Ask HN: How Would You Improve Stackoverflow?

Find a way of having re-occurring persistent subjective discussions that would still be a part of SO. Chat is a rubbish idea for this because it's transient.

Find a way to dis-encourage posting a first question and then disappearing without accepting the answer. Mandatory registrations? It's popular enough already.

Allow accepting multiple answers.

Make answering questions worthwhile even if a decent points outcome is not likely (new user, specific question). Mods awarding extra points?

Fix the problem of fastest answer typically getting the most attention: "the post-first then improve if popular" strategy.

Make points more meaningful, like reddit gold maybe. Reward not just total reputation (there is no catching up with some early members) but reputation spikes as well.

So many things to improve, but some could be risky.

I would allow small edits to fix typos. Right now, SO will not allow you to make only small changes.

Require finer grained categorization of questions.

The data explosion must be immense and every time I ask some noob question Im sure its already been asked.

I'd make search better. I consistently get better/more-relevant stackoverflow results when I start at Google than by using their internal search bar.

It is very difficult to contribute as a new user.

I try to upvote, I can't.

I try to downvote, I can't.

I wanted to reply to something, I couldn't.

shrug

Here's a killer feature: I would want to chat with the other people landing on the same page at that instant so that I can discuss the problem. If no one is there, I can always wait for sometime before someone shows up.

In some way, it's like a dynamic irc channel.

Find questions with at least 100 upvotes and active replies that been:

- "closed as off topic by ..." - "locked by ..."

- Compile a list of people who are closing and locking questions that are of great benefits to community.

- Make each of these people to start from zero at Stackoverflow to prove their worthiness.

Improve design and usability. Perhaps a dark theme can be great.

I would get rid of jerks

I would replace the homepage with featured questions. Currently there are more questions with negative scores than positive ones, and most of them are not even voted on.

It's too easy to ask questions, so most people don't bother trying to understand what they don't know.

As a professional developer, it has not been satisfying to contribute to SO for a long time (this includes asking questions) because the whole site feels like a massive content farm (to me anyway.)

With the massive community effort SO has, it could very well be a beautiful garden instead of a montage of jungles it became. Not saying I could coordinate the effort, though...

I would fire all the moderators.

Healthy moderation - just because someone has points doesn't imply he/she is God and has the right to troll others.

Better tagging!