is it with their time to cross-examine you to find out what your real question is. That would be both time consuming and unrewarding - unrewarding because it will help at most one person. No one else will care about your specific situation, so your ceiling is at most one upvote. If you want that kind of help, you have to pay for it, in one form or another. Unfortunately, most new users ask a question about something their genuinely confused about in a topic area they've just started to learn. Big mistake. Such questions were already asked 5 years ago and you'll get closed as a duplicate, or your confusion will be interpreted as cluelessness and closed as unclear. You'll get a ton of downvotes in either case.

I like stack exchange; I have a few thousand points on two different sites. I enjoy answering questions, or even just seeing what kinds of questions are being asked, and of course use it almost hourly when googling for different problems. I rarely ask a question though, and usually regret it when I do. But at this point let's just admit it's basically just a wiki with a psuedo-Q&A gimmick.

[1]: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/avINNb1_Dg2h6QfDRJOpnWVFWu...

One big problem as a Stack Overflow viewer who comes from Google is that many times the top result for a search leads to a question/answer that is a dead end. The question is valid but it is closed because it was asked on the wrong website (Stack Overflow vs. Stack Exchange), it's too subjective, it's a duplicate, etc. Or the question is downvoted and there are no useful answers.

Another issue which comes about from the overzealous duplicate tagging is that not all software engineering questions last forever. If someone is asking how something works in C89 and gets the best answer, and then someone else asks the same question five years later, the answer will be the same. But if it is a question about JavaScript or new C++ or Python, then answers can get stale pretty fast. One workaround the community uses is taking those questions that are top hits or top quality and keeps editing them year after year. But that only works for the high profile questions and answers. The policy hurts the site overall.

A really good post, and good point, but I also want to add that the first thing I thought when I saw the title was: "I don't think Stack Overflow should think of itself as a community".

In fact, SO is fantastic, the best ever at what it does, by far. It does what it does, really well. When it started, I occasionally asked or answered questions; now I don't, and it has nothing to do with community (good or bad). It's because, you know, all my questions are already asked on there, and answered, often multiple times.

This doesn't mean there won't be more questions that need asking, as of course there will for new technologies especially. It means that the ratio of users to questions has risen exponentially, so that the % who need to do _anything_ on SO has dropped.

You want the typical newbie experience? It's this: 1) types question into Google 2) clicks on link to SO 3) may have to repeat steps 1-2 a couple times 4) finds answer to their question 5) goes away

There is nothing in this that resembles "community". Like wikipedia, there may be a core group of ultra devoted users who keep adding new content. And you know what? That's ok. Perfect, even. The problem with SO's community, is that it's thought of as a community.

The worst thing they could do with SO, is try to make it a community. We already have Facebook and Twitter, and they didn't turn out so well. We don't have another substitute for Stack Overflow, if they try to turn it into a social network.

> "Newbie Experience" picture

+

> Over the next few quarters, we’re going to be taking a step back and re-evaluating how we deliver feedback to users about their questions. We want to make sure people are getting necessary feedback without feeling called out or publicly embarrassed.

My bet: they'll keep the mechanisms exactly the same and hide from the newbie user the information that their question has been flagged for closing, marked as a duplicate, etc., and show a 'temporary ghost score' capped at zero.

So Jeff Atwood wrote an article about what SO wants to be when it grows up. (https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-...)

The answer wasn't a Q&A help site it was a high quality curated wiki of the best answers and questions. It isn't supposed to be a forum where you come to ask your one off questions it supposed to be a place where you encounter a unique technical challenge figure out what the core issue is and then see if anyone else knows how to resolve the core issue and then have that core issue answered forever and always.

The one time I asked a Question on SO it was a very positive experience that went well got answered quickly, but I first had spent thirty minutes documenting everything checking the actual docs and ensuring I had done my due diligence before throwing it out there for someone else to answer.

If you aren't willing to put in work to find the answer to your question why the hell would you expect someone else to.

