Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#141

Post by rquirk » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 8:46 PM UTC

randrews wrote: post #124

AgentConundrum wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 subject…

FWIW, I agree with you here. The other style changes were pointless (the "If I'm.." to "For example, if I'm.." nonsense). You can always roll back a change to your own question though. In the editor's defence, a lot of low-rep users post really unreadable questions. Maybe he saw you had less than a few hundred points and got a bit trigger happy.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#142

Post by chc » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 8:47 PM UTC

bbarthel wrote: post #136

chc wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, that's still true — people who haven't participated in the site cannot upvote. I'm not sure if there was a larger point that I'm missing. Things still get upvoted quite a bit even with the rep requirement (and you could make a reasonable argument that the rep requirement means the votes you get are marginally better indicators of quality).

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#143

Post by petsos » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 8:54 PM UTC

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

You need rep to upvote and downvote.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#144

Post by randrews » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 8:58 PM UTC

rquirk wrote: post #141

randrews wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 subject…

FWIW, I agree with you here. The other style changes were pointless (the "If I'm.." to "For example, if I'm.." nonsense). You can always roll back a change to your own question though. In the editor's defence, a lot of low-rep users post really unreadable questions. Maybe he saw you had less than a few hundred points and got a bit trigger happy.

I would roll it back, if I cared at all about the site. This all happened about a year ago, I'm only pointing it out now because it's relevant to this thread.

It's a really poorly-thought-out feature: new users who can't write coherently get taught that they don't have to, because someone will come along and fix it for them; new users who can write are more likely to be annoyed by other people playing copyeditor on their posts. Guess which group sticks around?

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#145

Post by infocaptor » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 9:00 PM UTC

No matter what others say, but SO is awesome. I have got nearly instant responses. Only once I had to pay someone on freelancer to solve my jquery issue. It is like having SO community helping me in my development.

I know it is tempting to gain reputation points by answering simple questions.

Simple questions will have tons of responses. Instead try to pick the tough ones and answer them.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#146

Post by dangrossman » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 9:05 PM UTC

mendicant wrote: post #138

Confusion wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This week, the ability for anonymous, 0 rep users to edit questions was added. They go into a queue where other users must approve or reject the proposed edit, but you can drive-by suggest those improvements now.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#147

Post by petercooper » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 9:06 PM UTC

I agree 100%. I was in SO early (the beta) and still encountered this. Not only that, but a quick/early bad answer would tend to do better long-term than a later but correct answer.

Given this (and I'm no stranger to accumulating high levels of karma/followers/whatever by natural participation on sites) I only use Stack Overflow as a user now and rarely answer anything. It works great for that and I can sift through the answers and pick the one that works best while ignoring the score. It's clearly not for me in terms of participating fully but I can live with that.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#148

Post by khafra » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 9:08 PM UTC

gnosis wrote: post #120

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…

"SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answers." You want an even faster answer? Ask on IRC. As far as programming questions go, freenode is usually the best place to go (with a minority or apps and projects off on some other irc networks, sometimes). That said, HN, forums, mailing lists, usenet, and SO are usually better for preserving answers for others to learn from on…

I've asked a question in freenode channels then idled for the better part of a day, or even a few days, with little traffic and no answers. SO is faster, often much faster.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#149

Post by Deestan » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 9:15 PM UTC

lyudmil wrote: post #89

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 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…

To be a bit brutal:

Peter Programmer knows Python very well and is a highly skilled programmer, but there is a rep hurdle Peter can't pass because there are already tons of eager Python programmers answering every question at least as good as Peter. This means SO doesn't need Peter or his contributions. At all.

If your contributions are unique and useful, you pass the rep hurdle easily.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#150

Post by dangrossman » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 9:16 PM UTC

frou_dh wrote: post #51

bherms wrote: post #2

I don't really agree here.. While I do have my own gripes with Stack Overflow, I don't think this is the biggest issue. It took me two days of casual browsing/asking/answering to get a reputation of about 50 or so and another few weeks to get into the hundreds. -- Keep in mind I'm not a super genius expert or anything, I just asked a few questions and contributed a few answers in areas I was knowledgeable about. It's…

>The only major broken part (IMO) of SO is that the SE network is becoming so disjointed and your rep doesn't transfer between sites. Putting rep aside, I don't even know what all the other development-related SE sites are, let alone can be bothered to monitor them all. This means that there are interesting questions I'll never see because I only visit StackOverflow. I don't see how people other than complete SE junk…

You're not supposed to. They're separate sites with separate communities. Your interest in StackOverflow doesn't mean you should be keeping up with recipe questions on the Cooking StackExchange site.