Live data from Hacker News

Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

old.reddit.com

241–250 of 352 posts

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#241
What ticks me off on StackOverflow is changing my posts and attributing it to me.

For instance, I ended a post with "Thank you for any help, I appreciate your time". A overzealous moderator on a mission edited that and removed it. I added it back and told him that I'm polite in person and on the internet, and it's my desire to reflect that. That feedback was of course discarded and they locked the post.

So yeah, despite being top 5% in the world, I stopped answering questions on the stupid site.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that technically this is correct (the best kind of correct). But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now. I don't think the original author is complaining about the functionality, or even the community (though debatable). I think they're complaining about the UX. And that's not something we can argue with - they think they're posting valid questions, and their experience is tha…

> But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now. I'm sympathetic - but have you ever noticed, when people complain about their questions being closed unfairly, how rarely they provide links to the questions? If I'd posted 5 great questions, they'd all been unfairly closed, and I wanted to convince other people that was the case, I'd be linking to them - why wouldn't I present the prima…

That may be true, but the problem is real. It's not their question (nor mine), but here's an example I came across a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21178182

Unfortunately, there's no way to vote against closing a question. All you can do is vote to reopen it after it's closed.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#243
I don't see the rationale for closing questions. If they're bad questions, downvote. If it's a duplicate, put an answer linking to an answer to the other question. Closing cuts off the possibility that someone might actually provide a useful answer.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#244
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,…

> 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…

Jeff's announcement can be seen at https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

Some formatting that isn't quite clear there. First sentence is bold. "good" is italicized in the original too.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#245
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand your response. I asked a single very specific question. Everything else was context and to prove that I did some work on my end before asking for help.

I would have to look again, but I believe that SO explicitly asks you to post what you tried. And now you're saying that posting what I tried muddies up the value of my question. Can you see how this seems like a no-win situation?

Edit: Also, my question was marked as a duplicate. It doesn't seem to have been rejected for reasons related to asking too many questions or requiring a tutorial answer.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One of the big problems with this is that many newer answers are not good, and merely rehash the existing answers, just stated in a different (often worse) way. For example in [1] some of the newer answers just seem to repeat the top answer.

Another problem is that newer answers merely provide an alternative, that's neither better or worse. For example [2] is much newer than the existing answers, but not "better" than any of them. It merely provides an additional possible solution that's appropriate in some uses cases, but not in others.

The problem of older/outdated answers is real, but also much harder to solve than people think it is.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/q/35533803/660921

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/55096093/660921

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#247

What ticks me off on StackOverflow is changing my posts and attributing it to me. For instance, I ended a post with "Thank you for any help, I appreciate your time". A overzealous moderator on a mission edited that and removed it. I added it back and told him that I'm polite in person and on the internet, and it's my desire to reflect that. That feedback was of course discarded and they locked the post. So yeah, desp…

That sentence is redundant noise on the page. Show your appreciation by upvoting answers instead.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#248
post #11

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…

> As I was preparing that, and within 24h of the original post, it was closed.

> Of course I deleted it.

It was closed to prevent guesses from being posted as answers while you worked on the minimal example, if you'd just edited it in the question would've been put into the reopen queue.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is. Note that it takes some skill at writing to do a self answered question well. Often these falls into either:

1. Lots of material in question. Very simple unexplained answer.

2. Sparse material in question. Want to be multi part blog in the answer.

Neither of those are received well.

The key is to have a question that is good, helpful, and reproducible by others too (so they can try it out or find it if they have similar problems) and enough, but not too much detail in the answer. The answer is the tricky part because people get caught with not explaining anything because they already understand the domain in the question or explaining every nuance of the solution even though it is unnecessary for the solution itself.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#250
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…

There are a lot of people on Stack Overflow who struggle to tell if an existing answer is an answer to their question or not. They might copy something verbatim from an answer and have it not work because their shell is configured differently, there's a separate bug in their code, or even because they accidentally copied a PHP code snippet into a Javascript file, and whether through laziness or genuine confusion, they simply post the errors back to SO saying the answer doesn't work for them.

People these days are taught to always seek help as soon as they encounter difficulties, and I think they feel like as long as they're asking for help, then they're doing the right thing and deserve to have their problem solved. But when they need somebody to work through multiple issues with them, in multiple layers of their setup, and there's quite a lot they don't understand that's unrelated the concrete question they posed, then that crosses the line of relevancy to the question asked, as well as the line of what most SO contributors are willing to do. Most people who answer a Stack Overflow question do it because they're happy to take a few minutes out of their day to share their knowledge, not because they want to a second job as an unpaid private tutor. If someone needs that level of support, then they should ask another developer on their team, ask a teacher at their school, hire a tutor, etc.

Obviously there are a lot of circumstances where it's good to give back and give someone a little bit of extra help, but if you need someone to help you debug your Dockerfile, that discussion doesn't belong on a question about Python asyncio, and it doesn't justify posting the same question again and again because copy-pasting the original answers didn't solve your problem.

Post reply on HN