Wandering about the Internet, I stumbled across why online communities decay over time. This is a rather good article and should be read in conjunction with a group is its own worst enemy. I strongly advise people to read both of these articles — they will give appropriate background for some of the stresses the community of SO is facing.

The Decay Over Time article looks at the relationship between the size of the user base of a site and its quality (in particular YouTube and various Reddits). A key point that it emphasizes again and again is that if you do not expect to interact with someone again in the future, chances are you will be more selfish than kind (a one-off prisoner's dilemma vs an iterated version).

This has multiple repercussions.

  • When there is someone asking a question and you do not expect them to come back, you are less likely to help them. (I was reminded that this was partly signaled in the past by the accept rate being public information, though that had its own set of issues.)
  • The larger the community, the less likely any two people are going to interact again, the less kind they are to each other (see also: any number of meta posts about being kind to newbies).
  • The less likely someone is to have their contributions seen, the less effort they put into them (e.g. the regex answers).
  • The larger the community, the harder it is to get people to help out (/review/close).
  • If you see someone (with a name, a gravatar that is distinctive) answer a question again and again, you are more likely to have a favorable opinion on that person. This is why when you see Jon, or Greg, or Eric answer you are expecting to interact with them again and thus more likely to up vote it.
    • (related: Four Things to Design For #1 from A Group: The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in — user12345657 with a default gravatar is less likely to invest in the quality of the site, and even if I do interact with that individual again in the future, I am less likely to know it).

What does this all mean? It means that SO is fricking huge. As such, it has many big city problems.

What can be done?

  • Make it easier to have 'smaller' communities within various tags (Yeah, that's very vague). Somewhere out there, there are various webpages associated with some of these sub-communities. For example the Python community has a page for common duplicates... but it's not here at Stack Overflow.
  • Make it harder to ask a question. Add barriers to entry to try to keep keep things from growing too much.
  • Make it easier to find old crap — so it can be cleaned up (and clean it up). When people are aware that their minimal size answer in regex will be seen by someone again, there is some added incentive to put more effort into it.
    • (Related: Drive by votes on old material help clean up old crap (down votes feed the roomba) and make it clear to people that people do see and interact with the older material and are thus more likely to fix the old content and create better content going forward.)

And after reading all of this, don't forget to read:

we have chat rooms for the smaller tag communities, arcade has a room for each game –  ratchet freak May 23 at 23:37
Arqade is a minute fraction of the size of SO (closer in scale to P.SE) and through its gaming focus and chat rooms is very likely to have interactions with other people. The combination of these factors will likely keep Arqade from having any of these issues. But for SO, there needs to be more ways to have interactions (outside of comments and chat) to encourage people to belong to the site and form closer knit communities - in both cases helping moderate the site more and provide higher quality content when they contribute. –  MichaelT May 23 at 23:40
just wondering - where exactly is this Python common dupes page of which you speak? I've been in the tag over a year and haven't heard anything about it... –  MattDMo May 24 at 4:12
@MattDMo: Probably this one. There's also an older one. –  user2357112 May 24 at 7:44
+1 for the article, nice read altough I would argue a few points. The general idea is right insofar as if the conditions are staying the same, then things will develop towards what has been laid out there. So the real challenge for the growing community is to change itself. It is the same as with any growing business: From time to time you will hit inflection points, where the future of the entire organisation is on stake. Except if you're not growing anymore and are happy with it, it is unavoidable. The only question is when it will hit you and how well you are prepared. –  JensG May 24 at 11:45
In response to the Jon/Greg/Eric part and the post of Hans, I think SO is supposed to be faceless. It is not supposed to be recognized as any one person, even back in the days of Jeff. It is the site of everybody. We have no discussion forums on the front page (unless you go find them and they are secondary to the mission of the site) we have Q&A. The problem is that people are trying to make SO something other than its mission statement and what it was founded for. You have "millions" of users, of course there are going to be a number of people who disagree with the mission. statement. –  demongolem May 24 at 14:37
Funny thing... When adding the "a group is its own worst enemy" link to Pocket (Mac offline reader) I´m getting "buy cheap cialis" spam... Anyone else getting that? Odd combination writing about the evils of the internet and running a old fashioned SEO spam business ;) –  thomasf1 May 24 at 15:10
"Make it easier to find old crap — so it can be cleaned up (and clean it up)" - related - Is closing old questions a gigantic waste of time and effort? –  Dukeling May 24 at 15:20
I agree the quality of the questions asked today are very low. If we don't want the interesting people to leave because there is a flow a dumb questions and duplicates, we need to do something. –  rds May 25 at 13:27
@rds But what?_ –  Trilarion May 26 at 13:46
From "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy": "The user of social software is the group, and ease of use should be for the group [...]" => seems to argue against making it easy to enter the group (and I agree). If you want to enter, show some effort, like selecting a user name... (of course, you have a question to ask, we get it, so we could invert the system: ask first, to get it out now, but it will only appear to other users after you have filled out your profile "sufficiently"). –  Matthieu M. May 26 at 16:17
Agreed. I have seen (as more users' reps have naturally gone up over time) MASS overuse of down-voting all across the network. Often for no good reason. If a question is simply incomplete, the old way was to comment and ask "could you post xyz?" so users could better help to answer it. Now you just see negative numbers all across the front pages of the new questions pages in the network. Down-voting should only be used when something is seriously wrong, and a lot of thought should go into it. Just look at the related posts to the right. A year ago, you never saw that many negative numbers. –  rcd May 26 at 17:08
@MatthieuM. I think your observation is correct, article also mentions 'my favorite pattern is from MetaFilter, which is: When we start seeing effects of scale, we shut off the new user page. "Someone mentions us in the press and how great we are? Bye!" That's a way of raising the bar, that's creating a threshold of participation...' –  gnat May 26 at 17:16
I found your post interesting, but as a frequent contributor to the regex tag (lately) who invests lots of time in a great number of my answers (and knowing others who do the same in that tag), this did not match my perception: The less likely someone is to have their contributions seen, the less effort they put into them (e.g. the regex answers). That is probably true of many of the questions, but that's not my experience of the answers. :) –  zx81 May 27 at 6:31
People need to up/downvote questions more. You want to reward people asking questions good for SO? Upvote their questions. Plenty of views without voting on questions. You want to make new people asking pointless questions causing clutter to realize it? Downvote them. It drives me NUTS people don't vote on questions more because voting is the exact mechanism to help separate wheat from chaff. I don't care about some help vampire saying SO is "so mean" for DVing their content. Sorry, I'm heartless. If you can't bother to try, I'm not going to either, and will just DV your post. –  enderland May 27 at 22:25

13 Answers 13

This was all well known before the site got started, the founders were well-aware of it. Clay Shirky is one of the company directors. So it was a strong goal to avoid community building. The traditional things that communities need to build, like private messaging and chit-chatting with each other in posts, are strongly discouraged.

