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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#71

Post by jnovek »

prepend wrote: post #59
jnovek wrote: post #21

This culture is why I've never contributed to Stack Overflow. I'm a reasonably senior engineer, I've been lucky to experience an extraordinary breadth of technology in my career, and I love helping people learn to program... but I just don't have the time or emotional energy for SO's top posters to pick apart the minutia of every word I say in an answer. The ROI for me is nil.

Same here, I’ve been a reader for 10 years or however long, but their rules were too difficult for me to follow in order to vote. I had to visit every day and do menial, non-useful things just to be able to vote or answer. This didn’t work for me because SO wasn’t something I typically visited every day. So I just couldn’t get into the habit of being enough of a user to browse and vote so it was a vicious cycle of ap…

I definitely learned a lot of my attitudes about software engineering from "Joel on Software". It's weird to think that those works are "ancient" now.

I don't really have an answer to the problem, SO has some very smart people working for them who, I'm sure, think about this issue. For some reason technical discussions held by competent people on the internet seem to trend towards dumpster fire. I've also noticed this phenomenon on photography discussion groups.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#72

Post by mholt »

vasili111 wrote: post #45
el_cujo wrote: post #16

I really think it's better to just have an up vote arrow and no down vote option, for questions at least. The only reason on a site like that to really vote something down should be if something is off topic or against the rules, in which case you have a report button. If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasona…

Here is my proposal for removing downvotes but people do not like it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252338/downvote-sys...

That's ironic

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#74

Post by baud147258 »

adossi wrote: post #32
eternalny1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On StackOverflow, a decent amount of site reputation is required before one can down-vote.

You also lose 1 reputation for down-voting which helps prevent people from getting too trigger happy

Only on answers. You can downvote questions without any damage to your rep. And even then the damage is trivial.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#75

Post by herodotus »

ubercow13 wrote: post #35

I feel like HN is turning a bit in this direction too. I feel like I’m seeing more downvoted comments, and they are more often than not perfectly good comments, and no one replies explaining why they don’t like the comment. Of course you can’t talk about it because it’s against the rules.

agree. I sometimes upvote a downvoted comment just because it looks like a reasonable comment, and I cannot see any reason why it was downvoted.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#77

Post by prepend »

spapas82 wrote: post #38

I was a heavy SO user before some years however I have stopped posting questions nowadays (mainly because of the reasons presented in the article) and I find answering too time consuming. What I've found really helpful when I need to learn a new language / paradigm is to use IRC (freenode). I more or less learned Kotlin and Elixir just by reading some online articles and asking things on the corresponding IRC channel…

I like this method. I think there’s something about IRC that’s just hard enough to use that it filters out a lot of people.

If you described IRC to me, I wouldn’t think it would work. But almost 30 years later, I’m still using it. I think it’s another example of how protocols are better than apps for sustainability and true “value,” as opposed to fundraising.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#78

Post by jodrellblank »

Avamander wrote: post #3

> Can people truly not comprehend how downvoting a post to -20 (or more) is perceived by the author of that post? No, Stack Overflow high-rank users certainly do not. (A current community moderator literally said "Voting is not a friendly or unfriendly activity.") I've too suggested that the UI should be changed to be less abrasive and that high-rank people should be more accountable for their actions and been downvo…

The SO guidelines are that voting is about the question, not about the author. Everyone who has a rant about SO shows that is not universally agreed on, to say the least. But for you to say "people should be kinder and more empathic", for downvoting within the rules of the site, while you go on a rant calling people unwelcoming snarky abrasive asses, is amusingly hatey.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#79

Post by snazz »

Avamander wrote: post #33
adossi wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also lose 1 reputation for down-voting which helps prevent people from getting too trigger happy

1 rep doesn't matter at all for high-rank people, the rep loss should be based on total rep.

It should be something like 1% of your reputation. That’s significant enough to make even high-rank users have to think.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#80

Post by luckylion »

darkcha0s wrote: post #51
jnovek wrote: post #21

This culture is why I've never contributed to Stack Overflow. I'm a reasonably senior engineer, I've been lucky to experience an extraordinary breadth of technology in my career, and I love helping people learn to program... but I just don't have the time or emotional energy for SO's top posters to pick apart the minutia of every word I say in an answer. The ROI for me is nil.

It just turns into a "ACTUALLY!" contest, of who can pee higher. No matter how right you are, some guy will link a blog post detailing why in some obscure scenario that might not be valid, and proceed to downvote your obviously wrong answer.

That's strange, in all the time I've spent on SO sites, I can remember only one instance where that happened. Maybe it's community related and happens with certain topics more than with others?
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