Programming

That boat sailed off into the sunset a really long time ago.

Whatever comes next should consider not starting by talking down to new users.

Source: I'm still pissed about a ten year old bug that threw out my helpful answer after I composed it because I didn't have enough bullshit Internet points.

A decade later it doesn't really feel like SO has fixed their fundamentally "asshole to new contributors" vibe.

I'm glad someone else contributes, but I can't be arsed myself. And honestly, it doesn't look like the staff at SO really care.

So I expect the current SO cohort will eventually age out and something new, with a new vibe, will replace it. I hope it has pokemon memes.

If that new thing is polite, I might contribute there.

Pro tip: I'm at least twice as likely to contribute to the next thing if they revive the domain ExpertSexChange.com.

Stack Overflow is in an impossible situation. You can't both be a good meeting-place for experts and a good place for novices to get expert advice and an advertising venue. Those things have fundamentally incompatible requirements.

Any two of them, maybe.

All of the comments seem to be quite vehemently against the proposals, so it seems that stack overflow is quite happy with its somewhat toxic nature disguised as organisation :/

I'm surprised at how negative the reaction to SO is here! It just takes a while to get the site, which unfortunately doesn't work if you jump right in without lurking. If you ask questions the moment you run into trouble, you kind of project a disrespect for the answerer's time by not trying to solve it yourself first. If you ask as a last resort and list what you've tried, people are waayy nicer, even if your question sucks.

I think the real problem is that people's expectations aren't properly primed going in. The site could do a much better job about that. If you ask only as a last resort, you end up solving most of your problems yourself, and SO is REALLY good at helping you do that, in a way that leaves most other sites in the dust, in my opinion.

While I respect the degree of technical expertise you can get on SO, I am very much convinced this is a failed experiment which will slowly collapse on itself. And I think that because the organization of the site is completely at odds with it's professed goal.

SO is not really a forum, because time is supposed to be irrelevant : a 12 years old answer takes precedence over a question asked now, failing to consider that, maybe, the context of this question has changed. Its ridiculous, especially in the context of software engineering.

On the other hand, it's not a library either : a library is a collection of book, which are relatively self-contained knowledge systems. And in practice, the SO answers are not self-contained. They merely answer a specific point, with no guaranteed coherence from one to another, so a beginner cannot use them to build a broad understanding of a subject.

To take the analogy of the Cathedral and the Bazar, I am under the impression that SO members are trying to build a cathedral out of the stone sold by hundred of bazaar people, and refuse to see that fact that all stones all having different sizes and dimensions is maybe kind of a problem when you build a cathedral.

One of the key points nailed it.

There's way too many new questions. And frankly, new users do ask questions that are answered already. But the other problem - it's difficult to know how to ask the good questions. Because novices don't know what they're asking for. Which also means, they don't know what to search for.

But worse there's a gamified part to it. Badly written questions don't get much points. So even if you help, you aren't acknowledged unless the question asker is active. So you get weird ass questions like "How do I install Tailwind on Windows?" And you try your best to understand what they mean, spend half an hour on an answer, for them to reply "No" or worst, ghost you.

It makes it weird as a community because on one end, you want to help them. But on the other end, because of SO's own set of rules, you are limited to how. SO encourages new questions, they are badly written, experts feel like their time is being wasted because of the lack of response, experts become bitter. While the the bulk score chasers only go after extremely hot questions that have 20+ answers already. There are still jQuery answers (a pretty outdated framework from 10+ years ago) that get incredible activity, only because that's where the points are, compared to more modern tooling.

Source: I'm apparently a top 10% contributor (?) because a few of my answers from 2011-2015 hit the top page and are highly upvoted. Also guessing it's not hard to be in the top 10% because I'm not at all active, just been answering questions on SO for like a decade.

SO sucks.