SO has always been very "mean". Users get summarily banned when they post poorly received questions or answers, almost impossible to regain the right. There's not just thumbs-up voting, downvoting a post into oblivion is considered essential. And SO users themselves didn't hesitate being mean as well, posting such horrible comments as "What have you tried?".

Being mean is good, it chases away the riff-raff that destroys a web site. It is pretty hard to be mean these days, primarily because the tools to do so were removed. You can no longer say "Not a real question" (translation: this makes no freaking sense), "Not constructive" (translation: you are blabbering) and "Minimum understanding required" (translation: you are too dumb to understand an answer). Comments are filtered so that you can't post "What have you tried" anymore. Any other derogatory comment that squeaks past the filter gets flagged and is very quickly destroyed. It shows, there are a lot of riff-raff questions today.

SO users will have to choose what kind of website they want. Do you want a friendly place where you feel welcome and everybody says "Good morning!" or do you want an answer to your programming question? And no, unfortunately you cannot pick "both", the past 9 months is a strong hint that this is not working very well.

What on earth is wrong with "what have you tried?" It's one of the more helpful things a respondent can ask. It can save several well-meaning respondents from spending lots of time posting ideas that the OP has already tried and rejected. –  David Wallace May 24 at 11:08
I think if we are building a site for programmers, then friendliness to newbies shouldn't be a priority. It's worth persuing, sure. But as a site for programmers I think it is more important to control the riff raff and reduce the noise. If my most common reaction to reading a question is "not this again", then something is going wrong. –  Tim Seguine May 24 at 11:35
I don't think we are "mean" enough, mean in the good sense of the word. And I feel it is already too late for Stack Overflow... –  kapa May 24 at 13:49
I really like the logic that "we're mean because it keeps the bad questions away. Unfortunately, we're getting more and more bad questions, so we have to keep doing what we're doing". What about considering that if the current policy (being mean) isn't working, then maybe a different policy is called for? I see a lot of evidence that being mean keeps away those who mean well and who actually want to contribute and add content, while doing nothing to deter the lazy ones who just dump their code and wait for someone else to solve their problem for them. –  jalf May 24 at 14:54
The current policy is to strongly inhibit mean-ness, starting in the summer of 2012. Which produced the problem. –  Hans Passant May 24 at 14:58
@CodyGray That kind of ban is not a hellban. A hellban is when the site lets believe the banned person that they can still interact normally with the site but in fact they can't. For instance, on SO it would be allowing the banned user to post questions and answers that no one else would see. What you link to is a kind of ban where the fact that the user has been banned is quite clear to the user because they get a message telling them so. (AFAIK, there is no hellban on any of the SE sites.) –  Louis May 24 at 15:48
+1000 for this answer (investigating for some SQL injection). Screw summer '12. –  user3565300 May 25 at 7:48
@H2CO3 I couldn't share your sentiment any more. If Stack Overflow were to fork into two sites, where one has been explicitly made "meaner", I think we all know where the experts would go. I mean who really wants to deal with "How to I set up Apache to work with PHP" questions in a friendly, polite, hand-holding way 100 times a week? I really wish we had the old close reasons back. –  Jonathon Reinhart May 26 at 4:15
Maybe we need a stackoverflow-pro.SE. A place meant just for professional programmers. Those that can take criticism and are looking for answers to their questions. Those that can read a manual before they run for help. Honestly I am getting pretty disgusted seeing the same lame-ass questions day after day. I love the SO concept - but I have zero desire to hang out with people that aren't at my level or above. –  Dan-o May 26 at 4:33
@Tri - Joel Spolsky, the CEO of StackExchange. This blog post kicked it off. –  Hans Passant May 26 at 8:18
I'm all for curation and process. But a post that says "Being mean is good, it chases away the riff-raff that destroys a web site." getting (at this point, 92 upvotes) is saddening. If you're so smart then can't you tune a system so that it presents a friendly routing to kids in faraway places on dialup who don't speak English in Turbo C asking about <conio.h>, yet still get the experience you want? More automated warnings to question authors are a good thing, and you could set your filter to say anything with a warning count > X that still got posted is left to others to field. –  HostileFork May 26 at 15:55
I don't really understand why somebody prefers never being to able to ask a question at SO again over getting a snarky comment. Especially when it is so simple to do it by yourself. It is equal opportunity mean-ness for everybody, that answer you quoted is a downvote magnet. Even the King of Nice, Jon Skeet, has all of his highest scoring answers downvoted. He just doesn't complain about it. –  Hans Passant May 26 at 16:56
@HansPassant You may not understand, esp. if you equate human written rejection with machine rejection. But I ran a C++ group for a while, when I was doing much more answering here than now. Nice people--working professionals--hanging out having beers and such. But no one had StackOverflow accounts or rep and I'd ask why. They said they'd read the answers if it came up on Google, but the one time they signed up to ask a question they walked away saying "jeez, sorry I asked". That's the reality. Easy when a system has "approved" you to take snark--so save it for tough guys who want that game. –  HostileFork May 26 at 17:45
@HansPassant I described how working professionals, who could and would contribute/participate are turned off. I described the potential harm to aspiring programmers who might look up to SO as being a site that is the only game in town, and mentioned "think of the children". Yes, (some large percentage) of SO is mean at the moment--we're discussing the value of that. Note I started by disputing "Being mean is good, it chases away the riff-raff that destroys a web site."...I will squarely put myself in opposition from that statement, as I seem to need to constantly do. My last comment. –  HostileFork May 26 at 18:27
@HostileFork for the same reason not everyone is suited to write Wikipedia articles, not every programmer is able to ask questions that are deemed good for Stack Overflow. If you run away hurt after your first encounter with a community you're new to, then that's your loss. –  CodeCaster May 27 at 10:20

Stack Overflow is not a large community

Oh, sure, we all refer to the membership as a community - even the new top-bar site-switcher doohickey calls it one - but that's just shorthand. It is a place, the nexus of many related communities, a venue in which they can share information. You would no more call it a community than you would Portland - it's too big, too diverse, and has been for many years. There is a certain broad culture that is pervasive... But to call it a community is to ignore both the limitations and the strengths of communities - as well as the factors that make sites like Stack Overflow (or cities like Portland) work in spite of being far too big for everyone to know and remember one another.

