Stop pretending you care what we think.

Stack Overflow is not a community

A nightclub is not a party, it is a business that provides a party-like experience to sell overpriced cocktails.

Stack Overflow is not a community, it is a business which provides a community-like experience, in order to sell eyeballs to recruiters and other advertisers.

The nightclub owners have decided that rather than cater to the die-hard fans, they are going to pivot and make a mega-club that trades off the cool of the old name. But they can't say that's what they are doing, because that would kill the cool.

Stack Overflow owners have decided that rather than cater to the professionals, they are going to pivot and turn into a do-my-homework, write-my-code site for CS students, and lazy or incompetent programmers. There are a lot more of them than there are of the experts, and they'll ask and answer far more questions. They'll mostly be duplicates, but so what? It's engagement, it brings the eyeballs, and that's where the money is.

Like any other social network, we are not paying, we are not customers, we are the product.

The goal of quality is taking a back seat to increasing the audience.

90% of new questions are poor quality, duplicates, answered by the most basic one-page tutorial, or all three. "join with group by" must have been asked thousands of times.

What to do about it?

If it's a problem, there are solutions:

Homework must be banned outright

These are ALWAYS duplicates, often people doing the same course. Create a new site: https://cs-homework.stackexchange.com.

SQL-Help must be moved off the main stack overflow

There's clearly a lot of demand for it and plenty of people willing to provide it. But SQL is hard and it's in the nature of SQL that it's not obvious how one question relates to another. The answer is often something like "you need use a subquery not a join", and the question is not strictly a duplicate of anything, and will never be useful to anyone else.

Create a new site: https://sql-help.stackexchange.com.

Finding duplicates must be incentivised

Closing as duplicate should be rewarded, answering a question later closed as duplicate should be negative rep - you should have duped it.

But is it really a problem?

Not for the "community", that's a side issue. Is it a problem for the owners?

So that last three sections suppose that quality is actually a primary goal. In fact I don't believe this is true of the leadership: It's clear that growing the audience is the primary goal and quality has been sacrificed for 4 years as no way has been found to align the two.

Closing duplicates is not incentivised because they don't want us to do it - it kills engagement. At the moment, answering an easy duplicate will earn all parties 30 rep, and this is intentional: Are high-reputation users answering fewer questions?

From now on, it's newbies answering duplicate questions all the way.

Because "engagement" beats curating a high quality resource in cash terms.

Stop pretending you care what we think.

Stack Overflow is not a community

A nightclub is not a party, it is a business that provides a party-like experience to sell overpriced cocktails.

Stack Overflow is not a community, it is a business which provides a community-like experience, in order to sell eyeballs to recruiters and other advertisers.

The nightclub owners have decided that rather than cater to the die-hard fans, they are going to pivot and make a mega-club that trades off the cool of the old name. But they can't say that's what they are doing, because that would kill the cool.

Stack Overflow owners have decided that rather than cater to the professionals, they are going to pivot and turn into a do-my-homework, write-my-code site for CS students, and lazy or incompetent programmers. There are a lot more of them than there are of the experts, and they'll ask and answer far more questions. They'll mostly be duplicates, but so what? It's engagement, it brings the eyeballs, and that's where the money is.

Like any other social network, we are not paying, we are not customers, we are the product.

The goal of quality is taking a back seat to increasing the audience.

90% of new questions are poor quality, duplicates, answered by the most basic one-page tutorial, or all three. "join with group by" must have been asked thousands of times.

What to do about it?

If it's a problem, there are solutions:

Homework must be banned outright

These are ALWAYS duplicates, often people doing the same course. Create a new site: https://cs-homework.stackexchange.com.

SQL-Help must be moved off the main stack overflow

There's clearly a lot of demand for it and plenty of people willing to provide it. But SQL is hard and it's in the nature of SQL that it's not obvious how one question relates to another. The answer is often something like "you need use a subquery not a join", and the question is not strictly a duplicate of anything, and will never be useful to anyone else.

Create a new site: https://sql-help.stackexchange.com.

Finding duplicates must be incentivised

Closing as duplicate should be rewarded, answering a question later closed as duplicate should be negative rep - you should have duped it.

But is it really a problem?

Not for the "community", that's a side issue. Is it a problem for the owners?

So that last three sections suppose that quality is actually a primary goal. In fact I don't believe this is true of the leadership: It's clear that growing the audience is the primary goal and quality has been sacrificed for 4 years as no way has been found to align the two.

Closing duplicates is not incentivised because they don't want us to do it - it kills engagement. At the moment, answering an easy duplicate will earn all parties 30 rep, and this is intentional: Whatever they say they want, what they really want is what they reward.

