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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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
Very civil, somewhat civil, not very civil, and not at all civil. That's what the little slider is for.
Fifty years of Yippie! 1968-2018
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?
He was unable to discern between how some users behaved on his forum and how the same users behaved on another forum.
Thus the mass ban of all people from this other forum, even when they were completely innocent. The reasoning behind that move is The Daily WTF for us :)
Why did you leave StackExchange? Real reason?
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.
Actually, please allow me to post the full story here since I suppose most slashdot users don't know about it.
Once upon a time there was a website called The Daily WTF, it was pretty popular. And they needed to replace their old forum with a newer one, so the owner of the website chose Discourse, because apparently he was friends with Jeff Atwood.
Now, the users in that forum tend to troll each other a lot, and they love to find bugs in crappy software (it's the whole reason for the website). They found a severe XSS vulnerability within 24 hours, and a boatload of bugs shortly after (did you know Discourse has no QA testing?). People weren't happy with the "infiniscroll", the general website slowness, the inconsistent DiscoMardownBBcdeHTML syntax, etc. They started to complain.
The Discourse team came to the forum to answer questions and monitor the "meta/bugs" category (which was collecting several bugs per day). They had some frictions with the community since Jeff Atwood's idea of "civilized discussion" is clearly different than TDWTF's (plus some members in particular love to post inflamatory comments). This went on for some time, then they left.
But the forum was still slow and crashed every other day, and people still wanted to report bugs, so they went to meta.discourse.org, the official forum and bug tracker (Bugzilla, Jira? nope, Discourse). But as I said, Jeff has his own ideas of civilized discourse, which include things like silently deleting your posts for no clear reason, so people were still unhappy. Some TDWTF forum members decided to troll him a bit, doing things like everyone using the same avatar, but nothing particularly bad (IMO). This again went on for some time.
Then disaster happened: the admin of TDWTF forums went to meta.discourse to report that two buttons were in different order in the mobile and desktop views, but he made the mistake of illustrating the desktop view with a mobile screenshot (browser set to desktop mode). Jeff replied "not a bug, desktop view on mobile is not supported". The first admin replied that this had nothing to do with the bug, you can easily reproduce it in a desktop browser. ...and in response, Jeff banned every member of TDWTF, with the only messages "sorry, you are no longer welcome here", and another Discourse developer self-banned from TDWTF with the message "Time for you to migrate off Discourse".
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
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.