Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

blog.codinghorror.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 216 posts

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#81

Post by gaius »

crispyambulance wrote: post #37
torstenvl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a good observation, but I still don't think it completely explains the hostility on SO, which quite often seems like an even more hostile and juvenile version of certain Linux distro mailing lists. It honestly seems like most of SO is people screaming "RTFM n00b!" and downvoting questions into oblivion.

Yeah, it's a big turn-off. I think the game-ification of SO (in the form of badges, scores, privileges and rules) attracts personalities who crave that shit and don't see any problem with being harsh and dismissive to others that don't follow the rules (as they see them). Regardless of how much SO may say that it's about "the community" rather than the individual, it BECOMES personal when an individual has a genuine…

that don't follow the rules (as they see them

The rules are exactly what is gamified via the points and badges system. You can’t fault anyone for responding to the incentives they are given, when explicitly set out by the site owners via that system.

The personalities attracted by it are the ones that made it successful, by design. Otherwise it would be just another Yahoo Answers. The “rules” only changed after those contributors had made it a success. Some of those people apparently feel it was a “bait and switch”.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#83

Post by tobr »

rc_kas wrote: post #73
manigandham wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remove the entire concept of "accepted" answers and let votes decay or be withdrawn, along with scoring the rankings using time as an additional input. Quora has recently introduced secondary voting mechanisms where answers will randomly have a "is it still relevant" toggle for users to continue providing signal beyond the initial vote.

I think its harder than that. Some anwers are just timeless. Others should decay.

If they’re timeless they should continue to get votes, no? Even if everyone stops voting in a thread all the votes would decay at the same rate, so the timeless answer would stay at top.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#84

Post by crdoconnor »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #26

One challenge not discussed here is when an accepted and highly voted answer _used_ to be a good answer, but no longer is in later versions of whatever software/platform/library is discussed. This is also something that gets worse over time, like the uniqueness problem. I think it's worse than the uniqueness problem, multiple duplicate _good_ questions/answers don't actually harm, misguide, or delay anyone looking fo…

lol I find it amusing that the highest and lowest ranked comments on this page made the exact same point.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#85

Post by Someone1234 »

skohan wrote: post #46

I feel like Stack Overflow has gotten less useful to me as a programmer over the years, and these days I more often find the answers I need on a forum geared toward whatever technology I have a question about. I have a hard time telling whether this reflects a change in developer culture online over the years, or a change in the types of questions I tend to ask as I have become a more experienced programmer.

The way SO is moderated encourages out of date information.

For example, if you find a question from 2015, with all out of date answers, if you ask it again today it will be flagged as duplicate with a link to the 2015 answers and no further discussion is allowed. The older SO gets the worse the content gets.

They're trying to make a "Wiki site" but in a Q&A format, it doesn't work and doesn't make sense. Until they realize that their moderation policies are going to keep driving away questions that would warrant modern/fresh answers.

For example try searching SO but set your Google to only show content from the last 12 months, the results are simply low quality with half mod-dead. Most of the good content is from two years ago or more, back before the site switched from Q&A to "confused Wiki-site."

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#86

Post by beached_whale »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #26

One challenge not discussed here is when an accepted and highly voted answer _used_ to be a good answer, but no longer is in later versions of whatever software/platform/library is discussed. This is also something that gets worse over time, like the uniqueness problem. I think it's worse than the uniqueness problem, multiple duplicate _good_ questions/answers don't actually harm, misguide, or delay anyone looking fo…

There is a long tail to tech use and the answers often are the best for that particular set of variables. I think that adding tags to make it more specific in this regard as time passes can really help. If it stops being relevant when library X reached version Y, add a tag that says pre-version Y

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#87

Post by dasil003 »

gonational wrote: post #55
Flimm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you are giving Stack Overflow's leaders enough credit. There were many Q&A sites before it, but Stack Overflow was much better for the lurkers, and all of that content is licensed under Creative Commons, similar to Wikipedia. Also, Jeff is not trying to take credit for the users' hard work, I'm a contributor and I don't feel that way, especially after reading this part: > I am honored and humbled by the…

Stack overflow was instrumental in my early programming career, because without it I would have had to read entire volumes of information to solve simple problems in some cases. The issue that I have is the attempt to pretend to have guided the course more than was the case. SO was a Q&A with a tremendous UX, and the users used it to help each other. That’s it. Even this nonsense of “gamification” is just ego-driven…

> The only thing even remotely game like about SO is that each question can have just one selected “corrct” answer

Are you kidding me? Have you never seen the wall of badges?

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#88

Post by gonational »

forrest92 wrote: post #80

> Stack Overflow is a wiki first This is such an out of touch statement it's hilarious. Stackoverflow is a wiki in the same way my dog is a heater.

Literally fell out of my my chair and out the office window; had to be rescued.

+1 thank you for this comment.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#89

Post by tobr »

Someone1234 wrote: post #77
irrational wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I have really started noticing this exact problem. Every answer (usually from closer to 2010) I have looked at is recommending using jQuery, even though there are perfectly fine ways of doing it without jQuery in 2018. I've taken to looking the dates of answers and ignoring any that date from more than 2-3 years in the past.

If you still support IE11 very little has changed in the last 2-3 years. JQuery is still king. Companies that support large enterprise or government absolutely require IE11 support, since these places are required to use it due to exclusive e.g. Java Applets/Flash/ActiveX, etc. Microsoft's decision to drop those technologies from Edge was kind a mixed bag. From a security perspective it was the right decision. But it…

I find that IE11 is surprisingly polyfillable. The biggest issue has been flexbox, since CSS can’t exactly be polyfilled.

Re: What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

#90

Post by caymanjim »

EGreg wrote: post #79
gonational wrote: post #20

I’m gonna catch some flak for this... Listening to Jeff try to describe what stack overflow is and the “fundamental misunderstanding” by all of us millions of unwashed masses is amazing. It’s also a bit like listening to a muskox describe why it decided to grow long hair after so much time in the snow; IOW, a complete and total lack of understanding of emergence and a rewriting of history at the behest of Jeff’s enor…

Before StackOverflow, this was Q&A for programmers: https://xkcd.com/979/

Whenever that happens to me, it turns out that I'm the one who had the same question ten years earlier, and I still don't know the solution.
Post reply on HN