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Whither Stack Overflow

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Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#51

Post by charlesism »

CannisterFlux wrote: post #13

I stopped being really active on SO around the end of 2012. I don't think the reason was anything from the article. For me it was 2 fold: the rise of members who criticize everything and the feeling of shouting into a void. I don't have a good name for these users like help vampires. They seem more like Harry Enfield's old "Only Me!" character who show up to say "you don't want to do it like that" without providing a…

I'm with you. As far I'm concerned, Answer Puritans are more harmful than Help Vampires.

Just as you mention, for most questions on StackOverflow, there is at least one "Never Do That!" answer. Nobody seems to be aware that users seldom care enough about the sites the visit to "Read the FAQ" and no matter how many of them you hunt down and guilt, you will never find them all. The site has so much moral righteousness, it's kind of like the "Stanford Prison Experiment" of help sites.

While StackOverflow has many good qualities, it makes the mistake of "blaming the customer." It's an illusion to think you can improve a site by making people feel bad. The energy they spend on hunting witches, would be better spent on ways to fix the quality problem that focus on carrots only.

The problem with addressing question quality by making people feel bad, is that you're setting yourself up to be (ugh) "disrupted." As soon as someone finds a way to get the same quality of results without all the pithiness, and finger pointing, you're at a big disadvantage.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#52

Post by DanielStraight »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #36
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…

I used to spend quite a bit of time on SO and OnStartups. I haven't contributed to any of their sites since the ridiculous deletion of OnStartups due to the opinion of one moderator (If I remember correctly, which is vague now). I don't care that I lost half my rep. Some people had put really lengthy, researched, answers and a valuable resource was just rm'd. There's far too many silos. Sure separate maths from games…

Wow... you're not kidding about the silos. I haven't used Stack Overflow much lately, so I thought it was still just Stack Overflow and Super User. Instead...

  Stack Overflow
  Server Fault
  Super User
  Web Applications
  Webmasters
  Game Development
  Tex - LaTeX
  Unix & Linux
  Stack Apps
  Ask Ubuntu
  Wordpress Development
  User Experience
  Theoretical Computer Science
  Programmers
  Information Security
  Database Administrators
  Code Review
  Programming Puzzles & Code Golf
  Drupal Answers
  SharePoint
  Software Quality Assurance & Testing
  Computational Science
  Mathematica
  Computer Science
  Raspberry Pi
  Network Engineering
  Open Data
  Software Recommendations
  Arduino
  Joomla
  Data Science
  Emacs
  Vi and Vim
  Open Source
  Computer Graphics
  Hardware Recommendations
  3D Printing
  Retro Computing
And I'm sure I missed some. Unbelievable amount of fragmentation. Anyone want to take a crack at explaining the difference between "Computer Science" and "Theoretical Computer Science"?

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#53

Post by majewsky »

hsmallbone wrote: post #30
majewsky wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/303865/warlords-of-d...

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#54

Post by duaneb »

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #45
duaneb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are other options like the subreddit model, where the users define and moderate the divisions themselves.

...and where petty factionalism (among other factors) led to the creation of, say, /r/math, /r/maths, /r/askmath, /r/askmaths, /r/learnmath, /r/mathematics, /r/badmathematics... and so on for every topic you can think of.

Sure. I think that's preferred to the one community going stagnant--math is one of the only areas where that is arguably preferable.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#55

Post by Drdrdrq »

cvs268 wrote: post #39
rat87 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally disagree. Back in the day a lot of these questions fit on Stack Overflow just fine. A lot of the sites are too specific and have to few users for good answers. > The SO community has always aimed to close any questions whose answers will tend to be almost entirely based on opinions, rather than facts, references, or specific expertise. This isn't true back in the day people gave good opinions on things with…

> A lot of the sites are too specific and have too few users for good answers. Thats what! If enough people aren't interested/participating in a particular stackexchange site, then an open-ended question on StackOverflow is not likely to generate any canonical answers with proper references from the people hanging out on StackOverflow. Also such a question is likely to be too-specific i.e. "ahead of its time" to be d…

I had a schoolmate in high school who believed that every question has an objective answer. Man, what a pita it was when he set out to find it and wouldn't let go even after all the others gave up and tried to abort the discussion...

