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Stack Exchange is a network of question-and-answer (Q&A)
website A website (also written as a web site) is any web page whose content is identified by a common domain name and is published on at least one web server. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or purpose, such as news, educatio ...
s on topics in diverse fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. The
reputation system A reputation system is a program or algorithm that allow users of an online community to rate each other in order to build trust (social sciences), trust through reputation. Some common uses of these systems can be found on E-commerce websites s ...
allows the sites to be self-moderating. Stack Exchange is composed of 173 communities bringing in over 100 million unique visitors each month. the three most active sites in the network are
Stack Overflow In software, a stack overflow occurs if the call stack pointer exceeds the stack bound. The call stack may consist of a limited amount of address space, often determined at the start of the program. The size of the call stack depends on many fa ...
(which focuses on
computer programming Computer programming or coding is the composition of sequences of instructions, called computer program, programs, that computers can follow to perform tasks. It involves designing and implementing algorithms, step-by-step specifications of proc ...
), Mathematics, and Ask Ubuntu (focusing on the
Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...
distribution
Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...
). All sites in the network are modeled after the initial site Stack Overflow which was created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky in 2008. Further Q&A sites in the network are established, defined, and eventually if found relevant brought to creation by registered users through a special site named Area 51. User contributions since May 2, 2018 are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Older content, contributed while the site used the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license or the earlier Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Unported license, remains licensed under the license in force at the time it was contributed. In June 2021, Prosus acquired Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion, its first complete acquisition in the area of
educational technology Educational technology (commonly abbreviated as edutech, or edtech) is the combined use of computer hardware, software, and educational theory and practice to facilitate learning and teaching. When referred to with its abbreviation, "EdTech" ...
.


History


Founding and growth

In 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created
Stack Overflow In software, a stack overflow occurs if the call stack pointer exceeds the stack bound. The call stack may consist of a limited amount of address space, often determined at the start of the program. The size of the call stack depends on many fa ...
, a question-and-answer website for
computer programming Computer programming or coding is the composition of sequences of instructions, called computer program, programs, that computers can follow to perform tasks. It involves designing and implementing algorithms, step-by-step specifications of proc ...
questions, which they described as an alternative to the programmer forum Experts-Exchange. In 2009, they started additional sites based on the Stack Overflow model: Server Fault for questions related to
system administration An IT administrator, system administrator, sysadmin, or admin is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems, especially multi-user computers, such as servers. The system administr ...
and Super User for questions from computer
power user A power user is a user of computers, software and other electronic devices who uses advanced features of computer hardware, operating systems, programs, or websites which are not used by the average user. A power user might not have extensive tech ...
s. In September 2009, Spolsky's company, Fog Creek Software, released a
beta Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; or ) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Ancient Greek, beta represented the voiced bilabial plosive . In Modern Greek, it represe ...
version of the Stack Exchange 1.0 platform as a way for third parties to create their own communities based on the software behind Stack Overflow, with monthly fees. This white label service was not successful, with few customers and slow growing communities. In May 2010, Stack Overflow (as its own new company) raised US$6 million in
venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...
from
Union Square Ventures Union Square Ventures (USV) is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. The firm has backed more than 130 startups, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Coinbase, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Kickstarter, MongoDB, ...
and other investors, and it switched its focus to developing new sites for answering questions on specific subjects, Stack Exchange 2.0. Users vote on new site topics in a staging area called Area 51, where algorithms determine which suggested site topics have
critical mass In nuclear engineering, critical mass is the minimum mass of the fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction in a particular setup. The critical mass of a fissionable material depends upon its nuclear properties (specific ...
and should be created. In November 2010, Stack Exchange site topics in "beta testing" included physics, mathematics, and writing. Stack Exchange publicly launched in January 2011 with 33 Web sites; it had 27 employees and 1.5 million users at the time, and it included advertising. At that time, it was compared to
Quora Quora is an American social question-and-answer website and online knowledge market headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was founded on June 25, 2009, and made available to the public on June 21, 2010. Users can post questions, answ ...
, founded in 2009, which similarly specializes in expert answers. Other competing sites include WikiAnswers and Yahoo! Answers. In February 2011, Stack Overflow released an associated job board called Careers 2.0, charging fees to recruiters for access, which later re-branded to Stack Overflow Careers. In March 2011, Stack Overflow raised US$12 million in additional venture funding, and the company renamed itself to Stack Exchange, Inc. It is based in
Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...
. In February 2012, Atwood left the company. On April 18, 2013 CipherCloud issued
Digital Millennium Copyright Act The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or ...
(DMCA) takedown notices in an attempt to block discussion of possible weaknesses of their encryption algorithm. The Stack Exchange Crypto group discussion on the algorithm was censored, but it was later restored without pictures. , "Stack Exchange" no longer refers to the company, only the network of question-and-answer websites. Instead, the company is now referred to as Stack Overflow. In 2016, Stack Exchange added a variety of new sites which pushed the boundaries of the typical question-and-answer site. For example, Puzzling offers a platform for users who already know the answer to questions to challenge their peers to solve the problems unlike traditional Q–A sites where the poster does not know the answer.


