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Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

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Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#191

Post by BlueTemplar »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #181
BlueTemplar wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is probably even worse though with its auto-closing of comments after a short time, and tolerance for reposts. (Both of which make for netiquette violations !) P.S.: this is also an issue with hn, though at least dang et al. work tirelessly to identify reposts. It still makes it awkward when the best discussion that you would like to contribute to is locked, or worse, has now bits spread in consecutive discuss…

I never had a problem with a post closed on reddit and was able to ask very open ended questions, so independently of the rules, it was possible for me to get the help i needed, which wasn't possible on stackoverflow

This isn't so much about the first person asking the question-

(if they were really the first and not just failing to find previous occurrences of the same question being asked - because of the popularity of Reddit and how it works, the netiquette rule of searching first and avoiding duplicates seem to be forgotten in other spaces)

-but about those coming later with similar questions.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#192

Post by josephcsible »

Izkata wrote: post #184
josephcsible wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50 reputation is only 5 upvotes, and there's an association bonus that means you start with an extra 100 rep on every site once you establish yourself on one. Also, you can always comment on your own questions. The requirement only applies to commenting on others' questions.

> 50 reputation is only 5 upvotes On answers you get 10 for upvotes, on questions you only get 5. Then you can also get 2 at a time by making edits to others' questions/answers to improve them (this only works up to some limit, you stop getting the bonus past that).

> On answers you get 10 for upvotes, on questions you only get 5.

That hasn't been true since 2019: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-que...

> Then you can also get 2 at a time by making edits to others' questions/answers to improve them (this only works up to some limit, you stop getting the bonus past that).

The limit is 1000 reputation earned from edits or 2000 reputation total, whichever comes first.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#193

Post by zahrc »

ssd532 wrote: post #84
zahrc wrote: post #36

I have been using less SO over the years, as more and more libraries and even programming languages have their own Discord servers. And there it’s easier and quicker to get a specialised reply, with less judgement or responses like “already answered in thread X”

I don't like that approach because the contents are not searchable using public search engines.

https://www.linen.dev/ makes it possible (not my product)

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#194

Post by pasc1878 »

robocat wrote: post #62

Aside: earned reputation seems to last forever. I got to top 10% about ten years ago, mostly through basic questions and answers that you could easily do when StackOverflow started. I haven’t touched my account in years, and I am now in top 8% with about 5000 reputation, because old questions and answers keep getting upvotes. I would think few people have much incentive to try and gain StackOverflow reputation, so wh…

What keeps it going is adverts to the low rep users who can't turn them off.

They tend to use google to search and then find the SO answer. Yes trhey tend to be beginners and ask the same questions as the beginners 10 years ago. Thus the rep from your old question keeps growing.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#195

Post by PaulHoule »

bombcar wrote: post #108
bastawhiz wrote: post #88

I have a fair number of points on SO from asking and answering some common (and esoteric) questions. But I stopped, as a lot of folks don't mark answers as correct, so good answers don't get highlighted. Why give good advice if it's not marked as such? I got an email a few months ago that one of my answers had been edited. It turns out that someone who—as best as I can tell—hasn't ever actually answered a question ha…

I have a suspicion that there are coding bootcamps or whatever that tell their students to do these things, as I've noticed multiple users doing basically the same (apparently point farming) thing. Gamification works until it gets gamed.

I never got into the "game" aspect on Stack Overflow, that is, to fully participate you have to get a certain number of points and I've never been motivated to play along.

Sites like SO are bad at recognizing the kind of knowledge you got because you spent three years training in the mountains, which I've got some of (as well as opinions about as well founded as those of David Brooks or Jim Cramer)

There was a trade publication that licensed the SO software and I made myself the #2 user on their instance by simply asking a large number of good questions. I could have dethroned the #1 user but didn't want to because he was a knowledgeable guy who wrote great answers. I went looking at SO to see if anyone had gotten to the top of the leaderboard by this strategy and didn't find any so they've got to have some different mechanisms that make this hard.

Re: Ask HN: Is StackOverflow Dying?

#196

Post by PaulHoule »

I think it's always been a bad place to get answers.

If you do maintenance programming you always have little questions like "How do you find the length of a string in Python?" and all you need is "len(s)". On Stackoverflow there is a discussion even if there is nothing to discuss, fortunately it is very unlikely that alternative answers like "sum(1 for c in s)" will get near the top but sifting through a lot of wrong answers and garbage is worse in the long term than learning your way around the official documentation.

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