Nice place to pick up an online fight though (when you're up to it) :)
Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
11–20 of 123 posts
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#12Well, while I agree that SO might have become a somewhat elitist plateform, maybe partly because a lot of professional developers are using their SO account to enforce their curriculum, it is not either supposed to be a kind of nursery for "wanna be" developers that happen to have a quick look on programming languages, and think SO is a forum where any question can be asked.
Sorry to say that, but I'm neither surprised nor offended by the closing of that post.
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#13Just as the article observes, it's really ironic that many, many google searches for "how to do X in language Y" lead to questions on SO that are marked as [closed], 'not a good question', etc. Often, the accepted answer is a variation of RTFM, but sometimes with an inline code example.
Also ironic is when the question asks for help in choosing between frameworks or libraries of comparable functionality and it gets marked as [closed] 'opinion-based'. What's a good question then?
I understand that SO wants/wanted to discourage becoming just a copy-pastable repository of code snippets for common patterns, and that they also don't want to be full of thinly-veiled marketing posts about why framework X is better than its competitors. But then what content DO they want? (Rhetorical, but in-depth questions about API usage are probably the best ones to ask.)
I treat SO as read-only, and that makes it a valuable resource for me.
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#14Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to participate in. It's a shame.
I'm split on this topic, I've often asked a few questions and got very hostile responses & topic closed. On the other hand, some of my questions have been answered in depth by some very nice contributors; Jon Skeet being one of these. In my opinion, it's just another unfortunate side effect of anonymity on the internet. It's terrible, and I wish people were nicer to each other.
It has little to do with anonymity: local newspapers demand you sign off comments with your Facebook account.
The result? The only people that comment are trolls with fake account, people who have too strong opinions or don't care about their next job interview or people with "correct" opinions.
Meanwhile I rarely see anyone here or at the Ars Technica comment sections suggest we nuke one country or the other (and if anybody do we collectively moderate them beyond ground level.)
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#15I had been participating in Stack Overflow since its public beta (though I'm not an active participant anymore), and this topic comes up every now and then, but the astronomical growth of Stack Overflow has not stopped. The composition of all-time high users are also quite a bit different from a few years ago. I am not saying there is not a problem, but I take complaints like this with a grain of salt these days.
End of the day, I think it is important to keep in mind what Stack Overflow is not: it's not Khan Academy. It's not college classes. It's not your IRC buddy. It's more like Wikipedia (but not quite exactly that) than those things. Some choices should be made to keep the content quality high.
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#16The StackOverflow question given as an example is a terrible question.
Odds are that neither the person asking the question or the person who wrote this blog post realize how big the subject is, but since the question just says "tell me everything and I'll figure out if it's relevant," there really is no good way to answer, other than a link to the doc page and a little prodding along the lines of "what are you actually trying to do?"
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#17>Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place. No. There's a lot, A LOT of resources online for beginners. let the nerds run SO, it's perfect as it is for people who know what they are doing.
Maybe SO could better integrate this type of thing with results. Example: "Your question is simple but I know this great starter guide or Book on Amazon that can help you find your way".
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#18Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to participate in. It's a shame.
I'm split on this topic, I've often asked a few questions and got very hostile responses & topic closed. On the other hand, some of my questions have been answered in depth by some very nice contributors; Jon Skeet being one of these. In my opinion, it's just another unfortunate side effect of anonymity on the internet. It's terrible, and I wish people were nicer to each other.
At this point I would rather go to reddit (reddit!!) with technical questions instead of stack overflow.
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#19Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to participate in. It's a shame.
I think it's a bit like Wikipedia: the more you hang around, the less you like it. It's understandable though; after the 12324th question that basically boils down to "please do my homework", even a saint would lose his shit. It's the inevitable fate of every "beginners' resource", from IRC to forums, in the long run.
Personally, I had decent experiences in most cases. I never got over the fact that it refuses to become the de-facto point of reference for stacks, i.e. questions like "what are the best web libraries for $language", "what is the best practice for deploying $framework" are brutally rejected. And it's a shame, because those would have helped immensely -- it's very easy to learn a language, but it's really hard to figure out what you should use from the surrounding ecosystem.
Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners
#20The problem is that most users are not reading the FAQ and they don't use Google nor the search function on SO itself. This leads to the frustration of the experiences users who see a lot of malformed/unanswerable/duplicate questions. I see this every day. I usually don't comment and just vote on "close" silently but there are some users who are openly communicate their frustration and honestly they have a reason. I think that SO should come up with some NLP solution which filters out those questions and informs the offending users that their question is problematic. I have asked a LOT of questions on SO (136) and if I follow the guidelines I ALWAYS get quality responses. The problem IMHO is the lazy newbies who don't bother to read the guidelines / FAQ.