As an aside, I have to say spolsky that SO has made a real, measurable impact on my life. The number of times I type my query site:stackoverflow.com into google is higher than any other site.
it's understandable being defensive. but maybe that reflex is causing you to miss something?
[edit: also, how do you measure evaporative cooling?]
Humans are inherently social, and the amount of effort SO staff and moderators have to go to trying to stamp that out is a sign that SO really is a social network.
I always think it's a bad sign when product designers think they know much better than their users what they want. I think that's what killed Friendster. I think that's why Google Plus is kinda sad and sterile. If you're going to go to all the trouble of making a product for people, I'd rather you listened to them from time to time.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul...
It's a balancing act. What people actually want, and what they think they want, are often two different hings.
In the link, you seem to be basically making a slippery slope argument. I am sure a lot of people agree that they don't want a sea of memes. But a lot of reasonable people feel you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. A modestly subjective question like "What are the relative merits of frameworks X, Y, and Z?" is not anything like a rage comic. Neither is a reasonable discussion on programming mistakes.
Your "opportunity cost" argument strikes me as entirely wrongheaded. You pretend there are only two things people can do in the world: subjective questions and the objective ones. Your worry that a topic expert is spending 10 minutes on something he enjoys rather than the thing you want him to do is paternalistic and controlling. Every real community bonds not just over the practical stuff, but the fun stuff. It's as if you're saying that Golden Gate Park should be removed because those people should be out picking up trash or working to pay taxes.
If you want to make an analogy to a place of learning, consider a college campus. People are encouraged to do things there beyond studying. Areas are set aside just for having fun. That kind of community bonding doesn't take away from education; it enhances and supports it.
Also, nobody here is arguing that SO should be a place of pure entertainment. As far as I can tell, that's a straw man. Or perhaps more accurately, the imaginary bogeyman SO is fleeing.
Should I submit the same question to SO instead?
Saying that our definition of the topic is wrong, does not mean you aren't asking for off-topic questions to be allowed. It's the same thing.
However, look at what you're saying. You've divided the world into us and them. It's you, the defender of the one true definition, versus the ignorant outsider fools. It's utterly close-minded.
It's your bat and ball, naturally, so you're welcome to keep on driving off the people who have different views. But don't go around saying you listen to your users when you talk like this.
> ...throw out the gazillion-sub-site silliness and broaden allowed topics for discussion.
There is a disagreement about which topics should be allowed. Broaden means increase the number of topics considered to be on topic. He understands your definition of "on topic"; he just thinks it makes for a poor user experience. And I agree with him.
The problem here is that you and others confuse your view of "off topic for Stack Overflow" with some sort of universal truth. You get away with that not because you're right in some academic sense but because you have the power to drive off people with differing views.
My point, and I think his, is that the ever-narrowing topic definitions may be what the participating community wants, but it is driving off people with different ideas.
If you're happy with that, fine. But insisting that outsiders aren't allowed to comment on it is just another symptom of the drive for orthodoxy that I think is ruining it in the first place.
If you guys are happy to lose users in that fashion, by all means keep asserting that the only way you'll listen is if people put the right cover on their TPS report and submit it to the proper forum.
Whether you like it or not, SE users and former users are going to keep on discussing SE policies where they please. You guys can learn from it and even engage with it. Or you can just keep defining it as illegitimate, putting your hands over your ears, and going "la la la".
If the community and/or SE's owners are interested in serving the public, then they should engage with people where they are. Some of those people are on SE; most aren't. That's especially true for people who have gotten fed up with SE and left.
It's not my job to fix SE's brokenness. Nor is it that of the blogger whose article is linked at the top. Making SE better is the job of SE's owners and moderators. So if somebody should be putting forth extra effort here, it isn't the people who have never used or have given up on Stack Exchange. And even if it somehow should be those people, it won't be, no matter how much you suggest otherwise.
Personally, there's no way I'm going to go put my ideas in front of the SE community. From my experience there and the behavior of SE reps in this article, I have no reason to believe anybody will do anything but argue until I leave. I'm a little sad to think that SE's on the slow road to doom, but I've got better things to do then to try to sweep back that particular tide with my very modest broom.
I'm glad this guy's complaints got some attention by staff and volunteers at SE, but that's only because it got to the front page of HN. How many others are out there that will never be found? Post them in the right place and people will read them.
SO is pretty rigid about what they want. That's a good thing - their servers, their rules. Firm guidelines allow users to find either post useful questions, or find some other site.
Except, that's not what happens. Someone asks a question that's a lousy fit for the SE format; and people like it, and upvote it and answer it and the answers get upvotes. Then some mod comes along and closes it, and there's a bunch of negative feeling.
