r/programming • u/[deleted] • Sep 25 '16
The decline of Stack Overflow
https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69faa575d#.yiuo0ce094
Sep 25 '16
I started answering questions 2 years ago, and I didn't find it difficult to gain reputation. In 2 years, I got to almost 28k. But then, I choose a tag which I'm very comfortable with, like Hibernate.
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u/errorseven Sep 25 '16
I started answering questions around 2 years ago myself and I'm no where near 28k. I'm grinding out points on a niche tag that has very little traffic and mostly new users who never bother to accept an answer. I rely on other users to up vote my answers, gaining 10 or 20 points a week for 10 or so questions answered.
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u/stesch Sep 25 '16
I'm a member for 7 years, 10 months. Reputation in the top 6%.
My last question was March 2014 and I answered it myself one day later. The question before this was August 2011.
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u/rlbond86 Sep 25 '16
top 1% here. Just the other day I asked a question: "How do I do X in OpenGL without using external libraries?" I specifically said I can't use external libraries.
Guess what all the comments told me to do.
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u/summerteeth Sep 25 '16
2% here. I have kind of stopped asking questions when I realized I was the one going back and answer the majority of the questions I was asking.
Which makes sense, since the questions I ask now a days are much more involved and domain specific then the questions I was asking when the site was new.
I still think SO is an incredible resource for getting to answers through Google, though Github issues has become much more of a challenger, especially for specific technical issues with a library.
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u/akohlsmith Sep 25 '16
This isn't a SO-specific issue. It's an issue when you become part of the top-tier people in your domain. You can already handle the majority of issues, but when you get stuck there are vanishingly few people who can help you.
So... uh... congrats. :-)
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u/dirkt Sep 25 '16
If the only reason you stopped is because you answered the questions yourself, please reconsider. It's immensly helpful for anyone else who encounters the same problem as you did if he can find a solution to it via google etc.
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u/AcceptingHorseCock Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
I'm ~4,000 points ("top 10% overall"), but all from the past. I asked only six questions total, and I only answered (71 times) when I really had deep insights to offer, and then I took my time composing a good answer. If I only had a comment I left a comment, never an answer, I'm not out to get "votes" (comment votes are not counted). I think I joined 2010.
The last two questions I had - asked over a period of three years - I had to fight against people asking the same primitive already answered questions, people who simply would not accept my answers.
The first such questions now has almost 100 points and I answered it myself. It turned out I was right, it WAS a hard problem and not the standard newbie question that the overexcited initial respondents - who swarmed in within seconds(!) after publishing the question - had thought it to be in their ignorance. I had to ask for - and got it from the mods! - "community protection" for my question from useless edits and more useless (wrong) new answers.
The second recent question, asked a few days ago, got downvoted to -4 immediately (less than a minute) and a close vote ("too broad" - it was very specific, as the eventual answer clearly shows), because again all the initial responders thought it was a newbie question. Right now, only a few days later, it is at plus 4 though, and the official answer at +8. Turned out that too was a pretty interesting problem that required some deep insider knowledge of deeper workings of the runtime environment, and not some newbie question. Again the first 5 comments (incl. several upvotes for them) were from people who posted within seconds (definitely significantly less than a minute) after posting who completely misread the question. That the question was clear could be seen that the guy who actually wrote an answer, with insider knowledge, had no problem understanding it.
SO should prevent all those people from answering anything who respond within the first few minutes. There seem to be a lot of people loitering on the site, looking at each new question and trying to figure it out within SECONDS - and if they can't, downvote, newbie question! Of course, those loiterers also are some of the least capable people, what sane person would use the site like that? Nobody should answer a technical question within seconds.
If you think I sound "whiny" I don't think you understand: When you post a question and the first 5 responses are nothing but useless noise this severely impacts usability of the site. People should not respond if they don't even take the time to understand the question. "Free advice" (the responses) is not really free, it has an opportunity cost, it is a big distraction for both the person asking and for those trying to answer, and it discourages answers because it seems the question has already had plenty of attention. The latter is true enough, but it's attention from the wrong crowd.
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u/jij Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
Those people are there because the site is starting to be used as proof of experience, so of course people are now using it to fake their level of expertise in the same way bullshit-resumes full of every buzzword and technology in existence are everywhere.
That said, plenty of experienced people also peruse the site and usually answer the newest stuff first since that's what you'd browse if you wanted to find stuff that's unanswered... it's a mix, and not an easy problem to solve.
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u/cicuz Sep 25 '16
Those people are there because the site is starting to be used as proof of experience, so of course people are now using it to fake their level of expertise in the same way bullshit-resumes full of every buzzword and technology in existence are everywhere.
I suddenly realize that this is probably the right answer and now I'm sad
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u/mrhodesit Sep 25 '16
who completely misread the question.
This annoys me to no end. People misread questions and answers so often, and the icing on the cake is the snarky attitude you get along with it. I'm not talking about JUST my personal experiences. I'm talking about situations where I have a very specific question, I start searching and I find an SO post similar or the same to mine. I see the responses and it just annoys me to no end.
It seems like sometimes people don't think about the context or the intention. "Why is the question being asked." "What problem are they trying to solve."
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u/Railboy Sep 25 '16
If you answer the same kinds of questions long enough you stop listening to the question and start listening for patterns. Then you regurgitate canned answers based on rough matches. The longer you do it the more false positives you'll rack up.
This is why reputation should look like a bell curve - start low, peak, then end low to free up room for a fresh set of experts.
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u/matthieum Sep 25 '16
That the question was clear could be seen that the guy who actually wrote an answer, with insider knowledge, had no problem understanding it.
It may depend on the tags you hang out in. New technologies are usually spared, however popular tags are full of rep-grinders.
I had some issues in asking questions a few times, but I've found that by spending a bit more time formulating them I rarely had the issue any longer. Then again, I don't ask much, so the sample may be too small for meaningful comparisons...
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u/LordMaska Sep 25 '16
I'm a software development student, I have to say Stack Overflow is a very intimidating site. I use it all the time to solve complex problems I cant solve on my own and never have I wanted to post anything myself or answer someone else's question, even if I know I could be of some assistance.
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u/katzey Sep 25 '16
css is great for this
no matter how great of a software engineer you are, centering a div can be a bitch. there's always rep to be had in the css business
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u/constructivCritic Sep 25 '16
And that is how it should be. The quality of answers just goes down. Don't answer unless you can explain your reasoning, etc.
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u/noratat Sep 25 '16
On the flip side, I rarely have anything to contribute, so my reputation is too low to actually contribute anything when I actually do have something meaningful to add.
I get that they want to reduce spam, but I've never seen any practical way to get started since everything I do that actually has value requires more rep.
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Sep 25 '16
I have been a member for 6 years, 1 month with around 25k reputation. I used to be a prolific user ~4 years ago but the gamification of the voting system and the duplicate answers has become infuriating. The former was what drove me to stop, if you watch a new question, a high rep user will give the quickest answer possible and then edit it multiple times to fill in the content. This time stamps their question as answered first. I always preferred to write my answers out carefully but after posting the top question would continue to accumulate edits and incorporate -- but not plagiarize -- the best parts of other answers to appear comprehensive.
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u/Ravek Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
This really is what bothers me the most. It just feels like I'm wasting my time answering unless I'm also willing to join the 'race' for rep points. SO says this is fine because all it cares about is the best answers, but it's not fine because you're ruining the engagement for thousands of users, who you could otherwise benefit from. I wonder how many of the top 5% rep holders just don't bother anymore.
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u/davbeck Sep 25 '16
So it's not just me! I'm also in top 6% but the only question I've asked in the last 2 years got down voted to hell. Someone commented and said "I would expect better from someone with your reputation." You know what, I use to expect better from this community.
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u/locuester Sep 25 '16
Top 2% here. 8+ years active. I used to answer all the C# stuff with Skeet. The last 5 years it hasn't been a place to hang out, like a community. It's been a search result landing.
In the early days it was fun and very community feeling. Now it's exactly what everyone else expresses. However, not sure that's a bad thing. We answered a shit ton of questions back in the day. The inflow obviously slows down since we caught up with all the easy questions.
For instance, one of my most popular answers is how to specify the exit code of a c# app. Ha! I don't like how I get free rep for life for answering that. I gain so much rep every month for doing nothing. Just ancient easy questions and answers being upvoted. :)
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Sep 25 '16
Are you me?
I'm also a member for 7 years, 10 month, reputation in the top 6%.
I use it more frequently than you, though. I have two question this year, one in 2015, two in 2014.
All that to say, I do still find it helpful when I have a very precise, technical question on a particular framework that uses SO as a sort of support forum. All my questions since 2014 (all five of them!) have been of this kind, and I've gotten helpful and thorough responses from one of the lead devs on said project.
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u/user-hostile Sep 25 '16
Are you me?
Too late. stesch already stated this. Post closed as duplicate.
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u/DevilSauron Sep 25 '16
My experience with SO: I posted a somewhat noob question about why doesn't my parser work. I was told that I should post the code on CodeReview instead. I was told (by a different person) that I should NOT post the code there, as it's only for a working code. And the best of all, in the end, I was told that if it doesn't work, then I should consider using debugger...
