Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
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Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
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Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#2I don't really agree here.. While I do have my own gripes with Stack Overflow, I don't think this is the biggest issue. It took me two days of casual browsing/asking/answering to get a reputation of about 50 or so and another few weeks to get into the hundreds. -- Keep in mind I'm not a super genius expert or anything, I just asked a few questions and contributed a few answers in areas I was knowledgeable about. It's not that hard.
The only major broken part (IMO) of SO is that the SE network is becoming so disjointed and your rep doesn't transfer between sites.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#3I've never seen stackoverflow as a race to get the most rep possible. Reputation is just a "bonus", not a prerequisite to participate in the website. I like stackoverflow the way it is
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#4Personally I haven't gotten involved in SO precisely because of this. I don't feel the prize is worth the amount of effort that I'd put into playing the game.
However, plenty of people do feel that it's worth it, and certainly the barrier to entry keeps out (some of) the griefers that inevitably show up in online communities.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#5[deleted]
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#6[deleted]
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#7"but you quickly realize that every question that’s not some vague, poorly worded, open ended impossibility has already got 10 answers"
Exactly :) Stackoverflow has built-in breaks to control growth. Maybe HN could benefit from this ;)
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#8"Rep grinds" (see how MMO-speak has influenced us?) on non-gaming web sites may be becoming the norm. You grind out some rep, and get privileges based on that rep. One can argue that this serves as an effective barrier to keep out would-be posters of bad content and discussion, but as we can see it also screws with "legit" posters. Determined individuals will figure out how to work the game to their advantage, both for good and bad.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#9The thing is StackOverflow really really works. If I search Google for a programming query I nearly always find links to useful information on SO, if not the precise answer.
(I've even found my own answers via Google when I have forgotten how to do something)
That is SO's first and foremost use case. And I reiterate - it works extremely well.
The community features are secondary to that (it's not Quora), and there are thousands of users who will tell you that it is not 'impossible' to use.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#10It's definitely true that there are a lot of people waiting for new questions so they can pounce with a quick answer and get a few upvotes. However, there's also a large backlog of unanswered questions as well (http://stackoverflow.com/unanswered) that are very much in need of a "thoughtful, correctly documented" answer. And while it's unfortunate that legitimate brand-new users are unable to post comments, the reason behind the rep threshold was to reduce spam on the site. Commenting requires 50 reputation, or about 5 upvotes on an answer/10 upvotes on a question (both of which can be easily accomplished in an hour or two) - just high enough to deter spam.