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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#451

Post by tripzilch »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #242
el_cujo wrote: post #16

I really think it's better to just have an up vote arrow and no down vote option, for questions at least. The only reason on a site like that to really vote something down should be if something is off topic or against the rules, in which case you have a report button. If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasona…

I'd love a filter to reduce the number of questions with 0 upvotes in the 'interesting' feed. Most stuff in that feed is obviously not interesting (0 upvotes, plenty of views, no answers, older than 30 minutes, reputation Better filtering options would be helpful. I'd love to review unanswered recent questions by reputable users. I don't care about seeing questions with 0 upvotes, older than 30 minutes and more than…

Why are things older than 30 minutes uninteresting?

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#452

Post by sireat »

What's worse is the hypocrisy of these active SO moderators.

I spent time double checking my answer and answered a question on difference between 2 different web architectures only to see it closed for being too "broad" and the "right" answer being already on Google #1.

The person who closed the question had a top rated SO answer for a trivial C# declaration which already had a perfect #2 answer on MSDN.

https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-3.htm comes to mind here

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#453

Post by Annatar »

He calls it "Meta effect", I call it "Hacker" "News" effect.

So he's had it, he picked up his toys and he's going home. Good on him. I cannot think of a better thing to do, because this is the eternal September.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#454

Post by Annatar »

neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

"SO is a blessing for humanity."

My opinion is that "Stack Overflow" vastly exacerbated the eternal September effect -- people went there for instant gratification (of both the question and the answer variety), instead of focusing writing better manual pages. Yes, manual pages. The ones written in nroff. Those.

"I like Linux because I can find an answer to anything within seconds on Stack Overflow" (a "UNIX systems administrator" once told me that to my face) is not a good reason to adopt any technology, any programming language, or anything at all.

From my point of view, "Stack Overflow" is one of the great evils of the information technology industry: nobody bothers to think about the problem and research it any more. It's all about instant gratification and non-existent or shitty documentation nowadays. Great evil befell us all.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#455

Post by Annatar »

cptaj wrote: post #385
neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

Preach, my brother! SO is on Wikipedia level of blessings to humanity. I wish every profession out there could have a resource like this. People often share negative experiences asking question in SO but really, I can't fathom how that could happen. Just follow the composition rules, take a few minutes to write and research your question and you will be fine. Don't be so lazy. If you have a question that hasn't alrea…

"SO is on Wikipedia level of blessings to humanity."

I think it's time to pick up my toys and go home. And never return here.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#456

Post by scarface74 »

corobo wrote: post #434
scarface74 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t answer questions on SO, but I occasionally answer questions on r/aws. Half the time after further digging, it is an XYProblem.

That means the other half the time, with the same further digging, it is not. That's the problem.

As a question answerer, that’s why I prefer Reddit. It’s much less formal, more conversational and you can actually have a discussion.

I’ve never had the need to ask a question on SO, I have found a few answers on it of course.

Luckily, I’ve had plenty of complicated questions about AWS, but for those, our AWS Business support plan where we can talk to live support who can look at your environment has been invaluable.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#457

Post by jasode »

bachmeier wrote: post #355
jasode wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And it's very effective to provide "feedback" in the form of a drive-by downvote, isn't it? I understand your confusion and frustration but folks like Jon Skeet are also providing feedback to their fellow answerers who don't want to see bad questions . For some people, this signaling mechanism to reduce wasted effort for peers is even higher priority than feedback to the person asking the question.

Nobody's forced to read SO questions. Optimizing the site to maximize the probability that users feel stupid is not IMO the best choice. It doesn't take much time to add a comment. You could even let the downvoter select a reason from a menu.

>Nobody's forced to read SO questions.

Yes, you're absolutely correct. However, you're not realizing that the truth you stated (free-will volunteer vs conscript/slave) is actually the reason why users are not getting mandatory comments from downvoters.

Because StackOverflow can't force desirable expert answerers like Jon Skeet to look at SO questions, they have to keep some social mechanisms in place to keep the site attractive and tolerable for him and his peers. (E.g. Jon Skeet doesn't want to leave mandatory comments for every downvote and many of his expert peers agree with him. So far, StackOverflow & Jeff Atwood also agrees with them: make downvotes easier not harder.)

>Optimizing the site to maximize the probability that users feel stupid is not IMO the best choice.

It's certainly possible to believe SO's philosophy is fundamentally flawed and the rules need to be changed to favor the question asker over the answerers and if Jon Skeet doesn't like it he can fuck off. Well, I don't think SO has determined that the "brain drain" is worth it.

Look at the Skeet's profile[1]. He's probably the top C# and Java expert on that site. One of his most-upvoted answers is to the question, "Why is subtracting these two times (in 1927) giving a strange result?" The very tiny number of C# programmers with the expert skills to answer that question are outnumbered by the masses of people that ask stupid questions.

It doesn't seem like your suggested changes take into account the asymmetry of the bad overwhelming the good. The resource constraints of Q&A site are the minority of experts capable of answering the questions with quality answers. SO noticed that resource constraint in 2010 and that's why it prioritizes highly valuable contributors like Jon Skeet over random people who can ask any bad question.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#458

Post by bmn__ »

Grue3 wrote: post #448
neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

It's not a blessing. It bred an entire class of programmers who are unable to write anything without copypasting chunks of code from the Internet, and unable to understand any of that code. This is where all the interview candidates who can't solve FizzBuzz come from. They never had to solve a problem, Google basically did all the work for them.

You cannot blame SO. That class has always existed, instead in earlier times they copied the code off Usenet or something.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#459

Post by halr9000 »

Grue3 wrote: post #448
neves wrote: post #383

Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.

It's not a blessing. It bred an entire class of programmers who are unable to write anything without copypasting chunks of code from the Internet, and unable to understand any of that code. This is where all the interview candidates who can't solve FizzBuzz come from. They never had to solve a problem, Google basically did all the work for them.

While of course this problem exists, SO didn’t create them, but maybe enabled them at most. What created them was a big cycle starting with the internet leading to digital transformation and new business creation, which led to demand for new programmers, which led to college enrollment demand, and parents pushing their kids into a lucrative field. Lots of variables of course, but some (or many) of those recent college grads only passed due to rote memorization despite their inability to grasp basic concepts like abstraction.

So what if SO helped someone to get to the resume phase who perhaps shouldn’t be there? There’s only one way for them to figure that out, and it’s experience. Give them some constructive criticism and move on.

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