Declining relationship between users and company

In 2016, Stack Exchange announced the second iteration of the Stack Exchange Quality Project, in which they attempt to implement specific important features requested by the community to meet a distinct high-priority set of goals. After users enthusiastically responded with feature ideas, they complained that there was insufficient action on the company's part. In October 2018, the company removed its Interpersonal Skills site from the Hot Network Questions list after a complaint on Twitter, and an employee (who was part of the SRE team, which was not community-facing) posted tweets attacking moderators.


Late 2019 controversies

To start, in June 2019, more advertisements were added causing a large dispute. On September 27, 2019, a moderator of multiple Stack Exchange sites, specifically Monica Cellio, was dismissed from her moderator position, allegedly connected to behavior associated with upcoming changes to the Code of Conduct (CoC) relating to
gender pronouns Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it''). Personal pronouns may also take different for ...
. Many other moderators resigned or suspended their moderator activity in response to the dismissal. The company responded with two very poorly received messages which have since been deleted, and by a slightly less negatively-received apology several days later. In December 2019, the company posted a message, stating that they and the moderator had come to an agreement and expressing regret for any damage to her reputation. Nevertheless, this, plus the sudden departure of multiple community managers (Stack Exchange employees who interact with the community), led to an erosion of trust between the community and the company—convincing many of the site's most prolific users, including many community-elected moderators and a community manager, to depart within the next few months.


2019–2020 licensing change announcements

On September 2, 2019, the terms of service (and the footer of every page served) changed to referencing the "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike" (CC BY-SA) license's 4.0 version instead of its 3.0 version. Users were puzzled as to how Stack Overflow acquired the rights for this relicensing of their past contributions, with some users explicitly stating that they did not intend their contributions to be licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Users were concerned that, if the relicensing was found to be a breach of CC BY-SA 3.0, Stack Exchange would have made itself unable to distribute the content under any CC BY-SA license (and that the footer's license statement could be erroneous), and would have to rely on its "perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use, copy, cache, publish, display, distribute, modify, create derivative works and store" the content instead. On September 27, an official Stack Exchange reply stated it had been an "important step", but declined to discuss with the community the legal basis for the relicensing. In March 2020, a post announced that content contributed before May 2, 2018 was available under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. In the ensuing discussion, several users asked about the similar situation in August 2010, when Stack Exchange switched from accepting CC BY-SA 2.5 contributions to 3.0. A representative of the corporation noted "we are looking ..to show v2.5 for posts predating this change but cannot commit to it yet". Some users were unconvinced that the September 2019 announcement was not a breach of CC BY-SA 3.0 that would have caused its termination, and some answers were not placated by the dateline chosen. In the ensuing discussion, Stack Overflow staff declined to comment.


