81–90 of 239 posts
I used to enjoy visiting the site because quite often there was a nice general question on the front page that related to me in some way... Well, ALL of the general CS type questions are answered now... and any new ones are closed as dups almost immediately.. Which means the questions that survive these days are hyper specific, and not very useful or enjoyable...
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> 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 a…
It seems that you got SO wrong. Please have some time to read this: http://stackoverflow.com/tour I understand that it is a really nice side-effect that your questions stay there and can be read later by other people with your same problem, however, be aware that it is a side-effect. Let me quote the first few sentences on their own site: "With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers…
One reason people point posters towards more conventional, extensible, canonical solutions is so that following readers/askers understand that what's being asked is on the fringes of what should be done.
Personally, I also believe SO doesn't always make the right call on what content should stay or go, and some of my meta questions attempt to address this. The bottom line is that people that don't work for them are only participants, and we're not the ones making the rules.
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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.
"Better to have a bad question closed quickly than have it accumulate bad answers and rude comments and downvotes." Unless it's offensive in some way, this seems like a terribly short-sighted way of handling bad questions. Ask questions back or offer suggestions for improving the question. Closing or deleting it doesn't teach the person anything, and it doesn't help the community.
So it might be useful to bias the site toward leaving questions open, and let people make weighted votes for closing. Initially, the weight of a vote would be zero. This would allow the quality of an individual's judgement to be established, and their vote given more weight as it proved to be more predictive of whether or not an issue was eventually closed.
#1 on my StackOverflow wishlist is a way to make collaboration easier on answers. I see many questions and answers where the top answer mostly works, yet buried below there's a much better answer. I see this happening in areas where technology is in flux, such as languages with evolving syntax, or when toolchains are moving to new tools. Collaboration can improve this by enabling subsequent people to add additional i…
What would you look for that's not dealt with by comments and edits?
* Wiki-style editing of some kind, along with collaboration tooling, and users can annotate particular pieces of information within an answer.
* Ability to combine/collaborate on multiple answers, such as beginning with introductory information relevant to all the answers, then having some kind of sectioning for specific information for each version.
Two small steps can help toward this:
* Mark an answer as applicable to a specific version number, or range, or date, or implementation.
* Enable the question author to accept an additional new answer that is more current, without subtracting points from the original answer.
To me, I see this strange contradiction in how stackoverflow is evolving. Joel Spolsky (one of the founders) gave a very interesting presentation[1] in 2009. The key takeaway I've always remembered from his comments was the idea of "anthropology". The science of trying to really understand human behavior and make the website amplify good communities. What I see 6 years later is a lot of " why is this question closed…
Sometimes I wonder if I'm the sort of person who makes these places bad... but I do ask decent questions, and the only people who ever pay attention to them are the rep farmers hoping to cash in with a Google answer.
It has largely become more or less a standard expectation that every single question I come across on Stack Overflow through search engine results will be locked. This expectation is rarely contradicted, and then only usually within very small sub-niche topics (the Racket SO community is quite pleasant, frex). It has rather ensured that I never made any effort to contribute to that community. I do still use SO answer…
A note on locking: Locking prevents edits and comments on an individual post. The reason for locking a post is nearly always spam edits/comments. Locks are finite in time. Questions that rank highly for popular search queries receive a lot of traffic, and locking is often necessary to prevent vandalism. On question closure, this is rarely done by moderators (users with a diamond ♦ after their name), but by 5 votes fr…
This post has put in to words much of my own, un-reputable experience with SO and stack-exchange forums. The technical corrections and constant closing of questions by mods discouraged my asking of questions ages ago. There is a feeling that researching the details necessary to describe the question adequately takes away from research that may have yielded how to solve it by looking at similar questions or documentat…
There is a finite number of people who can answer a question, and these people have a finite amount of time. They don't necessarily know a question is going to be bad before they read it, so if a bad question stays, it continues wasting more and more people's time, and taking time from other people who did put in the effort to ask a good question. So instead, the question is closed while you improve it, and the idea is for it to be reopened when you're done.
1. Need to incentivize new users to read some real basic FAQs before posting. Not sure what the best solution is. Fascist Me wants to see them walk through a wizard, agreeing that they understand basic topic X before continuing, but that doesn't sound too user friendly.
2. Need some better text similarity with Latent Semantic Indexing or something to find duplicates. I'll see new questions that I know are recent duplicates, but then can't even find an example. Doh.
> the Stack Overflow staff and moderators seem to take the attitude that the long-term content of the site is much more important Perhaps the Stack Overflow owners realize they can muscle in on the programming language documentation business. With the ongoing increase in programmers who learn a programming language at the same time as they're paid to write production code in it, the promoters of some languages will i…
My favourite is the upvoted "You should have Googled this" comment with an accompanying, and equally upvoted, "Google sent me here." SO seems to have not awakened to the fact that it is the defacto programming information site for all languages and developer capabilities and no longer the purview of elite.