I'm a top 2% on a stack (gamedev), and find it very frustrating when I try to help the new users with an answer or in comments, and have the other mods come down on me for trying to help. I've had my fellow mods berate me in comments for trying to help. "With your reputation you should know better!" was one comment I got. At least I can still try to be helpful in comments on closed questions. And I can vote up questions that I see are getting pushed down with negativity.

To me, a lot of times naive and new user questions are excellent opportunities for learning, mentoring, and sharing. You have this little moment where you influence someone in a positive way, make them feel welcome, and maybe put them on a path to growth as a developer.

Closed as duplicate:

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-ve...

There totally are good examples ui/ux designs that minimize the emotional impact of negative feedback. Stack Overflow might take a page from dating apps. Imagine if Tinder told you all the hot people that rejected you! That's kindof where SO is now. Instead, Tinder takes a terrible experience (rejection), hides it, and only shows you the great experiences (acceptance).

The main constraint to work around is that, currently, question pages are mostly globally public. SO could change that pretty easily. They already have a lot of the mechanisms.

Like, it could be as simple as only showing downvotes and downvoters if you are logged in and have enough user 'points.' Otherwise, just show the newbies the result ('marked as duplicate' etc), and a [-] instead of -7 on the question tally. So it doesn't feel like a crowd of people yelling at you.

And, what could be really super cool, is if the SO team can auto-recommend learning materials specific to the programming language/framework/whatever. Like if I ask a stupid question about Django models, which becomes marked as duplicate, SO NLP's the question then matches it to the Django docs, which they've also indexed via NLP.

If there's some reason why you really need to see specific reasons the elite users decided the question was a duplicate or unclear, SO could use progressive ui design. Instead of blasting newbies in the face with criticism on the question page, make them click to reveal why H4x0r69 said your stupid XSS question confused CSPs and CORS, so the experience is a dialectic rather than public shaming.

I feel like there's an "elite" of old users who are discontent that there are both people asking questions they don't like and people eager to answer those questions. If they could just elevate those old users to a different space where they don't interfere with this asking/answering which is the point of the site to begin with, everyone would probably be much happier.

I have a somewhat different intepretation of the value StackOverflow provides. To me, part of what makes SO useful is the somewhat inconsistent, but still fairly obvious, requirement to do significant personal research, before asking a question. If a Here, let me google that for you link to the top result answers a users question, shouldn't there be some sort of negative feedback to cull those types of questions from the platform?

My point is, by discouraging behavior that the community is "generally" opposed to, SO helps in ways beyond just answer questions. That said, if they can make it a little nicer to ask a question, without losing the core value they provide (IMO - quality questions & quality answers), then by all means lets give it a try.

Stack Overflow is a huge community and they want to keep the quality of both the questions and the answers high. If they wouldn't downvote low quality questions, then the search function would degrade significantly. So newbies will always have a good chance of having a negative experience, even if it's done in the most respectable way with constructive criticism. I'm not sure much can be done against that, except perhaps better preparing first time question askers by having them go through a short tutorial before they can ask a question, or having first-time questions handled differently from regular ones (ie, only visible to moderators, so they don't attract too many negative comments from regular users).

One issue is moderation vs answering. Users interested in moderating questions are more prominent than users looking to actually answer questions.

1) Grace period. For new questions (and especially for new users) - add a grace period where the downvoting, closing questions, and voting to close are all prohibited. Could be 4 to 24 hours - some optimal window where questioners can read comments, clarify their question, add/revise code examples, etc. Getting downvoted or closed is an extremely toxic experience and tends to position the well for all questioners, be they newbies or veterans.

2) As an answerer I also need a way to watch a question and see if it improves over time. So when I provide feedback in a comment, or flag/watch a question, I need a historical view of all my threads.

Right now the experience is upvote or downvote right away, proffer an answer right away, vote to close or otherwise flag right away; there's too much immediacy in the interface. It feels like a churn. And churn is a game that appeals to rule enforcers (moderators).