That assertion generated more confusion than I initially expected... But I should have known better. It's natural to generalize one's interactions with a place to the place as a whole; I still think of Portland as the gal who approached me on the street offering brownies, and no doubt anyone reading this perceives Stack Overflow according to their own experiences, whether nice or nasty.

But that ain't the elephant...

Grid communications: scaling by breaking the social network

Hans touched on this already - the first and most crucial step toward allowing a site of this size to function is to discourage the sorts of interpersonal connections that would tie it down. I talked about this before, in a different context:

  1. Conversations not required. When a question is asked on a traditional forum, answering it often demands some amount of participation from at least a portion of the community. Details are fleshed out, the problem is clarified, solutions are proposed and debated, others with similar problems chime in with their experiences, tangential points are made, and eventually - anywhere from hours to months later - the conversation dies out. It's a very social, very natural way to interact. And it suffers mightily from the problem that Shirky talked about: all that back-and-forth and associated latency kills any hope of scale. On Stack Overflow, we close or delete questions that can't be answered straight away - it's not very sociable, but it scales wonderfully by effectively enabling a vast, human-powered computational grid.

This isn't easy: by default, people do not behave this way. Here's an email we received recently - I'm sure you'll recognize it immediately, as it comes up quite often:

Is it possible to directly contact (personal/private message) another user? I really want to follow up with some of these posts (especially similar projects to mine), but the rules shun asking questions on the post, so...?

There's a big fat "Ask Question" button at the top of every page on the site - but folks still default to wanting to ask questions directed at a specific person, in the context of an existing "discussion"...

Pushing against the tide: the cost of an unsocial network

The cost of scaling to this size has been a constant battle against human nature. We are social creatures, and when asked - forced - to forego these personal connections, we get irritated. Scanning the answers to the most popular discussion here finds the same two stories repeated over and over again:

  • I'm here to learn but Stack Overflow doesn't want to guide me - my questions get downvoted and closed with nary a helpful comment. Folks are upset that Stack Overflow can't take them by the hand, welcome them and show them how to improve their work. This quote from the accepted answer is telling:


    But of course, this sort of one-on-one back-and-forth interaction doesn't scale. Heck, if everyone who came here asked 5 questions, the site would already be dead - if each question required this sort of tedious commentary, it would be even worse.

    The opposite response to that discussion is just as revealing...

  • I keep trying to educate folks asking bad questions, but no matter how much I write they keep coming - so I get more terse, more mean as I lose patience. Shadow Wizard captures this succinctly in his answer:


    They're trying to do exactly what the first guy asked for, what Hans pines for: leave honest, even mean feedback. And then realizing that it doesn't help, and even when it does help it doesn't scale.

    This is why close reasons have descriptions attached - even one comment is too much to ask for most unanswerable questions. It's also why trying to cram very specific reasons into custom off-topic reasons for on-topic but poor-quality questions failed miserably on Stack Overflow: we can't enumerate all the badness, and in trying we just created pointless busywork for folks who could have used their time more effectively elsewhere.

And this is where Mysticial's answer subtly misses the point: the problem isn't "caretakers vs. vampires" - vampires don't care. It's not even caretakers vs. "tiny handful of people who care about asking good questions", because even though they often end up at odds with each other the truth is they both want the same thing, a persistent rewarding connection with another human... and that isn't a thing that either one can have.

So we've been having the same discussion for five years, because there is no permanent solution - it is a constant battle, and will be as long as SO exists. You can't change human nature; all you can do is actively work to subvert it, daily, in pursuit of your goal. So that's what we do here, but even that has become too labor-intensive...

Intensive farming

This is why we need to get away from the "big city" metaphor. The vast majority of users don't live here - they're just passing through. And we're not really trying to get most of them to stay if they're not interested in helping us build - if users were our goal, we'd be doing some sort of dodgy content-hiding trick to get folks to create accounts.

What we're doing here is more akin to gardening: planting seeds, fertilizing them, getting rid of the weeds, gathering the harvest. Except, Stack Overflow ain't your little backyard hot house where you tenderly nurture every tender seedling - it's more like a 25,000 acre wheat field. You cannot carefully tread the rows pulling weeds - you break out the heavy machinery!

The communities that do call this site home are those planters and cultivators, small indeed compared to those being fed by the results. Therefore, it is important to make sure that they are well-equipped and well-fed while keeping in mind that the communities they most identify with may yet be distinct from the roles they find themselves in here.

Your suggestions are generally good ones, albeit too vague to be directly actionable. So here's what we've been working on, plan to work on, or should be working on:

  • Tag subcommunities These already exist, and I'm hoping to see them strengthened somewhat by the recent split of MSO from MSE - sadly, MSE had a nasty habit of burying discussions specific to individual areas of expertise on SO.

    Chat has filled the gap to an extent here: many subcommunities on SO have at least moderately-active chatrooms. But chat has its own set of issues...

    From the very start, Stack Overflow has made compromises to enable very limited socialization in areas where it turns out things just didn't work properly without it, the big two being comments on posts and meta discussion. These additions were also followed by changes made to restrict socialization, as the destructive side-effects of unfettered commenting and discussion became painfully obvious.

    We haven't really restricted the use of chat very much; its original intention was to be that tavern-like third place, and that necessitates a bit less formality. That said, chat suffers greatly from problems of scale, and when a chatroom closes its doors to outsiders and spends its time trolling the community it was intended to serve, perhaps it is time to add a little bit of structure. We've been looking over various meta requests for changes to chat recently, with the goal of addressing at least some of the issues that prevent it from living up to its goals.

  • Adding resistance to asking questions is a problem that we've been working on for a long time now. The existing tools for blocking low-quality questions are insufficient - raising the bar quickly encounters resistance from established users who feel they should be exempt from banal requirements like writing full sentences - so we're working on coming up with more nuanced quality checks.

