Part of the difficulty SO faces is that there's sort of two similar but distinct problems that it's meant to solve, and as such there is no one "community". It's simultaneously a place to ask programming questions and get answers to them, and it's a repository of commonly asked programming questions with curated answers. The heavily engaged section of the community represented by your linked thread tends to focus on the latter goal, and the things they do to benefit the site for it (e.g., the aggressive closed-as-duplicate patrol) tend to be the things that makes it a hostile feeling place for the "long tail" community of new question askers and occasional answerers.

A trivial solution to this dilemma seems to be to consider stack overflow a place for the former, and have a system in place where you can vote specifically to elevate a question to the latter category. (god knows they don't mind adding stuff, with comments, votes on comments, votes on questions, on answers, votes on closing questions, votes on reopening them... – surely yet another kind of vote wouldn't bother them!)

Such an elevation may require some small edits. This adds all sorts of benefits:

1. Given that it is now clear that the question is moving from 'this answers the question asked by the original poster' to 'this is now like a blog post, generally useful information that should score highly on google', it is completely fine to edit the question and turn it into something that no longer entirely matches the original asker. I'd even go so far as to clone the question, and leave the real question unmolested.

2. The question (or, better yet, an answer) can be marked as obsoleted or outdated. There are huge swaths of questions on SO that have a ton of votes and an answer that was fantastic in the past, but is now flat out misleading or wrong, but it seems both onerous to begin the path of finding a few thousand people to downvote it, as well as 'mean' to the poster of that answer, and tricky for the historic purposes of the internet (imagine a fix in some source code has a comment that links to this answer!) - and for similar reasons, editing the answer so that it is nothing like the original answer is also flat out bizarre. It'd be so much better if it was possible to vote an answer as 'obsolete' or 'outdated'. But that doesn't work if SO is at odds with itself and at once a repo of common questions AND a specific question->specific answer forum.

3. Given that an SO community now has a presumably much smaller set of questions-with-answers that have been elevated to 'commonly asked question with great curated answers', they can 'police' their fiefdom of curated general knowledge vastly better, with mods and random passersby invited to ocassionally inspect one of these curated answers and see if it still seems useful, applicable, and correct in the current day and age. It also becomes far more feasible to browse through the entirety of the curated questions list.

This already exists as "Community wiki" [0], which is almost exactly what you describe, at least in theory.

It seems like a useful feature that often has a positive effect. It's not clear to be that it's improved the general attitude of the community or of management.

[0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/11740/what-are-comm...

The community wiki is strange to me because it completely removes the gamification aspect. If your post becomes a community wiki, you stop getting reputation. If you edit a community wiki, you get no reputation.

Ah, very interesting.

But does it matter? The SO I know still aggressively hints at the 'I dont know what we actually are' problem; if you answer very obvious questions, you get downvoted with notes to 'VTC and move on', for example. I also get no option to vote to promote an answer into the wiki.

The community wiki feature as implemented does not fulfill what I'm proposing, I'd say. Or at least, the current policies do not mesh with the existence of the wiki in a way to solve the dilemma.

I don't think community wiki's are what was described at all.

I'd describe as every question starting out as a forum post and only upvoted questions become Questions.

No one's question gets deleted. Question quality doesn't get diluted.

I was active from very early on but lost trust in SO when my best answer got turned into a community wiki. It’s an amazing resource but now I mostly consume.

The thing is that you eventually get a good answer, and I don't know who, but someone does eventually go back around and delete all the bad answers. I checked all my previous questions. I remember being met with people cursing me out for not already knowing the answer (why would I be even asking in the first place?), and after a few months, when I go back for reference, it all looks peachy.

You're left with a golden nugget of interaction with most answers, and that builds up over time.

I would switch too, but they do provide value as of today, even while your first few interactions might be more unsavory, because at the end of the day, as far as I can see, the people giving terrible first answers are regular people, and if so, the value they're providing is finding the good answer in a sea of awful people.

I’m just hearing about this case for the first time, and it took me a while to understand what happened, the question is detailed but there’s no summary, so here’s mine in case you’re interested:

A moderator had questions about / issues with a new Code of Conduct policy change which would “apparently force” moderators to use preferred pronouns of users, while the moderator preferred to use “they” to avoid using the wrong pronoun. StackExchange abruptly demoted the moderator before the change was published, and have since failed to give a good, evidence supported reasoning why. StackExchange attempted to apologize, multiple times, escalating to its CTO. The moderator still feels hurt and has not been reinstated.

You’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head. A few missing pieces:

- The moderator in question is a professional writer and preferred to avoid using any pronouns at all. She emailed SE to ask if that was acceptable, or if the new policy was mandating that she go out of her way to use pronouns. SE did not respond to her emails at all, then several weeks later they revoked her moderator status on a Friday night without even telling her — she figured it out when logged into the site and saw that her moderator tools were gone.

- Stack Exchange then went to the press and called her a transophobe and a bigot. They did post several “apologies,” but they weren’t apologies at all — they simply restated the (false) accusations and said they weren’t going to do anything to fix it. (See https://web.archive.org/web/20191005000615/https://meta.stac...)

- SE didn’t retract any of the accusations until the moderator got a lawyer and prepared to sue for defamation (SE’s accusations were the top Google result for her name for months)

- Then when all of the outrage started to die down, part 2 began when SE fired two long-time community managers who were just about the only staff members left that the community still trusted: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/342039/258777

Jiminy! That's an unforced error if I ever saw one! Thanks for the summary and context.

It's worth noting also around this same time they changed the front page of the site from the list of current questions to a "welcome" page that attempts to direct you towards purchasing one of their enterprise products. This is of no use to the vast majority of users who go to the site.

