91–100 of 352 posts
Now it's read-only. One of many sources of answers (mostly for Linux config rabbit holes these days). Never post anything on there because it gets modded to shit within minutes.
I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…
The problem with this is that answers change, for some languages the way you did X 5 years ago might still be the best way to do X, but for another language it's no longer the best way of doing it. And while S.O has done a good job of moderating and make sure they are that high quality source of info, they caused a second order effect in that no one wants to post there anymore. After a while you're left with a bunch of outdated answers and no one wants to post updated answers because "it's just going to get flagged".
The authors example of any new JS answers being marked as dups and old jquery answers being provided instead is exactly what I am talking about. I hardly ever use S.O for JS questions anymore because everything is from 5+ years ago with examples in Jquery or ES5 that you have to translate to modern JS. Yeah those are high quality answers, if we were all still using Jquery.
S.O could have gone about producing the "searchable corpus of answers" in a different way that would have preserved the quality but not dejected all of it's users.
I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…
They want to be the first result for "X in Y" and also have that be correct.
But if I ask how to write getter/setters in C# in 2009 and get an answer that represents the state of the art and accept it, that's it. That's pretty much locked in forever. Despite the fact that 14 years later, that answer should be very different.
But you can't "re-ask" the question. No one is going to "unaccept" the answer. And if anyone does edit the answer, it's not guaranteed to be correct anymore.
You get stuck with a corpus of knowledge that gets stale.
I haven't had many questions closed, but there hasn't been one time where it was not legitimate, and the linked question didn't answer my problem.
The OP linked a few questions that got closed, and while we cannot see the content, we can see from the URL that it's pretty obvious they are very searchable questions that are obvious duplicates or do not fit SO:
- "meaning-of-dollar-sign-after-digit-and-dash-in-a-regex"
- "any-reason-to-use-grid-for-mobile-andn-desktop-views"
- "regex-matching-behavior-between-char-class-and-eol"
- etc.
Not only that, but those questions were not just closed, but were actually deleted, which indicates not only a problem with the content, but also big problems with the format.
StackOverflow ain't the problem here.
Someone did the work of getting to the bottom of this and OP eventually shared his questions that were deleted https://old.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/116vvpp/saying_good... > The first question is a request for ideas. That's offtopic for SO. > The second question was a good question, but since it ended up being a bug in your setup, and not actually part of the language, it wasn't as useful of a general question. Th…
But the UX of the site is basically "post a question, get modded to shit" now.
I don't think the original author is complaining about the functionality, or even the community (though debatable). I think they're complaining about the UX. And that's not something we can argue with - they think they're posting valid questions, and their experience is that their questions are always rejected. This is true, and it remains true even if technically their questions should be rejected for valid reasons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If your motivation for asking the question is “I would like to participate in a discussion about ______”, then you should not be asking here. https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask "List question" is meta jargon on stackoverflow that longtime users will understand. It falls under these "open ended" questions, hence why OP's question was closed as "primarily opinion-based" - IIRC it used to have its own close…
The question mentioned by the original OP was "My last question (just now) asked about potential maintainability issues involved with a certain approach to CSS layout." which doesn't appear to be very open-ended, at least from my interpretation. I'll be honest, I mainly knew what the answer to your question would be, but I tried to put myself in the shoes of a newer user trying to understand what questions a person s…
> and asked for other concrete examples.
It's explicitly asking for an open-ended list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit has it's own moderation problems. I've been banned from more sub-reddits in the last 6 months than the proceeding 14 years I've used the website. The internet is fast becoming a collection of digital-fiefdoms.
Because a huge amount of traffic on the internet is spam and trolling garbage. Humans really don't work well in the context of anyone anywhere can show up and start causing problems. We generally start putting up castle walls because we tire of the bullshit. That said, Reddit has become very ban happy.
Do I live in a different world than everyone here? Stack Overflow is awesome and I don't think I've ever had a bad experience with it (seriously). The response time is like 10 minutes or less since everyone there is so hungry for karma. The complaints about "closing questions" never really hit me because, when a question is closed, they usually point you towards an answer that helps anyways. They've always answered m…
Some of them are quite active and fun to work with, others are brutal. And it also depends on how much effort you put into your questions, also.
But any complaining that goes beyond "googling my question doesn't get me my complete answer anymore" should include examples of when it failed, because often people complain who just wanted SO to do their legwork for them.
I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…