I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answered. SE got my traffic, but I didn't get my answer. Isn't that broken?
There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed.
Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet.
I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-mill developer machismo, and it makes me chuckle every time the first google hit directs me to a SO post with 1000 upvotes that has been closed as "off-topic".
It seems self-evident to me that in the year 2015, the internet has allowed me to make more valuable use of my time quickly searching for answers rather than scouring documentation. Docs have a time and a place, but are not needed for quick dips into the myriad techs you need to use to write a typical app these days.
We simply touch too many different code platforms to RTFM/RTFD on everything.
Just today I have probably worked with at least 20 code libraries with their own documentation, and most of those libraries will be replaced within 3 years from now.
I think reading the documentation for everything that a webdev works with now could be a full time job in itself.
It's unbelievably annoying when this happens. I have a number of bookmarks to incredibly insightful posts, whose usefulness has been corroborated by literally hundreds of people...all closed because they are deemed "off-topic" or some such by an admin.
My theory is that SO was essentially "done" years ago. But people are still on staff and needed something to do. Thus, unrelenting navel gazing ensued.
I think the thing missing in this is all the low-quality questions that end up getting closed due to lack of solvability. One of the objectives of SO's rules is to avoid flame wars and ambiguous answers.
Imagine the question : "What is the best templating engine to use for Django?" This question doesn't have an answer, because it's so dependent on use case (even that statement is controversial). So if it's on SO and not closed, you'll get a bunch of answers that are contradictory, and people flaming in the comments.
I think the main objective for the SO team is to have people land on the site and _have their answer right there_. By removing possibilities of these off-topic questions, you're less likely to land on answers that help your specific thing.
End result is "when I land on SO I get an answer every time" instead of "when I land on SO sometimes I get a flame war". For branding, at least, I think it works in their favor to close those questions
What actually happens is there's a bunch of decent answers, and then it gets closed, which somehow kind of leads to the best of both worlds, but leaves a bitter taste in a bunch of people's mouths -"that was really useful why close it" answers.
One of the problems is however carefully you craft your question somebody who should never been admin will find a way to flag it. Ask about a list of common ways/libraries/etc and boom - ban! Don't need to ask which is best (which could plausibly start a flamewar), just asking a smart question is enough. (And yes, I agree that people karma-farming is annoying, but could they please use community wiki or something instead of closing good questions with interesting questions?)
Also, smart, general questions are not the only questions to be closed: I got one closed on networking because the problem was between two company networks, not inside. There is an obvious reason for a rule about company networks and that is to keep hone networking out, not because we need another subsection for WANs, no?
"Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet."
This is wrong in multiple dimensions and [edit: the next sentence which i didn't quote is] flamebait.
One camp believes in following these guidelines to a fault. The other camp thinks some of the rules are counterproductive to SO's principles.
This reminds me of the unhelpful SO answers where they state the answer to a question is already stated as part of a spec and won't be answered with a link to the spec. My preferred answer to these questions will quote applicable parts of the spec along with reference numbers and a link.
I don't understand why I have to click another link to go to another site that doesn't have the same context and awareness of where I just came from.
And may no longer even EXIST ... seriously love when working with old libraries and all i have is some dump copy on github of a long dead source code littered with comments about see the web page for the docs... the docs dont come from the comments, and lo and behold, the stack overflow post ... slaps you in the face with yet another link.
I agree that it's not the most nuanced picture, but it correctly captures the ongoing debate on meta about this very question -- a debate whose very existence suggests that these guidelines aren't cut and dry at all.
For example, where is the guideline that answers this without ambiguity?
This viewpoint only makes sense if you subscribe to the (very silly) ideas that there are a limited number of internet points available and that they matter. Why does it matter to you which people are being rewarded for what?
It matters because people respond to incentives. If what you want to see encouraged is good answers to novel questions, you need a system that rewards that over copy-pasting from documentation.
What do you think happens when the two are rewarded equally, but the latter can be done much more frequently per unit of time?
I don't think what the site developers (or most users, for that matter) want to see is good answers to novel questions. I think they want to is good answers to all questions.
If I can find the answer I am after more quickly by searching and finding a hit on SO than I would by grepping documentation, how is that not providing value?
Now balance it against the more important questions that are unanswered or even unasked because SO becomes a place where there's no point to that. It's not as simple as that.
I get your argument, but it sounds like a weak version of the claim that there is a strict ordering of priorities in the world and that only the top priority should ever be worked on.
Heck, even if the site was only for "novel" questions, according to your logic, only the most important unanswered question should be visible, until it is answered. Otherwise people might be incentivized to answer the second most important question instead.
I still don't see what one has to do with the other(s). Besides, go browse through SO's unanswered questions; this is the state of things today! Simple questions, the most common variety, get answers in minutes. The complex and/or specialized questions which cannot easily be answered by a large portion of the userbase tend to languish.
Indeed. The result is that SO is a lot less useful than it used to be. I have repeatedly found myself chasing an obscure error message only to dead-end on SO and be forced to backtrack.
While I've experienced something similar too, I think it may have more to do with the fact that tech has diversified in the absolute sense. An obsecure question about your processor was easily answered in the past because everyone had tinkered with it. Today a question about a bolted-on feature in <insert tool of the year> might not receive an answer because so little experts on SO use it.(?) I've got no clue if this explains it, but it makes more sense to me than the idea that SO's attention/incentive span is so short that users are only spending time on 5-minutes-typing questions.
I've had that happen repeatedly as well, both now and "back in the day". I have no idea if a higher or lower proportion of the tougher questions are being answered now than they "used to be", but my sense is that it is about the same. The tougher questions are just tougher to answer; that hasn't changed through time. What I do know for sure is that a much higher proportion of easy questions can be answered by searching google and following one of the first few SO links, which is valuable.
Some people find difficult problems more rewarding to solve. Given that internet points are meaningless, someone interested in learning a language better could spend their time regurgitating documentation (and hopefully learning along the way). Eventually, one of those regurgitated responses gets picked up by Google and becomes the top answer, and nobody even needs to go to the SE forums to ask.
