Most people's questions about programming problems are going to be somewhere in the middle of the distribution. As time goes on and all the most common questions have been asked, the site is going become increasingly long tail - the dominion of obscurists - and any social/reputational component which it may have once had is going to be reduced.
Stack Overflow Fatigue
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue
#32Disclaimer: This is no flame, and this is no whining. This is my personal experience with stackoverflow, which may entirely depend on me doing complicated akward things.
My experience with stackoverflow boil down to these two situations:
I ask a question, write my little heart out to provide context, to provide things I have tried already and to state my problem, because I don't have trivial little coding problems I can solve with google (yes, that was arrogant, I am aware of this.). After I have posted such a question, I usually get like 3-4 1 line answers and then the question goes dead, because apparently, the answer to such a question is more complicated.
On the other hand, if I answer a question, I usually look and poke around a bit in order to provide a good, complete answer to an interesting question. Once I have posted such a question after like 10 minutes, there are like 3-4 one-line-answers posted already, upvoted already and my answer (which usually is more accurate and all) is just ignored and stays somewhere in the middle.
Joining these two experiences together, I have moved on to use groups and certain IRC-channels, as these are more helpful for nontrivial questions.
Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue
#33I worked for a for-pay Q&A site a little while back. They had all the incentives of SO and more. For example if you answered half-a-dozen questions a month, you got free access. The reward system. The asker declared how much the question was worth and awarded the points to one or more answerers. Awards could be adjusted by moderators so a better answer could be awarded the points. There were a large number of categor…
So why don't you do it any more?
Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue
#34I quit StackOverFlow once they devalued asking questions. No one on the site seemed to understand that incentivizing people to ask great questions was the most important thing. The site could have been a great starting point for learning esoteric topics like Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, Grails, Scala, Lift, Go, Emacs Lisp, etc. Basically, in general, you need one good question with 2 or 3 good answers [yes, some types are…
I still post questions on SO, but only because there simply isn't any other place to get answers to some questions I have. It wouldn't have annoyed me so much except there seemed to be so little complaint when this change was made.
Perhaps if there were a competitor that had as much interaction, I wouldn't post there.
Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue
#35My SO pet peeve was authors who answer nearly all questions in their field with "I discuss this in Chapter 5 of Volume 4 of my Everything You Need to Know About Everything series. In stores now."
And of course the flip side of that point is a lot of people's questions ARE already answered somewhere, often in books, if somebody just cared to get off their a-- and go look for it, spend time reading and investing in their own education. I've seen thousands of questions asked on the Internet where the asker could have answered it themselves by putting in a little more common sense effort, upfront.
The RTFM phenomenon.
Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue
#36My SO pet peeve was authors who answer nearly all questions in their field with "I discuss this in Chapter 5 of Volume 4 of my Everything You Need to Know About Everything series. In stores now."
I've also noticed there's this phenomenon I'll call Reverse India Off-Shoring:
1. western companies hire Indian engineers off-shore because they're cheaper and yet equivalent, supposedly
2. online forums flooded with barely readable questions by folks with Indian names where the thing being asked about is so simple and basic that it basically amounts to "would someone please do my job for me? k thx." How do I print a string. How do I write data to disk. How do I install Apache. Etc. That level of question.
I've seen that 100's of times in the last few years. It's alternatingly both funny and infuriating.
Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue
#37Disclaimer: This is no flame, and this is no whining. This is my personal experience with stackoverflow, which may entirely depend on me doing complicated akward things. My experience with stackoverflow boil down to these two situations: I ask a question, write my little heart out to provide context, to provide things I have tried already and to state my problem, because I don't have trivial little coding problems I…
I agree entirely - I've had exactly the same experiences. I think both of them boil down to the site suffering from it's own success.
This seems to be fundamentally because once one reasonably correct answer picks up an upvote or two, it often snowballs into picking up many more because future visitors won't add other answers of their own and just upvote that. This leads to there being a significant reward for getting your answer in first - more so than for it to be complete (or, in some cases, correct) - so users aim to answer as fast as possible. As their user base has grown, that time threshold has gone down, and the quality of many of the answers follows it.
I don't know what the answer to that is though - maybe there's not one.
Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue
#38I'd like to be answering questions there to provide a service, but I'd also like to receive recognition for it. But it seems like that's no longer possible, at least not at a level of tradeoff that's acceptable to me. For one thing, I always try to provide a tested answer, but doing so means that someone frequently jumps in front of me, scoring the reputation. In many of these cases I can see that the answer provided…
I agree, because this kind of thing is very common. I'd have taken it a step further: if you provide an answer to a question, you shouldn't be allowed to downvote other answers to the same question. And if you downvote an answer to a question, you're not allowed to post an answer to that question. So get rid of conflicts of interest, and always allow people to upvote other answers, whether they've provided an answer…
I disagree; I've done that before when I've answered a question, because I felt another answer had appeared which was incorrect or misleading.
For example, I answered one question about some kind of 2d sorting issue - another answer popped up which was both incomplete (it only dealt with the 1d case, which was trivial) and incorrect (it claimed to run in linear time, but was blatantly using a nlogn sort). I felt that a downvote was the right thing to do - but that does rely on the honesty of the users, and it sounds like that's often lacking.
Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue
#39I quit StackOverFlow once they devalued asking questions. No one on the site seemed to understand that incentivizing people to ask great questions was the most important thing. The site could have been a great starting point for learning esoteric topics like Haskell, Scheme, Lisp, Grails, Scala, Lift, Go, Emacs Lisp, etc. Basically, in general, you need one good question with 2 or 3 good answers [yes, some types are…
Are you using the site for reputation or to spread knowledge? If its the former then you're welcome to leave, if its the latter then why do you care about reputation?
Do you have a job for money or to feel satisfied and useful? If it's the former, then you can't complain about being made to do menial work or how you're treated. If it's the latter, then you can't complain about being underpaid. Because, yeah, life is full of false dichotomies like yours ;-)
Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue
#40I have become a little discouraged at how stale some of the posts have become. I have run into Google searches that give me results where the accepted answer is now wrong. Sometimes the posts have devolved into multiple new answers that are correct but have very few upvotes. In some cases the newer answers are rants on how the original answer is wrong. I do think there is still room for SO to grow with newer technolo…
I don't think a purge would get to the root of the problem, which is an incentive system that rewards adding early answers, rather than editing existing answers. One of Joel's stated goals in the early days was that the answers would converge, Wikipedia-like, toward some Platonic ideal-- but the system in place doesn't encourage that.
Neither does Wikipedia, but at least Wikipedia doesn't have "cold" articles.