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The Stack Overflow Age

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#121

Post by slavik81 »

fhood wrote: post #86
ken wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood it, either. By that reasoning, almost any technical question is an "opinion" question asking for a "recommendation". For example, pretty much any question about C string handling has many possible answers, e.g., [1] admits that comparing two strings is "rather broad" and the various answers there recommend looping over each index and comparing chars with ==, sscanf, strncmp, regexes, and PEGs. Opin…

Also there seems to be no problem with users who submit opinions instead of answers. Q: How do I do X extremely specific thing that I need because I have an unusual case that needs this specific thing. A (top voted): Why would you want to do X? You shouldn't do that. I clearly know more about your problem than you do because I assume everyone on here is a college student and not a developer working with a large mostl…

Be the change you want to see in the world. Downvote bad answers. Upvote good ones.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#122

Post by shagie »

DougWebb wrote: post #75
aeorgnoieang wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Closing' isn't a big deal really. There isn't anything wrong with asking a similar question, but if it's effectively a duplicate then it's helpful to consolidate the answers in 'one place' (one question). > It's meant to be a forum to help people, not rewrite the manual on a programming language. If there was only one way people should literally just RTM. Actually, it's not meant to be a forum. It's meant to be more…

if it's effectively a duplicate then it's helpful to consolidate the answers in 'one place' To do this, they've already got the tech to identify similar questions. They should just leave all the variations of the question open, and have a prominent "Similar Questions" list displayed for all of them. That would encourage question titles that express what makes them distinct from similar questions, and give people the…

The existing system, a question that is closed as a duplicate automatically redirects users who aren't logged in (most users are anonymous google users) to the question that is the duplicate target. All of the questions that target that duplicate or mention it in another post are listed in the 'linked questions' on the sidebar.

If it truly is not a duplicate question, then it should not be closed as a duplicate. However, many people asking new questions either don't search or are unaware that their question actually is that other question.

Leaving a question open doesn't help any of the google users and instead makes it harder to find the canonical answer to the question as little tidbits of information are scattered around.

If the canonical duplicate target is insufficient in answering the question, add an answer to it that does a better job than the other answers.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#123

Post by firefoxd »

Reading this thread makes it feel like stackoverflow has become the new PHP. You can't even say something positive about it before hell breaks loose.

It is really really useful. Actually it is indispensable. It got so many things right, just think about the world before Stackoverflow.

But the few things it gets wrong, people make it seems like it breaks everything else. Yes, it sucks. Most of the time I can't find an answer, I am frustrated. When i ask on Stackoverflow and the question gets closed or just marked as duplicate, i get even more frustrated.

Does it mean it sucks as a whole? Hell no. We gotta be grateful for the good part, and help fix the bad parts.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#125

Post by alphaalpha101 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #44
teh_klev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thing. The vast majority of (sane) users likely get on just fine without complaint. It's usually a noisy minority of folks who vocalise their grievances, especially when the rules of the site won't fit their world view of how they think the site should work. I've been a user on the site (and once upon a time a diamond mod) since the closed beta (userid < 500). Sure I've had my ups and downs and haven't al…

It is more an issue of who people think the site is for. There's two big camps, those who feel that SO is for everyone, and those who think they're creating a reference encyclopedia. The encyclopedia crowd won the war, and those of us who just wanted SO as a place anyone and everyone could go and ask a question without getting bludgeoned to death by high karma users have moved on. This has resulted in a lot of questi…

You're just plain wrong, mate. Anyone can ask a question. You just can't ask the same question that's been answered before or a question that is blatantly off topic.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#126

Post by dnomad »

firefoxd wrote: post #123

Reading this thread makes it feel like stackoverflow has become the new PHP. You can't even say something positive about it before hell breaks loose. It is really really useful. Actually it is indispensable. It got so many things right, just think about the world before Stackoverflow. But the few things it gets wrong, people make it seems like it breaks everything else. Yes, it sucks. Most of the time I can't find an…

SO sucks for the most part. I've certainly given up on it. It's certainly not that I think I could do a better job. Managing such a large community is more than likely a losing game. It's only going to get worse, I suspect, because of the growing inequality between the old-timers (who don't actually seem that interested in answering questions but in excessive moderation) and the newbies. The only hope of SO is devolution: spin out the communities that can be saved and give them more autonomy. But this will never happen. This means the site is going to die. There are powerful negative forces aligned against it. Eventually, even the old timers who've amassed these enormous reps, are going to start wondering why they devote so much time and energy to making Joel rich. Wikipedia, at least, is a non-profit foundation.

The interesting thing will be what comes after SO. I'm always struck by the Ubuntu community which does a much better job providing fast, relevant answers and support to the community than SO ever did. (The Stack Exchange, https://askubuntu.com/, is dead. All the exciting stuff happens elsewhere.) There's also something much more organic; you've got blogs, wikis, Q&A, chat, and various reddit forums all working together to serve the community. This seems to me be the future and should scale better than SO at the end of the day.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#127

Post by nils-m-holm »

zeveb wrote: post #68

> In the early days of the Internet, before the Web, there was a system called Usenet which created primitive online discussion forums. I wouldn't call Usenet groups 'primitive online discussion forums'; indeed, I rather strongly believe that in most respects Usenet was better & more advanced than current technologies. It was fast . How fast? Really, really fast: every article was already sitting on your local system…

Usenet was lightyears ahead of any web forum I have seen so far! Decentralized, independent, and offering reader software that still has no match in the world of WWW forums. I have downloaded news batches at 1200 baud and would still want to do this to get those advantages back!

Since the web forums have taken over, I have no place to go any longer, except for HN, but even this feels like a drag compared to the elegance of Usenet.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#128

Post by alphaalpha101 »

payne92 wrote: post #19

SO is definitely a force, but I feel its usefulness has faded from inattention to the user experience and use cases. For example: #1. There's a huge "homework problem" (narrow, specific questions that aren't broadly useful). Consider flagging homework as homework (and excluding it from searches), trying to divert questioners to other resources before their question is posted ("this looks like homework..."), and more…

Your USPS question has now been deleted by the way. Wow.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#129

Post by mkalygin »

payne92 wrote: post #19

SO is definitely a force, but I feel its usefulness has faded from inattention to the user experience and use cases. For example: #1. There's a huge "homework problem" (narrow, specific questions that aren't broadly useful). Consider flagging homework as homework (and excluding it from searches), trying to divert questioners to other resources before their question is posted ("this looks like homework..."), and more…

I also noticed that simple questions somehow get higher popularity. If you ask something very specific to your problem, chances are this question won't be answered and also will be downvoted. So people rather answer "how to find an object in JS array" rather than "I have this weird error in X library, how to fix it?". But in my opinion, basic stuff is not what you face with in everyday job. It's all these unexpected errors, bugs and lack of documentation, what makes you Google it. In this sense, GitHub Issues does a better job than SO.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#130

Post by dingaling »

nt8eo923nt45 wrote: post #116
megaman22 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wonder if people that complain about SO being nasty missed out on the shitshow that was programming forums before the current era. I recall some monumental flamewars back in the day on various sites I used to frequent.

Oh yeah, definitely. Especially on Usenet. You'd get flamed for asking a "stupid" question. You'd get flamed for using a "stupid" technology. You'd get flamed for doing things the way you did them, even if they worked just fine. I recall it mostly being constant flaming and hazing.

But at least on Usenet you had the chance to ask 'stupid’ questions, and repeatedly, compared to having them close as off-topic or belonging on obscure-niche.stackoverflow.com
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