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The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

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Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#271

Post by kbart »

intrasight wrote: post #246
SiVal wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but I disagree. While, yes, I've found that Google searches often led me to answers on SO, I've also lost count of the number of times Google has decided that a question on a StackOverflow page was the MOST RELEVANT to the question I was asking, but SO mods had put a big, fat stamp at the top from moderators announcing that THEY weren't going to permit anyone to answer it. I don't know how many times I've scan…

I always Google with the timeframe set to "last year"

What's the quickest way to do that?

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#272

Post by reitanqild »

Veedrac wrote: post #231
reitanqild wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why don't they just make it just a little bit harder to ask the first question? Today this is one of the default privileges, and IMO that is asking for work.

What does "a little bit harder" mean? Any reputation requirement is out of the window because it would alienate far too many people from ever contributing. A screening process wouldn't work well because SO already puts too much burden on moderators (which is largely why people end up making rushed moderation decisions).

> What does "a little bit harder" mean?

I'll try to answer below. But I don't think SO can have their cake and eat it to: IMO SO can either set the threshold for asking to non-zero or they could stop complaining about the current torrent of help vampires and low-effort questions.

> Any reputation requirement is out of the window because it would alienate far too many people from ever contributing.

And here is were our opinions differ.

It seems like somehow SO enjoy having a torrent of fresh noobs to correct.

If not, adding just the slightest speed bump to people who just want help with their homework (i.e. you cannot ask a question until your account is 6 hours old or has passed introductory training: look at tags, make a search, visit meta) would likely (IMO) weed out most vampires without affecting the large majority (the read only users) or anyone who is prepared to make any effort to become a contributor.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#273

Post by V-2 »

shagie wrote: post #212
V-2 wrote: post #164

> Someone at Hacker News expressed a common experience for many programmers (experienced or not) when trying to participate on Stack Overflow. Okay... > 4 — Respond to comment about a missing semicolon that got deleted when I was cutting/pasting/formatting my code. (Despite the error msg making it clear that the missing semicolon isn’t the issue) Who cares. I would just ignore this. > Duplicate answer person complain…

If someone grabs the code to try to reproduce the error and gets unrelated sytanx errors, that's their time wasted. The comment about the error helps others from wasting their time too... until the problem is fixed. As there is a taboo of modifying someone else's code, this is best done with a comment and hope the OP will fix it.

Yeah, well, that's a good point too. That's another possibility.

At any rate, whether the reason for someone to point out a missing semicolon is because they couldn't run the code straight away, or only because they didn't bother to read the question carefully - I fail to see why either scenario would be specific to StackOverflow and its peculiar community.

Surely on any QA site in existence you could come across someone acting on either of these possible reasons??

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#274

Post by dingaling »

speedkills wrote: post #227
grkvlt wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, before SO, you had sites like 'Expert Sex Change' (expertsexchange.com) which would purport to answer your question, but gray/blur out the actual text. They then required payment to expose the answers, which often turned out to be non-existent. On the other hand, I've had a lot of success with SO, both asking and answering, and while there are occasions where I find questions closed as duplicates or off-topic,…

I always remember scrolling down past the blurred out section and reading the actual answers without signing up. I wonder how many people ending up getting past that old school dark pattern.

Or just "View Source" and there was the raw text of the answer...

What Experts Exchange had going for it was a lot of corporate-domain programming knowledge, stuff like COBOL and IBM Visual Age that are basically unknown on Stack Overflow.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#275

Post by gotofritz »

reitanqild wrote: post #199
gotofritz wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the problem, since you can jump to the other question, it means all new answers will only happen in one place. Sure it can be improved, but it's not something that bothers me in practice TBH

It seems to me you aree providing a perfect example here: From what I can see you did not read the post you answered to (Is it inevitable that two different questions with different answers will be marked duplicates of each other, for example?), yet you hand out the answer like the ones we criticise for rubber stamping "duplicate" etc.

It's because I have never actually seen happen, hence I went with what I was familiar with.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#276

Post by sedatk »

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #34

Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the comm…

Do you mean it's only a matter of preference rather than limited resources?

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#277

Post by wyclif »

wruza wrote: post #178
mekoka wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who cannot be bothered to cover the simplest basics of a topic on their own. It's usually hard to explain anything to them because anywhere you try to start from they will need you to explain that topic first, and on, and on. If you ask them "what do you understand" in an attempt to join them in some common frame of comprehension, they look at you with a blank stare and reply "what do you mean". That's how the…

SO is also full of opposites: answer vampires. You put efforts into formulating your very specific question, correcting for english language rules, provide working examples only to see bunch of "we never did it like that, you do not need that" answers from old-boys that think they know everything. Ofc, if someone solved that issue the same way, he will show up and put his saving comment, but those beards form the com…

And just to add another layer to your observation: the effect you describe is accelerated depending on the technology or programming language if those things are specific to the question. So, for instance, if it's a Perl-related question (we never did it this way, there's 3,827 other ways to do it and your answer is not one of them so I'm voting to close) the Soup Nazi-ism is gonna be worse than, say, a TCP/IP question.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#278

Post by reitanqild »

gotofritz wrote: post #275
reitanqild wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me you aree providing a perfect example here: From what I can see you did not read the post you answered to (Is it inevitable that two different questions with different answers will be marked duplicates of each other, for example?), yet you hand out the answer like the ones we criticise for rubber stamping "duplicate" etc.

It's because I have never actually seen happen, hence I went with what I was familiar with.

Can you see our point now?

Because this is exactly the kind of rubber-stamping that we are talking about: to busy defending the system to actually read what the user tries to ask about/point out.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#279

Post by mhomde »

teach wrote: post #264
mhomde wrote: post #20

I'm a bit divided about Stack Overflow. On one hand side it's simply one, if not the best, resource for programmers. On the other hand it's become somewhat toxic and counterproductive. The better you become as a programmer the less value you derive from it. The true niche experts are less and less to be found (ie Product/Project -owners and Microsoft/Google/Apple etc -employees) and the other replies will often be ex…

> The better you become as a programmer the less value you derive from it. This has been my experience exactly. I'd been coding for 20+ years before Stack Overflow even existed. I nevertheless find many good answers on SO via Google searches. But virtually all of my questions are either downvoted to oblivion or closed as "duplicates". I spend hours trying to solve the problem myself and spend even more time reducing…

Yeah, it can be very frustrating :(

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#280

Post by angry_octet »

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #175
user5994461 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. In that case, I have a serious question for you: What's your plan for refreshing the site on the long term? Lemme explain. The "community" is actively closing new questions as "duplicate" if anything similar is already present. At the same time, the old answer (that all duplicates are redirecting to) is often locked down for various reasons. The blocking prevent…

> How do you intend to prevent that? Very very few posts are actually uneditable at all, and editing is open to all users (some need approval). If a post is locked and outdated it's likely that the question was locked because it was the kind of question that does not provide long-lasting answers (for example a software recommendation list).

Surely the better solution would be to say "This was the best answer in 2009. In 2012 there was a new answer."

Also in the era of search engines, does it matter if someone compiles a point in time solution? I've lost track of the number of times I've successfully searched for that entry, only to discover it has been closed as "inappropriate". So frustrating.

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