271–280 of 352 posts
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…
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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...
SO has made it clear that they don't want "my kind" participating, so ... I won’t go, where I’m not wanted. Life’s too short.
That question was a bit of a "trial balloon." I'd pretty much written SO off.
* pop *
Problem solved.
Just S’s and G’s, might want to take a gander at some of the other (over 100) questions I’ve asked. They are not all perfect, so there’s plenty of ammo.
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…
25k rep early adopter. I stopped using it when the librarians got out of control and it no longer was about helping people but instead about being a perfect library of provable knowledge where most users started to be categorised as problematic to that goal. Particularly users who were less competent at expressing themselves in English. Other things that irked: librarians removed all the flavour from many of my answe…
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…
If SO was an answer search engine, SO would be collating answers from answers.com, yahoo answers, reddit, etc into one platform. Clearly it doesn't, so your thesis fails.
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…
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…
As someone who mostly just runs into SO through searches and rarely asks: I want to see these duplicates thrive, I want to see the ideas. It's so common that the first SO thread is useless but that a near duplicate does actually provide me with the answer I need. Unfortunately, near half the questions I land on which I feel might actually help me are shut down, which is not just a complete waste of an opportunity but…
Trying to canonicalize dupe questions into one makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, good answers would be scattered across duplicate questions which is quite a large trade-off as well.
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…
We have only these descriptions but not the answers them self, grain of salt is applicable, possibly not in small quantities.
You can even read the questions from the URLs: "/meaning-of-dollar-sign-after-digit-and-dash-in-a-regex" C'mon.
This is a common trope with people complaining about SO, so it's not surprising they had terrible questions. Nobody likes to admit when their questions are bad.
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I don't know that SO ever wanted to be much of a community in the traditional sense. We had communities before SO: huge forums and similar construct. They were pleasant(ish) for people participating in them, but they were awful for random people off the internet trying to find the answer to a specific question like "how to X in language Y." You'd wind up paging through 50-60 back-and-forth posts in some long-forgotte…
the best way to fail is to not be what your customers want. SO's hostile attitude towards people who ask questions is comical considering the site only existed if people had done so.
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I found out you can be banned by proxy. Post a comment on one sub that the moderator or another sub doesn't like and your get instantly banned off that other sub. I posted some comment on a covid related sub about a year ago and got instantly banned from 50+ subreddits, most I've never interacted with before.
more and more you have to treat "reddit" as if it were an "internet" and have a separate account for every subreddit or group thereof.
One morning all of them - including the one that was 9 years old and had awards from participating in the first ever reddit gifts - got banned for "ban evasion".
Now I just make a new one every few months and distrust any account that can survive for more than a few years without getting banned.
So they encourage throwaways, but also ban you for using them.
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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…
SO is a great resource if you want an answer to "How would I have done this programming thing back in 2012?" The site's aggressive closing of newly-asked questions indicates this is likely an intended outcome.