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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

#151

Post by coryfklein »

corobo wrote: post #50
Chathamization wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> This is a place where technical questions are asked and answered

I think this is a great reflection of one of the largest problems that Stack Overflow has to solve, and that is user education. The definition of what is on topic for Stack Overflow is much more specific than just being "technical", but most users don't even know that.

This results in many new questions being closed. The community is constantly trying to reword these "closed" messages to be as friendly and helpful as possible, but to the newcomer it just feels like rejection.

In many ways, Stack Overflow has solved all it's "technology" problems, and now is left with a lot of psychology and communication problems. The site could definitely use a professional communications specialist.

(FWIW, for those curious, "on topic" is defined here: http://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic)

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

#152

Post by coryfklein »

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 suspect that the part that you are "missing" has to do with the following belief:

> answers supplied by random internet people and "graded" by other, less-knowledgeable random internet people

You've inherently discounted the quality of content on the site, so it's no wonder you find nothing valuable there. The fact is that "crowd sourcing" actually can work, and "random internet people" are able to curate and raise visibility of quality content.

I think Stack Overflow is one of the best examples of this. Despite being inundated with terrible content, the system is able to consistently identify quality and float it to the top while mostly keeping the trash out of sight.

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

#153

Post by brudgers »

I believe one of the features of StackOverflow's design is that people quit the site when they become burned out answering repetitive/uninteresting/homework/etc questions. Because the alternative is that they hang around the site and entertain themselves by treating people badly...despite the design, I believe that the way in which 'homework' questions are used as an excuse for unhelpful behavior illustrates the general problem that concerned Spolsky [1] when designing the site.

[1] and perhaps Atwood to a lesser degree based on their difference of opinion regarding 'how do I move the turtle in Logo'. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...

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

#154

Post by Gracana »

Bartweiss wrote: post #92
Gracana wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same feeling. The official docs, experts' websites, code from relevant projects, and books are always better than getting a quick answer from SO. Sometimes when I've exhausted my available resources (often the case is that I don't have the necessary book), I'll click on an SO link... only to find that the question is closed because it's not a bite-sized chunk that fits the SO format.

I think this depends a lot on how good the "official" docs are. For some topics (like a depressing amount of Android stuff), the official resources are unclear, out of date, or fundamentally wrong. If the official API is just a list of functions and parameters, Stack Overflow is a great place to find out about hidden side effects and other issues. For me, Stack Overflow helps to bridge the gap between crummy official…

I was thinking about that when I wrote my comment, but decided to only include my own experiences. I think you're right / what you say makes sense, though. Particularly for popular and fast moving projects (like everything web related), a lot of people are going to run into the same problems, and either the documentation is poor/doesn't exist, or they don't have the time to learn X the hard way.

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

#155

Post by coryfklein »

forgottenpass wrote: post #119
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. You have bit of experience, Stack Overflow's usefulness applies mostly for novices. See the people who said they learned to program with SO in this thread, or otherwise find the material there useful. They're the target userbase, not you. I suspect the audience is not limited on purpose. The work required to answer questions, and incentive system see…

> Stack Overflow's usefulness applies mostly for novices

I can understand this belief in that the most prominent content on the site is that which gets the most upvotes, and by statistical necessity the number of novices voting must be greater than the number of experts voting.

But when you get into the niche topics or tags, that's when the expertise really comes through. Try browsing the [scala] or [haskell] tags, they may not have a giant community, but the general level of both questions and answers hardly fits your generalization of "novice".

If we were just talking about the "hot questions" of the month (http://stackoverflow.com/?tab=month) I could understand why it would seem the site is mostly useful for novices, but there is definitely a place for expertise in the community as well.

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

#156

Post by Shog9 »

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…

The big problem with programmers.se is that the scope is woefully misunderstood. It started out as that "opinions" site everyone thinks would be such a great idea, and within days it became apparent that the same folks who like discussion questions in theory have their own hangups and prejudices in practice, and the whole thing was turning into a never-ending flame-war.

So by the time it was named "Programmers", the decision was already made to refocus the site on something a bit more useful: a site not about programming but rather dedicated to sharing information relevant to the profession of software development. However, actually communicating that effectively turned out to be a headache and a half.

6 years later, we're looking at just renaming the site again so as to avoid this endlessly painful confusion: http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/8204/wha...

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

#157

Post by initram »

corobo wrote: post #113
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 stopping them setting up an opinions.stackoverflow then if they've already got sibling sites? Somewhere to contain all of the opinion-based questions.

They do have some. For example the Software Recommendations Stack Exchange:

http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com

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

#158

Post by corobo »

coryfklein wrote: post #140
corobo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 befor…

> 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. This is a great idea. Have you considered discussing it on the Meta site? The solution would definitely have to be more nuanced - sometimes "closed" questions have useful answers on them so you wouldn't want to remove those from Google. But removing "closed"…

Well that's the other side of the problematic coin. The majority of my experience with SO is closed questions.

I generally consider myself a dumbass and not smart enough to figure out the rules to avoid getting topics closed, so I stick to reddit and HN (and it took years of lurking here before I started posting too!)

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

#159

Post by mr_pink »

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…

Yes, sir, you're definitely part of the problem. No other way to put it :)

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

#160

Post by initram »

wpietri wrote: post #83
bendbro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ques…

>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."

What a bizarre interpretation. When someone says, "It works for me," they're saying "I tried your example because I want to help, but was unable to reproduce your problem. Maybe there's some information you didn't provide that can explain the difference between what I'm seeing and what you're seeing? Please add more information so I can understand what's different and help you."

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