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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#41

Post by Avamander »

slig wrote: post #25
abacadaba wrote: post #9

Anecdotal: Searching github issues has long since surpassed the usefulness of stackoverflow for me. Possibly the types of questions I need answered has changed, but I think it's more that everything on stackoverflow is out of date or off topic. Or the people who could answer are also the people who are too busy and/or don't care enough to play the karma game.

This has been my experience recently as well, specially with fast-moving JS frameworks and libraries.

Yep, the time dimension is seriously overlooked by people flagging questions closed. IMO the duplicate close reason shouldn't accept questions older than a year.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#42

Post by wernercd »

philliphaydon wrote: post #20
mytailorisrich wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a feature. The person who answered is specifically indicated with their reputation to help sort among answers. It's like if you have a health-related question and get answers from two people: A trained surgeon and your mate from the pub (Edit: who's obviously not trained or knowledgeable on the topic, jeez). A priori whose answer is the more insightful? If you're not knowledgeable and get a number of anonymou…

If you’re using a public forum for health questions then you have bigger problems to worry about. But put it this way. Trained surgeon A who has 5 years experience and has been on the site for 3 years has 4000 reputation. Answers a question. A trained surgeon with 26 years experience who joined the site last week and has a reputation of 200 supplies a far better answer with added explanation of why and how etc. You l…

> If you're using a public form

If you don't understand how comparisons work, you have a bigger problem to worry about.

> put it this way

The question then becomes... the 26 year veteran surgeon does boob jobs and tummy tucks. The 5 year veteran does emergency room and brain surgery.

Given how complicated something as simple as "surgery" is... how do you plan on registering and ranking something with multiple levels of "experience" for "easy" viewing by users who want to ask questions?

New to site, surgeon, decades of experience, plastic surgery

Been on site, surgeon, years of experience, "real" surgeon

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#43

Post by phonebanshee »

philliphaydon wrote: post #4

One thing that always bothered me about SO was that it shows who answered and their score. It should display answers without the user until an answer is accepted. There’s been many cases where a high score user answers, gets a lot of upvotes cos people are like “oh his score is 30k so he must be right” yet the answer is not good or incorrect. And there is a better more correct answer by someone with a Low score who g…

Marked as answered is a fundamentally horrible idea and that feature should be removed. The problem is that the person asking the question isn't capable of determining a correct answer. Far, far to often they pick something that appears to solve their problem but actually is a terrible idea.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#44

Post by Avamander »

spapas82 wrote: post #38

I was a heavy SO user before some years however I have stopped posting questions nowadays (mainly because of the reasons presented in the article) and I find answering too time consuming. What I've found really helpful when I need to learn a new language / paradigm is to use IRC (freenode). I more or less learned Kotlin and Elixir just by reading some online articles and asking things on the corresponding IRC channel…

> What I've found really helpful when I need to learn a new language / paradigm is to use IRC (freenode).

Absolutely, for example my experience with PostgreSQL people there has been amazing.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#45

Post by vasili111 »

el_cujo wrote: post #16

I really think it's better to just have an up vote arrow and no down vote option, for questions at least. The only reason on a site like that to really vote something down should be if something is off topic or against the rules, in which case you have a report button. If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasona…

Here is my proposal for removing downvotes but people do not like it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252338/downvote-sys...

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#46

Post by commandersaki »

Minus blog post I came to a similar conclusion; asking on StackOverflow is a waste of time. I asked a question about how to do X - which turned out wasn't possible or I misunderstood how the system worked, and rather get an answer, I was told to reformulate the question or have it closed. Then eventually I was told in the comments of the question that this question doesn't make much sense. It was still a valid question, deserved a simple response, at least to add to the knowledge base.

Whatever, SO is a waste of time.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#47

Post by enriquto »

andrewl wrote: post #23
sowbug wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Creative Commons license disagrees with your characterization. Plus Jeff founded Stack Overflow, so it's odd to single him out if republishing works legally is stealing.

Exactly. Atwood's post says "Unfortunately, we don't have a good designated place for deleted "too fun" questions to live, but all Stack Exchange content is licensed under Creative Commons in perpetuity . Which means, with proper attribution, we can give it a permanent home on our own blogs. And he does link each term to the StackOverflow user who posted it.

> all Stack Exchange content is licensed under Creative Commons in perpetuity. Which means, with proper attribution, we can give it a permanent home on our own blogs.

But can we, in practice? Where can I find all the answers to that question, including the comments?

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#48

Post by human20190310 »

jnovek wrote: post #21

This culture is why I've never contributed to Stack Overflow. I'm a reasonably senior engineer, I've been lucky to experience an extraordinary breadth of technology in my career, and I love helping people learn to program... but I just don't have the time or emotional energy for SO's top posters to pick apart the minutia of every word I say in an answer. The ROI for me is nil.

At this point I just ask a question, get an answer, and if I don't like the commentary, I just delete it. I post there under my real name, which means I either have to address or accept dumb/nit-picking criticism, which is a no-win situation.

If the person who answers actually needs the points, I'll give that some consideration, but it seems like a lot of the time the solution is offered in the comments anyway. I don't know why that is.

Every once in a while I'll swoop in on a basic question and try to answer it before anyone else notices.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#49

Post by jon889 »

Stack Overflow started going downhill when they stopped allowing "fun" questions. used to be that I'd go there, ask a question and browse through the questions, seeing which I could answer and also fun ones I could just read for interest and pick up sometimes useful sometimes not bits of information which would lead to other topics and so on. Since then it's just a constant stream of "noob" questions with basically no answers. There's nothing wrong with "noob" questions, the questions I've asked on there are pretty much all "noob" questions as I was first learning about programming. The problem is only having those types of questions and nothing to attract people capable of answering to the site.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#50

Post by rgovostes »

Now that I have a few hundred reputation points the site is much more usable, but the privilege system drove me crazy for a while. If you are an expert in something, you cannot even comment (50 pts) to explain why an answer is wrong. And there are editing minimums so fixing bugs in broken code can be tedious sometimes.
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