3) Chat. A bad question may be intrinsically bad - incoherent and confused and unanswerable by anyone. Or a question may be bad in context.

SO is like email. It's asynchronous and creates a conversation history. In this context a good question is direct, concise, and descriptive.

Many questioners approach SO like it was a chat. They need to ask several small questions before they can formulate a real question. They need an informal conversation (chat) to set up a well structured, intelligible question (email). Many users are looking for help through the whole process: exploration > formulation > resolution. SO is optimized for the last step and ruthlessly moderates out the antecedent steps.

SO already has a chat at https://chat.stackoverflow.com/ - but usage seems sparse. Instead of "vote to close" being the only option for bad questions, maybe recategorize them instead. "Send to chat" or "Request for comments" to flag a question that needs help getting to an answerable state.

I have never participated in StackOverflow. In the early years, it was because they didn't allow logins except through Google/Facebook. And then it was because as an experienced developer with answers, I can provide value to the site but I don't have enough "reputation" to anything useful. I have to do a bunch of meaningless crap to earn the privilege of doing anything useful.

Most of you probably don't have this problem because you've long contributed to Stackoverflow. But the user experience isn't just hostile to newbies asking questions but also really anyone who hasn't been contributing for a long time.

What I find deeply frustrating and unhelpful on Stack Overflow are answers that don't offer a solution but instead give reasons why the OP shouldn't be doing what they're doing in the first place. Q: How can I do this in jQuery? A: You don't need jQuery. You should be using vanilla JS for that. Q: How can I hide scrollbars using CSS? A: That's bad UX and you shouldn't be doing that in the first place.

The lack of regard for the context of the problem the OP is trying to solve/trust that they have their reasons and project constraints for doing so is annoying and disrespectful.

The best questions on Stack Overflow are, without fail, those marked as "not a good fit for Stack Overflow"

Over the years, I have spent a fair bit of time on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites (at the moment, 816 answers and 70 questions, across the sites), in many of the sites from their early days. What I find happening on multiple sites, repeatedly, is similar to what I've seen on many other online communities like Wikipedia etc:

1. It starts as a community of people eager to share their knowledge, help people, etc.

2. Initially, the small community of users scours every (or a large fraction of) new questions that come in, jumping at opportunities to help (and perhaps also demonstrate their expertise etc: it feels good to answer a question well, like disposing off a level of a video game or whatever).

3. Over time, as many users come in, the community develops its own norms of what's good and bad, its own in-jokes and in-group markers / shibboleths, etc.

4. At some point, the number of new user actions that come into view becomes too much for one user to manage. Somewhat overwhelmed, and given their overdeveloped “connoisseur” tendencies at distinguishing between good and bad questions (https://xkcd.com/915/), they tend to look for shortcuts to dispose of questions (“this question is bad because ____”). Any question that does not match the in-group standards of a good question can easily be disposed off instead of engaging with them. It is easy to forget that these standards are somewhat arbitrary, and often not even encoded well anywhere... and even if they were, new users won't read it anyway. It is also easy to forget one's original motivation and purpose, of helping others.

The end result is that new users asking their questions in what way seems natural to them (remember Sturgeon's law) almost uniformly have a bad experience, though from the perspective of the regular answerers of the site, they are continuing to answer good questions at the same rate.

I have not had a bad experience asking my questions; I'm pretty sure I can still go to one of these sites, ask a question, and have it be well-received, but that's because I know the norms, the superficial things that make a question look like a good question “worthy” of being answered. But whenever I look at say Stack Overflow (the oldest, biggest site, and by far the worst offender in this regard), I see many horrifying instances of a new user's question being “rejected” for trivial reasons, when in the old days we'd have helped the asker improve the question and worked harder to extract the “pearl” inside the question.