I don't think they're mutually exclusive - there are multiple reward structures for multiple types of players. Both should be encouraged.
Right now, there's one reward structure. People who value and respond to that reward structure act rationally within it. This means that regurgitation gets rewarded over good answers to novel questions.
Fair point on the question of why it matters. On the question of what should be encouraged, I think "good answers to novel questions" is only one of many possibilities. In my opinion, what should be encouraged is simply "people quickly and easily finding good answers to their questions", and I think copy-pasting (or linking to) the relevant section from documentation serves that goal just fine, and that voting is a good system for indicating what answers are useful, regardless of the form they take.
My key point is that not all questions are created equal.
Further, there's the question of how much effort the questioner should be expected to put in. In a great many technical question fora, the experience is that many noobs make no attempt to search out answers.
Isn't the incentive to answer those kinds of questions mostly intrinsic? I mean, the interesting questions and answers are more likely to be given exactly because they are so. The extrinsic reward is then complementarily useful for the opposite questions: the ones that are not very interesting but important nonetheless, such as the case of a reference to a cryptic documentation.
Maybe the difference of opinion largely comes down to whether you think the second sentence of your comment "sounds right". It seems false to me, but it must seem true to you, since you wrote it. I would be very interested in seeing an analysis of data relating a measure of how many "non-novel" answers are being given to how many difficult questions are being answered.
I think this would be an excellent solution. Combine it with some semantic similarity analysis, and the vast majority of newbie questions could be replaced with "Here's a link to a pre-written answer that almost certainly addresses what you want".
They already do that analysis and show similar questions while you're asking a question. You can say "well they should do it better" (and I'm sure they try), but the whole beauty of the Q&A model is combining the strengths of computers and humans. Computers are better at organizing and storing tons of information, but humans are much better at figuring out what other humans are really asking.
I could see an argument that the people more equipped to answer more technical questions may leave if they have to wade through a bunch of questions that could be answered in the docs. If those sorts of answers "take over" then you'll have to wade through them to find more novel questions to post answers to.
Rewarded with what; internet points? How about rewarding the far larger portion of its userbase, i.e., the sector that doesn't care about upvotes, with information? Yes, I am in the former camp if I have to chose one. SO has become far too heavy handed an "noob hostile". I have been around since the beginning and am in the top 0.16% of users and I can't stand how stringently some adhere to the formal and informal guidelines.
Ultimately, the site depends utterly on the internet points people. Without them there is only noobs asking questions, and they leave without people answering.
That's a fair point. It's not my motivation for being active, but I assume it is for most, and it is an effective carrot. I would just like the balance to be tipped a little back in the direction of the consumers of the site.
I'm not suggesting we leave obviously terrible questions open, it's the borderline posts that get me. Interesting questions which may not have a black and white answer, but would still encourage discussion/opinions which would be useful to people down the road. I know "it's not a discussion site", but sometimes there are gray areas and it's useful to have the opinions of experts on the pros and cons of certain approaches/technologies/whatever.
That gets into sticky moderation issues. My experience moderating support fora is that no matter how or where you draw the line, there's always a grey area. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and there's always going to be something that seems like a reasonable except that gets cut.
I suspect that SOs answer to your need is "Go use a different site". At some point, that becomes a reasonable answer.
It is a reasonable answer, but the reason many people don't find the "go use a different site" answer satisfying is that sites on the internet have network effects that make switching untenable, so it makes more sense to stay and debate the point. Which is also reasonable.
True, but the guidelines could be changed. Every close-happy user loves to link back to the guidelines. If they were a bit more lenient these users would have less leverage. It is a people issue though, I can't think of a technical solution which will solve it 100% of the time.
Changing the guidelines doesn't so much fix things as change where the lines are. You'll still see just as much "close-happy" behavior, just in different subjects.
I'm tired of seeing stack overflow used as a place people go in lieu of actually reading documentation. However, I sympathize with the other point of view… Sometimes people just need something clearly explained to them and they can take it from there.
SO never quite the original vision right. (A strange thing to say about an incredibly successful site, but...)
The problem is that you can't boil down development to very focussed questions with very focussed answers.
A lot of answers are experience and opinion - and if someone experienced is giving an opinion that's usually useful in itself, dammit, even if someone else with experience disagrees.
'Is React better than Angular?' may seem pointlessly open, but if you get answers from two camps who both know what they're talking about, it's possible to learn a lot from both.
As a side note, the closed questions are not deleted from the web site because Stack Exchange takes a conservative approach when it comes to deletion. Nevertheless some questions do get deleted. The Help Center[1] and Meta[2] have more details on this.
> Questions that are extremely off topic, or of very low quality, may be removed at the discretion of the community and moderators.
In my experience, this is completely false, it should be reworded as "Questions that moderators like to remove on a whim".
The fact that a moderator (or group of moderators) don't find a question valuable doesn't mean that it is not valuable for the rest of the world, and this applies specifically with questions about recommendations.
You've also got people closing questions who don't know the language. Am I the best person to vote on say Clojure questions? I'd say not, but on SO that frequently happens. When the languages go to people, the conference speakers and book authors are ignored by someone who has never written a line of code in that language something is wrong.
Also in the rapidly changing JS world they don't reference the version consistently. Code that worked fine on version 1 doesn't work six months later on version 1.1, if I knew the version it would save a lot of time.
Can they not give the macho developers some kind of button that spends some of their points to put a badge on the questions they like, elevating them to "true SO" status? Thats how these things are supposed to work I believe.
I always upvote on closed questions that I find useful. This happens more often than it should, imo.
What I would think would be better is for questions that receive a lot of upvotes after they are closed, that the people who flagged the question have reduced capability to flag down questions in the future.
SO had always allowed and encouraged beginner questions, actually. These days the same question would likely be closed as a duplicate, because the question, presumably along with a good answer already exists.
So that's an example of a good question, actually. And an answer "read the docs" would be down-voted as unhelpful and quickly disappear.
