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

Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

stum.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 62 posts

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#41

Post by MrDOS »

StackOverflow is being killed by its overzealous moderation, as was Wikipedia a year or so ago before they backed off a bit. Let's sample a random question from the `php` tag: [1]. The question is not particularly well-asked, but I think it's fairly obvious that the answer is a union of the three tables. And yet, because he phrased his question as a requirement (it's the last sentence) and not an absolute question, it's been closed – even though I understand the question and possess the ability to give an answer (and maybe even edit the original question to improve its readability), I've been rendered unable to do so.

I think the big problem I have with quickly-closed questions is that they get just as thoroughly indexed on Google as answered questions. This becomes a particular problem with niche topics; last summer, I was tasked with some Salesforce development and the number of unanswered, closed APEX questions I found was astonishing.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17237166/sql-query-query-...

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#44

Post by jackmaney »

MrDOS wrote: post #41

StackOverflow is being killed by its overzealous moderation, as was Wikipedia a year or so ago before they backed off a bit. Let's sample a random question from the `php` tag: [1]. The question is not particularly well-asked, but I think it's fairly obvious that the answer is a union of the three tables. And yet, because he phrased his question as a requirement (it's the last sentence) and not an absolute question, i…

Stack Overflow is not a bargain-basement alternative to Elance, Odesk, or rent-a-coder.com, whereby people can get code snippets vomited at them for free. As was made evident in the comments, the OP of the question needed to show what he tried.

Also, closed questions can be edited. That's the main point of closing a question: to send a signal to the OP that the question needs to be edited and improved.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#45

Post by gnaritas »

MrDOS wrote: post #41

StackOverflow is being killed by its overzealous moderation, as was Wikipedia a year or so ago before they backed off a bit. Let's sample a random question from the `php` tag: [1]. The question is not particularly well-asked, but I think it's fairly obvious that the answer is a union of the three tables. And yet, because he phrased his question as a requirement (it's the last sentence) and not an absolute question, i…

Closing that question was appropriate. Moderation is good, it keeps the signal to noise ratio in check. It is not being killed, it's being helped; the site would be far less useful without the moderation as would Wikipedia.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#46

Post by gregd »

markdown wrote: post #16

Maybe it's just me, or the type of questions I ask, but I've found SO to be a little elitist. I love it for the fact I very often find answers there, but almost every time I've asked a question, the responses or lack thereof have been pretty brutal.

It's not just you and it gets worse on sites like SF where it's horribly elitist. On SO, it definitely depends on the category of your question. I've found that C# questions, which tend to be the most popular category, generally have the most thorough and complete answers, which I also don't find to be as elitist as some of the other categories.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#47

Post by gregd »

I was a heavy SO user during it's first year or so, until a user named RichB started harassing me (and others) on the site, to the point where he got put in the penalty box many, many times over the years. I guess I just realized it wasn't worth getting so upset at a very small subset of the users/trolls and investing my time & energy into the site and quit visiting regularly.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#48

Post by smackfu »

Is there any way to find actual interesting questions/answers on SO? It seems like the top questions by votes are always dominated by language spec arcana, which interests me not at all. But then I find links to great answers and questions from HN and elsewhere pretty regularly.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#49

Post by teh_klev »

MrDOS wrote: post #41

StackOverflow is being killed by its overzealous moderation, as was Wikipedia a year or so ago before they backed off a bit. Let's sample a random question from the `php` tag: [1]. The question is not particularly well-asked, but I think it's fairly obvious that the answer is a union of the three tables. And yet, because he phrased his question as a requirement (it's the last sentence) and not an absolute question, i…

That's a plz-send-teh-codez question. OP demonstrated no effort at all in solving his problem and couldn't be bothered learning how to format his question.

If the OP had provided a snippet of SQL or suggested a theory on how this might be solved, even if it was completely wrong, then the question would have remained open, gotten a few answers and perhaps even upvoted.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#50

Post by mwfunk »

SO is sort of like Wikipedia in that they're tremendously useful sites that are widely misunderstood. So many of the complaints about them seem to be based on misunderstanding their purpose. People see SO for the first time and jump to the conclusion that SO is sort of like Reddit, and that Wikipedia is someplace where anybody can write anything about anything. When the moderation works against them, they blame "asshole mods" instead of their own ignorance of the purpose of the sites themselves.

(not that there aren't asshole mods, but that's beside the point)

Anyway, hooray for SO (and hooray for Wikipedia), pretty much the rest of the web is composed of anything-goes sites and I love that they actively try to craft a particular experience.

Post reply on HN