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

Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

stum.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 62 posts

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#31

Post by markdown »

ygra wrote: post #18
markdown wrote: post #16

Maybe it's just me, or the type of questions I ask, but I've found SO to be a little elitist. I love it for the fact I very often find answers there, but almost every time I've asked a question, the responses or lack thereof have been pretty brutal.

It's a little messy sometimes. Trivial beginner questions are usually answered within a minute and you get about three correct answers immediately. But there are those nagging questions where you pondered two days and researched and then pour everything you know into a long, elaborate question, asking for help. And then, nothing. 16 views, no votes, no answers. Can be very frustrating. If you have mostly questions of…

> But there are those nagging questions where you pondered two days and researched and then pour everything you know into a long, elaborate question, asking for help. And then, nothing. 16 views, no votes, no answers.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. Even worse when a moderator comes along and closes it, as if it would have cost him something to just leave it open in case some kind soul came along and responded.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#32

Post by tikhonj »

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #21
markdown wrote: post #16

Maybe it's just me, or the type of questions I ask, but I've found SO to be a little elitist. I love it for the fact I very often find answers there, but almost every time I've asked a question, the responses or lack thereof have been pretty brutal.

It is often quite useless for questions that go beyond the basics. In such cases, a complete lack of attention is almost better than getting the responses that incorrectly suggest that the wrong question is being asked, or a moderator rewriting the question to ask something completely irrelevant, or comments that give blatantly wrong information. For any moderately complex question regarding open source software, for…

This really depends on the topic. I mostly stick around the functional programming tags (Haskell and OCaml) and have seen all sorts of difficult questions answered, often very well. Sometimes SO is basically the only place to find an answer at all. Especially in the Haskell tag, even extremely involved and non-trivial questions rarely go unanswered.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#33

Post by PommeDeTerre »

DanBC wrote: post #11

I love Stack Overflow. I'm interested in fragmentation. Reddit has it, and Stack Overflow has it too. I have no idea how they'll fix it. If you want to ask a question you need to ask the right SE site. Some are obvious, but others have overlapping sites and it's confusing for the target audience. What's worse is that some of these sites have made agreements with each other to funnel the "wrong questions" to the right…

The worst part of such fragmentation is the "fiefdoms" that can often form.

We see this at Stack Overflow, we see it at reddit, and even at Wikipedia to some extent.

A relatively small number of users end up as moderators of one form or another, and can exert disproportionately more control over other, non-moderator users.

While this may not necessarily be a bad thing in terms of maintaining a certain minimum standard of quality, it does take responsible moderators for this to happen.

More often than not, we see people with very little power or influence in the real world using their moderation abilities on some online forum to try to compensate. They use their power just for the sake of using it, and perhaps for the emotional high it may bring them, rather than out of a sense of bettering the community.

I think that this kind of behavior is far more harmful than the fragmentation itself.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#34

Post by balpha »

bigiain wrote: post #28
gus_massa wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of that is by design. It was designed as a questions-answer site, to collect every question of every programming language and provide the correct answer. It was not designed as a forum, where you go to talk with friends. The problem is what to do when all the questions had been answered?

Cynical me thinks "it's time to _monetize!_" How long till it follows expert sexchange.com's model?

We can't, and that's why: http://www.clearbits.net/creators/146-stack-exchange-data-du....

And did you really think the ads on the site and the http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ job listings are free?

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#35

Post by possibilistic »

ronilan wrote: post #4

Stack Overflow belongs to a very small elite group of sites (Wikipedia obviously being another) who's existance is what creates the quality of Google search results. Nough said :)

Would it be a threat to Google if all useful information was well-curated, semantic, etc? If developing a search engine became nontrivial, would the hypothetical loss of Google's search product cause them serious problems?

I would like to see this happen. Not to harm Google, but rather to make search a problem that doesn't require billions to tackle.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#36

Post by blisterpeanuts »

planetjones wrote: post #5

A fantastic site that has helped me immensely. It's a little hard to gain reputation so much now, due to the amount of people who jump in as soon as a question is asked. But the vast database of answers to common problems it has created have added immense value. I much prefer using SO rather than dedicated forums which are often badly designed and slow e.g. Oracle, IBM. Some of the other sites that SO spawned are use…

I second that. SO is a fantastic resource. Just when I feel I'm starting to become an expert, I look something up on SO and discover how much I still have to learn. Keeps ya' humble!

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#37

Post by chrisvineup »

UnfalseDesign wrote: post #29
chrisvineup wrote: post #10

I do love SO, but the moderation can be really hard to deal with when you aren't sure how to articulate your question.

It is somewhat like reading a magazine before you actually submit an article for publication. Many new users don't bother reading through some of the upvoted questions in the category they are seeking help on and hence never bother understanding what makes a good question. However, it is true that some of the users are brutal towards new users and downvote and move on without ever going back to see if the question wa…

Nothing compares to the downvoting going on over at english.stack... Jesus, you better have perfect English if you want anything other than a negative rep.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#38

Post by sublimit »

geertj wrote: post #8

Stackoverflow .. where all the useful questions are marked as "off topic".

Yeah, the moderation gets on my nerves. They might just lock the question before you have time to explain yourself better. And by then, they've already edited your question to what they falsely believed it was asking, even if there was nothing ambiguous about it. I've quietly decided to never use the site again because of things like that.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#39

Post by ronilan »

possibilistic wrote: post #35
ronilan wrote: post #4

Stack Overflow belongs to a very small elite group of sites (Wikipedia obviously being another) who's existance is what creates the quality of Google search results. Nough said :)

Would it be a threat to Google if all useful information was well-curated, semantic, etc? If developing a search engine became nontrivial, would the hypothetical loss of Google's search product cause them serious problems? I would like to see this happen. Not to harm Google, but rather to make search a problem that doesn't require billions to tackle.

Well-curated, semantic information is the opposite of a threat. It will make the results better, making the service provided by the provider of the results of higher quality.

A threat can only come if the searching audience moves elsewhere to search for [something]; and if [something] is very popular among the searching audience; and if [something] is also very important to individual searcher.

Because the reason for moving away can only be if [something] is not available from Google there aren't that many threats. I think last time there was a glimpse of such thing happening was in the summer of 2006, but there are other opinions.

Re: Five Years of Stackoverflow.com

#40

Post by mathattack »

ronilan wrote: post #4

Stack Overflow belongs to a very small elite group of sites (Wikipedia obviously being another) who's existance is what creates the quality of Google search results. Nough said :)

Very true. I used to be very happy when StackOverflow appeared on the list of query results. Then I just started adding StackOverflow to my searches to make sure it was added. :-)
Post reply on HN