However, perhaps that wasn't their focus. My impression is the Q&A site was supposed to be mostly a gateway to their other services, and for that to work, the Q&A part simply had to be "good enough". It's an interesting strategy that perhaps didn't work out quite the way they had hoped it would.
One thing I've noticed, that drives me crazy, is people demanding more information in response to a question, without any intention of using that information to help find an answer. Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details. I don't mean to suggest that more details aren't useful, only that it isn't helpful in any way to ask for more information if you don't intend to follow up. (Perhaps that could be improved by allowing those sorts of requests to be sent privately, and without any chance of generating points?)
> With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming.
The "build a library" being the key part. Vague questions aren't that useful in building the library in particular because lacking the necessary information, they can have too many unhelpful answers. Thus the focus on the problem with example demonstrating the problem (so the next person with the problem can verify that it is their problem or not) that gets answers.
Furthermore, you appear to be under a misunderstanding of how the stack overflow reputation system works.
> Their whole goal is to score points for asking more details.
No one gets points for comments. At all. The voting on comments is purely for visibility ranking of helpful and constructive aspects to the post they are on... and nothing else. No points.
The reason that people ask those clarifying questions is to make sure that they are answering the right question and aren't wasting their time on trying to answer something that turns out to not be the problem. Say someone asks how to do XYZ in C++... and the person gives an answer for C++17... and then the OP comes back and says "sorry, I'm using turbo C++ and that doesn't work." Instead a comment asking "what version of C++ are you using" up front to make sure that the person asking the question gets the correct answer rather than something that is unhelpful.
There is no private messaging on Stack Overflow, probably for the same reason there's none on HN. It increases the moderation workload and possibility of bullying in private. I'd hate to be Jon Skeet if there was private massing. Furthermore, having it be a comment presents the information in public (including the clarification) so that if someone else has the problem they can read the comments and be aware that something may not work in their situation even if parts of the questions match. ("You didn't include a version of C++ in this and it appears to be a very old version, could you update the question with the version you are using?")
This is also something I don't like, but I wonder if they went on, if the website would become another place for flamewars - something that happens a LOT when you have low moderation.
They may be interesting to read. They may be popular. But most of the time by page 2 and even worse at page 5, it’s crap. And that crap requires an excessive amount of community moderation work to keep clean and try to avoid having more people add answers to the bottom of page 7 that are already stated 6 times on previous pages.
If the moderation tools are less powerful than the popularity keeping it there, there isn’t much reason to moderate.
And thus the culture by those who shovel crap daily to try to shut down opinion based questions early - so they don’t have to do more work later.
Every attempt I’ve seen at an opinion oriented SE alternative has failed to get sufficient expert answering. It’s not fun as a ${Lang} expert to have a newbie argue with you regularly about some feature or design choice.
Edit: Just to check if moderation policies have changed since I last looked, I did a quick search for questions containing the phrase "pros and cons". As unfortunately expected, practically all of the questions are closed: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=pros+and+cons
I wish Stackoverflow would buy https://slant.co and just point people to that site for opinions.
EDIT: To clarify that a bit, I am interested in what the upsides are except for possibly saving some money. An orderly shutdown usually seems preferable to me over quickly killing the process, for both sides.
- week ahead if he or she was employed for less than month - month ahead if he or she was employed for less than three years - three months ahead if he or she was employed for more than three years
This goes both ways however, as employee has to notify his employeer on same basis that he or she quits. This introduces amount of games to recruitment process, where company frequently not only has to make bet by deciding to hire somebody, but also make sure that they'll wont be outbid during the three months that have to pass for person to change employeer
Most worker rights, in the end, become a matter of how much money they'll pay you to leave if they want you to leave.
Yes, one could--theoretically--fight back and not accept the money, but that only means you'd be a pariah in the company. What's the point of staying if the company wants you to leave and offers you a package? Take the money and get a new job in a couple weeks...
Anyone can quit at a moments notice, for any or no reason at all. For the sake of one’s colleagues and reputation it is widely considered good practice to give no less than 2 weeks notice, though this is merely custom.
Note: I am American, and most states are aren’t “right-to-work” meaning you can quit at a moment’s notice, but it’s common courtesy to give 2 weeks notice.
While the employer can take legal action and sue them, proving that someone is sick is rather difficult (and frowned upon by most judges). There are many cases where my mother's employer could have easily proven that (because witnesses same him partying or there are even pictures online where he partied on that day) but it is generally not worth it because a trail is more expensive then paying one month's pay and also not worth the time and overhead.
Not everyone takes work very seriously, unfortunately, which makes the process suck for everybody. When my mother's boss has an opportunity to fire them eithout notice (because they are late or caught steeling), he generally does that, which is super unfair for the employees who would have worked until their very last.
We know nothing about severance, job assistance, etc. You can't really infer anything about this subject from that tweet.
From the https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow, the first round was from 2010 - 7 years ago. USV will like to get their exit soon.
Labor seeks regulations that makes it difficult to be suddenly terminated. The primary downside is that companies are reluctant to hire employees.
Correct. Remember ROLES are made redundant, not people. If the role no longer exists then by definition there's nothing to handover.