From now on, it's newbies answering duplicate questions all the way.

Because "engagement" beats curating a high quality resource in cash terms.

Stop pretending you care what we think.

Stack Overflow is not a community

A nightclub is not a party, it is a business that provides a party-like experience to sell overpriced cocktails.

Stack Overflow is not a community, it is a business which provides a community-like experience, in order to sell eyeballs to recruiters and other advertisers.

The nightclub owners have decided that rather than cater to the die-hard fans, they are going to pivot and make a mega-club that trades off the cool of the old name. But they can't say that's what they are doing, because that would kill the cool.

Stack Overflow owners have decided that rather than cater to the professionals, they are going to pivot and turn into a do-my-homework, write-my-code site for CS students, and lazy or incompetent programmers. There are a lot more of them than there are of the experts, and they'll ask and answer far more questions. They'll mostly be duplicates, but so what? It's engagement, it brings the eyeballs, and that's where the money is.

Like any other social network, we are not paying, we are not customers, we are the product.

The goal of quality is taking a back seat to increasing the audience.

90% of new questions are poor quality, duplicates, answered by the most basic one-page tutorial, or all three. "join with group by" must have been asked thousands of times.

What to do about it?

If it's a problem, there are solutions:

Homework must be banned outright

These are ALWAYS duplicates, often people doing the same course. Create a new site: https://cs-homework.stackexchange.com.

SQL-Help must be moved off the main stack overflow

There's clearly a lot of demand for it and plenty of people willing to provide it. But SQL is hard and it's in the nature of SQL that it's not obvious how one question relates to another. The answer is often something like "you need use a subquery not a join", and the question is not strictly a duplicate of anything, and will never be useful to anyone else.

Create a new site: https://sql-help.stackexchange.com.

Finding duplicates must be incentivised

Closing as duplicate should be rewarded, answering a question later closed as duplicate should be negative rep - you should have duped it.

But is it really a problem?

Not for the "community", that's a side issue. Is it a problem for the owners?

So that last three sections suppose that quality is actually a primary goal. In fact I don't believe this is true of the leadership: It's clear that growing the audience is the primary goal and quality has been sacrificed for 4 years as no way has been found to align the two.

From now on, it's newbies answering duplicate questions all the way.

Because "engagement" beats curating a high quality resource in cash terms.

Stop pretending you care what we think.

Stack Overflow is not a community

A nightclub is not a party, it is a business that provides a party-like experience to sell overpriced cocktails.

Stack Overflow is not a community, it is a business which provides a community-like experience, in order to sell eyeballs to recruiters and other advertisers.

The nightclub owners have decided that rather than cater to the die-hard fans, they are going to pivot and make a mega-club that trades off the cool of the old name. But they can't say that's what they are doing, because that would kill the cool.

Stack Overflow owners have decided that rather than cater to the professionals, they are going to pivot and turn into a do-my-homework, write-my-code site for CS students, and lazy or incompetent programmers. There are a lot more of them than there are of the experts, and they'll ask and answer far more questions. They'll mostly be duplicates, but so what? It's engagement, it brings the eyeballs, and that's where the money is.

Like any other social network, we are not paying, we are not customers, we are the product.

The goal of quality is taking a back seat to increasing the audience.

90% of new questions are poor quality, duplicates, answered by the most basic one-page tutorial, or all three. "join with group by" must have been asked thousands of times.

What to do about it?

If it's a problem, there are solutions:

Homework must be banned outright

These are ALWAYS duplicates, often people doing the same course. Create a new site: https://cs-homework.stackexchange.com.

SQL-Help must be moved off the main stack overflow

There's clearly a lot of demand for it and plenty of people willing to provide it. But SQL is hard and it's in the nature of SQL that it's not obvious how one question relates to another. The answer is often something like "you need use a subquery not a join", and the question is not strictly a duplicate of anything, and will never be useful to anyone else.

Create a new site: https://sql-help.stackexchange.com.

Finding duplicates must be incentivised

Closing as duplicate should be rewarded, answering a question later closed as duplicate should be negative rep - you should have duped it.

But is it really a problem?

Not for the "community", that's a side issue. Is it a problem for the owners?

So that last three sections suppose that quality is actually a primary goal. In fact I don't believe this is true of the leadership: It's clear that growing the audience is the primary goal and quality has been sacrificed for 4 years as no way has been found to align the two.

Closing duplicates is not incentivised because they don't want us to do it - it kills engagement. At the moment, answering an easy duplicate will earn all parties 30 rep, and this is intentional: Are high-reputation users answering fewer questions?

From now on, it's newbies answering duplicate questions all the way.

Because "engagement" beats curating a high quality resource in cash terms.