Does SO need social networking features to improve the experience for expert users?

Question

No, not like this:

Hear me out!

As Stack Overflow grows, it becomes increasingly ridden with extremely newbie and mediocre questions. It's just natural. The team are fighting hard to keep the crap out, but there are many very basic questions that are okay on their own. They don't deserve to be kicked out* - they are just very, very, very basic and/or localized.

Too much basicness tires users who are interested in discussing more advanced topics.

As has been discussed many times over, the voting system is not suited to identify advanced questions due to what is known as the bike shed effect. A group of people will vote on what they understand, which puts truly expert questions at a natural disadvantage that a democratic voting system can't overcome.

Now, there is a small number of users on Stack Overflow who I, as a user, know share my basic values (like, teaching a man to fish rather than fishing for them); I also know they are experts in their fields. It is safe to assume that what these users regard an interesting question worthy of attention, is likely to be interesting to me as well.

The idea is to introduce an opt-in "follow" mechanism that allows followed users to share what they find interesting, with very little fuss and on a purely opt-in basis.

1. Allow every SO user to follow any other SO user with a certain minimum rep, say 3000.

   

2. To every user who is being followed (or every user), display a new link underneath every question, "Recommend".

   

3. Introduce a new filtered view somewhere, named "Recommended". The view will show me all questions that my followed users are recommending.

   

4. Whenever I browse a list of questions, highlight those questions that have been recommended by my followed users. (I haven't put much thought into how to implement this graphically - you get the drift.)

   

I'm not especially fond of social networking, and I think most of it doesn't have a place on SO. But I'm starting to think this specific thing could be the right way to go in order to tell apart expert content from the 10000th dreary "how do I upload a file" question.

This is an entirely opt-in feature - unless I actively follow some users, I will never notice this.

Maybe for a bit of ego-stroking, the profile page can show how many users follow you. Or even who. Everything else would simply be kept under wraps - no publication of follower data in the data dump, no follower leagues or anything like that.

---

^{* At least not under current SO rules. Maybe those rules need to be changed - but that is a different discussion.}

Answer 1

This post is brilliant because it suggests that what respected users think is more important than what they do.

Jon Skeet answers some pretty basic questions sometimes, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it would defeat the purpose of this request to see all of those answers. The beauty of this feature is that it would let us see the posts that made Jon (or bobince, or waffles, or whomever) think "oh, wow, I learned something interesting here" or "this is a great explanation of a difficult topic."

My point is that I'm against moving too much towards relying on automated algorithms like tag badge calculations or favorite counts. A little bit is fine, but I think it's good that users have to be around for a while to find people worth following. This system will work best when people follow users they genuinely respect, rather than blindly following high-rep users.

Other comments:

• The recommended list will become unwieldy once it gets long; some sort of pruning mechanism will be needed. Perhaps users should be able to remove recommendations from their lists manually. That could be tied into favoriting. Alternatively, recommendations could be set to time out after 90 days or when visited (perhaps whichever comes second).
• It might be nice to show off some "greatest hit" recommended questions. There are several possible metrics there, including the number of users who recommended a post or the number of followers who saw/liked the recommendation.
• Perhaps this could somehow tie into the existing "share on twitter/facebook" functionality somehow? I don't have a fully formed idea here, but they are all sharing.

Answer 2

It's an attractive idea, but one that will be more useful for subject areas where there are a lot of new users and a lot of basic questions, like c# or php. In a niche area like mathematica, where I am active, most of the users are 1000+ reputation and the "easy" questions are actually quite welcome. It might be a basic question, but Mathematica is such a large system that there's bound to be some corner of it that even an advanced user doesn't know well. With that kind of user base, a lot of upvotes means it has been upvoted by the high-rep regular users. Basic questions don't get a lot of votes unless the answer turns out to be more subtle than expected.

The system you propose also assumes that you've noticed who is a user worth following. This takes energy and a long history of watching that tag. An alternative might be to have a preference when you choose to follow a particular tag. You could choose to have questions highlighted to you if they are upvoted by users who have at least a bronze badge in that tag. This would leverage the existing functionality of the system without introducing yet another number - how many followers you have - that people will use to keep score.