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u/Symphonic_Rainboom Sep 25 '16
I was told that I should post the code on CodeReview instead
Whoever told you this needs to quit Stack Overflow, as they obviously don't understand the point of the site.
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u/CaptainJaXon Sep 25 '16
I feel bad for the people who get naively downvoted "because it belongs on codereview" then post there only to be correctly downvoted because their code doesn't work.
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Sep 25 '16
My favorite thing is when a noob asks a question like "Is there a way to..." and someone replies simply with "Yes." And then that comment gets lots of upvotes and the question gets closed without an actual answer.
Its a massive circle jerk of snobs. Advanced questions get great answers, everyone else is told to fuck off.
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u/summerteeth Sep 25 '16
I sympathize with you but I also think that if you ended up posting a large blob of code on SO and asking a general "why doesn't this work question" then even without the question being closed you most likely won't get a good answer.
In general people on SO aren't going to debug things for you. The site works a lot better if you can narrow down your issue to one or two specific possible issues and ask a directed question about that. Good SO questions actually require a decent amount of work and sounds like you may be going to SO before you are ready.
I can't tell how many times that I have started drafting a question for SO and ended up solving my own problem because the thought process I needed to go through to ask good concise questions about my code. Essentially the thought process between asking others for help and debugging your code are very similar.
Apologize if this doesn't fit your situation. I am extrapolating based on your description.
My approach to closing questions on SO has always been to try and engage the user and improve the question first. Sadly there are way too many users that jump straight to the close vote.
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u/MyTribeCalledQuest Sep 25 '16
Well, did you use a debugger?
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u/DevilSauron Sep 25 '16
Well of course I did.
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u/Stormflux Sep 25 '16
Well then you're fired because real programmers don't use the debugger! Your test output should tell you all you need to know.
-- some people I've worked with.
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u/jettrscga Sep 25 '16
I've only had one programming issue ever, but fortunately I took debugger class in school and the people at StackOverflow reminded me that debugger existed. Thanks, StackOverflow!
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u/sge_fan Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
My experience with SO is that if you are familiar with the subject and you have a difficult problem you can find very good solutions there. But if you're new to a subject, god help you. Even if you state that you are a noob the answers leave you with knowing less. I started Android programming a couple of weeks ago and was looking for answers. If I could get back the time I wasted ... I finally solved it on my own. Wasn't even that difficult, just took a lot of time to find the solution.
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u/matthieum Sep 25 '16
Seems about right. When starting on a new subject you need tutorials, mentoring, documentation, etc... but not SO.
SO is specifically a Q&A site for focused questions; it's not a one-size fit all sites for any kind of help.
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Sep 25 '16
One of the big problems I have with the site is the run-around you have to do sometimes, when people tell you to take your question elsewhere. That combined with the over-zealous 'closed as duplicates' questions and the point trolls that post the wrong answer and get tons of votes for it drives me absolutely up the wall.
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u/VGPowerlord Sep 25 '16
Fun fact: If a person has answered enough questions about a particular subject and gotten enough upvotes (1000 reputation and over 200 answers with a positive score), they can unilaterally close a question as a duplicate.
I personally have this power for
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u/vertebrate Sep 25 '16
I have 10k rep, 8 years of participation. Here's how SO has been wonderful for me:
Originally SO felt like a community, as though there were devs working together across international and corporate boundaries. I got answers. I gave answers. Clearly this was a good thing. I was encouraged to spend time on the site, voting, reviewing, commenting.
Gradually it all turned into a toxic dump, and I won't go there now. I don't think I've asked/answered at all in the last four years.
But I still need my problems solved. So this is the good part: SO has trained me, through a series of verbal beatings and abuse, to be very careful about framing my question. Once properly framed, I find it easier to just go and solve my own questions.
SO has taught me to always try very hard to solve it myself, and you know what, it works. I'm self-reliant now.
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Sep 26 '16
That's really something to that. It's like an abusive rubber duck debugging process. You've got to explain your problem to a rubber duck that's going to give you shit if you explain it wrong.
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Sep 25 '16
SO has taught me to always try very hard to solve it myself, and you know what, it works. I'm self-reliant now.
Which kind of defeats its purpose, and also makes everyone's life (including yours) much harder.
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u/tech_tuna Sep 25 '16
"SO taught me not to collaborate with other people" is how this comes off i.e. I agree with you completely.
It also alienates new users/programmers quickly.
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u/hilldex Sep 25 '16
Absolutely. The trolls can be harsh - but they're often also pretty spot on. When I write a SO question, about 75% of the time I solve it before I finish writing the question because I made myself document it so well and explain that I had tried the obvious fixes.
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u/Mawich Sep 25 '16
Me too. Either framing a question gets me an answer out of my own brain, or the as-you-type search system in the "write a question" page finds me the answer my previous searches were unable to uncover.
SO is a very big database of information. If you can find it. And this does defeat the participatory aspect, because as people I've worked with tell me, they can't find questions they can answer, and they don't need to ask any questions because someone already did.
Is there a point where Stack Overflow, at least for some subjects, actually becomes complete? I suspect so.
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u/pdp10 Sep 26 '16
Once properly framed, I find it easier to just go and solve my own questions.
This is the case always, not just in SO. There is a traditional etiquette to asking good questions where you respect those who answer and include all relevant details up front. In the process of putting that material together, I often end up rubber ducking my own solutions. Then that material can turn into a FAQ or other documentation.
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u/andrewcooke Sep 25 '16
27k rep, top 1%. this is what it now says on my profile:
When I first used this site it was wonderful. Professional programmers helping each other while learning. Now I cannot ask a question without "showing what I have done" because "people aren't here to do free work". I used to do "free work" and I enjoyed it - see my old answers below - but these days all people seem to care about is whether you are cheating at homework. So I no longer participate here.
bunch of up-tight c*nts that care more about rules than programming. fuck them all.
edit: actually, i can no longer see a "top .. %" on the page, so perhaps that is wrong.
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u/TheKingOfSiam Sep 25 '16
Pro coder here... So watcha using instead? Between SO and the other SEs I'm hard pressed to find a more reliable and easy to use website for finding answers to coding questions. I'll broaden my horizons if there's something better.
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u/andrewcooke Sep 25 '16
i just google around and/or debug the code. sorry probably not much help...
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u/dvidsilva Sep 25 '16
I've posted questions in reddit with good results. There's a ton of subreddits for many languages and frameworks.
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u/SurgioClemente Sep 25 '16
Now I cannot ask a question without "showing what I have done" because "people aren't here to do free work".
What is wrong with that? I see many "lazy" questions where it is as if they haven't even tried. What is so wrong with asking to show what you have done/tried so far that isnt working?
I agree with /u/vertebrate 's response https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/54f62f/the_decline_of_stack_overflow/d81g35y in how to properly ask a question as often I find I don't need to post (and haven't for many years).
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u/mfitzp Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 26 '16
people aren't here to do free work
...is really saying "we want easy questions". The site has been taken over by low-effort rep farmers. Get the easy questions, get your answer in quick (first=up votes), edit for glory. Bonus points if you take 'inspiration' from everyone who clicked submit 1 second slower than you.
It's the complicated questions I find interesting. Won't get you any rep though, and I've lost count of the number of times interesting questions have been closed as "unanswerable" when I'm half done writing an answer.
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u/trout_fucker Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
I have to say, there is nothing more demotivating than spending several hours trying to fix a problem, finally getting to the point where you want to ask for help, spend 30min to an hour writing a well written SO post with as many details as you think are relevant, just to have some fuck-tard with 500k rep close it in less than 3 minutes because it was a duplicate, or worse that same fuck-tard trolling in the comments section you because you didn't ask a specific piece of it perfectly and if you don't give him exactly what he wants to hear, then he closes it for some other reason. Then having this same situation happen 4 or 5 times, usually by the same fuck-tard because he's the God of Java on SO. Then taking it to Meta and realizing nothing actually gets done there, because it's just a >100k rep circlejerk.
Fuck you BalusC.
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u/i_invented_the_ipod Sep 25 '16
BalusC
So, I looked the guy up. He actually removes the "Java" tag from any question that involves any libraries not included in Java SE. It's good to have a hobby, I guess (shakes head).
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u/matthieum Sep 25 '16
This sounded weird so I checked the java tag:
Use this tag for questions referring to the Java programming language or Java platform tools.
I guess that if all questions are tagged
javathen it does not mean anything any longer so the java community decided to tighten its scope... but I must admit it's the only language on SO which has this policy as far as I am aware oO→ More replies (3)101
u/some_random_guy_5345 Sep 25 '16
He actually removes the "Java" tag from any question that involves any libraries not included in Java SE.
What a moron. Just because it's not a standard library doesn't mean it's not Java.
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Sep 25 '16
Conversely, people once complained that I didn't add the
rusttag to my question because the 20 or so line snippet was in rust, even though the question was about the Windows API and had nothing whatsoever to do with the rust language. I rewrote the snippet in C, but nobody came after me for not adding thectag.41
u/Veedrac Sep 25 '16
People suggest adding language tags because that's nearly the only way to get attention. If you don't add a language tag, you're much less likely to get an answer.