This is pretty much my experience. The site is read-only for a lot of people. I think I was rejected the other day because I didn't have the 50 reputation to comment on a reply that had other comments on an older question. They need to lessen restrictions that got too strict out of fear of the site becoming worthless. Right now the scales aren't balanced.
Comments on SE are meant to be temporary( in their value, not duration ). If you had to raise an important issue about something, you should have instead asked a question about it, where you could leave a link to the problematic answer/question and explain the problem. In fact that is the usual procedure in case of conflicts. There is no restriction on that. If your point is valid, the community does the rest.
And yet frequently asking a new question seeking clarification on an old questions topic matter, due to some relevant restriction, or even simply 'this no longer applies to V2 of lib$foo' is met with cries of "duplicate" and buried. Stack Overflow is suffering from the Wikipedia Moderation Problem ... which a few of my friends now refer to as "using a mod_assholes reverse proxy"
Most comments should end up as an edit to the question or answer, clarifying some point, at which point they can be removed. The Question and Answer are the important things on Stack Overflow, not the communication that went into creating and tuning them.
The remaining comments are just fluff, such as "thanks", which can more appropriately (for the site) be expressed as an upvote or accept. Or they're asking a new question, in which case the parent's comment applies.
Interesting how this is the case, because that was one of the key goals of the site when they were first building it.
I listened to Joel and Jeff talk about it in their early podcasts when they were first building the site. To be the definitive answer for a question requires that the answer be able to change and evolve over time as new information becomes available.
This has not been my experience when searching for programming questions. The threads I see closed is when I search for "what is the best ...", and while I find them very useful to read, I understand why SE do not like them.
Sometimes, I also see threads closed as homework questions, but those tend to have several duplicates which do have the answer in them, so it has so far not bothered me.
This type of thing was addressed by Yahoo! Answers in Taiwan which has a very strict scoring system for their mainline Q&A product. Basically they setup a separate section that was for discussions type questions called "chat" and provided no points on that side of the site. It was also not nearly as controversial to just move a question over there rather than closing it.
> and while I find them very useful to read, I understand why SE do not like them.
This is exactly what I don't understand. If a question is borderline, but obviously useful, why not err on the side of allowing it to stand?
>Sometimes, I also see threads closed as homework questions, but those tend to have several duplicates which do have the answer in them, so it has so far not bothered me.
This doesn't happen anymore. The "Homework" tag was removed and is no longer a valid reason to close a question. That doesn't mean these questions don't get closed using other rationals of course.
I can expand why I think SE do not like "what is best ..." questions.
1: There is no definitive answer to it. At best there is best practice, and at worst there is flame wars. If Moderators tried to distinguish what topic could become flame wars, you tend to end up with very biased moderation.
2: Recommendations are much more time-sensitive than purely technical questions. The best framework in 2005 might be abandon in 2015, which can mislead readers. As a reader, I know this and always check the post date, but from a UI perspective, this key component is not obvious in SO.
3: Flame wars are destructive, and SE has historically tried to avoid them. Questions like "should I pick GPL or BSD?", "Emacs or VI?", and "Python or ruby?" tend to be cut down before they cause problem in the SE community. I wish sometimes that HN would follow suit and do the same.
I think it depends. "What is the best image processing library?" should be closed. However, if that person goes on to detail what exactly they are trying to do and what constraints they are working with, it may not be so open-ended anymore. And this is only an example of one type of question which is routinely closed. There are others.
Yeah I feel that they are overzealous in closing useful (to me) questions, but its hard to know what the site would be like if they let discussions go--perhaps it would make it a lot more difficult to find the answer you're looking for.
Because so many questions I've found useful were closed, it has had a chilling effect on my desire to ask questions there. I used to ask questions regularly at the beginning.
But now, I feel like my question is probably going to be flagged, so why bother.
The moderation is ridiculous. Useful questions get closed all the time for nebulous "fit" reasons. My opinion is if the community thinks it's a valuable question by voting it up, it should stay.
I have found some useful information in the "dup" questions. It's a bit weird to discover that a useful answer is "closed as duplicate" but whatever, as long as I keep finding solutions to my problems, I'll keep going back.
Post a technical question about how to make your single page application crawlable, if it includes the word "SEO", there are great chances it will be closed.
"how can you get the most SEO results out of a one page website"
"Is there any way to dynamic generate content without affecting search engine indexing and ranking"
"Is there anything I can do to make google crawl my website"
"Is it safe to pre-load 4 website into one page without search engines interpreting it as misleading"
If you are a programmer who do not work at google, it is impossible to answer. If a co-worker gave me any of those questions, I would answer it by giving them the link to google's recommendation page about SEO, while warning that google is a private company that do not disclose their methods in indexing website. I can guess and speculate how they think or what their intention are, but any advice would only reflect how I think it works today, and google may at any time change how they index websites.
And I consider Google+SO the best programming tool ever created.
wrt Closed Questions, simple heuristic - if the page has lots of visits, lots of upvotes and is high in google for common searches do not close the topic. Clearly there exists a market for this question for many people, even if it boggles super-users' sensibilities.
For your information, the Google specification [1] is implemented in google, bing, msnbot, yandex, pinterest and mail.ru bots. Making the solution compatible with the other bots is a matter of adding 2 lines in the server configuration.
I know that Webmasters SE is supposedly the right place to ask questions about crawling issues and Ajax, but in fact you will find more questions on SO (see links below) because this is mainly related to technical issues with JavaScript.
Maybe I'm just off-base, but I'd consider all of those off-topic for SO. It's not a programming or programming tools question, it's a "how does Googlebot work?" question.
The knowledge would certainly be useful to many people, but it is outside of SO's scope as it is defined.
Don't you think that implementing the Google crawling scheme [1] (i.e. returning a snapshot of an Ajax application) is a programming or programming tools question?
Sometimes that's just as bad. Often the questions I see that are closed as "duplicates" are not actually duplicates, just closely related. The answer to one is not always the answer to another.