June - August 2023 moderation strike

In mid-2023, Stack Exchange made several changes regarding its policies around content generated by
artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...
which resulted in a strike of a portion of its volunteer moderators. The protest centered around a policy posted to moderators on May 29 stating that the use of AI-detection tools were not permitted to be used as part of moderation. In a statement, Stack Exchange confirmed that 11% of moderators had ceased content moderation in response to this policy. This would grow to more than 23% of all moderators on the network by June 22, including more than 70% of all Stack Overflow moderators. The strike began with a post to Meta Stack Exchange, which raised concerns regarding the quality and accuracy of AI-generated content, and the lack of transparency from Stack Exchange surrounding this policy change. Moderators also stated that the version of the policy released to the public differed from the version they had received on the moderator-only forum, notably in that the public version did not include language requiring that moderators stop restricting all AI content. Negotiations between Stack Exchange and moderators resulted in new policies allowing moderators to remove AI content when there is a strong indicator of GPT usage, and a commitment from the site to continue to provide data and API access. At the conclusion of negotiations, the strike ended on August 2, 2023.


Site features


Reputation and badges

The primary purpose of each Stack Exchange site is to enable users to post questions and answer them. Users can vote on both answers and questions, and through this process users earn reputation points, a form of
gamification Gamification is the process of enhancing systems, services, organisations and activities through the integration of game design elements and principles in non-game contexts. The goal is to increase user engagement, motivation, competition and ...
. This voting system was compared to
Digg Digg (stylized in lowercase as digg) is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select articles specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral phenomenon, viral Internet iss ...
when the Stack Exchange platform was first released. Users receive privileges by collecting reputation points, ranging from the ability to vote and comment on questions and answers to the ability to moderate many aspects of the site. Due to the prominence of Stack Exchange profiles in web search results and the Stack Overflow Careers job board, users may have reason to game the system. Along with posting questions and answers, users can add comments to them and edit text written by others. Each Stack Exchange site has a "meta" section where users can settle disputes, in the style of
MetaFilter MetaFilter, known as MeFi to its members, is a general-interest community weblog, founded in 1999 and based in the United States, featuring links to content that users have discovered on the web. Since 2003, it has included the popular question-a ...
's "MetaTalk" forum, because the self-moderation system for questions and answers can lead to significant arguments. Badges are awarded for asking and answering, participating in meta, and for moderating the site. There are bronze, silver and gold badges and appear on users' profile pages as well as their posts.


Moderators and election process

Moderators are responsible for managing the site, such as by following up on flagged posts, locking and protecting posts, suspending users, and deleting the worst posts (including misinformation) on the site. According to the Stack Exchange philosophy, they should be minimally involved in the site. They are also expected to lead by example, as well as to show respect to other users. To become a moderator, users have to participate in an election. Elections are called as needed by the Stack Exchange Community Team for a designated number of seats. Users must first nominate themselves and have at least 300 reputation (3,000 on Stack Overflow and 1,000 on Math Stack Exchange), while also being in good standing, such as not having been suspended during the past year. Aside from introducing themselves and explaining why they would be a good moderator, users must also answer questions written by the community. Nominations can be withdrawn at any time. After this, users vote on the candidates in a primary, where the vote tally is made public. The top 10 nominees advance to the election stage, where any user with at least 150 reputation is allowed to vote. A ranked-choice voting system is used where users can rank all the candidates if they wish. Votes are tallied using the Meek STV method (single transferable vote) which allows fractional parts of a vote to be counted.


Bounties

Stack Exchange allows users to donate some of their reputation to help questions receive answers or better answers, as well as to incentivize users to answer. This is called a 'bounty' and can be applied on questions 48 hours after being asked, lasting for 7 days plus a grace period of 24 hours. The minimum bounty is set at 50 reputation, except if the user has already answered the question or has offered a previous bounty on the question. Bounties cannot be cancelled, and reputation cannot be refunded from a bounty, even if the question did not receive an answer.


