As the years roll by I appreciate more and more the fact I learned how to program back when there was just IRC and if you asked a trivial question all you got was 'RTFM'
Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
81–90 of 243 posts
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#82Why would anyone care whether one Mr. Richter bothers to collect more points in Stack Overflow anymore?
Despite ALL the criticism in the article, it is still possible that StackOverflow is a very useful site.
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#83I think most of you are missing the point of the article. He targets SO specifically in this article but really, it can be applied to almost any community on the Internet. He mentions Wikipedia specifically but I've seen the same thing repeated over and over on forums, games, and even the IETF for over a decade. The question is: Is there a way to fix this?
I don't think so. As an Internet community grows, it loses focus and it changes, which makes it different (not necessarily "bad", but a different one that started). Also, the increase in number of members makes more difficult to follow who the members are, which is one of the key points of making you feel "part of the community" (plus the potential increase in trolls, even if signal to noise ratio is still good)
There are also stuff like repeated subjects, etc...
I've been in enough communities to see the same pattern repeated. I'm not really sure it can be fixed...
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#84I stopped contributing to SO because of this:
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/19659/search-filters...
Specifically, to keep SO interesting to me, I wanted to have a custom search that eliminated low-rep users from my view - questions from people who are able to answer questions (e.g. able to Google) are much more interesting.
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#85I think most of you are missing the point of the article. He targets SO specifically in this article but really, it can be applied to almost any community on the Internet. He mentions Wikipedia specifically but I've seen the same thing repeated over and over on forums, games, and even the IETF for over a decade. The question is: Is there a way to fix this?
Fix what exactly?
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#86Everytime I google a question and get a stack overflow result, it is always an unanswered and locked question for silly neckbeard pedantic reasons.
Stop Googling for "what's your favorite programmer t-shirt" and that won't happen as often.
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of that changes the fact that his valid edit was rejected by incompetent mods.
99.99% of the time, rejecting a suggested edit that changes code is the right thing to to. The competence of the reviewers isn't really the issue. The author should have just used his original account to make the edit and this would have been a non-issue.
He probably didn't realise he had two accounts.
The incompetence of the mods is relevant because it is one of the main criticism of TFA. It's a nice example of the Pete principle.
If a mod doesn't understand an answer he should just pass, not vote according to what's right most of the time. They are incompetent, both regarding LuaJIT and as moderators.
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#88Did he ever think that stackoverflow is about building a library of questions and answers so it is easier for people to find answers on Google?!
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#89The 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…
A very unfortunate incident, but there are bound to be mistakes made when there are tens of thousands of developers and over six million questions. Eventually, bugs are going to appear. The kind of dumb mistakes that developers (and other humans) make all the time. That doesn't make the error any less painful. Stuff happens.
Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow
#90DON'T TRUST ME BLINDLY: I work for Stack Exchange, so I'm totally biased. On the other hand, I left a lucrative career in finance for a lot less money here because I believe in what we're doing, so there's that. MOST IMPORTANTLY: I appreciate Michael's feedback, and he worries about a lot of the same things I do. Moreover, we are incredibly grateful for all he's done over the years - my honest belief is that his cont…
Add a custom search option that can filter people by reputation level, or by question to answer ratio.
I want to answer questions from people who are able to Google, and who are able to answer questions.
Another thing: add a custom search option that can find tumbleweed questions. I asked about it here:
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/14738/tumbleweed-que...
But Jeff thought it was already implemented, when it's not. The advanced search finds questions with a minimum number of views, not a maximum number of views.