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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#401

Post by toadi »

Sometimes I just have a feeling it's about language. I see it a lot in the software community (and Agile). You should say it that way because the other way is too (passive) aggressive or not PC.

SE is a worldwide profession and the internet makes this true. For some people English is a second or even third language. Not always constructing the right sentences, not understanding subtleness all the time.

As long as SO is useful for me I will use it. I want to solve problems. I'm not there for the warm community. If SO fails because there is no warm community and this is needed to succeed. I assume another site will get popular where people will contribute to answers that are useful for they community in general.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#402

Post by rco8786 »

neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

I think +1 posts are frowned upon here but damn this post deserves a +1

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#403

Post by StrangeWill »

waisbrot wrote: post #240

Every 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.…

Two different perspectives: on the search engine end being a consumer... that's a pretty easy-going experience, Google filters out the large amount of noise because it's a good search engine, you get your answer, you're on your way.

The other end of things, the users sitting on SO, weeding through the influx of questions, looking to grab bounties, etc. that is where working with SO is really rough. That is where we deal with a huge amount of garbage coming in.

Also as someone that has written answers for esoteric questions before, it can be hugely frustrating when the moderation-by-community ends up causing you grief because they don't understand the subject material enough to do anything other than to rule-lawyer your post to death (I started ripping my answers off the site and posting them to my own instead, which yay, I guess nice traffic boost?).

I stopped answering questions long ago unless it was referenced in a Github issue.

---

On the more esoteric side of things, the duplicates can be really rough, if you have an error that is caused by something non-trivial but the same error can be caused by a trivial mistake you'll be fishing through hundreds of posts trying to find alternative answers and underlying causes, this is pretty much the only time that you find the trash heap bubbling up on the consumer side of things.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#404

Post by turk73 »

SO has helped my career dramatically, but it has its warts. One thing is that as software products evolve, answers to questions change, but when you search you get all the old stuff, too. It is often very hard to discern what is current for a fast-moving technology. There's this thing called "experience" that SO does not provide--one must know how to make use of answers or be able to interpret them. I see too many copy & paste coders who try to solve problems they don't even understand.

At one point I became a member on SO so I could answer questions and give back. Wow, that became a frustrating experience! I was not prepared for the many jerks down voting my answers long after they were made (sometimes a version of something changes or a preferred approach changes, but at the time of the answer my response was correct). And then there was the incessant arguments about things that the person clearly had no professional understanding of. It made me realize that Europe(?) must be full of "programming hobbyists" who seem to have never worked a day in their lives. God bless them! But whoever they were, they don't even know when they're wrong or had any shared perspective about my answers, which told me clearly they didn't actually work as developers. I have personally given tech interviews to hundreds of senior-level developers, I know who is on the level and who is bullshitting.

The world needs what SO provides, but somehow the format needs to evolve, become curated and become an archive, a trove with "freshness dates" or something. Otherwise the site will lose most of its relevance as time progresses.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#405

Post by dawnerd »

neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

I’m so glad I don’t have to use expertsexchange anymore. People don’t realize how good we have it now.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#406

Post by falcor84 »

proverbialbunny wrote: post #396
neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

I enjoyed the pre-internet times when it came to programming far more than I do today. This is because of flow states. I have a hard time getting into a flow state when I'm looking something up, but when I know the language inside and out it's easy for me to get into a flow state. So much so, when I learn a language I try to know it well enough to never have to google for help. Of course, I still google around at tim…

That's a lofty goal, which I don't think is achievable anymore, at least not in modern web development. The amount of languages, libraries and APIs we have to regularly deal with makes offline development entirely infeasible. I too try to avoid googling for language features, but for the rest of my questions, SO is invaluable.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#407

Post by squiggleblaz »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #389
neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

Actually, you could perfectly well find answers in the pre-Internet times; you just had to dig deeper, grub through more books, talk to more colleagues, and experiment more.

Well yeah, but you could also travel from England to Australia in the pre-aeroplane days. Today, you can do it in about 24-36 hours. Back then it took months. Isn't that an improvement?

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#408

Post by ssalazar »

falcor84 wrote: post #406
proverbialbunny wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed the pre-internet times when it came to programming far more than I do today. This is because of flow states. I have a hard time getting into a flow state when I'm looking something up, but when I know the language inside and out it's easy for me to get into a flow state. So much so, when I learn a language I try to know it well enough to never have to google for help. Of course, I still google around at tim…

That's a lofty goal, which I don't think is achievable anymore, at least not in modern web development. The amount of languages, libraries and APIs we have to regularly deal with makes offline development entirely infeasible. I too try to avoid googling for language features, but for the rest of my questions, SO is invaluable.

> The amount of languages, libraries and APIs we have to regularly deal with

Is this because this Web programming innately needs lots of tools, etc. to work, or because the modern programming ecosystem (including stack overflow) has allowed it to grow to be this way?

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#409

Post by DangitBobby »

lmm wrote: post #349
Avamander wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interpreting downvotes as a lack of empathy is the same sort of wrong reasoning as thinking that letting somebody go in front of you at a stop sign is considerate. It disregards the well documented and publicly posted rules for something you made up. Interpreting downvotes as a considerate act is like stabbing tires on someone's car who just had a light go out. Saying nothing because downvotes don't give any useful…

Downvotes are a useful signal - they let you tell the difference between no-one looking at your question and you asking a bad question, which is huge. 99.9% of the time the alternative to a downvote isn't a thorough and considered explanation, it's no response at all.

There is a "times viewed" counter at the top for questions.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#410

Post by squiggleblaz »

jasode wrote: post #380
benologist wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/ has over a million subscribers and nobody gets upset if a neurosurgeon explains why washing your hands is important. https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ has over a million subscribers and they get repetitive questions all the time without making anybody feel bad about it. https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/ has almost a million subscribers and have no problem answerin…

Regarding your 4 examples: /r/NoStupidQuestions/, /r/AskHistorians/, /r/legaladvice/, /r/personalfinance/ I see why those 4 subreddits influence your thinking in how StackOverflow should work so it seems like it could adopt the same (social) mechanisms and it would only improve the site and not degrade it. However, notice that there is no reddit.com/r/ProgrammersAskAnyQuestion/ comparable subreddit that has more traf…

I tend to think the person who can truly identify that the question is a dupe is the questioner. The moderators who are insufficiently annoyed by a duplicate question that they want to link it can surely propose a link, but just like answers are accepted, a duplicate closure should be accepted.

It is always so frustrating to me when I find exactly the question I need an answer to on SO, but it's closed as a dupe of a question it's clearly not a duplicate of.

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