Having worked at a large company before that had their own instance of Confluence Questions (i.e. Atlassian's SO clone): it was incredibly useful. As a new employee, it allowed me to relatively quickly find the relevant people, or even to come across answers by them to questions people kept running into over and over again.

As I became responsible for an internal library used company-wide, I pushed for the Q&A site to be our primary means of communication, and would always refer to it after answering questions from people contacting me directly. I saw the same pattern repeat itself for many new hires.

Otherwise I think your observations are spot on.

It is simply not possible for Confluence Questions to be considered a useful product by even the most generous definitions.

The reason is simple: it only supports exact-matching text search _on titles_. There are a host of other usability problems that are so bad that they render a giant negative impact on information retrieval and actively steer Q&A traffic to repetitious and ephemeral tools like Slack.

But the lack of a functional search engine indexing the Q&A content with a high-performing notion of search relevancy is such a show-stopping, egregious defect that even all the other egregious flaws can be ignored by comparison.

It’s not a subjective debate at that point: just a factual defect of such severity that any misguided reports of the tool somehow miraculously being even marginally useful for someone have to be ignored.

I thank my lucky stars that Stack Overflow offers competition to this with a real search engine.

[0]: < https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Questions-for-Confluence/... >

I am on a committee in my workplace that deals directly with Confluence customer support to roll out changes to our internally deployed Confluence & Jira instances, and I know first hand from dealing directly with Confluence that they _intentionally_ only support exact matching _on the titles_ for searching in Questions. Really appalling.

I haven't used Confluence Question, but I use Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket every day, and search is also the limiting factor of all of those product.

Jira search is useless, you have to use filters and memory of dates to get a set of issues small enough for you to search manually.

The search in Confluence can best be summed up as "Here's a PDF". For some weird reason Confluence can search PDF sort of okay. It's typically not what you want, but because Confluence can search PDFs better than normal Confluence pages, PDFs are what you get in 75% of your searches.

Atlassians continued failure to deliver a half decent search feature in any of their products is fascinating. I honestly don't mind their products, they're fine for our needs, except you can't depend on search.

Disclaimer: long time Atlassian employee but I do not work on Jira/Conf/Bitbucket & all words here are my own opinions.

A major problem is that many deployments of Atlassian products are Server deployments (i.e. not Cloud), which means there's basically the embedded Lucene engine and that's it; anything else starts hurting either performance or deployment options at scale. And most Server customers have a much greater interest in scaling (while keeping servers performant & easy to run) than getting tweaks to search algorithms - in particular many customers refuse to upgrade unless there is a major bug fix or performance boost they're going to get.

On the Cloud side, for better or worse the focus has mostly been on letting people find their work, not find new content they haven't seen before. For example, Confluence's My Work tab (or similar - I forget the exact name), or the search in the cross-product https://start.atlassian.com/ are both useful for getting back to things you've seen before. Hopefully some day we'll finally make some headway on the "I don't know what I'm looking for but I know how to describe my problem" use case.

And just to buck the trend, search works as advertised in the Atlassian product I work on, statuspage.io ;) (but then our search use case is straightforward and rare enough to just use elasticsearch with some minor tweaking).

Search on Bitbucket is similarly broken for any cases more exotic than an exact word match. So in practice, it's useless for source code.

I agree that there was a lot that was lacking about Confluence Questions; my main point was that a StackOverflow-like product is incredibly useful. SO itself would probably do a better job at fulfilling that role than Confluence Questions.

The company I work for uses internal SO and I think it’s pretty useful. There’s a culture to push people to turn useful slack answers into SO q&a so that they are useful for others. Also, our internal search engine searches over it (as well as the wiki, jira, etc.)

Yeah my experience is that large places that use things like Yammer it ends up getting used as basically a Q&A site.

Yammer is more like a private Facebook. StackOverflow is a technical trove. Distinctly different goals.

Right, I understand that, but my point is that how it actually gets used is in largely a private-stackoverflow-substitute capacity, even though that's not really its intended use case. That's where the 'desire lines' go.

Perhaps for a large company with multiple offices etc, sure.

For a smaller company though, other than as a search tool (previously asked questions) I don't see what advantage it has over just using Slack/Teams etc. in a relevant channel to your question.

Because even in a small company, searching past content and conversations in Slack is a pain. The information gets lost. There is no reference back, so people just end up asking the same questions again, which is both super annoying and a gigantic waste of time.

