It's possible to overanalyze the outcome but in my opinion, the reason is rather simple: search results. In my programming-related searches, I never saw a result pointing to StackOverflow documentation. Whatever I wanted to know was already answered in a SO question. Take npm documentation for instance, which has covered topics like, "Configuring", "Publishing" npm packages [1].
As much as I loathe the state of documentation of some projects, I'd rarely open a specific website for help - I'll just Google, "publish npm package", "configure npm package", for which, none of the search results point to a StackOverflow documentation page.
Agreed. I didn't even know Documentation existed. I googled for it and eventually picked at random this page about Java lambda expressions [1]. Then I googled for Java lambda and Documentation is not in the first page. To be fair, there are no Stack Overflow results in that page.
However, if I google for a more specific issue such as Java lambda foreach index, guess what's the first link I get? This Stack Overflow page [2] Actually, the first six links are SO pages.
So, it is possible that they busted Documentation because of bad SEO for generic plain vanilla searches.
Same here. I've been googling around Django _a lot_ over the last few months (first time using Python for anything web-based, and first time setting up anything more complicated than just nginx/Caddy on the server in a long time, so I had a lot of questions).
I probably ended up on SO hundreds of times in that period, and never once saw Documentation mentioned (I _may_ have technically seen it in the nav bar, but just seeing "Documentation" in that context I'm going to assume it is documentation _for_ SO and just ignore it).
E: Forgot to mention, even reading the title of this post my initial thought was that it was documentation relating to the sunsetting of SO (which sounded crazy).
> Forgot to mention, even reading the title of this post my initial thought was that it was documentation relating to the sunsetting of SO (which sounded crazy)
And I thought it was Stack Overflow sunsetting the very idea of tech documentation because now everybody just read the SO thread for everything they want to do, which is even craziest.
Django is a weird case too because the official docs are so good and also offer very good tutorials. And the Two Scoops book is such an invaluable reference too. Reading both would put you in the position where you won't really need SO for Django questions.
Definitely, the official docs are fantastic. A lot of the SO use came from having a solution based on the docs, but wanting to check I wasn't missing a prefered/recommended way to do it, or being fairly sure something would be a Django built-in but not finding it (so SO was a bridge from how I was describing something to where it was in the official docs).
Which is strange thing. They always have something [unneeded] in a collapsable block at the top, but I never seen Documentation in there, in SO answers, in google, anywhere.
Few announcements through regular comment notifications would be fine to me even if not interested.
My first impression when seeing that there is "Why would I look at the documentation for Stackoverflow, I know my way around this website for what I need to do".
There's no such thing as "the top Google result", Google's search algorithms don't serve up the same results for every search for everyone at every time.
Yes I'm surprised they don't mention this as a reason for failure because, if it doesn't show up in Google search results, the whole project is doomed regardless of its merits. Nobody is going to go specifically on Documentation, use the custom search, often not find what they are looking for, and then go to Google.
I am sorry, I might be uninformed, may I know the merits of the product? As far as I know it wasn't really helpful. It was like someone built github for writing technical documentation.
Some pages are pretty good, and poor quality content gets downvoted and eventually deleted anyway. To take an example if you search for "php mysql" on Google, the top result is a w3school page full of ads with little content.
But again if it doesn't show up in search results it doesn't matter. That also means there's less of an incentive to improve the content since nobody will read it.
Now that MDN is an excellent resource, and MS finally made MSDN documentation more search-engine friendly with docs.microsoft.com I'm hoping it will mean W3Schools will be relegated to lower ranked google results.
I don't know how they're able to hold their place still, I really don't.
To be fair, they offered a complete JS reference when none existed (at least that I knew of), in format which was easy to understand. I don't really know where the hate against w3s comes from... I still find them easier to use than MDN for quick lookups.
It doesn't really teach you anything in depth, opting instead to just spit out a bunch of examples.
As someone who used it initially years back starting out, I would have appreciated if it actually gave me context about how things worked and why rather than just copying and pasting code.
The only real reason it seems to get attention is due to the feedback loop of its ranking. Users see it as a top result and assume it must be some sort of authority on web development.
It has nothing to do with the W3C despite the name. Not to imply that beginners might know about W3C in the first place but still!
> It doesn't really teach you anything in depth, opting instead to just spit out a bunch of examples.
You spelt the very reason it is (was?) popular. The documentation/tutorial that gets traffic isn't the one with the most in-depth technical treatment, but, one which gives accessible examples to get started.
Examples are super useful; for the cases I've used w3schools, their example either worked almost directly or at least showed me how to do something quickly. Keep in mind that I'm not a real web dev, so my usecases are trivial stuff.
The hate comes from little inaccuracies that have caused hours of stress and confusion. It is probably not as bad now but I recall getting pretty frustrated after spending hours debugging only to find out the docs were wrong.
The very first thing you see is a huge green box "Why does MDN look different?", which is completely irrelevant to what I'm looking for. Scrolling down reveals thin gray on gray fonts which make the page hard to read. The amount of information is excessive if you're in a hurry.
Note that it's called W3Schools, not "w3cschools". Lots of people assume they have something to do with the W3C because they named themselves something confusingly similar, but in fact they are not related to the W3C at all.
SO Documentation had low Google results because nobody used it, didn't have that many good examples, so people rarely linked it and so it had low pagerank.
As much as I loathe the state of documentation of some projects, I'd rarely open a specific website for help - I'll just Google, "publish npm package", "configure npm package", for which, none of the search results point to a StackOverflow documentation page.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/documentation/node.js/482/npm#t=20...