Why is Stack Overflow so popular?

Why is Stack Overflow so popular?

The first few days of my employment at Stack Overflow are a bit hazy.

It's not that I wasn't aware that the site had huge popularity, but when you're a new employee, it's hard to grasp just how popular the site is. And the truth is, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't know that Stack Overflow was a hit.

I've been with the company for less than a month and I'm already part of the most popular website on the planet. How cool is that? This post is an attempt to answer that question. How Stack Overflow got so popular. To begin, I'll mention the obvious: Stack Overflow is wildly popular because of the content. It has a great library of answers, great community, and an incredible moderation team. These qualities lead to a lot of upvotes and lots of questions and answers being answered. But the site is also very active, meaning that it's a big contributor to Google's ranking of the top results for a lot of web searches. That's how it got to number one on Google for "How do I do X in Y programming language".

Stack Overflow is also extremely successful on mobile. The mobile version of the site is a large part of that success, as well as its success on all other devices.

But if Stack Overflow isn't as popular as it is because of the content, what is it that makes it so popular? Why is Stack Overflow so great? It's because of the people. Stack Overflow is so successful because of its community. The people who use the site are the best part of it.

Community. I've mentioned this before, but it's worth mentioning again. Community is huge. It's what makes the site so popular. People are the reason that the site is so popular. Without a community, the site would not be so successful.

The community is an integral part of the Stack Overflow site. It's what makes it so great. It's what makes the site so great.

It's a community of users and moderators. The users are the people who ask and answer questions. They are the ones who provide the content and the answers.

Moderators are the people who run the site.

What is Stack Overflow?

The core purpose of Stack Overflow is to help people become better programmers by providing them with the guidance and knowledge they need to succeed.

We have many tools for doing so, including chat rooms, mailing lists, the site itself, and most importantly (and perhaps easiest to miss), people. Each of those helps with a different kind of programming question. There's lots of overlap, but there's plenty of space for everyone.

Is this site about programming? Stack Overflow is not a site about programming. It's about creating software. Some topics and tools are more closely related to software development, but programming itself is not the point.

All content on this site is Q&A questions and answers. We're not here to help you find your career. We're here to help you do something you love and get paid for it.
Jeff Atwood. What makes a good programmer? Do you know how to read a contract? Do you know how to use the best software for developing programs? Do you know how to manage code? Do you even know how to write code? You might not even know how to take advantage of Stack Overflow to get your programming problems solved. There's no one way to be a good programmer. But there is a difference between an intelligent, well-informed programmer and someone who just knows a little bit. It can be very difficult to tell the difference in some circumstances, especially when one or the other can appear to be successful.

This does not mean that all programmers are alike; the term can also be used to refer to particular techniques or styles of programming. For example, a programmer who writes every line of code in the source file, who has no automated test suite, and who does not have a team of professional programmers reviewing their work is quite likely not a good programmer. They might pass the tests and appear to be successful, but they're missing out on some valuable practices. Programmers at all skill levels should understand these differences. It is important to realize that there is no single way to be a good programmer. There are only good programmers, but they can be found in different places and they may use different practices.

Is Stack Overflow owned by Microsoft?

As you might already be aware, Stack Overflow is currently down for some time.

It doesn't seem that Stack Exchange has been hacked since the company took it over from Nominet back in the spring of last year. However, in late June, they were bought by Microsoft. With the announcement of this deal being made, a lot of people have questioned the trustworthiness of Stack Overflow, given that its source code was never made publicly available before and that its ownership structure is completely different to that of the rest of Stack Exchange. Some even point out that the lack of transparency makes the platform less appealing as an employer. A few weeks ago on /r/programming, one user has started a petition to get Stack Overflow to release its source code. As part of their explanation on why this should happen, the developer has pointed out the lack of trust that is being placed in the platform and how this could effect businesses. Another reason why this might be something that would need to be addressed by the company is due to the fact that this might allow those who do not want others to know who they are more freedom over what they post on the website and also whether it's a public profile or private. What's your opinion? Would this be something you want?

You're right, you know: there should be no reason to make one of the most trusted platforms for professionals to exchange ideas freely known to the outside world (that is, to everybody except them) or at least a good, solid way to tell users which parts of SO, where, belong to their own business (Stack Overflow, Inc.) and which parts to the public (the community).

Also, it's obvious that some kind of source control solution for each piece of code, maybe backed up somewhere else, makes no sense. Personally, I think we shouldn't have any worries. Just like a corporation runs itself, programmers' jobs would not be affected; as long as they work independently from a single company, so they need to care about its reputation. They should work more with other than their own team to prevent issues like a big company going under and stealing their employees. A platform run by programmers is exactly what we expect from programmers.

While this is definitely true in some ways, there is nothing special or unique about the programmers behind SO.

What is the use of Stack Overflow?

In this post I would like to answer a question that I have been asked a few times: ?

My personal take is that it is a community-driven Q&A platform for programmers. It was not built for the purpose of answering basic questions, but it is very effective at doing so. The site has grown over the years and now has nearly 200,000 questions and answers. That is a lot of questions and answers!

Here are some statistics from Stack Overflow: Number of questions asked: 1,876,943. Number of users: 2,852,633. Average number of questions asked per day: 679. Number of users per day: 18,988. Average number of users per day: 2,927. Number of answers per day: 4,812. Number of answers per user: 38.8 Average number of answers per day: 14.5 Total number of users and questions: 2,947,842. Average number of questions asked per user: 5.4 Total number of users: 2,852,633. Average number of users per user: 3.7 Average number of questions asked per user: 10.2 Average number of answers per user: 4.7 Average number of answers per question: 19.7 Average number of answers per day: 14.6 Average number of users per day: 18,988. There is a lot to digest here. If you are interested in getting more data about the site, you can visit the Data Explorer. I would recommend reading about the data on Meta Stack Overflow.

Do I really need to ask a question to get answer? Asking questions on Stack Overflow is free, and it is even possible to get reputation by answering questions.