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Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow

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Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow

#41

Post by Jorengarenar »

achairapart wrote: post #38

StackOverflow is one of the most toxic community out there. Asking a question is a miserable experience. Answering a question? Same. It really seems no one is there to help each other. It's mostly status quo or reputation. Moderators have too much work to do or have serious ego problems (most users call them "StackOverlords"). Or a mix between the two. One thing I noticed is that other sites of the Stack Exchange Net…

> Moderators have too much work to do or have serious ego problems

As I mentioned in other comment, the amount of poor questions (e.g. of type "why my code not work"), with bad grammar and formatting on top, far outweighs the number of properly asked new questions.

Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow

#42

Post by thomastjeffery »

Questions are silos.

StackOverflow users are constantly complaining about duplicate questions. The real problem is that the onus for better question asking is placed on the asker, who is only really motivated and prepared to express their confusion.

The whole reason most questions are asked is because the asker isn't familiar enough with the problem domain to find the answer. That also means they aren't familiar enough with the problem domain to find a duplicate/related question.

It's much easier for question answerers to find duplicate and related discussion. Instead of antagonizing the asker by closing their post as "pointless discussion that has already happened", answerers should be continuing discussion with the asker.

Every StackOverflow question (duplicate or not) provides two opportunities:

1. Answering the question.

2. Finding what information to better advertise so that confusion can be avoided in there future.

Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow

#43

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

mooreds wrote: post #31
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #30

Their business model conflicts with what would serve users best. It once was a place where I would trust answers, now I have to search multiple times, scroll through many results to find relevant answers. Having massive amounts of questions gets more surface area for ads but a lot of programming Q&A that is a few years out of date is mostly useless. API's change, things become deprecated or better solutions emerge. T…

I wasn't able to find a detailed breakdown of their revenue, though https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2020/07/28/stack-ove... indicates that Teams is responsible for 1/3 of it. Is it the ads you object to?

The ad revenue model requires a lot of SEO friendly pages to be in search indexes. I don't mind ads or that model in general.

A lot of the answers on pages are outdated but they have no incentive to cleanup old content if its going to affect their bottom line because they will have less indexed pages.

This means I get much more noise when trying to find something so I go elsewhere.

Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow

#44

Post by mooreds »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #43
mooreds wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't able to find a detailed breakdown of their revenue, though https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2020/07/28/stack-ove... indicates that Teams is responsible for 1/3 of it. Is it the ads you object to?

The ad revenue model requires a lot of SEO friendly pages to be in search indexes. I don't mind ads or that model in general. A lot of the answers on pages are outdated but they have no incentive to cleanup old content if its going to affect their bottom line because they will have less indexed pages. This means I get much more noise when trying to find something so I go elsewhere.

But won't that be self correcting if people bounce away from old (less useful) content? That would negatively affect SEO, I'd think.

Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow

#45

Post by webmobdev »

Jorengarenar wrote: post #41
achairapart wrote: post #38

StackOverflow is one of the most toxic community out there. Asking a question is a miserable experience. Answering a question? Same. It really seems no one is there to help each other. It's mostly status quo or reputation. Moderators have too much work to do or have serious ego problems (most users call them "StackOverlords"). Or a mix between the two. One thing I noticed is that other sites of the Stack Exchange Net…

> Moderators have too much work to do or have serious ego problems As I mentioned in other comment, the amount of poor questions (e.g. of type " why my code not work "), with bad grammar and formatting on top, far outweighs the number of properly asked new questions.

There are billions of us for whom English isn't our native language. A little more patience and empathy by the mods would go a long way.

Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow

#46

Post by Jorengarenar »

webmobdev wrote: post #45
Jorengarenar wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moderators have too much work to do or have serious ego problems As I mentioned in other comment, the amount of poor questions (e.g. of type " why my code not work "), with bad grammar and formatting on top, far outweighs the number of properly asked new questions.

There are billions of us for whom English isn't our native language. A little more patience and empathy by the mods would go a long way.

Sorry, I don't buy this argument at all. I'm not native speaker either and somehow have been able to write comprehensible sentences since elementary school. There is no excuse for not using punctuation, not capitalizing letters, not breaking statements into sentences.

Here, an example [1] right from SO, raw copy-paste:

>please can anyone point out what I have done wrong this is code for permutation which stores all possible permutation of the small vector "vec" and then display it

And this isn't the worst I seen, but those get deleted quickly. But this one already tickles half of the points I've made.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/67723738/

Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow

#47

Post by Jorengarenar »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #42

Questions are silos. StackOverflow users are constantly complaining about duplicate questions. The real problem is that the onus for better question asking is placed on the asker, who is only really motivated and prepared to express their confusion. The whole reason most questions are asked is because the asker isn't familiar enough with the problem domain to find the answer. That also means they aren't familiar enou…

> That also means they aren't familiar enough with the problem domain to find a duplicate/related question.

It would be a valid point if only the answer wasn't so often the first result after pasting the title of their post into search engine.

Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow

#48

Post by nailer »

listenallyall wrote: post #19

Despite 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…

The new fonts are just system fonts, which exist because they’re fast and good.

Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow

#49

Post by nicaragua »

nicaragua wrote: post #28

Not being able to link to an answer.

This question has been asked a lot, in multiple threads, by various Stack Overflow users and the UI hasn't changed much.

Here's one example.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/45597/how-can-i-lin...

To the people who downvoted my response, this thread is about what sucks about Stack Overflow, and my opinion is that it should be more apparent on how to link to answers.

Re: Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow

#50

Post by listenallyall »

nailer wrote: post #48
listenallyall wrote: post #19

Despite 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…

The new fonts are just system fonts, which exist because they’re fast and good.

Segoe UI, which Windows users now see by default at SO, is not a good font for reading blocks of text. Actually, it's not just "not good," it's terrible.
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