    In the meantime, Tim & Anna have been hard at work on a system for controlling "recidivism" - the tendency for some folks to continue asking very poor-quality questions after being suspended or banned. I've been quietly abusing the spam-handling system for a similar purpose as well. As of last night, I increased the time new users must wait between asking questions from 20 minutes to 90, to give the automated systems more time to kick in when someone creates an account and decides to post a question every time a thought crosses his mind.

  • Finding / cleaning old crap this is important, but... I actually think folks give it a lot more weight than it needs. It's far too easy to become obsessed with order far past the point where doing so is actually beneficial to anyone or anything. Closing old duplicates so that folks searching can find their way to a good answer? That's useful. Cleaning up old spam so that folks can trust the other answers? That's useful. Editing titles and tags so that folks can find their way to existing questions instead of posting new ones? That's useful. Closing an old, heavily cross-linked question to punish the (long-gone) asker for not doing enough research? That's... not useful.

    "But you're being inconsistent!" Yeah? So what. Save the foolish, obsessive, blind consistency for your bonsai garden.

    Something we can and should automate is better sifting of the wheat from the chaff. Not so we can find and burn more long-forgotten badness, but so we can all enjoy the good.

I am always extremely impressed when reading your answers. But sometimes, with all the inline links and catchphrases, I get the sneaking suspicion that you are some type of bot and that we've all been trolled. –  Cody Gray May 25 at 1:22
This habit is as much for my benefit as anyone else's; as the various metas have grown, it's become increasingly time-consuming for me to find things when I need them - as annoying as it can be to read, heavy cross-linking and searchable phrases make this a lot easier. –  Shog9 May 25 at 3:12
+1 for "That's... not useful". I saw more popular old questions on their way to deletion today. The system we have is heavily weighted to the deletionists since once the posts are deleted they're invisible. –  Lance Roberts May 25 at 3:26
I was hoping that I was suggesting that with the ability for a tag community to have more interaction within itself, there would be more commitment to the community and the site as a whole. As it is, tag communities are going going off site to do their interactions (not SE) and that will slowly diminish their activity on SE as another community forms off site. By providing additional ways to allow for interaction between people and encourage a demonstration that you are more likely to interact with someone (having a 'real name') people are then more likely to add quality content. –  MichaelT May 25 at 3:27
I think it's a lovely fantasy to imagine that SO is not a community. Merely from participating (albeit more passively than actively) in Meta and Chat, together with frequenting my selected tags, I have a pretty good idea of who the regulars are and what their personalities are like. I feel a bond, of sorts, with them. In addition to being educated by them, I am variously amused, entertained, delighted, frustrated and angered. There are some people with whom I want to interact and others with whom I don't. Despite being unintentional, there are community dynamics at play. –  eggyal May 25 at 7:14
Add to that the fact that SO holds occasional real-life meetups and it's no wonder that there is (at very least a perception of) regular users being a "clique". When I see a question asked by one of those people, I want to read it. I want to help them. I feel that that'd make me "one of the guys". When I see answers that they post, I take the time to read and vote. I can't honestly say that I give the same attention or interest in posts by people who I don't recognise. –  eggyal May 25 at 7:23
There are certainly communities here, @eggyal - but you don't need to be a part of one to participate, and many - if not most - contributors couldn't care less about the meta discussions or real-life meetups or personalities or what have you. The bulk of the activity is what it has always been, asking and answering questions; the communities are composed of others doing the same. I'm familiar with many of the folks answering questions in the tags I follow, but those outside of my areas of interest are much less recognizable - though no doubt crucial to their own communities. –  Shog9 May 25 at 16:38
I'd wager that the vast majority of those who contribute positively to SO (whether by providing high quality answers, by moderating/curating, or by understanding the site's rules and asking in-scope questions) not only participate in that community dynamic but more importantly feel that this is a community (and that's what they like about it)! Consequently, the concerns raised in @MichaelT's question (re "what happens when communities grow too large") do in fact apply to the way those people interact with the site - and dismissing those concerns as inapplicable ]misses the point. –  eggyal May 25 at 17:21
How about this for a new metaphor: The hodgepodge post-apocalyptic frontier town full of curmudgeonly tinkerers, protective guides, drunken mystics, and the occasional sheriff, through which thousands of pilgrims must pass on their way to the Emerald City^W^W Dark Tower^W^W Source^W Valley of Unicorns? –  Josh Caswell May 25 at 19:02
Such a great summary. +1 for hitting on the insufficiency of low-quality question filtering. I'm excited to see what will come of this :) –  Carrie Kendall May 26 at 13:56
+1: This is spot on. –  Lightness Races in Orbit May 26 at 18:44
The .stackexchange sites do definately have a community. They may differ from other online communities, like forums and Q&A sites, but are still communities. People help each other (which is the main purpose of the site after all), discuss the topics, and even criticize each other. Don't take this the wrong way, but you might want to read up on the definition of 'community'. –  poepje May 26 at 21:49
Shog9, there's a big 'community bulletin' box on meta.stackoverflow.com that need a new name if this is the chosen direction. –  bmargulies May 27 at 2:33
Note that I'm talking specifically about Stack Overflow here, @poepje - seeing as this is Meta Stack Overflow, I'd hoped you'd realize that. And I think you're misunderstanding the implications of this observation: a venue for hundreds of individual communities does not preclude the helpfulness that you refer to, it merely dictates to a degree the form that these interactions must take. I know this post is very long, but please read at least the section on scaling - I try to explain all of this in detail. Edit: see edit. –  Shog9 May 27 at 3:25
The next time a lady in Portland approaches you on the street and offers you brownies, it may be a different experience. Edit: Wait, never mind. You're in Colorado. :-) –  Cody Gray May 27 at 23:23

Raising the bar

Those were very interesting reads, and if I had to keep one quote that particularly resonated with my experience on Stack Overflow it would be from "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy":


I take it as meaning that we (as a community) should stop welcoming drivel with open arms. Oh, we do have close votes, but it is putting pressure on the existing community:

  • it's a tax on high-reputation users, the ones that could answer questions but spend their times reviewing drivel instead
  • it's a tax on existing users, flooded with drivel and thus struggling to find interesting questions

I remember at the beginning of Stack Overflow learning a lot by looking up at the questions. I was not able to answer them, but I would keep an eye on those that piqued my interest and read the answers. Now... well, finding a good question (whether I could answer or not) in the most popular tags is just hard. I keep trudging through crap.

