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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

#81

Post by ythl »

wheaties wrote: post #73
corobo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have flagged many questions for being off topic. You could say I'm part of the "problem" but from my standpoint, someone will ask a question that can be answered so many ways that the scope is too broad. Many times the person asking doesn't know enough to understand just how broad the question they've asked is. That's why I also leave a comment telling them _why_ I just voted to close. This is, unfortunately, an un…

"How do I convert a JSON object to CSV?" is a common broad question I see all the time. There is no standard conversion because they are completely different data structures.

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

#82

Post by dionidium »

wyldfire wrote: post #63
corobo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't necessarily agree with the logic, but SO's "topic" is software development. Many questions that are technical but not regarding software are closed for being off topic. Some/many are migrated to sibling stackexchange sites. Some questions are closed because they require opinion-based answers ("What's the best ...?", e.g.).

> Some questions are closed because they require opinion-based answers ("What's the best ...?", e.g.).

The problem with this is that there are opinions and preferences and biases (and so on) hiding all throughout even the most (seemingly) objective questions and answers. The SO folks think they're making a more meaningful distinction here than they actually are.

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

#83

Post by wpietri »

bendbro wrote: post #55
Mithaldu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, I fail to see that. Works for me works great for me ninety percent of the time.

When a person says, "I'm having a problem" and the response is, "Well I'm not having any problem, buh-bye!" it in effect says "I don't care that you have a problem."

Often the real problem for novices is that they don't know enough to ask the right question; good questions require that you already be pretty close to the answer. So the real process of helping somebody with technology often begins by turning a bad question into a good question.

So basically, I think "works for me" is disrespectful. Mostly I see it used defensively; the goal is to make the querent go away again. If somebody doesn't want to help, fine, I respect that. But in that case, they should not put themselves into a position where they are answering questions from novices.

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

#84

Post by Bartweiss »

crispyambulance wrote: post #75
epaga wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ironically, leaving a "thank you" will typically get deletions/nags from the self-appointed comment police. As much as I like (and heavily use) SO, it has a real problem with making people feel like shit when asking, answering and commenting. There are people who are exemplary in their politeness and helpfulness like the top-contributor, John Skeet. There are also quite "mean" people like Hans Passant (also super-hig…

The "comment police" bit is an interesting observation - much of the really petty hostility seems to come from mid-tier power users instead of mods and high-level contributors. I think the article here undervalues how unpleasant it is for a new programmer to get even a single response of "Seriously? Marking for deletion."

Those comments might get removed later, but saying "trolls are everywhere" is too pat when the people abusing new users are very visibly established, popular members of the community. Getting attacked by a random throwaway account is a very different feeling than getting attacked by someone up near the top of the totem pole.

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

#85

Post by geordee »

I stopped getting answers in SO. These days I see that the answer could be there in SO, Github, Gists, blogs and Google is the first place I go to. A few years back, I could go to SO for practically anything to do with coding. And I was doing Ruby and Rails.

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

#86

Post by dcosson »

wyldfire wrote: post #63
corobo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't necessarily agree with the logic, but SO's "topic" is software development. Many questions that are technical but not regarding software are closed for being off topic. Some/many are migrated to sibling stackexchange sites. Some questions are closed because they require opinion-based answers ("What's the best ...?", e.g.).

What's kind of interesting is a lot of the target SO questions are implicitly opinion-based. For any "How do you do X" there might be multiple ways to do it so the question is actually "what's the best way to do X" which is up for anyone to interpret "best". And this tends to work out nicely, you'll often see multiple answers where the top upvoted one is not the selected one, or some answers build off of other ones and describe why they think it needed updating. This kind of nuance and seeing multiple, competing answers is often pretty helpful while you're learning.

Plus some of the best, most interesting questions on there are "community wikis" which often tell you they should have been flagged as opinion based but are preserved for historical significance.

Because of that I really don't see the point in being so dogmatic about closing opinion based questions. Even something like "emacs or vim" I can imaging being a useful question, with a highly upvoted, thought provoking answer arguing each side.

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

#87

Post by dionidium »

crispyambulance wrote: post #75
epaga wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ironically, leaving a "thank you" will typically get deletions/nags from the self-appointed comment police. As much as I like (and heavily use) SO, it has a real problem with making people feel like shit when asking, answering and commenting. There are people who are exemplary in their politeness and helpfulness like the top-contributor, John Skeet. There are also quite "mean" people like Hans Passant (also super-hig…

SO mod on comments:

"You should expect comments to get deleted.

If they are oh-so-important, they should get rolled into the post they are commenting on. At which point they are obsolete."

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/255140/592746

So, your problem, clearly, is that you think your "thank you" is "oh so important." If your ego wasn't so big, you'd get that.

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

#88

Post by Bartweiss »

kzisme wrote: post #74

I've recently began using SO more actively (providing answers). Most of the questions I've found and tried to answer were duplicates, but since I didn't have enough reputation to mark it as duplicate. (or enough rep to comment on a post to ask for more information on a poorly asked question) It's fairly depressing to attempt to try to be active on a site like SO when it's setup for failure in the beginning. It's irri…

One of my least favorite SO patterns is seeing a top answer with ~150 points that's simply wrong, and then a second or third answer with ~20 points that's actually correct.

For high-profile questions this gets sorted out eventually, but it sometimes persists indefinitely for niche questions, and it's really unfortunate. I know "first mover advantage" is hard to solve (cf. Reddit), but it's a really big deal for SO.

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

#90

Post by kzisme »

johnslegers wrote: post #69

I’m the author of the article "The Decline of Stack Overflow". I initially published it in July 2015, when it got ±65,000 views in two days. I republished it @ Hackernoon this weekend at their request, which resulted in ±125,000 additional page views, bringing the total page views of the article since its publication in 2015 to ±245,000. The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles eve…

I've been getting the same vibe but have nowhere near the amount of experience in the industry as you.

Many times I've seen other users link answers from a previously asked question to a newly asked question, so I thought I was allowed to do the same....

Nope! Someone told me I was "plagiarizing" (I had clearly linked the old post and quoted the text containing the answer) and shortly after I had a moderator in the thread talking to me...

Later that day I got a message from a different moderator about the same issue to which I replied, but it's been a few days and still no reply...

Many of the down-votes my answers receive are from users who incorrectly answered the OP's question, but they still negatively impact me considering I only have ~35 rep at this point.

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