StackOverflow.Blog isn't that great

Question

I've been here a while, and done a few rodeos and, the quality of blog posts feels like its hit rock bottom at times. I admit there's some great ones but considering Stack Overflow as a company is in a wee bit of a transition, it might be a good time to go "maybe you guys should revisit it".

I do get that a big focus of the blog is to help market SO Careers and jobs related stuff. That's fine. We get reminded a lot that helps keeps the lights on.

We do also have a tradition of excellent blogs that shed light on the product - Jeff was pretty much a blogger before he started SO and it probably showed. Blogs also did a very good job at announcements - something Q&A hasn't been great at.

Many of new blogs however, are terrible. I don't want to name any names because I'm almost convinced that there's a stash of unpublished ones with these issues so blaming anyone does no good.

Many of them generic and vapid at best (though there's some tolerable ones), basically lists of links of resources that would get heavily downvoted on the QA networks. Someone said they look like buzzfeed titles - which I don't disagree with. In some cases, I'm pretty sure I've read better written, stuff by the same people who wrote the blogs in question.

Now that I've gotten all the horrible things I wanted to say... Stuff like this post is both more helpful to developers and readable, than 5 great resources for learning lolcat.

The former tells a story, its useful to developers (and as a non developer, I stopped in the middle of what started as a slightly angry rant and went "daymn" Nice work Mr Larsen.). The latter dosen't really do much more than point people at external links, and does little to sell the Careers Product in my opinion.

I do miss how we used to get blog posts about new things, and often find out about them from other users or MSO. And I really miss those old infrastructure posts on the old serverfault blog (Now rolled into the engineering tag in StackOverflow.Blog).

As far as Careers goes, the narrative as far as the blog feels lost. Its "Do these things!" "Look at these things" but never "Here's how we can help you". Almost tempted to say Careers hiring success stories would work better, but I suppose that needs someone willing to talk about it. Once again - there's no narrative, just lists, ordered or otherwise in the current posts.

Channels is the coming thing. In the terms that we used in the old days - We had the trilogy, and SE 2.0's maybe the Extended Universe now (I decline to guess which site's the Christmas specials) . Careers sometimes feels like the prequels (may it stand the test of time better) - they should be building on our story, but sometimes feel... kinda out of place. The refocus on Q&A and Channels could be the sequels - a chance to revisit the stuff that was done right but for an new audience.

So yeah, could we see more useful, less "listy" blog posts that help sell the SE model to folks? More stuff about stuff people actually face, and maybe even the network and the neat new things in the pipeline?

Answer 1

While I can't speak to all of the content on the blog, I will say that blogs do take time and some planning to write, which can take people away from doing development.

But I also noticed some things being said in chat, about the lack of engineering types of posts on the blog and did raise it with the team working on Channels. If you hadn't seen the recent post on Meta Stack Overflow about Channels, go check it out. There's a blurb that says:

...over the next month or so, we're going to be writing a series of blog posts about the work that's going into Channels. This includes insight into our thinking on the product, why people have told us they need Channels. We're also planning on sharing a lot of the challenges we've been facing, including issues around navigating between public Q&A and private Channels. As well as a dive into some of the architecture needed to make it run.

The initial plan was to just post updates on Meta, like we've done with other projects, but we decided the blog would be a better place for it, and it brings us back to where the content of the blog used to be. I believe the first post is going either today or tomorrow, and then we have others planned over the next month. We've even roped in Nick to write about all the architecture work behind getting Channels up.

I don't know the plans for blog posts outside of the Channels stuff, but we have heard the grumblings of the lack of development/engineering content and it's not gone unnoticed.

Answer 2

Personal opinion below. Started as comment, became too long.

Once upon a time, Jeff used to write blogs about actual things he did, and features of Stack Overflow, e.g. moderation, email notifications, etc. The rest of the team followed his lead and posted useful and interesting things about SE/SO itself, e.g. Reputation and Historical Archives by Josh.

Big changes were announced back then by blog posts, e.g. new top bar back in 2013.

These days, none of this exists. It has been replaced with blogs that just advertise/promote various products of Stack Overflow. There are rare posts about new features, e.g. How Stack Overflow Redesigned the Top Navigation but most features go without any blog post announcement, e.g. the network wide new top bar which is nothing like the Stack Overflow top bar. That's a great miss. Even if they'll post blog posts about new features, they will be drowned and buried beneath the others, with charts and calculators, which are nice for some and useful for others (and I do respect those who spent time and efforts to write them!), but as this discussion made me realize, not great anymore. Not in the way it used to be. The focus shifted from the actual development of stuff and the Q&A part, to the money-making products of Stack Overflow the company.

Answer 3

The SE blog posts I most enjoy, in addition to the ones about new features (not much of that lately) and the "making of" posts (infrequent), are the ones from the SE data scientists that analyze trends and talk about the SE data itself. That's pretty cool, and seems like a good way to get people to look at the relevant posts, tags, sites, etc. I hope someday that these kinds of posts will broaden beyond Stack Overflow to the other 170 sites on the network. I realize the scale is different, but maybe there are things to be said about groups of related sites?

Answer 4

The editorial staff who managed stackoverflow.blog for the past year or so are no longer with the company. With this change, we are revisiting our blog strategy entirely and starting fresh. I personally am excited to take this on and make some big changes. Feedback from the community has been noted and will be taken into account as we make these changes.

We'll always be talking about things regarding the community, insights into what we're building here at Stack Overflow, and posting finds from our data science team. Additionally, we'll continue to talk about topics like how developers can excel in their careers - but in a new way.

Look out for some posts from me crowd-sourcing opinions on what topics you want to see more of.