What kind of replacement, Stack Overflow has? I never saw something similar, more curated that would please these people...
Tired of Stack Overflow
301–310 of 517 posts
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
Problem is a good number of helpful pages has ben locked. Removing it would remove thebonly good answer to that question from the Internet.
Which is the OP's point, that they shouldn't be locked.
Here is what OP wrote :
> 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.
Something completely different in my opinion.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#303I get that people can take being downvoted personally. (I sometimes do.) And sure, downvoting something that already has -10 points is mean and doesn't serve anything. But being so protective of others in this regard, trying to protect them from receiving negative evaluations from people (random people from the internet you don't care about, no less!) is too much.
I think that thick skin is something to be cultivated. Sure the other guy is mean, but if you feel so bad about it, then you should work on where your self-worth comes from. I'm not saying it's easy. From personal experience, I would say that it may very well be the case that you spend too much time focused on just this one thing (let's say computers) and so lack distance. Perhaps something else. Find out. Work on it.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is the OP's point, that they shouldn't be locked.
Yep. If it's locked then it shouldn't be useful. If it's locked and useful then there is a problem.
This is the thing we are pointing out:
Again and again we found that Stack Overflow would try to get rid of some of the most helpful ages I had found.
For a while, more often than not it seemed, if you found a helpful answer it was locked or somehow on its way to destruction.
I don't see this as often anymore but I also don't see that many good results in my search engine anymore and I don't know if it is because search engines has become more and more useless or if it is because Stack Overflow deleted a good chunk of the most useful questions they had.
Possibly a combination if I had to guess :-/
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#305Every 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.…
You say that you search for info and Stack Overflow usually gets you the best answer. That's fair. That's your legit experience.
My experience is very different. I'd guess 50% of the time if I get a Stack Overflow result I click it and it is closed as off-topic or dup or whatever. If it's a dup, there's a 10% chance the link to the question it dups actually answers the question. If I'm very lucky, someone answered the question before the closure.
It's very frustrating for me. When it's good, it's soooo good.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#306Every 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.…
time and again when I search for an answer online the stack overflow is the best answer when -
I have an error text about a popular tool - I would say about 50% of the time SO is the best, the rest of the time is either some blog post or more likely an issues thread on github for the tool.
I really know a lot about the subject I am asking about so I know exactly how to ask to get a really good example bit of code doing what I want to do. - about 90% of the time SO gives the best answer. Of course it probably also gives a couple crap answers, almost always the answer I consider best in the response is not the one that is up highest. Actually maybe it does not give the best answer, but it definitely gives an adequate enough answer that I don't try to look any further.
The question is really pretty simple - on the level of how do you concatenate strings in Language X - this happens when I need to ask something simple about something I don't know or again when I just want a simple syntax lookup.
The problem is very complicated and it takes a lot of code even to provide a simple example of what you are trying to do - generally in such a case your problem is somewhat unique and anyway you are not going to provide an example code because doing so will be too much work to put up with SO. Instead you just keep on going trying to fix it yourself.
The question is very complicated and I know very little about the subject or problem domain. In such a case one is unlikely to produce an example code and as such SO is the wrong place to get help.
So as a general rule SO is really useful for something that you pretty much know how to do but you need a little refresher or help with some of the trickier bits, so sort of like reading the documentation but quicker. If you really need help with something however SO is pretty much useless because when you really need help you need something like a forum where you can ask some high level no code questions on the issue to get some guidance and SO by design does not do that. Maybe you might even need to ask for that SO hobgoblin, an opinion as to which methods are best to use when trying to achieve your goal!
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#307Every 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.…
Agreed 100%. Wikipedia is similar, in that both SO and Wikipedia have clearly defined goals, and policies based on achieving those goals. But for as long as they've been around there have always been people who get worked up over those sites not being quite what they want them to be. And what they want want them to be is usually a place where anything goes, and/or a place where they can more effectively earn some for…
> But for as long as they've been around there have always been people who get worked up over those sites not being quite what they want them to be
Problem is those sites used to be better.
A number of us where fighting to keep good resources good.
It feels we were steamrolled by people who enjoyed playing admins instead of actually asking or answering questions.
If you look into S.O. you'll find a abandoned accounts with a large number of points. People who made tbe site work.
I think a number of them gave up after trying to fight the bureaucracy.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#308Maybe hide downvotes and effects thereof of new questions for a certain limited duration, unless the downvoter comments. The downvoter would see a warning, possibly an encouragement to post and be friendly, and the downvote would eventually count.
The exact duration that's best would be unique per site and question. It should depend on how many active users the stack exchange has, the length of the posters account exists, and how many "quick downvoters" attack the question within the first X minutes.
Quick downvoters could be defined as users that downvote more than X questions that have appeared on the site for less than X minutes.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#309Every 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.…
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 suspect they resent the site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine results
And yet this is what the creators of the site explicitly wanted it to become.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#310Earlier 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
When i was taking freshman CS classes, this was a running joke with my classmates. Wed take to google for helping fixing an error, and 90-95% of C++ 101 questions have at least one answer in the form: "why are you trying to do this? Unless you know what you're doing (which by your question you probably dont), you should by using different methods entirely."
Friend having a coding problem? Give 'em the SO special: "Have you tried using vectors?"