Is Stack Overflow a game in which the goal is to get the most reputation and badges?
Or are you using it as a tool to discover solutions to programming problems?
Or Both?
Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
11–20 of 213 posts
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#12Is rep important enough to warrant a blog post complaining you cant get enough?
Man, money is too hard to get. I wish this damned CEO wasn't getting a 600k salary + bonuses. Blog post upcoming.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#13It sounds like this guy wants to participate in StackOverflow just to be there rather than because he finds it a useful tool for his own work. I'm glad there are hurdles for people who are just there to "get a good rep" rather than there to support their real work.
A (hopefully) more common workflow would look something like this:
- a developer googles a problem, the StackOverflow answer floats to the top, and he notices this is a particularly good answer. - this keeps happening, and the developer gets impressed
then one of two things happens (or both):
- he googles a question, and finds an old question without a great answer, and adds an answer. Yes, old questions don't get as many upvotes on their answers, but they do get upvoted, and at 10 points an upvote, it doesn't take long to get to 50.
- he googles a question and doesn't find an answer, so he posts a question
Neither of these require any rep, and you only have to do it once or twice with a good question or answer to get to the magical 50 karma. And 50 karma is the only milestone that matters on StackOverflow, in my opinion.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#14Em, it's a community Q&A website, it's not a game, and it's purpose is not to jack up some high score.
Just ask when you need to (when you want to know something you don't already know) and answer when you feel you can contribute an answer.
And stop caring if you get up-or-downvoted, and start caring about the quality of your output.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#15"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#16"So if you’re knowledgeable enough to provide a counterpoint to someone else’s poor answer, you have to post it as a new answer… and then you get down voted (lose rep!) for adding a new answer versus just commenting on the original, flawed answer."
Never happened to me. Sometimes I even noticed that the author had deleted the original wrong answer and left a positive comment on mine.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#17I 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…
If you have more than 200 rep on SE site A, you can associate that account with your account on SE site B and get a 100 rep bonus on site B. This lets users that are already familiar with the system comment and vote up on any site without having to have gained rep first.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#18Is rep important enough to warrant a blog post complaining you cant get enough? Man, money is too hard to get. I wish this damned CEO wasn't getting a 600k salary + bonuses. Blog post upcoming.
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Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#19It'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 rea…
I simply do not understand this ego thing with "points".
A million points gets you what? An award for most wasted time?
I wish HN had an option to turn off points on an account, I can't even block it with adblock because there's no element id.
There's more to life than meaningless "points".
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#20I 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…
> 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.
By design, I would argue. And a good decision, too.
To use a facetious example just to illustrate my point: without separate reputations, one could build up a huge reputation on http://apple.stackexchange.com/ and then use that influence over at http://askubuntu.com/ to provide a mediocre answer.
This mediocre answer could then get upvoted to the top by those who do not know a better way purely because of this user's reputation. Meanwhile the perfect answer provided by a newcomer to the SE network may remain hidden in second place.
N.B. I think the "bonus" reputation points that can be transferred are a way of addressing this imbalance while pushing people to use other SE sites at the same time.