It is interesting that some of these same criticisms have been applied to Wikipedia and the reasons remain the same too
StackOverflow unwinding?
41–50 of 210 posts
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#42It seemed inevitable that 95% (some very high %) of StackOverflow was destined to be little more than an archive, leaving a very stagnant system as the speed of activity & build out slowed to a crawl. Large, highly active development technology doesn't change every day. PHP has been around for 15 plus years, Python for 20 years. And those are two of most popular. How many questions can ultimately be asked about PHP o…
"That guarantees the stagnation of their community"
Not from my perspective. I'm a Rails developer, and between our continuously evolving platform, the proliferation of gems, and my changing projects, I've always got new questions.
Meanwhile, new technologies keep appearing to become the New Hotness.
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#43Closing questions - no, deleting questions - really really grinds my gears.
Nothing is more frustrating than finding a google result to SO, clicking through, and arriving at a 404. Nothing is more frustrating that searching for that great answer I read last year and not being able to find it because the question has been deleted. These are often questions that have been kicking around for 4 years, and, well, gone.
Of course, if you have enough SO points, then you probably don't care whether you've deleted a question, you can still see them.
While we're at it, SOers have always been, and are increasingly... well, jerks! If you are a new programmer, then of course your question will have incomplete information, because you don't know how to ask a good question yet. So stop downvoting into oblivion, please, and give people a little bit of time to acclimate and improve their question before closing.
I am in the top 10% of SO users as measured by points (lol.) What can I do, as a community member and hacker, to fix these things?
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#44It would be interesting to see empirical data on William Edwards's hypotheses, e.g. "Questions are getting fewer and fewer quality answers. Moderators and 'close this' clickers are getting increasingly narrow." An analysis like this might be feasible with Stack Exchange's API: https://api.stackexchange.com/docs .
But the first question is obvious: how do you measure quality? Votes are primarily for popularity, not quality.
One way would be "mean time to an accepted answer."
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
bookmark it (using the so interface - click on the star thing) and look again in a day or so. by then it will be clear if it's going to be answered or not.
main trouble with this is that some simple, dumb answer may have been marked correct by then.
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#46The 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…
Instead of closing those questions, they could move them to the "Programmers" site. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/faq?mnu=1 All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. How do we define that? Constructive subjective questions: -inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”. -tend to have long, not short, answers. -have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone. -invite sharing experiences over opini…
The mods on programmers are even worse than the mods on SO, in my opinion.
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#47So many questions are already authoritatively answered that there's a much higher bar for new users to contribute. And without new users coming in and participating, there's a feeling of stagnation. I'm not yet convinced they're at an impasse but I personally don't know how I would solve that problem.
I'm not sure it's a problem. If every PHP question you want to answer is already answered, hooray! Google solves your problems instantly. The PHP section is stagnant, but it's still helping people. The supply of answers scales down to the demand.
Meanwhile, some people start switching to Node or something else, and a new wave of Q&A starts on that. Rinse and repeat.
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#48It seemed inevitable that 95% (some very high %) of StackOverflow was destined to be little more than an archive, leaving a very stagnant system as the speed of activity & build out slowed to a crawl. Large, highly active development technology doesn't change every day. PHP has been around for 15 plus years, Python for 20 years. And those are two of most popular. How many questions can ultimately be asked about PHP o…
"That guarantees the stagnation of their community" Not from my perspective. I'm a Rails developer, and between our continuously evolving platform, the proliferation of gems, and my changing projects, I've always got new questions. Meanwhile, new technologies keep appearing to become the New Hotness.
Here's why it guarantees overall stagnation (not necessarily on a specific topic):
Let's say you have 10 super segments, eg: PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, Javascript, etc.
Once you build those out to a high degree, reasonably the amount of new content possible in relation to existing content, will plunge. Then if you add a new language that becomes popular and mass adopted, the best you can hope for is perhaps an addition of 5% to 10% to your content base. It all becomes modestly incremental, and the excitement overall is guaranteed to fall in that environment.
Ruby can be hopping as a subset, but the likelihood the whole thing will be is vastly reduced once the overall build-out slows. What's left to be excited about in the PHP section, once you've answered 97% of what is important about the language? How many ways can someone ask about error reporting?
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of closing those questions, they could move them to the "Programmers" site. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/faq?mnu=1 All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. How do we define that? Constructive subjective questions: -inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”. -tend to have long, not short, answers. -have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone. -invite sharing experiences over opini…
The mods on programmers are even worse than the mods on SO, in my opinion.
OK, so much for that idea.
Re: StackOverflow unwinding?
#50My 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.
:)) yep, clearly a mistake