Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

Post by brianpan » Wed, Feb 02, 2011, 10:08 PM UTC

fader wrote: post #207

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…

StackOverflow and Hacker News both seem to actively discourage casual participation. I am the sort of person who doesn't like to speak unless I have something new to add, so I don't post comments or answer questions often. However, I'm quite happy to use my time and energy to tend the garden and pull weeds, and plant something new when I happen to have a really great seed. HN and SO both tell me they don't want me th…

Post by mendicant » Fri, Feb 04, 2011, 10:04 PM UTC

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in a while I find somewhere that I can provide some value or insight, whether via editing an answer with a url that's out of date, a comment expanding on the answer, etc...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…