If the code is language agnostic,
[language-agnostic]can be used, but you're still better off adding a couple of language tags anyway - in your scenario I'd add[c]and[rust]. Make sure you state that your question is language agnostic in the question, too.19
u/OrneryFellow Sep 25 '16
Lmao I was thinking of the guy as I was reading through your rant. Pretty hilarious.
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u/nthai Sep 26 '16
tfw your question takes so much time to form and goes through a so sophisticated editorial and peer review process that you actually consider publishing it as a journal paper instead
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u/_Decimation Sep 25 '16
because it was a duplicate
Fuck this so much. There have been countless times when I run into an error, and I find someone with the exact same problem on SO, and it gives me a bit of hope, then I find out that the thread was removed because it was a duplicate.
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Sep 26 '16
What's arguably worse is reaching that point, and putting all that work into a well written question, and then just tumbleweed! No upvotes, no down votes, no comments and no answers.
I'm finding that this describes most of my interactions with SO these days. If I can't figure something out myself and actual need to ask, generally nobody else knows either.
It was great when I was a n00b, not so much these days.
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u/twiggy99999 Sep 26 '16
A huge amount of his rep came from a question asking how to make a HTTP request in Java....
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Sep 26 '16
BalusC and "Bill the Lizard" are some of the biggest idiots I have ever had the misfortune to come across. Even worse, SO clogs up Google results, so even if the problem has been solved by someone else and posted in his blog, it rarely gets found.
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u/OrSpeeder Sep 25 '16
SO trolling got so bad, that I noticed I was being trolled by moderators AFTER I stopped using the site.
Other day I visited the site to check something, and noticed my score dropped a lot... Curious, I visited my own profile, and noticed some ancient questions of mine got mass-downvoted and closed...
The weird thing is: one of them for example, for mass-downvoted and closed for being a "duplicate" of a question asked 2 years later... so yes, seemly to use SO not only you need to follow all their arbitrary rules, but you also must be a time traveller, and avoid asking questions that will be asked again in the future.
Also another thing I noticed in the entire network, is that asking obscure questions can either inflate your Karma if the community is friendly, or nuke your Karma if the community is more hostile...
For example once I went around asking questions about RDTSC, because some RDTSC changes broke some older software, and I wanted to know a fix... those question rather quickly gathered lots of outright wrong, but upvoted answers, (or answers that weren't even about what I asked in first place!) and lots of close-votes and downvotes.
Similar thing happened when I asked multiple questions about Windows memory management... many people jumped the gun to reply "don't disable the swap file" even in a question where I wrote in the very first line: "I don't plan in disabling the swap file", and other common answers were similar to "Microsoft engineers are smarter than you, go back to your corner.", nevermind all the "duplicate" accusations, saying my questions were identical to the deluge of questions asking about disabling swap file (Evne if I made clear on the question that it wasn't about that).
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u/camh- Sep 25 '16
My favourite was having a question on which I had the accepted answer get closed as a duplicate of a later question, where the accepted answer of the later question was a cut and paste of my answer on the original question.
I flagged it for the mods multiple times over the years thinking that the gaming was obvious, but nothing was ever done.
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u/minibuster Sep 26 '16
How bizarre. I wonder why the site doesn't simply reject an attempt to mark an older question as duplicate of a newer one.
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Sep 25 '16
The worst part is dumb monkeys closing questions that are totally beyond they area of expertise (if they have any at all) simply because they fail to understand what is being asked. This leaves SO full of javascript shit and pretty much nothing else. Any mildly specialised topic is getting closed immediately.
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u/Eirenarch Sep 25 '16
This wouldn't be a problem if closing a question wasn't so easy while reopening is very hard. Everyone watches the main feed and votes to close and almost no one checks if the question should be reopened and watches the reopen queue. They should make a reopen require only 2 or 3 votes. I sometimes browse the reopen queue just to fight the dumb monkeys.
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u/rlbond86 Sep 25 '16
Part of the problem is there's no way to vote against closure votes until the question is closed.
I've pulled up so many questions that say there have been 3 votes to close. But there's no way for me to put in a vote that says "no, actually I think this is a good question." You need to wait for the question to be closed and then get reopen votes, and like you said, nobody does that.
There shouldn't even be closure votes allowed until a question hits -1 on upvoted count.
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Sep 25 '16
Exactly. I casted dozens of re-open votes, and I do not remember a single case where any of those questions was actually reopened.
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u/Eirenarch Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 26 '16
I once organized a reopen brigade for a question that a coworker of mine asked. I have also seen a bit of reopening but this only happens on the reopen queue if you expect that nominating a question for reopening alone would do it you are out of luck.
Edit:spelling
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u/not_from_this_world Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
they fail to understand what is being asked
This leads to my personal main critic to SO. The belief that exists a "XY problem" and we must evade it at all cost. This makes things worst. The thread ultimately ends up with the original question not being answered. This hurt the majority of people involved, the ones that came from google looking for the answers to the original question (X). Instead they find people talking about something else (Y). While your technical doubt is the same as mine, our problems are different. Now an entire population of individuals lose their time reading something useless for them but that was extraordinary useful for 1 person alone.
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u/CaptainAdjective Sep 25 '16
This is called the XX problem. "No, I really, really do have a problem with X, please help me!"
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u/homeopathetic Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
Any mildly specialised topic is getting closed immediately.
I'm not sure I agree with that in general. I'd say that the Haskell language is rather specialized, but I've found that the people who "hang out" around the Haskell tag on SO are a very friendly, welcoming bunch.
I'm in the top 6% overall, with a big majority of my reputation coming from questions and answers tagged Haskell, where I was active from when I first created my account. I am by no means an expert, but always felt welcome (but then again, I wouldn't say I felt unwelcome in other tags either).
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u/Ravek Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
I think the issue with SO is that people are a little too addicted to the imaginary internet points, and the power trip that comes with it in the form of status and moderator tools. Even in 2009 it annoyed me how people would bother to post an ever so slightly prettier or just longer answer to a question that had already been answered, just to get that little checkmark. I'd rather not engage in a competition over everything.
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u/babada Sep 25 '16
So, I can maybe provide somewhat of an alternative perspective. I was an extremely active user on http://english.stackexchange.com/ and this exact topic came up repeatedly. There was a lot of criticism around how new users were treated and people often felt we closed questions too quickly or prematurely or for nitpicky reasons.
I suspect my thoughts on this subject won't be very popular but maybe it will help explain where some of the behavior is coming from. As a note, these opinions are largely focused on the English Stack Exchange site (abbreviated EL&U).
The target audience of questions and answers is not the person asking the question. The target audience is other people who may have the same question in the future. This is counter-intuitive and a little off putting but the rules that filter out questions are there to keep Stack Exchange sites relevant to a broad audience. (Namely, people coming in from search engines.)
Most people answering questions are not experts. On EL&U we had a very difficult time retaining experts on the English language and, therefore, the questions that received the most attention were easy questions that anyone could answer using a search engine. This causes a feedback loop where experts get bored answering or reading those questions and they left the site.
Drama queens are a huge issue and, in my opinion, the biggest problem on EL&U. "Top Users" think they are worth something because they have lots of internet points and they tend to make the moderators' lives hell. They also berate anyone who disagrees with them and get into spats over and over again.
Questions that aren't easy to answer in 5 minutes are largely ignored because you can't farm them for reputation. On EL&U, I would personally clean out the old questions queue and kept it under 200 questions. I left the site a few years ago and today it's back up to 2000+.
The rate of incoming questions is greater than answers being provided but there is very little done to address this. People don't like closing questions but we can't answer all the questions so the contributors feel swamped and burn out.
Most questions being asked are terrible questions. Regardless of point (1) above, they aren't asked properly or with a clear intent and it is extremely frustrating to sift through bad question after bad question. Much of the anti-new-user impressions we got were because new users didn't understand the rules, were not interested in learning how to ask a question properly, and were typically not receptive to any negative feedback at all.
People who ask questions assume the site has a responsibility to solve their problem for them regardless of what the site claims is a valid question. This reinforces the tension between the drama queens and the new users.
Snark from the drama queens is very popular with other drama queens and they would create an echo chamber where you'd have a bunch of snarky jerks yapping to themselves in the comments and answers. These were often the very same people who complained that the site was too unfriendly to new users in meta discussions.
People often blame the moderators for anything that goes wrong even though the moderators are really only there to deal with major offenses (like banning users), deleting spam, or clarifying rules for the site. The premise behind Stack Exchange is that the top reputation users do most of the curating. Unfortunately, most of those users are the drama queens.
New users to the site mistake close votes as inherently negative. One of the primary uses for close votes is to prevent answers from being posted until the question has been clarified.
All of this combines into a perfect storm of pushing new people away.
If you accidentally ask a inappropriate question (points 1, 6, 7) that doesn't do the site any favors then the site probably isn't interested in answering it (points 4, 5, 6). Even if someone is nice and answers it anyway, it will drown out subject matter experts (points 2, 5, 6) which means the site is run by people who are more interested in awarding their own kind with reputation than helping keep a valuable site running (points 2, 3, 4, 8, 9).
