81–90 of 96 posts
I 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…
I 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> whenever I Google a programming question, the most relevant question has been moderated into oblivion That or bombarded with "just google it" replies.
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.
This sounds like a similar problem to Wikipedia: great resource, bad community. I've never been active in the SO community, and am no longer active in the WP community, so my experience with both is as a read-only resource. Both are excellent in that regard.
As a casual user of both sites, I have had pretty much only positive experiences. I use both sites are starting points for ideas not the final truth on a subject[1]. When one invests a lot of time into something, one usually becomes emotionally involved and that can lead to conflict in these massively collaborative projects. The only time I post to either site is when I am looking for an answer and can't find it -- if the question is not posted I'll post it myself or if I figure it out later I'll go back and post the answer (or edit the page in the case of Wikipedia). My usage is pretty sparse, but I have never experienced moderators lashing out at me in any unfair way.
[1]: Especially with Wikipedia I tend mainly to use it as an aggregation of links to other more trustworthy sources. With SO, I test the answer myself before blindly using it.
This sounds like a similar problem to Wikipedia: great resource, bad community. I've never been active in the SO community, and am no longer active in the WP community, so my experience with both is as a read-only resource. Both are excellent in that regard.
All communities trend to strictness over time, otherwise they do not survive. But anyone can bring this up on meta, if they have data, if they have examples, and lobby for change.
It's interesting how some sites manage to be strict and not horrible while other sites don't manage that so well.
I'm not sure how that culture is nurtured. Setting expectations is important - but you can't do that for all gajillion sites; and you can't do it after you've left.
SO is much more pleasant if you stick to the less populous niche tags where there isn't a race to get the first answer, pompous mods, and other negative side effects of gamification.
> a race to get the first answer This seems like desired behavior, no? Quick answers ought to be a goal for Q&A sites.
Junk title, but you can apply this article's critique to many communities in general (especially online ones with a myopic user base). On the whole, the StackExchange sites contain a wealth of information that's readily accessible and can't be duplicated easily. There's certainly room for competition that's not just a plain forum, but what that looks like I'm not sure. "Harmful" though? Have we already forgotten "exp…