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Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

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Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#51

Post by frou_dh »

bherms wrote: post #2

I don't really agree here.. While I do have my own gripes with Stack Overflow, I don't think this is the biggest issue. It took me two days of casual browsing/asking/answering to get a reputation of about 50 or so and another few weeks to get into the hundreds. -- Keep in mind I'm not a super genius expert or anything, I just asked a few questions and contributed a few answers in areas I was knowledgeable about. It's…

>The only major broken part (IMO) of SO is that the SE network is becoming so disjointed and your rep doesn't transfer between sites.

Putting rep aside, I don't even know what all the other development-related SE sites are, let alone can be bothered to monitor them all. This means that there are interesting questions I'll never see because I only visit StackOverflow.

I don't see how people other than complete SE junkies are supposed to stay on top of this site creation and forking extravaganza. Good for them, but I don't have the energy.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#52

Post by dansingerman »

Gobiner wrote: post #44
dansingerman wrote: post #9

The thing is StackOverflow really really works. If I search Google for a programming query I nearly always find links to useful information on SO, if not the precise answer. (I've even found my own answers via Google when I have forgotten how to do something) That is SO's first and foremost use case. And I reiterate - it works extremely well. The community features are secondary to that (it's not Quora), and there ar…

I've found plenty of helpful information on StackOverflow via Google as well, but I definitely would not say that it "really really works." I've asked two questions (C#/.NET so there's a large pool of potential answerers) and neither question ever got the answer it deserved, even though both got answers from genuine experts (Jon Skeet and Eric Lippert). I found the answer to my first question on some MSDN blog after…

Maybe my enthusiasm for the quality of StackOverflow results in Google is because I remember the pre-SO days of scrolling through experts-exchange's hideous site and fictional paywall for a low quality answer in a tiny font.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#53

Post by ddkrone »

noarchy wrote: post #8

"Rep grinds" (see how MMO-speak has influenced us?) on non-gaming web sites may be becoming the norm. You grind out some rep, and get privileges based on that rep. One can argue that this serves as an effective barrier to keep out would-be posters of bad content and discussion, but as we can see it also screws with "legit" posters. Determined individuals will figure out how to work the game to their advantage, both f…

What game and what advantage? It's a Q/A site. The only way you are going to game the system is if you ask clearly delineated questions and provide thoughtful and clear answers.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#54

Post by axod »

Tycho wrote: post #25
ck2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply do not understand this ego thing with "points". A million points gets you what? An award for most wasted time? I wish HN had an option to turn off points on an account, I can't even block it with adblock because there's no element id. There's more to life than meaningless "points".

I think in the specific case of StackOverflow, having a lot of points is something that indicates to potential employers that you are a useful/knowledgable candidate. And it's not just a vague signifier - they can actually go and look at your answers and see what you're about.

And they can see how much time you waste answering questions on StackOverflow rather than working.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#55

Post by phwd »

alexsherrick wrote: post #35

A lot of people are dogging acconrad, but I have to agree with him. I was having a problem with rails, and I found the answer on stackoverflow. The right answer had no upvotes, so I figured I would upvote it; this way the original "asker" would know it is the right answer. However, it said I didn't have enough rep to upvote... I'm sure he'll figure it out but this would save him from checking the other "solutions".

This is to prevent "voting rings" using new accounts. It is a small measure of activity. All it would have taken from you was 15 rep,

1 Upvoted Answer (+10) and 1 Upvoted Question (+5) or 1 Question Upvoted (3 times) (+15) or 3 Upvoted Questions (+15)

(It is actually 14, since you start off with 1 rep)

That is really not a lot of activity/work needed from an individual.

Most likely a next user would have seen the answer on rails and voted by now.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#56

Post by rtghnyhjm »

stonemetal wrote: post #30
bherms wrote: post #2

I don't really agree here.. While I do have my own gripes with Stack Overflow, I don't think this is the biggest issue. It took me two days of casual browsing/asking/answering to get a reputation of about 50 or so and another few weeks to get into the hundreds. -- Keep in mind I'm not a super genius expert or anything, I just asked a few questions and contributed a few answers in areas I was knowledgeable about. It's…

Why should it transfer? Just because you are a great software engineer(as determined by your 23K rep. on SO), doesn't mean you are a great chief and should have a 23K rep on the cooking SE.

Because at low reps they are an anti-spam measure.

If I have demonstrated I'm not a spammer by having a solid score on SO then I should be allowed to post a comment straight away on cooking.

That's the reason for the 100rep liking bonus - it's a grandfather clause

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#57

Post by rtghnyhjm »

SandB0x wrote: post #22
Khao wrote: post #3

I've never seen stackoverflow as a race to get the most rep possible. Reputation is just a "bonus", not a prerequisite to participate in the website. I like stackoverflow the way it is

During the development of Stack Overflow, Joel and Jeff talked about the answers staying up-to-date in a wiki-like fashion. I think what the author means is that in order to participate in this - i.e. edit and improve an existing answer - you have to have a certain amount of rep. It's quite likely that a user Googling for their particular issue might find an incomplete or out-of-date answer on Stack Overflow. When th…

I think thats a big problem with the "accepted answer"

Firstly it's accepted by the questioner - who by definition knows the least about the subject, otherwise they wouldn't be asking!

Even if it is correct and well written - then it stays accepted years later when it's no longer the best way to do something.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#58

Post by topcat31 »

I completely disagree with both the premise and conclusion of this blog post.

I'm a complete coding noob (http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001) and along the way to learning programming have relied on StackOverflow for about 10 questions.

For every single one I have received complete, thorough, helpful and patient answers. In short, I could not be happier with SO. As a beginner it's been a phenomenal resource both for searching and for answering specific issues.

The post makes the point that newbies can't answer questions - and for me this is one of the reasons the quality of the site is so high. If you let anyone answer then you don't know how good quality the response is. As a beginner how am I to know if a given answer is correct?

Of course, any community site still has problems like this and SO is not immune to it but IMHO this is one of the ways they keep the quality bar higher than any other Q&A platform out there.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#59

Post by rtghnyhjm »

zem wrote: post #26
Khao wrote: post #3

I've never seen stackoverflow as a race to get the most rep possible. Reputation is just a "bonus", not a prerequisite to participate in the website. I like stackoverflow the way it is

yeah, but that's not what the author is complaining about. the problem is that stackoverflow has reputation barriers for performing various actions, so until you acquire some rep, your site experience is pretty broken. this is well and good if you intend to put some effort into building up reputation so that you can participate fully, but it works against someone who uses the site casually but who has useful things t…

I think the idea is to build a community - in order to use SO as more than a Google scrape you need to put in some work and become involved. Then you are more likely to go back and add answers yourself - so you contribute to the collective.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#60

Post by bryanlarsen »

zem wrote: post #26
Khao wrote: post #3

I've never seen stackoverflow as a race to get the most rep possible. Reputation is just a "bonus", not a prerequisite to participate in the website. I like stackoverflow the way it is

yeah, but that's not what the author is complaining about. the problem is that stackoverflow has reputation barriers for performing various actions, so until you acquire some rep, your site experience is pretty broken. this is well and good if you intend to put some effort into building up reputation so that you can participate fully, but it works against someone who uses the site casually but who has useful things t…

"someone who uses the site casually but who has useful things to say." will quickly get a lot more than 50 karma, so it doesn't really work against them at all.
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