Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

StackOverflow unwinding?

williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 210 posts

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#31

Post by pilgrim689 »

debacle wrote: post #16

The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases. I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently. The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions wi…

That's interesting. I also found that my more difficult questions never got answered.

Perhaps a fix to create an incentive to answer hard questions would be to create a ratio to estimate difficulty (how much time has gone by without an accepted or high-voted answer? number of views that don't add a good answer?) and then give more reward points to someone who successfully answers a "hard" question.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#32

Post by jcastro »

Karunamon wrote: post #14

The thing that drove me away from the entire Stack* series of sites was the heavy-handed "doesn't fit the format" (read: mod doesn't like it) question closings for no good reason. I've honestly lost count of the number of times that valid questions with well spoken, informative answers were shut down due to this nonsense. (The other was how much of a pain they make it to get started if you're new - one can look at th…

Stackexchanges have policies set by their commununity on each corresponding meta site.

Mods don't really set policy they enforce it, and most "Is this kind of question ontopic here?" style scope-adjusment can be done on meta.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#33

Post by nathan_long »

topbanana wrote: post #29
debacle wrote: post #16

The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases. I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently. The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions wi…

I agree with your point about hard questions. They ought to provide escalating reward for answering older questions.

They do some of this. For example, the silver Necromancer badge is awarded when you "Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more"

http://stackoverflow.com/badges

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#34

Post by chrislomax »

I don't generally have a problem on StackOverflow. The last few questions I have asked have been quite high level and not been asked before and they tend to get some good answers / guesses.

I find that a well structured question gets some good answers, I find a lot of people leaving their question open to interpretation and people cannot be bothered to ask the same old questions because the poster has neglected to be specific in their question.

I find a lot of people use it being lazy as well, most questions are simply part of the language / subject they are asking about but they cannot be bothered to read up on it. They would rather ask insanely simple questions to get other people to provide an answer for it.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#35

Post by streptomycin »

topbanana wrote: post #29
debacle wrote: post #16

The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases. I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently. The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions wi…

I agree with your point about hard questions. They ought to provide escalating reward for answering older questions.

You can put a bounty on your hard question if nobody answers it.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#36

Post by fusiongyro »

pilgrim689 wrote: post #31
debacle wrote: post #16

The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases. I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently. The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions wi…

That's interesting. I also found that my more difficult questions never got answered. Perhaps a fix to create an incentive to answer hard questions would be to create a ratio to estimate difficulty (how much time has gone by without an accepted or high-voted answer? number of views that don't add a good answer?) and then give more reward points to someone who successfully answers a "hard" question.

I've had this happen to me a lot, but I also have noticed that sometimes I see an interesting question that deserves a long answer and I want to answer it, but I have this nagging suspicion someone else is already working on an answer and by the time I write mine theirs will already have received some kind of critical mass of upvotes and my work will not get any upvotes at all.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#37

Post by jiggy2011 »

I think there is a general problem with Q&A/Forums in general.

I will generally only ever go to a website to ask a factual question if I cannot easily find the answer myself either from documentation or experimentation. If I ask a question on Q&A it's because the answer is not forthcoming , this may be because my entire approach to the problem is wrong or maybe I'm doing something that only a handful of people would ever want to do. In that case I am relying on the right people actually seeing my post which would have low odds, so I am better served using dedicated forums/newsgroups for the library in question.

So this really leaves opinion based questions as the best things to ask, which don't seem to be encouraged on SO and the format of correct/wrong doesn't work there so well anyway.

Another issue is that I'm usually asking questions related to work things that I am doing, and while I can easily justify using time that I am paid by someone else to ask questions it is less easy to justify spending work time answering other people's questions in order to gain rep.

Also giving a good answer to many questions involves showing sample code , or digging back into something I did a while ago so it's not really something I can do in 2 minutes. So this means I either have to answer questions somewhat covertly or wait until I get home by which time I may well have other things to do.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#38

Post by dbaupp »

pilgrim689 wrote: post #31
debacle wrote: post #16

The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases. I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently. The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions wi…

That's interesting. I also found that my more difficult questions never got answered. Perhaps a fix to create an incentive to answer hard questions would be to create a ratio to estimate difficulty (how much time has gone by without an accepted or high-voted answer? number of views that don't add a good answer?) and then give more reward points to someone who successfully answers a "hard" question.

There is the "bounty" system[0]: you (or anyone else) can offer up some of your own reputation as a bonus for answering the question. (For example: this Haskell question[1], and this C/GCC question[2] have had no/poor answers for a while, and the bounties have prompted more/better answers.)

[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/privileges/set-bounties [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11060565/tying-the-knot-w... [2]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11015672/gcc-removes-inli...

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#39

Post by nathan_long »

tgrass wrote: post #21
nathan_long wrote: post #11

The OP seems to be saying 1) SO and network is "anti-community", 2) making lots of targeted sites was misguided; they should be broader, and 3) purists are running off real experts. Having listened to many hours of planning and philosophizing on the SO podcast as the site developed, I think the OP misunderstands their approach. 1) They are "anti-community" only in the sense that they don't want content unrelated to t…

"love it or leave it" is only a proper response in a regime that seeks to protect the status quo.

OK, perhaps I was a bit harsh. But there is already a very active place to discuss how SO should do things; it's called meta.stackoverflow.com. This discussion has been going on for years.

It's great to try to influence it, but as time goes on, the chances decrease that a newcomer has a point that hasn't been considered. That's just life. You don't see HN changing its format every week; newcomers adjust.

And if someone does have a good point, and it's not being considered, as we say, "fork it." The public Q&A data is available, or you could start from scratch.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#40

Post by cocoflunchy »

recursive wrote: post #20

My opinion on SO is apparently in the minority around here. I find the content on SO to generally be of high quality, and in most cases, I agree with what moderation I see. Most questions I see that get closed seem like requests for extended discussions. I actually believe that SO works better on questions that have verifiable answers. As for my questions, I've asked 42, and gotten good answers to most of them.

I think you mistyped here: 42 is the answer, not the question.
Post reply on HN