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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

#161

Post by jobu »

Confusion wrote: post #156
mendicant wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care to participate in SO often. I don't have high rep. I _can_ provide insight. every once in a while I find somewhere that I can provide some value or insight, whether via editing an answer with a url that's out of date, a comment expanding on the answer, etc... and it seems like I never can. I don't care to jump through the hurdles to get to that point. I didn't come there to ask a question. I didn't come…

You do realize that they can't just grant anyone the right to edit questions or answers and that they don't have magical insight into your abilities? I don't know how you propose to solve the problem of automatically allowing those that have ability to bear responsibility, but I don't think there is any site that does it better than SO. It sucks for the casual user. I'm a casual user (I have 1.5K rep and subscribed r…

A casual user should at the very least be able to flag an answer for review by a more senior user (and earn rep). For example, fixing broken links, or Facebook API changes that make old answers invalid.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#162

Post by khafra »

gnosis wrote: post #153
khafra wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've asked a question in freenode channels then idled for the better part of a day, or even a few days, with little traffic and no answers. SO is faster, often much faster.

It could have just been the case that more experts for the particular area you're interested in were on SO at the time you asked that question. Had you asked a different question on a different topic, perhaps there would have been more experts ready to answer it on IRC than on SO. Having spent a long time on IRC, I can attest to seeing many people's questions getting answered there constantly, and usually (on the act…

I'll take it as encouraging that I've reached the level of expertise where my questions are more quickly answered on SO--I will grant that "where do I find an Ubuntu driver for my video card" will almost certainly be answered more quickly on #ubuntu than on Serverfault or Superuser.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#163

Post by jtolle »

Confusion wrote: post #156
mendicant wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care to participate in SO often. I don't have high rep. I _can_ provide insight. every once in a while I find somewhere that I can provide some value or insight, whether via editing an answer with a url that's out of date, a comment expanding on the answer, etc... and it seems like I never can. I don't care to jump through the hurdles to get to that point. I didn't come there to ask a question. I didn't come…

You do realize that they can't just grant anyone the right to edit questions or answers and that they don't have magical insight into your abilities? I don't know how you propose to solve the problem of automatically allowing those that have ability to bear responsibility, but I don't think there is any site that does it better than SO. It sucks for the casual user. I'm a casual user (I have 1.5K rep and subscribed r…

I think this is key. I answer questions to help other people. I also answer them to help improve my own ability to explain solutions to programming problems. Usually the problems are ones that I myself have dealt with before. I tend to answer questions pretty late, in a few relatively low-view tags, and I can tell from the view counts that maybe 10-50 people at most ever read any of my answers. But usually the asker of the question sees it and finds it useful enough to accept it.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#164

Post by jbri »

ddkrone wrote: post #133
bherms wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it may seem like just a gaming aspect, there are a lot of benefits as you gain more reputation on the site. Unlike many "points systems", SE actually allows you to become essentially a moderator of the site as you gain reputation. Once you've hit a certain mark you can edit, close, delete, etc. I think it's brilliant.

The old forums had the same system so there is nothing new or brilliant going on here, the stackexchange sites just measure things in terms of reputation/votes and the old forums did something similar with posts/replies. The only innovation I see is the automation of how promotion happens in terms of votes/rep.

In other words ... the autopromotion happens to people who provide quality contributions rather than those who add to the noise?

And you don't see how that's significantly better?

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#165

Post by mcantor »

alanh wrote: post #125
mcantor wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted you for being sarcastic, and because I was discouraged by the tone you used in this SO comment: Gordon, you downvoted my answer and left a misleading comment because you assumed that a user wouldn't edit the textarea? For shame. Your solution is not "pure CSS" but rather uses PHP to duplicate a textarea and then hopes that the user doesn't its content before printing. Please chill out, dude. There is abso…

Fair enough. Sometimes I do feel like that guy.

It's OK. We're all that guy sometimes. All we can do is watch out for it and adjust accordingly.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#166

Post by vannevar »

I think the poster makes a good point. In the early days of SO, as in any QA site, there were a surplus of questions and a dearth of answers. It would've been suicidal to obstruct people from providing answers, so the bar was set low there. Comments on the other hand are less valuable early on, so there was no reason to encourage them.

Fast forward to today, and now there are a critical mass of people willing---even eager---to answer questions, so that every new question has a surplus of answers, many of them wrong. SO might well improve their signal/noise ratio by reversing their policy and requiring higher karma for answers than they do for commenting. As the poster points out, a newb is unlikely to come up with an answer not already posted, but nonetheless might have some unique experience or insight on that answer that could be helpful.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#167

Post by brianpan »

lyudmil wrote: post #89
cletus wrote: post #61

Let me add some perspective as a relatively highly ranked user (cletus) on SO. I've seen this kind of post before and frankly it's annoying. The typical template is "I tried to answer 2 questions and didn't get 1000 points so it sucks" or some variation revolving around faster answerers or whatever. Rather than being a problem, SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answer…

I agree with what you're saying, but I don't think it addresses the post. It's certainly true that Stack Overflow is the best place to get answers to programming questions and I won't dispute that. Here, though, is what I think the problem is. I think it mirrors the OP's problem. Stack Overflow became and is the best place to get answers to programming problems because of the community it has been able to build. Ther…

I have the same feeling about HN. I've been regularly visiting HN for a year now, commenting when I have something insightful and voting articles and comments up if they're exceptional. Yet I still don't have enough karma to downvote. The feeling I get is- I'm a long-time member of the community, what do I need to do to be trusted with a simple downvote?

This isn't that bad since I can still be part of any discussion, but it makes feel unwelcome and a little frustrated when I see something that should be downvoted.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#168

Post by davros »

kylec wrote: post #28
SandB0x wrote: post #22

Earlier 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.

That sounds like a great idea to me

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#170

Post by gnosis »

khafra wrote: post #162
gnosis wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could have just been the case that more experts for the particular area you're interested in were on SO at the time you asked that question. Had you asked a different question on a different topic, perhaps there would have been more experts ready to answer it on IRC than on SO. Having spent a long time on IRC, I can attest to seeing many people's questions getting answered there constantly, and usually (on the act…

I'll take it as encouraging that I've reached the level of expertise where my questions are more quickly answered on SO--I will grant that "where do I find an Ubuntu driver for my video card" will almost certainly be answered more quickly on #ubuntu than on Serverfault or Superuser.

"I'll take it as encouraging that I've reached the level of expertise where my questions are more quickly answered on SO"

This attitude of yours says more about your lack of experience with and appreciation of IRC than it does about its relative merits in respect to SO.

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