It is challenging to articulate what precisely made Stack Overflow’s early years feel so special because there is really no one answer. It was a different time, in both broad cultural ways and in the niche of internet programming forums in particular. I cannot hope to really scratch the surface of what made SO what it was, nor could I possibly pay tribute to the vast array of people who contributed to that magic, but I will try to provide a rough idea of what made early SO so meaningful to me.
Stack Overflow as disruptive technology
Seventeen years later, it is difficult for us to even imagine how innovative Stack Overflow was as a technology at the time. I do not mean to say that it was the first website to have a reputation-style system or a similar approach to community curation; it certainly was not. But SO was created to solve a fairly specific problem, namely collecting high-quality answers to programming questions and cutting out the noise of endless discussions and debates. In 2009, search queries about programming would more often than not take you to phpBB threads of rambling discussion which likely did not provide much of an answer. It was awful. By comparison, SO’s clean, focused approach was a breath of fresh air.
There is a lot to be said for how powerful a singular focus can be. SO was a kind of living manifesto, a crystallization of the frustrations of people who knew all too well how things could go awry and wanted to build guardrails to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. However, despite this lofty goal, there was an understanding that it could not simply be imposed top-down by authority: ultimately, the value of the site hinged almost entirely on those writing questions and answers, as after all, the entirety of the site’s content comes from its users.
This resulted in an idealistic vision of SO as a new hybrid between a Q&A site and a wiki compiling a library of knowledge on the subjects of programming and technology. There is certainly something alluring about this proposition. A pure wiki is enormous in scope, vast and not always very usefully organized for solving a task at hand. Meanwhile, pure Q&A forums inevitably result in people asking lots of the same questions, and without mechanisms in place designed to handle that, answerers end up repeating themselves a lot. Under the SO system, well-written questions provide clear scope and focus, while the ability to mark a question as a duplicate ensures that if a question receives a high-quality answer, the problem of answering it can stay solved.
People have described the earliest days of SO as “addictive”, and for me at least, it is not hard to see why. Isn’t there something thrilling about the rare opportunity of a blank canvas upon which you can have a hand in building a better world? Which brings me to my next point…
Stack Overflow as participatory democracy
SO was not just technology: it was also a philosophical project. This is hard to convey these days, as in retrospect it all feels a bit quaint, but there was a time when the people calling the shots believed in something, and those beliefs were pervasive in the choices they made and the ways they communicated. If you find it hard to believe they were really that earnest about it, remember that this was a company publishing blog posts with titles like A Theory of Moderation. They were nerds, and they cared, and it showed.
So what were some of the foundational principles of the “SO philosophy”? One of them was a pursuit of quality over quantity: another of Jeff’s better-known blog posts of the era was entitled Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand. Nevertheless, there was an implicit understanding that maintaining the desired level of quality at the volume the site was intended to support would be an enormous undertaking, and as such, every user must be able to step up and participate in that task.
This democratic vision of a site run primarily by its users lumbers on in so many ways, however vestigial. Moderators were and are described as “human exception handlers”. Close voting, the ability for any user to edit any post at any time, and numerous other site privileges reflect SO’s wiki heart. But although plenty of sites have some form of voting, SO took its principles far beyond simple social features, resulting in a fundamentally democratic approach to constructing and iterating on SO-the-technology that, personally, I have never really observed before or since:
SO doesn’t just permit casting votes or flags, it gives users access to site moderation tools once they have sufficient reputation. The review queues are the most obvious one, but so is giving users access to site analytics. The underlying idea here is that sure, it wouldn’t be a good idea to give thousands of users all the privileges of a diamond mod, but we can aspire to close the gap between them as much as possible.
SO is a shockingly open platform, in certain ways. On what other website can you make SQL queries against a PII-scrubbed database? Again, the idea was that this site belongs to its users, and they need as many tools as possible at their disposal to make informed choices because that isn’t even really the job of the people who build the software. It would be like the people who write MediaWiki making decisions about how Wikipedia ought to be run.
That naturally leads to the idea of Meta itself, where employees, moderators, and users are all set on a largely equal playing field. It is no coincidence that Meta does not really distinguish “staff posts” from questions or answers from other users. The role of the company was to nurture, guide, and enable.
