[deleted]
Tired of Stack Overflow
101–110 of 517 posts
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#102This 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.
On the tags with less question (<5 per days), it has never happened to me, I even managed to be among the top poster for one of them. And the few times I got corrections from more experienced posters, they were pretty cool about it. But then it's really tag-dependent.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#103Slashdot’s moderation with reasons / meta moderation worked pretty well for me. Despite it coping pretty well with the fully spectrum of posts that site solicited it doesn’t seem to have ever been copied - I’m not sure why.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#104I 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...
The responses are the reason I stopped using the site in 2013. The ego on these schnooks lol
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#105Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#106Stack Overflow have some infamous example of "snarky" answers getting highly upvoted - despite being outright wrong. I wrote a bit about such a case here: https://www.cargocultcode.com/solving-the-zalgo-regex/
In short, the question here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... is complete legitimately and answerable, but nevertheless have dozens of answers ridiculing the question for trying to do something "impossible".
In general I do like SO quite a lot and find it very useful. But this is one example where SO spread wrong and misleading information. But when I wrote a post on meta.stackoverflow to point out this particular problem, it was quickly downvoted to -25 before getting deleted.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#107This 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.
likewise I also don't contribute questions either. I always say its a great place to find answers, terrible divisive place to ask questions.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#108At this stage SO is a reference work. The kind of things it's useful for are things like "what's the syntax for [algo] in [language]". There's specific answers people are looking for, and they stay that way.
It also means everything(tm) is there. It's been ages since I've needed to ask anything at all there. Someone has had the problem before, and gotten the answer.
Individual reputation might not matter much in this context. If the answer to your question has 100 upvotes, why does it matter who they fell to? If someone answers a question, does it matter how many other upvotes they got? Does it make them more authoritative?
You'll find loads of simple answers with loads of upvotes, and deep dives with just a few.
My own account is just as odd. The most upvoted answer by far is a one-liner that says "untick this box". That time I found an actual error in a Swift lib, I spent ages detailing it, and got barely any votes.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
My biggest pain point with that is needing to register to each one. There's many times I've seen questions I'd love to answer, but then realize I'm no longer on stack overflow and I'm on some sys admin stack exchange that I can't comment on unless I sign up, in which case I just close the tab.
It's an extra step, but you don't really need to "sign up", you just activate your main account on that specific site and you're ready to go.
And you can even get a reputation bonus on that specific site, so you already start with some privileges.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#110This 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.
You're thinking about it all wrong. Don't get lost in the gamification. SO is intended to create a repository of useful answers to useful questions. If you provide a useful answer to a question which gets views, people will read your answer. Over time, many people will read your answer - and that is your "return on investment".
(Also, if many people read your answer and approve of it, then eventually you'll get some votes too.)
Having said that - there is some merit to sticking by the (nastily-enforced) standards. It does get people to improve their answers. Not saying that I approve of people's conduct on SO - it can be quite terrible.