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Stack Overflow Fatigue

robertelwell.blogspot.com

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Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue

#51

Post by mistermann »

mkramlich wrote: post #35
telemachos wrote: post #19

My SO pet peeve was authors who answer nearly all questions in their field with "I discuss this in Chapter 5 of Volume 4 of my Everything You Need to Know About Everything series. In stores now."

And of course the flip side of that point is a lot of people's questions ARE already answered somewhere, often in books, if somebody just cared to get off their a-- and go look for it, spend time reading and investing in their own education. I've seen thousands of questions asked on the Internet where the asker could have answered it themselves by putting in a little more common sense effort, upfront. The RTFM phenom…

True enough, but with the number of technologies a developer is "required" to know these days, I have a bit of trouble buying the RTFM argument (unless it is referring to freely available, easily searchable help docs on the vendor/author website). The the amount of technologies I use on a day to day basis, it's literally impossible for me to RTFM on all of them, especially if by RTFM you mean read a book on the technology (not to mention, which book should I read....figuring that out can take an hour. And is reading just one book sufficient?)

Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue

#52

Post by mistermann »

barrkel wrote: post #41

The thing that drove me out was uninteresting questions. I wanted an advanced search that filtered questions by minimum asker reputation, but the only operator available filters by maximum asker reputation (i.e. to find newbies). I then asked for the feature on meta.stackoverflow.com, and folks there perceived I was being elitist and downvoted me to oblivion. So I left.

> I wanted an advanced search

I agree. SO has advanced search capabilities, but you have to be an uber power user and know all the esoteric switches, which I think is by design, so fanboys can be "leet". There is this page: http://stackoverflow.com/search (which isn't linked from the homepage), but why don't they take the 4 hours to build an advanced search form so people who aren't frickin experts on the SO platform can do advanced searches? I think this is by design.

>I then asked for the feature on meta.stackoverflow.com, and folks there perceived I was being elitist and downvoted me to oblivion. So I left.

Meta is not a particularly friendly place, and this seems to be the only place that Jeff takes guidance from, but I think it has to a certain degree become ineffective as the people that rule meta are super-uber SO users, and it it is a very homogeneous group of users, so genuinely new ideas basically can't enter. Maybe they could, but after the initial rude reception you get with a new idea, most people just can't be arsed and leave, as you did.

Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue

#53

Post by mistermann »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #33
russell wrote: post #29

I worked for a for-pay Q&A site a little while back. They had all the incentives of SO and more. For example if you answered half-a-dozen questions a month, you got free access. The reward system. The asker declared how much the question was worth and awarded the points to one or more answerers. Awards could be adjusted by moderators so a better answer could be awarded the points. There were a large number of categor…

So why don't you do it any more?

What was the site? Surely not experts-exchange?

Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue

#54

Post by mistermann »

markmywords wrote: post #26
hazmattron wrote: post #10

I find that Google is a great way to access the information on Stack Overflow, even as a participating member of the community. When I'm looking for an answer to a question, often a Google search will return the Stack Overflow post most relevant - helpful when there are many similar posts on a given topic.

Yes, it leads to better results than using the Stack Overflow search.

If SO was smart they would write an advanced search form that basically just translates into google compatible syntax and forwards it to google (assuming there are no legal issues with this.) Are there legal issues with this, is this a violation of the google TOS??

Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue

#55

Post by richardw »

tetha wrote: post #32

Disclaimer: This is no flame, and this is no whining. This is my personal experience with stackoverflow, which may entirely depend on me doing complicated akward things. My experience with stackoverflow boil down to these two situations: I ask a question, write my little heart out to provide context, to provide things I have tried already and to state my problem, because I don't have trivial little coding problems I…

I agree, same experience. Two thoughts:

1) Karma-seeking individuals are likely going to try find a way to get as much of the good stuff with the least effort. Easier questions will get snapped up.