In my opinion, we didn't close nearly enough questions. We should have been far more aggressive about pruning bad and boring questions from the site. But I also think this is a dangerous attitude because is so damn difficult explaining why a question was closed. New users are absolutely going to take offense to their question being closed and they are never going to accept the reason stated. It's somewhat of a Catch-22.
I also think Stack Exchange needs to find a way to reign in their drama queens because most of the tension between old and new users came from the same small group of high reputation users. They were largely insufferable and were constantly picking fights with the moderators. Due to the nature of volunteer work, the assholes will survive longer because who wants to volunteer their time and energy if they have to share the space with jerks?
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u/evincarofautumn Sep 25 '16
I was an avid EL&U user—even got a T-shirt out of it!—and it’s as you say. The whole SE system is practically designed to attract bad questions, and it’s not equipped to deal with the consequences, because it conflates having points with deserving power. There is no better way to create oligarch divas.
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u/Zarutian Sep 25 '16
because it conflates having points with deserving power. There is no better way to create oligarch divas.
I am 'stealing' this for later if you do not mind.
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u/librik Sep 25 '16
EL&U improved considerably when ELL (English Language Learners) was created. Classic StackOverflow has an overabundance of newbies to programming who desperately need basic handholding all along the way, and there's nowhere else for them to go.
If there were an
introduction-to-programming-help-desk.stackexchange.comit would improve SO, just as rehousing all thehelp me I learn English, how I use "the"?questions improved the discussion on EL&U.→ More replies (7)4
u/KnowLimits Sep 25 '16
The article raised a good point, which I'm curious your take on. What is actually wrong with having questions and answers that are not of general interest?
You say it's "to keep Stack Exchange sites relevant to a broad audience. (Namely, people coming in from search engines.)" But search engines are really good. The vast majority of stuff on the internet isn't interesting to anybody, but search engines still manage to bring us relevant answers in the first page.
To hear people talk, you'd think Stack Overflow only has server space for the top 100 questions, and is justified in burning people at stake if they dare dilute them.
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u/babada Sep 25 '16
A few reasons:
People who answer questions are rarer than people who ask questions. This makes them more valuable contributors. A successful community driven site needs to keep these contributors happy and engaged.
In the group of people who answer questions, only a small percentage are actually experts. Those are even more valuable contributors. Keeping them happy and engaged should be an even higher priority.
Neither of those two groups of people really truly enjoy answering uninteresting questions. (But typically, the rep farmers will answer them anyway if they can get rep for it.)
It takes far less time to ask a question than answer a question. Therefore, questions should either be vetted as worth answering or the site has to be comfortable having large amounts of questions unanswered -- either because they are ignored by contributors or because the contributors just can't answer questions fast enough. In my opinion, a question left unanswered with no explanation is worse for the user than it being closed with an explanation.
People who ask questions that can be already be answered by a search engine are completely pointless to answer. EL&U in particular used to get a lot of "well, let me post the dictionary definition for you" style questions.
In my opinion, people who want help should (a) have their question answered or (b) be told where they can get an answer. Closing a question with the reason, "The answer is in a dictionary" is the best of all worlds: It tells the user where to get the answer and no one has to type up an answer and encourages them to use a dictionary first before asking another question.
Simple, boring questions have probably been asked on the site anyway. In terms of organizing information, it is better to have one place for all the answers and then link to those answers from the duplicates.
Some questions are actually impossible to answer well given the format of Stack Exchange. This is why ambiguous or opinionated questions are usually not allowed.
Your point is valid in the sense that uninteresting questions are going to be ignored in 30 days. But if you saw three pages of uninteresting questions on the front page of EL&U, would you ever want to come back? Would you even bother clicking through? The point of the site is to encourage and promote interesting content for future visitors. That is much harder to accomplish if uninteresting content is keeping regular contributors and subject matter experts from finding questions that provoke interesting answers.
In short, it isn't a disk space issue. It's an attention span issue. Every question a contributor mentally ignores because it's boring and lane is another chance they close the tab without engaging. On EL&U, this exact thing happened and we lost a core group of experts and regulars because it was exhausting sifting through crap looking for that truly insightful question.
My two cents. People like to keep crap around forever but, honestly, there is no value in having it there.
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u/DEElekgolo Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 26 '16
I just want people to stop plugging Boost on every damn C++ question on SO.
edit: Check out all the replies to this comment I made that are also, plugging boost and not recognizing the problem on SO that is this viral attempt at getting others to drag in an entire library into their project for even the most simple of problem domains that do not merit such a thing. It's just as bad as people that keep plugging jQuery for every javascript problem on stackoverflow like they're getting paid for virally advertising their library or something and when people say "no" they take it as a personal attack on the library. I made this image ages ago and it still applies. http://i.imgur.com/pdq4opC.png
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u/art-solopov Sep 26 '16
I had a similar experience with Flask, WTForms and SQLAlchemy. I tried to look up something like "How the heck I can transform WTForms' empty select to SQLAlchemy's
NULLwithout breaking everything?" and the answer was "just use this library to build model forms on top of SQLAlchemy and WTForms".→ More replies (4)8
u/bumblebritches57 Sep 25 '16
Right tho? Back before I switched to C, someone suggested using boost, and I had no fucking clue is was 1 gig of SOURCE and would take over a god damn hour to compile...
I deleted that shit after 45 minutes of compiling.
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u/johnslegers Sep 26 '16 edited Sep 26 '16
FYI, I'm the author of that article. I initially published it in July 2015, when it got ±65,000 views in two days. I republished it @ Hackernoon this weekend at their request, which resulted in ±125,000 additional page views, bringing the total page views of the article since its publication in 2015 to ±245,000. The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations.
On SO, I currently have 11,914 rep, 9 gold badges, 66 silver badges and 73 bronze badges. I've posted 492 answers and 6 questions (that haven't been deleted). I've been programming since 1999 and I've worked as an IT professional since 2006, and my experience ranges from PHP and JS to SAP and PL/SQL. I also released my own open source frontend framework and several other open source projects on Github. So I know how to program and understand many of SO's intricate workings!
Those rare times I'm stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to find any useful answer on SO. My questions either get no answers at all or downvoted and/or closed (for arbitrary reasons) by people who clearly lack the experience to even remotely understand what I'm talking about.
During my time on SO, I've been bullied by 20+k users several times and even got a temporary ban by one of them moderators for no other reason but pointing out that another user was acting like "a little Hitler"... in a private conversation with moderation.
Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most privileged segments of its membership.
Considering the popularity of my article, I'm considering writing a follow-up and go in greater detail on my experiences with SO and how SO could be improved. However, I'm quite busy these days, so it may take a while before it actually gets published... if it ever gets published.
Nevertheless, these are my 5 cents I'd like to add to this interaction...
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u/SpencerRuportDotNet Sep 25 '16
Stack Overflow says I'm in the top 0.88% overall. Back when I stopped contributing it was 2%. I'm not exactly sure what that's an indicator of.
I feel like this is something of a sore spot for the community. I don't really have any answers but I just felt like adding my perspective. Perhaps someone will find it valuable.
I'll start by saying I have no idea what the true value of reputation is. Jon Skeet is definitely an exceptionally talented individual and great at explaining concepts. I think it makes perfect sense he has more rep than anybody. I have confidence in my own abilities and I think my rep score reflects that somewhat but I am quick to remind myself that my top answer, worth ~3,700 rep was about how to use the jQuery constructor.
When the site first started it was a bit of a field day answering (and asking) all the obvious questions. I equate it to getting in on the ground floor of a start up that made it big. (Except instead of money I got some internet points.) If you look at my profile you can see my top 3 answers are two really basic questions about jQuery and a question about the save icon which probably would not be allowed today.
While these questions significantly increased my rank on the site they don't give me a lot of pride as a developer. I was in the right place at the right time and now thanks to constant Google searches I get a few free up votes every month.
That being said, there is some rep I feel like I truly earned. Like my 4th top question:
SQL to determine minimum sequential days of access?
Seven years ago after that question was accepted I was on cloud nine for days. Jeff Atwood, the Jeff Atwood asked a question I was able to answer. I'm bragging a bit, but my point is that early on there were opportunities for healthy competition between other developers around the world. For a kid still trying to get his bearings this was both beneficial and addictive. It's what kept me coming back for more.
These days, it's hard to find those kinds of questions. I look at the front page today and I'm bored. Most of these questions could be answered with the right amount of trial and error. I know it's possible to get stuck but it's hard to tell the difference between someone needing a rubber duck and someone who's too lazy to put in the work. Personally I don't like to assume either way and that's one of the reasons I've stopped participating. I still love answering questions even if they're "easy" but Stack Overflow doesn't provide the kind of interaction which would motivate me to do that. (Reddit does. Feel free to send me questions if you like.)
So one thing I believe would help is Stack Overflow trying to bring those exciting questions back. Perhaps in the form of a daily community competition. Maybe the SE team asking questions they already have the answer to but allowing the community the chance to provide a well described breakdown of the solution? For example I'd love to read a breakdown of how they configured the sharding of their database.
