My Love / Hate Relationship With Stack Overflow

From Day One

I was an avid reader of Jeff Attwood's Coding Horror blog from the time I left university and ventured into the world of professional software development in 2006. I had just recently discovered the ever insightful Joel On Software by Joel Spolsky when the two bloggers announced a joint venture to create a new resource for programmers to collaborate using a question-and-answer format. Providing a desperately needed service backed by the talent, reputation, and influence of two widely known developers, I had great confidence that this venture would be a success. I am proud to say that while I had nothing to do with the actual coding or design of Stack Overflow, at very least I had my say on the name. I participated in this poll and counted my vote among the 1721 supporters of the eventual winner: stackoverflow.com.

Falling In Love

Perhaps my favorite thing about Stack Overflow (and the family of Stack Exchange sites) is when I try to ask a question that has already been answered by the community. I can quickly find similar questions to my own with all of the answers ranked based on how helpful the community found them. I can't tell you how many times I've paid a visit to the Stack, only to find that my question was already answered clearly enough to proceed immediately with my work.

In the rare case where I have not found the information I was looking for, I have been surprised by just how eager the community was to leap to my rescue. Helpful answers began to flow within minutes of posing my question. Intelligent developers from around the world competed with each other to offer helpful answers to my question in return for nothing more than my gratitude and some (nearly) meaningless reputation points.

The Hatred Begins

There was once a time where open-ended and opinionated questions would be asked and discussed ad nauseam. These questions would divide the community into cliques, each supporting their own point of view and uniting in defiance of all who would disagree. I, personally, found many of these discussions fascinating. It was exciting to see the varying perspectives and how viciously they were defended by their champions.

While some (like myself) loved these types of discussion and debate questions, others wanted these questions to fade away. The most adamant ones wanted them dragged out into the street and shot. They didn't like having questions with multiple conflicting answers or no real answer at all. Eventually, word came down from on high that every question needs to have a real answer.

This requirement did not destroy the world (or the site), but it began to slowly erode part of the community and its nature. Developers, as one might expect, tend to be nerdy. Many of us are pedantic (guilty as charged) and love to enforce stringent rules to the letter of the law. Those who are most eager to do so often find their way to elevated positions of authority also known as moderators. I am under the impression that some of today's Stack Overflow moderators are on a quest to smite questions (be they useful or no) before they can be answered. They close questions as off topic or not constructive or a wide variety of other resolutions if they even hint at straying from the true and acceptable path.

The biggest offenders I've seen are of the form: "what is the best tool for X?" These are usually perfectly sensible questions. I need to accomplish X. I've probably done some searching and found a couple of tools that claim to help with X, but I have no experience with any of them. I attempt to consult the community for its collective experience with these or other tools in the quest for X. I find that these questions often have a couple of brief answers and have been ruthlessly closed as not constructive. The very nature of this type of question makes it subjective, but there is still a lot of valuable information to be shared here. Instead, the community is stifled by an overzealous moderator too eager to close the question to see the tremendous value that its discussion would bring to the site.

The other casualty of this is those active members of the community who lost interest following the change of course. Instead of participating in an exciting discussion with intellectual equals, they were challenged to answer technical questions with correct answers. I guarantee you that some of these members reduced their level of activity on the site as a result.

Sites vs. Tags

My next beef is with the Stack Exchange family of sites. As more and more groups begin to create Q&A communities on Stack Exchange, it becomes harder and harder to find the right site to pose my questions or look for answers. Depending on the nature of my search, there may be a fair number of relevant sites to look at.

Imagine that you run into a library issue while programming a GUI application primarily targeting Ubuntu Linux. Where should you go first? Ask Ubuntu? Unix & Linux? Programmers? Stack Overflow? User Experience? You might think that some of my suggestions are more probable than others. My question is: why should you have to think about it?

Rather than running many similar but separate sites and migrating questions between them, why not put it all in one place and tag each question as belonging to multiple relevant categories? Stack Exchange can still maintain communities centered around each category. The moderators can still callously and judiciously kick inadequate questions out of their domain. Why should I have to choose a site? Just let me ask my question and allow the community as a whole help direct it to the place where it belongs.

Crawling Back For More

Even with the problems I've discussed above, Stack Overflow is still a fantastic resource. When I have a programming question, I consistently find the best answers there -- even if I make my way there by searching Google. The fact of the matter is that with a large, intelligent, and active community, Stack Overflow is the best resource I know for all flavors of programming minutiae. I simply could not perform my job as efficiently without it. I guess I have to accept its flaws and admit that I still love it after all.

What are the best and worst features of Stack Overflow for you? Tell me your thoughts in the comments.

Cheers,

Joshua Ganes