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The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

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Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#101

Post by Can_Not »

patja wrote: post #13
reitanqild wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time. > People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. People keep saying that and I keep wo…

I don't know that "the complete mess" is just about bullying and vile content, but more the horrible issues of signal to noise and the inability to filter out irrelevant responses. Forums, email lists, and Google Groups still have so many ill-informed and irrelevant non-sequitur responses crowding out the few pearls of wisdom.

My pet peeve is when you're trying to read an existing entry instead opening a new topic and half of the entries have extremely vague titles like "How do I do this?" and "Can someone help with problrm plz?" and I have to make the dreaded decision between reading all of them or risk skipping one that's actually relevant. Even when moderators could fix it, they usually don't. I always fix this in projects I maintain.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#102

Post by dandare »

EpicEng wrote: post #70
dandare wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Sure, I have no idea what you have to deal with on a daily basis and in the end the content is mostly helpful so you are probably doing it right. But in more than few occasions I have been treated like a dirty beggar/shoplifter/moron/(you name it) for actually asking a question (or answering one)! Yes I need you and yes I owe you a lot - but I don't like yo…

And I'm sure you'll have the same experience elsewhere. Once a site like SO gets large enough to be really useful to a lot of people you're going to also have to deal with an influx of the type of users you don't like. I don't know how you solve that problem.

It has nothing to do with size. The TSA staff in the post communist country where I come from are jerks and they roll their eyes every time someone makes a mistake. But TSA staff at most large international airports is trained to understand that people will make mistakes no matter what and that their role is not to move trays but to help people. SO simply never prioritised helping people over providing them with correct technical answers so it is only natural that some of the mods beehive like knowitall-bully-jerks.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#103

Post by [deleted] »

EpicEng wrote: post #70
dandare wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Sure, I have no idea what you have to deal with on a daily basis and in the end the content is mostly helpful so you are probably doing it right. But in more than few occasions I have been treated like a dirty beggar/shoplifter/moron/(you name it) for actually asking a question (or answering one)! Yes I need you and yes I owe you a lot - but I don't like yo…

And I'm sure you'll have the same experience elsewhere. Once a site like SO gets large enough to be really useful to a lot of people you're going to also have to deal with an influx of the type of users you don't like. I don't know how you solve that problem.

[deleted]

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#104

Post by rodgerd »

reitanqild wrote: post #9
Latty wrote: post #3

People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…

> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time. > People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. People keep saying that and I keep wo…

> if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying

You certainly never visited c.l.p.m back in the day, or you'd know exactly how bad the alternative could get.

I wonder how many people Abigail alone drove away from perl?

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#106

Post by Cozumel »

SO is an invaluable resource but I don't ask questions because of the hostility there, plus a lot of times in thinking about a question to phrase it properly I end up answering it myself.

But one of the major problems that I see there are the people who comment solely for the sake of commenting, it seems like they must get paid by the word they comment so much and it's never helpful, always snarky and irrelevant.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#107

Post by matt4077 »

Latty wrote: post #3

People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…

It's like Github... It's so good people forgot what it was like before. Seriously, go check out the swamp that is sourceforge...

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#108

Post by sklivvz1971 »

exstudent2 wrote: post #94
sklivvz1971 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of what? Help vampires waste answerers time, not readers time. Which is why they vote to close. No one wants to browse 200 lines of code to find the missing semicolon.

"Help vampires" aka people with a question that's been answered, are only a problem if you don't have proper search tools to show that a question has already been asked (or answered). If you provide those, and people still ask, maybe their question actually is different. If you provide similar question tools for answerers, let them link to the other question/answers but there's no value in closing the question. That'…

Help vampires: people that ask questions which have no value other than themselves. Duplicate questions are not "help vampires" by any means.

This is a good example of that: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30721824/near-syntax-erro...

Side note: don't pass judgement on stuff or people you don't know. It's quite insulting.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#109

Post by rodgerd »

The complaint is essentially describing how it's turned into Wikipedia, where the author is describing a space where "working the rules" is more important than trying to achieve the goal those rules are meant to enable.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#110

Post by marcosdumay »

mattmanser wrote: post #17
marcelluspye wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good. While I'd say this is currently true, answers on SO tend to stick around for a long time, and the 'marked as duplicate'-heavy behavior means that even if the best practice to solving a given problem changes, the top SO google result won't. While this isn't a _huge_ problem right now, with the way the site is set up I only see it getting worse, to the point…

You can edit the top answer or post a new answer, I have got 50 odd votes from adding asp.net's encryption/decryption methods that were added in 3.5 to old .net encryption questions. I've done it on a few other answers too, if the top answer seems clunky or inelegant, I tend to dig a bit deeper to see if there's a better way. Also, scrolling down a bit in the answers you usually find new ways of doing something as an…

You can. Most people can't. As the site gets aggressive against newcomers and old timers decide they have better things to do, there will be less and less people available edit them.

And don't think those editions are as high quality as the ones that come by the official channel, where literally anybody in the world with the needed knowledge can reply, and there is a robust process for vetting.

Besides, despite any theoretical possibility, people mostly do not edit old SO answers. There are exceptions, but outdated answer mostly stay there.

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