201–210 of 352 posts
It was part of a larger discussion on SO.
In it, I mention an exercise:
Here's an exercise: Go to Meta, and suggest that people applying for positions of authority have at least a 10% question-to-answer ratio.
If anyone were to do that, they would be attacked and downvoted. Possibly banned.
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…
> Find the best answer to your technical question, help others answer theirs
And here's one of the first snippets on their about page:
> Stack Overflow helps people find the answers they need, when they need them. We're best known for our public Q&A platform that over 100 million people visit every month to ask questions, learn, and share technical knowledge.
Stack Overflow's website says nothing about this when you're looking at it briefly. They highlight the fact that it's primarily a Q&A site. The people that insist that SO is _not_ a Q&A site are needlessly defending the gatekeepers that have ruined the site.
Finally, it's funny that everyone always says that SO is supposed to produce high quality answers, because it stopped producing any high quality answers around 7-8 years ago. The new answers on the site suck. My usual routine is:
1. Google question
2. Click 5-6 different SO links
3. Get pissed off because the answers are all crap
4. Go to the documentation
5. Spend an hour to find the one small doc reference that actually gives me the correct answer.
I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.
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…
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast...
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…
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…
I rarely respond to super recent comments, but you're 100% right. What SO didn't expect was that their real purpose was as feedstock for LLMs that will consume them and surpass them entirely.
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 find those who bash SO to be either help vampires or generally using the site wrong (asking an opinion based question, asking newbie questions without searching or not knowing how to form the right search queries, ...) Inevitably when their questions get moderated they'll feel personally slighted without dispassionate consideration of the situation (because why would they; they have a question and they want the ans…
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast...
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…
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 feel that pain. I recently posted question on SO about the best way to work around what is apparently a bug in Clang, providing a code listing, link to the (open-source) full listing, GDB traces ... 7-8 people asked that I provide a "minimal example", presumably so they could paste it into some online debugger. As I was preparing that, and within 24h of the original post, it was closed. Of course I deleted it. I'll…