I don't have an SO example on hand, but consider this Sci-Fi StackExchange question:
The question is "Why does Sauron need the Ring to control Middle-Earth?" The correct answer is that he doesn't; he can control Middle-Earth without it, his victory is inevitable, but needs it to remove the only possible method his enemies have of overcoming him. After being correctly answered, the question was flagged as a duplicate of "What was the point of Sauron making the One Ring?" which is a very different question and comes with different answers.
This is, in my experience, extremely common across the StackExchange network. In that example, the "duplicate" question was answered before being closed, but that's not always the case.
Very often when searching (with google) for subjective things you'll find a closed stackoverflow link high up in the results. I know stackoverflow isn't appropiate for those questions but i still keep going to those results. I understand their position, it's just annoying. This is an example of something i found today: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4674609/looking-for-a-ric...
When searching for the best tool for the job, I often get pointed to SE and the questions are closed as "not constructive". I seem to recall, however, that they opened a separate site for such discussions?
best tool for the job is off topic on Stack Overflow.
They did open Software Recommendations Stack Exchange.
Closed answers get deleted in some regular interval. If they for some weird reason aren't, you could consider flagging them, there is always a response to that.
"Best tool for the job" doesn't sound like something that should be on SO. Far too subjective and likely to result in stupid opinionated arguments that go nowhere.
Except those are the hard questions in software engineering. "How do I draw a triangle with OpenGL?" is an RTFM question. "How do I decide between R and Python?[1]" is a much more challenging, but much more important, question.
I've said it before: SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology. The questions that are hard, for real senior software engineers, are rarely found on SE sites. Programmers.SE was supposed to fix it, but it hasn't worked, because of the same moderation.
This is a moderation problem, but the solution chosen was the easy solution: just don't allow hard questions because hard questions beget arguments. Instead, requiring people to have civil discourse, perhaps even requiring that people show they can have civil discourse before allowing them to participate, is much, much more difficult.
I'm not sure SE could survive the second type of moderation. But by not having it, it certainly makes it usefulness to somebody like me, with many years of experience learning and using various technologies, near zero.
>> "SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology."
That's what I find in my use and I don't think that's a problem. I think the harder to answer questions should be on their own Stack Exchange system. Moderation on that system would have different rules. I think if you keep it separate the second type of moderation you describe could work, however mixing the two types of moderation with Stack Overflow would lead to more problems imo.
Although the question was framed badly it could have simply been edited to be more clear about what it was asking and what the answers are answering. It was helpful to me and I'm sure it's been helpful to others as well.
So, edit it then! Even if you don't have an account, there'll be an "improve this question" link right below the question that'll let anyone submit improvements. They'll be reviewed, and, if approved, will immediately submit the question itself to a "reopen review" - if the edits are able to resolve whatever problems existed, it doesn't have to stay closed.
It's easy to assume that every reader is able to look past a poorly-written, half-implicit question and suss out the underlying need - but that's not the case. If you're able to understand a question and it's clear that others are not, don't hesitate to share your insights - they can make the difference between a question being downvoted and deleted and one that goes on to help many others.
More often, I find a question that is closed and frozen in time that does have answers, because the answerers were faster than the moderators. For instance, "Where can I download Spring?" The top Google result is a StackOverflow page that is closed as off-topic.
The question is off-topic, but as you can see it was still answered. Still, to solve that problem, a new site was opened per request of users: Software Recommendations Stack Exchange
The problem with the new site is that it boasts a tiny fraction of the SO user count. It's just harder to get good answers on a site with so few active users. The same is true for programmers.stackexchange, where code review type questions end up.
> I often [find] a question on [...] Stack Exchange [but] some moderator [has] closed it before it got answered.
How often is often in practice, though? This is a common objection, and I see it mentioned a lot by disgruntled commenters here. This is just another form of observational bias, and in reality the situaion described is pretty rare...
There are many times that SO and SE sites have been useful to me, both is finding answers to existing questions, asking questions that are then answered, and also providing answers myself. I agree that it can be infuriating to see a question that you want answered on the site, but it has been closed as 'off topic' or 'irrelevant' or the classic 'not suitable for a question-and-answer format site.' However, this has not happened to me much in the several years I have used the site(s) so I have to assume one of the following is true:
a. I only ask/search for the 'right' kinds of questions?
b. Closed questions are not that common?
Due to the annoyance factor, I think that b. is what is happening, and people just weight those occurrences much higher in their subconcious. That means they will recall them more readily, thus giving the false impression that it happens a lot.
This is actually a very common observational bias, which people should be more aware of.
The availability heuristic is the idea that if something can be readily recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternatives which are not as readily recalled. The easier it is to recall the consequences of something the greater those consequences are often perceived to be, and similarly the greater the consequences the easier somehing is to recall. This means strong negative associations with closed answers make those easy to remember, and people incorrectly estimate the frequency of this situation to be much greater than it actually is.
It's hard to even research certain topics these days without google leading to a useless stackoverflow page. Yes, most questions have been 'answered'... But years ago and those aren't the ones Google leads to.
The overall quality of stack overflow has decreased dramatically over the past few years. These days, when I go there mostly I have the chance to help someone from India do his or her job and tell people to stop using obsolete database interfaces and leaving their code wide-open to SQL injection. It's not very rewarding, educational, useful or entertaining.
I sometimes feel as if there could be a thread titled 'SO pivots into airplanes' and the top comment would be about whether flight attendants would call some questions off topic.
That pissed me off so many times that once the mods actucally got into an argument over whether my question should be allowed, that was the last time i ever posted or answered a question on SE. That being said that site is super helpful, i just wish they could make the moderators more tolerable. You would be surprised how many times a question is closed yet will have so many upvotes and answers.
Interestingly i have noticed that Quora has some nice thoughtful answers to tech questions, especially questions that have no shot in hell of being answered on SE.
Having read over 5000( yes really ) questions and searched over 100 with Google, that didn't happen once.
Just to clarify, SE doesn't always have the question, but it always has the answer.
