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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

#191

Post by ilitirit »

gnosis wrote: post #120
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…

"SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answers." You want an even faster answer? Ask on IRC. As far as programming questions go, freenode is usually the best place to go (with a minority or apps and projects off on some other irc networks, sometimes). That said, HN, forums, mailing lists, usenet, and SO are usually better for preserving answers for others to learn from on…

> Ask on IRC.

Nearly every time I asked a programming question on IRC I've had bad experiences with arrogant users who think you're wasting their time with your noobness. Now of course I don't believe that everyone on IRC is like that, but it's really the last place I'd recommend for newbies.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#192

Post by danenania »

Confusion wrote: post #189
danenania wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point, but I really don't think that 1.5k rep qualifies as casual in the context of the discussion.

I have answered 76 in two years and 4 months (and posed 5). Let's be generous and say that's 1 answer every week. Is that not 'casual use'?

Over a sustained 2.5 year period, not really. I mean what percentile of activity/reputation do you think you'd be in for all members in that period? I'd guess well over 50... perhaps 75 or 80?

Programming is my full time job and I ask questions on SO somewhat regularly when I get stumped, and occasionally peruse for questions I can answer, but I don't make any efforts in particular to raise my rep for its own sake, and I just reached 100 rep after being a member for a year. I feel like I fit into the 'casual user' camp that he's referring to in the OP since I'm still pretty limited in my participation even though I FEEL like a somewhat invested member of the community. But I don't think these issues would really apply to you at your level of activity (and kudos to you for that, btw :) ).

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#193

Post by alnayyir »

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

You have no idea how devs actually function then.

Almost every open source project that is active and of a certain size has an IRC dev channel where they hash stuff out.

I've worked at more than one company where dev and ops idled in private IRC channels as well.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#194

Post by gnosis »

ilitirit wrote: post #191
gnosis wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answers." You want an even faster answer? Ask on IRC. As far as programming questions go, freenode is usually the best place to go (with a minority or apps and projects off on some other irc networks, sometimes). That said, HN, forums, mailing lists, usenet, and SO are usually better for preserving answers for others to learn from on…

> Ask on IRC. Nearly every time I asked a programming question on IRC I've had bad experiences with arrogant users who think you're wasting their time with your noobness. Now of course I don't believe that everyone on IRC is like that, but it's really the last place I'd recommend for newbies.

You've been unlucky. Yes, sometimes there are people on IRC who are unhelpful to and/or arrogant towards newbies. And some channels are worse in this respect than others. Fortunately, however, that is the exception rather than the rule.

Some channels, like #help (or most other channels with the word "help" in them, like #linuxhelp) are especially patient with newbies.

That said, it certainly does help to know and follow IRC netiquette , and know how to ask questions[1].

[1] - http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#195

Post by merijnv »

ilitirit wrote: post #191
gnosis wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answers." You want an even faster answer? Ask on IRC. As far as programming questions go, freenode is usually the best place to go (with a minority or apps and projects off on some other irc networks, sometimes). That said, HN, forums, mailing lists, usenet, and SO are usually better for preserving answers for others to learn from on…

> Ask on IRC. Nearly every time I asked a programming question on IRC I've had bad experiences with arrogant users who think you're wasting their time with your noobness. Now of course I don't believe that everyone on IRC is like that, but it's really the last place I'd recommend for newbies.

I used to agree with you, the "old" IRC nets are full of rude, mean and cruel people. But FreeNode is an excellent place for programming. I have the most experience in the python, haskell and freebsd channels and the people there are excellent, responsive and friendly. The C/C++ and Java channels attract slightly more grumpy people, but even those are generally quite helpful if you try and act with a modicum of sense (if you are on HN you probably exceed the requirements by far).

EDIT: Incidentally, freenode is also the home of the unofficial HN IRC channel (#startups).

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#196

Post by wanderr »

mendicant wrote: post #138
Confusion wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'initial rep hurdle' is so low that any dimwit -- pardon my French -- can overcome it... As some others have pointed out, too easily actually, judging from the number of bad answers from people with a few K of rep.

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…

This has been my experience as well. Actually, it's worse. I actually managed to earn a bunch of points on SO by finding some questions that needed better questions...but it took a long time to get there for all the usual reasons of not wanting to jump through those hoops or spend lots of time trolling the site. Then I did something really stupid: I had an outstanding unanswered question about a really obscure subject, and I thought well, is someone answers this they deserve a bounty, so I added one. I didn't really care about rep, and my question was hard, so I put most of my points into it. It didn't occur to me that spending most of my rep would cause my account to degrade back into noob mode; I was thinking I had earned the privelegs of a normal user and they were mine to keep.

Worst of all, my question went unanswered, and the bounty was just claimed by the system.

I haven't earned back enough reputation to be a normal user again, although I have stumbled across many SO questions/answers that could use my insight. Since I can't use the site correctly, I just leave.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#198

Post by chopsueyar »

brodie wrote: post #180
brianpan wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What I find even more frustrating is getting enough karma to do things like downvoting, and then losing those abilities out of the blue because the requirements were moved up.

hackernews, what?

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#199

Post by d0mine »

> Edit: closing comments since I’m tired of moderating (and I didn’t delete any but the obvious spam). Thanks for letting me vent.

It is ironic to hear it from a guy who complains that he can't comment without enough reputation points on a site visited by millions.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#200

Post by khafra »

alnayyir wrote: post #193
khafra wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 You have no idea how devs actually function then. Almost every open source project that is active and of a certain size has an IRC dev channel where they hash stuff out. I've worked at more than one company where dev and ops idled in private IRC channels as well.

My questions are not of the sort "Why hasn't my patch been committed?" I consider this a difference in type of expertise more than a difference in level of expertise.
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