Stack Overflow: Quality through Community Control
Stack Overflow has created a community with very high-quality standards by ceding control to community members with strong reputations
Stack Overflow is the predominant place on the web for programming-related questions and answers. The platform has over 8M user accounts and over 15M questions have been asked and answered by users.
Stack Overflow is notable for its ability to maintain high quality standards despite the open nature of the platform. Many open platforms, such as Android, struggle to maintain high quality bars the more they open the platform. Stack Overflow maintains a high-quality bar for content by assigning reputational scores to users, giving content control to community members and automatically monitoring question and answer content for quality indicators.
One of the key ways Stack Overflow generates high quality content is through the reputation point system it assigns to members for asking and answering questions. Users receive points for up-voted questions and answers. The “Users” section of the homepage lists users in order of their reputation points creating a public badge of honor for those who have contributed the most, encouraging users to continue contributing to the community.
Members with high reputational scores also receive moderator control over the community. Users with varying levels of reputation score have the power to edit other users’ questions, close questions, and even delete questions. This ceded control not only incentivizes users to contribute to the community, it also helps maintain the high quality of the content.
Stack Overflow has also implemented automated monitoring of posted questions and answers to recognize commonly posted patterns of bad questions and answers. For example, if a user tries to type “I’m having this problem too!” as an answer, they are taken to the “How to answer” guide with information about the community guidelines for questions and answers. The website also tracks IP addresses and user accounts with repeated violations of community standards and will block those accounts from being able to contribute content.
Stack Overflow is not without issues. Notably, while Stack Overflow has created substantial value for the developer community, it has struggled to capture some of that value for the company. Ads and job postings are two of the key ways Stack Overflow has been able to make money. Job postings provide benefit both to companies and users of the site who may be seeking jobs. Ads are a more contentious way to make money amongst the developer company, but Stack Overflow has adopted a “dev-friendly” approach to ads. They wrote openly about their approach to selling and displaying ads and have publicly stated that they don’t care if users use ad blockers. Stack Overflow has also worked on building an enterprise product, to help developers share expertise within companies.
Another key platform issue is the widely varying needs of different users. Stack Overflow is a well-known place to seek answers to extremely complicated, specific problems. The site also features beginner content, but some community members occasionally exhibit sarcasm or even hostility to beginning developers who ask basic questions. This can make the community feel unwelcoming to folks just getting started which could risk the rise of an alternative platform.
Stack Overflow has exhibited incredible growth and value as a platform for providing high-quality question and answer content to software developers. As the platform continues to grow, it will be crucial to keep a tight watch on the health of the community, particularly for new users. Enabling users to moderate the community has ceded significant control to the community which could be an Achilles’ Heel in the long-term.
Sources:
https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/11/15/how-we-make-money-at-stack-overflow-2016-edition/
https://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=Reputation&filter=all
https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d
I wonder how susceptible Stack Overflow would be to disintermediation in its enterprise play. Companies who receive high value answers/information from certain contributors, may want to use those contributors as consultants or hire them as employees.