SO is huge, and needs constant tending to keep it useful. Cool urls don't change, but when Mark Pilgrim (who has a gajillion urls over SE) leaves the Internet there's a gajillion urls that need to be found and changed. (No, I have no idea why a site run by programmers, for programmers, can't kludge together a script to search for and replace urls.) That's one small example. There are plenty of other examples.
Then there's the "problem" of duplicate answers. Ideally, there would be one great question, with a bunch of answers, with the best answer being upvoted most and the answer most fitting being accepted. But very few people searches before asking, and all the tags are not useful, so there are a lot of duplicates. That could be okay, except the dupes are usually worse quality than one great question. And the answers lose quality over time - there's only so many times that someone is going to write a great answer.
Then the gamification is broken on some of the sites. You start off almost unable to make any contribution, and people with low scores do not get the upvotes. (This guy with a million votes must know what he's talking about, UPVOTE.) In theory you could concentrate on an obscure segment. In practice not much on SO is obscure because there are so many users.
The fragmentation is a bigger problem, I think. I want to ask a question about linux software, on my Ubuntu install. Already there are two different SE's I could ask on. There could be more depending on the software. This is a more vicious form of the duplicates problem.
The proliferation of SEs into ever more niche segments is okay, I think. They either sink or swim. Lousy for you if you've invested time and effort into something that sinks.
There is definitely a niche for a subjective version though. All those questions that peope love to ask, and answer. ("What's your favorite monspace font?" "What are your 3 most important programming pearls of wisdom?" "What book did you find most useful when you started, and what is most useful today?" etc etc. Obviously, versions of these questions exist in reddit and /prog/ and news:comp.* and etc etc.
FWIW I love the SE sites, and I love the fierce moderation. I've disagreed with it at times, and certainly with the cold way it gets implemented. But I'm glad SE exists. I just wish I knew a where I could ask different questions and have them seen by a huge crowd of clueful users.
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ -- for conceptual, no-source-code whiteboard programming questions
http://workplace.stackexchange.com/ -- for questions about general professional workplace issues that aren't specific to programming
And of course the rest of the sites at
http://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#traffic
I'll be the first to tell you that our Q&A engine isn't necessarily effective at every topic. It's primarily effective at technical-ish topics where there can be somewhat definitive answers backed by a bit of research. That's still a pretty big chunk of the world, e.g.:
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su...
The ghettoization of stack-exchange was a mistake. Give me an interface more like reddit - let me pick which areas I want to see questions from, all merged on to one page.
In fact, in terms of my actual daily "rotation" of sites, there are exactly 3: Reddit, HN, and Gmail.
I absolutely want to visit less sites. Stack-Exchange as a product for me would have significantly more value to me as an integrated network, rather than the current mish-mash of partitioned off sites. Let me search all questions, let all questions (in tags I don't have filtered, and of subject areas I've added) appear in my questions list.
Click the "Filtered Questions" link at the top to customize it.
That, and the fact that the SO/Programmers distinction is rather confusing and unnecessary in my opinion.
Granted this is Google's algorithm's fault not SOs problem. There is no reason to give a single site the first n listings no matter how authoritative it has become (and SO is very authoritative now).
How has your Net Promoter Score changed? Do you do surveys with questions like, "How disappointed would you be if Stack Overflow went away tomorrow?" How does attrition of users with at least 3 upvoted answers look over time?
I wouldn't expect the metrics you mention to capture the sort of user satisfaction issues, and I could see the above numbers not showing a problem because general growth is masking specific issues. I'm sure you can name quite a number of products whose quality decline started well before popularity peaked.
That's actually what Stack Exchange is about, so it's not surprising I guess that there's this impedance mismatch. If you want to just have a bunch of opinions, take it to Quora.
If you want to see if he has evidence, try asking him. And not in a "it's your job to argue with me" way. Call him up on the phone, ask open questions, and then listen to the answers without being demanding or dismissive like you are here.
That's a pretty basic product management skill. If it's something you're not familiar with, plenty of people teach classes. I know the Luxr folks do a good job, for example.
Howdy Joel,
its really quality not quantity and my subjective opinion of the appeal of the site(s).
Why did you shut down the old JoS forum?
Our best guess is lots of people taking vacations offsetting growth, on the 3 year graph you'll notice growth resumes sometime around September every year.
I honestly don't care* too much about it, we're in the business of quality questions and answers; traffic is a side effect, not a goal.
(Disclaimer, SE Inc. Employee etc. etc.)
*Provided it's high enough to pay the bills naturally, which isn't that hard to do.