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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

#181

Post by Shog9 »

Silhouette wrote: post #170
Shog9 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has pretty much always been true in my experience; if you're really determined to learn something in depth , you gotta go past page 1 of the search results and look for the folks who've spent years writing about some obscure topic and only get links from other people who are similarly dedicated. And then hope their blog doesn't disappear from the 'Net before you finish digesting or need to refer back to that inf…

It's always been true to some extent, but I think it's SO that changed relatively recently, not the rest of the web. In the earlier days of SO, it used to be that a search engine might return an SO link or two but they had a decent chance of being relevant. At that time, SO was smaller, the questions being asked were more common and general, and thus the answers were mostly correct and widely applicable. Today, unfor…

Funny you mentioned "keyword stuffing"... Came across a related sub-thread on reddit earlier today [1], where a bunch of folks were trash-talking one of the top answerers in the [java] tags for his efforts in marking duplicates and removing irrelevant tags.

There is an insane amount of hostility directed toward anyone trying to minimize the noise Stack Overflow generates, I'm afraid. Folks feel entitled to spam the whole site - indeed, the whole Internet - with their questions, and take umbrage at anyone who might stand in their way.

So a lot of folks are left feeling that their choice is between trying to help and getting blasted with vitriol, or just walking away and letting entropy win. I find it hard to blame those who opt for the latter route.

We do try to combat this to a degree by deleting unanswered or poorly-received questions after some nominal period of time; of course, given search engines' fascination with boosting the rank of recent content, this can only help so much - there are several thousand new questions a day in the most popular (and thus crowded) tags, where you can imagine the inherent motivation on the part of each author is to optimize for views rather than specificity or clarity.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/54f62f/the_dec...

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

#182

Post by sanderjd »

coryfklein wrote: post #178
sanderjd wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see the SO community's answers to "How do you write a game?".

I think this is an interesting and common response to the policies. As if the "Too Broad" close policy is the only thing stopping volunteer contributors from writing a 10 page thesis "How To Write A Video Game" for every questioner that asks for it.

Isn't this alleviated somewhat by marking duplicates? If nobody ever writes any good answers on the original question, oh well! It's just annoying when nobody can write a good answer to a broad question.

But hey, it's their site, and I'm just some rando on the internet - they get to make whatever policies they want.

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

#183

Post by sanderjd »

coryfklein wrote: post #177
sanderjd wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be true that most users don't know how narrowly the topic is defined, but it's also true that many users do know, and simply think it is defined far too narrowly. Sometimes, if you just can't seem to communicate some policy concept to your target audience, it's a problem with the policy, not the communication.

> Sometimes, if you just can't seem to communicate some policy concept to your target audience, it's a problem with the policy, not the communication. I agree 100%. If you were to claim that the "on topic" policy for Stack Overflow is too narrow, I would respectfully disagree.

Yep, I think it's too narrow. I'm more than happy to agree to disagree! I'm curious though, since you're certain this is the correct policy, why do you think it has been so hard to communicate?

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

#184

Post by kzisme »

r00fus wrote: post #180
kzisme wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of what exactly? The last question I answered got deleted by moderators.

Specifically this: > ... 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.

Ah the other user wrote that, but I think what he was getting at was...

It's fairly hard to dispute an incorrect answer with a low amount of reputation. I think?

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

#185

Post by dx034 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #32
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…

"But all my attempts to ask questions were unsuccessful." Sure. But all the times you had questions that were answered on stackoverflow even before you asked them on Google, you were successful. And by answering your own questions on SO you're helping out the next guy. Post your question hoping you'll get an answer, but recognizing that you probably won't, and that you'll probably come back 24 hours later and post an…

Yes, answering questions is great, I totally agree with that. But I would love if SO could allow more open questions as well. I'm not a huge fan of Reddit, but it seems the only place where I can ask those questions (plus some IRC channels perhaps).

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

#186

Post by dx034 »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #42
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?

Unfortunately not, I deleted them after they were continuing to accumulate negative points.

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

#187

Post by dx034 »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #28
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…

Go is the first language I learned from the docs alone and from reddit. Never once did I go to SO. I even wrote an introductory book on it, and wrote one or two answers for Go questions. never had to refer SO. doesn't imply that I think SO is declining.

Go just has an amazing documentation. Especially the fact that it links directly to the source code helps a lot. IMO way better than what Java or C# offer as an official documentation (just to name the two where I struggled the most).

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

#188

Post by thewhitetulip »

dx034 wrote: post #187
thewhitetulip wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go is the first language I learned from the docs alone and from reddit. Never once did I go to SO. I even wrote an introductory book on it, and wrote one or two answers for Go questions. never had to refer SO. doesn't imply that I think SO is declining.

Go just has an amazing documentation. Especially the fact that it links directly to the source code helps a lot. IMO way better than what Java or C# offer as an official documentation (just to name the two where I struggled the most).

True that.

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

#189

Post by scraft »

I have 851 reputation (top 39% of all users), I have answered 15 questions, about 50% haven't received any points, a few have received a minimal amount, and two or three have received a bunch of points.

My answers are generally to quite niche topics, I have never gone out of my way to answer questions, I typically post an answer when I have invested a good chunk of time to find the solution to something and then see a question about the same issue. I sometimes see questions I could answer (or improve existing answers), but do not provide an answer as I find it hard to justify the time, I feel that if I wanted to rack up points on stackoverflow it wouldn't be that hard to post several answers a day.

My reputation has gone up pretty much steadily, for the last three years, with an average of about 3 or 4 posts per year. I am a pretty light user, and being in the top 39%, if anything, surprises me as I could easily imagine being in the top 80%.

I find stackoverflow very useful, I work in games development which is quite a broad subject, in an ideal world I'd have very in depth knowledge about hundreds of topics, but in reality stackoverflow allows me to get quick answers to a huge amount of questions/problems, which in turn gives me more time to devote on area which I feel are most important. I haven't noticed stackoverflow going down hill in the time I have used it.

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

#190

Post by Bartweiss »

r00fus wrote: post #166
Bartweiss wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Huh. Maybe the site has changed in the past 5 years, but when I started - I gave answers on stuff I knew (basic JS, advanced SQL) and asked questions about stuff I didn't know (Obj-C, advanced JS/jQuery, Ruby).

This is still viable, but it's gotten a bit trickier because "closed as duplicate" has slowly become a more common outcome. So it's possible to have the stuff you know well be largely covered, and you lose gained karma if the post with your answer gets deleted.
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