Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tired of Stack Overflow

arp242.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 517 posts

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#411

Post by someguydave »

viraptor wrote: post #350
krilly wrote: post #262

Earlier 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 don't know anything about how the SO community works, but I suspect they resent the site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine results, and would rather all it's users to be active members of the community. Why do you think that? I guess I'm a member of that community and really don't care how people reach SO. The site is also saturated to some extent now... There's a good chance th…

>why should I spend time writing the answer

There's a world of difference between über (rare and awesome) active users ignoring "tiring" questions and actively downvoting and closing them, which is what the parent comment is complaining about.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#412

Post by someguydave »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #334
mwfunk wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 form of imaginary internet points, or at least not have meanies downvote them or reject their contributions. That is most certainly NOT what I argued. This is really frustrating in all these discussions because every time you try to make any argument that even vaguely smells of "hey, l…

I think the kind of people who take forums/SE/wikis very seriously and have a strong belief in the Platonic ideal of their respective forum are exactly the kind of people who should be completely excluded from having any kind of status on that site. There is such a thing as taking something too seriously.

The puzzle is: how do you sustain a site with unpaid "user contributed" content while you actively discourage the most prolific (and also likely most problematic) users?

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#413

Post by squiggleblaz »

wruza wrote: post #345
setr wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people answering questions, they’d see the same question 10,000 times, and likely miss the questions that are actually worth answering. And in a Q&A site, the answerers are far more important than the questioners — if the questions will be answered, the questioners will flock there out of need, regardless of want. Answerers are however not so constrained. People complain about SO because, I think, it does the cor…

>For people answering questions, they’d see the same question 10,000 times, and likely miss the questions that are actually worth answering. Me included. I was a regular answerer for interesting tags in which I have at least sort of moderate knowledge, but after just a few months I lost interest in it, since it is just a never-ending stream of the same basic low quality beggings. It is like '00s inbox with one precio…

But doesn't that just mean the closure of duplicates is irrelevant? You're already getting a never-ending stream of the same basic low quality beggings. So the two possibilities are - filter them or go away.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#414

Post by wyclif »

airstrike wrote: post #324
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.…

#python on freenode is my go-to alternative if I can't find an answer on SO or if I'm more interested in a brainstorming session and can't really ask for one in SO but then again not every problem I have involves Python, in which case I do feel I'm out of luck...

#python on Freenode is probably the most high-quality IRC channel I join on a regular basis.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#415

Post by yoz-y »

ssalazar wrote: post #408
falcor84 wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I would say a little bit of both. Since modern networked programming is much more complex than before (having to care about security, distributed storage, systems, worldwide connectivity over vast range of devices etc.) it has more moving parts and thus more combinations of various systems possible. Naturally complexity grows exponentially.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#416

Post by squiggleblaz »

GordonS wrote: post #289
Rapzid wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Arrghh, this one drives me absolutely nuts sometimes! It's like someone doesn't know the answer to your question, but does know the answer to some alternative (that is unlikely to work for your situation) and just wants SO points.

Sometimes I think it's more that they don't understand trying to understand something. They see someone trying to do something and genuinely want to help. They don't realise that for the one who is asking the question, their goal is not necessarily simply to do something, but to understand something.

It's a little like the difference between an idealist and a pragmatist, except not.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#417

Post by hgoel »

SO is great as long as the answers aren't some form of "Why are you even trying to solve this problem?" Or "Just use this library instead of doing it yourself" without any actual answer included. They should atleast be something like "this is what you can do/look into, BUT ...".

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#418

Post by paulmd »

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…

There are most definitely programming-help subreddits on Reddit so I'm not sure what you're on about, besides insisting that we need the toxicity of StackOverflow due to "reasons".

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#419

Post by neves »

olingern wrote: post #394
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 remember digging through .NET forums to find answers for working with ASP record sets. 100% not fun. Nothing is perfect and SO has its warts — but it’s far better than anything we’ve ever had.

What about Usenet? I was happy with Dejavu!

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#420

Post by hgoel »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #258
Gibbon1 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem. Stack Overflows commenting system is like a lawyers idea of fact finding. Everyone gives an answer and votes like a jury would with the mods acting as harsh judges. This is why SO just gets more and more toxic over time. What you want is a communal Socratic method. Where everyone goes round and round till the community produces a good solid answer.

The (now read-only) WikiWikiWeb [0] [1] did something like this. The site appears to be down right now, but here's an example page on Archive.org [2] [0] http://wiki.c2.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190828124025/https://wiki.c2.c...

That site is so good for finding in-depth discussion of topics. Just a lot of people throwing ideas around, way more useful for finding leads and inspiration compared to the fairly bland Wikipedia articles many of the topics have.
Post reply on HN