Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

StackOverflow seems to have devolved into a bunch of shit questions. Anything too technical doesn't get answered, since the real veterans have left, and anything not technical enough (like an approach to a problem) gets closed.

I loved SO in the beginning. Now it's a cesspool.

That's certainly a good point, but it seems wasteful to copy, just in case. Surely though multiple links would decrease that chance.

What I was really getting at was wholesale monotonous rewrites. A lot of the web in my mind could be DRYed up. But perhaps redundancy isn't the issue I think it is.

I do feel I do a lot of toing and froing with searches. More than in the past, but possibly that's just because there is so much more information to filter. I'd have thought that healthy linking would help search engines.

To me Stack Overflow is the new "Experts Exchange"

I love Java and I love the Java ecosystem. Stack Exchange serves the Java ecosystem very poorly however.

A lot of the frustration people have with Java is that they try to learn it from a task-oriented perspective, and that really gets you in trouble if you work with Spring or Maven, particularly on a big team. If your first experience is with a 40-module Maven project that is all SNAPSHOT releases, it takes two hours to do a complete build, and there are just two people who understand maven vs 23 developers who get their answers a problem at a time from StackOverflow and who copy each others' bad solutions while adding more problems, of course you hate Maven.

In the case of Maven the documentation sux and you need to read the source code and not be afraid to write plug-ins, but Spring is not so mysterious if you take your tablet to the gym and read the manual cover to cover a few times.

There is no language that favors holistic thinking and punishes "task-oriented" thinking more than Java. For instance, when most developers have to deal with logging it's because things have gotten horribly tangled up with slf4j and commons-logging. Once more, the situation is pretty simple if you understand the big picture, but from a task oriented perspective you're just stumbling in the dark.

You're using the fact that he had two accounts as an excuse, but it really doesn't hold up. This was an edit with inarguable merit. Yet users rejected it because they were using the heuristic "changes to code is bad" as a substitute for understanding the edit. That's bad moderation. If you don't understand a change, you shouldn't vote on its worthiness.

Speaking as a contributor and reviewer on Super User and Stack Overflow, your opinion of what should happen is shared by more or less everyone who is an established member of the community. The trouble is that there are a lot of newbies, many of whom don't take time either to read the "about" and "how to ask good questions" advice which the sites make prominently available for new users, or to characterize their problem in sufficient detail to make it solvable, or to search for the trivially obvious answer to whatever question they're asking.

Once you've seen enough of this sort of thing -- and, again, especially on the highly popular sites there is a lot of it -- there's a certain fatigue which sets in; you get jaded, I suppose, and that seems from what I've seen to be the proximate cause for newbie questions getting downvoted to oblivion or flagged for closure without anyone taking a moment to advise the asker on what he should've done differently.

Is this ideal? Of course not; in fact, it's not even close, and I say that as someone who has considerable experience with the phenomenon so described. But Stack Exchange sites are moderated by volunteers, and you can't issue ukazes to volunteers without a significant risk of losing them -- after all, if you make them not want to do what they do, they'll just stop doing it.

In any case, just as a community can be judged by its attitude toward newbies, so can those newbies be judged by their attitude toward the community in which they attempt to participate. As in any other such case, it is entirely reasonable for those who have invested time and effort into Stack Exchange sites to expect that new users will deport themselves with respect for the rules and mores of the community.

With regard to giving the ability to comment to new and unregistered users, there's a problem similar to that of low-quality newbie questions; so to broaden the provision of commenting privilege would produce an instant and enduring deluge of spam. You really can't expect volunteers to handle sewage disposal, especially when the sewage is deep enough to require hip waders. Again, this is not ideal, but it is a consequence of the Stack Exchange model's basic assumptions, and I'd have to say that model has acquitted itself well enough in practice to vindicate the claims made on its behalf.