My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

You might get more results searching for "deletionism vs inclusionism", which seems to be the most widely used name for the debate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...

the key to not getting your answered close is to copy paste large text of garbage code that these zealous mods won't bother reading through. the large wall of code allows the question to appear to carry merit and come across as a coding question, when in reality it has nothing to do with the question.

This is what is happening. the quality of the questions has deteriorated so much instead of improving.

the people providing quality answers have moved on.

when the chicken leaves and the eggs start rotting, that's when you know, the decline is the beginning.

{Based on my recollection of something I heard listening through the StackOverflow/StackExchange Podcast archive.}

The example of the Python question about angles is from 2011. I believe that subsequent to that time there were changes to both the close process and the reopening process. Part of the problem I think was that close votes accumulated and did not expire, so that they would stick even after a question was edited or months had passed since the vote was cast.

The most recent podcast...about taking more Venture Capital...discussed some of the cultural issues that have developed at StackOverflow. There are two significant pools of users: those like me who know a little or nothing, and those who know a lot. One of the goals of the funding is to make StackOverflow work better for both...at least that was my impression from the podcast.

At the top end, the gamification has problems. It doesn't matter how competitive or smart anyone is, they aren't going to catch John Skeet any time soon. So people make up things to entertain themselves. Anyone else remember the popular Meta about deliberately feeding bad algorithms to suspected homework questions?

It's always been clear [you can listen to six plus years of Joel and Jeff and the gang yourself] that the longterm purpose of StackOverflow is not helping the person originally asking the question. It's making the internet better. It's also always been clear that there was a tension between questions that are interesting to experts and questions that are so basic that only an absolute beginner will ask them. The test case was:

    How do I move the Turtle in Logo? [1][2]

It's simple, clear, to the point, and offensive to some programmers.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions?page=2

[2]: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=mov...

I am constantly amazed how mods can find a duplicate I could not, and I consider myself a fairly savvy googler.

Edit:

Instead of forcing RTFM on every new user, I don't see why new users should not have immediate tryout without reprocussions and learn the guidelines from a kindly mod or other user replying with a reason why their question is not appropriate/duplicate or whatever. That is the point of upvotes/downvotes and active moderation. This is a learning community, not a cadre of elitists.

Who cares how many times a question comes up? That is just such a non-issue, a peeve of a minority of replaceable people, because people are always replaceable, including the ranks of those who answer the most questions. Resurfacing questions is helpful for people new to programming topics and who are just discovering the lay of the land by using the New filter on StackOverflow. Novelty for advanced users should be an incredibly low priority, yet because advanced users have power, it becomes a big priority. The fact is, if some advanced users get bored by the stream of novice questions and leave, that's fine, there will always be new experts to take their place: SO is extremely popular that way.

What really frustrates me is that the usual interface to SO is Google, yet SO closes so many questions as duplicates that this interface is massively under-optimized. It would be much easier to find the solutions to problems if there were variations in Google's index for every different way a question's been asked (and answered).

And answering questions is a great way for intermediate developers to concretize their own knowledge. There's always a new wave of developers needing to learn. Why on earth SO fetishizes itself now as a DRY repository of programming questions is beyond me. Ok, it's not actually beyond me, it's because SO is made up of programmers, and programmers tend be compulsive about DRYing up everything in sight even when that's not the best solution to the problem.

The complaints of SO's elites are the same I've seen since always on mailing lists and forums by the folks who have the most power and thus force their ideals on everyone else. It repels novice users and creates a hostile environment for mentoring and learning. What's sad is that when SO first came out, it was set apart from these incumbents for being welcome, open, and friendly.

Another side issue is that the SO culture almost certainly is not receptive to female developers. I thought of this the other day when I saw some woman's post in the negatives. The sort of chest-thumping, rule-brandishing nitpickery that's the order of the day is an intimidating turn-off for a large swathe of people.

What's happened to SO is why every institution has to be replaced eventually, as SO will be, by some question and answer site that returns to SO's roots. The world is crying out for it again the same way it was when SO was founded.