StackOverflow Considered Harmful?

What a strange rant.

First of all, this guy continued answering and asking questions since he published this article, so I guess he changed his mind about deleting his account. http://stackoverflow.com/users/2189331/jdevlin

Secondly the italic bits about how he should be allowed to delete questions because he created the content make no sense. All SO questions and answers are collaboratively created so he can't claim ownership.

I agree the moderation is out of hand, and it should be easy to delete your account (but what's this about a link that "got misclicked")?

That is simply not true! SO has changed a few times over the time, discussions, suggestions to improvements are constantly being discussed in meta. For the most of it - most of the changes that I saw in my 3+ years there were good changes. That's a constant uphill battle that must take into account malicious users and trolls.

And to the article writer: once you wrote a question and people responded it is no longer "your" question. It belongs to the community: as an example I'll give you a 3 lines question that was answered by a few paragraphs answer including screenshots, links etc. Who put more effort into it? the OP or the guys that answered ? Now, if you delete such a question - you're deleting all the useful comments and answers as well. And yes, if you try to do that for multiple questions in a row - it looks suspicious and you should be stopped!

As for the "attitude" towards new users, this happens only when the user posts a bad question, and by bad I mean: 1. impossible to understand 2. impossible to reproduce 3. already been asked multiple times 4. HM or alternatively, posted a question that is far from perfect but can be improved - but then he/she bails off and not respond to comments.

In all the scenarios above - I'd rather have this question put on hold, until the user improves it.

And in general, when you join a community you should put minimal effort in learning the guidelines of acceptable behavior - if you don't like it - don't use it.

Personally, I find these guidelines useful and helpful.

All in all, I like the interface, I find it as a GREAT resource of learning and developing my personal skills, and unlike the author - I LOVE SO.

To the contrary: it has always been difficult to rank questions on Stack Exchange because there are far too few people casting downvotes on questions.

Here's the thing about stack overflow:

How many people have worked at a location that has blocked stack overflow?

Because I have worked with an organization of about 2500 people, not all of which were IT. One day, management went on a mad whitelisting crusade and blocked about 98% of the internet, including the stack exchange network.

IT ground totally to a halt, across all our branches. No programming, no sys-admining, no help desk.

Stack overflow is not a programmer social network, and it is not a Q&A site.

It's the new textbook. Developers and sysadmins used to keep hundreds of kilos of dead tree libraries with them because only the textbooks contained the arcane knowledge like "component X was actually not implemented properly, and will crash under Y circumstances". Languages and libraries never advertise that on their website.

Post-stack-overflow developers and admins use stack-overflow as their source of kooky corner cases and badly explained concepts documentation. They don't have or need the dead tree books.

So considered harmful? In my experience any IT staff who say they don't rely on stack overflow are lying.