2) You can still use the system, just offer a karma reward for a good answer.

Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue

#56

Post by gbhn »

mkramlich wrote: post #35
telemachos wrote: post #19

My SO pet peeve was authors who answer nearly all questions in their field with "I discuss this in Chapter 5 of Volume 4 of my Everything You Need to Know About Everything series. In stores now."

And of course the flip side of that point is a lot of people's questions ARE already answered somewhere, often in books, if somebody just cared to get off their a-- and go look for it, spend time reading and investing in their own education. I've seen thousands of questions asked on the Internet where the asker could have answered it themselves by putting in a little more common sense effort, upfront. The RTFM phenom…

The Stack Overflow goal is to build the "FM" in a search-friendly way that speaks directly to specific questions.

For myself, I like the site, and sometimes have problems it helps with, but too seldom for it to become a go-to resource. I think there are lots of people in situations for whom it can be indispensable in that way, though.

Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue

#57

Post by tetha »

richardw wrote: post #55
tetha wrote: post #32

Disclaimer: This is no flame, and this is no whining. This is my personal experience with stackoverflow, which may entirely depend on me doing complicated akward things. My experience with stackoverflow boil down to these two situations: I ask a question, write my little heart out to provide context, to provide things I have tried already and to state my problem, because I don't have trivial little coding problems I…

I agree, same experience. Two thoughts: 1) Karma-seeking individuals are likely going to try find a way to get as much of the good stuff with the least effort. Easier questions will get snapped up. 2) You can still use the system, just offer a karma reward for a good answer.

I just don't see the reward of extra effort anymore. Once I have found the right mailing list (which is not that hard), I can invest exactly the same effort I invest into posting a nontrivial question on stackoverflow and usually I can get far better answers without any extra effort, without having to handle any kind of karma-politics.

Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue

#58

Post by rquirk »

sprout wrote: post #45
wisty wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither does Wikipedia, but at least Wikipedia doesn't have "cold" articles.

So you think that Wikipedia content gets worse or stagnant over time? Definitely, I think it's more effective than the SO model.

The WP pages on Chrome or Git only mention major features of those pieces of software. Features don't change that much. Part of the articles talk about the historic aspects of the projects, and again the past doesn't really change.

SO tends to go into minute detail on a particular aspect of something, so the staleness effect is amplified. For example, questions on how to write a Chrome extension tend to be stale, as do ones on specific features of Git such as integration with Subversion, or submodule support.

Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue

#59

Post by [deleted] »

sprout wrote: post #43
eli wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that points on SO actually unlock admin and moderation features on the site gives them real value. I don't care at all about my Reddit karma, but if it meant I could eventually retitle misleading posts I would.

I think that's a place where Wikipedia presents a better model in a lot of ways. People love to complain about its cliquey admin groups, but the fact is they're extremely effective at getting quality content out there. Bottom line, I think, is that forcing people to discuss (not just summarily up or downvote) is really important to getting meaningful content. It's fairly easy to see when someone is talking out of the…

[deleted]

Re: Stack Overflow Fatigue

#60

Post by eru »

mistermann wrote: post #46
archangel_one wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree entirely - I've had exactly the same experiences. I think both of them boil down to the site suffering from it's own success. This seems to be fundamentally because once one reasonably correct answer picks up an upvote or two, it often snowballs into picking up many more because future visitors won't add other answers of their own and just upvote that. This leads to there being a significant reward for gettin…

I also agree....almost a year ago this problem was actually discussed on the SO podcast (people doing the instantaneous one liner reply in order to get upvotes asap, the problem somewhat originated from a blog post someone did one specific ways to game the SO rep system). I have a similar problem in that I ask questions that are generally "harder" and don't often have a perfectly black and white answer, but I'll get…

> It's not particularly easy, but I think they could improve things to stop gaming of the system.

Or put another way, they just change the mechanics, so that the gaming the system means doing the right thing.

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