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Founders@Google Presents: The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange

Google TechTalks

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  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Joel Spolsky, co-creator of Stack Overflow

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11K views14 years ago1 recommendation

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Joel Spolsky explains how the software architecture and rules of Stack Overflow were intentionally designed to shape its community culture and curation standards.

Google Tech Talk September 10, 2012 Presented by Joel Spolsky. ABSTRACT Software developers love Stack Overflow and know that it has a ... unique culture to it. But what isn't as well known is how the structure of the software and technology behind Stack Overflow is designed to help shape that community. We'll discuss some of the unique aspects of the Stack Overflow community, the basics of cultural anthropology, and how we've designed the sites to facilitate the community that our users ask for. Speaker Info: Joel Spolsky is an expert on software development, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, and the co-creator of stackoverflow.com. His website Joel on Software is popular with software developers around the world and has been translated into over thirty languages. He has written four books about software development, including Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent (Apress 2007). Joel has worked at Microsoft, where he designed VBA as a member of the Excel team, and at Juno Online Services, developing an Internet client used by millions.

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1 person recommends this

What people say. Recommended for its insights into online community design and how Stack Overflow successfully curated high-quality answers by excluding discussion.

Permiton Hacker News • Recommends

On “We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole”

StackOverflow was successful explicitly because of the people/question it excluded . The "toxicity" was the point. It was trying very very hard not to become Yahoo Questions. If you want to hear more about this you should watch Joel Spolsky's talk "The Cultural Anthropology of Stack Exchange": link to this video The point of StackOverflow was explicitly not to help the question-askers, but to prioritize the people who would reach the question via Google. That's why so many people have bad stories about times they went to ask questions on StackOverflow: it was supposed to be very high-friction and there was supposed to be a high standard for the questions asked there. Now with LLMs users get the best of…
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spolskyon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Stack Overflow Moderator Election”

This. Here's a video of the speech in question: link to this video We generally believe that it's important to keep the quality on Stack Overflow high, so that when you click on a stackoverflow.com result on Google, you can trust that you're going to get something good. That means that Stack Overflow is not just a host where anyone can type things into the Internet, and we host it. It's a curated environment.
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mhpon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Expatriates Stack Exchange”

Your thesis is that "StackExchange itself is becoming a little bit backward", but the statements you use to back that up have been part of Stack Exchange from the beginning. Also, the things you point out that are 'broken' are part of the formula that makes the network succeed. Stack Overflow was not built for discussion. The FAQ says: "Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers." I understand that you may want those types of questions to exist there, but that's not the original purpose of Stack Overflow. (Sidenote: different sites, depending on their topic or maturity do allow mor…
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