And thus I believe we should raise the bar for asking questions. A good question is hard:

  • what tools are involved, with versions and addons/plugins ?
  • what is the minimal snippet of code that reproduces the issue ? (if there is no code, it's dubious)
  • what is the observed result (error message, crash, ...) ?
  • what is the expected result ?
  • what are the hypothesis about the deviation from this expected result ?
  • ...

A good question has to both show research effort and provide all the necessary facts while being short and to the point.

There was another question on Meta in which a user had suggested a form to submit questions, with multiple steps and separate fields. I honestly believe this would be a good first step => let's teach users to ask quality questions!

Note: imagine, if we had an "error message" field, how the search for duplicates would be easier => prioritize questions with the same error message! (fuzzy matching, of course).

Building Trust

There are heuristics today used to judge the quality of a potential question. I would suggest, if possible, that the thresholds of these heuristics be tuned depending on the user history:

  • by default, they should be tight
  • and as more and more questions are accepted by the community, they should loosen up
  • getting a question closed gets you back to square one

It may mean that a newcomer will be unable to easily ask a question; that's fair, if she's really interested in getting the answer, she'll put the necessary effort in meeting the heuristics criteria. On the other hand the tide of lazy copy/pasted dumps "please fix" questions should ebb away.

And what happens if a worthy question is never asked (too tiresome)? Well, it's collateral damage... but then today I wonder how many worthy questions go unanswered (or unsatisfactorily answered) because they are lost in the flood.

Introducing Delay

It's a rather simple solution, actually. A solution that is used whenever spam is a risk. As long as users are untrusted, or have had inappropriate behavior before, let us delay their questions:

  • our dear newbie asks a question (her homework assignment is hard)
  • she is informed that her question is delayed and will only appear on the site in 60 min, and that in the mean time she may:
    • reject the question (only way to ask another)
    • edit the question: to clarify it, enrich it, fix typos and grammar issues, ...
    • browse the site: here is a list of related questions

As for the delay? I suggest it gets reduced depending on the time elapsed since the last closed question (from this user), this time being initialized as the registration time for new users. Not only does it keep new users from spamming the site, but it also keeps existing users on their toes: ask a trash question, and you will have a delay on your questions for a while.

I like the idea of a delay, especially when coupled with providing an OP with a targeted reading list. If people use the reading list then perhaps reduce their wait (they are trying). It would be interesting to know how many people already use the facility provided when asking a question and how many questions get abandoned because the answer was found on that list. My guess is few and almost none. –  Iain May 27 at 9:41
@Iain: let's be honest, most of the questions suggested are generally completely unrelated. Unfortunately the "suggest duplicate" feature of SO just plain does not work :( –  Matthieu M. May 27 at 9:53
Oh yes it's almost not worth the effort as is. As it happens I was just asking for a feature request regarding duplicates but yes, the whole search thing needs improvement. Given that SE's mission is supposed to be to to get people to information then improving search would be a useful place to start. With good search we could have good targeted reading lists which would allow us to educate people on how to educate themselves. –  Iain May 27 at 10:32

This answer exists to present some implications of Shog9's authoritative response.

Shog9 offers a vision on which the SO is the ultimate Mechanical Turk of programming question-answering. The fact that human beings labor to deliver the answers isn't the important thing. The important idea that questions that meet the entrance criteria find answers. Questions that don't, don't.

If this is the vision, I respectfully submit that there's a fair amount of window-dressing that needs some refreshing. These are places where FAQ's and other materials talk about community in a broad way. The anti-communal vision should be uniformly and relentlessly pushed at every opportunity. A new visitor's interactions with the site should miss no opportunity to paint this picture.

While the site, as a whole, is not a community, there are important communities that contribute to the site -- the experts who answer the questions. The 'community' branding of the meta site(s) presumably stems from this. However, at the moment, there's constant confusion between a narrow idea of the community of experts and the impossibly ideal of the giant community of all.

How much community-of-experts is enough? What tools make sense as part of the sites to facilitate it? It is possible to try to avoid community even amongst the experts, but are there really enough of us to have collective Feet of, ahem, Clay?

Comment-motivated expansion: Shog9 eloquently presented the constant drive of human beans for social contact. It will always be hard to explain to new users that these sites have chosen to limit that social contact in hopes of achieving a higher goal. If you want to spend less time reading an endless series of meta-questions and comments and (for all I know) emails to the team complaining about 'mean-ness', I submit that you'll have to 'front' this aspect of the site. Whether that means eliminating the word 'community' or not is not for me to say.

I may need to re-write that introductory paragraph. My point wasn't that community is a bad thing - on SO or elsewhere - but rather that talking about or treating SO as a single, tightly-knit community is ignoring the reality of what SO is and has been for many years. You know this already; you've been around for most of this time. How many folks active on SO right now do you think know your name, or my name, or even the names of the top answerers? Your community is the folks you interact with regularly - and no matter who you are, that's a tiny slice of SO. –  Shog9 May 27 at 15:12
Regarding your edit: "fronting" these requirements been the explicit goal of many of the changes over the past couple of years, from the new /about page and revised close reason descriptions to simply telling folks up-front that they can't comment until they've participated elsewhere on the site. Just In Time Learning is the only effective solution here, and... it's a lot of work. But we are working on it. –  Shog9 May 27 at 19:09
Sorry to imply that this would be news to you. –  bmargulies May 28 at 2:49
I think that you're mistakenly using the word "community" when you mean a set. There's, for example, the set of experts who answer the questions. They don't form a community. They're just a set of people with a common label. There's too many of them to form any meaningful sort of a community. There may be some ad-hoc communities that form naturally within the overall SO user base, but this is not very relevant to anything here, I don't think. It's almost like the word "community" was devalued the same as the word "friend". Nobody has 100s of friends. There are no communities of thousands. –  Kuba Ober Jun 17 at 3:02

You are citing the "Kitty Genovese" incident when RTFM is a more appropriate explanation of the phenomenon in question.

Predictably, Stack Overflow's Summer of Love has proven as intellectually vacant as its namesake. Some ideas sound great in principle "all you need is love" right? but are wildly subject to human frailties such as the Free Rider Problem.

I'd really like it if "all you need is love" could be an organizing principle of human endeavor, but it is simply not stable.