Finally, of course, diamond mods themselves are democratically elected, but in the earliest days, a great many staff members were active users of the site, too. Some of the most passionate and active users on Meta made the jump to diamond mod or CM. There was a feeling that we were all in this together, and we had the same goals: making the best Q&A site we could, whatever that took.
Nothing is ever perfect. Democracy is hard, and there was always some resentment that not everything was truly democratic. After all, SO-the-company decided what to implement and how to do it, and from the very start, those choices were not always aligned with popular opinion. Still, even when decisions were made, the mutual understanding that the site was collectively run in a partnership between SO’s employees and users motivated, at the absolute least, explanations of future plans and earnest attempts to sway hearts and minds by mounting a compelling case.
Far too many people had a hand in this grand process of consensus-building for me to ever hope to list, but there is one exemplar who is so fondly remembered that tears were shed upon his departure: Josh Heyer, better known as Shog9. He brought a clarity, calmness, and earnestness to the challenge of wrangling such a diverse set of interests that provided a guiding light that the community could trust, no easy feat among a group as fiercely opinionated as programmers. Whenever there was something that made the community uneasy, if Shog threw his vote behind it, we all knew we had to at least give it a try. It was nice to feel like we had such an ally bridging the company and community, a leader we would follow into battle. I still remember the day I learned he was laid off, and I had not been actively participating on SO for years at that point. I simply could not imagine an SO without him.
But why is Shog so fondly remembered? Take a look at some of his questions and answers on MSE, and it probably won’t take long for you to understand. Often, he would ask for help from the community, and after soliciting feedback, he would come back with a proposal and really get into the weeds of the reasoning that was made. Often that reasoning included data, and lots of it, and people could participate in the conversation and actually impact the way things were implemented, in the end. Users had a role in the foundational design of new site tools, and our feedback was seriously listened to.
It sounds hopelessly idealistic now, but we really did feel like our voices mattered. Because, for a time, they did.
Stack Overflow as community
The early days of Stack Overflow were a different time for internet social spaces. Social media was still in its infancy. Forums were generally niche and disorganized. Even instant messaging was still not widespread. SO offered the opportunity to be a part of something with a group of other people passionate about all the same things. I don’t think it’s hard to understand why people look back on that so fondly.
It is worth reflecting on the similarities and differences between Stack Overflow and Wikipedia. They shared many of the same ideological principles, but there were some crucial differences. For one, one of the core ideas of SO was that, since it is not just a wiki, it needed purpose-built tools and workflows to facilitate what the site was supposed to be. On Wikipedia, everything is MediaWiki—it’s all “made of the same stuff.” SO is not really like that. The content is all just Markdown; everything else is fixed-function software built on top.
In this way, SO was never truly as democratic as Wikipedia, nor could it ever be. Even setting aside the implementation differences, MediaWiki is open-source software, and Wikipedia is run by a non-profit. SO is and always was a product by a for-profit company. Its founders had an ideological vision, yes, but staff come and go, and sometimes, the culture goes with them. In the beginning, the company needed its users. It had to treat them with respect, as it had nothing more than a foundation to build upon. These days, SO-the-company owns the single largest repository of written programming knowledge in existence, and it will continue to own it whether its users choose to participate or not. We gave untold hours of our lives cultivating a corporation’s greatest asset, and now we must live with the reality that it seems to believe we are no longer necessary and can be dispensed with. Only time will tell whether they are right.
Still, it is a testament to the strength of SO’s original vision that SO-the-community has never truly abandoned its principles. The community is larger, more amorphous, more fundamentally fixated on the same goal it always was: doing the day-to-day dirty work of question-answering and moderation. In this way, that ideological vision lives on in the people who are left, in spite of it all, and in the systems (many decaying, some being actively dismantled) that were set up by those who believed.
I will not attempt to comment on whether things could (or should) have gone another way. I cannot really say. It is sad to have been a part of something beautiful only to see it slowly crumble and fall into disrepair, managed by people who seem to find SO’s grand experiment an inconvenient obstacle to be put out to pasture. But many of us are still here, after all this time, and I don’t think that happens without having been a part of something really special.
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