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The Stack Overflow Age

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#61

Post by sosborn »

shagie wrote: post #50
Someone1234 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until it is. Ironically most of the more helpful SO google results are helpful exactly because of the discussion/updates that took place in the comment chain under an answer from ten years earlier. > Guys how do I filter an array in JavaScript?! >> Use XYZ >>> XYZ works, but it doesn't work in IE5 >>>> If you're on IE10 or above you can use ABC instead of XYZ, it is cleaner! >>>>> Hey guys, change this {} to this {},…

The indents there suggest a threaded discussion that looks more like a 1 on 1 chat or threaded discussion board. Wouldn’t one of those resources be a better place to hold such a discussion?

In the best (and rarest) examples of SO, those comments percolate into the accepted answer as edits (and marked as such).

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#62

Post by aeorgnoieang »

payne92 wrote: post #19

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…

[2] isn't an example of "subjective editorial decisions"; your question was off-topic because 'recommendation' questions are prohibited. For that tho, there's a Stack Exchange sister site:

- [Software Recommendations Stack Exchange](https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/)

I don't like that 'decision', i.e. to not allow recommendations, but I understand the reasoning behind it, that recommendation questions are basically polls. [But isn't everything on which people can vote basically a poll too? Obviously yes in my opinion.]

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#63

Post by aeorgnoieang »

ProAm wrote: post #46
payne92 wrote: post #19

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…

'Closing' isn't a big deal really. There isn't anything wrong with asking a similar question, but if it's effectively a duplicate then it's helpful to consolidate the answers in 'one place' (one question).

> It's meant to be a forum to help people, not rewrite the manual on a programming language. If there was only one way people should literally just RTM.

Actually, it's not meant to be a forum. It's meant to be more like a manual, the manual that no one has written (because the SO manual [potentially] covers everything, not just one product or package or library).

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#64

Post by aeorgnoieang »

simias wrote: post #33
ProAm wrote: post #9

It's too bad the culture of SO turned out the way it did. I was eager and happy to use it early on but was quickly disillusioned and it's my last resort to turn to if I have questions these days.

From a "lurker" perspective who often stumbles on SO after a web search it's really a great resource. On the other hand I never actually contributed anything to the website... because it won't let me. One day I stumbled upon a question regarding some problem I had, the accepted answer had a C code snippet that contained an error. I thought I'd be a good netizen and decided to create an account to submit a correction.…

> I'm sure they must have done a lot of testing to end up with this system but it basically means that I'll probably never contribute anything to their website.

I think it's really more that it just ended-up like that. It is sad that everyone 'can't' contribute, but that's okay really. Not everyone should be contributing.

But I suspect you could contribute. You mention finding questions to which you don't know the answer. Surely, for some of those questions at least, you later found an answer elsewhere. When you do, go back to the question and add an answer based on what you learned.

It's also perfectly acceptable (and commendable) to just add an answer that's a little bit better than the existing answers. Hell, just combining two or more answers into a single (comprehensible) answer is a relatively easy way to contribute (and help others).

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#65

Post by aeorgnoieang »

clavalle wrote: post #55
zbentley wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And that's great if you want a collection of uncontroversial answers to common questions. 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…

This is a pretty good example of a probably pretty common phenomenon whereby different people have drastically different experiences about what's, nominally at least, 'the same thing'.

I've definitely noticed what you described and I've spent some not-entirely-insignificant amount of time fighting it on the meta site.

But I've also had a pretty nice experience with other portions (e.g. tags) of the site.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#66

Post by Ajedi32 »

aepiepaey wrote: post #53

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…

Yes, once you start asking _really_ difficult questions that require in-depth knowledge of a niche topic to answer SO becomes less useful, since the pool of people who know enough to actually answer your question is too small.

In cases like that I usually just end up answering my own question later, after I've figured it out by other means.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#67

Post by aeorgnoieang »

Someone1234 wrote: post #49
aw3c2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> discussing SO is not for discussion!

Until it is. Ironically most of the more helpful SO google results are helpful exactly because of the discussion/updates that took place in the comment chain under an answer from ten years earlier. > Guys how do I filter an array in JavaScript?! >> Use XYZ >>> XYZ works, but it doesn't work in IE5 >>>> If you're on IE10 or above you can use ABC instead of XYZ, it is cleaner! >>>>> Hey guys, change this {} to this {},…

Ideally, those 'discussions' would be incorporated into an answer, if only a new answer. Even-more-ideally, a single (most-upvoted) answer would incorporate all of the info from other answers and subsequent comments. That, of course, doesn't happen that often.

Every Wikipedia article has a talk page. But that doesn't mean that the purpose of the site is discussion. I think the same thing applies to SO.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#68

Post by zeveb »

> In the early days of the Internet, before the Web, there was a system called Usenet which created primitive online discussion forums.

I wouldn't call Usenet groups 'primitive online discussion forums'; indeed, I rather strongly believe that in most respects Usenet was better & more advanced than current technologies.

It was fast. How fast? Really, really fast: every article was already sitting on your local system, so there was no network lag (or just LAN lag, if your local system was on a network). Articles were plain ASCII text: no ads, no images, no JavaScript. The combination of local articles & small articles wins over web pages every day of the week.

It was easy to find stuff. While the system was distributed across the world, there was a nice, neat hierarchy. This wins over the Web, which needs a service like Google to be usable. If one wanted to, one could perform full-text search over the entire newsfeed in realtime (James 'Kibo" Parry was famous for this). Imagine being able to grep the Internet!

It was decentralised: you could get multiple newsfeeds from multiple sources. You could have site-local newsgroups if you wanted to, or just share certain groups with your peers.

It had killfiles. It's hard to express, nowadays, how valuable these were. And you were in control, not some unaccountable moderator.

A 21st-century version of Usenet, with encryption, authentication & Unicode, and capable of scaling up to 7 billion people, would be just awesome.

Web forums are a primitive version of Usenet.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#69

Post by ProAm »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #63
ProAm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

'Closing' isn't a big deal really. There isn't anything wrong with asking a similar question, but if it's effectively a duplicate then it's helpful to consolidate the answers in 'one place' (one question). > It's meant to be a forum to help people, not rewrite the manual on a programming language. If there was only one way people should literally just RTM. Actually, it's not meant to be a forum. It's meant to be more…

> Actually, it's not meant to be a forum. It's meant to be more like a manual

It's meant to be a question and answers site, if they want it to be a reproduction of the manual they should just link to the actual manuals. I feel it completely defeats the purpose of having a community to help others if it's not meant to be forum-esque.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#70

Post by maxxxxx »

aw3c2 wrote: post #37
maxxxxx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question was pretty broad but I think discussing it would have been very valuable for quite a few people. What bothered me were the snide responses. At minimum they should have stayed quiet or explained that SO doesn't deal with this kind of question.

> discussing SO is not for discussion!

If SO not for discussion is there a forum where you can discuss broad software architecture? Something with a spirit like HN where not everything is on topic but usually discussions are respectful and interesting.
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