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Did you? I always just scrolled past the fold.
I think they changed it once SO started becoming popular (I may be misremembering the timeline, but I definitely remember being very frustrated about not being able to view the answers at one point)
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What's so bad about the culture? I've never had any problem there. Please note that I've answered a bunch of question, but only on a tag with not a lot of frequentation.
On some of the high traffic tags (Java, C++, Python) there are a few high rep users that will swoop in on any basic-level question within seconds and close as duplicate/off-topic/too-broad, etc. So on the one hand it is not very newbie or tutorial friendly, but on the other hand, it clears away those kinds of questions to make room for more difficult questions that may not have a good answer on SO yet. Even still, mo…
If you have basically no idea what you're doing, or just want an example for something, it can be great.
On the other hand, if you try to find an answer about something you're really knowledgeable about, the result is often unsatisfactory:
Like trying to find the reference documentation to answer some specific question, and the documentation is buried under a lot of SO questions (that usually don't answer that question).[1]
Or you find someone who asked exactly the question you're looking for an answer to, but it either: has no answer, despite being very old, or has been closed due to being "not constructive" or "off topic".
[1]: While I generally prefer the in-language documentation, e.g. Python's integrated documentation is often missing notices (deprecation notices, warnings about illogical behaviour, ...) that exist in the web version.
SO is definitely a force, but I feel its usefulness has faded from inattention to the user experience and use cases. For example: #1. There's a huge "homework problem" (narrow, specific questions that aren't broadly useful). Consider flagging homework as homework (and excluding it from searches), trying to divert questioners to other resources before their question is posted ("this looks like homework..."), and more…
Questions should never be closed on a site that has a voting system. Completely defeats the purpose of both options. There is nothing wrong with asking a similar question to another or posting answers that are similar to others. People learn in different manners, sometimes it might take a person to read the same question (but a little different) a few different times before they can grasp the concept. It's meant to b…
By encouraging post duplication, you will quickly burn out folks who want to be helpful. I certainly would not want to answer 1000 questions that are essentially 1 question reworded 1000 times, would you?
The Pedant Police make Stack Overflow very difficult to use.
Rules/purity oriented folks (what you call "The Pedant Police") do make it harder to use . . . for askers and a little bit for answerers. But they make it a lot easier to use for people who want to find already-written answers to their questions. As Jeff says in TFA, that's the tradeoff they want to make: > Most importantly, we realized that each question is asked by one person but the answers are seen by thousands o…
But if you want to go off the beaten track a bit it leads to problems.
And any expert is going to ask questions off the beaten track.
So...they are limiting SO to relatively inexperienced developers looking for answers to common questions.
Considering that they make money by selling the talent that uses the site I'm not sure if it is wise to make that trade-off as rigidly as they do.
Stack Overflow is useful at times, and frustrating at others. If you have basically no idea what you're doing, or just want an example for something, it can be great. On the other hand, if you try to find an answer about something you're really knowledgeable about, the result is often unsatisfactory: Like trying to find the reference documentation to answer some specific question, and the documentation is buried unde…
“Who were you, DenverCoder9? What did you see?!”
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Questions should never be closed on a site that has a voting system. Completely defeats the purpose of both options. There is nothing wrong with asking a similar question to another or posting answers that are similar to others. People learn in different manners, sometimes it might take a person to read the same question (but a little different) a few different times before they can grasp the concept. It's meant to b…
I disagree. A user who does not understand an answer to a question they have can easily ask for clarification without reposting the same question again (even if reworded). If they see a question they do not understand, they can ask for clarification in order to determine if the question they found is similar to the one they have. These are basic skills that prove useful in a variety of situations where you may want t…
Often times people just starting to learn or are new to a subject matter dont know what they dont know. So they might simply not have the capacity to realize they are asking a similar question or that an answer to another question will suit their needs. I feel its more beneficial to allow these people to ask their questions with the limited expanse of knowledge they have and use it to learn. Hopefully as a result will one day return the favor. The system now shuns these people and they never return or help and end up disliking the community.
>By encouraging post duplication, you will quickly burn out folks who want to be helpful
This is what the voting system is for. Any system that places a ranking level on votes should filter this out easily. There is nothing that says you have to answer a question just because you know the answer. Just vote and move on to keep yourself from burning out.
It's interesting to see all the negative comments about the SO culture here. I just hadn't really noticed it but maybe it is a problem for beginners. I generally find what I'm looking for and when I post a question I try to research first to avoid spam. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
It's interesting to see all the negative comments about the SO culture here. I just hadn't really noticed it but maybe it is a problem for beginners. I generally find what I'm looking for and when I post a question I try to research first to avoid spam. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
I cannot help but read "beginners" in a derogatory tone. Or at the very least a way to hand-wave away the unhealthy atmosphere that has formed at SO. It is definitely a problem for people with low SO Reputation since others can come along and edit their posts completely changing the context and meaning, and seem more brave to bully low rep users (e.g. delete/dup their posts). I have fairly high SO Rep from way-back-w…
That's a pretty good way of putting it. But... wasn't that what it was always about? The original article says:
> So we decided to optimize everything to be useful for the thousands, not the individual. We literally have 1000 visitors for every person who asks a question. That’s why we sort the answers by votes. It’s also why we optimize for questions and answers that will be helpful to other people, later.
StackOverflow isn't optimized for the people asking questions, it's optimized for the thousands of people arriving at the question later from Google.
