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Stack Exchange Is Now Stack Overflow

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Re: Stack Exchange Is Now Stack Overflow

#51

Post by pramodliv1 »

slantyyz wrote: post #28
elmarschraml wrote: post #12

Reading between the lines, it seems to confirm a change in business model. To paraphrase: "Turns out software for running Q&A sites isn't that hot a property, but having access to a large part of all the world's programmers is"

Serious question - do many people here actually use anything other than Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Power User? I occasionally get and click on a Google result for the photography stack exchange, but I've rarely clicked on any results for the other Exchange sites for my non-technical searches.

I use math.stackexchage.com It's an active community with 486,887 questions. http://math.stackexchange.com/questions

Re: Stack Exchange Is Now Stack Overflow

#52

Post by matwood »

EliRivers wrote: post #29
wiremine wrote: post #3

Was just thinking what it was like to develop before Stack Overflow... and before github... Yikes! Kudos to the team over at SO to continue to iterate the business. I do wish they'd add an "out of date" button to flag questions/answers that are no longer relevant or just plain wrong. I think the amount of cruft they're going to deal with in the next 10 years is going to be HUGE.

I have to resort to SO a couple of times a month, so before SO (and other such) it was 95% the same as it is now. I probably would have found much more use for it in my first year or so as a programmer, but at least from my own experience, once I had familiarity with my tools and libraries, the kind of problems that require digging on the internet aren't the kind easily put into bite-sized Q&A. Maybe it's different f…

I find SO valuable for 'gotcha' types of questions. Update to the iOS9 sdk and now suddenly my build breaks with error-235132. Check SO and find out, yeah there is some flag that now needs to be YES instead of NO.

SO also lets me get by in frameworks and languages without having to know them all super deep. I find it much more useful to spend my cognitive load on algorithmic level or higher architectural level items instead of Spring configuration values or random iOS .plist keys.

Re: Stack Exchange Is Now Stack Overflow

#53

Post by samplusplus »

paulmd wrote: post #14
skybrian wrote: post #6

Buried in there is an announcement [1] that they're going to start accepting documentation and particularly examples of API usage, not just Q&A. It seems like a good place to put stuff that isn't a question. [1] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/303865/warlords-of-d...

That's smart. Programmers do a lot of searching for examples, there was a recent Google study on the topic. [1] One of my personal favorites lately has been bropages [2] - it's a crowdsourced set of usage examples for Unix command-line tools. Instead of wading through fifty pages of obtuse manpages or googling for usage, you just use "bro [command]" and you get some working examples. [1] https://research.google.com/p…

I have always been a huge fan of http://Readme.io I wish StackOverflow would integrate with some of these existing platforms instead of creating a new one. One of the biggest problems I have with documentation is fragmentation across platforms. I fear StackOverflow adding another platform will add to the fragmentation problem.

Re: Stack Exchange Is Now Stack Overflow

#54

Post by slg »

wiremine wrote: post #38
RubyPinch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

stackoverflow is also part-wiki, so depreciating questions isn't as likely as someone coming around and updating the answers

> so depreciating questions isn't as likely as someone coming around and updating the answers True, but I think it would be helpful for two reasons: a. Someone looking for an answer might not realize it is out of date. b. It would help surface questions that do need updating. You statement presupposes someone actually finds the out of date info. A button would help SO bring all those items to a single location.

>It would help surface questions that do need updating.

This is the biggest issue with out of date answers. No one is browsing old questions when they already know the answer. They are browsing because they have the same problem and they got there through search. The user can leave a comment in that question but that won't really bring any attention to the issue. This can lead to the question being asked again and then quickly closed because it is a duplicate of the question with the outdated answer. That serves to worsens mod/user relationships regarding duplicates that has already been brought up in this thread.

Re: Stack Exchange Is Now Stack Overflow

#55

Post by omaranto »

slantyyz wrote: post #28
elmarschraml wrote: post #12

Reading between the lines, it seems to confirm a change in business model. To paraphrase: "Turns out software for running Q&A sites isn't that hot a property, but having access to a large part of all the world's programmers is"

Serious question - do many people here actually use anything other than Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Power User? I occasionally get and click on a Google result for the photography stack exchange, but I've rarely clicked on any results for the other Exchange sites for my non-technical searches.

The one I use the most is MathOverflow. Second place is probably Mathematics Stack Exchange.

Re: Stack Exchange Is Now Stack Overflow

#57

Post by chris-at »

0xffffabcd wrote: post #26
freshyill wrote: post #4

Names don't matter much. As long as they still have a community willing to shame users for asking a question vaguely similar to one that was asked a few years earlier, then it's all good with me.

Either make a post on meta about the problem and provide a solution if you have on how to fix it OR make your own SO with your own rules. I'm really tired of seeing these off topic (whining) comments whenever SO comes up. It's useless and doesn't add anything to the discussion here.

Meta is for celebrating Stackoverflow, not for criticism.

Mention something that could be improved and you'll see what I mean.

Re: Stack Exchange Is Now Stack Overflow

#59

Post by Aldo_MX »

0xffffabcd wrote: post #26
freshyill wrote: post #4

Names don't matter much. As long as they still have a community willing to shame users for asking a question vaguely similar to one that was asked a few years earlier, then it's all good with me.

Either make a post on meta about the problem and provide a solution if you have on how to fix it OR make your own SO with your own rules. I'm really tired of seeing these off topic (whining) comments whenever SO comes up. It's useless and doesn't add anything to the discussion here.

User: Google.com -> How do I ...?

Google: Take this link to Stack Overflow

* This discussion is closed, the moderator left the following message: 400 Bad Request. This is not the correct SO for this type of question.

Re: Stack Exchange Is Now Stack Overflow

#60

Post by Aldo_MX »

slantyyz wrote: post #28
elmarschraml wrote: post #12

Reading between the lines, it seems to confirm a change in business model. To paraphrase: "Turns out software for running Q&A sites isn't that hot a property, but having access to a large part of all the world's programmers is"

Serious question - do many people here actually use anything other than Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Power User? I occasionally get and click on a Google result for the photography stack exchange, but I've rarely clicked on any results for the other Exchange sites for my non-technical searches.

I personally avoid any website related to Stack Overflow unless the rest of relevant search results point to content farms.

After many years of dealing with the hostility of SO, I feel that the effort to dig a bit in blogs, forums or mailing lists is less than the effort you have to do with dealing with SO's redirect loop: Off-topic question, Wrong stack overflow site, Duplicate question, Screw you because I got the reputation, etc.

That redirect loop usually ends up in an old question because some short sighted moderator couldn't tell the difference between the question 5 years in the past, than the question today.

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