The unfriendly attitude towards newcomers.
Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow
11–20 of 60 posts
Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow
#12It doesn't allow broad questions, only nuts and bolts questions. As in: is my approach to building this the best approach? I could really do with a site that lets me ask that kind of question.
Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow
#13Not their fault but old answers really suck. A 2016 answer about Azure is useless. Even a 2016 answer about react. Also it’s a trope that the select answer isn’t always the best so there is a meta conversation about what is the “really best” answer
I disagree that old answers are useless.
Frontend JavaScript frameworks are actually a good example. If you wanted to use ENYOjs, an amazing but seemingly defunct framework. You couldn’t go to the website because the whole thing was turned into a react fork and the original documentation was deleted. Besides stackoverflow you’re stuck and what if you have to maintain an old enyo project on roku or another web based platform? What if you are basing your project on some open source work from the past? Anyway there are many cases where old answers are useful and sometimes more useful then new answers.
I do agree it’s extremely helpful when answers are continually updated with the times. But that doesn’t always happen but it’s nice.
Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow
#14Answers posted in the comments rather than in the answers section.
Questions closed as duplicate when there is some subtle but important difference.
Closed questions still appearing in the search results.
Mostly though just a general lack of good will, it's obnoxious.
Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow
#15Not their fault but old answers really suck. A 2016 answer about Azure is useless. Even a 2016 answer about react. Also it’s a trope that the select answer isn’t always the best so there is a meta conversation about what is the “really best” answer
I agree, and it unnerves me because the solutions seem to be easy. Just allow users to tag an answer as outdated, or to add a "valid until YYYY" tag. This would provide a quick indication when skimming answers, without removing old ones. It could also allow to reopen an old question in case the accepted answer or all its answers are marked as outdated.
Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow
#16That “what animal provides milk at the supermarket?” and “what animal goes moo?” are marked as duplicate questions because they have the same answer. They’re clearly not duplicates and have very different concerns.
Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow
#17Not their fault but old answers really suck. A 2016 answer about Azure is useless. Even a 2016 answer about react. Also it’s a trope that the select answer isn’t always the best so there is a meta conversation about what is the “really best” answer
I agree, and it unnerves me because the solutions seem to be easy. Just allow users to tag an answer as outdated, or to add a "valid until YYYY" tag. This would provide a quick indication when skimming answers, without removing old ones. It could also allow to reopen an old question in case the accepted answer or all its answers are marked as outdated.
> Just allow users to tag an answer as outdated
StackOverflow is testing such a feature right now: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/407613/outdated-acc...
Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow
#18I practically don't use StackOverflow. It can be useful sometimes to find references to bugs, or something, but many of the solutions I've seen are sub-par, or the problems I have are mostly some issue in GitHub/GitLab that I'll comment in or open myself.
On the rare occasions I find a useful question, some asshole closes it because it was asked before. What makes them an asshole is that it's not the same question at all, or the question was not answered.
Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow
#19Despite what SO states, the karma system does matter. And it's flawed, as the vast majority of karma that will ever be awarded, has already been awarded. Very simple questions have thousands of upvotes, as do the answers, and all of the basic, common questions have been covered extensively. The only path for a new, energetic, enthusiastic user to grow his/her karma score (and associated credibility) is via a massive grind. The likelihood of a new question or answer gaining hundreds of upvotes, is very slim.
I don't claim to have all of the answers, but a decay function seems quite obvious to me. For one thing, technology evolves. The jquery way of doing something shouldn't have 10x the upvotes as the ES6 way. Old answers should lose a percentage of their upvotes over time, if they remain relevant they will gain new upvotes, but if not, they will get surpassed by newer, more relevant responses.
Oh, and the new fonts.
Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow
#20The fact that anyone can post anything, so you could have a serious issue in your code and they give you an inefficient solution, which is then upvoted by users who don’t know better.