The Strengths and Weakness of Stackoverflow

Weaknesses: The biggest one is the intentional bias toward the answer over the question (Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand).

1) This has a bunch of undesirable consequences:

• A highly competitive culture of reputation-seekers.
• A website flooded with beginner-level Q & A. The corollary of which is…
• Downvoting, hostile treatment, or otherwise ignoring of those asking more involved questions that often require richer answers.

2) The branding damage caused by esoteric StackExchange (SE) sister sites.

This damage means a couple things:

• programmers/computer users are often confused by or treated badly for using the “wrong” StackExchange site. Redirecting questions from Stackoverflow (SO) to the other SE sites as a means to force the SE “network” is an overbearing approach. The internet doesn’t like overbearing.
• There are WAY too many low value, brand-diluting SE sites that detract from the key SE property, Stackoverflow.

3) How meta.stackoverflow sets the worst example for all SE sites. Meta is the most clique-y and ruthless in enforcing the principles espoused by SE leaders. This site, as SE’s customer service/gateway to new users, should be the MOST embracing of any of the sites, not the LEAST.

4) The attribution biases of reputation earning. By this I mean the self-reinforcing tendencies to not upvote (or to downvote) those with low reputation and to over-upvote (or not downvote) those with high reputation. Basically, I mean to not give credit to those who “don’t know what they are talking about” and to give too much credit to the “experts”. Admittedly, this phenomenon happens in any social network where there is a tangible measure of the status of the participants.

5) SO’s money-maker, the Q&A, is an increasingly exhausted, limited resource. Its increasingly difficult to ask a question which isn’t a “dupe (i.e., a duplicate)” of another question. Programming doesn’t/shouldn’t/won’t evolve like creative content does on sites like YouTube. Stackoverflow is intentionally not a place for open-ended discussion. Rather like Wikipedia, it aims to be a definite source of factual information. The main problem with this comparison though is that Wikipedia is a .org and stays a float due to the benevolence that comes with being a non-profit. For stackoverflow .com, which makes money off our eyeballs, I’m curious what will happen to its “customer” base when people can’t accumulate reputation points as they once were able to. For example, that you could score hundred of points for explaining arrays in 2009 and now in 2013 you wouldn’t gain or even commonly lose points for an analogous question gets at the heart of this issue.

Strengths: With these in mind I’ve actually come to value Stackoverflow despite is clique-y, often bullying members. Some of its less discussed strengths are:

1) how they’ve nailed SEO. SO always pops to the top on Google searches.

2) how freakin’ fast their pages load. So much data and yet so fast.

Summary: Judging from its popularity, it appears that for most people the positives of SO outweigh its negatives. As a programmer myself, I agree with that. But if they want to bring the masses onboard, I’m highly skeptical of SE’s “one-size-fits-all” approach.

originally posted on Quora: http://qr.ae/NrfL3