Between that and their CEO retiring, it's clear that the site is moving to a new way of working, and it's one that isn't beneficial to their actual users. If they're having trouble making money the way they previously did, then I guess they have to try something new, but it sure is sad to see this happen.

I'd say most people come to SO from Google searches and are not following any of those politics.

Most users, sure. I think most of the regular answerers are aware of this, and they are the main value of SO.

As a pretty avid finder of answers on SO, it's not surprising how much money people are willing to throw at this. It's one of the most useful resources on the internet, from my experiences.

But not a resource that was able to become profitable.

It is the Uber hypothesis. With so many users and so much demand, there must be profit somewhere right? /s

They're already making money from 200k paid user accounts, from their team/enterprise-facing products, which they're using the funding to expand on.

Also, Uber has raised 160x as much capital, which makes the comparison slightly hyperbolic.

Not sure that's the best example: Uber is profitable in mature markets, but has high fixed costs from legal battles and SDC adventures.

My question is, why can't SO make a profit? All the substantive content is given for free by the community, and it's a widely known, relied-upon site. How is it so hard to cover operating costs from ads and whatever related sources come from that?

Uber is only “profitable” if you ignore a lot of expenses.

I’m purposefully not choosing the latest quarter that looks worse. I don’t think it’s fair to judge whether a company has a sound business model based on the effects of Covid.

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...

Adjusted EBITDA. We define Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss), excluding (i) income (loss) from discontinued operations, net of income taxes, (ii) net income (loss) attributable to non-controlling interests, net of tax, (iii) provision for (benefit from) income taxes, (iv) income (loss) from equity method investment, net of tax, (v) interest expense, (vi) other income (expense), net, (vii) depreciation and amortization, (viii) stock-based compensation expense, (ix) certain legal, tax, and regulatory reserve changes and settlements, (x) asset impairment/loss on sale of assets, (xi) acquisition and financing related expenses, (xii) restructuring charges and (xiii) other items not indicative of our ongoing operating performance.

it's more like there's no reason why it can't be profitable but it wants to expand into 100 other niches

Aside from the Monica Celio event, SO navigated the trouble waters of newspeak well enough to deserve respect.

IMO, they should not have created non-technical sites. This is where the danger lies, but they were confident they can handle it.

When SO took off they thought they could replicate the success with other sites. This lead to the original trilogy (SO, SuperUser, ServerFault) and the Area51 site to propose new sites, of which many betas were started. Turns out few beta sites reached the engagement criteria to graduate to a full site, and this creeping scale with hundreds of site led to substantial technical debt. Each site was more or less a fork of the codebase, and required a separate DB instance.

The mistake was to treat each site as a separate community and expect it to eventually grow to an SO-level success. In contrast, Reddit's subreddit approach is much more scaleable and can tolerate niche communities. Reddit is strong not because of any single community, but because of the combination of communities to grab inbound traffic and keep users engaged. SO partially missed out on this.

> Each site was more or less a fork of the codebase, and required a separate DB instance.

I don't believe this is true. At least as of 2016, the various sites were on a shared codebase [0], and there were two SQL Server clusters total [1], for all the various sites, chat, devops, other systems, etc.

[0]: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

[1]: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

Yes, what you say is more precise than what I said. They did a lot of fixing and by now nearly all sites use the same codebase (incl frontend), apparently with feature toggles for some sites (e.g. Stackapps or Meta have unique mechanics but run on the same software). The only surviving forks are probably Area51 and their Enterprise product. Previously, frontend/layout had diverged though, which prevented rapid rollout of new UI features[1]. One of the perks of a graduated site used to be a custom design (not always just CSS changes).

Sites don't need separate database servers but separate database schemas, which is also why migrations between sites are still quite broken. Many processes around launching a new site appear to be very manual.

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/307862

Why, I greatly appreciate sites about foreign languages study, for instance.

Of course, something like politics.stackexchange.com would be a suicide.

So like... https://politics.stackexchange.com

I'd rather avoid either asking or answering anything there like a plague. Maybe not as suicidal as tweeting something slightly unorthodox on a politically heated topic, but still not a place to be while the cancel culture exists.

Not to mention Interpersonal. :(

Judaism is a heated topic. If they did not have judaism.stackexchange.com, they would not have the Monica Celio incident.

That sounds awfully close to antisemitism. Perhaps you'd like to expand upon your statement?

What makes Judaism as a topic more heated than Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, all of which also have their own Stack Exchange sites?

You just proved my point!

... no, definitely missed it. Do you think that there's something special about Judaism vs other religions that makes it contentious to talk about?

If so, what and why?

If not, what are you talking about?

I'm not keen on going back to the experts exchange days. The only thing that matters to me is that I can either find an answer immediately or eventually get an answer. Today, that still works meaning the community is still working. I'm not able to get my answers from standard docs because my questions tend to be for edge cases in tech or languages that I don't use as often.

“I would switch sites easily if there was a compelling alternative, but I haven't heard of one.”

That’s because it’s difficult to unseat an incumbent in a market where there are strong network effects, which is also the same reason that investors are willing to invest. The fact that they have lost brand trust without losing traffic is a positive, not a negative.

A lot of investors have ingrained that "bundling/unbundling" phases happen across every industry and see Google Search as the ultimate unbundling opportunity in all likelihood. Therefore, I'm not surprised micro/niche search engines continue to see outsized funding relative to their business model potential.

>I would switch sites easily if there was a compelling alternative, but I haven't heard of one.

I think you just answered your own question on why people are willing to throw money at them.

This has been an issue since the very beginning. There was a "discussion" and you can guess which side won.