It must be related to the specific field you are searching for; older ones are usually complete. I wouldn't be surprised if a more casual programming field has a larger ratio of closed answers.
It seems to happen with certain areas of interest more than others. I would say I encounter them in as much as 30% of my searches, which are web development related.
While I understand the intentions of the moderators, they seem to assess the value of a question for people at the moderator's own skill level than at the people who might be asking the question or seeking an answer to a particular question.
The silver lining for me is that at least they don't delete the questions and answers they mod down. I've found a lot of useful stuff in questions that the mods didn't like.
Thank you for your response, I will comment per paragraph:
SE has good rules which keep questions relevant. I would say that if the question is closed and there are no existing duplicates, then the question itself doesn't have much value. ( There are of course outliers. )
There is a misunderstanding here, moderators on SE don't actually close most of the questions, normal users with privileges to do that, do so by voting. So such a question doesn't have value because users decided so, not moderators.
The last paragraph shares the misconception with the previous one. Users vote on and close question. Inf fact moderators are so rare on SE, that they only do critical things that should not be trusted to users, which do the rest.
I think the point is these often are upvoted questions[1] with thought out answers. In fairness, I would argue the question I just referenced doesn't "belong" on SO as it's pretty clearly based in opinion. But if I Google "simple django rich text editor" and this is the first result, I would argue it does bring value to SO by bringing me onto the site.
Having strict moderation standards is SO's business. I may or may not agree, but it seems to work for them.
Leaving closed questions, particularly those without answers, on their site sucking up google juice and deceptively appearing in my search results is scummy. If they don't want it on their site, they should ask google not to crawl it. And that goes squared when the question doesn't have an answer.
>> moderators on SE don't actually close most of the questions, normal users with privileges to do that, do so by voting.
To a person _arriving at SO from Google_, "moderator" and "normal users with privileges" are basically the same thing, even though they may be technically different. And, those "normal users with privileges" tend to be overly aggressive when flagging questions as "off topic" or "opinion-based".
As stated, this happens almost entirely with (a) questions that could be considered opinion-based (up to discussion whether these belong on SO, SO's stance is they do not); (b) specific long-tail questions that may have very precise or specific answers.
Googling 100 things (which is not a lot) is not likely to return more than 1 or 2 of these at most. It's rare that I hit this but I've seen it a dozen or so times at least. Most of the time it's a question that has been heavily upvoted with a heavily upvoted (and accepted) answer.
Happens to me constantly. The best questions for me are always like how best to make money in an Android app, which StackOverflow hates because there isn't any clear answer, just many people who have tried many ad networks, free and pro apps, etc.. The only questions they seem to allow are trivial things I know from reading documentation anyway.
I posted a employer ad on SO Careers, and also GitHub Jobs. The SO post resulted in a satisfyingly large set of high-quality candidates. I was satisfied with the value.
In contrast, GitHub was surprisingly disappointing. Maybe one or two worthwhile candidates, and a ton of junk. It appears that GitHub's jobs get scraped and posted elsewhere, and the bulk of responses to my ad were low-quality (and that's being generous) candidates responding to those reposted versions.
Interesting theory. What prevents other sites from scraping SO posts? If the answer is "nothing", that suggests it's just a matter of time until it's just as bad. Right?
I'm not sure, as I didn't dig too deeply. I forget the details, but I knew the post had been reposted, since many of the (poor quality) candidates said things like "I'm inquiring about the position posted at [some-place-other-than-github]"
Used it as both an employer and job-seeker, and have been very happy on both sides.
As an employer, application quality was fantastic - for 3 different technical roles, a majority of applicants in the final round of interviewing, and the eventual hires themselves, all came from Stack Overflow.
Also, the cost was a lot lower. Typical cost from a recruitment agency would be around £3-5K for a junior developer, £5-10K for a mid-level developer. StackOverflow was £250. The results from StackOverflow were also better - the recruitment agency sent Java developers for JavaScript roles, and all those usual horror stories. The only advantage of the agencies was that they found more applicants, but typically, they sent more chaff than wheat.
Sorry if it sounds like I work for the PR team, but if you're looking to hire I can't see the downside of advertising on StackOverflow.
I had a great experience about 3 years ago. It was amazing.
First, SO Careers 1.0 came to a halt, they made a few changes in 2.0, they changed it to an invite-only system as opposed to a premium subscription service. They best part of all, they reimbursed everyone who had previously paid. Here was the blog post about it: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/02/careers-2-0-launches/
It was great, I was getting several requests per week for a while, and it even helped me land a job across the country.
All that being said, I haven't kept my SO Careers profile up to date lately, and haven't had many inquiries in a while.
Not really. The usual guidelines are "have a portfolio of some sort" - IOW, something you can use to demonstrate what you know instead of just leaning on a sad list of keywords. That can be a nice SO profile, but could also be a solid open source project or well-written blog.
If you do plan on showing off your SO profile, don't get hung up on rep - well-written answers that demonstrate mastery of a subject are a lot more useful than an arbitrary number.
That is actually (surprisingly) not made super prominent on a users profile page. There is a place to list questions/answers that you felt were good representations of your skill/knowledge
I got my first job out of college via SO Careers; it was a pretty solid gig, though I've moved on since then. I think I applied to several jobs through it, and wound up with a few phone screens leading to one actual interview in person. The response rate was pretty good; in fact, the only slow response I've had was when I applied for a job at Trello, but that was probably due to them being swamped more than anything else.
I've found that it's quite a good source of information on legitimately good or interesting technology companies in various cities. Once you look outside Silicon Valley, it can sometimes be surprisingly hard to figure out what the good companies are, if any, in a given city. My experience is that the good companies typically have at least a profile or job posting on there.
(And if you're a good company and you have neither of those, I recommend getting one if you can afford it -- not sure what the cost is.)
It's pretty good, as a programmer I ditched Linkedin a while ago, I always get great opportunities from SO Careers, and always get spam (pretty much) and shitty opportunities from Linkedin, just being there, without actively applying to jobs.
To any of the people who have had some success with SO Careers — are you in Europe / Germany?