Similarly, favoriting questions will also be a good indicator of high-value questions. You could have a preference when following a tag, to see which questions have been highlighted by tag-badged users.

---

EDIT in response to belisarius' comments

I think what I have in mind (and I only thought of this when I read Pekka's question, so I don't claim any great insights for this) is an interface along the lines of the following, when someone chooses to follow a particular tag.

[checkbox] Highlight questions upvoted by users with this tag badge
[checkbox] Highlight questions favorited by users with this tag badge

• [radio button] Include only questions tagged [text box - the followed tag would be included by default]
• [radio button] Exclude questions tagged [text box]

This way you could choose just to follow the implicitly recommended questions in the tag you are following, or expose yourself to some serendipity via the questions upvoted or favorited in other areas, but maybe only a few other tags, if that's what you want.

I really like the idea of having a more filtered recommendation system, but I don't like the idea of high-rep users feeling that they have to both upvote and recommend. And what if you don't currently have any followers, so you don't bother recommending, and then one day you start accumulating followers? Should you then go back and recommend old questions you really liked?

Also, with user-based following, users who want to follow high-quality recommendations would have to keep monitoring to see who the newer experts in their area of interest are. My tag-and-badge based modification of Pekka's proposal would update itself as communities evolve and new experts are revealed, without requiring people to keep doing care-and-feeding of their "Following" list.

Answer 3

I still think the solution is just to get rid of all the localised nonsense.

"We" were here first; there's no reason to allow Stack Overflow to become an arbitrary meeting place for every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants free debugging help with their codez over a couple of stupid syntax errors just to be "friendly to newbs". I spend plenty of time on IRC helping newbs out (so I'm not some elitist) but this is not the place for them. Or, at least, it shouldn't be.

I quite like your idea, OP, but it feels like a hack and one that we shouldn't have to resort to in order to actually make SO useful for experts exchanging knowledge (*cough*).

Answer 4

Given Jeff's comments I would propose a simplification to this: Just make it possible for us to subscribe to the favorites of other users. Favoriting is already pretty much parallel to marking a question as awesome/interesting, but as Pekka notes we can't reasonably troll a bunch of favorite lists. Subscribe-by-email to favorites, or an RSS feed or something, would be great.

Answer 5

I like the idea, here's some points.

The recommended list will probably get stale quick without some additional filtering. Maybe the recommended posts could just influence the interesting page algorithm. If you really wanted to just look at the recommended posts, that tab could be put in your user profile, so as not to take up front page real estate.

For point 4, you could just put a new line where needed under the views line, that says something as simple as 3 recs.

Answer 6

Social Networking is Bad for Stack Exchange Q&A

The problem that I see with the recommend and follow links is that it just seems to me like an alternative form of filtering questions, when the voting system already does that for us.

Most of the traffic on Stack Overflow comes from search engines, and most people who view an existing question and it's answers, who benefit from it, are generally those people coming from Google. Therefore, the only people that would benefit from social networking features would be people on Stack Overflow already who actively, and addictively, participate in Q&A. Most of us who follow users would then only be looking at questions and answers out of curiosity, not to solve real problems, and this could possibly distort the amount of reputation that these users gain.

It's been said before that social networking features would take the focus off the content and incorrectly bias it towards people. In other words, answers wouldn't stand on their own purely on the content.

But What About Social Networking in Chat?

Instead of just being another naysayer, I'm going to propose something a bit different. I recently jumped into the NSChat and C++ Lounge chat rooms to bounce some ideas around about some problems I was facing that I wasn't sure was appropriate as actual SO questions, since they involved a fair amount of discussion and follow up. I was impressed with the community's willingness to help, and noted that these rooms sort of had a feel all of their own, with rules, guidelines, and even room leaders who weren't moderators.

The rooms had a very distinct social feel to them. People knew each other, talked about off-topic stuff, joked around, and also talked about relevant problems. The rules in chat are different than the rules on the Q&A sites.

