> It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work").

This explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's goals were misaligned to humans. Pretty ironic that AI bots goals are more aligned :-/

▲ zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-]

Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.

That is not a reason for fishing instructors to give up. And it is not a reason why the facility should hand out fish; and when the instructors go to town and hear gossip about how stingy they are, it really just isn't going to ring true to them.

▲ lelanthran 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Well, yes. Most people want to be given a fish, rather than learning how to fish.

Understood, but that is not what SO represented itself as. They called themselves a Q and A site, not a wiki of fact-checked information.

From what you are saying, they pretended to give fish when in reality only teaching fishing. Users went their because they were told that they could get fish, and only found out once there that there was no fish, only fishing lessons.

Blame lies squarely on SO, not on users. If SO clarified their marketing as "Not a Q and A site" then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Right now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange, and this is what it says on the landing page, front and center:

     Stack Exchange Q&A communities are different.

▲

zahlman 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Understood, but that is not what SO represented itself as. They called themselves a Q and A site, not a wiki of fact-checked information.

At the beginning, even Atwood and Spolsky didn't really know what "a Q&A site" is. They didn't have a precedent for what they were making; that was the point of making it. Even Quora came later, and it's useless now because they didn't get it.

It turns out that a Q and A site actually fundamentally is pretty close to "a wiki of fact-checked information", just with Qs as a prompting and labeling mechanism. (Which really isn't that surprising; if you've seen e.g. science books for children in Q&A format, you'll notice the Qs are generally unrealistic for children to ask. I remember one that was along the lines of "is it true you can get electricity from a lemon?", used to introduce a description of a basic copper-zinc battery cell.)

By 2011 or so, at least Atwood had figured this out, and was publicly blogging to explain it. By 2014, a core group of users clearly grasped the idea, but was still struggling to figure out what kinds of close reasons actually keep questions on target (and were also struggling with a ton of social issues in general).

> Right now, the only description of the SO site is on stack-exchange

Not true. https://stackoverflow.com/tour

	▲	lelanthran 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> https://stackoverflow.com/tour From your link: > This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat. > > Just questions... > > ...and answers. And that's specifically what you said the site was not; people were going there for answers to their questions. They weren't getting them.