Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

goofygrin.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 213 posts

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#131

Post by cruise02 »

alanh wrote: post #84

To me, the #1 problem with Stack Overflow is the number of plain bad answers that are given and often accepted. CSS question? Here’s someone’s un-researched and invalid first guess, that doen’t work in practice. +10 karma and accepted. Hard question? Here’s some loser’s gut feeling of “can’t be done” in exchange for +2 karma, and then a knowledgeable follow-up a day later from someone who has actually been there, don…

You pointed out yourself in the comments to that answer that rsync was helpful, but that you didn't like the rude tone. The answer you accepted also agreed that you should use rsync until you edited the question to add more details. Now it's cheap and worthless?

The system seems to work. The top-voted answer is the one you accepted.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#132

Post by ultrasaurus »

barrkel wrote: post #83
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…

I've generally stopped answering questions on SO, unless they're explicitly related to the Delphi compiler and RTL and nobody else has answered them - and I find these with a combination of Google search alert and RSS feed on SO tags, which are delayed, rather than by visiting the site. Something that would have kept me there is something along the lines of this: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/19659/search-f…

The reputation might be a sort inverse filter: thousands of people participate in the programming jokes questions whereas even perfect answers to questions like "Under conditions X, Y, Z how can my foo do bar?" are unlikely to get much love.

It's those hard questions I love StackOverflow for (and there's no rush of people sniping them).

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#133

Post by ddkrone »

bherms wrote: post #110
ddkrone wrote: post #48

There is nothing sucky about the stackexchange sites. They are designed to be useful and growing repositories of frequent question and answers. The whole rep/voting thing is just a gaming layer on top to make the process of participation a little more fun but if you just focus on the gaming aspect and take it way too seriously like this guy then you miss out completely.

While it may seem like just a gaming aspect, there are a lot of benefits as you gain more reputation on the site. Unlike many "points systems", SE actually allows you to become essentially a moderator of the site as you gain reputation. Once you've hit a certain mark you can edit, close, delete, etc. I think it's brilliant.

The old forums had the same system so there is nothing new or brilliant going on here, the stackexchange sites just measure things in terms of reputation/votes and the old forums did something similar with posts/replies. The only innovation I see is the automation of how promotion happens in terms of votes/rep.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#134

Post by alanh »

cruise02 wrote: post #131
alanh wrote: post #84

To me, the #1 problem with Stack Overflow is the number of plain bad answers that are given and often accepted. CSS question? Here’s someone’s un-researched and invalid first guess, that doen’t work in practice. +10 karma and accepted. Hard question? Here’s some loser’s gut feeling of “can’t be done” in exchange for +2 karma, and then a knowledgeable follow-up a day later from someone who has actually been there, don…

You pointed out yourself in the comments to that answer that rsync was helpful, but that you didn't like the rude tone. The answer you accepted also agreed that you should use rsync until you edited the question to add more details. Now it's cheap and worthless? The system seems to work. The top-voted answer is the one you accepted.

I was being generous, as rsync could be a useful suggestion to other visitors to the page, but it absolutely doesn’t answer the question that was asked. The top-voted answer, to the contrary, was edited to be genuinely helpful and an accurate answer, and deserves those upvotes. Also keep in mind that the page is getting activity because it’s linked from this discussion, so some karma changes have been triggered just now.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#135

Post by tzs »

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…

I mostly use SO when an answer shows up in Google. I've only answers a very small number of questions.

Occasionally I see an answer there that is mostly right, but has one or two things that are not quite right. My first impulse is to add a comment--except I am not allowed to add comments.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#136

Post by bbarthel »

chc wrote: post #95
georgemcbay wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This happens sometimes, but I don't think it's endemic. I've seen people come in a day late, even in questions where an answer has been accepted, and get tons of votes. It just has to be obviously much better than the others and you have to hope the stars don't align against you (as with so many things in life). The "fastest gun" problem typically occurs when the best answer does not really stand out to people. For e…

Unless something has changed, you need a minimum level of reputation to upvote. If you are not a member of the site (I have a vague memory of starting with only 10 rep - I have no idea now) you have no mechanism to actually do as you suggest until after you've posted or asked a question that has gotten at least one vote.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#137

Post by ben1040 »

I thought the same thing when I joined SO a few months ago, and agreed with a lot of what was written in the blog post.

But, then I decided to give SO another chance just now. I posted two answers and in ten minutes got enough upvotes to get me out of the 15-rep new-user jail.

So consider my mind changed and I don't see what the big problem is, now.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#138

Post by mendicant »

Confusion wrote: post #123
jessriedel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't care to participate in SO often. I don't have high rep.

I _can_ provide insight.

every once in a while I find somewhere that I can provide some value or insight, whether via editing an answer with a url that's out of date, a comment expanding on the answer, etc... and it seems like I never can.

I don't care to jump through the hurdles to get to that point. I didn't come there to ask a question. I didn't come there to sift through questions to answer.

I came looking for something. I stumbled upon something where I could provide value and was shut down because I have better things to do with my time than to jump through hoops.

It's fine for the power users who want the world to see their rep, or the people trolling for questions regarding their pet projects. It sucks for the casual user.

So, yes, in theory the rep hurdle is quite low. I've just got better things to do with my time. -- Which I already wasted trying to help someone in the first place.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#139

Post by ForumRatt »

I frequent the sister site Super User, I had no problem in getting rep points, so far I am at over 8K in less than 8 months. No these are not forums and you will be berated for not following the proper order of things. If you can't compete stay off the site, its not for everybody like a forum is.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#140

Post by georgemcbay »

Confusion wrote: post #121
georgemcbay wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Generally, no, I don't upvote the answers, because I have no idea what open id provider I used to make my old stack overflow account, which brings me to the other broken thing about Stack Overflow... Open ID. Nice in theory, hellish in practice.
Post reply on HN