Scripting the Future of Stack Overflow
As we enter a new decade, there are tremendous forces converging—cloud computing, big data, AI, ML, and an increasingly diverse group of young coders from around the world. Every day, millions of developers visit Stack Overflow to find information they need as they push these exciting new technologies forward. There has been a massive shift since my days as a computer engineering graduate. I was fascinated by the power of languages like Perl, but had only my teachers, classmates, and a few small web forums and mailing lists as a community to support my learning. The numbers below really put into perspective the impact that our community generates and the opportunities that lie ahead:
- Across Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network, we saw around 10 billion page views from 100+ million unique visitors over the course of 2019.
- In 2019, Stack Overflow added over 2.8 million answers and 2.6 million new questions, with over 1.7 million new users joining the community. There are now over 18 million questions and 27 million answers on Stack Overflow, and over 150,000 people sign up for a Stack Overflow account each month, 12 years after we started.
- Every day, users answer thousands of questions on topics like cloud technology, container orchestration, and machine learning. There is an ever growing trove of knowledge on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.
- Our community members and volunteer moderators handled almost two million flags to keep inaccurate, abusive, unwelcoming, or inappropriate content off the site and in line with our updated Code of Conduct.
- Hundreds of thousands of engineers leveraged the power of Stack Overflow for Teams to better collaborate and ship products faster.
- Over 40,000 jobs were posted on Stack Overflow Jobs in 2019. We now have over 1,000,000 searchable profiles of developers who are interested in being contacted about a job on Stack Overflow Talent.
- Almost a million developers found new and useful tools after seeing a company advertise on one of our sites.
There are a handful of companies that are indispensable to the world of software and to our evolution to a digital society. Stack Overflow is privileged to be in this group of disruptive companies. Thanks to our founders Joel and Jeff, our employees all over the world, and the millions of community members who have contributed so meaningfully to our mission and laid the foundation for our future.
The work we do would not be possible without the contributions of our incredible community. Across Stack Overflow, hundreds of thousands of users, supported by hundreds of moderators, helped to review questions, triage answers, propose new tags, and keep the discourse respectful and on topic. The little actions taken on a daily basis add up to millions of important contributions. Alongside this tremendous activity, nuanced discussions about topics like cybersecurity, cloud server architecture, and data science are happening across our network of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sites.
Learning from the company and community — and evolving the organization
During my first three months at the company between October and December of 2019, I connected with all our employees around the world and spent a significant amount of time outside the office speaking with customers and community members. What became apparent in my conversations is that software development has evolved rapidly, and successful companies are evolving their own cultures and practices to keep pace.
For the modern developer, the lines between programming languages, software frameworks, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps are blurring. Developers and organizations are trying to keep up and compete (as the incumbent) or disrupt and take market share (from the incumbent) in an as-a-service digital economy. Every significant developer technology relies on coders finding answers by asking questions on Stack Overflow. But while Stack Overflow has played a massive role in empowering and enabling developers around the world to learn, write code, and build products faster, we as an organization have not kept up with the evolution of the industry.
It is critically important that we evolve our platform, community infrastructure, and culture to be more useful to our community so we continue to be a core part of a developer’s workflow. Of the ~90,000 respondents to our 2019 Stack Overflow Developer survey, 80% tagged themselves as hobbyist programmers, 60% wrote their first line of code before the age of 17, and only 10% were women. Statistics like these have significant implications on how we think about making our community more welcoming, engaging, and inclusive. The key to Stack Overflow’s future and growth are the millions of developers from around the world who find the site useful, but who haven’t yet been welcomed into the community. We need to expand our reach and engagement to ensure these developers join the conversation and push their own learning to new heights.
A key part of great product development is to stay close to customers, listen, and take a thoughtful, data-driven, and research-oriented approach to building products. In our case, it is critical that we work closely with our community to listen, change, and evolve rapidly. As an example, over the past several months, we had a lot of dialog with our community about how best to enforce and evolve our code of conduct. We learned that we needed much better channels to listen to our moderators and community members. We have not evolved the existing channels of engagement for power users in our community, like Meta, or articulated how we intended to make improvements going forward. This has caused friction as our user base and business have rapidly grown. We acknowledge these issues, apologize for our mistakes, and have plans for improving in the future.
