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StackOverflow unwinding?

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Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#81

Post by Roboprog »

mtrn wrote: post #63

A couple of points (from a top 0.47% user, but that's not why I'm on SO): * imagine googling for a programming questions and be stuck in 2008 - I don't want to go back * imagine researching a wittgenstein paper - do you need philosophy.stackexchange.com - probably not; the numbers show, that SO's still the metrics vanguard - I think the demand for the niche sites is certainly there, but large communities have formed…

Yes, the organization and search-ability is invaluable. Of course most of the content eventually becomes "geologic" as new material is steadily put down at about a steady rate, the rate of "in the last year" material must become a steadily smaller percentage.

I found at least one of the newer sites, the Ubuntu S/E, to be quite useful for troubleshooting LTS version 12 just a few days after 12 came out.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#82

Post by BennyMcBenBen »

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…

'The moderators are also awful.' SO is holding elections right now. If you feel the moderators are doing a poor job, why not vote for a moderator who shares your beliefs?

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#83

Post by Roboprog »

spolsky wrote: post #61

None of the actual metrics of the site bear this out. I don't know what "myspacing" is, and "floundering" is pretty subjective, but in terms of actual measurable things, we have more questions asked, more questions answered, more people active on the site, more sites with more activity and most metrics are up about 100% in the last year. Some of the things that we track pretty closely (like number of users who ask or…

You need to look into somehow adding a "question age" increment to answer point values. That seems to be the biggest legitimate recurring issue in the discussion. Otherwise, the system seems to be working as intended.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#84

Post by topbanana »

streptomycin wrote: post #35
topbanana wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can, but you are penalised for doing so.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#85

Post by yrizos »

topbanana wrote: post #84
streptomycin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can, but you are penalised for doing so.

Penalised? You spend some imaginary points and in return you get more chances for a good answer to your question... That's a fair tradeoff, if you ask me...

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#86

Post by leviathant »

DodgyEggplant wrote: post #23
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…

'The moderators are also awful.' +1 the more interesting questions about beautiful code, attitude to coding etc are closed. If it's not "set X to Y", they close it.

In my opinion, that's a feature and not a bug.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#87

Post by yrizos »

beyti wrote: post #25
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…

Totally agree on the so called subjective questions. The idea should be "wide-open your minds" instead of everybody's "how can I cast it to list" questions.

Why would you want Stack Overflow to be about "wide-open your minds", when Hacker News is perfectly suitable for that?

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#88

Post by SonicSoul »

BennyMcBenBen wrote: post #82
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…

'The moderators are also awful.' SO is holding elections right now. If you feel the moderators are doing a poor job, why not vote for a moderator who shares your beliefs?

that seems futile. unless you're a serious power user you're not going to keep track of who the good/bad moderators are. i guess everyone could go back to their closed questions and see who closed them? although it usually takes a few votes and i'm not sure if you can even see who the close votes came from. I couldn't agree more that moderators on SO are awful, but not going to spend time tracking them down and down voting in hopes this will somehow change their behavior. All of my slightly subjective questions got closed, and in frustration i'd see similar types of questions get up to hundreds or thousands of points. What is this subjective rule anyway? why do they have to be closed? can't users just read the question and decide if they want to move on? if a question is getting up voted, who cares how subjective it is? it's obviously liked by some people.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#89

Post by dwc »

jcastro wrote: post #32
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.

I understand the "meta is murder" argument, and it's a tough and deadly problem. But I don't think splitting the meta into a separate site is the answer. You end up with a very strange self selection problem, where the "meta" community isn't very representative of the community at all.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#90

Post by yrizos »

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…

Heh, the good old "high-quality content" argument... Any links to the almost-always-crap content you consider high quality? Don't get me wrong, it could actually be high quality, it's just that it rarely is... Links or it didn't happen.
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