301–304 of 304 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I don't have enough 'reputation' to be allowed to answer questions You don't need reputation to ask or answer questions, so this is FUD.
Well, it was when I tried to do it and I haven't gone back to check if it changed. Busy, remember? So probably mistaken, but hardly FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).
People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…
>help vampires What is that?
It's a sliding scale. Most people just don't know how to ask a good question initially, but some just don't care. In general, I'd say the 'help vampire' problem is where the asker is looking for the answerer's time, not their help. They want someone to do free work for them, without putting in effort themselves.
I believe this is the origin: http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/
People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…
Some advice from me to ease your experience on SO: 1. Earn some reputation first in order to see how stuff works from the other side. When you join a new company, you don't come the first day and tell everyone how they're doing it wrong before learning about the project, about the tradeoffs etc. Same here. Having rep above certain threshold gives you additional privileges (commenting, editing etc.). Also, when you ha…
In general, you make reasonable points - although it's clear SO could improve here. The new asker experience obviously has problems. Not worth sacrificing question quality to improve on, but I have no doubt there will be ways to help without doing so. (And they seem to be working on it).
One interesting issue with the duplicate answers is that if you notice later a typo in your answer and edit it you get pushed to the bottom of the answer stack, despite having the first answer. This seems like an issue SO could solve to help contributors. I doubt many abuse the system to completely rewrite an answer and stay on top.
In what ordering do you see this feature? Votes, active, or newest. Answers that have the same score are randomly ordered when sorting by votes.