Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

embeddedrelated.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 239 posts

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#41

Post by nraynaud »

jarrettc wrote: post #22

I've always been uneasy about the fact that Stack Overflow users can edit each other's posts more or less arbitrarily. User A can edit user B's post to say something embarrassing, and most readers will attribute it to User B. I've had this happen with my posts. It's never been egregious, like a user inserting something inflammatory into my otherwise mundane programming question. Most often, the offending edits give t…

And people karma-whoring on your question. Nobody has the answer, but your question has been edited 10 times.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#42

Post by jobu »

jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

Wasn't there a similar debate over Quality vs Quantity with the Wikipedia community a few years back? It's been a while, but I remember seeing complaints about thousands of articles getting culled for being trivial (comic books, movies, anime, moderately famous people or places).

It's hard to find many articles about it anymore, but I did find this from 2007: http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#43

Post by 3JPLW »

afandian wrote: post #36
jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

That's really depressing. Makes me question my participation in the site a little bit (never joined the chat or wanted to). Do you have any actual examples?

It's the first agenda item on the Python SO team's winter meeting: http://sopython.com/transcript/3/winter-2015-general-meeting...

They were just discussing it on chat today: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/6/15-16

I've never gotten involved in Chat before, either, but just searching the most active chatroom for `cv-` brought that up immediately.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#44

Post by jofer »

3JPLW wrote: post #43
afandian wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really depressing. Makes me question my participation in the site a little bit (never joined the chat or wanted to). Do you have any actual examples?

It's the first agenda item on the Python SO team's winter meeting: http://sopython.com/transcript/3/winter-2015-general-meeting... They were just discussing it on chat today: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/6/15-16 I've never gotten involved in Chat before, either, but just searching the most active chatroom for `cv-` brought that up immediately.

Huh, I didn't see that discussion before I wrote the comment, but I was specifically referring to sopython.

They mean well, but it does feel a bit like a mob at times.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#45

Post by teh_klev »

jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

The PHP chat room is/was quite bad in that respect and there's a small handful of particularly caustic individuals who go out of their way to spread unpleasantness for less well informed users.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#47

Post by lordnacho »

Quite often when I Google something, I end up on an SO page with exactly the answer I needed, and it's been closed due to some BS. And there's a bunch of comments about why it's closed.

I think the moderators have gotten more and more zealous. Everything is looked at with the guidelines in mind, instead of common sense. I suspect there's a certain type of person who likes to apply stringent rules to everything, and common sense people just have enough and decide not to run in the elections.

If SO was a billboard I could understand the need to only have the interesting stuff on. But SO doesn't have a space problem. If someone has posted a question, it's likely they're not the only noob wondering what the answer is. If the question is useful to people, Google will lead them there.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#49

Post by Marcus316 »

Guvante wrote: post #23
_almosnow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I did ask, strange you didn't notice that since it's right there in the link you posted. And yeah, you are right, I used the word 'cunt' after they started behaving like that, I'm sorry if that scared you; I did it because I was really pissed off by all their bs. Have you ever felt annoyed some time in your life? Apparently not, lucky you.

The history of questions is why StackOverflow is so great. If it were like a normal forum with only time sensitive content it would have gone away like all other technical forums. Your question is shared with all the future people who have the same problem, it isn't your soapbox to complain in. Your experience with SO is probably fairly minor, the moderators have each had to deal with at least a half dozen people bre…

Please note, closed questions can also be removed from the site.

I have a single Gold Badge in the SO world. It was awarded for an answer that I gave which earned more than 100 up votes[1]. Sadly the question to which I responded has since been closed (for years now). When content that I worked hard to create suddenly disappears from the site because moderators deem it to be "not a good fit", you start to feel it's not worth your time ...

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/25/great-answer?userid=...

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#50

Post by peeters »

_almosnow wrote: post #20
Latty wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked back at version one to see what people would have downvoted/closed for: 'I have tried to do that (by overloading operator[], operator=) but it doesn't seem like I'm going somewhere. Can anyone suggest me a way to achieve this behavior?' You said you have tried, but you didn't post what you tried, or how it didn't work. This makes your question hard to answer, and essentially means anyone answering is going t…

>You said you have tried, but you didn't post what you tried, or how it didn't work. >by overloading operator[], operator= It's literally there... >You then finished it up with a passive-aggressive FAQ section which was entirely unnecessary ... 'I want to do it this way, even if there is a better way' What's wrong with that? I wanted to achieve a very specific thing. Can you please tell me what is wrong with that? Th…

> That FAQ is meant to avoid getting answers that I don't need.

1) Answers on questions aren't just meant to serve you, they're meant to serve people that find the question later. It's incredibly important to note when there's a better way altogether to approach a problem.

2) Askers on SO often exhibit the XY problem. Saying you're not interested in other approaches is not simply dickish; it's ignoring (often) good advice that other people are donating their time to give you.

Honestly, your entire interaction on that question is a prime example of why so many moderators go to the other extreme and become trigger happy. Because anybody would get burnt out dealing day in, day out with people having the same sense of entitlement that you have.

Post reply on HN