If there is a handover then there better also be a big chunk of cash to the departing worker in return for waiving the right to sue, because if there isn't, it's tribunal time.
My point is that we don't know the details, a tweet is way too short.
That's how it's done in sane countries because notice periods are proscribed by law. And no, it does not lead to people vandalizing their workplace.
(Disclaimer: I work @ Indeed, but I've seen friends quickly hired using Prime.)
StackOverflow Sunsetting Documentation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14917765
Why I think they targeted the wrong market:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12399438
tl;dr:
- it doesn't make sense to donate open-source docs to an offsite corporate service that might shut down
- also, the very common complaint that SO has poor moderation, groupthink doesn't work for docs like it does for one-topic answers
We weren't really interested in their google juice, all we wanted was their actual functionality. Some non-stackoverflow domain would have been fine.
It just seemed like a missed opportunity on their end. I don't think we were the only company asking for this kind of service...
https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise
Edit: while interesting, this (private internal instance for your team) is not what johansch is after (separate public instance dedicated to your product, for your users)
Still no solution for a company wanting to host a public stackoverflow instance for some product.
Good times - having to write a huge authentication / middleware layer to make sure everything is correct.
I've never personally seen a thriving Get Satisfaction instance. So maybe I'm being a little too hard on them. But I must've come across a hundred of them. I don't believe it's a well designed product.
I wonder: How would people feel if they went the Wikipedia way? It's obviously a very beneficial site, but not as widely applicable as Wikipedia. I personally prefer the Wikipedia model of being ad-free and having no additional product and doing a fundraising drive every so often. PBS as well.
That said, I certainly think given the audience of SO that there are several opportunities for them, so it'll be interesting to see what works.
Personally I'd be more interested in seeing StackOverflow branch out. What have they done these past few years? It seems like StackOverflow has remained stagnant, yet they have so much potential.
The complaints I see are usually related more to thinking that they really shouldn't need to spend so much (the FY17-18 plan for expenses is $76.8M [2]), and that their fundraising drives always make it seem like they're on the brink of death when they actually have a huge amount of money in the bank.
[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
[2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikimedia...
SO is too big to go for a Wikipedia style model unless they strip off just the core SO part and relevant engineers and make only that part donation based. And I'd guess the other 90% would end up in layoffs anyway.
Can you elaborate? Do you mean the other stack exchange sites like Photography, Gardening, Software Engineering, etc.? Or the careers site, or something else entirely? I'm only aware of the Stack Exchange network and careers.
[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=File%3A2014...
Edit: Reminds me of the situation of SoundCloud (company offering a service loved by their consumers, still can't monetize enough to satisfy investors, let alone cover the costs (huge headcount))
Seeing this post also made me realize I have no clue how the company makes money.
Here's a crazy idea: what if Stackoverflow developed a search engine for developers? Usually I get to Stackoverflow posts through Google but perhaps Stackoverflow can provide a better experience by doing code specific web crawling.
An old news article said they only get ~33% from banner ads. Most revenue comes from from job listings:
Good to see them back to a focus. I guess hiring could be a good cash cow but all of the sub communities are a bit much.
I remember a few technologies that officially said something like "support is provided through custom stackoverflow tags", but it didn't bring more functionalities.
A company trying to launch its new technology (i can imagine asp.net core for example) could have an associated community channel to talk about it, with automatic links from tags. That would be a nice addition.
My limit was the "Time to take a stand incident" when Joel effectively dictated that the developer community of StackOverflow must agree with the statement.
> Carving up the world into ... nations ... is both morally repugnant and frankly stupid
The follow up of mods keeping the post open, backing it up and enforcing that idea on other questions really hammered home the idea that StackOverflow belongs to them, regardless of whatever they might say.
There was no room for nuance, just an American-centric political orthodoxy you must follow or aren't welcome.
[1]https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take...
Here is the full quote:
>It’s impossible not to see the parallel: the only way to build a successful world today is to allow the contributions of everyone. Carving up the world into us vs. them, building walls, and demonizing religions, nations, and refugees is both morally repugnant and counterproductive, and it goes so much against the spirit of Stack Overflow that as a community we must speak out.
Whereas, Joel dictated that if you supported "carving up the world" you were against the sprit of Stack Overflow, no matter how that might impact you as a non-American.
Is anyone archiving them and making the archives available in any useful way?
That's not to say that SO doesn't bring value. It has nice tagging and discoverability through search engines, good moderation, and an achievement and reputation system that encourages people to make quality contributions. But the days before it existed weren't so dark.
[1] Source: [2002] https://www.cnet.com/news/google-buys-remaining-deja-com-bus...
On the flip side, back then most of the programs I was writing could fit on a few screens and had almost no external dependencies besides libc and the C book was the SO for libc.
-The failure of the documentation (which failed for various reasons)
-VCs who want their return on their precious dollars.
So sorry to hear this. My thoughts to everyone, it is a very difficult day.
I actually like people outside my country reminding my fellow citizens that we do have it pretty bad and it is in our power to change it if we decide to do that one day. The message might eventually soak in after some decades have passed.
