I sometimes stumble upon old answers I posted to questions I currently have - is that a bad or good thing?
Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
121–130 of 227 posts
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#122One interesting nugget: more than half of the 200+ employees at Stack Exchange are working on StackOverflow Careers. Has anyone used SO Careers? Opinions?
To any of the people who have had some success with SO Careers — are you in Europe / Germany? I get remarkably few contacts on Careers compared to other sources, and then often from people who completely ignored my location (back when I was marked as "no relocation"). Friends who I gave invites to didn't seem to get anywhere with SO. Also, it's still the case that searching for a postal code on the German version of…
We're looking into the zip code issue, stay tuned.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stack Exchange is to Jobs postings as Facebook is to Advertising. Both have massive potential audience, but both don't deliver engagement and effectively eat your budget. Facebook isn't largely effective (in part) because the audience isn't there to be advertised to, their busy socializing with friends/family. Stack Exchange isn't effective as a Job Bulletin because the audience isn't there to find a job (they probab…
Yeah, exactly! People watch TV for entertainment. TV ads don't work.
> Yeah, exactly! People watch TV for entertainment. TV ads don't work.
TV ads are often entertaining, and you don't have to go out of your way to view them (you usually don't have a choice). Ads on Facebook and other sites are often seen as intrusive and usually ignored. In the case of Stack Exchange's Careers page, you have to explicit go to it to view the listings.
Very different things.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Best tool for the job" doesn't sound like something that should be on SO. Far too subjective and likely to result in stupid opinionated arguments that go nowhere.
Except those are the hard questions in software engineering. "How do I draw a triangle with OpenGL?" is an RTFM question. "How do I decide between R and Python?[1]" is a much more challenging, but much more important, question. I've said it before: SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology. The questions that are ha…
>> "SO is useful for the first 5 years of a software engineer's life. After that, it's occasionally useful when you need to pick up a new technology."
That's what I find in my use and I don't think that's a problem. I think the harder to answer questions should be on their own Stack Exchange system. Moderation on that system would have different rules. I think if you keep it separate the second type of moderation you describe could work, however mixing the two types of moderation with Stack Overflow would lead to more problems imo.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide examples of some of those questions? Usually when I encounter that, it's been closed as a duplicate with a link to the original.
Post a technical question about how to make your single page application crawlable, if it includes the word "SEO", there are great chances it will be closed. Some examples: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21044302/make-ajax-loaded... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26298780/how-to-make-ajax... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14887710/ajax-deep-linkin... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21785074/seo-with-si…
"how can you get the most SEO results out of a one page website"
"Is there any way to dynamic generate content without affecting search engine indexing and ranking"
"Is there anything I can do to make google crawl my website"
"Is it safe to pre-load 4 website into one page without search engines interpreting it as misleading"
If you are a programmer who do not work at google, it is impossible to answer. If a co-worker gave me any of those questions, I would answer it by giving them the link to google's recommendation page about SEO, while warning that google is a private company that do not disclose their methods in indexing website. I can guess and speculate how they think or what their intention are, but any advice would only reflect how I think it works today, and google may at any time change how they index websites.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#126I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answered. SE got my traffic, but I didn't get my answer. Isn't that broken?
There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-…
"Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet."
This is wrong in multiple dimensions and [edit: the next sentence which i didn't quote is] flamebait.
One camp believes in following these guidelines to a fault. The other camp thinks some of the rules are counterproductive to SO's principles.
Source: http://stackoverflow.com/help, the guidelines are clearly outlined.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-…
Can they not give the macho developers some kind of button that spends some of their points to put a badge on the questions they like, elevating them to "true SO" status? Thats how these things are supposed to work I believe.
Maybe they won't be able to find the true SO questions if they're buried amongst the lesser quality ones.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, exactly! People watch TV for entertainment. TV ads don't work.
> Yeah, exactly! People watch TV for entertainment. TV ads don't work. TV ads are often entertaining, and you don't have to go out of your way to view them (you usually don't have a choice). Ads on Facebook and other sites are often seen as intrusive and usually ignored. In the case of Stack Exchange's Careers page, you have to explicit go to it to view the listings. Very different things.
TV ads are fun to watch, huh? Maybe, depends on a lot of variables.
On facebook ads - the best FB ads are native to facebook. Pictures or videos. You don't need to go to another site. They are interesting and draw the viewer's attention just like good TV (any) ads. You have the added benefit of instant social proof and maybe even clicks to your site, if you included a shortened link somewhere. Don't confuse FB ads with adwords or direct response banner advertising. It is not. People who treat it this way are the same people who complain it doesn't work.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for your response, I will comment per paragraph: SE has good rules which keep questions relevant. I would say that if the question is closed and there are no existing duplicates, then the question itself doesn't have much value. ( There are of course outliers. ) There is a misunderstanding here, moderators on SE don't actually close most of the questions, normal users with privileges to do that, do so by vo…
"if the question is closed and there are no existing duplicates, then the question itself doesn't have much value." Not fitting the guidelines of SO and not having much value are two very different things. Are you sure you meant the latter?
They don't have much value to Stack Overflow, obviously, otherwise they would have remained opened and been voted up on Stack Overflow.
Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-…
The latter group sounds like people who are sick of seeing SO being a place where people are rewarded for regurgitating documentation. I've some sympathy for that.
Rewarded with what; internet points? How about rewarding the far larger portion of its userbase, i.e., the sector that doesn't care about upvotes, with information? Yes, I am in the former camp if I have to chose one. SO has become far too heavy handed an "noob hostile". I have been around since the beginning and am in the top 0.16% of users and I can't stand how stringently some adhere to the formal and informal guidelines.