151–160 of 304 posts
While StackOverflow is still an outstanding resource, they never really solved the “why bother?” problem for the really difficult subjects. Your choices are: answer a trivial JavaScript question and get a million points, or spend an hour painstakingly explaining a hard problem for maybe one point (where, half the time, the original submitter doesn’t even bother to “accept” your answer so you lose even that small poin…
It feels almost like the variables in their little machine are out of tune. If they scaled back the free privileges and hire some trained moderators they could probably clean things up a bunch.
While StackOverflow is still an outstanding resource, they never really solved the “why bother?” problem for the really difficult subjects. Your choices are: answer a trivial JavaScript question and get a million points, or spend an hour painstakingly explaining a hard problem for maybe one point (where, half the time, the original submitter doesn’t even bother to “accept” your answer so you lose even that small poin…
Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the comm…
The truth is that you've managed to piss off and alienate a lot of people in pursuit of... something, and when a new community platform gains critical mass, we will take the content and jump ship happily. To change this, you could try publicly acknowledging the issues, encouraging people (especially moderators) to be less pedantic and nicer, and rolling back some of the most egregious abuse by the little Q&A tyrants.
People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…
>help vampires What is that?
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampi...
A common variation is someone who asks a reasonable question, gets an answer, then repeatedly modifies/extends the original question, or who asks a long series of follow up questions n comments. This variation is described here:
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"People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on." It wasn't bullying so much as low-quality content. It is quite likely you didn't have this problem, as I didn't very often either. If you know where to go, help has always been available for many languages/runtimes/environments/etc., and generally th…
My pre-SO experience was similar to yours, but things change, and alternative forums improved a lot. I'm not saying there's any generic forum better than SO out there. But they are not that far behind anymore.
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"Help vampires" aka people with a question that's been answered, are only a problem if you don't have proper search tools to show that a question has already been asked (or answered). If you provide those, and people still ask, maybe their question actually is different. If you provide similar question tools for answerers, let them link to the other question/answers but there's no value in closing the question. That'…
Help vampires: people that ask questions which have no value other than themselves. Duplicate questions are not "help vampires" by any means. This is a good example of that: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30721824/near-syntax-erro... Side note: don't pass judgement on stuff or people you don't know. It's quite insulting.
People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…
>help vampires What is that?
People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on tha…
> The consequence thereof is that many good questions not only get closed before anyone is able to respond, but that many of them end up vanishing into oblivion for eternity after merely 9 days.
Yes, any cutoff time has the downside that you lose posts. But it's not like SO makes rules for no reason. Where's the discussion of the problem that that rule is solving? How do we know they're not worse than this problem?
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>SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good. While I'd say this is currently true, answers on SO tend to stick around for a long time, and the 'marked as duplicate'-heavy behavior means that even if the best practice to solving a given problem changes, the top SO google result won't. While this isn't a _huge_ problem right now, with the way the site is set up I only see it getting worse, to the point…
You can edit the top answer or post a new answer, I have got 50 odd votes from adding asp.net's encryption/decryption methods that were added in 3.5 to old .net encryption questions. I've done it on a few other answers too, if the top answer seems clunky or inelegant, I tend to dig a bit deeper to see if there's a better way. Also, scrolling down a bit in the answers you usually find new ways of doing something as an…
Nope you can't.
- You'll be blocked if your edit is not "in the spirit of the originally post(er)".
If you only have to add a separate and standalone paragraph at the end on a newer subfeature (like your asp example), it's generally fine.
If you have to rewrite one of the main paragraph, the reviewers will systematically reject your edit.
Typically, that means that there is no way to update an obsolete post when the tools or best practices have changed, because it's considered major changes diverging from the original author.
- Combine that with the aggressive policy of closing and locking down questions, and it's impossible to post a new separate answer on most of the questions.