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I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

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Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#31

Post by zamalek »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #8

Stackoverflow 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,…

Agreed. This related to the misconception that "little or no activity on an open source project means that it's dead." That statement is frequently true, but not always.

If most of the common questions have been answered, then there will obviously be a correlated decline in the number of questions posted and subsequently answers posted. Esoteric questions aren't abundant, especially over a constant time frame.

Declining question/answer activity shows that the website is healthy. I've opened S/O a few times over the past year with the intention to answer questions, only to find duplicate/off-topic/low-effort/etc. questions.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#32

Post by bryanlarsen »

dx034 wrote: post #26

I would love to use stackoverflow actively, but wasn't very successful so far. It's great to use as a passive user. It's a great encyclopedia. But all my attempts to ask questions were unsuccessful. I posted 3 questions where I did not receive any answers or clues at all. The questions seem to have a lot of views, so I tried to answer them myself later (in cases I found one). Which is ok, but makes it like an encyclo…

"But all my attempts to ask questions were unsuccessful."

Sure. But all the times you had questions that were answered on stackoverflow even before you asked them on Google, you were successful.

And by answering your own questions on SO you're helping out the next guy.

Post your question hoping you'll get an answer, but recognizing that you probably won't, and that you'll probably come back 24 hours later and post an answer to your own question.

You will accumulate karma for these, slowly but steadily. But more importantly, you're helping out those who follow.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#33

Post by br3w5 »

Hold on what the hell - I just skimmed through the 'decline of...' article referenced by the above article to look for the one of the reason for those 2013 stats being that there are users that can find the answers to the questions they need without asking and without answering. I am within the 8% that have answered more than 5 questions but I don't have time to actively contribute but do use it everyday and am voting on questions and answers everyday. If there are more like me then how is it in decline?

That the referenced article doesn't cover this then undermines the other arguments about its attitude to users (arguments I largely disagree with).

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#35

Post by p333347 »

There are three ways to use stackoverflow - ask, answer and lurk.

Asking is hard as the admins are quite intolerant of anything that doesn't abide by the rules, in their opinion. That said, small quick queries, those that would get shot down when posted as questions, are best asked in chat rooms and you will get a useful answer. The notification comes in handy when a chat room question is answered after an extended period of time.

Answering is harder, as questions are usually highly problem specific (due to the rules), mostly particular framework or domain related, and only those who have faced similar issues can make meaningful posts. Often times the multi hundred thousand rep kings can get away with non answers (some even get accepted) in spite of a lesser rep king complaining about that in the comments.

That leaves with lurking. Lurking has benefited me immensely. It seems every problem you have is already answered in like 2010.

The programmers.stackexchange is much better as it allows opinion based, discussion oriented posts although the admins seem to be getting intolerant there lately, which is a bit odd.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#36

Post by AlexC04 »

epaga wrote: post #12
bryanlarsen wrote: post #8

Stackoverflow 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.

I have a question about nodejs from 2011 that still gets comments and upvotes regularly.

One of my favorite parts I think is the fact that the correct answer changed over time, so I continued to update the question.

At first the answer to "how to read a file one line at a time" was to use a module, later, a better module came along, eventually nodejs finally added native support for file reading.

I had an "annual update" going for a while since the correct answer changed to often.

Eventually someone came along and completely rewrote my question. Wiped all the history, evolution, etc... And boiled it down to "use native"

I was saddened a little, but understood.

I find a number of stack overflow rules/guidelines to be odd. For example: 'do not say "thanks" or "hello" people reading your question do not have time for that's [sic]

It's definitely a community which has been usurped by the aspie side of programming

That said, I still get thanks on it and it makes me smile when I do

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#37

Post by 2-4-Flinching »

pavlik_enemy wrote: post #13

For 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…

Yea, I asked an advanced Java question and got downvoted -20 with no answers. It was downvoted because it was something you actually had to have understanding of Java and the API. That has been my experience with stackoverflow. Ask a simple question get love. Ask something advance get downvoted and sometimes trolled. So sad people can't just move on if they don't know and answer and have to downvote to make them feel better.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#38

Post by ci5er »

4ad wrote: post #18
ubertaco wrote: post #17

SO 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

> I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random stuff on SO works for them

This is probably true.

I'm not a Windows developer and on a recent project I had to use their IDE (which turns out to quite nice, if you are an IDE person) and a set of their APIs. I read, but did not understand, some pretty fundamental/basic MS-authored documentation. I found a few answers to questions related to other people not understanding it either, and was on my way again.

To be fair to MS, it was documented, completely and accurately. I just wasn't accustomed to some of their calling conventions and was getting yelled at by the linker.

EDIT: Outside of embedded systems, where there are a lot fewer moving parts than on your typical MS OS box, it's been a while (20 years?) since I was thrown at an environment where everything changed from what I am accustomed to. OS. Language. CPU architecture target. IDE. IDE configuration for project build. Build process. SDKs. Calling convention. Oh, and the 2M line code-base that I had just been introduced to (and where none of the MS Visual Studio project files had been checked into version control - so I'm fumbling in the dark there). Googling for the error message and landing on SO at least gets you to the point that you know you have a configuration problem vs a calling convention problem. That tells you where you need to start looking in the documentation.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#39

Post by sporkenfang »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #8

Stackoverflow 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,…

Stackoverflow is a good language resource for me -- if I don't know the language I'm working in as well yet, it's invaluable. For non-beginner questions I don't find your percentages to be accurate, apologies. In the latter case SO (and hell sometimes even googling the problem) are unhelpful, and whatever is on SO that is related isn't applicable enough to be helpful. In these cases sometimes I find myself asking SO questions, but more often than not after about ten minutes of searching I go offline in my quest and find a senior+ engineer who has a free moment to ask.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#40

Post by ap22213 »

Annatar wrote: post #22

Stack overflow, like a lot of the forums out there, suffers from the same pathology: it is very easy to stumble upon an answer which answers the question, and is correct in a very wide context, but is actually bad advice (low quality correct answer, which without experience is bad practice). And now comes the catch-22: if I do not have enough experience to recognize the correct-correct answer, the answer presented wi…

Plus, for specialized topics, a good portion (10-15%?) of the top-voted answers are just wrong or misleading.

About once every few weeks in reviewing one of my team's code, I see something strange. I ask them about it, and they say they did it that way because of SO. Then, I have to explain why it's not a good idea to do in our code. Then, I have to spend a couple hours showing them why, because clearly 'everything on the Internet is correct.'

Overall though, SO has saved me a TON of time over the years. But, lately I have been more often reading user mailing lists or looking at the source code.

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