Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#91

Post by alanh » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:22 PM UTC

AgentConundrum wrote: post #64

What a terrible article. I'm sorry for the rant, but this really pissed me off. Admittedly, I don't participate in StackOverflow that much right now - I sort of go through an ebb and flow where I get really gung ho about answering questions, then it sort of wears off for a while - but this guy sounds a lot like he wants to game the system, and is only in it for the points. I'm not trying to put words in Jeff/Joel's m…

xatax, I just recognized your name from an incorrect answer you provided on StackOverflow that nevertheless was accepted (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4435906/print-when-textar...). You made assumptions and then adopted your self-confessed strategy of “quickly add[ing] an answer which …gives the asker enough to finish the answer on their own,” but failed to understand the problem inherent in the question. You seem to be “rep whoring” and part of the problem on Stack Overflow. How dare you just write a wall of text to dismiss as “terrible” someone’s critique of SO.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#92

Post by jessriedel » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:23 PM UTC

lyudmil wrote: post #89

cletus wrote: post #61

Let me add some perspective as a relatively highly ranked user (cletus) on SO. I've seen this kind of post before and frankly it's annoying. The typical template is "I tried to answer 2 questions and didn't get 1000 points so it sucks" or some variation revolving around faster answerers or whatever. Rather than being a problem, SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answer…

I agree with what you're saying, but I don't think it addresses the post. It's certainly true that Stack Overflow is the best place to get answers to programming questions and I won't dispute that. Here, though, is what I think the problem is. I think it mirrors the OP's problem. Stack Overflow became and is the best place to get answers to programming problems because of the community it has been able to build. Ther…

Exactly. The OP's point is that it's hard to get over the initial rep hurdle so that you can participate.

This prompts the idea: is there some sort of way that new users could quickly and reliably gain a minimum amount of rep by doing a bit of maintenance on the site? Say, flagging spam or suggesting correction which must be approved by someone with lots of rep? If this is possible, why don't more people know about it.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#93

Post by mcantor » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:23 PM UTC

This post appears to be written from the perspective that the goal of Stack Overflow is to gain points, when I believe the goal of Stack Overflow is to answer questions.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#94

Post by RuadhanMc » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:24 PM UTC

fakelvis wrote: post #20

bherms wrote: post #2

I don't really agree here.. While I do have my own gripes with Stack Overflow, I don't think this is the biggest issue. It took me two days of casual browsing/asking/answering to get a reputation of about 50 or so and another few weeks to get into the hundreds. -- Keep in mind I'm not a super genius expert or anything, I just asked a few questions and contributed a few answers in areas I was knowledgeable about. It's…

> The only major broken part (IMO) of SO is that the SE network is becoming so disjointed and your rep doesn't transfer between sites. By design, I would argue. And a good decision, too. To use a facetious example just to illustrate my point: without separate reputations, one could build up a huge reputation on http://apple.stackexchange.com/ and then use that influence over at http://askubuntu.com/ to provide a medi…

Exactly. Reputation is supposed to illustrate your expertise. If you gain 1000 rep points in the cooking SE, does that mean that you should have 1000 rep points in the programming SE? Of course not, since your expertise is with cooking and not programming. If you were to carry across reputation from one SE to another then it would make the reputation meaningless. Instead of being an expert cook with 1000 rep points you would be an expert SE user with 1000 points that might have come from answering questions about cooking, programming Ubuntu, startsup, etc.

Now THAT would break the system.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#95

Post by chc » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:28 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #79

cletus wrote: post #61

Let me add some perspective as a relatively highly ranked user (cletus) on SO. I've seen this kind of post before and frankly it's annoying. The typical template is "I tried to answer 2 questions and didn't get 1000 points so it sucks" or some variation revolving around faster answerers or whatever. Rather than being a problem, SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answer…

Re: "But to complain about a system where there are too many people answering questions is, to be perfectly blunt, ridiculous and narcissistic" I've never tried to participate in Stack Overflow as a hyper-active question answerer, but as a sometimes-user of the site who ends up there via Google often when performing coding question searches, the site still suffers from what has been dubbed "The Fastest Gun in the Wes…

This happens sometimes, but I don't think it's endemic. I've seen people come in a day late, even in questions where an answer has been accepted, and get tons of votes. It just has to be obviously much better than the others and you have to hope the stars don't align against you (as with so many things in life). The "fastest gun" problem typically occurs when the best answer does not really stand out to people.

For example, glancing at my top five answers, one of them was posted the day after the others in the question and got four times as many votes as the next top answer. I remember that at the time I wrote my answer, a very low-quality answer from somebody who didn't know Ruby very well was accepted, but now mine is accepted and the other guy graciously deleted his.

And that one's still getting votes. People come across those old questions and vote the good answers up years later. So the site can correct itself as long as people are willing to do that.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#96

Post by RuadhanMc » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:31 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #4

Personally I haven't gotten involved in SO precisely because of this. I don't feel the prize is worth the amount of effort that I'd put into playing the game. However, plenty of people do feel that it's worth it, and certainly the barrier to entry keeps out (some of) the griefers that inevitably show up in online communities.

The prize is the satisfaction you get from helping other people with a great answer. The reputation is window dressing. If you think of rep as the end goal, then of course it is not worth your time. If you enjoy answering people's questions, then it probably is worth your time.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#97

Post by alanh » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:32 PM UTC

alexsherrick wrote: post #35

A lot of people are dogging acconrad, but I have to agree with him. I was having a problem with rails, and I found the answer on stackoverflow. The right answer had no upvotes, so I figured I would upvote it; this way the original "asker" would know it is the right answer. However, it said I didn't have enough rep to upvote... I'm sure he'll figure it out but this would save him from checking the other "solutions".

Hey, let’s all downvote alexsherrick and tell him he’s an idiot for not understanding site policy instead of recognizing that he is pointing out an undesirable effect of that policy!

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#98

Post by jdp23 » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:33 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #61

Let me add some perspective as a relatively highly ranked user (cletus) on SO. I've seen this kind of post before and frankly it's annoying. The typical template is "I tried to answer 2 questions and didn't get 1000 points so it sucks" or some variation revolving around faster answerers or whatever. Rather than being a problem, SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answer…

Do I understand correctly that as a relatively high-ranked you don't think it sucks, you just don't go there much any more because you don't think the questions are interesting?

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#99

Post by Gimpson » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:36 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #79

cletus wrote: post #61

Let me add some perspective as a relatively highly ranked user (cletus) on SO. I've seen this kind of post before and frankly it's annoying. The typical template is "I tried to answer 2 questions and didn't get 1000 points so it sucks" or some variation revolving around faster answerers or whatever. Rather than being a problem, SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answer…

Re: "But to complain about a system where there are too many people answering questions is, to be perfectly blunt, ridiculous and narcissistic" I've never tried to participate in Stack Overflow as a hyper-active question answerer, but as a sometimes-user of the site who ends up there via Google often when performing coding question searches, the site still suffers from what has been dubbed "The Fastest Gun in the Wes…

I presume that when you find questions in this state you're upvoting the "good but slow" answers? The original asker may have accepted the fast answer and moved on, but if you're landing on the question now, it's definitely not too late to improve the content you found.

Re: Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible

#100

Post by RuadhanMc » Tue, Feb 01, 2011, 6:40 PM UTC

I would encourage anyone who is interested about the thinking behind Stack Overflow, reputation, money, question and answer sites, badges, commenting, wiki, etc, to go back and listen to the early Stack Overflow podcasts. You will get an hour by hour insight into their thinking behind certain features of the site and will see that there are some very good reasons (and to be honest, some not) for some things being the way they are.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/podcasts/