51–60 of 352 posts
My favorite is people downvoting and arguing about answers I posted over a decade ago. "Yeah, I know that's not how you'd solve a problem in Python today. It was a good answer in 2011 when I wrote it. How bored are you, exactly, that this is how you want to spend your days?"
People bickering over answers on decade old questions sounds exactly like the sort of community SO is trying to foster.
I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…
My favorite is people downvoting and arguing about answers I posted over a decade ago. "Yeah, I know that's not how you'd solve a problem in Python today. It was a good answer in 2011 when I wrote it. How bored are you, exactly, that this is how you want to spend your days?"
I don’t care about the downvotes but I hate when people make misguided attempts to “improve” old answers. The most recent was someone who went in and removed use of the word “you” as an attempt to “depersonalize” the answer. There was some kind of recognizable idea behind the edits, but the user’s changes mostly just damaged the readability and made the answers more convoluted. The editor argued with me and linked to…
The early days were so much better because the toxicity had not set in.
However, my account clearly has first mover advantage. I sit at Top 0.5% without having contributed in a very long time. Both on the Question and Answer side, I have benefitted from providing answers to basic questions and asking basic questions.
I do the same thing for questions I ask, but did not receive any similar treatment. I did accumulate quite a number of reputation from answering spree 5 years ago (slightly over 5K).
I do not mod or police ever, but I just reopened a few questions that I think is worthy for the effort - I probably should do more of that to offset the overzealous folks if I find time...
My favorite is people downvoting and arguing about answers I posted over a decade ago. "Yeah, I know that's not how you'd solve a problem in Python today. It was a good answer in 2011 when I wrote it. How bored are you, exactly, that this is how you want to spend your days?"
Likewise for their comments.
It's disappointing that Reddit is now the go-to for answers. The language subreddits get flooded with questions akin to "where am I missing a semicolon?" and any interesting discussion or articles get drowned out.
My favorite is people downvoting and arguing about answers I posted over a decade ago. "Yeah, I know that's not how you'd solve a problem in Python today. It was a good answer in 2011 when I wrote it. How bored are you, exactly, that this is how you want to spend your days?"
SO explicitly allows same person posting question and immediately answer it himself. This is weird if you see it as a forum, but this make sense if this is seens as FAQ.
I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…
You’re just repeating what SO owners say, or aspire to. Why do you agree?
I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…
The issue is that by discouraging participation in the community, you end up with a repository of old questions with decent answers (that may or may not be 'decent' anymore) and fewer newer questions with even worse answers.
My experience is that using SO is basically trying to find a middle ground between an answer that is too old to be relevant, but not so new that the effect of the stagnation of the community hasn't made the answer less than helpful.