[deleted]
The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
201–210 of 304 posts
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open. with all due respect but SO search isn't quite stellar.
Yes, SO search is average quality. Therefore I add site:stackoverflow.com to all my google searches.
My SO experience is similar to yours.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Every moderator on every site will tell you this; without this narrative they wouldn't exist. Is there any proof that this is the case though? To me SO is super useful with ~20% of great threads killed for being off topic. Voting puts good topic on top, no need for administrator intervention.
The new questions queue ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions ) should convince anyone that help vampires are real. Even if not, most experienced answerers regularly see literal copy-pasted homework questions (often several duplicates from different students) and people circumventing question bans to write yet more horrible questions. Help vampires aren't just real, they're everywhere. If they didn't exist, it wouldn'…
Then why don't they just make it just a little bit harder to ask the first question?
Today this is one of the default privileges, and IMO that is asking for work.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Subjective moderation is a major problem. You know, some moderator deciding that a question is "off-topic" or "opinion-based" and just closing the thread. It really puts a damper on people's motivation to ask questions or provide answers.
Nearly every SO issue I've viewed over the last few months has been closed as "off-topic" or some other "not welcome here" reason (I don't know what they are). I was joking about it with friends and they said the same. It makes me think of the wikipedia "deletionists" and I wonder what kind of contributions they would be happy with.
[deleted]
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#205People 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…
Some advice from me to ease your experience on SO:
1. Earn some reputation first in order to see how stuff works from the other side. When you join a new company, you don't come the first day and tell everyone how they're doing it wrong before learning about the project, about the tradeoffs etc. Same here.
Having rep above certain threshold gives you additional privileges (commenting, editing etc.).
Also, when you have a rep over few hundred, I'm more likely to even read your question. Most questions from 0-rep users are very basic same-stuff-again / low-quality questions that are not challenging to answer.
Moreover, when you have some points, you can put a bounty on your question, which means you really want to have a good answer for that and can make a sacrifice, and makes the question stand out (on a separate bounty-enabled-questions page). This gives more incentive to others to look at your question. There's nothing more soul crushing on SO than taking time to write an elaborate answer and getting 0 upvotes, because the guy forgot to upvote or whatever because he doesn't care.
2. It's a misconception that you need to "respond very fast" to the questions to get the rep. Everyone has a different strategy, and well I spent some time a few years ago using this strategy to get some initial reputation. But I stopped some 5 years ago. I almost never play the "fastest gun in the west". I google things that I encounter during my normal daily work, and keep the tab open. If the best answer is not satisfactory, and later I come up with something better, I write it down as a new answer, and perhaps if I found similar problem in multiple SO questions, I put a comment with a cross-link to my answer in other thread.
You really need very little effort to get SO rep as a part of your normal daily work, yet everything I talk to seem amazed "wow how come you have so much rep on Stack!". Just create a damn account, be always logged in, and don't keep your solutions for yourself.
3. Try to put up an exhaustive question, write down a SMALL, reproducible scenario, explore some options yourself (ask yourself "what did I try?"). A lot of newcomers put very vague questions, very little information, it's not fun to ask someone a ten clarifying questions.
4. I felt really bad when I got my first downvote but it was indeed a bad answer, to a different question than the OP asked. I learnt the lesson and I don't read in haste anymore. It's good to be humbled sometimes.
Regarding "closing as duplicate", it's true some mods are too eager, but if it makes sense, I believe dupe questions should be closed - duplication is not good (DRY) and best code is no code, if possible.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#206People 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…
> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time. > 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. People keep saying that and I keep wo…
Well, before SO, you had sites like 'Expert Sex Change' (expertsexchange.com) which would purport to answer your question, but gray/blur out the actual text. They then required payment to expose the answers, which often turned out to be non-existent.
On the other hand, I've had a lot of success with SO, both asking and answering, and while there are occasions where I find questions closed as duplicates or off-topic, they are pretty rare. I frequent the Java, Docker, Kubernetes, jclouds and similar categories, and they are generally very good.
It may be down to the choice of topic? Perhaps PHP and .NET have more first-time users, and a lower quality of questions? I don't know; although since the SO data is all freely available [1] it might make a nice research project to discover [2] what causes these questions to be closed!
[1] https://archive.org/details/stackexchange [2] https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/540597/ov...
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#207I've answered 21 questions, got upvotes on 15 answers, 3 answers accepted by owners, asked 2 questions by myself and both were upvoted. I have no idea what these people in the article are talking about. SO is super friendly and super helpful.
You never found a super-useful question that mods had tried to kill?
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You can. Most people can't. As the site gets aggressive against newcomers and old timers decide they have better things to do, there will be less and less people available edit them. And don't think those editions are as high quality as the ones that come by the official channel, where literally anybody in the world with the needed knowledge can reply, and there is a robust process for vetting. Besides, despite any t…
The site isn't aggressive against newcomers, it's aggressive against bad form questions/answers. Which is usually, it is true, done by newcomers because they don't know how to make a good form ones. This is a social problem which is very hard to solve - how to make people produce high quality content without discouraging them too much when they produce low quality. Some people would be annoyed and leave. But I think SO found a model that largely works - at least for the most of my questions, I found pretty good answers. For some, I found none, but neither did I find answers in any other place.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. For the first time in a while, I've picked up a language I have not used for almost 15 years. Google is helping immensely, and I've been shocked at how often (>95%) of the time the first result is SO, and that answer is perfect. So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open. It might not be perfect, though I'd say it's the best by a massive margin.
The biggest problem for me is which SO site to search. If I've a problem with a bit of bash script to control KDE on Ubuntu then is that Superuser, Unix, SO, AskUbuntu, or ... I don't understand why the site is split up in that manner. So whilst I'll often choose an SO site I can't use their search. Try "KDE notifications from bash scripts" for example. Google will show that there are answers on SO and Unix.stackexch…
Yes, fragmentation is a real problem. Can be probably solved by integrating the search indexes to some measure without integrating the sites themselves. It's not easy, but it can be done IMHO.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#210People 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 SO is in decline. And decline is caused by its own success. - The SO was great because answers for noob questions where hard to find. At this point of time (thanks to SO and their knowledge database) there are so many other resources to get these noob questions answered or they are already answered. And some of these other resources are updated to reflect the most recent technology changes while SO answers are st…
> - Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering.
I suspect part of the reason they're not interested in answering is because a difficult question requires a lot more work to likely get less points as a result. Meanwhile, answering a ton of easy questions can be done quickly and gets more points over on Stack Overflow in the same time frame.
That and yeah, lots of people who could answer your question would rather be doing something that pays the bills or helps them instead.