I get remarkably few contacts on Careers compared to other sources, and then often from people who completely ignored my location (back when I was marked as "no relocation"). Friends who I gave invites to didn't seem to get anywhere with SO.
Also, it's still the case that searching for a postal code on the German version of the site (as it suggests, in German, in the search field) will assume you meant a US zipcode.
I kept my profile there for a while from 2011-2012 and at the time I didn't get any leads. When I actively searched for job postings there, they mostly seemed to be within a few core areas, usually aligning with the same things Stack Overflow proper has a lot of activity in: .NET, enterprise Java, etc.
As a web developer working in stuff like PHP or Ruby, I just chalked it up to me being in the wrong venue. Over time, I've gotten better leads and interviews from stuff like We Work Remotely and even Indeed. From my experience, the stuff SO Careers was optimizing for and prioritizing on profile pages wasn't really important for landing an interview request.
All that said, a lot can change in 2 years and it seems SO Careers's success somewhat speaks for itself.
And I found my current job a Trello there. I wanted a remote dev position and spent a few months getting an RSS feed of remote jobs from SO -- it was, by far, the highest quality of my sources.
I've been hired through SO Careers and also hired 1 developer through it. Neither was through a job posting - both were through using their candidate search service.
I tried to use it a little over a year ago when I was looking for my next gig. I got a couple decent leads out of it, but no real interviews. It seemed not to really have reached a point of "critical mass" yet where there were a lot of good listings available. It seems to have marginally more promise than the rest of the things of its breed, but it did not change my mind that finding a job through (even casual) acquaintances (which is what I ended up doing) is much more effective. The half hour it takes to set up a profile would be much better spent going to your local dev Meetup if you only had a half hour to spend IMHO. That being said, it seems to collect "all the right info" and I go back and update it every once in a while.
Yes we hired through SO Careers and have been very satisfied with the result. You need to spend a lot of time crafting your job offer and should not be afraid to take the premium package but it is worth it.
The staff has been very helpful with giving us great tips to improve our offer.
As an employer, we got no real prospects, only a few people who were looking for remote work, even though the description said local only. They gave us a full refund with no hassle under their satisfaction guaranteed policy.
As an employee, it brought to my attention a great job from a good local company that actually cared about developers and allows remote work.
I would guess most of those employees will be in sales / account management where the job would be to develop relationships with businesses to post jobs on StackOverflow. For example, look here [1].
In my experience (speaking from the employer point of view), SO Careers has been pretty good. Most of the people who applied were looking to work remotely (which was fine by us), so that might skew the experience (as in, not sure what the response quality would be if we didn't select "remote work ok" given that most of our respondents wanted to work remotely).
Their careers business has the opportunity to be a revenue generator for the company. The starting cost for a job listing is $495 per 30 days and goes up to $1499 per 30 days. In my opinion, the profiles on Stack Overflow careers allow developers to present themselves much better than many other career sites.
We changed prices in December. Market conditions right now are tough; we’re seeing more frequently that it’s unrealistic to expect to hire a developer in 30 days given that for every developer there are 4-5 jobs. We’re optimizing our products and pricing to encourage customers to allow listings to run a longer on the site. To make this feel like the right decision for our customers, we’re significantly discounting our 60 and 90 day listings. That said, if you’ve been using Stack Overflow Careers for a while and want to keep buying 30-day job listings for $350, that’s fine too. (I'm on the marketing team, btw)
I got approached by an employer through SO careers. We went for few rounds and got the offer. But I ended up taking another offer with better compensation.
I've had a profile there for a while and prefer it over LinkedIn because it's (obviously) more developer focused. It's also less spammy than LinkedIn in terms of being contacted by recruiters/agencies.
That said, LinkedIn still takes up the majority of what little time I spend on sites like these since that's where most people are.
Stack Exchange is to Jobs postings as Facebook is to Advertising.
Both have massive potential audience, but both don't deliver engagement and effectively eat your budget.
Facebook isn't largely effective (in part) because the audience isn't there to be advertised to, their busy socializing with friends/family. Stack Exchange isn't effective as a Job Bulletin because the audience isn't there to find a job (they probably already have one), they're there to get assistance for a problem.
> Yeah, exactly! People watch TV for entertainment. TV ads don't work.
TV ads are often entertaining, and you don't have to go out of your way to view them (you usually don't have a choice). Ads on Facebook and other sites are often seen as intrusive and usually ignored. In the case of Stack Exchange's Careers page, you have to explicit go to it to view the listings.
TV ads are fun to watch, huh? Maybe, depends on a lot of variables.
On facebook ads - the best FB ads are native to facebook. Pictures or videos. You don't need to go to another site. They are interesting and draw the viewer's attention just like good TV (any) ads. You have the added benefit of instant social proof and maybe even clicks to your site, if you included a shortened link somewhere. Don't confuse FB ads with adwords or direct response banner advertising. It is not. People who treat it this way are the same people who complain it doesn't work.
> Don't confuse FB ads with adwords or direct response banner advertising. It is not. People who treat it this way are the same people who complain it doesn't work.
I'm not. My company has gone through no less than 3 different marketing agencies that believed they could "do social right", and we've given it our own go internally as well. None succeed in doing anything but getting more likes on our FB page and draining our marketing budget. People simply did not click through to the website nor convert into purchases. After FB's algorithm change to synthetic feeds, well, it got even worse.
You might say "well, you've used the wrong social marketing company!"... and that's exactly what they all said when they pitched us.
Our story is not unique. Perhaps it depends on the types of products, etc, but there have been some very high profile mega-corps that very publicly yanked their FB ad support citing similar reasons.
Adwords and other direct banner adverts, on the other hand, do work, and they work very well. One possibility they work so well is the user is already looking for a product that is then pitched to them, ie. browsing a how-to forum and then gets presented with products that the how-to uses.
> there ought to be a place for people to go specifically for viewing advertising; no such place exists.
There are plenty. It's about a captive audience. Take a movie theater for example -- you don't have a choice but to sit there and if not look at it, you hear the ads. Same if you're trying to watch at TV show, you have no choice.
