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Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

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Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#121

Post by Confusion »

georgemcbay wrote: post #79
cletus wrote: post #61

Let me add some perspective as a relatively highly ranked user (cletus) on SO. I've seen this kind of post before and frankly it's annoying. The typical template is "I tried to answer 2 questions and didn't get 1000 points so it sucks" or some variation revolving around faster answerers or whatever. Rather than being a problem, SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answer…

Re: "But to complain about a system where there are too many people answering questions is, to be perfectly blunt, ridiculous and narcissistic" I've never tried to participate in Stack Overflow as a hyper-active question answerer, but as a sometimes-user of the site who ends up there via Google often when performing coding question searches, the site still suffers from what has been dubbed "The Fastest Gun in the Wes…

Do you take the trouble to upvote those answers that are helpful to you? I think that, given some time, the best answers of all questions will slowly bubble up, but that only happens if folks like you and me upvote the answers that are actually good

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#122

Post by BrianLy »

lyudmil wrote: post #114
ender7 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Ask questions. Asking questions gets you rep (and quite quickly too, if your questions are voted up).

Valid, but asking questions is hard to do consistently. I've only ever asked questions if I've been unable to deal with a problem. Answering questions is something I can do on my own time because it's fun. Answering questions is what draws me to the Stack Overflow community. The way I view it it's just a particularity of the way Stack Overflow has been set up. I think cletus is correct - rep cannot be your goal or yo…

Why not ask questions that you've solved yourself with much effort and googling? That would mean that that knowledge is captured on SO for easier access by others.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#123

Post by Confusion »

jessriedel wrote: post #92
lyudmil wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you're saying, but I don't think it addresses the post. It's certainly true that Stack Overflow is the best place to get answers to programming questions and I won't dispute that. Here, though, is what I think the problem is. I think it mirrors the OP's problem. Stack Overflow became and is the best place to get answers to programming problems because of the community it has been able to build. Ther…

Exactly. The OP's point is that it's hard to get over the initial rep hurdle so that you can participate. This prompts the idea: is there some sort of way that new users could quickly and reliably gain a minimum amount of rep by doing a bit of maintenance on the site? Say, flagging spam or suggesting correction which must be approved by someone with lots of rep? If this is possible, why don't more people know about i…

The 'initial rep hurdle' is so low that any dimwit -- pardon my French -- can overcome it... As some others have pointed out, too easily actually, judging from the number of bad answers from people with a few K of rep.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#124

Post by randrews »

AgentConundrum wrote: post #90
randrews wrote: post #74

I asked two questions, one about C and one about Objective C. I got answers to both, relatively quickly. The answers worked. But, in the C question, I provided some more information by adding a comment instead of editing my post. Result? Comment deleted with a snotty note. In the Objective C question, I called the language "Objective C" instead of "Objective-C". Result? My question edited to fit someone else's idea o…

Clarity is a good thing, and uniformity and standards definitely help with that. Looking at the revision page you linked, I don't see anything there that's offensive. I may have made similar edits myself had I seen it (at least, if it were a question in an area I'm familiar with). Keep in mind that StackOverflow isn't just about answering your question; it's about providing a large searchable knowledge-base so others…

Clarity from changing "Objective C" to "Objective-C", whatever. The rest of the changes didn't add clarity, they were totally stylistic.

People are not computers, and we're touchy about stuff we write. If you want to add a tag to my question to make it more searchable, fine. If you want to let me know I have a typo, or used the wrong word or something, whatever. Just editing someone's question, especially for subjective writing style, comes across as rude.

If it's not supposed to, or if the rest of that community doesn't mind, I'm happy for them. But it's not for me, and it's not for a lot of other people either. So, I agree with the OP.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#125

Post by alanh »

mcantor wrote: post #109
alanh wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did, you should have checked. I even made a public test-case to illustrate why naïve solutions don’t work: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/105727/web/print_textarea.html Edited to avoid sarcasm

I downvoted you for being sarcastic, and because I was discouraged by the tone you used in this SO comment: Gordon, you downvoted my answer and left a misleading comment because you assumed that a user wouldn't edit the textarea? For shame. Your solution is not "pure CSS" but rather uses PHP to duplicate a textarea and then hopes that the user doesn't its content before printing. Please chill out, dude. There is abso…

Fair enough. Sometimes I do feel like that guy.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#126

Post by kaffeinecoma »

I totally disagree with this blog posting, but here's a situation that I feel SO could do better.

I wish there were a feature whereby as a question-asker, you could say "I've dutifully read all the provided responses, and none of them answers my question. Marking this as 'unsolved'".

And then the "unsolved" questions would not count against your percentage in "accept rate". When new answers come in, you'd need to go back and re-evaluate whether or not the new responses answer your question or not.

The original idea of publishing askers' accept ratio is to encourage people to "give credit where credit is due". But it also has the unfortunate side effect of encouraging people to accept sub-par answers at times.

Apart from that I love the site, and hope Jeff makes a bundle (or at least a happy existence) from it.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#128

Post by flipside »

Any Q&A site that discourages potentially useful answers is doing it wrong.

As it happens, I've come up with an algorithm that would solve the most common problems with Q&A sites (included the ones cited in this article) and am in the process of building a prototype.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#129

Post by wtallis »

ck2 wrote: post #19
kylec wrote: post #10

It's definitely true that there are a lot of people waiting for new questions so they can pounce with a quick answer and get a few upvotes. However, there's also a large backlog of unanswered questions as well ( http://stackoverflow.com/unanswered ) that are very much in need of a "thoughtful, correctly documented" answer. And while it's unfortunate that legitimate brand-new users are unable to post comments, the rea…

I simply do not understand this ego thing with "points". A million points gets you what? An award for most wasted time? I wish HN had an option to turn off points on an account, I can't even block it with adblock because there's no element id. There's more to life than meaningless "points".

You can't get to a million points on SO without learning a few things yourself.

Most of the questions I answer these days on SO are outside my areas of expertise, but I know enough to know where to look for information that can help me come up with an answer.

And even in answering noob questions you at least get practice in understanding people who don't know enough to articulate what they want and in writing clear, concise, simple answers. Both of those skills are valuable to any software developer.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#130

Post by chrisaycock »

randrews wrote: post #116
frou_dh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not worth quitting over. Editing of others' posts is part of the culture and almost never an attack.

That's exactly why it is worth quitting over: I don't want to be part of a culture where that's normal.

I edit articles on Wikipedia just to correct grammar and spelling. Are you offended by that, too?
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