Sometimes I am looking for subjective answer, because let's face it - objective one doesn't always exist (if ever). Saying SO is not the correct site for this is of course a legitimate response, but the feelings it evokes in me (especially after it replaced myriad of forums where I could have gotten a better answer) are not very friendly. I deal with it in my own way (not actively helping others), but it's a shame...

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#56

Post by Drdrdrq »

cel1ne wrote: post #29

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 a…

Hey, really, you find Android SDK terrible? Genuinly curious, which parts? I have written my share of Java (though I wouldn't consider myself a hardcore Java programmer) and I found Android... logical, well documented and in general a delight to work with (well, apart from Eclipse and sloooooow emulators).

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#57

Post by jlericson »

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…

I sympathize with 2-4. Those things make it much harder to earn reputation by asking then it used to be. Fixing those problems requires fighting a bunch of institutional inertia, so it will require either time or some sort of judo move.

But I don't understand how having separate sites relates. If you contribute to some of the smaller sites, I think you will find you'll get excellent answers from people more focused on the sort of problems the site covers. Frankly, I've seen DBA questions asked on SO that get short-sighted answers from programmers. Those questions should be asked of people who really know how a database works under the hood.

I can see how collaborative filtering might help. But a big reason people have moved to dedicated sites as opposed to SO is that they want to have separate moderation policies for the questions they enjoy answering. (I've put a little bit of thought into the criteria for spinning off sites on meta.SO: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/271989/does-it-pay-t...)

(Disclosure: I'm a Community Manager hired by Stack Overflow.)

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#58

Post by dang »

dredmorbius wrote: post #3
dang wrote: post #2

We 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...

I think that degree of anthill-overturning would be past prudent.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#59

Post by cel1ne »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #56
cel1ne wrote: post #29

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 a…

Hey, really, you find Android SDK terrible? Genuinly curious, which parts? I have written my share of Java (though I wouldn't consider myself a hardcore Java programmer) and I found Android... logical, well documented and in general a delight to work with (well, apart from Eclipse and sloooooow emulators).

It's gotten better, but check my comments from some time ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9476547

Generally: bad inheritance, bad separation of concern, unidiomatic java (I think much of it was automatically converted from C++), overcomplicated classes and just so many wtf-moments I had.

Example: You want to store state.

1. In standard activities you have this really nice method "onSaveInstanceState" where you can save state to a "Bundle". And "onCreate" where you are handed a bundle to restore. You write the logic for doing that and should be done.

2. Then you learn that "onSaveInstanceState" isn't actually called when stopping an app, only when rotating the screen, so you have to save your state elsewhere. In onStop for example, sounds nice.

3. onStop doesn't take a "Bundle". Hm… ok let's see save it to disk.

4. Oh, Bundle isn't meant to be serialised because the internal format is allowed to change, so you have to write serialisation again after all. Ok, "Bundle" is out. Let's use json and be done with it.

5. But for some reason it sometimes doesn't work. Turns out "onStop" only sounds like it's being called when your app stops. It's actually not guaranteed to be called, so you have to use "onPause".

This is just one example of many where things could be more aptly named, better documented and so on.

Re: Whither Stack Overflow

#60

Post by Drdrdrq »

cel1ne wrote: post #59
Drdrdrq wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, really, you find Android SDK terrible? Genuinly curious, which parts? I have written my share of Java (though I wouldn't consider myself a hardcore Java programmer) and I found Android... logical, well documented and in general a delight to work with (well, apart from Eclipse and sloooooow emulators).

It's gotten better, but check my comments from some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9476547 Generally: bad inheritance, bad separation of concern, unidiomatic java (I think much of it was automatically converted from C++), overcomplicated classes and just so many wtf-moments I had. Example: You want to store state. 1. In standard activities you have this rea…

Thanks for the explanation. I guess I never even looked at the names of these callbacks because I just followed the app lifecycle diagram - yeah, I agree, the names could be much better.
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