Slashdot Mirror
Interviews: Ask Stack Overflow Co-Founder Jeff Atwood a Question
Jeff Atwood is an author, entrepreneur, and software developer. He runs the popular programming blog Coding Horror and is the co-founder of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network. In early 2012 he decided to leave Stack Exchange so he could spend more time with his family. A year later he announced his new company the Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. and the Discourse open-source discussion platform which aims to improve conversations on the internet. Jeff has agreed to give some of his time to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
What is the root password for the majority of your systems?
If you had a magic wand to make one change in technology right now, what would it be?
comes directly from search engines, vs. people who log in to the web site directly?
Jeff,
How does this Slashdot question thing actually work? Does some Slashdroid from Dice cold call you and ask you to do the Slashdot community the favor of answering our questions? Or, do you pay Dice for access to their community for your marketing purposes.
Many people will take this question as an offense or a challenge, I mean no such disrespect. I think that many others here on Slashdot would like to know the truth behind these community ask Slashdot posts.
As a follow up; if the answer is the latter, that you initiated the "conversation", why did you choose Slashdot and not Reddit?
Moderators who cherrypick questions, rigged elections, insane groupthink. The whole organization is worse than WIkipedia and no where near as useful.
Jeff, have you thought about how to use reputation mechanisms to improve the quality of published scientific results? I'm asking in the context of John P. A. Ioannidis's famous paper http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124.
It seems to me one fix for this (horrible) problem might be an online reputation mechanism where scientists could rate the reproduciblility of published results.
Thoughts?
(thanks for inventing Stack Exchange - you've done the world a big favor)
Hi Jeff, I am a long time Stack Exchange user and community moderator on Programmers.
You seem to operate your startup space out of New York as opposed to the popular incubator location of the Silly Valley. Is this out of a conscious choice or rejection of the Silicon Valley VC culture? If so, what is your opinion of the potentially unethical recruiting strategies and inherent discrimination of these strategies as employed and evangelized to founders by organizations like Y Combinator? Do you have any opinions of Y Combinator?
How much civilized discourse do you think actually happens on /. ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Is this the dumbest question you've ever been asked?
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
In hindsight, would you have reduced the scope of on-topic questions for Stackoverflow to where it's at today when you started the site knowing what you do now, and do you think it would've made the site less popular?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Why did you feel it necessary to ban the entire population of the WTDWTF Discourse install from meta.d? After all, these are the people who, over a period of 18 months, have picked up more bugs and inconsistencies in your software than the whole of your team of paid developers and testers. The same people who are now looking to migrate off Discourse.
If you could ask anyone anything, who would you ask, what would you ask them, and why?
I don't mean to minimize StackOverflow's contribution to the online knowledge base, because it's a great tool when used properly. I'm a systems guy and Server Fault is often more useful than vendor support for looking up strange error messages and possible troubleshooting routes. But, there are a lot of low skill programmers and sysadmins out there who lean on these tools way too much. How do you feel about these properties contributing to the crappy cargo cult programming and sysadmin work we see in our field?
Also if some question is even slightly controversial or in any way subjective, it is locked down by a gang of annoying Nazi mods. Don't these guys have anything better to do?
Almost any question about "is x better than y?" is closed. Threads should be closed only if there is some kind of abuse.
From time to time I search stackoverflow for easy answers and I would say about 20% of the time the question has been closed even though it is the reason I went to stackoverflow in the first place. In most of these instances a useful answer was also provided before closure. So my question to you is simply what gives.
The most common reason for closure I run into is that the people closing it don't have any domain clue what is being asked and appear to assume if they don't understand nobody else does either.
Another common reason for closure is the "duplicate" question meme in which nuance is overlooked and questions are marked as duplicates because the people doing the marking failed to understand or appreciate the difference. This is very annoying.
Less common but equally annoying issues are closure due to chatter about domain specific algorithms not being "programming questions" or even more amusing someone posting a question that is more specifically addressed by one of a hundred different stack exchanges even though it is still on topic.
Jeff,
I see a lot of users on the Discourse meta forums that appear to be suspended for no particular reason. Many of them seem to have contributed a lot to discourse (if their Senior Tester badges are to be believed). What happened to them?
As SO ages, some of the offered solutions are no longer valid.
Are there currently plans to automate some way of validating old answers automatically?
This problem seems to be a larger problem with forums in general. Do you have any musings regarding aging forums?
Stack Overflow is a great resource. However, it's license is problematic. Several posts on the license discussion makes it hard to use the code in your project.
The simple solution would be to make everything public domain.
Have you considering changing the license to make it public domain?
In reading your work for years and seeing your various contributions, it seems like you are fascinated with filtering out the most useful information. In many of your blog posts the insight is not yours but rather a conglomeration of chosen useful quotes and sources. I very much appreciate this. My question for you is how do you handle critical feedback vs trolls when dealing with communities. For example, the down button is often a disagree button rather than a negative point. How do you deal with mixed opinions?
To use a real life personal example, TEF noted how he felt you were suggesting that people shouldn't play around to learn. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csyL9EC0S0c ) Yet, the way he said it was clearly inflammatory. How do you separate the legitimate concern and critical feedback from the troll who doesn't want to listen to your response?
Why did you leave StackExchange? Real reason?
Not long ago I was reading a recent discussion on reddit's woes and the hiring of a new CEO. It made me think how we have seen communities come and go for many years.
Clay Shirky wrote about his experience in 1978: "Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue... And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. ... the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. ... the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom."