In the fourth quarter of 2019, we created a large task force made up of passionate community advocates from across the company to propose solutions to this core problem. The team’s mission is to improve our feedback loop and working relationship with our community. We added a member of our Community team to our leadership team and restructured the organization to invest in Product leadership to build Community-centric features. We are also forming a moderator council, which will include a group of users with diverse experience levels and backgrounds who can help guide our processes. We’re making hard choices and treating no assumptions as sacred in considering ways to evolve the community.
Most importantly, we kicked off a key large scale community survey named Through The Loop and invited our entire community to share their suggestions, product feature requests, and ideas for how Stack Overflow should evolve more broadly. We’ve heard consistent feedback from you regarding key topics like question and answer quality, welcomingness and inclusion, and discovery for relevant questions and answers. All of this is in pursuit of new and more productive ways to work with and listen to our community in the next era of the company. We want to serve all of the millions of people who use Stack Overflow, not just those who know the most about how the site has worked in the past. To be clear, this does not mean channels like Meta will go away, but they need to grow to ensure that users are heard and responded to in a timely fashion.
We’ve completed the process of defining how our moderator council will be structured, shared an internal framework for asking coworkers tough community questions, defined the important functions that would be best served by more scalable solutions than Meta, and built outlines of our new moderator training modules. By the end of this quarter, all of these initiatives will be shared publicly with you, our users.
Community engagement and inclusion is a top priority for Stack Overflow in 2020. Already, the team has established and released a plan for improving communication and empowering our users internally. We are experimenting to improve in areas we know need work: encouraging more question asking, reduce user to user friction, expanding inclusion, and creating a more integrated experience between Stack Overflow and other technical sites on Stack Exchange. The results of all of this work is being shared publicly through our new Loop series on the Stack Overflow blog and by subscribing to our Stack Overflow newsletter and podcast. We have seen some encouraging results: more people are asking questions, we cut the number of negative comments nearly in half, and December was our best month ever for new user signups!
Our latest podcast is a conversation with Prashanth on our plans for 2020. Give it a listen.Building a business and serving every team
At the same time, Stack Overflow continues to grow and evolve as a business. We began with our Advertising product and then expanded to our Talent product. My first quarter helping to manage these businesses has convinced me that Stack Overflow is an underestimated and perhaps even under recognized platform for helping developers connect with companies directly either to understand their developer-centric products or to find their next role at those companies. There’s a lot we can do to raise the awareness of these capabilities.
Our third line of business, Stack Overflow for Teams, is our flagship SaaS product and lets development and technical teams use the power of Stack Overflow internally to answer questions about their own code and technology. It’s becoming an invaluable part of the toolset for developers and technical workers at tech giants like Microsoft, which has over 70,000 users. It’s also used by small startups like Osso VR, which has a few dozen developers using the platform. The Enterprise version launched only two years ago and our mid-level Business tier just six months ago. Within this short period of time, Teams became the fastest growing product in our portfolio. We’re also expanding partnerships within the product. Stack Overflow for Teams integrates with lots of your favorite tools—Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Okta. Key developer workflow tools like GitHub Enterprise and Jira are coming shortly.
The way companies use Stack Overflow for Teams is fascinating, including one that hits close to home: development teams looking to ship product faster and be more responsive to their customers. This requires Engineering, Product Management, Product Marketing, and other teams to collaborate closely to not only build and ship products but also enable Sales and Customer Success teams to present accurate and up-to-date feature updates and roadmaps to prospects or customers. We recently made Stack Overflow for Teams available for free for the first 30 days, so everyone can experience the power that comes with this collaboration and knowledge sharing tool.
What I hear time and again in conversations with our customers and community members is that the tools we built to discuss writing code can be extremely useful across many areas of an organization—in Engineering, Product Development, Product Marketing, and even People, Business Operations, Legal, Customer Success, and Sales organizations. I know developers love data so I wanted to share highlights from a study we commissioned from Forrester Consulting to assess Teams’ TEI (Total Economic Impact). They sat down with four of our enterprise-sized customers and dug deep. After weeks of interviews and number crunching, the findings prove an incredible 179% return on investment. The full study also revealed some other surprisingly huge impact for companies that use Stack Overflow Teams:
- $224,000 in question-asking time savings in the first year
- $1.1M in question-answering time savings in the first year
- Decreased time to market
- More efficient onboarding for new team members
These numbers are exciting and give everyone at the company a lot of confidence that we can continue to help developers and technical workers all around the world do their daily jobs better and more efficiently.
