Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
michael.richter.name
Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
1–10 of 243 posts
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#2I also find the quality of answers, and of questions(!) poor. A little googling usually finds better information. And then there's the line-going-dead issue that plagues most question/answer forums (fora?): after some back-and-forth somebody suggests to try something, and the supplicant never responds. Did that work, and they went on with their life? Did they give up? Are they still trying to find an answer? Nobody will ever know.
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#3Most of this is just a symptom of Stack Overflow being too successful. It was good when it was just a few thousand good/nice people. Now that it has critical mass, you have to deal with the rest of the people. I doubt that the problems are going to be solved by having good people leave.
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#4I also find the quality of answers, and of questions(!) poor. A little googling usually finds better information. And then there's the line-going-dead issue that plagues most question/answer forums (fora?): after some back-and-forth somebody suggests to try something, and the supplicant never responds. Did that work, and they went on with their life? Did they give up? Are they still trying to find an answer? Nobody w…
That could be cleaned up by having the system either flag or remove questions that have no conclusion.
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#5In four years you should have learnt that it's "Stack Overflow" with a space and that you can only get moderator status when you have a diamond next to your name.
Then again, there are plenty of 3-year+ users with 100k+ who still think moderators are any other users who disagree with them and/or can only vote to close a question.
When you don't want to see the effects of leaving joke questions around as more and more users use that as a reason to increase the noise, then you don't want to see why moderation and locking/deleting needs to take place.
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#6I want to tell the OP to stop being such a buzz-kill, but the high-scoring example he posts is quite comical (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2387218/what-does-this-li...).
It seems that most of the OP's angst are over the relatively simplistic points system. In his Java ternary example, perhaps it could be counterbalanced with the upvotes you receive and the worthiness of the question (as marked by stars and upvotes). But then the scoring system would become much less obvious and then you'd have complaints about that.
Either way, even with the deluge of non-useful content...I'm amazed at Google's ability to almost always get me to the most relevant discussion, even with a bare amount of generalizing my search query...and in the cherry-picking testing I've done, the Google search engine usually does a better job than SO's own engine (though SO's related-questions sidebar is also quite good). I wonder if some Googler's 20%-time idea was to closely study the SO API and build an algorithm and quality flags specific to the SO domain, as a way to keep devs loyal to the Google search platform?
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#7Overall I agree, but I think his analogy of feeding fish vs teaching is a bit of a chicken and egg problem: oftentimes today if I'm googling a trivial problem, Stack Overflow is the first result, and I'm actually glad that is the case the majority of the time.
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#8His bullet #2 under "Creeping authoritarianism" is so incredibly correct! It's exactly what happened to wikipedia, and why editors are leaving in droves.
With Stack Overflow it's simply not worth it to answer a difficult question, the time to point ratio is just not there, and to make it worse it's all about speed - how fast you can answer, because once the question goes off the home page you will get basically no points. So a hard question is doubly bad - it takes a long time, and by the time you are done you'll get no points.
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#9In four years you should have learnt that it's "Stack Overflow" with a space and that you can only get moderator status when you have a diamond next to your name. Then again, there are plenty of 3-year+ users with 100k+ who still think moderators are any other users who disagree with them and/or can only vote to close a question. When you don't want to see the effects of leaving joke questions around as more and more…
There are a set of tools that you gain access to when you hit 10k reputation, which are often referred to as the "10k moderator tools." I think this is what the author is talking about when he says he was close to moderator status.
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#10StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly. And see some ads.
That's really it. Everything it does is geared toward that, and it does it quite well.
I have lots of SO points. A lot of them have come from answering common, basic questions. If you think points exist to prove merit, that's bad. But if you think points exist to show "this person makes the kind of content that brings programmers to our site and makes them happy", it's good. The latter is their intent.
Does having easy answers available on SO make us dumber? I doubt it. People have made the same argument about search engines, and you probably could have said the same about encyclopedias.