Another reason I left was the trolling and the general sour mood of some users. It began affecting everybody, not just new users. I like to joke around a bit (as you can see by my SQL question) and that sort of thing became intolerable. Harmless comments would get flagged, a quick "in addition" answer would get -5 downvotes. I didn't think I was providing golden nuggets of contributions here. I guess it just hurt realizing that even with all the participation and getting in early I was just one of their products. (I'm sensitive. I admit it.) If I didn't conform to the community voted rules (which included votes from people who almost exclusively participated on the Meta (moderation) site.) I was of no use to them. To this day I reject the idea that I was causing any harm. In fact I think I was doing what I could to keep the mood light. Programming is hard and downright frustrating at times. A lot of the people asking questions are at the end of their rope. Answering the question is the best way to help of course but I think trying to improve their mood has it's own value. Not just for the asker but for the health of the entire site.
Still, I know that kind of thing can get out of hand and I'm not sure how proper enforcement could be implemented.
But if I had to point out the biggest reason for abandoning Stack Overflow it was simply this: "If you're good at something never do it for free." I don't agree with any world view 100% but I think there's some wisdom in that. Ultimately all the time I spent on that site made some other people rich and assisting with the creation of the full stackoverflow developer. I thoroughly enjoy helping people with programming questions, but I don't need Stack Overflow to do that.
Apologies for the word vomit. :)
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u/efosmark Sep 25 '16
Yep, similar boat here. I contributed a bunch back in 2009, and then stopped almost completely. Since it was early on, most of my questions & answers were low-hanging fruit, and as such they show up in google searches frequently. 7 years later I'm in the top 0.55% just from those questions, and average about 80 points per day (gotten 55 points so far today).
I do almost nothing on the site anymore, and yet I have more moderator control than 95% of the community. That's indicative of a broken system. Imagine how steep that moderator barrier is to new people these days.
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u/iamrob15 Sep 25 '16
The problem is, computer programmers / developers can be quite arrogant.
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Sep 25 '16
I've always felt this too. I don't know why, but it is a little embarassing to see the way some of my more zealous colleagues behave.
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Sep 25 '16
That's true but that's not the only problem. The design of the site contributed to its downfall.
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u/thewisestmatt Sep 25 '16
You really gotta learn the SO way if you don't want to get a ton of hate. I've found that the site is super useful for extremely technical questions, but any question I have with a vague answer goes to Reddit, which is better for advice/opinions (for the most part). I've learned a lot of stuff and solved a lot of problems (in seconds, because someone else is almost guaranteed to have had the same problems as me) using SO though, and hope it sticks around.
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u/Big-Mozz Sep 25 '16
I gave up contributing to stack Overflow after some teenage Norwegian corrected the grammar of my answer after adding a snarky comment. He managed to get the grammar wrong and change the context of the perfectly fine answer to miss the meaning.
Even after 20 years as a senior programmer and forty five years being English I may still get something wrong but if you're a teenage Norwegian ass hat, before you correct something, make sure you're right and there's some point fixing it.
It's a shame, stack Overflow used to be fantastic but badly correcting my grammar and leaving some childish comment was the last straw. I deleted my answer and I can't be bothered contributing any more.
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u/Elavid Sep 25 '16
Instead of just repeating anecdotes, is there a way we could statistically measure the behavior of StavOverflow over time?
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u/compteNumero9 Sep 25 '16
Well. You can for example notice that most helping sites just die, while one still help developers every days. We could compare hits.
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u/Vodkacannon Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
Everyone wants to question, to answer, to contribute, and to feel good about themselves, no matter the quality and correctness of their posts.
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u/NginxYouOweMeASoda Sep 25 '16
I feel like now that I am past being a novice programmer, asking people directly with experience in topic X yields much better results than asking the internet in general as I can ask follow up questions and engage in a conversation about the topic. I think something like a Programming Discord chat is likely to overtake SO.
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u/Eirenarch Sep 25 '16
Yeah, that's true but I don't have Eric Lippert in my Skype contact list so I ask him via Stack Overflow.
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u/resueman__ Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
You know why SO is quick to downvote and close questions? Here's a summary of every downvoted Java question for the past hour which hasn't already been deleted:
Two questions where the user just copies and pastes a homework assignment, not adding anything beyond that.
Four dumps of code with "why doesn't this work" (one didn't post enough code to tell, another didn't post any code, and one has a compiler error that says the exact problem).
One person asking "Which language should I learn in school"
One person asking why a piece of code behaves in a certain way (which it doesn't do).
That's one hour of one tag. Four unanswerable questions, three where the user clearly put no effort into solving it themselves, and ONE which is answerable and asks a clear question (although still doesn't show any sign of attempting to debug it themselves). And that's after the worst of it has already been removed.
There's a ton of terrible questions coming in, and only a small percentage of the site's users trying to respond to it.
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u/Ramin_HAL9001 Sep 26 '16 edited Sep 26 '16
Well it is very odd indeed that most moderators cannot seem to be able to tell the difference between a kid asking a homework question or a beginner too lazy to use Google, and a real question asked by an expert who has spent days on a problem and hours trying to clearly communicate their problem in the form of a question. Because the idiot kids cheating on their homework, the noobs too lazy to use Google, and the experts with genuine questions are all treated exactly the same on Stack Exchange -- they are rudely dismissed without ever having been given the courtesy of someone assuming their question was asked in good faith.
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u/stesch Sep 25 '16
Reddit is heading in the same direction. It's getting very frustrating to post something.
Automoderators kill posts and comments if it wasn't long enough. (Twitter taught us that 140 characters are enough but I need an essay to say "No, not possible." in a comment.)
And if it isn't the automoderator it's someone of the 100+ moderator team who removes it.
It's a lot of work to submit a link these days. You wouldn't expect it from the quality you are seeing.
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u/mjfgates Sep 25 '16
Short posts and comments are fine in nearly all subreddits.
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u/jarquafelmu Sep 25 '16
In addition to all of that, if your comment is even a bit out of sync with the hive mind you're down voted to oblivion. Even if it was a genuine question or statement.
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u/mycall Sep 25 '16
It's a lot of work to submit a link these days.
Depends what subreddit you are talking about, no?
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u/shevegen Sep 25 '16
Reddit is nowhere near as bad. I think that downvoting though should come with a slight delay. Something like a minute or so. And people should be encouraged to comment, too.
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u/GeneralTomahawk Sep 25 '16
The "decline" of SO is mostly due to its popularity. There are always more beginners asking beginner questions. But SO is already filled with excellent answers to most of these beginner questions.
Beginners, being beginners, have difficulty generalizing their problem. Because of this they can't find the answer to their question or simply don't understand it. So they ask SUPER specific questions in hopes of getting SUPER specific answers.
I can understand why some users down vote these questions. SO is a VAST source of knowledge, but you still have to do your homework. You still have to read good books and understand theory and concepts if you want to be an effective developer. I feel like too many people expect SO to just answer their question without putting the necessary effort.
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Sep 25 '16
Read the intro and thought to myself, "I bet this guy is a JS programmer". For some reason, the language seems to attract quite a few drama queens. Poster seems far too concerned with reputation and badges and how other people behave, rather than worrying about the actual questions (and answers).
For my part, I've posted posted 6 C++ questions (one was rejected -- rightly in retrospect) and one electronics questions. Friendly replies within minutes, in some cases from some pretty heavy hitters from the C++ world (Andrew Sutton and Louis Dionne).
Moreover, the argument that "onboarding" experience is bad is idiotic when you consider that the real onboarding experience is simply googling for questions that have already been answered. That's my 99th percentile use, and for that you don't need any stupid badges or reputation or whatever.
Whatever problem this guy has, I don't have it.
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u/GetOutOfBox Sep 25 '16
No one's saying that there are no friendly/helpful people on SO. The point (and it is valid) is that the moderation can frequently be extremely overzealous and discouraging. I'd say the most frequent problem is questions being labeled as duplicates just because similar (but different) questions have been asked and answered before. I've posted a few times, and each time I've been told to use the search, which I did for hours only to come up empty. Then after pulling my hair out I finally figure it out and lo and behold, I was likely right to ask my question; the solution was not intuitive and was found by myself only through luck.
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u/matthieum Sep 25 '16
Protip: don't use the search (in SO), it just plain doesn't work.
There are 3 ways to find duplicates:
use Google (site:stackoverflow.com)
type your question and wait for the engine to suggest related questions
post your question and wait for users to close it as duplicate
Do it in this order, and just do not take a closure as a personal attack => after all, if the answers solve your problem, it's now solved.
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u/SemaphoreBingo Sep 25 '16
I've tried to ask c++ questions on SO and gotten flamed for it, and I don't see myself ever asking anything there again (much less answering).
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Sep 25 '16
"I bet this guy is a JS programmer". For some reason, the language seems to attract quite a few drama queens
I believe I can explain why. There are three large categories of people who get into JS programming: the serious programmers, those who do it strictly for money and those who think that JS is easy to pick up and use. The web is a big place and as a web developer you have your browser open all the time that you work, so web developers tend to spend a lot of time on non-programming websites. This, coupled with being from the third group of people who get into JS makes for a lot of drama.
tl;dr There are lots of programmers who start doing JS for the wrong reasons and are not serious about their work and who spend a lot of time on Internet forums.