I mean, I assume that they don't actually care about small companies, they don't have much money anyways. In these scenarios, they tend to act as a "loss-leader" for marketing purposes, mostly.

FWIW Atlassian's perspective is generally more like "they don't have much money yet, so let's get them while it's easy to get them". Small companies grow into big companies, and small single-team deployments tend to spread into big whole-company deployments - but small customers are much easier to get than large customers :)

Disclaimer: long time Atlassian employee but all words are my own.

Yes, companies large enough where you might not know who you'd need for help with a problem within your first week is exactly the use where SO shines, in my opinion.

> I'm guessing that revenue from job postings (Careers section) and banner ads did not bring enough money.

I've used their jobs platform on both sides (as a developer looking for work and as a hiring manager) and, regarding job postings at least, I suspect you're right. I've had very limited success with it. And yet it's my favorite platform for hiring or job-searching as a developer. I like it much more than Indeed which, to my chagrin, has proven more effective.

It's free for people looking for jobs and IIRC around $500 - $1500/mo for companies looking to post a listing or two. It still baffles me that it does not have more uptake. I spoke with a room full of about 80 new developers at a code academy recently and asked how many of them used it. There weren't more than 2 or 3 hands.

I suggested to our Sales rep that the hostile reception a lot of first-time question-askers encounter probably isn't doing them any favors. (SO has introduced new features to address this problem.)

Their Marketing team also footgunned themselves, at least as far as our company was concerned. When it came time to extend our first contract, our Sales rep asked if I'd like some t-shirts for our team. I said sure. He said send me your sizes. So I polled my team of 12 and sent him the sizes. He came back and told me that a Marketing Director or someone said there was a new limit of 4. I said, "Hey, you asked me and I got a team full of devs looking forward to a t-shirt. Can you send me one for each?" He said he'd check but came back and said the person calling the shots was firm. They sent the 4 t-shirts. I delayed renewing our subscription 3 or 4 months as a result. We gave them another shot in the future at one of the lower levels. But those shirts would have paid for themselves the moment they sent them.

I still don't know what the Marketing side was thinking. It ended up making me more attentive about paying for the platform. If they had sent the t-shirts, I probably would have just let the subscription ride and continued paying it even if we didn't have an active listing up. Instead, I only renewed when we needed to fill a new position. I'd say it taught me a valuable Sales or Marketing lesson, but isn't this common sense?

Alas, the platform itself continued to perform so weakly in supplying candidates to our postings that I have discontinued using it all together, even though I still recommend young developers sign up and use when looking for jobs.

I think SO deserves to succeed so hopefully the private Q&A will boost revenues.

> I spoke with a room full of about 80 new developers at a code academy recently and asked how many of them used it. There weren't more than 2 or 3 hands.

I've been a developer for 10+ years and won't use it. I tried it on a whim a couple years ago and my GitHub wasn't cool enough for them so they told me "thanks but no thanks" so I've never looked again, and probably never will (my Github remains uncool, with no sign of that ever changing).

I bounced off SO itself for similar reasons, and my lack of participation there probably contributed to their rejecting me. Sign up, find question, have useful comment to make (no good for a full answer, but great clarifying comment on another) get told "sorry you can only post questions and full answers and nothing else until you've spent tons of time giving us free content" and was like "LOL OK [logout]".

Got new email at work and am starting with reputation 1 at SO. Can't comment anymore. This is hostile and I don't want to write answers any more. They have a lot other privileges which I never cared for. But commenting should not be a privilege.

Let's see what comes first: rep 50 or the next new email.

Always curious: why are you using a company email instead of a private email for SO? Using company email for something potentially interesting privately or just a potential long-time investment is something I still fail to understand.

I keep private and work stuff separated. I have a private SO account as well.

That makes sense, thanks for answering.

You can add new emails or change the email of your existing account.

You can link your SO account to more than one email.

When I explored this a year or two back, you couldn't remove an email.

Given demain transfers, this would be a straight-up security hole miles wide.

It is possible to remove an email address used for authentication now.

Per Joel Spolsky himself "We have almost 300 amazing employees worldwide and booked $70m in revenue last year. We have talent, advertising, and software products. The SaaS products (Stack Overflow for Teams and Enterprise) are growing at 200% a year."

Of that amount, the jobs product brings in close to 70% of the revenue.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-st...

I suspect your challenges with using jobs has to do with scale. It is competing with other companies that are spending a lot more, thus getting served up more in searches and thus generating more impressions.

