What effect does the current crisis have on the SE network?

Question

Outraged users are telling Stack Exchange Inc. that their management of the current crisis is endangering the wellbeing of the Stack Exchange sites. This warning has been repeated in many forms countless times.

But I cannot see any indication that the sites actually suffer from the pronoun crisis, the firing of Monica, the resignation of many moderators, or Stack Exchange Inc.'s intransparent site managment. On the contrary, it seems to me that the sites are healthy and users are still happily asking and answering away.

Does the current crisis actually affect the sites? And if so, in what way?

Answer 1

This is just personal experience, not hard data, but I believe that my reasoning makes sense:

I recently posted an answer to the same issue on both the MSDN forums and StackOverflow. The experience on StackOverflow is not only better, it's a whole different magnitude of better.

The problem is that Jeff and Joel designed a system which is self-regulating and extremely resilient. It works better than everything else available on the web: If all elected SO moderators stopped working and quality control were done only by staff and "regular" casual users, the quality would decline immensely, sure, - but it would probably still be better than all the alternatives out there. That's just how abysmal the alternatives are. Nothing (I have seen so far) comes even close to the StackExchange sites (and StackOverflow in particular).

So, this is probably not what you want to hear (and no, it's not what I want to hear either), but as long as there is no viable alternative (and I don't see one), it does not matter one bit whether questions receive +5, +10 or +15 rep per upvote, whether the CoC mandates this or that, or which measures are taken to increase or decrease the participation of particular groups of people. A lot more things would need to go wrong to make regular users go back to the dark days of crappy vendor support forums, where you have to dig through tons of "me too" and flame war posts to get to the answer you need.

Answer 2

There is at least one SE site that's not just been affected by the recent controversy, but (IMO) crippled by it: Writing.SE.

We've lost all our mods to this controversy - including Monica herself. A number of high-rep users, including some of our biggest contributors, have either deleted their accounts in protest of the CoC changes, or suspended activity in protest of how Monica's situation was handled. There is talk, in that second Meta question, of having the entire community abandon the site en masse and create a new one - though it is only talk at this stage.

The net result is that activity, which wasn't all that high before, now seems to be even lower. It's taking longer to close off-topic questions - sometimes over a day - because we have very few users who are willing and able to do so. I'm honestly not sure how much of an exaggeration it would be to say that it feels like Writing.SE is dying.

Fortunately, this seems to be an extreme case, and I can't say I'm noticing the effects of recent events on any of the other SE sites I frequent. Only Writing.

Answer 3

Others already answered about the effect on sites. I'll share the effect of the crisis on me personally and possibly on others who feel the same.

TL;DR: The crisis made me lose any trust in Stack Exchange the company.

I don't trust anything they do anymore and believe their motives for changes are very far from what they say.

I don't leave, because that won't change anything and won't help the others who are staying.

But I'm just a guest here now, who is on bad terms with the host. I don't really like being here anymore, staying for sake of others, and, well, old habits die hard.

Answer 4

In the short term? Probably next to none.

In the long term we may look back on this year as the tipping point, where the network began a slow, drawn-out march into a more hyphen-site-like menagarie of low-quality garbage, paywalled at that. Experts will leave but newcomers will still pour in, driving up visits … and filling up the database with reams of introductory nonsense that doesn't just borderline harm the OP but also harms future visitors. There's no direct way to measure the effect of that.

Then again, we've been calling 2014 that year for some time. But even that is not a given. The system is pretty resilient, because that's how it was designed to be, and it'll take yet more abysmal management to completely break that down.

The company knows this. Otherwise you might think they would spend less time trying to piss off the people who built the repository of information that will likely carry the site in its current form forwards for a long time to come.

I wager that this is also why so many people are so pissed off: because there is nothing else to do. We can't sit back with a smug "fine then, we'll see what happens to ya" mentality. We can only gather outrage at the unfairness of it all then try to move on, knowing full well that no only does the company not care, but that they also don't have much reason to.

Answer 5

The current crisis doesn't seem to have much of an effect on the SE network....yet.

If Stack Exchange would change all their sites to readonly tomorrow, it would still take months before the larger sites, like Stack Overflow, start significantly dropping in the Google Search ranking. Answers on questions like this will remain relevant for years to come. Once Stack Overflow starts dropping in the Google Search ranks, it may still take even more months before an alternative Q&A site starts filling the gap.