To clarify, I wouldn't support following users to see what they say in questions or answers, or for the purpose of tracking any activities those users are doing on the main site, but it might be interesting to be able to follow what users are saying in chat rooms they participate in.

The chat rooms already have a starring feature that is a start to this process, but I could see this being expanded so that some of these social networking features exist in the chat rooms themselves.

Again, I wouldn't want Stack Exchange to implement anything that could disrupt the Q&A, but for the most part, it seems that what goes on in chat rooms is mostly removed from what goes on in the actual Q&A, and these are already the closest things we have to social on Stack Exchange today. So the next question is to determine whether or not there are reasons that this could be harmful, then determine how to address those issues. If it's possible to implement such features without being disruptive, then Stack Exchange may be more open to the ideas of implementing such features. Hope this helps!

Answer 7

Reputation System would become a Popularity Score

A way to favorite or follow track users would only be a way to inadvertently game the reputation system solely based on subconscious human nature.

People with lots of followers would get even more up votes from the acolytes no matter how flippant, trivial, incomplete and incorrect their answers might be.

People with no followers would most likely get ignored even with better more complete and accurate answers.

This would turn the reputation system into a popularity score, more than it already is.

Social isn't always Positive

The inverse is also just as true, create an enemy and they could more easily follow you and serial down vote everything you answer or ask. That will make the sites better how?

I don't want to have to manage yet another list of people I don't want tracking me, I don't want to manage yet another list of people I have to constantly respond to requests either.

It would just encourage newbies to think that stackexchange sites are FORUMS!

There is already this tendency for new users to treat all the stackexchange sites as discussion forums. Nothing should be done to encourage this behavior and increase the load on the community and moderators especially to police questions that clog up the works.

It would also signal a similar shift in policy to long existing members as well.

Use an existing Social network and leave me out of it

The RSS feeds already do what a favorite would do.

Use an existing 3rd party aggregation site like Delcicous.com to bookmark these feeds and aggregate them and publish and share them. Use Pinterest or Bo.lt as well?

Answer 8

I'm not a frequent meta user, so maybe it's an old idea. But...

What if users with some minimal rep would be able to upvote a question twice. To indicate that not only it's a well formed question, but an interesting one as well.

And the list of double-upvoted questions could be public on the voter's user page. Just like favorites. So I could choose to follow it.

I understand the slight difference between favorites and interesting questions. Maybe "uppervoting" could fill the interestingness-gap.

One could think of extending this to three available upvotes for even higher rep users.

Just an idea.

Answer 9

Well you're basically asking for a "newsfeed" of their activity. Instead of recommend, what you really want is a list of what they've voted up, which has previously been removed.

I think that's reasonable to ask.

Answer 10

This could, to some extent, be automated within the existing systems.

For example, you could take "favourites" as a measure of which questions a given user would recommend to others as being "interesting"*. A simple recommender algorithm (e.g. nearest K neighbours) could then be used to populate a list of recommended posts, based on questions favourited by users whose other favourites are similar to your own.

Adding an explicit "follow" option to another user's profile might be used to adjust the weighting of this algorithm, increasing the weighting of questions favourited by the followed user.

This way, you'll get access to posts that are probably interesting, even if not favourited by someone you're following. Adding the weighting will serve to further refine the results towards posts that are more likely to be interesting.

---

_{* Yes, I'm aware favourites are used for more than just "questions I'm interested in". If really necessary, you could (of course) add a separate "recommended" option as described by the OP.}

Answer 11

If you want to "follow" bobince, I suggest starting with...

his posting activity:

https://stackoverflow.com/users/18936/bobince?tab=activity#page_1-filter_posts

his comment activity:

https://stackoverflow.com/users/18936/bobince?tab=activity#page_1-filter_comments

the questions bobince has favorited:

https://stackoverflow.com/users/18936/bobince?tab=favorites

I'm violently opposed to asking users to do extra work just on your behalf -- if the question is interesting then there is IMNSHO a very high probability they have commented on it, answered it, favorited it, or upvoted it.

The only one of those you don't have visibility into at the moment is the upvoting.