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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#171

Post by wahnfrieden »

Someone1234 wrote: post #147
rglullis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's a reasonable justification. Why don't you agree?

SO is stagnant directly due to this policy. Often time it is like taking a time-machine back ten years ago or more. For example a lot of JavaScript questions get answered with "use JQuery" even for things now built in, and no new questions can replace them nor is the timestamp on questions meaningful. SO's policy will be the death of SO. Nobody has a reason to participate, it is a super toxic community, and it is out…

It serves the function of a Q&A place to get help, just roughly and against its best intentions (eg a user may aggressively close your Q with some ideological nonsense from the site owners but still link you to another answer)

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#172

Post by dan_mctree »

chrisan wrote: post #67

Someone did the work of getting to the bottom of this and OP eventually shared his questions that were deleted https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/116vvpp/saying_good... > The first question is a request for ideas. That's offtopic for SO. > The second question was a good question, but since it ended up being a bug in your setup, and not actually part of the language, it wasn't as useful of a general question. Th…

As someone who mostly just runs into SO through searches and rarely asks: I want to see these duplicates thrive, I want to see the ideas. It's so common that the first SO thread is useless but that a near duplicate does actually provide me with the answer I need. Unfortunately, near half the questions I land on which I feel might actually help me are shut down, which is not just a complete waste of an opportunity but also a waste of my time.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#173

Post by berjin »

nmilo wrote: post #88

Do I live in a different world than everyone here? Stack Overflow is awesome and I don't think I've ever had a bad experience with it (seriously). The response time is like 10 minutes or less since everyone there is so hungry for karma. The complaints about "closing questions" never really hit me because, when a question is closed, they usually point you towards an answer that helps anyways. They've always answered m…

I agree. SO is great because it doesn't try to please everyone. It's for professionals not to build your whole app for you.

There seems to have been a swell in beginners learning to code perhaps due to economic motivations rather than curiosity. These people seem to want SO to do their homework for them without having done any leg work themselves. I can sympathise with people trying their best to find the answers but lacking the domain vocabulary to find the answers; Usually closed questions point them in to the right place anyway. However a lot of the questions are 1) duplicates or 2) high level questions for which there isn't a definite answer it's a matter of taste.

That's not what SO is for. It's your job to figure out the high level picture, learn the absolute basics of the tech stack you're working with and SO can fill gaps where information is too esoteric to find easily in docs. The questions are generally unique rather than duplicated and improve over time rather than a constant stream of crap that reddit is.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#174

Post by e_i_pi_2 »

tsgagnon wrote: post #60
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 primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. 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 g…

I think they need a middle ground - perhaps some way for users to submit new answers weighted by how recent they are and then have other users vote to override the previous answer

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#175

Post by arp242 »

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…

One of the problems is that lots of people have different ideas about what Stack Overflow is and isn't, and many people don't really seem to have a clear vision at all.

It's undeniable that the original intent of Stack Overflow is as you described; both Jeff and Joel have been very explicit about why they launched Stack Overflow and what its intended purpose was.

But Jeff left over 10 years ago and Joel was never very involved in the day-to-day operations. Since Jeff left things have been rather directionless; for a long time many Stack Overflow employees disagreed about lots of things and the net result was that ... nothing ever changed.

There's still many people who subscribe to this view of Stack Overflow, but also many who don't. In my own rant about Stack Overflow[1] I complained that these sort of useful questions being downvoted or closed.

In the end, this lack of direction results in a weird mish-mash site where different people are operating under different assumptions about what the "correct" behaviour ought to be, and it leaves everyone unhappy.

[1]: https://www.arp242.net/stackoverflow.html

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#176

Post by jmuguy »

matsemann wrote: post #148
chrisan wrote: post #67

Someone did the work of getting to the bottom of this and OP eventually shared his questions that were deleted https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/116vvpp/saying_good... > The first question is a request for ideas. That's offtopic for SO. > The second question was a good question, but since it ended up being a bug in your setup, and not actually part of the language, it wasn't as useful of a general question. Th…

Yup, classic SO bashing. "They closed my question for no reason!!", "I asked a well formed question and they down voted me!!". And people either refuse to give examples (because they know they're lying), or when responding it's quite obvious why they got the reaction they got. Mind you, I believe SO could be more friendly. But if you've tried moderating and being active there, you quickly understand the bluntness. Wi…

I feel for people that spend any amount of time trying to moderate that place. I try going through triage and its just an endless sea of low effort shit.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#178

Post by jasonlotito »

"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

I remember SO coming onto the scene, to combat Experts Exchange.

Now, it's the modern EE.

I've never seen a duplicate question. I have numerous times seen a question I've had closed as a duplicate, but the linked to "answer" was definitely "NOT" the answer.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#179

Post by user- »

nmilo wrote: post #88

Do I live in a different world than everyone here? Stack Overflow is awesome and I don't think I've ever had a bad experience with it (seriously). The response time is like 10 minutes or less since everyone there is so hungry for karma. The complaints about "closing questions" never really hit me because, when a question is closed, they usually point you towards an answer that helps anyways. They've always answered m…

> Do I live in a different world than everyone here?

> The response time is like 10 minutes or less

I have to say, you do, and I want to live in it. I've asked detailed, well formatted, clear questions and they usually got like 10 views in a month.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#180

Post by bediger4000 »

syntheticnature wrote: post #10
bediger4000 wrote: post #4

SO has an additional problem the article's author doesn't get to: high-voted answers that at the time were relevant and correct, but are not relevant now due to time passing and Microsoft aligning Windows to fit their current direction. I reckon this problem exists for other technologies that change with time, too.

Indeed, I was recently looking for some information, and all the SO results I turned up were for the language in question as of 2011, and found to be inapplicable.

I've had the same sort of experience. This leads me to believe SO could age off answers, or maybe even questions, and everyone except history buffs would benefit.
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