Congratulations! Stack Overflow is popular and attracting the interest of the public. In the public consciousness, Stack Overflow is a place to get answers to questions. Average Joes come here to eradicate their ignorance. Good for them, possibly! It's a universally bad thing for experts, though.

I think of being an expert on the SE network like being a professor at a university. The "clueless ignorant masses" in this analogy would be the students.

Generally speaking, I'd say that most professors want to explore new and interesting ideas. Do research, publish papers, participate in scholarly debates, and such.

Students want to gain general knowledge and reduce their ignorance in the quickest way possible. Every semester, a new crop of students arrives with the same trivial problems. They have the same question, over, and over, and over again. They don't know enough to ask it in the right way, and they're just there for a quick answer so they can move on.

The size of SO is such that the student:teacher ratio is overwhelming for the teachers in this case.

So who do you optimize for? If you optimize for the "professors," you want the minimum number of high-quality students possible, ones that are likely to learn quickly and ask interesting questions, and perhaps even become professors themselves. (High entrance requirements, SAT/GRE scores, etc) Otherwise, over time, being asked to do the same laborious teaching over and over is likely to tire them out and make them grumpy.

If you optimize for the "students," you need a steady stream of disposable "professor-lites" ready and willing to direct these ignorant noobs to their answers before they get tired, and leave or move into the ranks of the "professors." (Teaching Assistants, anyone?)

Automated systems (or systems that appear automated or are low-impact) can reduce the load on your professors, but humans are both crafty and stupid - crafty enough to work around the systems, while being stupid enough to not realize the system is there to save everyone time. I think there are some good automated systems on SE, and improving them should be a priority. It's probably one of the primary solutions to the problem.

I think it's also important for the experts to realize that, by a combination of design and popularity, they're putting themselves in an area where there is an infinite amount of ignorance, constantly flowing in their direction.

If there were one of those mall signs on SO, it would be a great big box with the word "Ignorance" and a little "You Are Here" sticker in the middle.

There is no solution for the ignorance, it's infinite and wholly incurable. People are never going to RTFM or check the FAQ first. Ignorance is going to keep coming as long as the site is helpful and popular.

Most of us are volunteers and get nothing out of this but invisible rep points and some good feels when something interesting comes along.

In order to counter the flow of ignorance, you can try to become unhelpful and unpopular. Being mean to people instead of answering their trivial, ignorant questions is one way to do this. Being mean to people doesn't really make them go away, though. Mostly on the internet, it makes them angry and more engaged and prone to conflict - I call this "psycho ex-girlfriend syndrome" as I'm a heterosexual male. ("I HATE YOU and NEVER want to be around you again so I'm going to stand outside your window and OBSESS about you FOR WEEKS!")

Over time it can help destroy the site's reputation with the public, thus making it a place many people avoid. It's a solid plan, but it kind of feels like a failure if the goal is to remain popular. (Most sites on the internet want popularity, because popularity = money.) You'll eventually be left with the folks who are the most tolerant to giving/receiving rudeness and those who relish conflict.

A university full of jaded, angry professors doing research and engaging in debate is pretty interesting, but I don't know if that's what the SE Overlords have in mind. It certainly hews closer to a goal of "interesting answers to interesting questions," though.


Interesting post, only this morning a fellow developer made a comment about is being harder to receive a good quality answer on Stack Overflow. We discussed a few points, some of which I'll highlight here in logical order:

  • He believed that 'the good people' now either take longer, or don't bother posting answers. This is in keeping with the OP's sentiment about community getting larger and perhaps people seeming less willing to post answers due to many of the original points, such as likelihood of seeing that person again perhaps.
  • I countered this by saying, in my opinion it's not that good answers don't get posted, but that interesting posts can often become swamped in smaller / less interesting / worse quality questions, this is again I believe a scale problem. I believe that less experienced members can see Stack Overflow as a google for easy directed answers and will often ask basic questions without attempted to gain an understanding of their issue first.
  • I then proposed that perhaps a set of checks could be performed in addition to the 'similar questions' list, such as asking 'Have you looked on Google for this problem?', 'Have you consulted the relevant API / guidance information for your product / language etc.?'. The counter to this approach is that this can be very irritating for an experienced user. Possibly this could only be activated under a certain level of points.
  • I then raised, what I believe is a more fundamental issue with serious sites using the gamification / points model to reward contributions. I believe this is a serious problem over long term of using this methodology. Namely, that over time, users begin to 'search out points', you get 10 users racing to be the first 3-line answer for a common jQuery problem and each getting 10 votes in 5 minutes, and hundreds over time, whereas a niche area with a complex question may have much more effort placed into the answer, and receive far less of the 'credit'. This is potentially exaggerated by being able to say, post your Stack Overflow badge on you person website as some kind of extra line on your CV.
  • This brings me to my final point, which is that in my experience there is a tendency toward high activity (and therefore vote potential) in areas which are either very accessible (JavaScript for example) or very popular (C#/.NET perhaps). I was for example very active in a particular library's tag set, until our company decided not to use said framework any more, as a result I now don't end up answering these questions.
  • So to sum up the last two points, using gamefication to encourage contribution and then the inherent reward potential of answering simple questions in popular categories, anyone who is looking to 'vote snipe' will be likely to spend their time on short simple answers to short simple questions, rather than wade through a more complex or interesting question to provide a more detailed answer.

Taking the slightly rambling points above into account, these would be my off the cuff suggestions:

  • Rank questions based on complexity and apply a multiplier, either positive or negative to points. For example, someone telling someone how to bind a click handler in JavaScript should receive fewer points per vote than someone describing the intricacies of creating a complex shader function in DirectX for example.
  • 'Matchmaking' - Further from the complexity suggestion, if questions were ranked on complexity, perhaps you as a user would earn a complexity rating based on questions you'd asked in that area (or you could choose your own). This would allow / attempt to shift more technically able users to more technically complex questions. This would hopefully promote more niche / complex answers.
  • Offer reputation more actively for housekeeping tasks such as closing and editing questions to reward outside badges, those who actively help the community.

I disagree with the premise of your question (that a large community necessarily decays). Granted, some ways of organizing or running a community don't scale, but that doesn't mean scalable algorithms to not exist.

Moreover, Stack Overflow implements all 4 recommendations from the second article, namely:

If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.

