What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

If your question is well researched, has citations, and is written clearly, it should be fine. The main thing is to put in the work when asking.

That said, remember Stack Overflow is intended as a kind of peer review system, so the audience is conceptually coworkers at your company in a different division that you’ve never met before. If you’re looking for a more highly structured school / student / learning environment, you probably want to go elsewhere.

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Thanks for the info - “There are rules about that”… But it doesn’t look like they are enforced. This is their front end to SO:

The only instructions for use are “Check out answers to some of the most common questions we get.”

The reason people don’t know they can edit, is because the link is called ‘improve’ instead of ‘edit’. Just change it to “edit” and see a world of difference.

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Particularly not when people like Monica are ejected over potential violations of purity laws.

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I believe this is covered at

Sorry that does not cover it, as Sara Chipps is clearly not willing to admit errors or learn from them. Just look as the answers to that post and the many other posts from mods leaving etc.

Hopefully you have already got a large payout, as the current problems are clearly due to StackOverflow moving away from your aims. Maybe StackOverflow will recover trust of the expert users, if not, it will become just another site for students to answer each others programming questions.

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There was a later apology as well at https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334551/an-apology-to-our-community-and-next-steps

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That later apology started on the right foot, and it made a lot of very positive promises, but those promises have not been kept. That post was initially received very well, but now that a couple months have passed and Fullerton has not followed through on his claims, it’s turned quite sour. Over the past 60 days or so, the network has grown very fragmented, and SE has become incredibly distant from the community they’re meant to foster.

A very common sentiment is that SE is more comfortable pandering to non-developer Twitter critics and absolute beginners on the site than maintaining the (relatively very small) group of volunteer experts and insanely dedicated moderators that actually provide the source of the site’s value.

I say this as a user that’s oscillated between tiers 1 and 2 since 2013 – I’m quite familiar with the site and its culture, but I’m not part of the group that’s being driven out. I’m just worried about what the future of SO looks like with the balance being tipped decisively toward T2 users, at the cost of T3 users.

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Stack Overflow is indeed the best resource out there BUT
is it just me or do most of the correct answers forget to include

1, the framework version the code is targetting -> making applying the answer only useful after another 3 hours down the rabbit hole of which framework this apply to
( an answer that works in .net 4.6.2 may not work in .net 4.0 for example )

2, forgetting to include the namespaces to import to get the answer to work, again another 3 hours down another rabbit hole, I note that Scala adds these for you, nice !

Pretty much this :point_up:

Now to expand on this, and I’m sorry if I ramble on. If I had more time, I would have written a shorter reply.

I’d love it if StackOverflow could find some way to separate curation from community. SO is an incredible resource for finding solutions. It’s the Wikipedia of knowledge bases. Its curation is second to none. It’s superlatives. It’s more or less integrated into my IDE (Codota plugin in IDEA: one keystroke and bam, SO results in the side panel).

BUT: it has an increasingly toxic internal community that frequently escapes into the publicly visible Q&A space. When it comes to asking a question, the word “minefield” comes to mind. The whole experience feels “gameified” to me, and while I fully understand that’s an opt-out experience, the whole UX of the site feels geared toward gamification. As a very occasional moderator on StackOverflow, I would love to just hide ALL the metrics, scores, and up/down buttons, at least while I don’t have my moderator hat on.

Disclosure: I’m a moderator on the freeCodeCamp forums. I won’t even pretend to be unbiased, but please don’t construe this as a we/you us/them argument. Just bear with me, k? :peace:
So on the community “side” there are resources like the aforementioned freeCodeCamp forum – a pretty big community (which BTW runs on Discourse) that welcomes pretty much all skill levels, and that’s almost entirely comprised of rank newbs asking the same questions hundreds of others have asked, often in broken second-language English. I’m glad for Discourse’s duplicate detection, but in the end it’s a suggestion many will bypass. We try to be tolerant of everything except outright CoC abuse, following up with gentle “please show your code” or “what have you tried so far” questions. Lots of interaction, lots of personal response. No downvotes, no “candidate to close”. We can’t solve everything, and the truly unanswerable stuff just falls off the topic list. We just try to be a friendly bunch as much as we fallible humans can.

To go back and expand (yay recursive tangents) on the “toxic internal community” bit: Please understand, if nothing else, that if I were to write this post verbatim on meta.stackexchange.com, it would almost certainly be buried in an avalanche of downvotes. Especially if I included this paragraph (though I admit that would be pre-emptive whining). That’s why I wrote this little polemic here, in the codinghorror community that I just now decided to join, rather than there.

And not to keep putting such a fine point on it, but I really don’t intend to make this a “we” vs “you” argument. And I certainly don’t speak for FCC in any official way :upside_down_face: What I would really like is for some way to have the very imperfect free-form help forums and the more stringent curated knowledge bases interact better. Some kind of pipeline where moderators can promote discussions into the knowledge base, and feed back answers into the forum. I don’t know exactly what shape that would take, but these two tools were made for each other. Basically: will Discourse marry StackOverflow?

And not to overly butter your bread @codinghorror , but thank you for an awesome forum tool to help build communities. I thought we’d all be stuck with phpBB forever. Oh and that SO thingie is all right too :grinning:

:vulcan_salute:

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This. Similarly, it’s amazing how infrequently people scroll down to the bottom of a question and upvote recent, quality answers. I think SO should have a way to compensate for this; maybe 10% of the time it sorts by “new, popular answer,” or even “new, long answer”

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That post no longer exists. Well I can’t access it anyway.

It must make you so sad Jeff to see what SE/SO has become since you left. What you and Joel started was amazing and the synergy between the technical work of your team and the community input was a thing of beauty. I guess it’s inevitable that something this good has to be monetised and that’s when the trouble comes.

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