Whither Stack Overflow
motherboard.vice.com
Whither Stack Overflow
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Re: Whither Stack Overflow
#2We changed the baity title to the one encoded in the URL, often a good place to look for something more neutral.
Better still would be to change the URL to the paper the article reports on, but it doesn't seem to be accessible online.
Re: Whither Stack Overflow
#3We changed the baity title to the one encoded in the URL, often a good place to look for something more neutral. Better still would be to change the URL to the paper the article reports on, but it doesn't seem to be accessible online.
I'll leave you to ponder whether or not HN wishes to officially link directly to Sci-Hub.
That said, those willing to thumb their noses at paywalled science may do so here: http://31.184.194.81/http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleD...
Re: Whither Stack Overflow
#4Do Stackoverflow use ML learning algorithms to filter out duplicate questions answers? Perhaps this could reduce some of the problems listed in this article?
Re: Whither Stack Overflow
#5a well-written summary of a paper by Ivan Srba and Maria Bielikova of Slovak University of Technology, published this week IEEE Software.
from the Vice article, near the end:
> Stack Overflow's talent for self-regulation is really, truly impressive and, sure, results in some dickishness, but asking bad or lazy questions is its own kind of dickishness. It would be a shame to see it erode further.
Re: Whither Stack Overflow
#6What is interesting to me is how good their "are any of these questions similar to yours?" suggestions are. When searching fails, I usually start asking a question - often just to find a solution without posting it. And if not, I can still just post the question.
Re: Whither Stack Overflow
#7The article casts users as the problem: help vampires, noobs and reputation collectors.
My strong opinion is that there are other serious issues that the article doesn't even touch on:
1) the silo model of creating dedicated SE sites. There should have been one SO for everything. Collaborative filtering etc would have been an infinitely better direction to go in.
2) the over-moderation by misguided 'defenders' who are too eager to mark something duplicate or move it to some dead SE site. Here's a group of users the article doesn't point fingers at, but which I believe is more of a problem than the noobs!
3) the shelf-life of answers. Almost all the accepted answers are now wrong. Frameworks change, features are added to languages, bugs get fixed. And woe betide anyone who asks a question afresh hoping to get a new and actually working solution...
4) that I'm ok with subjective questions. These ought be handled as such, rather than closed.
There are a gazillion little ways to fix this and make SO relevant again, but I think the mgmt and 'community' are a big part of the problem, not solution :(
(disclosure: I have well over 40K rep, most of it on SO)
Re: Whither Stack Overflow
#8Interesting read. Here's how I'd sum up my history with Stack Overflow:
1) SO launched a few years after I graduated college and was an immediate and invaluable resource to me.
2) I learned more, got in a position to be able to answer some questions, and started trying to answer questions. Realized there were people on the site that were much faster than I was at answering (and often more incomplete) and stopped.
3) Started asking more subjective questions. They got really useful, long, smart answers from experienced people. Example question: "How do I plan an enterprise level web application?"
4) Started contributing to SO less and less as the correct SO answer would often be a top Google hit. 5) Noticed that many of my subjective question posts were closed or moderated in some way.
6) Tried asking more subjective questions that were immediately closed by moderators as being too open ended. Got frustrated. Stopped thinking of Stack Overflow as a place to go to get an expert's opinion.
7) Noticed as I got more experienced that the quality of answers was extremely variable. Sometimes the most upvoted answer or the answer that was marked correct either lacked import context/caveat information or conflicted my firsthand experience with the problem.
I don't use SO as a source of learning anymore other than when API documentation isn't available or sufficient.
It's an invaluable tool for a junior developer but becomes less and less useful as a person grows into their career.
Re: Whither Stack Overflow
#9The article casts users as the problem: help vampires, noobs and reputation collectors. My strong opinion is that there are other serious issues that the article doesn't even touch on: 1) the silo model of creating dedicated SE sites. There should have been one SO for everything. Collaborative filtering etc would have been an infinitely better direction to go in. 2) the over-moderation by misguided 'defenders' who ar…
In addition, the reputation model is actually incentivising the wrong thing. Answering some simple question that many people see will give you an answer that gets upvoted to the double or even triple digits. Answering something hard and well might only get a handful of votes if it's a niche topic.
(disclosure: 11K rep, mostly on tools like make, autofoo and cmake.)
Re: Whither Stack Overflow
#10Interesting read. Here's how I'd sum up my history with Stack Overflow: 1) SO launched a few years after I graduated college and was an immediate and invaluable resource to me. 2) I learned more, got in a position to be able to answer some questions, and started trying to answer questions. Realized there were people on the site that were much faster than I was at answering (and often more incomplete) and stopped. 3)…
The programming SE is where you can ask questions like that, as far as I know.