A user handle is displayed with all posts.

Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. Have to design some way in which good works get recognized. The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma or "member since."

Reputation score is displayed with questions and answers, and available as tooptips on comments.

Three, you need barriers to participation. This is one of the things that killed Usenet. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.


And, finally, you have to find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations. In conversational contexts, Metcalfe's law is a drag. The fact that the amount of two-way connections you have to support goes up with the square of the users means that the density of conversation falls off very fast as the system scales even a little bit. You have to have some way to let users hang onto the less is more pattern, in order to keep associated with one another.

Stack Overflow forbids conversations, prompting users to take it to chat. "Noise" is downvoted, or flagged for removal.

Stack Overflow is topic based (a question with attached answers and comments), and the number of people that interact with a topic is low.

In summary, I don't think Stack Overflow has a scalability problem. In fact, I'd say Stack Overflow is one of the most scalable social websites, and definitely the most scalable web site in the Q/A space.

I disagree with the premise of your question (that a large community necessarily decays). History would like to have a word with you. –  Park Young-Bae May 24 at 10:16
@meriton I would contend that the lack of quality that is perceived and often griped about is because people aren't interacting enough with each other. That you ask a question, check back, and you've got your answer. That you answer a question, get some rep and move on. The lack of the probability of long term interaction with the site and community is in part what is driving this reduction in quality. There needs to be more ways to interact with the community outside of the Q&A format and chat alone is certainly not the answer. –  MichaelT May 24 at 11:33
I think the assumption of the OP is perfectly correct. The quality of the questions posted today is extremely poor. In the best case their are duplicates, in the most frequent situation, they are just revealing a complete lack of understanding from the poster. –  rds May 25 at 13:22
I disagree that a reputation of 1 to post a question is a barrer to participation. –  rds May 25 at 13:40
@rds: You mean like this one? stackoverflow.com/questions/23918790/… –  staticx May 28 at 18:09
lol @staticx please don't start making a list :-o –  rds May 28 at 22:16
I never said Stackoverflow was perfect. I only said that blaming it on the size of the community is neither productive nor necessarily true. At least, OP gives no evidence for a causal relationship (and no, correlation does not imply causation) –  meriton May 29 at 6:21

Stack Overflow is a place where the majority of people commenting/answering regularly are professional programmers. So the challenge is to increase expert/pro attraction at a high enough rate as newbie attraction increases.

In my opinion, Stack Overflow is seeing a decay in good questions/answers because most of the really good and commonly wondered about questions are ones that have already been asked and answered. So it is natural that the question activity ratio of pro to newbie be lower.

Furthermore, I would argue that the growth decay relationship is more so just a representation of more lazy/ignorant people being present than people just not caring what strangers think of them. Many people (including myself, and probably some pretty terrible people) feel more comfortable talking trash to their friends, and act more polite or reserved in the hopes of making a good impression when it comes to interacting with strangers.


I've said a few times that SO should be split up, loosely, by language. It's not trivial to come up with boundaries, but I fail to see why C++ questions need to be on the same site as PHP questions. Plus, making it so that HTML questions cannot be spoilt by irrelevant PHP trivialities would be helpful. This way you keep the sites smaller and can tailor the help centres to each actual community.

While for the majority of questions I think this would work, there are some areas where this line is blurred: language interactions. Should we decide that questions about calling from C++ into Python or calling a Rust callback from Go are not appropriate ? Or does the segregation by tag we have today already suffices ? I suppose that this is something you considered (hence loosely), but I am not quite sure how you propose to get there. –  Matthieu M. May 27 at 6:25
@MatthieuM.: Yeah I don't have an answer for that. –  Lightness Races in Orbit May 27 at 6:57
@MatthieuM: I suspect the practical answer to that is that there would be questions on both the C++ and the Python sites about how to do that interaction, and some of them could be construed as dupes. Practically there's no difference between a C++ programmer writing a Python wrapper for their library, and a Python programmer writing a Python wrapper for a C++ library they'd like to use, so they'd ask the same questions in different places (and get answers that assume different knowledge). –  Steve Jessop May 27 at 8:24
@SteveJessop: I considered that split indeed, and viewed it as potentially negative, but you do make a good point that a primarily C++ developer and a primarily Python developer would attack the issue from different angles and seek different answers (building on their own strengths). Can you think of other cases where multiple languages come into play (apart from the css/JS duo). –  Matthieu M. May 27 at 8:41
@MatthieuM: there's a large class of questions where the questioner doesn't mind what language the answer is in within limits. e.g they can link either C or C++ into their project, or they're happy for their program to run additional processes for certain computations (Python program runs some Ruby). One could argue that such questions are too broad since they admit essentially unrelated answers (a good C answer and a good C++ answer might look nothing alike), but splitting C from C++ into different sites would make that argument permanent and definitive, which might not be desirable. –  Steve Jessop May 27 at 9:58
... for another case of language mixing, SQL with almost any language used on a server. There are tasks for which the best solution might be to break out of whatever ORM you're using and just write a SQL query, the questioner doesn't know. So it would be useful to solicit both SQL answers and Python/PHP/Ruby/Java/whatever it is answers to the same question. –  Steve Jessop May 27 at 10:01
... for another case of language mixing, regexes with any language that provides a regex library ;-) I would happily contend that PCRE is not part of the Perl language either formally or in practical use. But regardless of that hair-splitting, regexes are freely mixed with the language they're compiled and run from even though they're almost the same in all. So answers to the same question could be entirely or almost host-language-independent, or depend very much on the host language. So I think tags are a more useful way to deal with them than separate sites per language. –  Steve Jessop May 27 at 10:02
@SteveJessop: Nah - if the question is about the regex itself then that belongs to the PCRE/Perl/Whatever community. If it's about some API than delegates to a regex engine, then it belongs to a language. I'd love to encourage this proper separation of concerns and teach people to properly whittle down their problems to a single technology. Granted, a whole SE site just for PCRE seems like overkill but I really don't want to see any more regex questions tagged PHP! –  Lightness Races in Orbit May 27 at 10:21
@LightnessRacesinOrbit: if people whittle their questions down that far, then they (rightly) risk a lecture on X-Y problems. I'm not saying there exists a perfect solution, merely pointing out which imperfections apply where :-) –  Steve Jessop May 27 at 10:23
@SteveJessop: Yep I read you –  Lightness Races in Orbit May 27 at 12:17
No - there's already a big problem with fairly arbitrary and destructive forced-migration to subsidiary sites: what is really needed is not division of the questions into yet more sites, but better tools and more utilization of site views filtered by user interest. If that really worked, then a lot of the specialist technology sites could be merged back into stackoverflow, and the whole migration/categorization issue put to rest. Plus it's easily extensible to the "community standards" issue with question quality filters. –  Chris Stratton May 30 at 22:10

It may also be that technology is growing exponentially; so, Stack Overflow cannot effectively address the problem now.

