Right, their decline is because of the thing that they've been accused of since the very beginning, and not the trillion-dollar technology that replaces them. Brilliant take.
Now we have a new guy in town, who offers "robotized copy-paste the solution to YOUR specific programming problem, no reading required! we can even control your computer for you, so you can do something you actually enjoy and stop wasting time on this complicated computery thingy for boring nerds", which serves the aforementioned audience much better.
"Target audience" connotes people that the site wanted to be there. That's just who showed up, because that's who will always show up basically anywhere that looks like it might be helpful to them, by default.
The biggest suckers were the people who were genuinely putting it effort there. So, in the end, did they make the world a better place? One would like to hope they did, but we are yet to see the long term consequences of the capabilities which were created with the value extracted there.
For sure. The site was quite poorly designed for its stated goals.
> but we are yet to see the long term consequences of the capabilities which were created with the value extracted there.
I cannot see fit to blame people for the actions of others they enabled, even deliberately let alone inadvertently.
When you look at experts from Microsoft world - the likes of Raymond Chen (Old New Thing), Jon Skeet (high profile Stackoverflow contributer in C#/.NET), Mark Russinovich (SysInternals creator), Dave Plummer (early Windows dev with YouTube channel now), they are/were employees and they present as polite and professional. Either they would not assume that everyone who doesn't know some obscure thing they know is an idiot, or they would keep that thought out of polite discussion.
Google AI answer says there are 35 million more developers today than in 2005, citing Evans Data Corp and Slashdata. There are tens of millions of developers around the planet writing internal desktop software, dashboards, reports, CRUD web pages, who have been in their jobs <3 years, and likely arrived to a language/framework/tooling/libraries they weren't familiar with.
I bet Spolsky naively expected that would be SO's userbase. Millions of company employees around the world asking each other politely "how to merge two lists in Python" or "what's the idiomatic way to read lines of text from a file in C#" or "what's this second parameter in this Win32 API call" and building an 'internal' company wiki of common questions and answers that people entering any environment/language/API/library commonly have.
Instead they opened to a world where flames and insults that would get someone written up or fired from a company are celebrated, particularly when directed at Microsoft users and ordinary company programmers. A world where people will not only assume that if someone doesn't know a programming fact they are an idiot, but will prefer insulting instead of saying nothing. A world where everyone is either an expert or an idiot with nothing in between.
It's a wonder SO worked as well as it did, for as long as it did.
you sound exactly like the mfs that ruined that forum.
But also, we were not "mods". We were just members of the community who did absolutely nothing to gain power over you except to participate by asking and answering questions. The actual moderators of the site, with a diamond next to their names, were almost literally one-in-a-million users. But it only took 3,000 reputation to cast a close vote, and 15 to flag to close a question (prioritizing it for consideration by the first group).
Posts like yours are made, IMX, because people had a bad experience asking a question. If that describes you, feel free to provide a link to the question and I'll be happy to give a detailed explanation of why things went as they did and what the site wanted you to do better in asking it.
The one thing I really liked was how it tried to find existing questions and answers that were like yours during the question input phase, but that is also why it came off as hostile when you subsequently collected down votes even after passing through this filter
The biggest blocker to this is that the site itself did not provide ways for the community to fix the front matter, and the site ownership ignored pleas to fix that front matter and to take more action to make people read it before participating.
There's also a huge problem that people equate popularity with success. It's the same phenomenon that leads people to declare the site "dead" (or not) based on the rate of new incoming questions. No; it's dead because the site management pushes ever more AI involvement that fights against the policy forbidding AIGC in questions and answers; and because they're destroying the core principles of participation in the site in the hope of making that question rate go up again (while ignoring the voices of those who would otherwise answer those questions).
> but that is also why it came off as hostile when you subsequently collected down votes even after passing through this filter
Questions only really had downvotes because they went into a public queue immediately and that was the mechanism to hide low quality content. It is not a problem to ask a duplicate and fail to recognize it; someone closing your question as a duplicate is helping you get a cached answer immediately, while also helping make that answer easier to find in the future. Anyone who downvoted a question merely because it was a duplicate was misunderstanding the system. On the other hand, getting through that filter, and even if you had a genuinely new question, doesn't mean you had a good question.
It should never have worked like that; this was counterproductive to the site's stated goals (but it was what the founders came up with, and doing it the right way would have killed engagement right out of the gate). What you really want is for the question to start out effectively closed, in a state where it can be workshopped, without the voting system. Anything that made it through that system would, in theory, never attract downvotes because the legitimate reasons to downvote it would have been addressed already. And by doing it that way, you limit exposure to the question to people who are interested in fixing questions, and let the people interested in answering questions have their own feed. (Of course, people can also wear multiple hats, but you get the idea.)
In fact, we had something like that for a little while, called the Staging Ground. It was, in my view, the only good idea the company had after the Prosus acquisition, in a sea of bad ones. It was not perfect, but it was a damn sight better than the traditional system.
Why should I give a damn about what you or others think is required for a "successful" website? Not everything is about profit or popularity or anything else. Some things are about making the thing that you set out to make.
hope that helps :)
This is what killed SO. People were going to the site to get problems solved, not to add to their list of problems.
They were incorrect to take the approach that they did.
Last year, my friend's cat died. Imagine if he had gone to Wikipedia to edit the page for Cat, inserting his question in the page text, seeking veterinary advice. I hope you would agree that this would be an abuse of the system which should certainly not be rewarded.
Similarly, on a Q&A site like Stack Overflow when you ask a question, it is simply expected that you think about other people, and what their needs will be.
Specifically: a question and answer are added primarily so that, indefinitely into the future, other people can find them with a search engine, read the question and confirm that it matches what they're trying to find out, and go to the answers. Think about what those users would want the question and answer to look like. Think about whether they would ever be able to find the question with reasonable search terms, and whether an answer to you could possibly also answer them. Think about whether they would expect Stack Overflow to house that question. This is, really, at the root of all the reasons for closing a question.
Quick context for anyone who isn't aware, rep there doesn't work like karma here: your question getting upvoted is apparently now +10 (used to be +5), your answer getting upvoted is +10, either getting downvoted is -2 (and costs the downvoter, they get -1), plus a few others.