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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#231

Post by packetslave »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #156
pixl97 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems. I'm not sure that's true, I think it is just an artifact of western society, and in particular our acceptance of mass marketing. What ruined mail? Marketing. What ruined TV? Marketing. What ruined phones? Marketing. What ruined the web? Marketing. Twice. What ruined search? You get the picture. Marketing is all a…

Marketing is a contributor to ruining things, but so is "shitty little edgelords who just want to start trouble, break things, troll people, 'shitpost', or some combination of the above."

And that's before you even get to the semi-related issue of "Nazis and other scum will use any slightly-popular medium without iron-clad moderation to spread their filth."

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#232

Post by metabagel »

siwatanejo wrote: post #228
_gabe_ wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read when you go to stackoverflow.com is: > 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,…

IME, I indeed sometimes reach step5 (other times SO answers are okish) but if I do reach step5, I add a step6 for good measure that consists of adding my own answer. It's how I gained a lot of reputation in SO, not by marking questions as duplicate.

I never considered asking and answering my own question. I didn't even realize it was allowed.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#233

Post by shagie »

metabagel wrote: post #206
stevenhuang wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, here is my question which was marked as a duplicate. I'll never make the mistake of posting a question to SO again. Total waste of my time. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast...

By intentional design, Stack Overflow is a poor site to use if you need to work through multiple questions and answers to solve a problem. There are other sites that work to fill in that approach and do so better.

Stack Overflow works best when there is a well defined problem that can be reproduced and you are a specific answer rather than guidance for how to proceed or a tutorial.

If someone needs to come back to a question to answer comments and work through it, SO becomes more and more difficult to use in that format. AN important thing to remember is that it isn't the right site for every question (and trying to use it as such will run into those intentional design choices made at the very start to make it difficult to use for certain types of questions).

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#234

Post by caconym_ »

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 author of the linked post claims fairly strenuously that they always search for answers elsewhere before posting, which (taken at face value) suggests that they are not at all suffering from this "common misunderstanding". If you want to refute their point then you really have to make the case that SO is functioning as intended despite their implicit claim to the contrary.

I personally have no trouble believing that it isn't functioning as intended, but I haven't participated in asking or answering for a decade-ish so I don't really know.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#235

Post by arp242 »

_gabe_ wrote: post #202
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…

I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read when you go to stackoverflow.com is: > 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,…

Before you can ask your first question you're shown https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask/advice

Note how you have the check "thanks, I will keep these tips in mind when asking" before being able to proceed. This has been shown for years and isn't a new thing.

Maybe some things should be clearer; as I mentioned in another comment[1] I think Stack Overflow lacks a clear vision, but people are certainly given more information beyond the tagline.

You can take any tagline to its extreme.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887632

> 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.

Don't brand people are "liars" because they have a different view of things.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#236

Post by mananaysiempre »

_gabe_ wrote: post #202
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…

I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read when you go to stackoverflow.com is: > 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,…

> I hear this strawman all the time.

Is it a strawman if it appears (among other places) in the 2008 launch blog post of one of the two cofounders[1]?

> Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question.

Or here’s the other cofounder’s 2018 retrospective[2]:

> Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time.

Reasonable people may disagree on how well SO accomplishes that goal, but I think it’s well established that it converged on having it as a goal fairly quickly and has had it in sight for basically all of its existence—unlike other initial positions which are known to have changed[3,4].

In no way is this meant as an endorsement of gatekeeping[5]; it’s just that it’s never been not about giving you the perfect answer to your question, for any value of you including me.

(SO calling itself a Q&A site is perhaps a little tautological, given it more or less defined the term. But Q&A as envisioned there is, in particular, not[6] a forum, which would be about answering or discussing a specific poster’s question.)

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau...

[2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-...

[3] https://blog.codinghorror.com/meta-is-murder/

[4] https://blog.codinghorror.com/listen-to-your-community-but-d...

[5] https://blog.codinghorror.com/stack-overflow-none-of-us-is-a...

[6] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exc...

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#237

Post by nl »

This is such a foreign experience to me. I've been a member of SO for 13 years, and I've asked 24 questions.

I've had one question downvoted[1] which I'm a bit annoyed about (I misunderstood the documentation terminology - but I don't think that is an uncommon problem).

My only other bad experience was when I had a buggy version of a library and an error in my question[2]. Someone solved the error in my question after I had already edited it to fix that and wanted their answer accepted even though that didn't solve the problem I was having.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/43889952/what-shape-inpu...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/63256952/pil-image-from-...

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#238

Post by arp242 »

_fat_santa wrote: post #92
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. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." The problem with this is that answers change, for some languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best way of doing it. And whil…

> After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged".

I have answered many old questions and never once has this been flagged; usually it gets upvoted.

I have 10 "necromancer" badges: "Answer a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more" – some of these answered questions that were over ten years old. And this excludes the answers which haven't gathered 5 upvotes (yet).

Answering old questions is absolutely worthwhile in my experience.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#239

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#240

Post by SimonPStevens »

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…

This exactly. SO is not really a resource to get your personal questions answered.

If you are a reasonably senior developer there are close to zero questions that you have that should be asked on stack overflow. You already have enough ability to figure out most problems on your own. Or if you can't, it's most likely too niche for SO and you need to hunt out a friendly subject matter expert instead.

Alternatively, if you're a beginner, it's likely all the questions you have have already been asked, and you are SOs target audience. But not for asking questions, just for looking up the answers. Use SO like a differently organised Wikipedia instead.

Blocking SO is a really odd response, it's one of the best and most comprehensive well organised data sets of beginner to mid level programming information. Don't contribute, fine, but why stop using what's there. Similar to how only 0.1% of people contribute to Wikipedia, doesn't mean it's not still a valuable resource for the other 99.9%

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