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Whither Stack Overflow

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Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#21

Post by reitanqild »

Strilanc wrote: post #17
willvarfar wrote: post #7

The 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…

> There should have been one SO for everything. What could possibly go right about mixing Judaism questions and Christianity questions into the programming questions?

Ask reddit.

On a more serious note: Stack Overflow started out as a technical site. Questions about programming often crosses the border to hardware or networking. They rarely however cross into theology.

I'd be fine with opening a different site for theological questions as long as I could have all my technical questions in one place (and more importantly not having someone move them around.)

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#22

Post by borispavlovic »

Strilanc wrote: post #17
willvarfar wrote: post #7

The 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…

> There should have been one SO for everything. What could possibly go right about mixing Judaism questions and Christianity questions into the programming questions?

Is this a problem with wikipedia.org? Imagine both of these sets of questions tagged as `religion` and you have a common source for all people interested generally in any religion.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#23

Post by _pmf_ »

Like Wikipedia, it's users vs. bureaucrats now. I actually dislike the "edit queue" that appears at the top of the profile; I'd rater opt out of participating in this patronizing crap completely.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#24

Post by alixaxel »

I kinda left SO primarily for how trivial-oriented is has become. Say you write an answer on how to automatically distinguish images of floorplants from general pictures; 3 up votes. What is the current content type for JSON(P)? Hundreds.

The same goes for questions, if you ask something that is moderately complicated it will go largely unnoticed and unanswered (even if you bounty the hell out of it).

And then you have the zealous behaviour of some mods, some of them don't even have the slightest sense of consistency - I've seen extremely helpful questions with tons of valuable answers being closed as "off-topic" just because the post was (still) getting a lot of attention. Where as mostly related questions / answers in another thread (but with much less value in terms of knowledge) are still alive.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#25

Post by alixaxel »

endgame wrote: post #9
willvarfar wrote: post #7

The 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.)

^ This.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#26

Post by alixaxel »

endgame wrote: post #9
willvarfar wrote: post #7

The 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.)

I once thought of a potential solution where the number of reputation you would gain would be directly derived from the number of tag-experts who saw the question (and did not provide an answer).

But maybe this would lead to it's own problems too.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#27

Post by _pmf_ »

cvs268 wrote: post #15

Everything does NOT belong on StackOverflow. I wish SO highlighted http://stackexchange.com/sites so that people can participate in the respective stackexchange communities where they will be more welcome. I have seen that a lot of good questions on StackOverflow get closed/migrated simply because they are irrelevant on StackOverflow. A similar analogy would be to think of something that would be gold in the right su…

What's kind of telling is that the highest rating SO questions are those that would nowadays be closed as "primarily opinion based" or "unclear what you're asking".

I know that the current tendency for those questions is that they should be posted on programmers.stackoverflow, but I found the quality there dubious at least (too much armchair architects).

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#28

Post by reitanqild »

willvarfar wrote: post #20
Strilanc wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There should have been one SO for everything. What could possibly go right about mixing Judaism questions and Christianity questions into the programming questions?

Its something I've mulled for years ;) Here's about collaborative filtering: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-... Here's just general SO discontent: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/25426541504/stack... and http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/26580091073/stack... ;)

The collaborative filtering thing stands out as a really good idea to me.

Anyone here who can say anything about the community size you would need for something like this to be viable?

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#29

Post by cel1ne »

Just some thoughts about SO:

* The android section is terrible. The questions are a mixture of people not knowing how to write java code at all mixed with questions of people getting hindered by the terrible SDK. (I develop software in Java for 10+ years and Android still gets me sometimes.)

This situation would be better if it wasn't so easy to shoot yourself in the foot with the android-SDK, but nothing we can do about that now.

* Sometimes I have in-depth question about libraries which, if I follow the support-instructions, often go like this:

1. Ask in the chat (ugh, why chat?): I almost never do that, because I need archivable asynchronous communication not chat.

2. Ask on the mailing-list if there is one. This goes well in some projects.

3. Open a github-issue. In overwhelmed projects like react-native, you get immediately forwarded to SO.

4. Ask on SO where nobody answers because nobody knows the technical details.

So… The maintainers of projects like react-native often get spammed with general coding questions of newcomers, which leaves no time for in-depth questions.

Another problem is that, especially in Android, many answers are not actual solutions but crude workarounds that work in specific cases and might even break more stuff in the future. But: "Hey it compiles!".

frustrated

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#30

Post by hsmallbone »

majewsky wrote: post #16
debaserab2 wrote: post #8

Interesting 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)…

> I don't use SO as a source of learning anymore other than when API documentation isn't available or sufficient. The latter point is really important. I use API documentation whenever it is actually reasonably complete and up-to-date. But with many abysmal documentations ( cough Rails cough ) I just go straight for SO because the thing I'm looking for is probably not even documented. Or if not, I won't find it in th…

I often wish there was a site like SO with a great community around building task-oriented code-first samples to replace shoddy project documentation. Often with SO the accepted answer is too specific, outdated or not descriptive enough but its existence locks out better responses. I would prefer a canonical, up-to-date wiki answer than strict authorship most of the time. I've taken a few stabs at building a solution to this problem but I think finding the right mix is super important.
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