The current crisis seems to have resulted in several active users and moderators reducing their activity on the different Stack Exchange sites. The question is if these users will eventually be replaced by new contributors, or if there will be a slow decline in user contributions. If there is a decline in user participation and Stack Exchange continues on their drive to make their sites more welcoming, which seems to imply to make it easier to ask questions, I can see the question quality gradually dropping over time and this will have an adverse impact.

From personal experience I have found Stack Overflow less useful in the recent years. More and more I am stumbling on questions without an answer, or answers with outdated content and quite frequently I am finding my answers on GitHub issues. This might well be because I am increasingly relying on open source projects. As a result, I often find it more rewarding to raise a pull request to bug fix or enhance an open source project, rather than answering questions on Stack Overflow. Open source contributions are also a much more valuable addition to your CV rather than reputation points on Stack Overflow.

Answer 6

A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in computer science¹:

As Heinzi already said in his answer: Even if things becomes worse, the technical Q/A sites of the network (like Stack Overflow) are still far better than most alternatives.

One could do a deep philosophical dive here and think about accumulation and distribution and mechanics of economies. But roughly speaking: In the past 10 years, people could have answered in different forums and could have tried to make different forums and Q/A sites better. But Stack Overflow had (past tense) a goal that was shared by all those who strived to make things better: Create the single, best Q/A site in the world. So it accumulated all the knowledgeable and engaged people who are willing to spend their precious time to achieve this goal.

The model of self-moderation worked astonishingly well in this time. So many people did not only write answers, but also worked in the review queues, trying to minimize the suffering that is caused by the slings and arrows of outrageously bad questions. One could say that Stack Overflow basically "drained" the engaged people from the places where they could have contributed otherwise. But (Heinzi also said that, indirectly) : Even if the quality declines, there will still be enough momentum, particularly on Stack Overflow, to keep the site moving.

So I think the core of the reason of why it will have a limited effect on large network sites like Stack Overflow is:

The effect will not be visible to new users!

Nowadays, when you have a programming question (or error message), you type it into Google, and the "I'm feeling lucky" button could be labeled "I'm confident that the first result is the Stack Overflow Q/A that exactly solves my problem". But one day, people will think that it's normal that you sometimes have to step into the uncharted territory of "Page 2 of the Google search results" to find something that is really helpful. It will be normal that there are many duplicate/cr4p questions that remain on the site, or are even upvoted and answered. We'll be back at the point where there is not a one-stop high-quality Q/A site. But people will not miss what is sometimes referred to as "elitism" when they never really experienced the benefits of it.

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¹: Mainly referring to Stack Overflow here

Answer 7

Any effect will take a long time to show (and the corollary of that is that when it does show, it'll take an extremely long time to fix).

So, right now the main sites have a lot of high-quality answers that keep people coming back to the site to read them. There will still be high-quality answers posted, but maybe not as many as before. What will happen over time is that as technology changes, new questions will be asked, but they will not get the same level of high-quality answers as before. The net result, a slow decline in quality, and thus a slowly decreasing relevance for Stack Overflow as a whole.

What this will result in is alternatives being sought out. For some types of questions, this is already happening. For example, Has SO become an anti-pattern.

Note that a few users make a disproportionate contribution so if you alienate those users, the quality of the site is certain to be affected. This is normal on most sites. The majority turn up to read what a few dedicated users create.

I imagine other sites will take up the slack and start to provide answers to programming questions in other ways. Pluralsight has released an extension to Visual Studio that prompts you with answers to questions you have, and links to snippets and short tutorials on that subject. It looks pretty cool, but it obviously requires a paid-for subscription, but many companies already have this as a perk.

Other sites might start up alternatives to SO. All it would take is for, say, GitHub that is already used for Microsoft documentation to open up a section for Q&A-style documentation and next thing you know (in Internet time), it'll be the go-to place for all answers to Microsoft stuff and Stack Overflow will be remembered in the same terms as Slashdot or MySpace.

Answer 8

It probably depends on which Stack Exchange site you're talking about. I've quit participating in writing SE, but I occasionally check in to it to see if anything interesting has come up. It seems much worse than before the current crisis (mostly low quality questions and few good answers). Software related sites may be faring better...

[Edit: for anybody who doesn't read comments: feedback says software related sites are faring poorly too]