Things like DVR have changed that partially and reduced the effectiveness of TV adverts; a major reason why broadcasting companies have fought hard against being able to fast-forward through commercials, etc. You can always show up late to the movie theater too, but most don't and it's not as convenient.
Other examples would be the newspaper classified's sections (or craigslist being the online version). People go and look there specifically to be sold to.
The point being, if your audience isn't captive, or if they aren't already interested in your product, then your adverts are wasted effort (and money).
When's the last time you were on FB and saw a sidebar ad for Coors Light and decided to run out and buy some? What about a car advert? Vacuum cleaner? Probably never. Maybe you liked their FB page, but it likely didn't result in a conversion (meaning you ran out and bought something from that company).
Now if you were on a forum or doing a search for the best Vacuum or best beer or what car you should buy -- you're already interested in the product and far more receptive to being pitched too at that moment.
If you can't have a captive audience, then the next best thing (or maybe better thing) is to have an audience who is looking to buy already. FB and other social sites don't provide that...
Had contact with a couple of interesting people, startups, companies via SO Careers. I think, it's one of the top job hubs currently, if you are in the software business.
"Spolsky says that two-thirds of its revenues today come from recruitment services, via its Stack Overflow Careers site, and one-third from advertising."
I found this very interesting. Stack Exchange is an insanely useful service, but I struggled to figure out how they would monetize it. (Similar to Wikipedia) They're received enough money that exit valuation expectations are high. I guess the cash flow projections from these are enough.
I worry about exit strategies. Stack Overflow was supposed to be "programming-question forum, done right." We've seen a lot of old people come through with the strategy of "build up critical mass of questions+answers, then enact paywall."
I'll probably always be skeptical that SO is just about to become ruined, unless they explicitly move it into a long-term strategy where the careers board is all they want for revenue.
Worth keeping in mind that, because everything contributed is licensed to us via CC-BY-SA, we essentially have to compete against our own content - if we make the user experience awful, there are plenty of other sites willing to take the same information and present it better.
> we essentially have to compete against our own content
What requires SO to publish this information? This means someone else can legally mirror SO answers, but if that data one day disappeared from the Wayback machine and the Google cache, then what?
If there are third-parties out there actively building caches of SO, then that answers my question.
Not sure what you're asking; we have to publish it or else it ain't exactly a website.
Beyond that, not only are there plenty of sites scraping us (the better ones use the API, the worst ones don't throttle and get throttled) but we periodically publish full archives, hosted by a neutral 3rd-party: https://archive.org/details/stackexchange - kinda hard to take back something that's been torrented.
You probably didn't follow the early years. I just can't ever see them taking the site-with-a-dash's monetization strategy.
It's exactly why they made it in the first place, they repeatedly rubbished expert's exchange in the podcasts and even went so far as to creative commons the content, you can download all the questions and answers if you want.
I think a paywall will kill it, and they know that. Perhaps more focused ads is the way to go. The value of programmer eyeballs is a lot higher than grandma.
They're getting that revenue because they've got high-quality candidates.
I worked at a firm that was also doing well in the careers space, and that was because when CVS/Walgreens/RiteAid was looking for pharmacists (for example), we could ensure that their ads were only shown to pharmacists, and not plumbers, cashiers, truck drivers, etc.
So the chain stores knew that not only that their ad dollars were being well-spent, but that the candidates they were getting were already well-qualified, saving their HR departments time & effort in filtering out those that weren't. Frankly, I feel we were under-charging them, even though we had excellent revenue figures.
Except you don't have to browse to page four of a giant thread to find out a posted solution doesn't work, and you can update an old answer when the information becomes outdated, etc.
Stale is stale wherever you put it - page four or on top. Technology moves so fast that that responses from 2009 to HTML/JS question should be just ignored no matter how green the accepted checkmark.
Other than "can I use <new API>" style questions, the vast majority of 2009 HTML/JS answers are still entirely valid.
Again, though, you're missing the point. On StackOverflow, a stale answer can be fixed, by virtually anyone. On traditional vBulletin-style forums, the post saying "this isn't true anymore, there's a better way" might be buried hundreds of posts in.
I agree with you to an extent, and this is especially true for iOS stuff where there's a lot of API/platform churn, and sometimes the same issue or bug pops up twice with a few years between.
I often land on a question that I'm asking, and it has a lot of upvotes, but it was answered 3 years ago using deprecated APIs.
If the API has really changed that much you can ask another similar question mentioning that you're interested in the new stuff, not the old one from the previous question.
Unfortunately, Tech Crunch labels Stack Exchange as a 'forum'. It's not.
A Forum is for hanging out and sharing. It may have information you need, it may not. You will spend a lot of time scrolling through useless material finding it. Or even worse: http://xkcd.com/979/
Stack Exchange will not waste your time. You have a much higher chance to find the answer you're looking for.
In short, while Forums and Stack Exchange are avenues to convey information, SE works to ensure finding information is easy and painless, whereas a forum does not.
There are multiple definitions for forum. The standard Internet definition is indeed "hang out, post lots of BS, troll newbs" - but the broader definition is simply "a venue for exchanging ideas", and SE certainly fits that.
We don't like to call it a forum, precisely because it brings to mind the former. But the latter (older) definition is perfectly applicable.
(I'm an employee of Stack Exchange, working in the "annoy gortok with pedantry" department)
> SE works to ensure finding information is easy and painless, whereas a forum does not.
SE is trying to create create technical manuals one extremely directed question and one specific answer at a time. There is nothing wrong with discussion around questions or topics, especially if it helps to clarify anything being discussed. It seems like the moderators think there is only one way to ask or question a topic, whereas in reality people learn in different ways. Having multiple discussion points is helpful, the cream will rise to the top with votes. Duplicates shouldn't be closed either, there is value in seeing the same question answered in a different manner especially when both answers are correct. SO and SE has gotten so bad it's my last resort these days, I turn to Reddit before asking questions there and that is embarrassing to say.
