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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#71

Post by dietrichepp »

fabian2k wrote: post #68
dietrichepp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Decline the edit suggestion or roll back if the edit is not an improvement. You don't have to argue here for edits that are not obvious and clear improvements. If the user repeats these edits, just flag for mod attention. Edit wars can be stopped easily by diamond moderators.

I did roll back, and the user started an edit war with me and I flagged it for moderator intervention. I didn’t see a response from a diamond mod.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#72

Post by dotancohen »

thatwasunusual wrote: post #43
kstrauser wrote: post #15

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 think this could easily be solved by removing the ability to vote on anything after X number of time units.

That would make sense if a new question could be asked after the same X number of time units. As it is, 2012 answers suggesting jQuery for any simple Javascript question are no longer relevant.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#74

Post by silversmith »

Aperocky wrote: post #55

I wonder if the amount of reputation had an outsized effect. 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…

Counter-ancedote: my 13 year old, 9K rep account gets the same treatment as original poster. I've given up on participating (after latest and particularly upsetting episode of "question not good enough"), and use the site only through google. Shame, it used to be easy access to expertise.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#75

Post by fabian2k »

dietrichepp wrote: post #71
fabian2k wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decline the edit suggestion or roll back if the edit is not an improvement. You don't have to argue here for edits that are not obvious and clear improvements. If the user repeats these edits, just flag for mod attention. Edit wars can be stopped easily by diamond moderators.

I did roll back, and the user started an edit war with me and I flagged it for moderator intervention. I didn’t see a response from a diamond mod.

You usually won't see a response, the moderator will either lock the post or more likely warn the user to stop the edit war and if necessary will suspend the user.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#76

Post by wmeredith »

rcfox wrote: post #18

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.

Reddit is targeting late 2023 for an IPO. The end quality end is nigh for them as well.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#77

Post by avgDev »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #16

Using StackOverflow for 13 years, 161 answers, 62 questions. ~1.9M people reached. I am confirming S.O. is toxic. Multiple times I asked questions that have been closed. I'm the founder of Ruby students community, there are ~2K folks. And I do not recommend them to ask questions on S.O., since the the atmosphere S.O. created is discouraging.

I had a professor who recommended that all students try to ask for help at least once on SO. 95% of students got their post deleted or got some snarky comments.

Honestly, it seems like this reflects the programming environment fairly well. Most devs will be more than happy to answer questions and help. However, if you have done nothing you cannot be helped.

I worked with a guy who gave up easily and was frustrated, but he refused TO READ. I would try to help him and would quickly realize our knowledge gap was so significant that I would need to provide reading materials for him, but he wouldn't read them.

I have been building applications as solo dev for years at a midsize company and I have never encountered anything that wasn't already answered on SO or on reddit/github.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#78

Post by tsgagnon »

Izkata wrote: post #49
tsgagnon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link to the rule about asking questions with only a "single correct answer"? Out of curiosity, I tried digging around and couldn't find references to that kind of rule.

> If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here. https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask "List question" is meta jargon on stackoverflow that longtime users will understand. It falls under these "open ended" questions, hence why OP's question was closed as "primarily opinion-based" - IIRC it used to have its own close…

The question mentioned by the original OP was "My last question (just now) asked about potential maintainability issues involved with a certain approach to CSS layout." which doesn't appear to be very open-ended, at least from my interpretation.

I'll be honest, I mainly knew what the answer to your question would be, but I tried to put myself in the shoes of a newer user trying to understand what questions a person should ask on SO and was curious of maybe things were different.

And the answer appears to still be some form "you won't know until it's closed".

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#79

Post by pixl97 »

digianarchist wrote: post #40
rcfox wrote: post #18

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.

Reddit has it's own moderation problems. I've been banned from more sub-reddits in the last 6 months than the proceeding 14 years I've used the website. The internet is fast becoming a collection of digital-fiefdoms.

Because a huge amount of traffic on the internet is spam and trolling garbage. Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems. We generally start putting up castle walls because we tire of the bullshit.

That said, Reddit has become very ban happy.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#80

Post by Natsu »

fishtoaster wrote: post #36

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 problem is that you need people getting their questions answered to have anything to search for and it's only gotten worse for the first part. I never try to post on the site and I just use whatever I find in search if it's even usable.
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