There are two clear trends. One is that less input and customization tends to grow bigger. Note how Geocities was replaced with Myspace which was then replaced with Facebook and Twitter. These newer systems take away personal freedom of expression and makes people follow a 'prescribed' system, albeit an easier one to use. The other trend is that communities that try to be truly free and open end up either stifled by that openness or give up. The only obvious exception is a platform that allows us to simply filter out everything we don't want to see, which becomes a series of the feared echo chamber. With the excessive amount of data and the build up of complex rules on how information is shared, where does this leave us? It seems that like the famous iron triangle allowing free (and legal) speech with the possibility of diverse opinions, a cohesive group, and growth only allows you to pick two.
It seems to me this is a wicked problem, perhaps unsolvable. But I wonder what you think regarding what other design options exist? Is this even possible with human nature as it is? Which do you value most: free speech, a cohesive group or growth?
What has been your involvement in SO/SE/discourse.org at a programming level? (Kudos anyway. The results are certainly impressive).
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
You left Stack Exchange to spend more time with your family yet a year later you launched another company. Was the time spent with your family not all that great compared to developing a new business idea? I can see a lot of hard nosed entrepreneurs suffering from boredom when not out on the edge. However, you only get what you give; at work _and_ at home.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
I think its probably inarguable that the biggest innovation StackOverflow brought to the web was the centrality of reputation and user moderation to its design. Sure, our own /. had done something similar years before, and it was hardly the first either, but no website I know of had before taken it to its logical conclusion in quite the way SO does. This effectively "crowdsourced" a lot of traditional website administrative activities, which turned out to be an incredibly powerful idea. Practically all the functionality of SO is built around the concept.
So when I saw you were tackling online message boards, I expected the same kind of thing. But browsing around a typical Discourse thread, I'm not seeing that at all. Sure, users can "heart" posts, but all that does is bump a small counter next to the heart. There is no way to tell at a glance which posts users found the best and/or worst. Higher rated posts don't sort to the top, or get bigger or anything. As a result, I don't even see that feature used much. Certainly its nothing like SO, where post voting is the central activity. It also seems like moderation on Discourse is designed to be done by administrators, not users. I don't see any facility for users getting moderation privs as they gain reputation. Compared to SO, Discourse seems kind of, well, like a big step backwards in interactivity.
I'm sure I'm missing something here. What is it? Or did you really decide SO's centering of its design around users and their opinion on posts was a mistake, or perhaps just not a good fit for a more generalized discussion board?
I don't see many large, high profile sites running an entire Microsoft Windows stack nowadays (IIS/SQL Server, etc) but Stack Exchange is one of them.
What were the reasons behind choosing a full Microsoft stack versus any of the Open Source alternatives which seem much more prevalent, especially in start-ups and smaller businesses for web presence?
Have a squat over at the hobo house.
It seems like the internet is mostly a terrible place to have debates. Many forums quickly become echo chambers for people who want to be as offensive as possible just to prove that they can exercise their free speech rights. Other times debates are derailed by cheap tactics like being deliberately offensive to derail the arguments and bog everyone down in accusations that they are "SJWs". Ad-hominems and obvious logical fallacies seem to be the norm.
How do you plan to avoid this happening? So far no-one seems to have found a way.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Mr Atwood, how can we improve the quality of debates on Slashdot? We don't have access to the source code so suggestions that users can implement would be best, but I'm sure the staff are reading too.
Lately it has become apparent that certain topics are impossible to debate on Slashdot, e.g. women in tech. They rapidly devolve into an echo chamber of rage and outright trolling, and dissenting voices are mod-bombed into oblivion even though the meta-moderation system is supposed to prevent that. There are rules, e.g. for how to apply moderation, but people ignore or abuse them to shape the debate how they want it.
What can we do to fix this?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
How is it that you've managed to make Stack Overflow the top 10 search results for common programming questions despite your own supposed efforts at deduping and the fact that Google usually groups similar pages from the same site itself?
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
How do you feel about the fact that while important questions go unanswered people are harvesting points simply by taking the word "thanks" off the end of posts? Does it worry you at all that the kind of people most attracted to your site are not interested in actually answering questions?
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
Why do even accepted answers live below the comments of people who have misread the question and are claiming it's a duplicate, or worse just making fun of the question?
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
When I google a problem, I often encounter the crapexchange sites in the first few hits. OF these maybe on a good hit there is a 40% chance of getting a good answer. 30% of the time I get a wrong answer, about half are those are so oviously wrong the person must be under the influence of some pretty strong hallucinogens. 30% are shutdown because some Nazirator is pissed that he can't answer the question in 5 minutes. If he can't get the karma no one can!
Imagine the following scenario, a person posts a question to a DIY forum. A person responds by suggesting that the person stick a screwdriver into an electric socket. Another person calls the first person a moron.. It's the second person who gets punished. The person who suggests the screwdriver gets increased karma.
I'm not a big fan of nastiness on the net, but you know what? if someone says something really stupid, they should get called on it!
One of the better descriptions of the problems of the whole class http://michael.richter.name/bl..."> is here.
So why did you create a sert of sites that seem to discourage experts ( except in a few rare exceptions ) and encourage mediocracy?
it seems to me that the whole thing is a scam to promote the clueless
A question on the history of Stack Exchange. What was the original idea that drove you to make StackExchange and how has it evolved or added since?
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Every time I see "this question is closed as "not constructive", I'd like to give StackOverflow a taste of their own medicine. For example, StackOverflow exec's would be having an board meeting over the phone, and all of a sudden the phone clicks off and a pre-recorded voice says, "This meeting has been closed as primarily opinion-based and not constructive".