Meta-comment: I am so over titles of the form "* considered harmful" when it has something to do with someone's opinion and IT/computing. Please just stop.
And -gate over trivialities.
I like to call this "gategate"
StackOverflow Considered Harmful?
51–60 of 96 posts
Re: StackOverflow Considered Harmful?
#52Considering that whenever I google a programming question, the most useful answer is generally on StackOverflow and at the top of the search results, I have a hard time considering it harmful in any way. It might not be perfect, but I don't know anything better.
Considering that whenever I Google a programming question, the most relevant question has been moderated into oblivion and so I have to seek my answer elsewhere. Above is a bit toungue-in-cheek, but it is true in many cases. I don't find SO as the definitive answer site for that reason, but there is a lot of good information there.
Other very useless answer is having the first result as: 'This is a common question, you should use Google'.
This doesn't happen in SO, but it happens often enough in other forums.
Re: StackOverflow Considered Harmful?
#53I can't say this wasn't unexpected. I've read so many useful questions on there that were seemingly derailed by the mods and people complaining to the mods in the comments section. I understand their point of view about the strict QA format. That's their business model and it's how they became who they are, but not listening to your core audience begging you to reform your policies is a clear sign of stagnation and c…
That is simply not true! SO has changed a few times over the time, discussions, suggestions to improvements are constantly being discussed in meta. For the most of it - most of the changes that I saw in my 3+ years there were good changes. That's a constant uphill battle that must take into account malicious users and trolls. And to the article writer: once you wrote a question and people responded it is no longer "y…
> As for the "attitude" towards new users, this happens only when the user posts a bad question
This is not true in my experience. Several times in the past month, I've googled for some problem or other and found a StackExchange question with my exact problem and several useful solutions, which had been closed because a moderator deemed it insignificant or overly broad. I understand the need for community standards in a site like this, but if your standards are getting in the way of the actual questions people want to ask, you need to change the standards, not crack down on legitimate use.
Re: StackOverflow Considered Harmful?
#54What a strange rant. First of all, this guy continued answering and asking questions since he published this article, so I guess he changed his mind about deleting his account. http://stackoverflow.com/users/2189331/jdevlin Secondly the italic bits about how he should be allowed to delete questions because he created the content make no sense. All SO questions and answers are collaboratively created so he can't claim…
There are plenty of collaborative communities where post deletion is allowed. There is clearly a different level of value between a SO question and a reddit comment thread, but deletions are almost always disruptive in some way. But those posts have his name on them. He is judged by them, and he in some way has to stand by them. I don't know that deletion should be an assured right with all user-created content, but…
>... no one should be publishing someone else's content under their name without their continued consent.
I disagree. That's the deal when you add content to one of these kinds of sites - you don't own it. And you know that going in. And there are valid reasons to disallow it: if people start deleting their own answers the conversation becomes (in some cases) impossible to follow.
It's kind of silly to be so heavily invested on a site like this and then expect them to change the rules when you're ready to move on.
Re: StackOverflow Considered Harmful?
#55Here's the thing about stack overflow: How many people have worked at a location that has blocked stack overflow? Because I have worked with an organization of about 2500 people, not all of which were IT. One day, management went on a mad whitelisting crusade and blocked about 98% of the internet, including the stack exchange network. IT ground totally to a halt, across all our branches. No programming, no sys-admini…
For IT, I find that most of the useful answers I get nowadays are from Nixcraft and DigitalOcean.
Not to say that there aren't a few useful answers at ServerFault/StackOverflow, but the moderation and design has made it hostile to all but the most simple questions.
Re: StackOverflow Considered Harmful?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
But how will you get clicks if you don't resort to ever-more-Buzzfeed-esque titles?
Yeah, right? He should've just said "13 reasons why I will never use StackOverflow again."
I made the mistake of clicking one of those "13 reason ..." links the other day. Each of the thirteen reasons was split into 4 parts, so I had to navigate through 52 pages to read the entire article. I quit when I realized what they'd done (5th section).
I'm not going to waste my time ... especially when your site is ad-laden and slow. The funny part is that this is probably a consequence of Adwords not allowing asynchronous ad updates on a page. They needed me to navigate through 52 pages to increase their impression counts.
Very sad ... and now back to my regularly scheduled uBlock.
Re: StackOverflow Considered Harmful?
#57Here's the thing about stack overflow: How many people have worked at a location that has blocked stack overflow? Because I have worked with an organization of about 2500 people, not all of which were IT. One day, management went on a mad whitelisting crusade and blocked about 98% of the internet, including the stack exchange network. IT ground totally to a halt, across all our branches. No programming, no sys-admini…
I would think very seriously before taking a job at a place that blocked stack overflow, both because it's saved my ass more than once and because, well, I don't like places with white lists. I'm okay with a black list - people shouldn't be surfing porn or political circle jerks when they're on someone else's dime. But it's frustrating as hell to realize Google found a site with the answer I need but I can't open it because it's not on the white list.
IT managers typically give the reasonable-sounding response "It's no problem to add sites. Just let us know which ones you need and we'll add them after we take a look."
To which I say "Great. Give me your home number so if I'm chasing some weird error at midnight during a big release I can call you every five minutes to get you to add entries as I look for a solution.
Re: StackOverflow Considered Harmful?
#58What a strange rant. First of all, this guy continued answering and asking questions since he published this article, so I guess he changed his mind about deleting his account. http://stackoverflow.com/users/2189331/jdevlin Secondly the italic bits about how he should be allowed to delete questions because he created the content make no sense. All SO questions and answers are collaboratively created so he can't claim…
After posting this, I thought: well, what I said was entirely correct, but why did I bother objecting to some random guy's sour grapes story? And then the answer came to me... I did it because I want the ycombinator points! There is a point whore in all of us...
Re: StackOverflow Considered Harmful?
#59What a strange rant. First of all, this guy continued answering and asking questions since he published this article, so I guess he changed his mind about deleting his account. http://stackoverflow.com/users/2189331/jdevlin Secondly the italic bits about how he should be allowed to delete questions because he created the content make no sense. All SO questions and answers are collaboratively created so he can't claim…
There are plenty of collaborative communities where post deletion is allowed. There is clearly a different level of value between a SO question and a reddit comment thread, but deletions are almost always disruptive in some way. But those posts have his name on them. He is judged by them, and he in some way has to stand by them. I don't know that deletion should be an assured right with all user-created content, but…
knorby, my main point wasn't about who holds copyright here, but it was to say that when he deleted a question, he was also deleting answers that other people had written. You really do need a good reason to do that.
Re: StackOverflow Considered Harmful?
#60I like Stack Overflow. I agree with many of its criticisms, but I still think it's a huge gain for the programming community overall. I think the worst aspect is the endless "your premise is flawed, you should do instead" answers. I often formulate toy examples, or ask questions out of curiosity rather than practical need. Somehow, users always latch on to the irrelevant part of my question instead of answering the p…
A disclaimer is the right way to go. The more guidance you can put into the question, the better off everyone is.