261–270 of 352 posts
Don't you dare question or besmirch the viability of raw CSS!! I made that mistake on HN a few days ago.
This came as a surprise to me as I thought the tech community was well aware of what a quagmire CSS is.
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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.)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...
Note the first revision and its author https://stackoverflow.com/revisions/1003841/1
Then look at https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions (both pages, but the key part is on the most recent one) with the closed, locked, and deleted actions and who did them.
The (for lack of better terms) Atwoodian and Spoloskian philosophies of how the site should be run and that fracture continue to this day with (excessively simplified caricatures) some looking to delete everything that isn't good so that they could concentrate on what was left and others trying to fix everything even though it isn't good to start with and a "we'll get around to it" for most of the content.
That the fracture hasn't been resolved and Stack Overflow corporate still hasn't really come down and said what they want it to be (though they want more "engagement" so it feels like it will be more Spoloskian - but they don't want the Atwoodians to leave).
I'll take help from any site, but I have no enthusiasm for SO and will not participate on the site (although I do have a lot of karma from old answers of mine).
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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…
Here's my non-low-effort question which was closed for being a duplicate. I found help on another forum and resolved never to waste my time posting a question on SO again. The cost/benefit ratio is off the charts. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast...
These types of posts annoy me. I constantly see people talking about SO being "toxic", or closing perfectly good questions. And yet these people never link to specific examples. Why is that?
Part of it may be that there’s nothing to link to. I received a toxic welcome in Stack Exchange comments just this morning and checking it now the whole thread is gone as if it never happened.
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…
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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…
A lot of the bashing is accurate though. I'd seen tons of questions closed as duplicates, then gone to the thing it's supposed to be a duplicate of, and... its not. Glaringly, blatantly ... not a duplicate. Its as if the person that closed it as a duplicate didn't even read the question well enough to understand it. And, because of that, there's no answer to the new question.
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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 understan…
This is standard polite phrasing indicating that I would be happy with any response, regardless of how minimal. I wasn't asking for a tutorial. I don't recall SO requesting me to strip out polite extraneous wording when I made my submission, but perhaps I missed it?
Lukas' solution didn't answer my question. So, yeah, there's going to be back-and-forth when the question wasn't answered. That's what this part was about: "...but you didn't actually explain the syntax..."
And again, my question was flagged as a dupe, not for wording or structure or back-and-forth.
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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.
https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#questionsperday - look at "questions per day" and the "answered%" (which is down from its peek of over 7000 questions per day).
The fourth most visited site on the network gets under 100 questions per day. The site that I used to be active on (back when I was active) got about 50 per day (which was completely manageable for a dozen people to read every question every day, fix the ones that had problems and close the unanswerable ones) and is now down to under 5 per day.
But Stack Overflow is still getting thousands of questions per day. Each question, unless its really good to start with and shows that it can be answerable and isn't just someone trying to get someone else to do their work is only a tiny blip in the overall firehose of questions.
At the start, when there were fewer questions per day and more people were interested in answering the questions and moderating the content - that is when the site thrived. But as it got more popular and the quality of the questions has gone down, people don't care about answering questions as much and those who worked to try to keep what is there interesting have left.
If you look at https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422885/2022-a-year-... and pull up the google doc for the "community moderation in time" ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1upnX9UX8ab8rde8DrGnO... ) you'll see that most of the moderation tasks that were done by the community have dropped year over year over year. That makes it harder for the good questions to get noticed and get answers since the poorly written ones remain on the site longer.
And yes, I do believe that other sources with people more familiar with that technology are better places to ask. If there's a discord for it - working with the devs there is likely helpful. If its hosted on GitHub and the team uses Discussions there - that's a much better and more focused Q&A format for that technology.
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Here's my non-low-effort question which was closed for being a duplicate. I found help on another forum and resolved never to waste my time posting a question on SO again. The cost/benefit ratio is off the charts. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60824493/how-do-you-cast...
"Closed as duplicate" has nothing to do with effort or question quality. The only thing that matters is whether the linked questions/answers contain the solution.