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The Stack Overflow Age

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#91

Post by tptacek »

zeveb wrote: post #68

> 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…

It was "fast" in the sense you refer to as because it was batshit: every ISP and Usenet provider was forced to keep a copy of every public message everybody was reading. In its heyday, running a market-competitive Usenet server strained commercial storage technology (running an actually-competitive Usenet server required custom software engineering), and that was with a userbase a fraction of the size of Reddit.

Of course, it was incredibly slow in a more important sense: the latency with which you'd see responses to your messages. Your reply had to propagate through the network of Usenet peering relationships before your counterparty could see it. Contrast that to "primitive" web message boards, where that propagation is instantaneous.

But, most importantly: because everyone was keeping a replicated log of everything anyone had ever sent, almost nobody had archives. The only way to read old forum messages was to... wait for it... go to a web application like DejaNews.

Software piracy killed Usenet --- binaries made it impossible for a typical provider (of any sort) to provide full-feed Usenet, which is what customers demanded, and so everyone gradually migrated to centralized providers. But even if that hadn't happened, Reddit would have killed Usenet eventually.

(I ran a Freenix-ranked Usenet server in the 1990s for a mid-sized regional ISP, in part by independently inventing the INN history cache; my love for NNTP is deep and real.)

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#92

Post by sachinag »

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…

The really in depth stuff tends to be blogged about - SO should really have a team of sockpuppet writers who pose questions and then also post summary answers with links back to the blog posts.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#93

Post by unwind »

klenwell wrote: post #80
Someone1234 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot help but read "beginners" in a derogatory tone. Or at the very least a way to hand-wave away the unhealthy atmosphere that has formed at SO. It is definitely a problem for people with low SO Reputation since others can come along and edit their posts completely changing the context and meaning, and seem more brave to bully low rep users (e.g. delete/dup their posts). I have fairly high SO Rep from way-back-w…

For my last two jobs, I've created a new SO account for that job. I'm a pretty experienced user with decent reputation on my main account. I think I'm a pretty good question writer. I do my research beforehand, pay attention to niceties like formatting and grammar, and try to provide the right amount of context. My first couple questions almost immediately get downvoted without explanation. Comparable questions from…

So uh would you mind quantifying what "decent" rep means to you? This feels like something that is quite subjective. 5k, 10k, 50k?

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#94

Post by potta_coffee »

Someone1234 wrote: post #39
zwieback wrote: post #34

It's interesting to see all the negative comments about the SO culture here. I just hadn't really noticed it but maybe it is a problem for beginners. I generally find what I'm looking for and when I post a question I try to research first to avoid spam. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?

I cannot help but read "beginners" in a derogatory tone. Or at the very least a way to hand-wave away the unhealthy atmosphere that has formed at SO. It is definitely a problem for people with low SO Reputation since others can come along and edit their posts completely changing the context and meaning, and seem more brave to bully low rep users (e.g. delete/dup their posts). I have fairly high SO Rep from way-back-w…

I spent about 3 days contributing answers to SO before encountering some real pricks who live on that site and are on the offensive to get every reputation point they can. Snide comments and downvotes from these assholes has caused me to avoid contributing to the site even though I sometimes end up there occasionally for answers.

Also I've found that as I've become a better programmer, I spend way less time on sites like SO and more time reading actual documentation.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#95

Post by payne92 »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #62
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 bas…

I get what you're saying about their 'decision' to prohibit 'recommendation' questions, but my point is that it doesn't make any sense. It's a distinction without a difference, as many, many questions on the site are 'recommendations' or 'how do I':

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1942298/wrapping-a-c-lib...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/127803/how-to-parse-an-i...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1006289/how-to-find-out-...

..etc..

I don't understand why "how to generate a USPS label" (my question) is different than any of the above examples.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#96

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

vehementi wrote: post #45
simias wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

This has been an exact summary of my experience with SO. Extremely useful when searching for things. Difficult to get started contributing to.

The thresholds for unlocking privileges are there to filter out offensive trolls and other drains on the community. This can be a bit annoying since it applies separately to every subdomain and I can't be bothered to build up rep in every place that I might want to make an occasional comment.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#97

Post by mark-r »

ythn wrote: post #21
baud147258 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so bad about the culture? I've never had any problem there. Please note that I've answered a bunch of question, but only on a tag with not a lot of frequentation.

On some of the high traffic tags (Java, C++, Python) there are a few high rep users that will swoop in on any basic-level question within seconds and close as duplicate/off-topic/too-broad, etc. So on the one hand it is not very newbie or tutorial friendly, but on the other hand, it clears away those kinds of questions to make room for more difficult questions that may not have a good answer on SO yet. Even still, mo…

Thanks for noticing. Even when I vote to close a question, I try to leave something helpful behind.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#98

Post by maxxxxx »

baud147258 wrote: post #89
maxxxxx wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that one of the other site of the stackexchage network, https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/ , does that

Cool. I will have to check that out.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#99

Post by shagie »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #96
vehementi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been an exact summary of my experience with SO. Extremely useful when searching for things. Difficult to get started contributing to.

The thresholds for unlocking privileges are there to filter out offensive trolls and other drains on the community. This can be a bit annoying since it applies separately to every subdomain and I can't be bothered to build up rep in every place that I might want to make an occasional comment.

Once you have sufficient rep on one site, you get 100 rep on all sites which is enough to comment everywhere.

Re: The Stack Overflow Age

#100

Post by kristianc »

fhood wrote: post #86
ken wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood it, either. By that reasoning, almost any technical question is an "opinion" question asking for a "recommendation". For example, pretty much any question about C string handling has many possible answers, e.g., [1] admits that comparing two strings is "rather broad" and the various answers there recommend looping over each index and comparing chars with ==, sscanf, strncmp, regexes, and PEGs. Opin…

Also there seems to be no problem with users who submit opinions instead of answers. Q: How do I do X extremely specific thing that I need because I have an unusual case that needs this specific thing. A (top voted): Why would you want to do X? You shouldn't do that. I clearly know more about your problem than you do because I assume everyone on here is a college student and not a developer working with a large mostl…

This seems to be a common thing across all online support communities, even ones where the software company has outsourced support to their community. I'd love to see a solution to it, as it makes discussions incredibly frustrating to read.
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