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I then asked for the feature on meta.stackoverflow.com, and folks there perceived I was being elitist and downvoted me to oblivion. So I left.
My personal frustration with the site is that their engagement model was a little too game-like. While reputation and badges might be a good metric for the quality of the contribution, the actual implementation ended up reinforcing a base of easy homework questions, and people racing for the simplest answers.
I found that when asking descriptive questions, that I would quickly get several one-line answers that pretty much guessed at the answer based on the title. Even the nuanced answers tended to have answers and explanations that either ignored the problem or suggested things already asked in the question.
Sticking with the question, I can either comment on an answer, or edit my own question to address it, or I could comment a response to the comment. Working this way, I have managed to at least get good leads a few times, but the really difficult questions ended up being things I had to solve myself.
Lately, though, I find that it pops up in my preliminary googling of a problem early on, and at least provides better references than generic forums or experts-exchange.
If they could find a way to make reputation and badges reinforce the _quality_ of the answer, instead of the _response time_ of the answer, and encourage difficult questions rather than the proliferation of basic questions, and the attitude that answering the most of them the fastest made you some kind of "elite" programmer, then I think it could be very powerful.
That being said, when I am tracking down an obscure error or specific exception, I usually find it on the libraries forum, or a forum with a narrower focus, but they definitely like the UI polish of SO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The fact that points on SO actually unlock admin and moderation features on the site gives them real value. I don't care at all about my Reddit karma, but if it meant I could eventually retitle misleading posts I would.
Bottom line, I think, is that forcing people to discuss (not just summarily up or downvote) is really important to getting meaningful content. It's fairly easy to see when someone is talking out of their ass, but it's much harder to get a read on how intelligent an anonymous (or even attributed) vote is.
My 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…
3. Person with onshore job answers the question instead of doing work.
4. That person is deemed useless, and his job is offshored.
The cycle repeats.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Disclaimer: 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 gettin…
I have a similar problem in that I ask questions that are generally "harder" and don't often have a perfectly black and white answer, but I'll get a few "little effort" answers and then they go dead, and I am left with a poor answer acceptance ratio. If I ever eventually figure out a question, I always go back and answer it myself, so really I'm trying to do the right thing as I am a big believer in the site, but I think it misses subtleties like this. It's not particularly easy, but I think they could improve things to stop gaming of the system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Wait, you didn't finish. 3. Person with onshore job answers the question instead of doing work. 4. That person is deemed useless, and his job is offshored. The cycle repeats.
5. CEO: profit! (on paper)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There's definitely a problem here and something needs to be done, but that's not the solution.
I wonder if something like displaying answers on newly asked questions, but locking voting for minutes (where x=???), and total_answers wouldn't stop the answer sniping in its tracks and give people willing to put the proper amount of work into writing an answer an equal footing.
SO has proven that the community for some reason is more than willing to spend vast amounts of energy helping others in exchange for "karma", but from what I'm reading lately, they are somewhat in danger of letting the golden goose die (or, a lot of the golden gooses). It'll still be a great site, but it could be a lot better if they tightened some of these problems up. I think they might be focusing on other things now though.
Disclaimer: 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…
Smaller support communities (IRC, groups) seemed to be the best niche for getting questions answered, and it doesn't appear StackOverflow is seeing that.
The problem with StackOverflow is that it doesn't allow discussions, and as long as that will be the case I only see it working for general, domain-agnostic questions. If you have questions about the dark corners of C++/C#/Java, or how to best apply a design pattern, then chances are SO has something for you. As we level up as developers we gravitate relatively quickly towards specific domains. And a community of dom…
Totally agree, but this kind of interaction is explicitly what the SO team seems to be against, and for just SO itself, I agree. A legitimate justification for this is that people get into discussions which takes time away from input into the Q&A aspect of the site.
However, as you said, some problems or topics require a discussion, not singular statements upvoted or downvoted. I think SO can do just fine without discussions, but the stackexchange platform will be sorely lacking if they don't support a discussion "mode", but from what Jeff Atwood has said, at least as I interpret it, he seems to see no need for this mode at all, and thinks the stackexchange engine should eventually replace all phpBB boards out there. To me, this is insane, but this is how I interpret what he says, unless I've missed something.