111–120 of 179 posts
I believe it. And that's not even counting looking up answers or getting your questions answered. When I am truly stumped, I immediately start drafting a comprehensive SO question. Nine times out of ten, clearly enunciating the problem leads me directly to the answer and I never even post it.
A lot of time has been spent by developers trying to get points. There is a cost to that. The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation. If there was no StackOverflow the vendors would have to do better. I'm thinking of msdn as an example since a lot of the Stack questions are MS technology based. MS is far from alone though. Much of the money saved has gone to vendors. Even given those po…
The site has enabled software vendors to slack off on their documentation ... I'm thinking of msdn as an example The number of questions on SO that can be answered by RTFM is quite remarkable. I think that points to a lot of the documentation being just fine. The last bug of my own I spent any significant of time on was answerable by RTFM [1]. There are plenty of PHP+MySQL questions that appear where the OP is clearl…
And then there's also the problem of cross-technology questions, where you have a question of combining multiple technologies. These kind of questions are usually a bad fit for documentation.
Even with that though, it has undeniably saved me time. All told though, possibly not as much as Google results for blogs talking about similar things, which usually have a lot more context so you can determine if it's still accurate or not. SO has huge bit-rot problems.
Wikipedia, Youtube, Google, StackExchange, should all get world peace awards.
- That as soon as an answer to something is on StackOverflow, it isn't available anywhere else
- That every pageview on an answer saves someone 10$. Everyone running any kind of webpage knows how small of a percentage of the views is from people really trying to use it at all, and likely even among those a large fraction does not have any particular problem, but just view those "top 100 books" etc. mini-articles.
It is the internet and www in general that enables people to be connected and share ideas. There's no reason to credit specific sites like Facebook or eBay with connecting people, because someone else would have done it (possibly better) if they had not.
I think there's plenty of credit to go around. Stack Overflow's fundamental decisions (gamification, open content, canonicity, searchability) were very significant in releasing valuable knowledge from the arcane vaults of obscure forums and mailing lists, not to mention creating a reliable(-ish) place to go for new questions. The project also represents an interesting template for community curation (which was begun…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's good but SE is a federation of sites, so it's an unfair comparison. From the start I've always thought that the biggest danger to SO/SE wasn't failure, you guys are smart enough to see and recover from outright failure. Instead it's reaching a level of success far below what you're capable of. It seems to me that SO/SE spent a lot of work innovating in the early days but once they found their comfort zone they…
"I remember back when you and Jeff were talking about taking over the way all online discussion happened." Aren't they now -- or at least Jeff Atwood -- working on Discourse?
See http://discuss.emberjs.com/ and http://bbs.boingboing.net/ for real world implementations. It's very, very cool to see forums being dragged out of the 1990s.