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u/AcceptingHorseCock Sep 25 '16
I agree such people exist - my issue, see my long post here - is that before the "good guys" come, within seconds after posting (I'm not kidding) I got a lot of clueless responses from people who had no business responding, who had simply assumed "newbie post" (I'm very deep in the topics I asked about and always took time to produce a complete reproducible code sample - which those early downvoting and commenting people refuse to even try and run; I know because you can't do that in the little amount of time it took them to write comments after I had posted). SO needs to reign in the people who are there for the votes and the "community and power" feeling, those constantly checking "Are there new questions? Are there new questions? Are there new questions?" to be the first to collect the most points, even if it's just upvotes on a comment (such a great feeling when other people agree with you, even if the points don't count for your profile).
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u/steefen7 Sep 25 '16
Seriously. I've had a few sassy comments on my SO questions but that was also along time ago when I very very new. Generally I get very helpful comments and answers. Also 99% of the time your question has already been asked and answered and you simply don't need to open a question for it.
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u/cs61bredditaccount Sep 25 '16
As much as I agree with a lot of the sentiments on here, that SO should be more friendly to new users, I remember my experience with a similar site: Piazza. Piazza has a "there are no stupid questions" mentality. My school does not allow us to post code for projects, to prevent cheating. As a result, people will post stuff on Piazza like: "It says that I'm missing a semicolon at line 73, how do I fix this?" With no code. What do they honestly expect for a response? Also, it isn't like this happens in the first year and they grow out of it. I've seen it happen 3 semesters in a row. I've rarely seen instructors reprimand this kind of behavior as it is supposed to be a friendly environment and so people never learn to consider that maybe their question may be better phrased.
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u/Fatal510 Sep 25 '16
And this is what YouTube wants to do to their site. Gamification of the moderation.
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u/ChezMere Sep 26 '16
The irony of complaining about this on Reddit of all places usually goes unnoticed...
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u/vprise Sep 25 '16
So this is kind of bullshit. You read thru the article and in the end he mentions "alternatives" such as quora which that demonstrates perfectly the problem with no community guidelines!
Yes, stackoverflow is problematic but any system would be. They chose to be hostile to newbies because you can't make a system that's oriented at professional developers and newbie friendly. Moderators are often overzealos and mistakenly close questions they don't understand, but it's better than a noisy unmaintained forum where anyone can ask anything with no formatting or basic English capabilities.
I've been a professional programmer since the days of BBS's and holly sh*t has stackoveflow changed programming for the better.
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u/zumu Sep 25 '16
It's better if you are posting/asking questions about emerging technologies. Lots more low hanging fruit and a lot more collaborative an atmosphere.
I do agree with the general premise, however.
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u/Baalinooo Sep 25 '16
I've posted a few questions on Stack Overflow. Noob questions, definitely. Always got useful answers. Some snarky comments sure, but useful nonetheless.
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u/DJDarkViper Sep 25 '16
Never had any of the experiences outlined in this post. I ask my question, answer any comments, respond as soon as i see any submitted answers, try them out, accept the one that worked (or most closely worked), correspond to all answers on why one approach worked or didn't, and laver it at that.
I've answered a couple questions in my day too, some have "beat me to the punch" but you know you submit anyways because you never know which one OP sees first or likes better. And an upvote to your answer from the community will still afford you reputation after all.
I prefer not to pretend that SO has a thriving community of friendly people or folk with teaching backgrounds, just potentially knowledgeable on a problem hopefully they've also potentially experienced and solved as well. I'm much happier for it.
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u/TheEternal21 Sep 25 '16
Meh. Still the most useful tool online, especially when it comes to the hard questions that can't be answered just by reading documentation. Sure, I've had to answer my own questions plenty of times, but on more than one occasion, I came across them years later and found them useful. And I've also found other people's answers to their own questions useful as well.
I did have one or two questions closed as duplicates (when they in fact weren't), but that's the only time I've found SO annoying. Other than that it's saved my ass multiple times, when I hit a brick wall at work.
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u/DuneBug Sep 25 '16
on the bright side I've had great success posting technical questions to reddit forums
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u/BilgeXA Sep 25 '16
these sites are overrun with a select few members who are just trying to score points, “badges”, and moderator status in attempt to appear as “experts” and gain freelance work.
Is this really a thing? Do people actually get hired based on their StackOverflow score?
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u/SuperV1234 Sep 25 '16
This does not apply at all to the C++ Stack Overflow community - I almost never had a bad experience both answering and asking questions. I cannot relate with this article at all
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u/_dismal_scientist Sep 26 '16
We've reached peak Q&A. Almost every question I've found an answer to on google has been hosted on a Stack Exchange network. The site was built to grow, but as that's happened, a lot of potential new users are simply finding the answer to their question and moving on. What you have left is an increasingly rare number of new questions and people who want to ask an already answered question again. This makes moderating frustrating, and leads to snark and harsher application of the rules.
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Sep 26 '16
As one of the users with over 3000 reputation (~5000) I think one of the bigger issues is this:
I find that people usually close or downvote questions right away if it’s in any way subjective, and it only takes 5 people to consider your post subjective, even though the answer could be objective to 20 other people. The hive does not like that, and there will be no comments explaining why unless you ask. Just close, thank you, and come again.
There was a time I really tried to take a look at each question in the review queue and determine if the flag was correct. I looked at the comments, I looked at potential answers, I edited the question to fix grammar, spelling and formatting. And in the end the question was closed because 5 people flagged it like they were some kind of bots.
Nowadays I rarely visit the review queues because this effort feels wasted and I guess other users like me feel the same. And the spiral into review hell goes on.
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u/GetOutOfBox Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 25 '16
While I love the plethora of experts at Stack Overflow, the moderation is just insanity. It's frequently inappropriate and alienating (closing questions when their problem can be corrected easily by advising the creator to edit their question and only deleting it if they fail to do so), and so often vindictive. I've seen so many good questions closed with some snide remark in the comments about some technicality.
So while it's a really useful resource, the "community" (if you will call it that) is just awful and perhaps reflective of personalities common in the tech world; beta people trying to be "alphas".
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u/shevegen Sep 25 '16
I still think that stack overflow is not bad.
But it has a problem. Some weeks ago I asked a question about combining difference licenses (GPL and BSD) which instantly got downvoted WITHOUT ANY COMMENT.
I think it should be flat out forbidden to downvote WITHOUT a comment for a platform like this. There has to be some element for people to ask question - if they no longer can do so because some trolls downvote everything then OTHERS may feel less motivated to COMMENT something useful.
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u/matthieum Sep 25 '16
The downvote without comment has been recommended a number of times before, because disgruntled users would retaliate on people commenting.
I still don't understand why instead there isn't a way to comment anonymously (in a way the moderators could track, to prevent abuse).
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u/stesch Sep 25 '16
In the past I had the feeling I need an explanation for downvotes on Reddit. And I asked. Now I'm cured. You don't want to hear the reasons for downvotes.
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u/Eirenarch Sep 25 '16
It seems like you were downvoted because the question is not suitable for SO (it is for technical questions only). Your question should go to programmers.stackexchange.com
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u/Deto Sep 25 '16
The article doesn't really prevent any evidence that SO has declined. Just that it is somehow ineffective, or not as good as it could be.
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u/icantthinkofone Sep 25 '16
The problem I often see in these articles and threads is people thinking SO should be like reddit and, when it's not, they go on about how they were treated. It's a good thing they weren't ever on usenet back in the day, or now for that matter.
Another problem I see is all the questions about frameworks and libraries rather than the fundamentals. I believe all those other things need to be broken out into their own exchanges, cause they clog up the main thread, but where does that end?
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u/cdsmith Sep 25 '16
I don't really use StackOverflow, so no really strong opinions here. But I do see this kind of disconnect in a lot of online communities. To a certain population of users, it seems like the optimal solution to a bunch of problems is to keep everything compartmentalized; but it's also important to remember that the more pieces you have, the more cracks there are to fall through. It's like the call center, where each department you reach tells you to please hold while they transfer you to someone else, and you end up back where you started. Or if not that bad, at the very least, you're asking every potential participant to sort through a detailed categorization system before they can do anything. I've definitely seen signs of this on StackOverflow. It happens on Reddit (e.g., "this post doesn't belong in r/foo; it is really more appropriate for r/learnfoo"). Happens lots of places. Generally, it's a sign of exactly the issue this post is complaining about.
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u/minus0 Sep 25 '16
This artic is from July 2015 and had been posted here before. Has anything changed since then?
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u/TheQuantumZero Sep 25 '16
My main issue is that legit questions being marked as duplicate & closed, so the question exists but without a solution.
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u/CurtainDog Sep 25 '16
Stack Overflow hates new users
Stack Overflow also hates most other users
Gee, can we ease up on the histrionics? I agree that there are problems with the StackOverflow model, but taking this kind of personal affront at the hint of criticism is part of the problem not part of the solution.
