There’s this popular idea among developers that when you face a problem with code, you should get out a rubber duck and explain, to the duck, exactly how your code was supposed to work, line by line, what you expected to see, what you saw instead, etc. Developers who try this report that the very act of explaining the problem in detail to an inanimate object often helps them find the solution.

This is one of many tricks to solving programming problems on your own. Another trick is divide and conquer debugging. You can’t study a thousand lines of code to find the one bug. But you can divide them in half and quickly figure out if the problem happens in the first half or the second half. Keep doing this five or six times and you’ll pinpoint the single line of code with the problem.

It’s interesting, with this in mind, to read Jon Skeet’s checklist for writing the perfect question. One of the questions Jon asks is “Have you read the whole question to yourself carefully, to make sure it makes sense and contains enough information for someone coming to it without any of the context that you already know?” That is essentially the Rubber Duck Test. Another question is “If your question includes code, have you written it as a short but complete program?” Emphasis on the short—that is essentially a test of whether or not you tried divide and conquer.

What Jon’s checklist can do, in the best of worlds, is to help people try the things that experienced programmers may have already tried, before they ask for help.

Sadly, not everybody finds his checklist. Maybe they found it and they don’t care. They’re having an urgent problem with code; they heard that Stack Overflow could help them; and they don’t have time to read some nerd’s complicated protocol for requesting help.

One of the frequent debates about Stack Overflow is whether the site needs to be open to questions from programming novices.

When Jeff and I were talking about the initial design of Stack Overflow, I told him about this popular Usenet group for the C programming language in the 1980s. It was called comp.lang.c.

C is a simple and limited programming language. You can get a C compiler that fits in 100K. So, when you make a discussion group about C, you quickly run out of things to talk about.

Also. In the 1990s, C was a common language for undergraduates who were learning programming. And, in fact, said undergraduates would have very basic problems in C. And they might show up on comp.lang.c asking their questions.

And the old-timers on comp.lang.c were bored. So bored. Bored of the undergraduates showing up every September wondering why they can’t return a local char array from a function et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum. Every damn September.

The old timers invented the concept of FAQs. They used them to say “please don’t ask things that have been asked before, ever, in the history of Usenet” which honestly meant that the only questions they really wanted to see were so bizarre and so esoteric that they were really enormously boring to 99% of working C programmers. The newsgroup languished because it catered only to the few people that had been there for a decade.

Jeff and I talked about this. What did we think of newbie questions?

We decided that newbies had to be welcome. Nothing was too “beginner” to be a reasonable question on Stack Overflow… as long as you did some homework before asking the question.

We understood that this might mean that some of the more advanced people might grow bored with duplicate, simple questions, and move on. We thought that was fine: Stack Overflow doesn’t have to be a lifetime commitment. You’re welcome to get bored and move on if you think that the newbies keep asking why they can’t return local char arrays (“but it works for me!”) and you would rather devote the remaining short years of your life to something more productive, like sorting your record albums.

The mere fact that you are a newbie doesn’t mean that your question doesn’t belong on Stack Overflow. To prove the point, I asked “How do you move the turtle in Logo,” hoping to leave behind evidence that the site designers wanted to allow absolute beginners.

Thanks to the law of unintended consequences, this caused a lot of brouhaha, but not because the question was too easy. The real problem there was that I was asking the question in bad faith. Jeff Atwood explained it: “Simple is fine. No effort and research is not.” (Also this.)

To novices, the long bureaucratic rigmarole associated with asking your first question on Stack Overflow can feel either completely unnecessary, or just plain weird. It’s like Burning Man. You just want to go to a nice glittery dance party in the desert, but the Burning People are yammering on about their goddamn 10 principles, and “radical self-expression” and so on and so forth, and therefore after washing your dishes you must carefully save the dirty dishwater like a cherished relic and remove every drop of it from the Playa, bringing it home with you, in your check-in luggage if necessary. Every community has lots of rules and when you join the community they either seem strange and delightful or, if you’re just desperately trying to get some code to work, they are strange and maddening.

A lot of the rules that are important to make Burning Man successful are seemingly arbitrary, but they’re still necessary. The US Bureau of Land Management which makes the desert available for Burning Man requires that no contaminated water be poured out on the ground because the clay dirt doesn’t really absorb it so well and it can introduce all kinds of disease and whatnot, but who cares because Burning Man simply will not be allowed to continue if the participants don’t pack out their used water.

Similarly for Stack Overflow. We don’t allow, say, questions that are too broad (“How do I make a program?”). Our general rule is that if the correct length of an answer is a whole book you are asking too much. These questions feel like showing up on a medical website and saying something like “I think my kidney has been hurting. How can I remove it?” It’s crazy—and incidentally, insulting to the people who spent ten years in training learning to be surgeons.

One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.

I care a lot about this. Being a developer gives you an unparalleled opportunity to write the script for the future. All the flak that Stack Overflow throws in the face of newbies trying to become developers is actively harmful to people, to society, and to Stack Overflow itself, by driving away potential future contributors. And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier.

We’re planning a lot of work in this area for the next year. We can’t change everybody and we can’t force people to be nice. But I think we can improve some aspects of the Stack Overflow user interface to encourage better behavior, for example, we could improve the prompts we provide on the “Ask Question” page, and we could provide more tools for community moderation of comments where the snark currently runs unchecked.

We’re also working on new features that will let you direct your questions to a private, smaller group of people on your own team, which may bring some of the friendly neighborhood feel to the big city of Stack Overflow.

