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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

#41

Post by acjohnson55 »

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…

It probably depends on the type of coding your doing, and your style of problem solving.

I've experienced a massive boost in productivity using StackOverflow to help resolve the sorts of issues that are too big to appear in the docs and too small to have a whole blog post. But perhaps it has something to do with the sort of software I work on that I happen to run into a lot of problems in that sweet spot.

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

#42

Post by acjohnson55 »

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…

I'm curious -- could you share links to your questions?

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

#43

Post by erikb »

I agree, most normal questions are answered on Stackoverflow already. There is a lot of opportunity in the edge cases though. And it's true that these are the answers that take experts and time. Maybe SO should advertise more experienced people to share their knowledge as well.

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

#44

Post by bryanlarsen »

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,…

P.S. for SO devs, how about an "Advanced Necromancer" gold badge? 1 year and 10 points rather than 60 days and 5 points for the current silver?

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

#45

Post by Mithaldu »

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,…

All the "works for me" answers like yours and the articles are just another example of what's wrong with SO.

I was tempted to qualify this more, but honestly, if you can't see why "works for me" is one of the worst kinds of answers you can give in tech, then i doubt i can convince you.

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

#46

Post by pjc50 »

ci5er wrote: post #38
4ad wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

One of the weird things about MS documentation is how slow MSDN is. It's often faster to find the answer through Google->Stackoverflow than it is starting at the top and drilling down MSDN.

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

#47

Post by acjohnson55 »

p333347 wrote: post #35

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 p…

To be fair, asking on SO isn't all that difficult. It just requires a little patience, to read and understand the guidelines, and to craft a high quality question. Unfortunately, when someone's blocked on some tricky programming task they've already been banging their head against for hours, it's probably a time when patience is in short supply. But, that patience is often rewarded with a solution.

I'm amused to see programmers.stackexchange get a positive call out, because it used to be the paragon of moderator intolerance. Perhaps that culture has changed for the better.

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

#48

Post by raesene6 »

Lapsa wrote: post #5

top 2% here i can understand the reasoning but i left SO when they broke it into pieces with StackExchange network i actually enjoyed stuff like code golfs, joke questions (minus endless flow of repetitive xkcd references) have always been interested in THAT programming part where problem meets consciousness meets technology. spent a lot of time puzzling around questions on design, patterns - more ethereal side of pr…

interestingly I thought that breaking things up helped a lot and that they could do better by continuing that trend..

For me a big part of the problem of SO (as opposed to other SE sites) is that it's too big for the mods to really have much option other than applying blanket rules without exception.

On the smaller sites there seems to be more scope for a more flexible approach to moderation as the question/answer flow is more manageable.

Also I think it lets more people get engaged by feeling to be a key part of a smaller community where on SO their contribution would be very unlikely to be noticed as the site is soo big..

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

#49

Post by pjc50 »

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…

"learn how to create an OS package to ... " is also the wrong answer, firstly because it will take a tremendously long time, and secondly because there should already be an OS/distro mechanism for handling resolv.conf.

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

#50

Post by corobo »

Chathamization wrote: post #30
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,…

One issue I run into is finding a Stack Overflow question that exactly matches the issue I've run into, find that it's been closed for being a duplicate, click the link to the question it's supposed to be a duplicate of, and find that the other question is completely unrelated. Not only can I not find the answer from SO at this point, but if I find the answer on my own I can't even help others. Another issue I've run…

The ones that really get my gripe are the ones that are flagged for being off topic.. Off what topic? This is a place where technical questions are asked and answered and this is a technical question that needs answering - Why is it closed?
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