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Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

michael.richter.name

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Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#41

Post by compare »

nathan_long wrote: post #10

StackOverflow 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…

Fascinating that OP became a worker in a critical part of Google's machine, and he didn't even realize it.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#42

Post by schrodinger »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #32
jordan0day wrote: post #17

> There's an old cliché in English: give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. StackOverflow is filled to the brim with people giving fishes. This hits the nail on the head, imo. While the SO system is (presumably) meant to reward "karma" based on the quality of answers, more often than not it seems that quantity is just as important. And it's not hard to see why this is the ca…

more often than not it seems that quantity is just as important. And it's not hard to see why this is the case -- there's an inherent risk in typing a well thought-out (read: time consuming and potentially long) answer This is what turned me off from SO. The strategy to garner points (at least in the topics I'm expert in) is to lurk waiting for quickly-answered questions. Pounce on these, by entering a rough, approxi…

I usually write the short answer and submit, and then edit to provide more detail to avoid this problem.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#43

Post by agon »

crntaylor wrote: post #31

The author's main problem stems from his desire to use Stack Overflow as a mechanism for gaining internet points - as is illustrated by his confession that "I saw a simple Java question, hit Google, read briefly, then synthesized an original answer." Why bother? Instead, I use Stack Overflow predominantly for three reasons -- 1. To ask interesting questions that I think will get a better answer there than anywhere el…

I agree. I view SO in a similar manner as you. Several times I've been able to find explanations of bizarre behavior from different frameworks that weren't listed in the official documentation.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#44

Post by cruise02 »

pygy_ wrote: post #22

The LuaJIT author, Mike Pall recently stopped contributing to SO [0] after having an edit on one of his own posts about LuaJIT reverted by clueless mods [1]. The reply was highly precise and technical, and the reasons given by the mods to reject the edit are spurious, since they just couldn't understand it and its implications. I reached out to two of them (I couldn't find how to contact the third one), but they didn…

It's generally accepted by the community at Stack Overflow that you don't edit other people's answers except to make improvements to formatting and punctuation. Changing the code should be left to the original author of the post, as that changes the meaning of the answer. The people who rejected the edit probably didn't notice that it was the same person who suggested the edit.

Mike could have avoided that by just using the same account to edit his original post. You can always edit your own work without it going through the review process.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#45

Post by shortstuffsushi »

crntaylor wrote: post #31

The author's main problem stems from his desire to use Stack Overflow as a mechanism for gaining internet points - as is illustrated by his confession that "I saw a simple Java question, hit Google, read briefly, then synthesized an original answer." Why bother? Instead, I use Stack Overflow predominantly for three reasons -- 1. To ask interesting questions that I think will get a better answer there than anywhere el…

That actually seems to be just the opposite of what he was saying. He stated that he believes this mechanism is broken, to the point that after two years of inactivity, the votes he receives his old answers have kept him in the top 3% of scorers.

He's not looking for votes, he's saying it's silly how trivial it is to get them, and also how many points he gets off of a simple LMGTFY answer (your quote), vs how few he gets off a well thought out and explained one (the kernel answer, I believe).

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#46

Post by frobozz »

IMHO, The banning of "what have you tried", and the removal of "too localized" will lead to even more poor pedagogy.

The question to which the author links (2387218) is a perfect example of a wholly unresearched question, where the only possible valid answers are "RTFM/STFW" or "here's a fish".

This was the kind of thing that would have been deleted under "too localized" as it offers no benefit for future seekers of enlightenment.

I suppose it may be flagged for deletion according to this criterion:

> Questions asking for code must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem being solved. Include attempted solutions, why they didn't work, and the expected results.

but that doesn't quite seem to fit. The question is not "give me teh codez", but it does show that the asker has not attempted any solutions.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#47

Post by infogulch »

jordan0day wrote: post #17

> There's an old cliché in English: give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. StackOverflow is filled to the brim with people giving fishes. This hits the nail on the head, imo. While the SO system is (presumably) meant to reward "karma" based on the quality of answers, more often than not it seems that quantity is just as important. And it's not hard to see why this is the ca…

Paraphrasing: 'the SO system rewards karma based on the quality of answers'

Fixed: 'the SO system rewards karma based on the number of people that find an answer useful'

The population of people needing answers is heavily biased towards newbies. 100% of new programmers need answers to simple questions. (And only a small fraction of them have learned how to use search Google or documentation properly.) 60% of those never move on to more advanced questions [0]. Therefore advanced questions cannot ever target more than 40% of the total user base, where basic syntax-questions target 100%.

It's even worse when you consider that most of the really advanced questions that can generate the most awesome answers are never asked because the advanced users know how to teach themselves and don't need SO.

[0] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm...

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#48

Post by crntaylor »

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #45
crntaylor wrote: post #31

The author's main problem stems from his desire to use Stack Overflow as a mechanism for gaining internet points - as is illustrated by his confession that "I saw a simple Java question, hit Google, read briefly, then synthesized an original answer." Why bother? Instead, I use Stack Overflow predominantly for three reasons -- 1. To ask interesting questions that I think will get a better answer there than anywhere el…

That actually seems to be just the opposite of what he was saying. He stated that he believes this mechanism is broken, to the point that after two years of inactivity, the votes he receives his old answers have kept him in the top 3% of scorers. He's not looking for votes, he's saying it's silly how trivial it is to get them, and also how many points he gets off of a simple LMGTFY answer (your quote), vs how few he…

My point is that it's silly to care about how many points you have in the first place.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#49

Post by Guvante »

jdludlow wrote: post #36
pygy_ wrote: post #22

The LuaJIT author, Mike Pall recently stopped contributing to SO [0] after having an edit on one of his own posts about LuaJIT reverted by clueless mods [1]. The reply was highly precise and technical, and the reasons given by the mods to reject the edit are spurious, since they just couldn't understand it and its implications. I reached out to two of them (I couldn't find how to contact the third one), but they didn…

It looks like user Tobu already fixed it, but that is quite ridiculous.

Seems that the reviewers ignored the comment.

I know I have seen nearly 1 in 20 edit suggestions are some random person suggesting an edit to a post that completely changes the meaning.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#50

Post by JimDabell »

The site seems designed to enable lazy developers to scrape by without learning how to do things properly. There are developers out there who, when faced with a problem, don't bother debugging, don't bother looking at the documentation, don't bother searching Google for the error message, but just post a question on Stack Overflow and wait for somebody to solve their problem for them.

I've seen questions where you can literally copy and paste the question into Google, look at the first result to find an authoritative source, and copy sample code to solve the problem. Yet that was apparently too difficult for the person asking on Stack Overflow, and if anybody points out they should be doing this, they get their comment removed.

I've answered a lot of questions where somebody is genuinely stuck on a difficult problem and it's taken serious effort to figure out what's going on. I've also answered questions where the answer is only a quick Google search away. The former get a couple of votes up. The latter get hundreds of votes up.

This is not a healthy addition to the software development community. This is enabling developers with a vitally important gap in their skills to avoid becoming competent.

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