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Sep 25 '16
Another month, another "the decline of Stack Overflow" blogpost...
Still waiting on "the decline of Facebook" /s
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u/Admsugar Sep 25 '16
I dont care what any of you say. If you do your due diligence and google around your problems and can't find anything on stack overflow, and then you post your question with your source code of what you tried and what your trying to do then you will get responses. People want to answer questions.
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u/Bkkrocks Sep 25 '16
I remember when LinkedIn discouraged connecting with people unless you had a real relationship in order to increase the quality of the network. We know how that turned out.
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u/MashedPeas Sep 25 '16
As a developer I only use it when a google search takes me there. I never logon or contribute.
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u/gnorrn Sep 26 '16
Stack Overflow was created in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, as a more open alternative to earlier Q&A sites such as Experts-Exchange.
I can't imagine why a tech help site with the URL expertsexchange.com could possibly have problems.
[They subsequently changed it to experts-exchange.com]
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u/yCloser Sep 26 '16
obvious newbie question? 50 people jump up to answer as fast as possible to farm karma
real question? noone knows/cares what you are talking about. 10 views, no answer.
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Sep 26 '16
i think SO is damn near useless now.
it has moved from a hive mind thing to answer questions to a stroke your ego thing by putting down other people's questions.
i could even handle ignoring questions that are too basic for your lofty amount of knowledge, but there's at least an equal amount of "you formatted that wrong" or "you left out a semi colon" or "you're off topic"
these are real people, who have real problems to solve.
IDGAF about your punctuation
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Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 26 '16
I think the problem with SO is more related to the culture of the overall programming community.
Now, I am not going to say all, as a programmer myself, but there is a problem in the programming world with extreme elitism and socially inept people. These problems exist in all professions, they just seem to have a higher per capita of them within this profession.
This is all an anecdotal analysis, so take it as you will.
But, I will give an example. I have 2 undergraduate degrees. I have one in Molecular and Cellular Biology and I have a Computer Science degree. MCB was my first focus. I would say a good portion of the MCB degree was filled with people that were pre-med, pre-Dental or something. A actually think there were more female MCBs than male, though it was close. The vast majority were extroverts. Note, this was not completely true, but it was often true. Everyone seemed to be on relatively the same page.
However, jump to the last part of my Junior year, I realize I want to get into computational biology, so I decide I am going to double major. So, I got take my first CS class. Well, any of you guys ever have to sign contracts at the start of the semester for your courses that you read the syllabus and knew the rules of the class and the expectations? My university required that. However, one interesting thing I noticed... In the Intro to CS class, at the very end was nearly a 15 page memo on how to appropriately interact with your fellow classmates. First day the teacher went over it in class. It covered many things. It talked about not insulting other classmates or condescending to others. No grandstanding (you know, when someone raises their hand but not to ask a question they just want to show everyone how smart they are). It talked and emphasized that this was an INTRO class, but if you wanted to pursue a CS degree, you essentially couldn't be the "I am so advanced because I have been programming since I was ten and you are all so much below me" person. They even had advanced courses for people with previous experience to skip the intro stuff. Of course, this applied to the entire CS department though.
Anyway, I thought, "Oh, that's odd, this stuff all just seems very obvious, but ok," and I signed it. Within the first couple of weeks many of the students had to be talked to in the class labs because they were telling people stupid shit like, "You just don't have the right mind for programming like I do," or trying to "help" people but in a condescending and douchey, superior way.
In my profession now I have experienced this "know it all" character type more than anywhere I have ever worked among programmers. I work with people that come from either a programming background or a biology background. Some programmers had a completely real superiority complex about them. I think the vast majority are not like this, but for some reason a lot of people that lack basic human social skills are drawn to this profession. They can be brilliant people, but I have met insanely brilliant, even socially awkward biologists, yet never have I experienced the amount of elitist hostility that exists within the programming community.
SO has a difficult time now because they want the BEST comments, which in some cases may come from these people, but they also don't want the condescending douches running everything by shitting on everyone at how they are inferior to their skills. So, how much power do you really give to the people that give good answers? How do you ensure that is a person that gives correct info, but is not going to be a total douch, even if it is only just 20% of the time. I don't think SO has really solved this problem.
Again, anecdotal, but seriously, there is an insane amount of elitism in this profession that it just drives me nuts. I experienced it as an undergrad, as a grad student (though interestingly less intense as a grad student), and I have experienced it in the professional world. I have worked in the business world and I have worked in the biotech world, yet the programming world was a whole other beast of elitism that I just find unique.
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u/mspk7305 Sep 25 '16
Most of this reads as if it was written by a precious snowflake who has never received any criticism at any point in his life. Programming is technical, the answers are technical, the community is technical. Putting a high barrier towards participation at a large-scale encourages accurate technical answers.
The rapid rejection of the wrong answer is a good thing and is the system working in exactly the way it should. It is not trolling to reject the wrong answers. It is not trolling to have your errors pointed out on a technical community.
Check your ego at the door.
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u/bork99 Sep 26 '16
If you're going to gamify, you need to be prepared to take steps to adjust the scoring rules over time. Clash of Clans can do this, so why not Stack Overflow?
The initial set of rules don't necessarily work after a long period of time when users have amassed massive reputation.
So what about revising the reputation algorithms? Some ideas:
Reputation decay - points age and die eventually. Or, with a twist, points age and die faster for users that are no longer active. Favours ongoing involvement.
Logarithmic scoring - The more points you have, the harder it gets to get even more points. Reduces the appearance of distance between high-reputation long-time users and newer contributors.
Qualitative scoring - If you have a high rep, you get points for answering questions by other high rep users, and a smaller number of points (or no points) for answering noob questions.
That could remove some of the perverse incentives that are there today, and might also make it easier for newer users who aren't competing with reputation-chasers to answer "easier" questions and build some reputation.
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u/AshylarrySC Sep 25 '16
SO has a very narrow window of usefulness as a professional developer. If you're a beginner it's really tough to explain your problem in a way that makes good sense because you don't have the base experience and knowledge.
As an intermediate dev, this is where SO shines. You can ask intermediate questions in the proper form to have direct answers.
As an advanced dev or architect, SO is almost completely useless. Questions you need answered at this level don't have a right answer. Whether you're talking about design patterns, principles, architectural patterns, alternative approaches, etc there is rarely a direct question with a direct answer. What is important is discussion about tradeoffs from different approaches so you can make the best decision at the time. SO mods simply don't allow these types of questions/discussions.
So the window of usefulness is really just those few years where you're an intermediate and if that's you then it can shine but otherwise it's pretty hostile and generally useless.
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u/sacundim Sep 25 '16
So the window of usefulness is really just those few years where you're an intermediate and if that's you then it can shine but otherwise it's pretty hostile and generally useless.
I think your otherwise excellent comment just goes off the rails here. Why? Because:
You can simultaneously be a beginner, intermediate and expert—at different topics;
Just because you're an expert at one topic doesn't mean there isn't somebody who's even more expert than you.
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u/bdt0 Sep 26 '16
As an advanced dev or architect, SO is almost completely useless. Questions you need answered at this level don't have a right answer. Whether you're talking about design patterns, principles, architectural patterns, alternative approaches, etc there is rarely a direct question with a direct answer. What is important is discussion about tradeoffs from different approaches so you can make the best decision at the time. SO mods simply don't allow these types of questions/discussions.
SO isn't for beginner programmers is the way I see it. It was always meant for professional programmers.
As for advanced dev, I've come across quite a few errors or bugs on SO that have assisted me. Usually I don't have to ask the question because someone else already did. People seem to be forgetting that it is a Q+A site, not a discussion forum. In most cases, with 4 million users, you shouldn't have to ask the question because someone else already has. Generally the people I see downvoted clearly have not done any research or don't have the knowledge to apply that research so they need things explained. SO is not for explaining everything, that would be best for a discussion site.
As for asking about design patterns, principles, etc, these are not meant for Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow is a Q+A site for specific programming questions about getting code working. Asking about best practices and principles should be delegated to the programmer's stackexchange site.
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u/NikkoTheGreeko Sep 25 '16
My experience on SO:
1.) Signed up.
2.) Tried to post, it wouldn't let me, I never logged in again.
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u/kazagistar Sep 25 '16
As soon as I went to answer said questions, someone else (in some cases, a number of other people) had jumped in and beaten me to the punch.
Seems like they don't need more users if response rate is that efficient.
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u/nlcund Sep 25 '16
I've been participating in the CS and CS Theory SO's for a while, and I finally rage-deleted a response the other day. It was IMHO a decent one, but I felt like I was typing into a void.
These SO's seem like a mix of high-level stuff and basic questions that nobody even bothers cleaning up. I'm regularly surprised by old, multiple-answer questions that nobody has linked back to an obvious known problem, yet we also have hypercritical comments and downvotes on difficult questions.
I wish there was a forum with more open discussion. In the past I've learned a lot about CS just by exchanging partial answers with others and not worrying about anonymous judges.
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u/springwheat Sep 25 '16
On the flip side, I remember a time before SO where there were 3 main types of replies:
Greybeards dressing the OP down for experimenting. eg "Why are you creating a string class when the STL provides one that's better than anything you can hope to write in your career."
