My solution is to give enormous bounties. Then the haters stfu I have lots of points to give away though
I think you are on to something here... maybe rep could be purchased for $$$. Then you can literally put your money where your mouth is.
Tired of Stack Overflow
271–280 of 517 posts
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here, I’ve been a reader for 10 years or however long, but their rules were too difficult for me to follow in order to vote. I had to visit every day and do menial, non-useful things just to be able to vote or answer. This didn’t work for me because SO wasn’t something I typically visited every day. So I just couldn’t get into the habit of being enough of a user to browse and vote so it was a vicious cycle of ap…
> their rules were too difficult for me to follow in order to vote. I had to visit every day and do menial, non-useful things just to be able to vote or answer Has it changed a few years ago? When I started 3 years ago, I could answer right from the start and I got the ability to vote quickly enough, after a pair of vote on an answer, without having to do menial tasks every day. Reputation can also be gained with edi…
Answering questions doesn't help unless those answers get upvotes. As a newbie, your answers are less likely to get upvotes, especially if you're slower than the old timers.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that when I search for a question online I very often find a SO question with my exact problem. But it seems like almost EVERY SINGLE TIME, the question has been locked for being unconstructive, off-topic, (wrongly) a duplicate, whatever. Despite having hundreds of upvotes and tens of thousands of views. So this page is at the top of the google search results for the query and it can never be updated with new…
I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers.
Problem is a good number of helpful pages has ben locked.
Removing it would remove thebonly good answer to that question from the Internet.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that when I search for a question online I very often find a SO question with my exact problem. But it seems like almost EVERY SINGLE TIME, the question has been locked for being unconstructive, off-topic, (wrongly) a duplicate, whatever. Despite having hundreds of upvotes and tens of thousands of views. So this page is at the top of the google search results for the query and it can never be updated with new…
I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers.
The problem is that I often land on a locked SO question, and it's actually incredibly helpful, leading me to wonder why it was locked in the first place.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#275I 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…
Make downvotes require a comment. Let other users vote on the reasoning. If it's a BS reason like "Duplicate! Duplicate!" that's wrong, let others erase that vandalism from the site. One of the stupidest things on the internet is when someone comments that it's a duplicate question and then posts something that makes it obvious they read neither the question nor the supposed duplicate. Most downvotes are never explai…
+1. Cowards often downvote perfectly legitimate posts and face no consequences.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#276One thing I can't stand on SO are the people who do everything to write up an answer to a question according to the rules and standards, and want upvotes, while refusing to upvote the question they are answering because "it's not up to standard", basically not good enough.
One thing I can't stand on SO are the people who ask low effort questions, get upvotes and high quality answers, and don't reciprocate. They say "thanks" as a comment and disappear without upvoting or accepting any of the answers.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#277Every year I see a post complaining about how unfriendly Stack Overflow is, how their pet question got downvoted so unfairly, and how Stack Overflow is dying. Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying. But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. And when I can't find an answer anywhere and I ask on SO I usually get a good answer quickly.…
> . Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying. But even Stack Overflow agrees, which is why they keep having projects to improve the site for new users.
and it seems to work somewhat :
Lately I've seen less abuse and I've even seen people corrected when they tried to abuse people who answered questions in good faith or similar.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#278This 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.
I have a small number of answers, and the most successful / least criticized ones were always on niche languages or topics. C/C++/Java? No chance. I corrected a wrong answer on a question in C++ once, which was immediately reverted with “nope, your answer is too different from the original, make a new answer”. Great, so now there’s an answer that is fundamentally wrong with 26 upvotes that apparently can’t be correct…
> I corrected a wrong answer on a question in C++ once, which was immediately reverted with “nope, your answer is too different from the original, make a new answer”.
This is how Stack Overflow is designed to work. One single user is not supposed to be able to edit a top answer and change it into a different answer.
The Stack Overflow Way™ is to post a new answer that tells the correct answer and why the other answer is wrong. Then the community has two separate answers and they can vote on which one is more correct.
Confusing? Yes. Arcane? Yes. Did the system fail in this specific circumstance? Absolutely yes.
But they can't just let people edit highly voted answers into fundamentally different answers. That's why your edit was not approved.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what?" This kind of commentary exposes why SO becomes so hostile. The exact question was: "Is there a way to list all standard Go packages? I have a list of packages and I want to figure out if this is a standard package." From this, it's rather obvious what they're trying to do and why they want…
My favorite are the interrogations. Because surely the poster doesn't really want to list the standard packages; they must be needing something else and getting distracted by listing standard packages so if we press them hard enough they will spill the beans.. /s
I think they should employ a "no stupid questions" policy, like the /r/nostupidquestions subreddit, where the point is to share knowledge without discriminating against anyone.
What happens if the same question gets asked 10,000 times? Absolutely nothing. Search engines will filter them for us. 5 more megabytes of text in SO's database. Pointless gatekeeping.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is my proposal for removing downvotes but people do not like it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252338/downvote-sys...
I found the first answer insightful: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/252340/1862046 Roughly, it seems downvotes are used by people to indicate not enough effort has gone into the question (easily researched, duplicate question, confusing/poor english, etc). So either all unflagged questions is valid and should be nurtured into clear, well-written queries or pointed to existing questions, or questions are to be judge…
Yes, the truly lazy questions clutter up the site and I guess we need a way to cull them.
But on the other hand, I resent having to couch every question with 5x the verbiage as a disclaimer to chronicle every little thing I did to investigate the problem before asking the question.
I also enjoy being whined at by moderators if you call out someone who's being a dick. Don't bitch at the person doing YOUR job; bitch at the person who made it necessary.