jaydles

We're humbled hearing from folks like you - your willingness to give back is what makes it all work. Keep your money. But here's how you CAN help, right now: Sign up if you haven't, create a developer story, and when you ARE job-hunting, try Jobs. We I think you'll find it to be the most developer-friendly offering on the planet.

Regarding point 1, blowing off that question was an inside joke. I get why it comes off as dismissive and rude without context - it was originally an internal presentation - but the asker was Michael Pryor. He's Joel's co-founder at FogCreek and the CEO of Trello. It was playful banter between very senior peers.

Most useful book I've ever read, period. Changed the way I think about decisions and influenced how I think about building products.

I work at SE... and you're right. We eliminated this close reason because a huge percent of the cases it was used weren't appropriate.

He's my boss, so I'm super biased, but I can still share a primary-source perspective. I knew him for years before working here, and would say that both as a manager and a general human being, he's one of the genuinely best people I've ever known. From when he started Fogcreek, his and Michael's whole philosophy was to create an environment and mission that makes smart people actually love working there, and then get the hell out of their way. Here at SE, we've grown a ton since I've been here, but I can tell you our exec team spends a lot of time discussing how to ensure we maintain an environment where employees are actually excited to work. (I know that sounds goofy/cheesy/like BS, but talk to any of our devs or other employees; I think you'll find that just about all of us take great pride in what we do.)

Kind of you, but the real credit goes to all the people who donate their time and knowledge to help others. We (I work at SE) are incredibly excited to be able to use this investment to do even more for them.

The problem here appears to be that it's hard to report that the site's readability is poor with images turned off in your browser, in large part because the interface elements needed to do so (buttons) have images associated with their containers, etc.

We never want to make it harder than it has to be to share bugs or suggestions, and we do want to help as many people as we can. We especially want to help those trying to give us feedback to improve the product. The challenge is always prioritization. Today, the number of folks browsing without images is a very small percentage. We definitely want them to be able to benefit from users content, and ideally, we'd love it if they could post and report bugs, too, but it's just lower priority than some other places (where we can surely improve as well).

It sounds like what you're mainly describing is that it's hard to ask a question that isn't already answered on the site. (You can't close as a dupe unless the duplicate has answers.) From a "helping the most people learn" perspective, this sounds like a champagne problem: There's so many answers that it's hard to find something to ask that's not already covered.

From a community perspective, we do want all devs to be able to get involved in the site, so it's not ideal if the solution set is actually so comprehensive that it raises the bar for getting involved.

But I'm not too worried. SO still gets over ten thousand questions per day, which gives devs who want to contribute to the programming community a ton of opportunities to share answers and help. Plus, and new languages like swift leave a lot of blue ocean for asking new questions.

Don't get me wrong, our two biggest product priorities are focused on how we can make it easier for new users to get involved, and how we can ensure that more active users continue to feel appreciated and find it rewarding to share their knowledge on SO, where so many others can benefit from it. There's plenty more we can do on both fronts, but I'm not too worried that we're running out of ways for devs to contribute if they want to.

Disclosure: I work at Stack Exchange. I love Stack Exchange. I am not an unbiased observer of Stack Exchange. My mom says I and my company are special, and I believe her.

The term "mod" is a red herring here. The engine will auto-reverse obviously targeted voting, and the community team reverses cases too subtle for the engine to handle, but that are clearly personally targeted.

Disclaimer: WORK THERE. BIASED.

Now... I actually agree that we can do more to help with questions that are less black and white. It's harder than it sounds - being a little rigid, and downright intolerant of questions that descend into religious debate "which language is better overall?" is a key part of what makes SO and our other sites work. But, I completely agree that we could probably do more to help more with a lot of more subjective or nuanced questions, and we're devoting a lot of energy to figuring out how to do so without undermining what's working well today. In summary, I agree with your point. :)

As to Startups, the main issue wasn't just questions per day. We have a lot of sites with less activity that we think are doing really well for their communities.