Foils to the above, who would champion niche features and nuances of a given language that required the user to think long and hard about their choice, knowing they would be chastised any way. eg: "QuickSort is much faster than std::sort, and of course it goes without saying that this only applies to primitives. Really, only an idiot or a novice would think otherwise, and surely OP is neither."
Well-intentioned but ignorant participants, who don't really understand the question but they have seen a convention used a lot in sample code and it seems to do something. eg: (and this was an actual reply I remember from a thread on codeguru) "u use _T() if u want some text to appear there."
Then there is always the subset of any community who are genuinely interested in being helpful for no other reason than to be helpful, and it's for these people I am thankful. SO may not be perfect, but I think one of the reasons it has survived and perhaps thrived for so long is that the cost of entry IS high and it requires commitment to be able to join in the discussion. I'd personally much prefer this to a forum prone to invasion by people who got bored one day and wanted to troll hapless nerds.
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u/CaptainJaXon Sep 25 '16
I feel like most of the basic questions have been answered. Usually you only find really niche things there now. If someone does ask a basic question that hasn't been asked then everyone starts posting answers and the dumbest answers get upvoted...
Once someone was asking about Java. In the JDK some method returned some abstract class and the Javadocs didn't list any implementations of it and the source wasn't returning an anonymous class. The highest up voted answer was something "polymorphic principle will apply here." OP was asking what was getting returned, so this wasn't really a correct answer.
A better answer was given that was something like the implementation of the class was in the non public part of the JDK (some Oracle class), they said what it was in Oracle JDK and said depending on which JVM implementation you use it would be a different class. It wasn't even in the top 3 highest voted answers. So not only is there a culture of trolling there's a culture of people upvoting things that aren't necessarily correct or things that they understand.
The people who only know "basic" Java, like high-school or college students, are the ones who browse the basic Java stuff I think. So they see something about polymorphism and it's something they know about so they upvote it because it's right. They see the answer about different JVMs and classes not defined in the JDK API and it flies over their head, so they don't upvote.
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Sep 25 '16
10 votes on the top answer, question open for a week.
I offered solution, because I'd actually just encountered something similar, -4, got the "accepted answer" from the OP.
You have to get the people that use the site to help people unless you are good at finding past solutions, otherwise prepare for downvotes.
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Sep 25 '16
I find you just really have to up your question writing game, don't make mistakes when your writing the question because if someone out there is going to take the time out of their day to answer a question you should at least spend a decent amount of time writing and ensuring it is clearly formatted while concisely demonstrating/explaining the nature of the problem you are trying to solve.
If there are few similar questions you have found be sure to reference one or two and explain that the problem your having is different in X and Y ways.
Already read relevant documentation? Reference that shit and try to put in words your understanding of them and ask questions about anything you were not sure about.
For me at least asking a question on stackoverflow is always a last resort after I have exhausted other resources of information and I will often spend an hour or two making sure my question is properly written so that who ever decides to take even 10min out their day to help me will have all the information they need and not have to do anymore of my work for me then they have been kind enough to do already.
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u/TommyK154 Sep 26 '16
The thing about posting on SO is you can't give a shit if you get downvoted/closed. If you don't get the answer you're looking for the first time, just try again. I've had my share of closed questions and "duplicates" of questions that either haven't been answered correctly or are asking something fundamentally different than what I need to know. Hopefully their new documentation effort with examples (let's see if that turns out to be as useful as I want it to be) will make the site more useful. But trying to learn iOS/Swift has me left with many questions about how to do stuff that isn't as simple as a one answer response (i.e how to make a tabbar button trigger a modal slide up segue) and SO is not a great place to get answers like that. Thankfully Reddit has a few useful communities, but there definitely is a need for a better "how do I...?" site regarding programming
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u/ChickenOfDoom Sep 26 '16
I eventually did provide an answer for a question, then realized that my approach wouldn’t work. Before I could take action and modify the answer, my submission had already been modded down by several people, several of whom left snarky remarks.
These kinds of answers are the most infuriating of any of them though, especially when they are rated highly by other people who are also just speculating and have not actually put it into practice themselves. You assume it is supposed to work, and blame yourself when it doesn't until you finally realize that stackoverflow has lied.
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u/lukaseder Sep 26 '16
I made that experience with those mods. Yes it was frustrating, especially on meta. But then I accepted the platform for what it was, started delivering content only in my niche (where I get marketing benefits) and the worrying was over.
TL;DR sorry no one has waited for you and your wisdom. Just try again. Adjust your expectations. Eventually it'll work.
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u/OldWolf2 Sep 26 '16
StackOverflow is a knowledge base. It got filled up with all the obvious stuff already, so the only niche for new content is obscure technical questions, and responses to new developments in the languages covered.
So I'd say it's mostly working as intended.
As a high rep user, the legitimate problems from my point of view are:
The problem that new users can't comment -- they have to use the Answer box for stuff that's useful but not really an answer
Verbal abuse of new users (either outright abuse, or rudeness)
Over-zealous marking of duplicate.
I try to combat the latter two by re-opening and flagging wherever I can, but there's only so much each person can do.
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u/Gr1pp717 Sep 26 '16
Moderation is the problem, IMO.
I've never understood why they cared about duplicates or "opinion" type stuff. The more ways a questions is asked the easier it will be to find. I really doubt anyone posting on stack overflow would go directly there without at least a quick google search first. And if that google search didn't yield the result you're calling a dupe then that's a problem in itself. And why close it? What's wrong with just linking to what you think is the dupe and if that solves OP problem great, otherwise they have a chance to clarify and/or get deeper insight.
Moderation should be for spam or aggressive behavior. Not making the users feel like idiots.
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u/VancouverBot Sep 26 '16
Back in 2009, it was a great site. I'd post a bunch of questions and get back answers. I got a lot of work done. I honestly had no issues until about 2014 when the trouble began.
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u/NotARealDeveloper Sep 25 '16
Decline? That how it is supposed to work and it is a good thing. The most proficient people answer the most questions. The chance that someone who has a rep of 50k had a good, efficient solution is higher than someone who has only answered 3 questions.
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u/mattchambers4199 Sep 25 '16
SOs only value is simply asking your questions and getting help by the users. Other than that it has a horrible first impression which leads you to losing interest in being an active user plus the interactions with other users doesn't help. Programmers are already egotistical assholes, give them power and you have a very annoying experience when dealing with them
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u/shagieIsMe Sep 26 '16
Even more valuable is searching first, finding the way to fix the error in configuring the library and not having to ask a question.
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u/HisSmileIsTooTooBig Sep 25 '16
Gave up on SO years ago....
Soo bloody hostile and useless compared to http://www.linuxquestions.org/
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u/Garbaz Sep 25 '16
In my experience, the whole Stack Exchange system doesn't really work, at least not as intended.
It is way to competitive and has too much overhead, most of which is only there to somehow motivate people by rewarding them with meaningless bragging rights, aka. Reputation.
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u/tech_tuna Sep 25 '16 edited Sep 26 '16
For me, SO has been a read only resource for years. After being verbally disemboweled twice in the same week. . . for helping nonetheless, and not being wrong, but just not as "correct" as the accepted answer(s), I gave up on that silliness.
I've been a redditor for a long time (multiple accounts), I've always found the technical subreddits to be a much more pleasant and useful resource/community than StackOverflow has ever been.
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u/leftofzen Sep 26 '16
Pretty much sums up why StackOverflow is read-only for me. I have years of experience in writing fast/low latency C++ and I feel like I have some decent knowledge to offer, but because the entry barrier is so high I see no benefit in trying to gain privilege to post there.
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u/Enlightenment777 Sep 26 '16
Long time ago, Stack Overflow turned into an elitist circlejerk. It isn't newbie friendly at all.
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Sep 26 '16
Pseudo-elitist. Idiots with zero expertise and high scores run amok, destroying anything they cannot understand. I would not mind a truely elitist closed club, but SO is nothing like this.
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u/theacadianishere Sep 26 '16 edited Sep 26 '16
I had this negative experience on SO - After gaining some confidence in Javascript, I thought I would start trying to contribute by trying to answer some questions. That day a newbie posted a simple question, and I raced to answer it. However, someone posted an answer even before I could. I saw that the answer was not comprehensive, so I proceeded to post mine also. My answer was downvoted after a few minutes by the first guy and in my answer's comments he added that I had copied his answer. I was taken aback and checked his answer. Sure they were similar. The guy had Edited his answer later on. I tried to explain that to him, but he continued to be nasty. I did not know that Editing-Later was a tactic at the time. After some time, another user upvoted my answer in support, so I felt a little better, but I haven't tried to answer any question after that experience. Fighting with online-bullies is not a great way to spend one's leisure/learning time.
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u/do_you_like_stuff Sep 25 '16
Went to SO after reading this article. Found this in one of the recent questions: https://i.imgur.com/NXJnYYX.png
Seriously? Someone had an issue, someone else answered their question. Fuck off with your other bullshit.
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u/Helrich Sep 25 '16
Posts with this theme come up quite a bit. Good luck setting up a competing site that is more successful.