Growing Stack Overflow
In 2020, in order to continue to fuel our growth, we’re expanding and diversifying company leadership. Just last week we announced the addition of Teresa Dietrich, who joined as our Chief Product Officer and brings great technical leadership experience from companies like McKinsey New Ventures, Namely, and WebMD. We’ve also added Adrianna Burrows to our Board. In addition to being a Stack Overflow alum, Adrianna has been a marketing leader at great companies like Microsoft, Cornerstone on Demand and is currently CMO of Payscale. I’m grateful to have their expertise to help drive the company forward.
Stack Overflow is already an indispensable part of the developer workflow from the perspective of our public community, but there is so much more to do for developers as they ship code. Many of the product innovations we’re excited to explore under Teresa’s leadership are the opportunities at the intersection of private and public Stack Overflow. Developers want us to be a more active part of their daily workflow. Coders already leverage public Q&A several times a day to answer their most pressing development questions, but want a more integrated and more enriching experience, especially when combined with our private Teams product.
We are already seeing many companies leverage our community infrastructure to better support their own developer communities. Sencha, Snowflake, and Mapbox have all announced efforts to use Stack Overflow as a platform for helping programmers to use their products. “We want to make it easier and faster for anyone to find answers to their questions, especially questions that others have raised without needing to wait for a reply from our team,” wrote Yaniv Markovski, head of support at Mapbox. “As a bonus, joining in on this community conversation creates a feedback loop that allows us to create better documentation and learn how we can improve our product.” We are currently exploring how we can create an exceptional experience for developers and companies to interact more directly on Stack Overflow— i.e., by creating more curated channels and spaces on Stack Overflow to interact more directly with specific communities. Stay tuned for more ideas here!
As we look forward to 2020, we plan to invest in public Q&A, expand our community, and continue to cement our place as a pillar of the software industry and broader knowledge economy. We also know that we have work to do on improving how we engage with our community, as well as continuing to strive for more diversity, inclusion, and approachability.
This is a big mandate. So as we embark on the journey this coming year, I’ve asked everyone at Stack Overflow to maintain a growth mindset (through hard work, openness to feedback, and resilience), to always operate with our “why” at the center, and to conduct every meeting as if there is a community member and customer in the room. What I ask of you—anyone reading this post—is to continue to grow with us, to give us feedback through our new feedback loops, and to continue to rely on Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network as the essential resource for exchanging ideas and information on technical topics.
Visionary companies are guided by a mission, not just a sustainable business model, and seek out challenges that can help move humanity forward. We have the opportunity to do that at Stack Overflow, to realize our profound mission of helping write the script of the future by serving developers and technical workers. Let’s answer the most important questions in this great new era of technology, together.
19 Comments
Does this mean that Meta is being even further removed from the platform? How are you going to get bug reports?
Among all the things that I find contradictory here, the fact to you want to “expand inclusion” but still don’t have a transcript to the podcasts seems like a big one
Community engagement and inclusion is a top priority for Stack Overflow in 2020. — That in itself is a winning strategy. Reading this post got me to thinking about your comments on inclusion. Would you consider making a coding sandbox for hobbyists with input available from the community? It would be nice to practice on real world problems from beginning to end. This could also be leveraged for Enterprise business level clients. Keep up the good work.
> we kicked off a key large scale community survey named Through The Loop and invited our entire community to share their suggestions
Really? This is the first I’ve heard of it. Through what channel(s) did you extend these invitations?
Its good to see such a great vision and I am happy to be part of such a beautiful community.
Quite simple, my thoughts, so I will keep them short. I have been on SO for over 10 years. What appealed to me then was that it seemed to be a site of the developers for the developers. We all seemed to play a role in keeping SO operating and useful to the world at large. As I have seen SO evolve business-wise especially in the last few years, I have seen many turned off by the ramifications. SO works best as by the people for the people. How can I say stop being a business when you want to run a business, but it is precisely the business aspect of things being too visible which causes so much commotion. Give us, the users, our community.
[Did Stack Exchange cut the number of negative comments nearly in half between the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2019 and January 21, 2020?](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/45768/7654)
Changing scenario has brought many challenges,, and transformation is part of growth,, together we can achieve new goals.
Stackoverflow,, Super User & Stack Exchange team must re-engineer the system to encourage maximum participation.