Your comments about marketing though...yeah, that is daft. Swag costs next to nothing.

> I suggested to our Sales rep that the hostile reception a lot of first-time question-askers encounter probably isn't doing them any favors.

I also find that there seems to be a cadre of "answerers" who jump on new questions and then get pissy when you don't mark their answer correct because it doesn't actually answer the question. Your normal question will start getting negative votes suddenly at that point.

I also simply find SO quite a lot less useful than it used to be. They don't have a good solution to the "stale answer"--this was correct 5 years ago but is now completely obsolete and incorrect. SO is really only useful for things that appeared in the last year or that haven't changed in the last 10 years.

I look up answers on StackOverflow. I ask questions on IRC or (sometimes, these days) Slack. I don't think I've ever seen a co-worker's question get answered on SO—seems to be kind of a crap shoot. So are my methods but at least I don't have to tend my "karma" on those to be able to use them effectively.

While this is an unabashed just-so story...

The world is a hard enough place to get a good job. Especially when there are scores of other people trying to that single entry level coding position that opened up and you just got out of college. So, how do you set yourself apart from all the others? You put Stack Overflow on your resume. You provided 200 answers on Stack Overflow! Opps, that one just got deleted.

Stack Overflow is a vehicle for resume improvement and comparison. Someone with 631 rep must certainly be better than someone with 239 rep. It sets a clear goal for how you measure up against the competition. Remeber to up vote your friends from college too.

Now that you've got a job as a contractor, your project manager is trying to find you contracts and up your billable rate... sending out your resume. He's asking you to get your reputation to over 2000 so the resumes can be marketed as "in the top 10% of Stack Overflow Users" or something like that. Everyone else in the office too. The easiest way to do that is to up vote all your co-workers and make trivial edits (guaranteed two rep and can't be down voted).

Documentation was a bonanza! Just add a few words, toss some code and as long as it is a "substantial edit" the reputation will roll in.

This is even more important for those people trying for the elusive remote jobs that get listed on the side of every Stack Overflow page and attach the profile of the person with it.

---

How much of that is accurate? I have no idea. Its a story of a hypothetical social group at Stack Overflow that isn't interested in Spolsky vision or the Atwood vision of what the site should be.

It's also a site that has people who try to make a community site and feel that an upvote is the same as a like on Facebook. Make people feel better by up voting their posts (especially if they are down voted).

There's also the "FreELance" where people get a job for beer money and then post every single problem they have to Stack Overflow.

Without any guidance from SO corporate as the final arbitrator of culture, nor the tools for the core group (see "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy") to clearly define the boundaries that exist, the only tool that people have to get people who have a differing philosophy for what the site should be is rudeness. Compound this with far more things for the core group to curate and moderate (trying to keep it from becoming, in their minds, Yahoo Answers)... and, well, you've got Stack Overflow of today.

Why would you continue to pay for something that you weren't using though? That seems odd to me in terms of being responsible with company money, especially if it came down to some free tshirts.

It's a job listing, they might leave it open looking for good candidates even if they don't _need_ one right now.

What's the point in downvoting the answer that outlines the reasoning (with which no one is forced to agree) behind the changes? It seems utterly childish. Does the SO "community" cannot grasp the fact the site needs to sustain itself somehow?

By convention on Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites, voting works differently on the meta.* sites.

On the main sites, downvoting means "this is a bad question or answer" or "this answer is incorrect".

On the meta sites, downvoting means "I disagree with this".

https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/270/167210

This is the case on every single site that enables content placement by user sentiment.

Downvotes are the digital tantrum.

I think it's possible that they feel like Teams and Enterprise are really great (I use Teams at work and really like it) but that it's not really well-known. When I talk to other people, they're not aware of them but like the idea.

If you have a product people really like but it doesn't seem like people are aware of it and want to encourage more adoption, you go looking for places to advertise... but the people most likely to want a internal version of SO are the people using SO. That means the obvious place to advertise is on Stack Overflow.

I think it's a bit overboard to make it the focus of the home page rather than a secondary focus. But the homepage can change. It's already changed once.

Lots of companies make the centerpiece of their homepage their big new product. When Teams is better-known, it probably won't need to be so obviously marketed.

I think what makes this so jarring is that the first use of the homepage is for a specific reason rather than to talk about SO's primary purpose. If the page talked about how to ask/answer (something like a short version of the tour page) before it mentioned the other things (Teams, Jobs, etc) would that have been okay?

