151–160 of 203 posts
My reputation is at 1335.
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You only need 50 reputation to comment anywhere on the site. That's only 5 upvotes on a good answer or 10 upvotes on questions. It's an extremely low bar to get over. Note: You can always comment on your own posts (questions or answers).
Well it is a barrier that has stopped me participating too. It is very easy to dismiss these when you, and all those around you, are beyond them.
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We just click a link Comments. No one is taking a tone with you. Oh, the irony.
Comments. What about them? The close message is auto-inserted so we don't have to take the time to comment. Irony, no. My tone here is a response to being called overzealous and condescending. It has nothing to do with my attitude when I'm acting as moderator on SO.
I got tired of the thankless task of doing other peoples' work, along with the overzealous mods shutting down my questions in the most condescending tone possible. In particular, I recall going so far as to read vendor-specific documentation for someone, and providing example code to parse the binary data in question. It was probably an hour of my work and I didn't even get a 'thank you', much less any reputation bum…
I'm not even a moderator, but if you as a bad question I vote to close it. That's how the site works. Even if you feel you put a lot of work into something doesn't mean it's a valid question to the site. Read the FAQ.
Second, I asked a question, and I believe it was a good one. However, it was closed for being "too conversational," whatever that means. Instead of merely answering my question, the mods instead chose to make condescending comments, which eventually lead to an answer in the comments, so why not just answer the question in the first place?
SO mods think their job is to eliminate 'bad' questions. But that's not their job. Their job is to foster a community and a valuable site. Look at all the 'bad' questions which have made it onto HN and Reddit that have been closed by an overzealous mod, then re-opened due to mass appeal. Overzealous SO mods are a known problem, so much so that they've alluded to it repeatedly on the SO podcast.
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The high-traffic tags are full of low-quality or frequently asked questions. The amount of duplication in e.g. the C++ tag is staggering, but there doesn't seem to be a conscious effort to enforce a no-duplicate policy of any kind. Picking out worthwhile questions is difficult with all that noise. Worse, the "unanswered" section is full of questions that have been answered, the asker just never bothered to click acce…
Regarding duplicates: they should be closed as duplicates of a canonical question, but the incentives all work against that so it rarely happens. There's a ten-month-old widely-supported proposal on meta meant to address this, but it hasn't received any comment from the Stack Exchange Inc. folks. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/90620/134300
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I agree, often I've wanted to add something, but I'm unable to because I haven't participated enough. I'm on the wrong side of the chicken and egg, so I just leech.
Welllll...it takes, approximately, three to five useful answers. Note that they don't need to be The Answer To Life, Universe, And Everything; they don't need to be the longest, or fastest, or best-looking answers to that question - just useful. I've run a tiny experiment on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/users/779183/friar-tuck - it took me, from "logout and clear all cookies" to "Commenting privilege unlocked", twent…
Normally when I hit SO I'm stuck and often it's not on my dollar. I always intend to go back and add something, but when I do have free time, I like to get away from the computer and thus I never end up contributing.
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I actually don’t use Stack Overflow as a contributor for precisely the same reason: I created my account with an OpenID, the provider is no longer around, and now I can’t log in nor fix it.
You can create a new account and ask for the accounts to be merged.