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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#251

Post by mananaysiempre »

shagie wrote: post #244
mananaysiempre wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Right, but you can see it’s a bit fuzzy on what the thing actually is, very possibly because they themselves weren’t quite clear about that. The feel-good wording could sort of be made to fit a forum if they wished, but ultimately they didn’t. (Or possibly the homepage of SO at the time was the place that contained the actual description.)

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#252

Post by joshuaissac »

Izkata wrote: post #227
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask, and ye shall receive: [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34722910 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887968

The main post[0] you go on about in there is a badly formatted question: It's not self-contained, and relies entirely on external links. It doesn't surprise me it got close votes. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75361518/accessing-an-io...

> It's not self-contained, and relies entirely on external links.

The question does not rely on external links. The links just provide optional additional context (about how to use a custom URL scheme and what DRY is). The question has the ios, xcode and swift tags, so even without the links, it is pretty clear what the asker is looking for.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#253

Post by marcosdumay »

metabagel wrote: post #232
siwatanejo wrote: post #228

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.

Depending on your reputation, the rules keep changing and you may or may not be allowed today.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#254

Post by etblg »

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.

I'm not sure if there wasn't a time it was a collection of fiefdoms honestly, at least for the social web.

My reference point is mostly 2000s era internet forums, and that was certainly a time of admins of forums going on power trips over their little meaningless slice of the internet.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#255

Post by tomrod »

arp242 wrote: post #235
_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,…

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 in…

I agree with parent to your comment. It's not a different view if they've branded themselves with the first words of their site.

To defend this as "different views" when their brand clearly suggest otherwise is, I believe, a bit disingenous. To the parent commenter's point, the community friction and aggressive closure of "seeming" but poorly identified duplicates are compounded by often poor searchability on the site itself. So the issue really is the gatekeeping that occurs by moderators who are operating against the vision the site itself communicate (Ed: regardless of how consistently or inconsistently the vision is current or historically communicated).

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#257

Post by shagie »

metabagel wrote: post #245
shagie wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 que…

What you asked for was https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/60824493/1 which finished with:

> I would appreciate any guidance to get me moving in the right direction.

And then in a comment:

> @Lukas, I had seen your solution, but you didn't actually explain the syntax, and I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I tried again today, and I think I have something which appears to be working, although I still don't understand the syntax.

This might have been something to work through in a more interactive form such as Stack Overflow Chat - https://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/62927/2023/2/8

The Q&A part of SO doesn't work well with back and forth communication but rather "here is a question, assume this is the final form, try to answer it and move on." There is far too much material there for people to try to curate and cultivate the questions and answers too much.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#258

Post by Izkata »

ranting-moth wrote: post #197

My pet annoyance is also the prohibition of opinion based answers. I've found many great answers, usually the top result on Google. But sadly the question is locked. Sometime the top answer (before the question was locked) was pretty much the right thing to do 5 years ago, but no one can add another answer. I do understand that opinion based questions are a moderation tar pit. But sometimes there aren't that many opt…

That (plus "culture"-style questions as in the sibling reply) was pretty much the original purpose of programmers.stackexchange.com but it got taken over by people who didn't like these open-ended questions. After some years with them banned, it was renamed to softwareengineering.stackexchange.com

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#259

Post by _gabe_ »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #236
_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,…

> 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…

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

Yes. As you mentioned the blog post is from 2008, that's 15 years ago now. Jeff hasn't had any input on the direction of stack overflow for more than a decade. From Jeff's blog post that you linked:

> I have not worked at Stack Overflow in any capacity whatsoever since February 2012 and I've had zero day to day operational input since that date, more or less by choice.

So I don't see how his blog post from 2018 has any place in the company's current mission. He says in the blog post that you linked that he had plenty of opinions, but he has chosen to not have any direct influence in the company for over a decade.

And Joel stepped down as CEO in 2019. And Joel's vision has clearly changed. This is from a blog post in 2019, which probably reflects what the current vision of SO has become after seeing what SO has turned into:

> In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.[0]

So, yes. People are building a strawman by trying to say the rude, snarky, meaningless cruel remarks are necessary to maintain "quality" answers.

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-st...

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#260

Post by metabagel »

shagie wrote: post #249
metabagel wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

This makes a lot more sense to me than how SO presents itself. It's a forum to post your own questions to which you already found the answers. I do see value in that.

But, there's almost no value in posting questions and hoping for an answer back. If that's what you want, then the right place is wherever the folks hang out who work on that technology - IRC, Discord, email list, etc.

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