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StackOverflow unwinding?

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Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#181

Post by excuse-me »

nathan_long wrote: post #177
excuse-me wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving the problem of 100 new questions 90 of which are just dupes of existing PHP/Python answers and nobody can spot and answer the new Ruby ones

They've had a feature for a long time where you can mark which tags you want to see and which you don't.

Which works if the confused new user knows enough about the problem to tag it accurately.

There are a lot of questions tagged openGL asking how to do file wildcards (to load images) or visual-studio about how to pass arrays to functions

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#182

Post by TylerE »

cruise02 wrote: post #179
TylerE wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My fundamental problem with that approach is that I don't want to read 5 sites. I want to read 1 site with the content I want on it. The ghettoization of stack-exchange was a mistake. Give me an interface more like reddit - let me pick which areas I want to see questions from, all merged on to one page.

Here you go http://stackexchange.com/questions Click the "Filtered Questions" link at the top to customize it.

Hrrm, that's a start. Any way to get this in the SO theme? I like that lot more than the SE layout.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#183

Post by cruise02 »

TylerE wrote: post #182
cruise02 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go http://stackexchange.com/questions Click the "Filtered Questions" link at the top to customize it.

Hrrm, that's a start. Any way to get this in the SO theme? I like that lot more than the SE layout.

No, I don't think I've ever seen any official support for customizing themes. There is the Hot Dog theme for SO (http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/34939/1288) that you might be able to use as a starting point for a custom user theme.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#184

Post by TylerE »

cruise02 wrote: post #183
TylerE wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hrrm, that's a start. Any way to get this in the SO theme? I like that lot more than the SE layout.

No, I don't think I've ever seen any official support for customizing themes. There is the Hot Dog theme for SO ( http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/34939/1288 ) that you might be able to use as a starting point for a custom user theme.

Sorry, should have been more clear. What I really meant was having things like the score, number of answers, etc, in nice big numbers next to the question.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#185

Post by wpietri »

codinghorror wrote: post #171
wpietri wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. It's his blog. Providing you with hard evidence to drive your product design process isn't his job. It's yours.

He provided no evidence. Do some science, don't waste everyone's time with unsubstantiated opinions. That's actually what Stack Exchange is about, so it's not surprising I guess that there's this impedance mismatch. If you want to just have a bunch of opinions, take it to Quora.

So you get to set the rules for what appears not only on Stack Exchange, but some guy's own blog? I'd love to see your explanation for that.

If you want to see if he has evidence, try asking him. And not in a "it's your job to argue with me" way. Call him up on the phone, ask open questions, and then listen to the answers without being demanding or dismissive like you are here.

That's a pretty basic product management skill. If it's something you're not familiar with, plenty of people teach classes. I know the Luxr folks do a good job, for example.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#186

Post by wpietri »

cruise02 wrote: post #178
wpietri wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anybody here complained about wanting off-topic questions? The linked article sure isn't.

From the linked article: > ...throw out the gazillion-sub-site silliness and broaden allowed topics for discussion.

Right. That's a sign that people disagree about what exactly is on-topic. Not a sign that people want to turn it into an anything-goes meme factory.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#187

Post by willvarfar »

kamaal wrote: post #150
debacle wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO is slowly driving away the more senior participants who haven't been drawn in by the gamification of the site. Every few months it seems like the questions on the site are more and more of the "I could have googled this but it was faster to ask it on SO." variety. In short, SO is becoming a Mechanical Turk for searching for answers to software questions, and the reason is because Google is becoming less and less u…

I think SO will be happy if they will be able to become a database for most common programming problems. That is where the crowd is, mediocre programmers are plenty and they won't be asking expert questions either. They need hand holding at every step. And if you could answer all they question they have, you could serve a huge crowd. On other hand, asking expert questions may make you an awesome site. But the target…

(blog author)

+1 aha this!

This is really the root cause perhaps?

This is why Joel and the chap whose own code is a horror are here talking quantity in reply to a blog post about quality perhaps?

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#188

Post by roel_v »

simonsarris wrote: post #100
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…

Also, very difficult questions get relatively few points compared to very easy ones when they are answered. I pride myself in answering some of the trickier questions in my domain, ie http://stackoverflow.com/q/10060242/154112 Those are easily the questions I feel the best about after answering, and really they generate the best encouragement by far. Much better than points is seeing this: http://i.imgur.com/POZmt.pn…

"Also, very difficult questions get relatively few points compared to very easy ones when they are answered."

Yeah, this. It hurts my eyes to see that most of my rep on SO I got from A) Recommending the K&R for a starters' C book, and B) for explaining how the @ works for error message suppression in PHP.

While the numerous questions I answered that took actual experience and hard work, hardly ever get an upvote, let alone an 'accept', presumably because whoever asked it doesn't care enough about the issue to do the work required to solve a hard problem, even if the principles are handed to him.

This is one of the main reasons I hardly use SO anymore, myself.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#189

Post by willvarfar »

codinghorror wrote: post #132
wpietri wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they don't want Stack Overflow to be a social network. But like Soylent Green, it's made out of people. In SO's case, inconveniently alive people. Humans are inherently social, and the amount of effort SO staff and moderators have to go to trying to stamp that out is a sign that SO really is a social network. I always think it's a bad sign when product designers think they know much better than their users what…

We do listen to the people! No other site gives so much power to regular users, up to and including moderator elections. The problem with listening to the people too much is that popularity becomes the most important metric, with predictable results: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul... It's a balancing act. What people actually want, and what they think they want, are often two different h…

so what should I do with my most recent post? http://serverfault.com/questions/400268/profile-long-running...

Should I submit the same question to SO instead?

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#190

Post by cruise02 »

TylerE wrote: post #184
cruise02 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think I've ever seen any official support for customizing themes. There is the Hot Dog theme for SO ( http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/34939/1288 ) that you might be able to use as a starting point for a custom user theme.

Sorry, should have been more clear. What I really meant was having things like the score, number of answers, etc, in nice big numbers next to the question.

Oh, not on the official site. I don't think that page is updated in real time, so the vote counts would be off by quite a bit for the hottest questions on each site. You might find an app on http://stackapps.com/ that uses the API though.
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