(My last phrase reminded me of the title of a post from 2011: https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... which ends with:

> Therefore, the only logical thing to do is to maximize the happiness and enjoyment of answerers. If this means aggressively downvoting or closing unworthy and uninteresting questions, so be it.

I think this was the right choice to make at the time, and if Stack Exchange Inc in order to make the sites more welcoming ends up making the sites a less fun place for answerers there won't be much of value left, but still there's a lot that can be done to understand why otherwise initially well-intentioned answerers end up behaving this way over the course of years, and finding ways to keep answerers on the site without regularly crushing those seeking answers.)

Now I want to know what the controversial new policy was.

Hostility is an issue that has plagued every major discussion board, comment section, and social network. I applaud any network that makes a real effort to manage the hostility. It is a very difficult problem to manage, since people rarely intend to sound hostile, yet most readers assume the worst.

My sister leaves Facebook every few months because she perceives there's too much hostility there, then rejoins again a few months later to see what's going on in the family. I see most of the posts and comments she sees, and I can see why she thinks people might be belittling her, so I don't blame her. I'm glad she doesn't try to get into technical discussions where the appearance of hostility can be far worse.

I think this is an important lesson for an awful lot of online communities -- in a public forum* some mild, warranted criticism is then published to your friends and they are then encouraged by the algorithm to put in their tuppence-worth. Should any of those be inclined to comment -- perhaps less sensitively, slightly more inflammatory -- then the cycle begins anew, with more fuel added to the fire.

* Mostly looking at Twitter and Facebook with their explicit "engagement means my friends will see this" algorithm

SO's problem was they wanted to a community that rewrote manuals and documentation, rather than be a community that helped programmers answer problems.

That created a problem that has snowballed and is probably to big to ever really fix now. It is caustic, its not user friendly (even to users with experience).

this reads a bit like a parody of the all-inclusive movement. the first half of the article chronicles how she took offence where none was offered, and instead of "my bad", there's a whole 'nother half of it talking about "improving the way people give each other feedback".

as others have suggested, (part of) the issue is with the nature of the site itself. we can talk about elitism, seniors shitting on "noobs", whatever. the truth is, there's all walks of people on SO. there's a continuous barrage of bare-naked prompts for "do my homework for me", there's a continuous barrage of "(i don't even know which side is up, but) what's wrong with this gymnastics equipment i'm using?" questions. if you're any kind of regular in that kind of environment, you'll eventuaatlly get exhausted. the only way they can improve the site for "beginners", however ill-defined that term is, covering both the blatant homework cheaters and honest learners, is to limit engagement by force. "you seem burnt out, you can't post comments or answers for a week. come back when you're in a better mood." that seems like a sure-fire way to drive away their knowledge pool and ultimately their revenue stream. another way is to rate-limit the crappy input, but that doesn't seem to be what the article is hinting at at all.

for all the bitching about how toxic SO is, this is not my personal experience. however, that doesn't mean i think the format of the site has merit. IMO, if you want to fix the experience for honest neophytes, you need to enable dialogue. a newbie asks a ill-posed question, a senior points out the misconceptions, asks for clarifications. the newbie comes back with more information, improved followup. senior is finally in position to provide a red-meat answer.

i just described a mailing list, and that's a format you cannot sell with the kind of margin SO has been raking in. they could ditch their programmers and employ a bunch of writers to collate the wisdom of various product-specific mailing lists into an encyclopedia, but they're not interested. i understand that, it'd be a hell of a pivot. but if they push on catering to the lowest common denominator, they're doomed.

For me SO has been useful when I search on google and the 1st result is a similar question on the platform. Almost never get the answers on stack overflow, but I find alternate ways to search on google for the answers that I need, which is often found on other sites. With the focus on questions and phrasing , the site has become an useful resource to find ways to rephrase your questions, but very rarely find the required answers on the site.

Does Stack go the way of Yahoo answers at some point? The former has served me on countless assignments/reports, hope it remains useful.

HN is far more hostile than stack overflow :)