“The key to Stack Overflow’s future and growth are the millions of developers from around the world who find the site useful, but who haven’t yet been welcomed into the community.”
I’ve had the privilege to work with many excellent, and a couple of brilliant, developers over my decades-long career, and continue to do so. The vast majority of those will do a Google search, click on the top result (usually a Stack Overflow question), get their answer, be happy, and move on. No votes, no thoughts of opening an account, no feedback. This is what made them feel welcome. This was my target audience for all of the questions I’ve asked and answered on this site over the years. My advice: Don’t screw that up.
In my opinion, what a lot of people on the various fluid sides of the ‘community vs company’ debate have forgotten is that those forever anonymous visitors are the life-blood of this place. Sure the company could shut the site down or hide it behind a paywall. Sure all the moderators could walk out. But at the end of the day, there is obviously demand for a site (or sites) like this, and it is that demand that will drive the existence of a site like this. And that demand seems to be growing no matter how we all behave here on Stack Overflow.
I honestly don’t believe that the reason that the millions upon millions of developers around the world, who use this site and don’t open an account, has nothing to do about feeling welcome. For those people, who will never ever join, as long as the site is convenient and they get good plausible information quickly, then the site has done the very best it can do to welcome these people. That proof and result of that is that they keep coming back.
I don’t have a vested interest in the company. You do. The volunteers who take responsibility for the upkeep of this place want to believe that it is a worthwhile effort. What I, and I think many of them, have a vested interest in is the *idea* that this place and other sites represents. I’ve posted info on my own tech blog, of code sharing sites, and I’m happy (maybe even borderline addicted) to helping other and showing off my hard-earned knowledge.
I hope you don’t try to force membership onto people who don’t want it, in a crazed politically correct effort to make them feel ‘welcome’. I hope that the moderators can accept that this is thing we’ve made here is for those people who will never ask a question, never open an account, never vote on an answer. As personally as they are justifiably taking things, I feel they would make different decisions if they kept that understanding closer to heart.
I’d love it if your company was a huge financial success, but I have my own job to support myself and my family. I look forward the day when one of my kids needs to find out some information, I tell them to research the information for themself aftey they ask me, and they find the answer on a question I’ve answered on this site. No money or stock options or potential corporate buyers involved. No frustration because of thousands of unclosed low quality posts due to the lack to some sought after feature. Just an exchange of useful information from one person to another.
I’m going to hang around here for as long as I can. I’m going to keep trying to moderate. I have my doubts and concerns, and they are warranted. Your statement here hasn’t alleviated any of that. Only actions and results will do that.
Hopefully, we would see positive changes with the moderators topic and the complex environment that we’re facing in the network. I expect to see your results.
Since you’ve mentioned Through the Loop, I think it’s worth pointing out that commentary in Meta has made it clear that Through the Loop is only intended for Stack Overflow users, and not users in the broader community across the other Stack Exchange network sites. Although I have never visited Stack Overflow itself, I spend an average of 20 to 30 hours a week answering questions on other community sites (The Workplace, Personal Finance and Money, etc). Despite that heavy involvement with Stack Exchange, I am not a Stack Overflow user, so I will not be eligible for inclusion in this process.
Whether I am personally included or not, it’s not really clear if me and the others who also focus on network sites vs Stack Overflow will even have a way to provide feedback in the future, since much of the commentary about new feedback mechanisms like Through the Loop has been exclusively Stack Overflow focused. The massive changes around Stack Exchange are both exciting and a little scary given the amount of time I spend with this community, and given that, it’s disappointing to know that people like me will not be able to participate in this process. I understand that Stack Overflow and supporting developers is – and always will be – the main focus, but it’s frustrating to feel like my slice of your user base is being deliberately excluded.
Excited to see stackoverflow continue to evolve over time!
tldr…
Could we have this in concise point form please. What changes can users expect?
I would like to make one comment on my personal user experience with SO:
I see no reason for a query on a search engine (of any brand) should lead me to a page which says something like the following…
“This question already has answers here:
[…] on Chromebook/Chrome OS (2 answers)
Closed 4 years ago.”
The whole presentation and response is disruptive, abrupt, insulting and fairly senseless to the user (in this case me). Internal searches yield the same response.
So why I ask, if SO is supposed to be the champion of uber-programming, smooth and flowing user experience and overall product excellence, would your own site work this way?
