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Ask HN: Is Stackoverflow running out of questions and answers?

15 points by untilHellbanned ↗ HN
I think I'm observing a trend whereby you can't get basic questions answered anymore. At this point, most SO Q &A are duplications on some level, so it seems many things go unanswered, are downvoted, or closed. Is this healthy for the SO network?

23 comments

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_RPM
No, Stack Overflow is just getting more popular. A lot of beginner programmers want to know how to send a JavaScript variable to a PHP script. This has been solved years ago on Stack Overflow, so it will get closed. This is just an example.
jaydles
It sounds like what you're mainly describing is that it's hard to ask a question that isn't already answered on the site. (You can't close as a dupe unless the duplicate has answers.) From a "helping the most people learn" perspective, this sounds like a champagne problem: There's so many answers that it's hard to find something to ask that's not already covered.

From a community perspective, we do want all devs to be able to get involved in the site, so it's not ideal if the solution set is actually so comprehensive that it raises the bar for getting involved.

But I'm not too worried. SO still gets over ten thousand questions per day, which gives devs who want to contribute to the programming community a ton of opportunities to share answers and help. Plus, and new languages like swift leave a lot of blue ocean for asking new questions.

Don't get me wrong, our two biggest product priorities are focused on how we can make it easier for new users to get involved, and how we can ensure that more active users continue to feel appreciated and find it rewarding to share their knowledge on SO, where so many others can benefit from it. There's plenty more we can do on both fronts, but I'm not too worried that we're running out of ways for devs to contribute if they want to.

Disclosure: I work at Stack Exchange. I love Stack Exchange. I am not an unbiased observer of Stack Exchange. My mom says I and my company are special, and I believe her.

DanBC
EDIT: this post is grumpier than I meant it to be! Sorry.

Imagine you have images turned off. You visit one of the sites. Obviously it's unusable because images are controls, but that's okay. But you notice that they're using a font colour that is very close to the background colour (eg light-medium blue on medium-blue) and then wanting to load an image in the background (white) that would provide the contrast.

You can't tell anyone because minimum karma requirements prevent making a meta-post.

Bug reports from naive users are probably horrible, but still, how many hoops do you want bug-reporters to jump through?

See this example for a hostile response to a reasonable question where it's assumed that people visiting the site need the buttons -- they don't. Most people will be reading questions and answers and will not have accounts.

http://meta.christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/4120/is...

jaydles
The problem here appears to be that it's hard to report that the site's readability is poor with images turned off in your browser, in large part because the interface elements needed to do so (buttons) have images associated with their containers, etc.

We never want to make it harder than it has to be to share bugs or suggestions, and we do want to help as many people as we can. We especially want to help those trying to give us feedback to improve the product. The challenge is always prioritization. Today, the number of folks browsing without images is a very small percentage. We definitely want them to be able to benefit from users content, and ideally, we'd love it if they could post and report bugs, too, but it's just lower priority than some other places (where we can surely improve as well).

untilHellbanned
> so it's not ideal if the solution set is actually so comprehensive that it raises the bar for getting involved.

This is precisely what I'm concerned about. I also love SE MASSIVELY. But it does seem like there is a natural ceiling on the service which doesn't afflict others like wikipedia or facebook where content can be generated endlessly.

> But I'm not too worried. SO still gets over ten thousand questions per day

> focused on how we can make it easier for new users to get involved

"still" seems like the operative word. My question hinted at whether new content on the site was "still" accelerating. My very hand-wavy feeling is it isn't because everybody including newcomers are getting the vibe that everything is already solved (Swift, etc. always being a drop in the bucket compared to JS/PHP questions).

I've made the transition from low rep to decent rep (>5,000), and am finding my incentive to participate go down as more questions & answers seem barren and I get increasingly thwarted by militant members of the community.

cheald
> it does seem like there is a natural ceiling on the service which doesn't afflict others like wikipedia or facebook where content can be generated endlessly.

Software development, languages, toolkits, libraries, and frameworks are constantly evolving; there will always be new questions to answer, but they will require you to develop knowledge of those systems ahead of those asking the questions.

The really good questions are usually few and far between, but that's generally because the sorts of people who ask really good questions tend to be the kinds of people who are able to discover the solution without resorting to SO.

untilHellbanned
> The really good questions are usually few and far between, but that's generally because the sorts of people who ask really good questions tend to be the kinds of people who are able to discover the solution without resorting to SO.

Yes, this is the ceiling i'm concerned about.

logn
> Software development, languages, toolkits, libraries, and frameworks are constantly evolving

Just make sure to never ask or answer anything related to this on SO. Only copy-pasted stack traces are allowed. Otherwise your thread will be locked and the mods will disperse the crowd.

cheald
I assume you're talking about threads which ask for advice on which framework, etc to use? Those are specifically off-topic.
zackmorris
As someone who works at SE, would you consider giving a bonus to unanswered questions? Anymore, I've noticed that many of my questions don't receive responses, or if they do, I'm unable to award an answer because they often don't solve the problem. I'm either pushing the envelope too hard, or I'm too fringe and people have trouble seeing what I'm getting at. But just because a question doesn't have an answer doesn't mean it's not important. Quite the contrary, I actually find the unanswered questions the most interesting. I’ve discovered some of the solutions myself days/weeks/months later and posted my own solution, which seems like something that should also have merit.

I feel that my low success rate is hurting my reputation on the site and preventing users from posting answers (I had someone say that my low solution rate deterred him/her from answering but can't find the comment).

The other thing that hurts is that I simply get distracted and never go back to review my questions/award answers. It would be nice if other users could confirm that something works and award the answer for me so I'm not penalized (perhaps by users with a certain rep level, or if a solution gets enough points, or enough time has passed).

I love SE/SO, but maybe someone could confirm that I'm not the only one having these troubles.

uiiuwer8
stop bullshiting please. Your site is racist as hell. I am from India and just because my name is Indian my questions are downvoted.

Then I created profile with american ( Christan ) name and same question have got 50+ upvotes.

Fact is that many of American scumbags , who in reality do nothing at their jobs and just show up for $$ between 8 to 4 have been dominating site for at least two years.

Another problem is ,every new question which your stupid moderators don't agree with are closed without regard irrespective of value of the question.

Its one thing to occasionally close the question but its another when you call every question poster stupid, opinion-based and especially judge based on nationality.

I have kept proof of how same people and their tone change when I post with american name.

My honest feedback is if you want to maintain the site quality stop judging question posters.

sharth
I've seen comments like this numerous times, but nobody ever links to their high quality questions that have been downvoted.

Could you link to yours?

mzzk
>stop bullshiting please >racist as hell >American scumbags >stupid moderators

Stop mudslinging.

>I have kept proof

Please post.

Someone1234
It is fun when you google stuff, get SO results, and then see that it was "closed due to duplication." Particularly when it is the top Google result with no clarification what it is a "duplication" of or similar.
cheald
If a SO question is closed as a duplicate, there's a big banner at the top of it saying what it's a duplicate of.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27002661/c-sorting-arrays for example - that grey box at the top shows the answer it was marked as a duplicate of.

techdragon
And isn't it awesome that we have no way to fight back, with the argument that "the old question is irrelevant because it's too old". Sometimes things change and old answers become VERY BAD

For instance any question that suggests a Python programmer use PIL instead of Pillow. And for another example any recommendation that a Python programmer 'easy_install' something, pip is now the recommended tool and easy_install is depreciated.

cheald
So add comments (or updated answers) on the original questions/answers. Those are the ones with the search engine juice anyhow!