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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

#121

Post by treehau5 »

jmcomets wrote: post #76
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…

> The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations. I disagree. Many people simply view an article to understand the author's opinion (my case). IMO the "new user" experience on StackOverflow really depends on the topic addressed. Maybe that's just programmer personality speaking, I wish someone would do a…

Taking article views as acceptance for the article's viewpoints is quite the fallacy. That headline alone will generate many thousands of views because people are curious, not because they agree -- this is a problem with the internet as a whole these days, so many people have news and topics filtered and curated to their own beliefs, they are unaware that they are living in their own "filter bubble" and thus we assume if I click on article a it means I like article a, so news algorithm xyz will proceed to show me more like a.

I've read the article. It has some legitimate claims, I've even experienced some of them, but I am not so thin-skinned as some people are about internet points, and these issues aren't exclusive to StackOverflow. They are gripes about internet behavior, and human behavior as a whole. It all has to be taken into context, as many point out, the situation was much worse before Stack Overflow.

In the article,

> Quora might seem like an obvious choice, but it shares many of the issues common at Stack Overflow,

Exactly. You can take Stackoverflow and substitute Quora, or reddit in some cases and get the same exact situations described. It's a people problem. Anything led by a curated community of imaginary points will naturally produce elitist behavior. Heck you have this problem in real life (opposed to virtual life) in Academia, a.k.a the "academic elite," what makes you think it is going to be any different on the internet?

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

#122

Post by Bartweiss »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #47
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…

I don't agree that asking questions is easy, or limited only by quality barriers. That may be true for adhering to the rules, but it's not enough to get accurate answers.

If you have a problem which is at all subtle or complicated, it's frequently necessary to open by saying "I know about X and Y, that's not what I'm asking!" Otherwise, the fastest guns in the west will see the header, skim a few lines, and answer "Just do X!" Or, of course, mark as trivial because "X" is in the documentation.

I've found a lot of these questions when trying to grapple with broken APIs. Someone will go "I want to do this thing, but the method call to do it is broken in these specific ways", and get answered with "Just use the method call in the API, dummy!" Often, it comes with a downvote and they never get another answer.

You can work around this, I succeeded with "This method call is broken in this way, so how do I work around that?" But it's far from obvious, and it means learning to not just write good questions but preempt systematically bad answers.

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

#123

Post by Bartweiss »

qznc wrote: post #56
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…

> It seems every problem you have is already answered in like 2010 And that is often a problem, because in 2016 the answer has changed. ;)

I think this is going to be a steadily-growing problem for SO. I already discount old answers of "Not supported, try this framework" because they're often about features which arrived in a later version. Eventually an awful lot of replies are going to be offering deprecated methods or unnecessary workarounds, and I haven't seen a good plan for maintaining quality as that happens.

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

#124

Post by warbiscuit »

dionidium wrote: post #82
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.).

> 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.

Not to mention "what's the best library" can frequently be answered in an objective fashion, if the answers give a breakdown of why.

Things like "lib A requires excessive boilerplate compared to lib B, see example", or "lib A can't be installed under the following platforms", etc. What should be voted down on those types of questions isn't the question, but poor answers.

It's really frustrating, because getting the opinion of experts who have tried a bunch of alternatives, and know the pros and cons that matter, is exactly why I go to SO frequently.

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

#125

Post by Silhouette »

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 must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.

I don't think you are.

Stack Overflow was an interesting idea, but I find it has a terrible signal/noise ratio today and one of the most unpleasant and unconstructive cultures of any tech discussion site, for basically the same reasons that many other comments here have already given.

The way they chose to co-opt search engines was also a brilliant move by the founders, but has also now become annoying to the point where I'd have the entire SO network removed from my search results pages by default if I could.

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

#126

Post by pc86 »

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…

> I didn't want to make random changes elsewhere just to make the minimum needed to fix it, so I let it be.

Instead of just adding "I fixed a small code bug but SO has a minimum edit length, so here it is" to the end of the answer?

s/newpoint/new point()/g may not be obvious to the next person.

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

#127

Post by ravenstine »

I rarely have the sort of experiences on SO that some seem to have. From my witnessing the kind of frustration friends have had with SO, and from experiencing my own occasional mistakes, I think some people are just poor at stating an actual question, but can describe their problem in detail, which is fine except often just talking about a problem without conveying the direction one is looking to go towards isn't helpful to others. Some people also just get offended really easily. Perhaps it comes from a past of spending time on very Machiavellian BBSes, but my skin is rather thick and I've only once run into a complete jerk on the Stack Exchange system, though not on Stack Overflow.

It's easy to complain about any system, but what do we really have that's better than Stack Exchange? Quora? Yahoo Answers? lol Maybe Experts Exchange, but the userbase hasn't been nearly as large as SE in years. I personally like the fact that SO/SE is so strict because, for all the power of the internet, there is mostly incorrect information on it. I'd much rather some people get dissatisfied with it, and that some of my questions get closed or downvoted easily, than have to wade through a ton of duplicate questions with answers that appear to be written by 12 year olds.

The only thing that I wish SO would implement is mandatory explanations for downvotes. Upvotes help a question get attention so there really isn't a big need for an explanation, but a negative score from a few voters early on can prevent a perfectly valid question from ever being taken seriously. This has happened to me on a couple occasions where I knew that the question was valid and the body properly formatted, but someone just didn't like the question for whatever reason. It's a good thing that a bounty can fix this, but I shouldn't have to spend 100+ of my points just because one or two people didn't like that I was asking a question that supposedly every programmer should know and I'm an idiot for asking it.

I have no clue what people are talking about when it comes to a "signal to noise" ratio; Stack Exchange is one of the least noisy sites I've ever seen.

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

#128

Post by eugenekolo2 »

I don't think you're looking at it from the right angle. SO is a great resource that's amassed a lot of simple questions. My personally favourite use of it is to find boiler plate code, or to get answers to simple questions in languages I'm not an expert in, but unfortunately get forced to use for whatever reason. The same is true for sysadmining tasks. I'm wearing far too many hats to remember how to change hostname on 4 different operating systems - it's far easier to just google and click the SO link than to read manuals every time I have a simple task.

Additionally, your answer regarding:

> On the other hand, even the simplest questions are not closed just because they are simple. One of my favourite examples is the question whether you need a null check before calling an instanceof. My answer is number 2, with a sarcastic comment that this could be tested in an IDE for a minute. And a very good comment points out that it takes less than that to get the answer on Stackoverflow.

Is particularly bad. "Test in an IDE" is not a valid response when the question pertains to a JVM implementation. Your Sun JVM may be different than my Apache JVM, different than JoeShmoe JVM. A better answer might be to refer to lines in the official JVM specification, and note if there's an ambiguity, and that most implementations follow X, but not necessarily...

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

#129

Post by pjc50 »

Silhouette wrote: post #125
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 must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get. I don't think you are. Stack Overflow was an interesting idea, but I find it has a terrible signal/noise ratio today and one of the most unpleasant and unconstructive cultures of any tech discussion site, for basically the same reasons that many other comments here have already given. The way they chose to co-opt search engines was also a brilliant m…

What would you prefer be returned instead? Places like Expertsexchange or Quora?

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

#130

Post by cloudjacker »

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…

It really depends on what language you are asking about. Stackoverflow has subcommunities.

Some niche frameworks have great helpful communities

While the general Javascript community there hates questions that aren't formatted a very particular way

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