Stackoverflow is a little more boring for contributors now than
it was before (which is why I gradually stopped answering),
simply because most of the general questions have already been
answered.
I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining
11–20 of 196 posts
Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining
#12Stackoverflow works great for me, and I don't know why more people don't appear to use it like I do. 1) When you've got a problem, Google it. 98% of the time the answer will be in top 5 links to stackoverflow or documentation. You upvote the answer and question. 2) 1.5% of the time, stackoverflow will have a related question, but either it doesn't have an answer, or the answer has issues. You figure it out yourself,…
Top 2% here - I have used Stackoverflow this way for years. It has saved me hundreds of hours of searching over the years and still does.
One thing I'd add is I try to leave a thank you comment in addition to an upvote when I find an answer to a hard question.
Getting comments years later thanking you for a quick answer you jotted down at some point is so satisfying.
Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining
#13For me the biggest problem with SO is that it's hard to get answers to advanced questions in some areas. Not a lot of people could answer the question in the first place, because it's about some obscure and rarely encountered problem, and these experts are constantly spammed with basic questions from inexperienced programmers. Though it depends on the area you're interested in - I've got almost no answers to advanced Rails-related questions and got pretty good responses to Scala-related stuff I'm interested in (but maybe it's because Scala questions were about more basic stuff)
Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining
#14This is my experience as well. I'm in the top percentile and I almost never answer any more. The points keep coming though, for a handful of popular questions/answers.
Answering is way less rewarding than a few years ago, but SO is working fine. From the opposite point of view, I have asked one question on SO to which I never received an answer, probably because it's not possible (it had to do with Flash streaming).
Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining
#15For me the biggest problem with SO is that it's hard to get answers to advanced questions in some areas. Not a lot of people could answer the question in the first place, because it's about some obscure and rarely encountered problem, and these experts are constantly spammed with basic questions from inexperienced programmers. Though it depends on the area you're interested in - I've got almost no answers to advanced…
This is why bounties were invented - not a silver bullet, but might help getting visibility to the question.
Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining
#16Stackoverflow works great for me, and I don't know why more people don't appear to use it like I do. 1) When you've got a problem, Google it. 98% of the time the answer will be in top 5 links to stackoverflow or documentation. You upvote the answer and question. 2) 1.5% of the time, stackoverflow will have a related question, but either it doesn't have an answer, or the answer has issues. You figure it out yourself,…
I taught myself to code using SO in just the last two years. I reference it almost daily. I've shipped production software in this time span using the information. I can't believe such a high quality source of information exists on the internet, it is a phenomenal public resource. Difficult to contribute to? Sure. Prickly moderators, who close questions I've found very useful? Definitely. Is it dying? I have no idea, I hope not. The creators of the site deserve some kind of medal, in addition to whatever valuation the company has. Really an incredible resource.
Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining
#17SO is another area where I feel "out of sync" with the rest of the "programming world", in that I've...
* ...never posted a question to SO (because I've never found it either necessary or helpful to do so),
* ...only ever "copy-pasted" from SO once (it was a CSS polyfill for iOS having broken "support" for vh/vw)
* ...only attempted to answer questions on SO twice, exclusively out of a feeling of "am I missing something?"
I've been programming for 16 years, and doing so professionally for 7 of those. I've always seen StackOverflow as like a worse version of MDN or something: obscure API-specific stuff that should be in documentation for libXYZ or XYZService but for some reason isn't, with answers supplied by random internet people and "graded" by other, less-knowledgeable random internet people.
For more advanced stuff (like "what are higher-kinded types" or "how do monads help simplify concurrency"), online articles, tutorials, or IRC channels have always been a sufficient supplement to just trying stuff myself.
I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.
Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining
#18SO is another area where I feel "out of sync" with the rest of the "programming world", in that I've... * ...never posted a question to SO (because I've never found it either necessary or helpful to do so), * ...only ever "copy-pasted" from SO once (it was a CSS polyfill for iOS having broken "support" for vh/vw) * ...only attempted to answer questions on SO twice, exclusively out of a feeling of "am I missing someth…
I don't think you are missing anything.
I also have never asked anything on SO, and never used SO as a reference. SO only seems to work for factual simple answers that are found in the documentation or manual pages.
For higher level discussion SO is not appropriate; mailing lists and IRC work best for that.
I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random stuff on SO works for them
Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining
#19For me the biggest problem with SO is that it's hard to get answers to advanced questions in some areas. Not a lot of people could answer the question in the first place, because it's about some obscure and rarely encountered problem, and these experts are constantly spammed with basic questions from inexperienced programmers. Though it depends on the area you're interested in - I've got almost no answers to advanced…
Yeah, unfortunately looking for advanced Rails answers means sifting through lots of silt: answers that were correct for version X but no longer, answers that avoid the question by doing something else, cargo cult solutions.
Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining
#20I don't quite agree as someone with few points on StackOverflow the mods can be quite hostile and inflexible when it comes to the rules. For instance I found a browser bug in the code submitted on a stack overflow answer [1] and I edited it and it got rejected because it wasn't in the spirit of what the original author intended or something like that. I also had no way of replying to the rejection motivating what my…
They actually give you 101 points on every new site if you're a proven user, which lets you comment.
How many points do you need to be a proven user then?