What I see is many rather simple and direct questions are not answered. The reasons are they are for a niche, based on models, etc. Perhaps a missing component is the manufacturers, such as Samsung, do not answer questions on Stack Overflow. Perhaps Stack Overflow needs a rewards/encouragement system for the companies who are the genesis of the problems/questions. As is, I don't think those companies really support their products to the level needed in today's world - but what's new?

This was the case a decade and 1/2 ago with other major companies when you had to have special accounts and make four phone calls before you could ever talk to anyone who knew anything. I think the technology world is getting so complex that even Stack Overflow isn't able to bring together answers for it all.

Also, someone mentioned the old answers thing. That is VERY irritating. It really does make SO users frustrated and not willing to participate because the 2+ year old stuff is often flat out wrong currently.


I'm of the opinion that Stack Overflow. would be much better off broken up further -- e.g. into a Python board, a C++ board, etc. -- rather than structured completely via tags as "one ring to bind them all".

While there are disadvantages to that because some questions legitimately span boundaries, I think those are problems that could be resolved via more extensive migration paths, and a mechanism to facilitate limited cross-posting (with links, etc.).

One of the things I notice on Stack Overflow. specifically (as opposed to smaller Stack Exchange sites) is that voting seems to encourage people to answer as fast as they can, rather than as thoughtfully as they can, because the number of potential upvotes dwindles very very quickly -- I presume this is because of the number of voters who indiscriminately monitor a large number of tags and so are inclined only to review very recent questions. By "very recent" and "very quickly" I mean a time scale on the order of minutes.

Smaller, separate boards would slow this down. It would also allow for greater fine-tuning of policy, etc., from community to community. An advantage to that would be the consequences of such fine-tuning could be compared and contrasted. The current Meta Stack Overflow could continue to exist as a tiered/overarching community concerned with the programming boards in general.

In discussion of expanding migration paths at U&L, some members have expressed opposition explicitly, because they do not want to increase the significance of the Stack Exchange community in general. I consider this unfortunate; IMO the individual boards would be better served with a higher degree of integration -- just, not to the point of the "one ring to bind them all" board, which is where things stand currently WRT programming.

We don't have "boards" now, so why should we break up and create them? –  Cody Gray May 25 at 1:23
I disagree with almost everything in this answer but you point a real problem : people upvoting in fields where they don't have any competence. This makes people upvote trivial QA because they understand the problem and it seems it's a thing they ought to know, even if it's obvious. People should still monitor tags they don't master, because we're here to learn, but maybe there should be some kind of warning against upvoting when you don't know the language well enough. –  dystroy May 26 at 6:54
@dystroy How could that work "you haven't answered any questions in the tag <css-float-left-problem> do you know enough about that to vote on it?"? I agree with "a real problem", don't know if there is a technical solution to it though. An voting-entrance exam per tag =P? –  AD7six May 26 at 7:16
I agree... the top 50 tags get their own site. –  ojblass May 27 at 19:53

Yes, Stack Overflow has tools to ban users that behave badly. But it is extremely easy to create a new account and pollute again.

Hopefully, this can be mitigated, in two different ways.

Make it harder to post the first question

  • Ask new users to review close votes, and once enough work has been done there, earn the reputation required to post a question. This would also be quite educative for users to see the mess poor questions inflige to the community.

Make it harder to create a new account

  • Prove a real identity, for instance by linking to a phone number (which is a sparse resource).
"ask new users to review close votes" No thanks. Based on what I've seen, they would just make things worse. Besides, new users haven't learned the ropes yet. They aren't the people we want enforcing standards. –  Cody Gray May 25 at 14:00
I strongly agree with your headers and am appalled by the bullets. Great strategic goal, terrible implementation ideas. –  Josh Caswell May 25 at 18:52
I wonder if something like: adding a delay to questions before they are visibile to the rest of the world would be useful. Would at least stop one-question-wonder accounts asking utter garbage, as they are unlikely to have the patience to hang around a day to see answers to their question appear. –  AD7six May 26 at 7:20
Having to enter Phone Numbers, Credit Card Numbers or whatever is the number one reason for cancelling mail orders or leaving web pages in general. For 99.999% of websites, the ratio danger of abuse / benefit is too high to me. I (healthily) distrust any online personal data storage, and I drive well with it. Stories like recent data breaches prove my point. –  phresnel May 26 at 12:21
Hmn, on thinking about it, the close vote thing seems like it might have possibilities -- don't let them actually vote, but let new users gain rep by correctly RECOGNIZING which reason is apprpriate. Kinda like the "are you paying attention question", except in reverse. –  jmoreno May 26 at 20:20
@AD7six: if someone asks a question that isn't excellent, I want them to be present when people come to answer it, because there will be comments requesting clarifications and extra details. I think your proposal (a) won't stop one-question-wonders asking, it just makes the time spent on their questions even more futile; (b) will create a lot of frustrating situations where a dodgy but fixable question doesn't get interactively fixed because the questioner doesn't manage to be online when it gets unhidden. –  Steve Jessop May 27 at 8:30
That said, with a slight tweak ... if questions from 1-rep users are can be unhidden by the original questioner at any time after the delay has passed. There are still other objections to this, but it would remove my objection :-) –  Steve Jessop May 27 at 8:32
@SteveJessop was an off-the-cuff suggestion/comment (i.e. not particularly serious). I think it's quite common (especially in low-quality questions) for the author to be awol while people read it wondering what it means anyway though. –  AD7six May 27 at 8:33
@AD7six: I agree that it's quite common (and there are sometimes borderline questions that I'll come back to and downvote / close-vote only if the questioner hasn't answered requests in comments). I think it's common enough for the questioner to improve a question, that it would be a real loss to make it much harder to do so. –  Steve Jessop May 27 at 8:33

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