New site design and philosophy for Stack Overflow(meta.stackoverflow.com)
meta.stackoverflow.com
New site design and philosophy for Stack Overflow
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/438177/new-site-design-and-philosophy-for-stack-overflow-starting-february-24-2026-at
9 comments
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??!?
>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.
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.
I feel stupid. Not only did I read all that, looking for and not finding the new philosophy. But then I did it again.
Yeah the philosophy part was completely absent. Many users are intuiting that a change in philosophy is strongly suggested here, yet whoever wrote this has been almost careful not to directly say what the new philosophy is and why it's so different from the old philosophy as to be worth rewriting all the code.
I have some sympathy for the author's total misjudgment of his/her audience given 95% of it just quit.
This will be the third death of SO, but likely way more permanent.
Did anyone click through?
That is a horrible website! Wow
That is a horrible website! Wow
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.