How is Stack Overflow advertised? In other words, how can a someone who is completely new discover this website?

I know that time taken to stumble upon it on your own (without suggestions) is inversely proportional to the time one spends on the Internet. How did you, individually, learn of this website? Who was it that recommended it to you?

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    A webring link on Geocities. – Shog9 Aug 25 '14 at 3:57

Search is the biggest way folks find us, and that's exactly how it was intended. We wanted programmers researching a problem to find the best, vetted information possible to solve it and hope they ask a new question once hitting the site and not finding what they specifically needed.

But, there's other ways as well:

  • Some third-party editors now ship with plugins that allow you to directly search the site from with your development environment (a nice artifact of having a good API is people building neat stuff on it).

  • Folks tweeting / sharing interesting or entertaining questions, or answers that they wrote.

  • Word of mouth / evangelists. Believe it or not, I've given talks at universities to CS / Programming students that hadn't heard of the site before, but might remember seeing it once or twice.

  • An increasing number of educators telling students that it's okay to ask questions on Stack Overflow if they get stuck (though, a double-edged sword).

And, when it comes to search, it's important to consider how various search engines have come to understand how you operate. Do they think of you as 'articles' or Q&A? Quite a few make this distinction, and fortunately, we tend to get it right. Much like search engines can determine if you're looking for news on a current event and deliver you the most recent results, they can also tell if it looks like you want to ask a question and give you results from places where you can.

Finally, we strongly suspect that we're listed in documentation given to new employees at at least several large organizations. That's .. also a double-edged sword, but interesting.

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    You can also mention the companies that use SO as "free tech support forum". – usr2564301 Aug 25 '14 at 6:43
  • Tim Post. Please explain the use of "double - edged sword" you have used on two instances – Pranay Aryal Aug 25 '14 at 13:38
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    @speedoheck I don't want to be too critical, but the way you are framing your "I don't understand this idiom" comments comes across badly. You've put them in the imperative mood so they sound like commands even though you have said "please". – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten Aug 25 '14 at 14:53
  • @dmckee you have got good reputation for asking quality questions and giving quality answers (this question included) but deciding what comes across as bad may best be left to a generalized opinion irrespective of reputation. – Pranay Aryal Aug 25 '14 at 15:15
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    @dmckee: What? No, they don't. I can't believe you're being so rude. – Lightness Races in Orbit Oct 7 '14 at 18:05
  • @PranayAryal english.stackexchange.com/questions/60728/… – user2201041 Nov 22 '19 at 15:05

They ask a question of a search engine and the first link that pops up is just the right Stack Overflow question.

At least, that's how it works on a good day.

Most of the site's traffic comes from google as Stack Overflow has quite a good page rank.

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First and foremost via search engines (not just Google). SO is always present in the top of the results.

Furthermore via links to SO solutions on many message boards, forums and blogs. This is how I discovered SO years ago.

It's a pity, however, that SO only allows new users (after four years of very frequent use I am still a new user due to my reputation) to participate via questions or answers. The questions have been posed, and the answers have been given. So what I can (and want to) contribute is my up- or downvote, but SO is not interested in my newbie opinion and therefore my interest in participating is getting less and less.

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    You can always suggest edits. Earns you 2 rep each time one gets accepted, up to 1000 rep in total. – rene Nov 21 '19 at 13:35
  • @rene but what's rep level one can start suggesting edits? – VLAZ Nov 21 '19 at 13:49
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    @VLAZ that comes at 1 rep ... you can even suggest edits when not logged in ... – rene Nov 21 '19 at 13:53
  • @rene thanks, didn't know that. I even went through the privileges page bud didn't see anything about gaining a suggest edit privilege, only stuff about "now you can create community wikis that are easier to edit" or "you can directly edit posts" (the 2k rep one). – VLAZ Nov 21 '19 at 14:12
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    You may not be able to compete on the easy questions, but you very likely have some specific knowledge or experience that very few others have (long tail feature). You just have to locate the questions where you can apply your skills (they are out there, given the 9,000 questions that are posted every single weekday). The advantage is you have hours to compose an answer) – Peter Mortensen Nov 21 '19 at 17:24
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    SO is not interested in my newbie opinion... - The system requires users to prove they understand how the site works to gain privileges. They're trying to reduce the chances of people doing things like up voting spam (or even down voting a good answer because they don't understand what we actually consider spam here). – BSMP Nov 21 '19 at 18:22
  • @Peter Mortensen : you have a point there. Never occured to me that was the way to gain reputation (apparently my grey covers a blond color). Thanks! – Geert-Emo Nov 21 '19 at 20:20
  • @BSMP : sure, I understand that. But.. a lot of dicussion in the meta.SO thinktank is about tactical down-voting by members that gained the trust that they don't spam. I don't know what's wourse. Letting more people participate gives a larger active user base. "Three times spamming? You're out! Three times tactical downvoting? You're out!" could also resolve the problem i.m.o. – Geert-Emo Nov 21 '19 at 20:31

A search engine (Google) recommend Stack Overflow to me, nobody else.

Good content is the key here. When I have a question/problem, the first thing I do, is to ask Google. Today, years after I learned about Stack Overflow, my main traffic comes still through search engines.

Many diversified Questions & Answers in high quality are the best advertisement to win new users.

There are so many people out there, which sacrifice their time to help you. This is the main reason why I stick with Stack Overflow.

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  • Yes, but unfortunately in most cases it is the low-quality ones that the search engines point to. – Peter Mortensen Nov 21 '19 at 17:15

Like others responded, mostly developers - especially newbies rely on the default search engine in the browser for troubleshooting. Normally Stack Overflow will be the light at the end of tunnel - when typing in the error/syntax or even copy/pasting the entire exception from the console in the address bar in an urge to solve it.

The simple search result speaks for itself.

enter image description here

Mostly someone might be there in the same situation across the globe and documented on the Internet SOmewhere. Also peer recommendation is another referrer. If I am not wrong, there may be a Stack Overflow annual survey question on this. :)

Funny memes floating on the Internet gives you the idea of a typical trial and error mindset.

Enter image description here

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I learnt programming from a bootcamp. The one thing we were taught from the very first day was that Google is our friend. You had to search and actively try to solve the problem you had before going to ask a technical mentor (instructors) to help you out. There is where I started using Stack Overflow passively.

Soon afterwards, as I started joining developer meetups, I got to interact with some developers in the market and was told that Stack Overflow is heaven for developers. When I asked why I was told, "you will know why if you continue programming." Now I know why.

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  • Re "...was told that Stack Overflow is heaven for developers": It is good to hear that it is not all negative stories. – Peter Mortensen Nov 23 '19 at 4:58

It's not the way I found Stack Overflow, but some GitHub projects and so on say to use Stack Overflow for support.

(Some companies try that too, but they generally get asked to cease, from what I've seen.)

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  • Hopefully they qualify that statement. Otherwise, some are in for a negative surprise. – Peter Mortensen Nov 23 '19 at 5:00

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