Maybe not from his perspective, but from the perspective of those asking questions and looking for answers, it works pretty well.
Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
31–40 of 213 posts
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#32I'd like to point out that while I definitely did not write this post, I did feel it easy to relate, because it seems hard at this point to gain reputation without gaming the system a bit. But there are so many ways to get involved...I think the best seems to be being knowledgeable in a very specific area of expertise - answering C# questions is really tough, but if you know Heroku, there are so many more questions there without answers that you can really gobble up quite a bit of reputation by knowing something niche.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
I think in the specific case of StackOverflow, having a lot of points is something that indicates to potential employers that you are a useful/knowledgable candidate. And it's not just a vague signifier - they can actually go and look at your answers and see what you're about.
But if I was an employer and saw someone that was really active on Stackoverflow, I'd consider the problem of them being on SO and other sites when they should be working.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
During the development of Stack Overflow, Joel and Jeff talked about the answers staying up-to-date in a wiki-like fashion. I think what the author means is that in order to participate in this - i.e. edit and improve an existing answer - you have to have a certain amount of rep. It's quite likely that a user Googling for their particular issue might find an incomplete or out-of-date answer on Stack Overflow. When th…
This used to be true, but there's a feature currently in testing that will allow anyone (even someone coming from Google) to propose an edit to a post. This edit proposal can be approved either by a moderator or several users with sufficient rep. Hopefully this will make Stack Overflow more wiki-like and help solve the problem with answers getting out of date.
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Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#35A lot of people are dogging acconrad, but I have to agree with him. I was having a problem with rails, and I found the answer on stackoverflow. The right answer had no upvotes, so I figured I would upvote it; this way the original "asker" would know it is the right answer. However, it said I didn't have enough rep to upvote... I'm sure he'll figure it out but this would save him from checking the other "solutions".
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#36It'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".
But doesn't a million points mean that you've helped a lot of people?
When I started coding it was a certain Jon Skeet that was helping out almost everyone on the C# newsgroups including the newbie coder that was myself. I'd like to return that favour to the community and points are a close equivalent to one's helpfulness.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#37I'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
I have 170 rep and I don't know how I've gotten that much since I rarely post on StackOverflow. It's really easy to gain rep if you participate with the best answer you can give, instead of trying to post lots of less-elaborate answers just to have a bigger audience.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#38Stack-overflow is amazingly effective, especially when one considers the alternatives like those countless forgettable websites heavily laden with front-and-center ads, and the ones that have nag screens that block responses to answers until you "sign up", and the ones with clueless dilettantes fumbling in the dark.
My only concern is that I think the exchange community might get fractured/diluted if there are too many separate stack exchange sites.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#39I went through a short period where I really cared about what my profile looked like there. I don't know why I ever felt that way. I think my top voted answer is telling someone what I thought important concepts in C to communicate to students are. I don't think that says anything about me positive or negative to be honest.
If you look around the top contributors to the python tag you'll realize there is a lot of room for people to submit good, thoughtful answers. If you take the time to write something good then it will get voted up and if that's what you want you'll be all set.
It seems like no worse of a way to spend your time than anything save perhaps reading a good technical book and let's face it there aren't very many of those.
Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
#40I'd like to point out that while I definitely did not write this post, I did feel it easy to relate, because it seems hard at this point to gain reputation without gaming the system a bit. But there are so many ways to get involved...I think the best seems to be being knowledgeable in a very specific area of expertise - answering C# questions is really tough, but if you know Heroku, there are so many more questions t…
All the while one does not / is not able to answer questions, he can learn from the answers that have already been submitted, no reputation gained but knowledge (I have heard people compiling e-books on the best posts from Stackoverflow). I call that a step forward.