Even as we try to make Stack Overflow more friendly, our primary consideration at Stack Overflow has been to build the world’s greatest resource for software developers. The average programmer, in the world, has been helped by Stack Overflow 340 times. That’s the real end-game here. There are other resources for learning to program and getting help, but there’s only one site in the world that developers trust this much, and that is worth preserving—the programming equivalent to the Library of Congress.

[This is the second in a series of posts about Stack Overflow. The first one is The Stack Overflow Age.]

Around 2010 the success of Stack Overflow had led us into some conversations with VCs, who wanted to invest.

The firm that eventually invested in us, Union Square Ventures, told us that they were so excited by the power of gamification that they were only investing in companies that incorporated some kind of game play.

For example, Foursquare. Remember Foursquare? It was all about making your normal post-NYU life of going to ramen noodle places and dive bars into a fun game that incidentally generated wads of data for marketers. Or Duolingo, which is a fun app with flash cards that teaches you foreign languages. Those were other USV investments from that time period.

At the time, I had to think for a minute to realize that Stack Overflow has “gamification” too. Not a ton. Maybe a dusting of gamification, most of it around reputation.

Stack Overflow reputation started as a very simple score. The original idea was just that you would get 10 points when your answers were upvoted. Upvotes do two things. They get the most useful answers to the top, signaling that other developers who saw this answer thought it was good. They also send the person who wrote the answer a real signal that their efforts helped someone. This can be incredibly motivating.

You would lose points if your questions were downvoted, but you actually only lose 2 points. We didn’t want to punish you so much as we wanted to show other people that your answer was wrong. And to avoid abuse, we actually make you pay one reputation point to downvote somebody, so you better really mean it. That was pretty much the whole system.

Now, this wasn’t an original idea. It was originally inspired by Reddit Karma, which started out as an integer that appeared in parentheses after your handle. If you posted something that got upvoted, your karma went up as a “reward.” That was it. Karma didn’t do a single thing but still served as a system for reward and punishment.

What reputation and karma do is send a message that this is a community with norms, it’s not just a place to type words onto the internet. (That would be 4chan.) We don’t really exist for the purpose of letting you exercise your freedom of speech. You can get your freedom of speech somewhere else. Our goal is to get the best answers to questions. All the voting makes it clear that we have standards, that some posts are better than others, and that the community itself has some norms about what’s good and bad that they express through the vote.

It’s not a perfect system (more on the problems in a minute), but it’s a reasonable first approximation.

By the way, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, the creators of Reddit, were themselves inspired by a more primitive karma system, on Slashdot. This system had real-world implications. You didn’t get karma so that other people could see your karma; you got karma so that the system knew you weren’t a spammer. If a lot of your posts had been flagged for abuse, your karma would go down and you might lose posting or moderation privileges. But you weren’t really supposed to show off your high karma. “Don’t worry too much about it; it’s just an integer in a database,” Slashdot told us.

To be honest, it was initially surprising to me that you could just print a number after people’s handles and they would feel rewarded. Look at me! Look at my four digit number! But it does drive a tremendous amount of good behavior. Even people who aren’t participating in the system (by working to earn reputation) buy into it (e.g., by respecting high-reputation users for their demonstrated knowledge and helpfulness).

But there’s still something of a mystery here, which is why earning “magic internet points” is appealing to anyone.

I think the answer is that it’s nice to know that you’ve made a difference. You toil away in the hot kitchen all day and when you serve dinner it’s nice to hear a compliment or two. If somebody compliments you on the extra effort you put into making radish roses, you’re going to be very happy.

This is a part of a greater human need: to make an impact on the world, and to know that you’re contributing and being appreciated for it. Stack Overflow’s reputation system serves to recognize that you’re a human being and we are super thankful for your contribution.

That said, there is a dark side to gamification. It’s not 100% awesome.

The first problem we noticed is that it’s very nice to get an upvote, but getting a downvote feels like a slap in the face. Especially if you don’t understand why you got the downvote, or if you don’t agree. Stack Overflow’s voting has made many people unhappy over the years, and there are probably loads of people who felt unwelcome and who don’t participate in Stack Overflow as a result. (Here’s an old blog post explaining why we didn’t just eliminate downvotes).

There’s another problem, which is that, to the extent that the gamification in Stack Overflow makes the site feel less inclusive and welcoming to many people, it is disproportionately off-putting to programmers from underrepresented groups. While Stack Overflow does have many amazing, high reputation contributors who are women or minorities, we’ve also heard from too many who were apprehensive about participating.

These are big problems. There’s a lot more we can and will say about that over the next few months, and we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us trying to make Stack Overflow a more inclusive and diverse place so we can improve the important service that it provides to developers everywhere.

Gamification can shape behavior. It can guide you to do certain things in certain ways, and it can encourage certain behaviors. But it’s a very weak force. You can’t do that much with gamification. You certainly can’t get people to do something that they’re not interested in doing, anyway. I’ve heard a lot of crazy business plans that are pinning rather too high hopes on gamification as a way of getting people to go along with some crazy scheme that the people won’t want to go along with. Nobody’s going to learn French just to get the Duolingo points. But if you are learning French, and you are using Duolingo, you might make an effort to open the app every day just to keep your streak going.

I’ve got more posts coming! The next one will be about the obsessive way Stack Overflow was designed for the artifact, in other words, we optimized everything to create amazing results for developers with problems arriving from Google, not just to answer questions that people typed into our site.