Technologies used

Stack Exchange uses IIS, SQL Server, and the
ASP.NET ASP.NET is a server-side web-application framework designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. It was developed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, applications and services. The name stands for Ac ...
framework, all from a single code base for every Stack Exchange site (except Area 51, which runs off a fork of the Stack Overflow code base). Blogs formerly used
WordPress WordPress (WP, or WordPress.org) is a web content management system. It was originally created as a tool to publish blogs but has evolved to support publishing other web content, including more traditional websites, electronic mailing list, ma ...
, but they have been discontinued. The team also uses
Redis Redis (; Remote Dictionary Server) is an in-memory key–value database, used as a distributed cache and message broker, with optional durability. Because it holds all data in memory and because of its design, Redis offers low- latency reads ...
, HAProxy and
Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is a Search engine (computing), search engine based on Apache Lucene, a free and open-source search engine. It provides a distributed, Multitenancy, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema ...
. Stack Exchange tries to stay up to date with the newest technologies from
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
, usually using the latest releases of any given framework. The code is primarily written in C# ASP.NET MVC using the Razor View Engine. The preferred IDE is
Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including web site, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development ...
and the data layers uses Dapper for data access. The site makes use of
URL slug Clean URLs (also known as user-friendly URLs, pretty URLs, search-engine–friendly URLs or RESTful URLs) are web addresses or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) intended to improve the usability and accessibility of a website, web application, or we ...
s in addition to numeric
identifier An identifier is a name that identifies (that is, labels the identity of) either a unique object or a unique ''class'' of objects, where the "object" or class may be an idea, person, physical countable object (or class thereof), or physical mass ...
s for question URLs.


Site creation process

Every new site created in the Stack Exchange Network goes through a detailed review process on a site called Area 51, that is consisting of four steps: * Definition: A public proposal must be drafted and posted so that any member of the community can discuss the proposal and vote on it. This allows a collaborative proposal to emerge over time. The proposal must address these four key issues *# the topic of the site *# the targeted audience *# forty exemplary questions, upvoted at least 10 times from the community *# 60 followers from the community * Commitment: First, 200 users interested in the new site are asked to formally commit and support the site by actively participating and contributing to it by asking or answering 10 questions during th
FIRDR
six months of the public beta. Second, 100 users interested in the new site that have committed with over 200 reputation on another site on the network. Finally, it requires a commitment score of 500, which uses the following formula: *# PrelimScore = SUM(Reputation >= 200 ? 0.233 * ln(Reputation-101) - 0.75 : 0) + 1.5 *# UserScore = PrelimScore * 0.9 ^ (DAYS / 180) * Beta: A live test version of this site is tested out, in two steps. # Private Beta:If the concept receives 100% commitment (reaches the requirements listed above), the site enters the private beta phase, where committed members begin actively using the site and publicizing it. It must remain for at least 35 days (or 5 weeks). # Public Beta: The site is open to the public for a long period. This allows the creators to ensure that the site reaches critical mass before it is fully launched. It much remain for at least 180 days (or 6 months) of public beta, and 215 total days of beta (31 weeks). * Graduation: If the site has at least 1000 open questions, and 70% of questions or more have at least 1 upvoted answer, it is granted a "graduation" and fully launched.


Notable users


Nobel Prize winners

*
Gerard 't Hooft Gerardus "Gerard" 't Hooft (; born July 5, 1946) is a Dutch theoretical physicist and professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He shared the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics with his thesis advisor Martinus J. G. Veltman "for elucidating t ...


Fields Medal winners

* Peter Scholze (2018) * Martin Hairer (2014) * Terence Tao (2006) * Tim Gowers (1998) * Curtis McMullen (1998) * Richard Borcherds (1998) *
Edward Witten Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physics, theoretical physicist known for his contributions to string theory, topological quantum field theory, and various areas of mathematics. He is a professor emeritus in the sc ...
(1990) *
Vaughan Jones Sir Vaughan Frederick Randal Jones (31 December 19526 September 2020) was a New Zealand mathematician known for his work on von Neumann algebras and knot polynomials. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1990. Early life Jones was born in Gisbo ...
(1990) *
Michael Freedman Michael Hartley Freedman (born April 21, 1951) is an American mathematician at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the 4-dimensional gen ...
(1986) *
William Thurston William Paul Thurston (October 30, 1946August 21, 2012) was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds. Thurst ...
(1982)


