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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

#101

Post by lloeki »

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…

Maybe some questions are just not "too broad" but simply broad, and that one may wish to have a number of possible solutions to a problem and pick the one that fits one's case best ("one" being possibly someone else in the future that has a not precisely similar but close enough problem that the set of proposed solutions can help in finding the right path).

So maybe, just maybe a slightly broad question with a couple answers may be better that an theoretically ideal set of a thousand (question, answer) tuples each trying to fit a very restricted case. Unfortunately some mods seem hell-bent on promoting the latter, possibly in hope of writing bots that solve-by-Google (see stacksort[0]).

[0]: https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/

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

#102

Post by Bartweiss »

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…

> Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most privileged segments of its membership.

This strikes me as a key point that went unaddressed in the reply article. Yes, trolling is a standard feature of the internet. Yes, ignoring it is the right thing to do. But most places, trolling means an anonymous or throwaway account was rude, and will probably be removed/downvoted on any moderated site.

On Stack Overflow, we're frequently talking about reputable power users mocking novices, and being rewarded for that behavior. When a novice programmer shows up and is promptly insulted by someone with a decade more experience, something has gone terribly wrong.

Obviously something has to be done to help control the tide of "fix my voodoo code" posts that come through, but right now the 'cure' is largely insulting non-answers from major users. That's a terrible, antisocial way to address the problem.

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

#103

Post by Bartweiss »

onewaystreet wrote: post #96
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…

Your two advanced questions are answered on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6246719/what-is-a-higher-... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27190934/implementation-f... These are only two questions of many on these topics.

One thing I love about SO: that second question has only seen ~20 votes, but it still has a detailed and thoughtful response to a subtle question. I'm constantly impressed by how niche a topic can be and still get a really solid answer.

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

#104

Post by pavlik_enemy »

2-4-Flinching wrote: post #37
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…

Same thing happened when I wanted to know how to convert private method to public in Ruby. Yeah, that's not what people usually do (and not what they should do) but I really needed to know. The reason was laughable, "unclear question" even though it was perfectly clear what were my intentions.

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

#105

Post by crispyambulance »

dionidium wrote: post #87
crispyambulance wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just pointing out that one of the things the parent says gives him joy on stack-overflow is actually "not allowed".

I don't have "a problem".

I use stackoverflow quite productively, appreciate its utility, and help folks out with answers when I can. I've gotten acclimated to the rudeness but I wish it were a nicer place.... more skeet less passant.

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

#106

Post by d0mine »

dcosson wrote: post #86
wyldfire wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

"how to do X" has an objective answer: "here's how". Whether it is "the best" is subjective. That is why multiple answers are allowed on Stack Overflow (instead of a single article as on Wikipedia modulo different languages).

The accepted tick on the answer says that "here's how" might have worked for the question author.

The most upvoted/popular answer works as a rule (there are exceptions). Popularity contest is not the best way to get the truth on a technical subject but it works more often than not (you can read the answer in the chronological order if you like).

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

#107

Post by corobo »

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…

> You could say I'm part of the "problem"

And I do! With lots of swearing! :)

The only time I'm on SO is from a Google search result. They should at least make the danged site noindex itself for that page if it's the question has been closed. You wouldn't believe the amount of times I've been searching for a solution and found a SO link and thought I had the answer coming my way only to see the thing was closed before anyone could answer the question.

In all honesty, I don't give a rats why a question was closed. It was either closed and is now useless or open and has answers.

The solution is to make the closed question not appear in Google search results. If the same question keeps appearing the solution is to let someone answer it.

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

#108

Post by corobo »

dhimes wrote: post #59
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?

Exactly. Double frustration if it was the first return from google.

That's the only way visit SO. It's double frustration all the time.

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

#109

Post by Bartweiss »

kzisme wrote: post #94
Bartweiss wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's frustrating as well when the question that was asked gets answered by me, and I receive a slew of down-votes since I answered it first. The next few answers are essentially copy/paste of my answers or other answers on the question...but I'm still negatively impacted by the down-votes since I only have ~39 rep and wow has getting started been a pain.

A weird observation: starting with SO is particularly punishing if you come to it as an established programmer.

The karma restrictions don't chafe much if you're a novice who mostly asks questions, and occasionally answers a simple topic they recognize. If you're experienced, you want to give more complex answers, and perhaps comment on other answers that you think are suboptimal. Doing that, you feel the new users restrictions (and the sting of uninformed downvotes) constantly.

50 karma is big, because the option to comment on other people's posts is core to giving relevant answers ("Did you want it to do X, or Y?") and using the site properly.

Honestly, I'd just ask a few questions (if your domain is uncommon enough that they won't be duplicates) and let that karma carry you until the site becomes usable.

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