Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#101

Post by cruise02 » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:55 PM UTC

pygy_ wrote: post #87

cruise02 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.99% of the time, rejecting a suggested edit that changes code is the right thing to to. The competence of the reviewers isn't really the issue. The author should have just used his original account to make the edit and this would have been a non-issue.

He probably didn't realise he had two accounts. The incompetence of the mods is relevant because it is one of the main criticism of TFA. It's a nice example of the Pete principle. If a mod doesn't understand an answer he should just pass, not vote according to what's right most of the time. They are incompetent, both regarding LuaJIT and as moderators.

How many LuaJIT experts do you suppose there are reviewing edits on Stack Overflow?

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#102

Post by pygy_ » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:59 PM UTC

cruise02 wrote: post #101

pygy_ wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He probably didn't realise he had two accounts. The incompetence of the mods is relevant because it is one of the main criticism of TFA. It's a nice example of the Pete principle. If a mod doesn't understand an answer he should just pass, not vote according to what's right most of the time. They are incompetent, both regarding LuaJIT and as moderators.

How many LuaJIT experts do you suppose there are reviewing edits on Stack Overflow?

He used to be there. You can't find a better expert.

I'd expect mods familiar with Lua to recognize him, and he should have mod powers, to begin with.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#103

Post by daphneokeefe » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 6:04 PM UTC

nettletea wrote: post #70

I have a few moans about SO, but I also find it very useful. I bear no flair. The one thing that niggles me most on the web in general, is continuous reinvention. If you must paraphrase someone else's work then do. However most of the time a simple link would suffice. The same for repeat/similar questions. And it's always good to reference your sources.

A disappointing percentage of links go dead, thereby making the answer useless. This problem increases over time.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#104

Post by aaronem » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 6:04 PM UTC

adamb_ wrote: post #72

Did SO get everything right? No. Is SO the best code Q/A resource available? Absolutely yes. Remember what was used before SO? Pure shit. Open-ended help forums scattered throughout the web that had little/no moderation and no indication of where the solution could be found in the discussion, or if a solution was ever found at all. SO's aligned everyone's incentives to post the solution & the site's formatting makes…

This is an excellent point.

Is the Stack Exchange model perfect? No.

Does it reward what the article's author calls "obsessive twerps" more strongly than it does anyone else? Arguably yes.

Can it be substantially improved upon? Almost certainly.

Is it nonetheless an enormous qualitative improvement on its predecessors? Good God, yes!

The article's author brings up the old saw about giving a man a fish versus teaching him to fish, and that's well and good. But sometimes you just need a fish.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#105

Post by aaronem » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 6:07 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #61

nathan_long wrote: post #10

StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly. And see some ads. That's really it. Everything it does is geared toward that, and it does it quite well. I have lots of SO points. A lot of them have come from answering common, basic questions. If you think points exist to prove merit…

"Does having easy answers available on SO make us dumber?" Yes, in that the worlds largest helper only supports simple boring common questions, as per the article. If you're trying to do stats in scala, and the only help you can get is "hello world" in java, that's not good for Scala, statistics, or much of anything else, making the world overall dumber. By analogy, lets say reality TV shows completely push video doc…

By what mechanism do you imagine Stack Exchange-style sites starving out more detailed and comprehensive treatments of individual subjects? The proposition would seem to require the assumption that all programming can be reduced to cookbook recipes.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#106

Post by anu_gupta » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 6:08 PM UTC

pygy_ wrote: post #22

The LuaJIT author, Mike Pall recently stopped contributing to SO [0] after having an edit on one of his own posts about LuaJIT reverted by clueless mods [1]. The reply was highly precise and technical, and the reasons given by the mods to reject the edit are spurious, since they just couldn't understand it and its implications. I reached out to two of them (I couldn't find how to contact the third one), but they didn…

His edit wasn't rejected by mods. It was rejected by other users who have the power to review edits. A mod has a specific meaning within SE sites.

If he'd raised an issue on meta, I'm sure a real mod would have sorted this out, or he could have just used the same account to make this edit.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#107

Post by yalogin » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 6:09 PM UTC

Over the last year or so I saw that the community has become too pedantic. I have tried to start some (what I thought were) valid system related discussions by asking open ended questions. They were closed as too open. Having seen some very open ended questions on stackoverflow show up on HN and other places I was really disappointed with it. The users close questions without giving any reason why or how to ask the question properly. I don't ask questions on there frequently and but the quality of my questions has remained the same but the way the community approached it was really different.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#108

Post by sp332 » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 6:10 PM UTC

jere wrote: post #12

>It's possible because I did what many of the people whose questions I answered (and got points for) should have done for themselves: I saw a simple Java question, hit Google, read briefly, then synthesized an original answer. I had a very similar experience. I got the most points (3 times as many as any other question I ever answered) from showing how to perform the most basic task in ckEditor, I library I had not u…

Your answer probably is the top response on Google.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#109

Post by sp332 » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 6:12 PM UTC

Turing_Machine wrote: post #38

ars wrote: post #8

His bullet #2 under "Creeping authoritarianism" is so incredibly correct! It's exactly what happened to wikipedia, and why editors are leaving in droves. With Stack Overflow it's simply not worth it to answer a difficult question, the time to point ratio is just not there, and to make it worse it's all about speed - how fast you can answer, because once the question goes off the home page you will get basically no po…

Yep. Any community that gives censorship powers to an "elite" group runs into this problem. I'd add to his points (which are good) by noting that when your job description involves censoring, the obvious way to make it look like you're doing your job is to censor lots of stuff. This is just a gut feeling, but (at least for the stuff I tend to search for) Google results leading to Stack Overflow are more likely than n…

The difference with SO was (supposed to be) that the only people who got those privileges had high karma which was earned by being a good citizen of the site.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#110

Post by avalaunch » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 6:13 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #66

shortstuffsushi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually seems to be just the opposite of what he was saying. He stated that he believes this mechanism is broken, to the point that after two years of inactivity, the votes he receives his old answers have kept him in the top 3% of scorers. He's not looking for votes, he's saying it's silly how trivial it is to get them, and also how many points he gets off of a simple LMGTFY answer (your quote), vs how few he…

> and also how many points he gets off of a simple LMGTFY answer (your quote), vs how few he gets off a well thought out and explained one (the kernel answer, I believe). I don't contribute much to SO, though I do a fair bit to some other SE sites (SF, SU, DBA) and it is the same on those but there is a fairly logical explanation most of the time. A question that requires a more detailed answer is often more specific…

True but nobody is refuting the logic of how it works. They're refuting the reasoning behind why it works that way. As is, you get more points and labeled as an expert of a language if you choose to answer the easy, low hanging fruit questions. On the other hand, if you actually are an expert of a language and tackle those questions that only experts can answer, you get 10x-100x less points.