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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

#231

Post by dinkumthinkum »

vitd wrote: post #218
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're wrong. If this was true, why is it that nearly any question you find on SO from Google is marked as "closed for not conforming to ideology or other arbitrary reason."

What are you searching for? I've literally never seen this on anything on Stack Overflow when coming from Google. I have seen it on some posts while I've been using the site directly, and it's almost always justified, from what I can tell.

Really? It's a pretty well-known, common complaint.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#232

Post by mark-r »

vitd wrote: post #216
praveenhm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the most annoying part of stack overflow,instead of closing the discussion,they should have a provision to move to more opinionated discussion list.

They do. When you vote to close a question (and anyone can do that, not just moderators), you have to give a reason. One of the predefined reasons is "belongs on SuperUser stack exchange," and another where you can fill in a reason, such as "belongs on Programmer stack exchange." (Programmer is for code review, style questions, opinion-based stuff, etc.)

My experience is that programmers.stackexchange is even more militant about closing questions than stackoverflow. I guess they got tired of receiving all of the unwanted garbage and it makes them extra sensitive.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#234

Post by dennisgorelik »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #197
dennisgorelik wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Michael Richter mistakenly assumes that "hard work == productivity". "Tough to solve C++ problems" are not in as high demand as relatively easy to answer Java questions. Stack Overflow scoring system captures that.

demand != productivity Questions that google can answer are low-productivity, possibly anti-productive if they cause people to hit stackoverflow instead of language docs. Hard questions can completely save the day of a few people, and teach even more.

High demand for your effort means that your efforts scale better, which in turn improves productivity.

If your answer saved 30 minutes of effort for 10000 developers then it's 5 times better than to save 10 hours of effort for 100 developers.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#235

Post by Dylan16807 »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #234
Dylan16807 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

demand != productivity Questions that google can answer are low-productivity, possibly anti-productive if they cause people to hit stackoverflow instead of language docs. Hard questions can completely save the day of a few people, and teach even more.

High demand for your effort means that your efforts scale better, which in turn improves productivity. If your answer saved 30 minutes of effort for 10000 developers then it's 5 times better than to save 10 hours of effort for 100 developers.

If the easy questions were saving the time of that many people I wouldn't expect them to be re-asked so often. And the tricky expert-needing questions can teach you something about the language/platform/etc. even if you never encounter that specific problem. The 'fish' questions don't do that so much.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#236

Post by mark-r »

itsadok wrote: post #210
protomyth wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you fix the edit also?

Somebody else already had, a month ago. http://stackoverflow.com/revisions/11318414/4

So eventually the system was self correcting. Unfortunately that may be too late to redeem the site in the eyes of the contributor.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#237

Post by dspillett »

avalaunch wrote: post #110
dspillett wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). I don't contribute much to SO, though I do a fair bit to some other SE sites (SF, SU, DBA) and it is the same on those but there is a fairly logical explanation most of the time. A question that requires a more detailed answer is often more specific…

True but nobody is refuting the logic of how it works. They're refuting the reasoning behind why it works that way. As is, you get more points and labeled as an expert of a language if you choose to answer the easy, low hanging fruit questions. On the other hand, if you actually are an expert of a language and tackle those questions that only experts can answer, you get 10x-100x less points.

But aren't the problems which only experts can answer by their very nature both problems that most people won't encounter and problems that most passers-by are not likely to feel confident passing judgement on possible solutions for? There is the "bounty" system which I think tries to account for that a bit but I don't see it often used, other than that the only way around the expert requiring problem problem is some form of manual curation by domain experts, which would potentially introduce a small shipment of other worm cans.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#238

Post by V-2 »

iconjack wrote: post #132
V-2 wrote: post #91

"In well over two years I have contributed nothing to StackOverflow: no questions, no answers, nothing. (Well, that's not true. When my score went over 10,000 I tried out the moderator powers for a couple of edits, just to test them out.) Over one third of my reputation was "earned" from me doing absolutely nothing for over two years." So what? Apparently his answers were valuable enough and saved the time (and nerve…

Ironically, the question you linked to is exactly the kind that gets closed so often on StackOverflow as being "not a real question" or some such. Thankfully, when they close something it doesn't get deleted.

They do delete worthless questions, spam questions etc.

The example may be a bit off, I didn't put much effort into finding one (I just searched for questions tagged with design-patterns, since this is a relatively "timeless" subject, and I picked one with a highly-rated answer), so I surely could've chosen a better one, my point still stands I believe

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#239

Post by V-2 »

alecdbrooks wrote: post #164
V-2 wrote: post #91

"In well over two years I have contributed nothing to StackOverflow: no questions, no answers, nothing. (Well, that's not true. When my score went over 10,000 I tried out the moderator powers for a couple of edits, just to test them out.) Over one third of my reputation was "earned" from me doing absolutely nothing for over two years." So what? Apparently his answers were valuable enough and saved the time (and nerve…

>"Indeed I went from the top 4% of contributors at my time of departure to the top 3%" >OMG, I didn't realize this issue was so serious. It's actually a fairly big jump. If you look at a distribution of Stack Exchange users[0], it follows a power law distribution, where many users have few points and a handful have a lot[1]. Once you reach the 96th percentile, it takes a fairly large jump in reputation to get to 97.…

This "alternate possibility" is one that came to my mind when I thought about this. Of course one could try to verify it.

And anyway - now, I understand that this is beside the point you are making now; just returning to the context set by the article - let me stress that I still fail to see how this is a problem.

It would be very simple to "fix" the scoring in this regard, all it takes is to disable voting in questions older than 30 days, for example. But I'm stumped on how SO would benefit from such a move.

Quite the opposite - this would be an obvious incentive for repeating oneself (or others); reposting old explanations to keep on scoring points off the same know-how. Plus time-wasting fights on what is and what is not a duplicate, etc.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#240

Post by V-2 »

alecdbrooks wrote: post #164
V-2 wrote: post #91

"In well over two years I have contributed nothing to StackOverflow: no questions, no answers, nothing. (Well, that's not true. When my score went over 10,000 I tried out the moderator powers for a couple of edits, just to test them out.) Over one third of my reputation was "earned" from me doing absolutely nothing for over two years." So what? Apparently his answers were valuable enough and saved the time (and nerve…

>"Indeed I went from the top 4% of contributors at my time of departure to the top 3%" >OMG, I didn't realize this issue was so serious. It's actually a fairly big jump. If you look at a distribution of Stack Exchange users[0], it follows a power law distribution, where many users have few points and a handful have a lot[1]. Once you reach the 96th percentile, it takes a fairly large jump in reputation to get to 97.…

By the way, this Data Explorer is very interesting, I had no idea it existed, thanks
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