Doesn't surprise me considering how much I use Stack Overflow. I also have a lot of respect for Joel--I don't actually know much about him but from his blog posts he seems like a very decent guy.
He's my boss, so I'm super biased, but I can still share a primary-source perspective. I knew him for years before working here, and would say that both as a manager and a general human being, he's one of the genuinely best people I've ever known. From when he started Fogcreek, his and Michael's whole philosophy was to create an environment and mission that makes smart people actually love working there, and then get the hell out of their way. Here at SE, we've grown a ton since I've been here, but I can tell you our exec team spends a lot of time discussing how to ensure we maintain an environment where employees are actually excited to work. (I know that sounds goofy/cheesy/like BS, but talk to any of our devs or other employees; I think you'll find that just about all of us take great pride in what we do.)
As a startup entrepreneur which don't doubt about success and growth -- how could I ? ;) -- I am very interested in the work invested by the whole team in a sane and enjoyable workspace.
What are the trade-offs ? I always feel like only the exceptional rich companies can sustain such high standard of living, the same rich which will respond that it's the only way for keeping an healthy work in the end.
Seems like a never ending chicken and egg problem that I don't have time to solve, I have hard deadlines to manage... (it's slightly exaggerated, of course, but you got the picture)
What will they use the money for? If they're not expanding, and are profitable (and so don't need to cover running costs), I can only guess at retiring founder debt.
They said they aren't profitable, they're hiring too quickly for that. They're using the money to hire quicker, just like most other people use investment for.
Kind of you, but the real credit goes to all the people who donate their time and knowledge to help others. We (I work at SE) are incredibly excited to be able to use this investment to do even more for them.
Credit also goes to the promoters of programming languages with bugs and bad documentation. Some of them use Stack Overflow in lieu of providing their own reliable issue tracking hosting; some even actively increase tags on SO for their own language to help along programming language ranking systems. Some of these promoters even lose their own investment, which may even have been redirected to SE in the same boardroom discussion somewhere.
I have basically zero imagination about big dollar numbers, but I just don't see what they are going to do with $40,000,000 that would generate more than $40,000,000 in value.
Without that context, I have no way of seeing this as anything other than a "bubble" investment, even in a pretty awesome product/team.
It's easier than emit obligation on the market, I guess.
See it as a long-term shot. No doubt that 40M in recruitment will pay if the SO team continue to be half as good as they seems to be today (which is one of the challenges).
They are hiring lots of people to provide new features and keep growing. To add $40m value you've got to add of the order of 4m users which seems quite doable.
I live in fear that StackExchange will not turn out to be a viable business and will eventually die off. Many times SO has saved me when all other hope was lost. It really needs a billionaire playboy type to be its patron.
I use every bit of StackExchange and have for a few years....except for meta
I use multiple stack exchange sites and even chat and have found it all useful...except for meta
In the few times I have posted to meta, I get downvoted into oblivion. So far, the vibe I get from meta, is that there is an in-crowd with a certain philosophy and if it isn't yours get the fuck out or we will downvote you and pick apart your every word.
It makes me wonder...as a help forum what the hell is meta really for?
Also congrats to SE, glad to see them get this funding...but please wtf is meta?
StackOverflow has saved my bacon more than a few times, so good for Joel and the gang, they provided an invaluable service to the development community. However, I feel like StackExchange needs to get its priorities into check.
Unbeknown to some, there are tonnes of StackExchange Q&A sites. Picked on Area 51 and then voted up by the community. Many start with good intentions, but lose steam and never make it to a fully-fledged Q&A site because they didn't meet the minimum requirements (the Startups StackExchange is a good example of this). There is literally a StackExchange site for every single niche; cooking, scepticism, music, science fiction, mathematics, database administration, Apple products, web services, Wordpress and tonnes more.
You have to ask yourself, are a lot of these individual Q&A sites simply using unnecessary server resources when they're probably being carried and offset by StackOverflow's advertising revenue? I would love to see StackExchange go down the path of focusing on programmers more than I would cooking or mathematics. I contribute to a lot of individual StackExchange sites, mostly the Wordpress one.
Reading the about page seems to highlight that not even StackExchange themselves know what they want to be or the fact they target a wide range of niches.
Stack Exchange is the largest network of websites for software developers including Stack Overflow, the pre-eminent destination site for programmers to find, ask, and answer their questions.
This statement seems to indicate they focus on catering to developers, but going through the list of over 100 StackExchange Q&A sites yields sites for niches like; marketing, mathematics, cooking, science fiction, gaming, DIY, Apple software/hardware, electrical engineering and tonnes more. I would say a few sites relate to programming, but many do not.
Then there is the issue of overzealous moderators (mostly on StackOverflow). How many times have you Googled a problem, SO comes up as the first result, you click it and the question has a few hundred, sometimes a few thousand upvotes and it has been closed? Happens to me quite a lot. I see questions being closed as duplicates when they're in fact not duplicates and were closed because the mod simply lacked the understanding of what was being asked. Questions closely related to a duplicate often get closed as a duplicate and once a question has been "moderated" it rarely ever gets re-opened.
The issue is in part with the points/badges system. You have an imbalance of power. It is virtually impossible for a new user to get high enough to make even a subtle difference to SO. Those at the top want to keep their spot, unfortunately many of the moderators are a little too click happy. Instead of the site feeling like a community moderated website, you have these select few power users telling us what is right or wrong (especially evident by the fact of high ranking Google results leading to closed questions).
Things have been broken for a very long time on SO and I hope the investment means they can try and address the problems (which they must be aware of).
Don't get me wrong, StackExchange have provided a beyond invaluable service, but the arrogance, overzealous moderators and often confusing policies/rules around the kind of questions you can ask/how you can ask them really deters me from participating. My involvement with SO these days is read only, because I don't want to get dragged into all of the politics of the site and the power users who control it.
Seems to me this could be a problem for SO in the future if people like myself are deterred from answering because they don't feel like their contribution will be accepted or will be heavily criticised.