I don't generally find the homepage to be a stellar introduction to SO.

Agreed, the website change is dumb. They could make users aware of the products without the obnoxious front page advertising takeover.

I actually mean the questions list (the pre-change view). As-is, the list of active questions is full of... well, junk. It'd be better to have the home page include some curated questions not luck-of-the draw stuff to show off the value of the site.

I’ve had a few clients running SO enterprise. I too questioned it’s usefulness until I had some company/environment specific questions and immediately got answers. I think everyone needs something like this.

seemed like a good trial idea until I got onto the pricing page...

to get SSO, we'd have to start out with the 11$/user/month plan, in my current company(~1000 users) that would mean roughly 132 000$ a year making it a pretty tough sell.

But what is the value of something that actually helps users get answers faster? What is the cost of someone waiting around trying to find an answer? I can tell you from experience having implemented my fair share of content systems that:

1) You can always get them cheaper than the list price 2) If it works, the software pays for itself in less than a year

You can always get a tool for low-cost (or even free with open source). Having something that is already used by developers and has a good reputation makes it a pretty easy sale in my book.

This is where other solutions such as the Q&A plugin for Confluance have their place. The Q&A plugin for 1k users is $1000/year (on top of the $24k/year for the 1k users)... but that's a small fraction of the price for the enterprise cost.

... And lacking the integration with other systems, the enterprise version of SO (and for that matter, teams) really lacks a good price / integration / use pitch.

I would love to have something like this for a research group. But that is too steep a pricing!

At that scale it's likely you can negotiate a custom contract.

At my scale (<10 people), I can't. Are there any alternatives, open or closed source?

For 10 people you probably don't need the middle level, only the low one, which is $5/seat/month. There's also non-profit and educational pricing if you're associated with one of those. It's 50 cents/seat/month for the low level or $1.10/user/month for the middle one. They mentioned it on MSO. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/367590

Even at that scale you probably could ask - typically those companies value direct contact over "anonymous" online sales as they hope for longer term upselling opportunities once they have a name and phone number and give discount.

> revenue from job postings (Careers section) and banner ads did not bring enough money

Actually, as per 2018 We Are Developers conference, Joel mentioned the Careers section (Talent) was making them the most money: https://invidio.us/watch?v=oUzUo8Jre8s @ 4m40s

But isn't that the point? 'The most' doesn't mean 'enough'.

They could probably increase pricing on their jobs product, whatever they’re charging. I think it’s the best out there. I found the way they list remote positions and sometimes salary range to be highly effective in finding a job.

The company doesn't need to be that big. They claimed before that they were leaving money on the table with ads and recently just had another big discussion thread after running network ads. They can easily run at half the size and just be a nice business, but I guess that's not acceptable anymore.

When the company has early stage investors (and Stack Overflow does[1]), just being a nice business isn't enough. Investors want money back from their risky investment.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stack-overflow#secti...

Yea I didn't realize they raised $68M. That's a lot to recover and puts them in a bad position.

Articles on the $40M series D: https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-raises-40m-... and http://fortune.com/2015/01/20/stack-exchange-40-million/

From the Fortune article:

> Today, the company announces a new $40 million Series D round of funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and existing investors Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions, and Index Ventures participated. Stack Overflow, founded in 2008, has raised a total of $70 million in venture funding. The company did not disclose its valuation or revenue, but said it is not profitable.

> Currently, Stack Exchange earns a third of its revenue from an advertising product that allows companies like Microsoft market its products to developers. With this new funding, Stack Exchange will invest more heavily in its Careers products, which include job listings and a candidate search database. Clients pay anywhere from $495 for a 30-day job posting to thousands of dollars for annual job postings.

> ...

> The 200-person company will also use the capital to release its site in Japanese, Russian, and Spanish and invest in expanding its Q&A community. Currently, the majority of its users are located in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.

To add to the sibling comment (noname120), this is what Joel Spolsky said back in 2010 when raising money:

>Joel Spolsky: "Most of the goal of raising VC would be to create, partner with, and/or buy StackOverflow-like communities for other fields." -- from https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/39565

So 2019's intensified advertisement for enterprise sales of StackOverflow Teams looks aligned with what JS said back in 2010. I also see that Crunchbase lists subsequent funding rounds in 2011,2013,2015. I don't know if JS's pitch deck was the same investment thesis to the subsequent VCs or not.