It’s like someone going into a bank (where ALL their money is) and asking a teller “What’s the difference between a Cashier’s Check and a Certified Check?” Then having the teller tell you “We’re sorry, this is a very old question, and has already been answered. You can read our old answer below, or go out and find that answer elsewhere” and then not allowing the client (again, me) to respond with anything like “Yeah…but…I need to know what my car dealer will need…blah blah” as the teller closes the window in my face.
I realize this example may not exactly fit here, but I hope you see my point.
Look, I am genuinely and too often bemused at what presenters pass off as an acceptable response to queries. Many responses I’ve been presented with from SO over the years have been borderline to argumentative, as in “Why would you ask such a primitive [aka dumb] question?” But then again, maybe I’m too sensitive…or maybe I’m too critical of mediocrity when there’s little reason for a “master resource” such as yours, fails to take a look at themselves.
I’m excited to hear about SO taking a look at their business model(s) and services.
But I’d like to suggest you append to that job, the task of re-designing your search result’s presentation and making it work for the user. This interface was designed by a bunch of propeller-heads twenty years ago when there was nothing else available as a resource for programmers. And it hasn’t been revisited since. Maybe patched, but not re-envisioned.
My suggestions are:
1) Stop saying “This question has already been answered:” and simply MERGE the posts into a single response that removes duplicates, includes the newer or edited replies, posts responses in age order and displays their dates on the left.
Understand that users’ queries are topical and not just mechanical into a large sea of knowledge that doesn’t have the time to deal with “old stuff” because you, or the data “have moved on” to more “important things”. Yet to the user, their question IS new.
2) Stop saying “Closed 4 years ago”. Certainly someone assigned to reply to a query can get pretty bored with the same-old-same-old. And certainly, if a topic has been answered pretty well, then the displayed results should point to the “answer”. But hey, you got a computer to do that for you, right?
I would be willing to bet good money that if you eliminated the closing of topics, automated the process of extending queries into groups or puddles, you’d discover the number of new individual queries would go down, and the quality of your resource would go up.
Nobody want’s to hear “We’re sorry, this topic is closed, don’t bother us again” because it better hadn’t be. And if you consider it as closed, then you better look harder at your user’s position as opposed to your mechanic’s.
The truth is, topics are NEVER closed – only your willingness to handle them – unless of course, you are determined to be dismissive and in that case, you’ve lost the client (me).
A query might be resolved, but the topic is NEVER closed. So keep your internal check-off to yourself and for your statistics.
3) Please take a look at what the typical user sees as his/her resource’s interface. It was poorly conceived yet perfect at the time. You don’t need to dress it up with flyouts, moving banners, irrelevant suggestions or pop-ups. That’s not what I’m saying.
The basic search and results are fine for the most part.
It’s the presentation and built-in assistance that I think, personally, needs a complete overhaul.
I feel like you may already be on the threshold and I just missed it in your letter.
But I thought I’d bring it up.
Thanks so much for consideration, and thank you for years of an excellent resource to the world, much less to me.
This appears to be an important bulletin – but too long, esp. for a non-english reader. If anyone could break this down to the changes and new goals of S.O. that would be great!
Congratulations on your success!
Stack Exchange is an extreme place. The quality is exceptional since it attracts top level talent in fields requiring advanced education (engineering, for example). The broad range of specialties and world class expertise is undeniable. Sites like Yahoo answers are a joke.
The downside is the atmosphere is cold, attitudes are selfish, power trips are flaunted, and on and on. I was just asking how to find something and was told it was inferior and how much better the new one is and that I really should change. to what is “trending”. Those are the trade-offs. Nobody is forcing me to use Stack Exchange. See, now I am lashing out because I got dumped on. Sorry.
I think the problem is trying to cater to everybody. Having top level professionals mix with recreational hobbyists is asking for conflict. I used to enjoy Stack Exchange, but now it is simply a tool of last resort. I don’t like walking on egg shells because I might be seen as a nuisance for being curious about something that has been rendered obsolete.
I’m a Java developer from China, is that possible for SO to launch new community by region or language? It’s super challenging for Chinese developers to use this site, because most developer in China have a very bad master of English language, not to mention to use it for technical discussions.
in China, we do have SO-like website,but most of them are hard to use and full of ad.
Check out Area51, there you can create and grow a baby community and if there are enough users, it might be launched property.
https://area51.stackexchange.com/