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IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

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Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#71

Post by stefan_kendall3 »

sajt wrote: post #7
kayman wrote: post #2

Microsoft making a lot of moves that are starting surprise the tech community. it will take some time to convert the generation that grew up with the old closed microsoft, but slowly I believe they will have converts.

I think Stack Overflow has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Their community is outright hostile to active discussion. Only directly answerable questions are tolerated. Microsoft is (as always) a few years late to the party.

People now seem to be afraid to answer for fear of downvotes, and those that do get downvoted go on a witch hunt and downvote anything you've ever posted.

It's terrible.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#72

Post by colordrops »

lelandbatey wrote: post #37
fredley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a mod on a similarly hostile StackExchange site. The community has always been outright hostile to active discussion (outside of chat, the area of the site for specifically this) for all but a brief period when it was still working out what it was. The fact it's hostile to active discussion is part of what enables it to continue to be a useful resource. That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems…

Yeah, I agree. I think it's actually fantastic that they focus so narrowly on answerable questions. It's still a super useful resource, and a tight focus means it will probably be able to stay on track for a long long time. However, I wish there was a place as fantastically focused on good discussion.

Wouldn't this be easily solved by adding a "discussion" link from the question page to a wiki/forum page for more free-form or reddit-vote style questions?

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#73

Post by axefrog »

jessedhillon wrote: post #69

I don't understand why Microsoft continues to make it's own rendering engine. I get that they need a web browser they can control and distribute with their OS, but why a rendering engine? Especially one that, in my region (SF bay area), runs natively on fewer than 1% of the dev machines I see out there. If somebody were inclined to test their site for IE they'd most likely have to go through the hassle of setting up…

I'd be careful and try to recognise that the concentration of Apple-focussed development environments that you observe in the SF Bay area is not a reasonable reflection of the developer community at large. Windows still holds the greater proportion of market share by a large margin. On that note, you should make a point of also asking why Apple needs its own browser, or why Google needed to diverge Chrome from Webkit, or why Opera needs to exist, and so forth. Competition is good and mitigates complacency.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#74

Post by mathattack »

dragonwriter wrote: post #39
mathattack wrote: post #33

Wow - is this a massive pivot for Stack Overflow? A new revenue model?

No, Google and other vendors have done this with a number of things (shifting support channels to SO) over the last few years. Its not a shift for SO. It might be a shift for Microsoft , though.

Does SO get paid for it?

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#75

Post by foxylad »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #56
arrowgunz wrote: post #47

That is one smart move by Microsoft. Microsoft definitely seems like it is heading in the right direction. I'm quite excited to see what Microsoft have under their sleeves. Faster release cycles for Internet Explorer (like any other popular browsers) would be a killer move by them, IMO.

I don't see what's so amazing about this move. SO is well established at this point and Microsoft are just moving a small subset of their vast technical support effort to another platform. It is an excellent publicity stunt, though. It'll certainly fuel more of the "Microsoft has turned over a new leaf" discussion, but in the grand scheme of things with all their previous announcements like open-sourcing the C# compi…

It may be negligible, but for me it's evidence of a humility that I haven't seen before. "Old Microsoft" would never have publicly admitted that MSDN was inferior to SO, and if they admitted it privately their response would have been to build a replacement. Hell, Ballmer would have been throwing tables at anyone who suggested this during his tenure.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#76

Post by bunderbunder »

lelandbatey wrote: post #37
fredley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a mod on a similarly hostile StackExchange site. The community has always been outright hostile to active discussion (outside of chat, the area of the site for specifically this) for all but a brief period when it was still working out what it was. The fact it's hostile to active discussion is part of what enables it to continue to be a useful resource. That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems…

Yeah, I agree. I think it's actually fantastic that they focus so narrowly on answerable questions. It's still a super useful resource, and a tight focus means it will probably be able to stay on track for a long long time. However, I wish there was a place as fantastically focused on good discussion.

On the other hand, in the past few years I've found that all of the most useful Stack Overflow or P.SE pages I've found when Googling for information have turned out to be questions with 25+ upvotes, with answers having 50ish upvotes. And all closed as "not constructive."

It's certainly staying on track, but it's worth noting that many track-related analogies are pejoratives that focus on the way that you can't steer vehicles that go on tracks. I suspect an inordinate amount of incoming traffic to Stack Exchange is for information that only Stack Exchange apparently thinks (not just by the closing, but by the choice of words in explaining the reason for the closing) is not particularly valuable. Methinks that's evidence that the community governance has become an echo chamber - otherwise one should think that the people running this company would have identified a gap in the market that they could be exploiting by now.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#77

Post by girvo »

fidz wrote: post #58
lelandbatey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I agree. I think it's actually fantastic that they focus so narrowly on answerable questions. It's still a super useful resource, and a tight focus means it will probably be able to stay on track for a long long time. However, I wish there was a place as fantastically focused on good discussion.

What do you think about Quora?

That hiding answers to people who aren't logged in is user-hostile.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#78

Post by dionidium »

fredley wrote: post #10
sajt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Stack Overflow has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Their community is outright hostile to active discussion. Only directly answerable questions are tolerated. Microsoft is (as always) a few years late to the party.

I am a mod on a similarly hostile StackExchange site. The community has always been outright hostile to active discussion (outside of chat, the area of the site for specifically this) for all but a brief period when it was still working out what it was. The fact it's hostile to active discussion is part of what enables it to continue to be a useful resource. That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems…

It's not just about discussion. It's a general stance positioning the perfect against the pretty good. Here's just one example: questions often get closed as duplicate after good answers start rolling in. Sometimes, the new answers are better than the old ones. The mods argue that the users should move their answers over to the old question. Or that they should improve the old answers. It's a lot of should, should, should.

But why are we talking about shoulds that will never get done when a really good answer is already here? You've got users actively providing good content and your response is to reprimand them and tell them that content should be over here instead? You know, we have these things called links on the world wide web. The internet isn't running out of them.

Sometimes it feels like the mods are building a really tidy card catalog at the expense of the books in the collection.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#79

Post by Aldo_MX »

justin66 wrote: post #62
Aldo_MX wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you still have a link to a deleted question/answer, archive.org is your friend. It's a shame that the SO community is constantly killing interesting and useful questions, just because "they don't match their format".

Interesting, thanks. I was really just making a joke: the questions I google up are somehow quite often flagged for one reason or another, which makes SO's uncanny SEO effectiveness kind of irritating. I agree that is baffling the way interesting questions are always getting quashed.

I know that this was a joke, but in all seriousness, you should better bookmark any question you find useful/interesting.

Re: IE Web Development Support Moving to Stack Overflow

#80

Post by dionidium »

dionidium wrote: post #78
fredley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a mod on a similarly hostile StackExchange site. The community has always been outright hostile to active discussion (outside of chat, the area of the site for specifically this) for all but a brief period when it was still working out what it was. The fact it's hostile to active discussion is part of what enables it to continue to be a useful resource. That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems…

It's not just about discussion. It's a general stance positioning the perfect against the pretty good. Here's just one example: questions often get closed as duplicate after good answers start rolling in. Sometimes, the new answers are better than the old ones. The mods argue that the users should move their answers over to the old question. Or that they should improve the old answers. It's a lot of should, should, s…

While I'm ranting, I'll just note that the position that there's a canonical way to ask every question and a that there exists a single acceptable answer is a fairly absurd proposition that, once accepted, leads to all kinds of equally absurd behavior.
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