Founders

* Joel Spolsky (co-founder of
Stack Overflow In software, a stack overflow occurs if the call stack pointer exceeds the stack bound. The call stack may consist of a limited amount of address space, often determined at the start of the program. The size of the call stack depends on many fa ...
) * Jeff Atwood (co-founder of Stack Overflow) *
Ravi Vakil Ravi D. Vakil (born February 22, 1970) is a Canadian-American mathematician working in algebraic geometry. He is the current president of the American Mathematical Society. Education and career Vakil attended high school at Martingrove Collegiat ...
(co-founder of
MathOverflow MathOverflow is a mathematics question-and-answer (Q&A) website, which serves as an online community of mathematicians. It allows users to ask questions, submit answers, and rate both, all while getting merit points for their activities. It is ...
)


Other notable scientists and mathematicians

*
Scott Aaronson Scott Joel Aaronson (born May 21, 1981) is an American Theoretical computer science, theoretical computer scientist and Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. His primary areas of research are ...
* Ian Agol *
John Baez John Carlos Baez ( ; born June 12, 1961) is an American mathematical physicist and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) in Riverside, California. He has worked on spin foams in loop quantum gravity, ap ...
* Carlo Beenakker * Andreas Blass * Robert Bryant * Cleo * Noam Elkies * Matthew Emerton *
David Eppstein David Arthur Eppstein (born 1963) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine. He is known for his work in computational geometry, graph algor ...
(inventor of Eppstein's algorithm) * Alexandre Eremenko *
Joel David Hamkins Joel David Hamkins is an American mathematician and philosopher who is the John Cardinal O'Hara Professor of Logic at the University of Notre Dame. He has made contributions in mathematical logic, mathematical and philosophical logic, set theor ...
(top user on
MathOverflow MathOverflow is a mathematics question-and-answer (Q&A) website, which serves as an online community of mathematicians. It allows users to ask questions, submit answers, and rate both, all while getting merit points for their activities. It is ...
) * James E. Humphreys * Gil Kalai * Anna Krylov * Greg Kuperberg * Tim Peters (software engineer) (inventor of Timsort) * Joseph O'Rourke * Igor Rivin *
Guido van Rossum Guido van Rossum (; born 31 January 1956) is a Dutch programmer. He is the creator of the Python programming language, for which he was the " benevolent dictator for life" (BDFL) until he stepped down from the position on 12 July 2018. He ...
(creator of Python) * Anders Sandberg *
Jeffrey Shallit Jeffrey Outlaw Shallit (born October 17, 1957) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is an active number theorist and a noted critic of intelligent design. He is married to Anna Lubiw, also a computer scientist. Early life ...
(computer scientist with Erdos number of one) *
Peter Shor Peter Williston Shor (born August 14, 1959) is an American theoretical computer scientist known for his work on quantum computation, in particular for devising Shor's algorithm, a quantum algorithm for factoring exponentially faster than the ...
(inventor of
Shor's algorithm Shor's algorithm is a quantum algorithm for finding the prime factors of an integer. It was developed in 1994 by the American mathematician Peter Shor. It is one of the few known quantum algorithms with compelling potential applications and strong ...
) * Michael Shulman


See also

*
MathOverflow MathOverflow is a mathematics question-and-answer (Q&A) website, which serves as an online community of mathematicians. It allows users to ask questions, submit answers, and rate both, all while getting merit points for their activities. It is ...
* Minimal reproducible example * PhysicsOverflow *
Q&A software A question and answer system (or Q&A system) is an online software system that attempts to answer questions asked by users. Q&A software is frequently integrated by large and specialist corporations and tends to be implemented as a Online communit ...


References


External links

*
List of Stack Exchange sites

Stack Exchange monthly archive of sites
on
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
{{Fog Creek Software Companies based in New York City Computing websites Creative Commons-licensed websites Internet properties established in 2008 Question-and-answer websites Software developer communities Stack Exchange network