61–70 of 139 posts
That is one of the main reasons to own your own data and not to trust some company with it. Just post it on your own blog and link to it instead.
Doesn't this ignore the power of having a common place to go for questions and answers, back and forth, etc.? I visit a couple of sites almost every day, and (I hope) help as well as be one of the people helped. But I'm not googling extensively for newly-posted things every day.
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The moderators feel any question that can have discussion should be closed. They just want one right answer, anything with multiple is bad by their definitions. So if you are getting discussion, you are actually just experiencing the common case of getting your needs addressed before the terrible moderation kicks in and closes good content.
That's surprising and disappointing - a lot of my value derived from these postings is from the discussions and the alternate answers / differing viewpoints. Also confusing from the point of view of the site operators - aren't they missing a lot of site interaction and pageviews and additional free content, etc. ?
After seeing a couple of posts like this, I'd like to provide an alternative perspective: I no longer actively answer questions on StackOverflow, because it is too hard to find worthwhile questions between all the noise. If someone specifically asks me to answer something, I will do it, but trying to find interesting questions on StackOverflow has become impossible due to the high influx of very low quality material.…
Eventually I just deleted my account and left since my motivation to answer stuff over there was a bit more than "I'd like to help people". I also liked to find questions I can't answer and figure out how to solve them on my own. Those became buried under lazy questions to a point where I had to dig for hours to find one. Maybe android was/is a bit of an extreme case, but still I see the same pattern more or less when I occasionally browse SO after finding an answer to my own problems over there.
As for the OP, I think a lot of people don't get the SO format. Yes, that post contains a lot of very useful information. That's great, but: No it's still not a good fit for SO, SO is for specific questions with a clear answer and that post isn't that. It's overly broad in scope and has no right answer. One can argue about whether deleting really helps anybody (don't think so personally), but closing it seems appropriate considering how the site is supposed to work.
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The trouble is, the question is completely backwards. "I have this solution, what problems can I solve with it?" is not something a human being generally asks. For every answer to this question, SO would be better served with a question asking "How does [Java internal or widely used library class] accomplish [thing that seems impossible in Java]" for which the answer is "It uses sun.misc.Unsafe in [this way]". Yes, t…
> "I have this solution, what problems can I solve with it?" is not something a human being generally asks. Either you're being sarcastic, or you have no familiarity with the history of science. The rest of your answer shows another aspect of what's wrong with Stack Overflow: zealous mods who get an idea of the perfect question into their heads, and then who go out to purge anything that doesn't conform, regardless o…
This question is useful as a place for blogposts to link to, not as a primary answer to a question you might Google. So it's 'wrong' for stackoverflow in that sense. But no, I'm not agreeing that mods should have closed it, and I didn't say it should have been purged from SO. Luckily, it hasn't been, so we can stop worrying.
Outside of "how do I do X in JQuery again?", most times google directs me to StackOverflow it is to a question that got closed for some reason or other. I just can assume there are people for which it works better that way, but for me StackOverflow is useless in most cases where I'd hope it could help me. (EDIT: to add, the case mentioned by jrcii of "question is closed, but has a useful answer" also happens)
When Google lands me there, about 80-90% of the time a SO post contains the answer I was looking for, it has tons of votes, yet is closed as being off-topic or too broad. Useful yet puzzling.
Here is a question of mine for example (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4701538/javascript-based-...).
Leaving aside the question if the question is indeed off-topic, I don't know why anyone will come 4 years later and question intelligence of person asking the question and person answering it. Are these mods suddenly wiser than participants 4 years ago or here to stroke their ago?
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On the contrary, as a C# developer I find tons of useful information there especially in advanced issues. And the discussion is also useful because they present solutions from different angles. Perhaps SO is better suited for those on the Desktop frontier rather than mobile or web development.
Weird. In the past two years or so, I've answered almost every one of my own answers after an additional day or two of work. Generally, when I think I've exhausted all leads on solving a problem I'll distill everything down into the smallest reproducible setup, do a detailed write-up, and list all what I've done. At best I might get a token up-vote from someone who pities me, but I never get any real attention. There…
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Weird. In the past two years or so, I've answered almost every one of my own answers after an additional day or two of work. Generally, when I think I've exhausted all leads on solving a problem I'll distill everything down into the smallest reproducible setup, do a detailed write-up, and list all what I've done. At best I might get a token up-vote from someone who pities me, but I never get any real attention. There…
> The winning strategy is That's true, if you care about the points, badges, etc.
Outside of "how do I do X in JQuery again?", most times google directs me to StackOverflow it is to a question that got closed for some reason or other. I just can assume there are people for which it works better that way, but for me StackOverflow is useless in most cases where I'd hope it could help me. (EDIT: to add, the case mentioned by jrcii of "question is closed, but has a useful answer" also happens)
I usually get closed questions but the answers are often useful. I don't see why "closed" as such is problem. I could interpret it as "someone asked this question and it's been answer, we're moving on". Sometimes I find an answer on a random web forum - if the forum still permits answers, there will 20 or 100 pages to look through and the usually the only good things will be right after the question. The web at scale…
Closed as "out of scope"/"duplicate" isn't saying "this is finished, moving on", but "don't ask this kind of thing, go somewhere else, even if you probably would get a good answer to your related question here".
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On the contrary, as a C# developer I find tons of useful information there especially in advanced issues. And the discussion is also useful because they present solutions from different angles. Perhaps SO is better suited for those on the Desktop frontier rather than mobile or web development.
Weird. In the past two years or so, I've answered almost every one of my own answers after an additional day or two of work. Generally, when I think I've exhausted all leads on solving a problem I'll distill everything down into the smallest reproducible setup, do a detailed write-up, and list all what I've done. At best I might get a token up-vote from someone who pities me, but I never get any real attention. There…
Could you build an incentive strategy and reputation system around collaborative answers?