2/24/2026 at 11:13:17 PM
I love posts like this because it’s just a knife fight between community members whose identities are built around curation VS. a company whose user studies all sound the same alarm “new users leave because their shit gets curated”Same thing happens to Wikipedia. The people building the platform pay good money for user study that show, pretty clearly, that trying to contribute to SO/WP is like hitting a brick wall. User study after user study will show the same thing but not give any way to break the logjam.
So then something like the above happens, with identical results each time. It’s glorious. Meanwhile new questions trend to 0.
by selridge
2/25/2026 at 6:08:29 AM
The previous role of the current VP of Community for Stack Overflow was at Wikipedia. Did it work then? Will it work now? I found SO useful because I could find working answers in minutes from search results. Threaded replies are going to make that much harder. But hey, mods won’t close my crappy questions any more, that’s a win right? Right??!?by taklimakan
2/25/2026 at 9:13:26 PM
>Did it work then? Will it work now?God, who knows. Could it have worked at Wikipedia? Both Wikipedia and SO have the same problem that all the easy work is taken. The article on Silicon looked *pretty* different 25 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Silicon&oldid=280...
"A chemical element, in the periodic table Silicon has the symbol Si and atom number 14."
Now it has 127 references. Same with SO. There's just only so many questions to ask about list comprehension but everyone has them. The site was built for a lot, but it wasn't built for new humans having question shaped problems who still wanted to ask those questions.
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#g...
This is not a problem that is gonna be solved by a change here or there. That graph says "toes up". Wikipedia has a softer one; it's heading the same direction and it hit the peak before SO did. It's structural. I think a lot of folks imagine "if only we did X, ..." but I am not so sure.
by selridge