Stack Exchange Is Now Stack Overflow

For me, it was the usenet, and specifically comp.lang.c and comp.arch.embedded. It was quite entertaining and useful, but that was way before it become Google groups and the spammer bots discovering it.

I don't understand your first para. New users don't want to ask questions. They want an answer to their questions, and only if there is no answer they want to ask a question.

SO is not just a question-asking site, it's also a repository of already asked questions.

Many (but admitedly not all) questions closed as dupes make no effort to distinguish themselves from previously answered questions.

(I'm someone who thinks there are problems with some of the SO sites. I'm not a fan.)

This will probably get downvoted into oblivion but ...

I have a kind of love hate relationship with SO.

I love that I get answers. I hate that I spend so much time writing answers and then see SO make bank from my work.

I've probably spent over 1000 hours writing answers on SO. Most of that time is spent writing working samples for answers. In fact http://webglfundamentals.org was started because of answers I wrote on SO where it they seemed too long for SO.

But, now there's this feeling of conflict where for every answer I have on webglfundamentals.org I really just want to paste a link to the article there on SO when it's relevent. But, SO frowns on that. So, I have to basically give SO all my content and work for free [or ignore it]. I supposedly get some kind of benefit from their gamification rep which I can show on my resume or something but conversely it feels like a treadmill that I must keep running on or lose my rep. It's become an unpaid responsibility.

To be clear it's not just webglfundamentals.org. It's any tech blog post period. I feel like an SO gets more popular they just suck up all content. Why write anything tech on my blog when 99% of the people looking for an answer will go to SO first? So it's become a negative influence for me in a way. Because no one is going to look anywhere but SO I feel less compelled to write tech articles.

Sorry for the rant. Maybe there's a solution? Maybe I've just got a bad POV. Like I said I certainly appreciate the other answers. Random brainfart, maybe like Youtube they should pay contributors? Yea, that will never work but something just feels wrong to me at moment. Also it isn't about the money really. I can't really put my finger on it.

I too have a lot of complex feelings about Stack Overflow. I appreciate it as a resource, but I also worry about what it incentivizes and why and how it incentivizes them. Your example is great: why is it that complicated questions with complicated answers you cannot just link to existing, well written how to article. Some of my best resources have come from such links that could only be appended as comments to the question, so they don't benefit from as much Rep gain as an answer, nor can they be marked as the "accepted" answer, when often they are the best answer...

It's a particular concern given they are exploring a "Documentation" site designed for such long form answers and presumably there will be more answers on the main page of the form "see this example of this Documentation page" and it will be interesting to see if some of the Rep systems and moderation policies adjust with that. On the flipside the Documentation site as proposed still encourages people to (re)create content that could exist elsewhere for Rep points and maybe to the detriment of useful community sites or existing documentation sites. Some of that will be wait and see as they move forward into the project, of course.

Finally, in a slightly different direction, as a somewhat unsuccessful game designer in a past life, I spent a lot of time thinking about point systems and incentive systems, and it's hard not to evaluate Stack Overflow's Rep through some of those filters. From those respects, Stack Overflow Rep is not bad, but sometimes concerning, largely in part from a reactionary position on myself that the "gamification" of the world is largely a bad thing, incentivizing in people sometimes the worst OCD tendencies and disincentivizing thoughtfulness or creativity. Stack Overflow Rep is definitely OCD incentivizing.

I had interviewers ask me about my Stack Overflow Rep, and for one thing its not hard to find, and for second thing many of my points are actually elsewhere in the Exchange network, which can be fun to explain. But it's also easy for me to worry what in fact they are really asking about if they are interested in such an arbitrary metric, as well known and "extensive" as it may be... (Particularly in a world of employers that forbid social media participation entirely, which would include things like Stack Overflow.)