Stackoverflow works great for me, and I don't know why more people don't appear to use it like I do.
1) When you've got a problem, Google it. 98% of the time the answer will be in top 5 links to stackoverflow or documentation. You upvote the answer and question.
2) 1.5% of the time, stackoverflow will have a related question, but either it doesn't have an answer, or the answer has issues.
You figure it out yourself, so you post a comment or answer or just the crappy workaround you used because you ran out of time to figure it out completely.
3) The remaining 0.5% of the time, you get nothing. You post a question, but of course nobody answers because it's an esoteric, hard question. 24 hours later you post an answer to your own question, or more likely a crappy workaround.
And eventually somebody posts a great answer to your question. (Once this happened to me >3 years after I posted it!) It's way too late for you, but it will help the next person with the same problem.
You don't get a lot of karma quickly this way since you're posting esoteric stuff, but you do tend to pick up some badges that are designed to reward this sort of behaviour, like "Populist" and "Necromancer". You do pick up karma slowly and steadily, though. What's satisfying is seeing an answer tick over from zero to one ~12 months after you posted it, realising that you saved somebody hours of frustration.
If you answer an easy question, you've saved somebody a few minutes. When you answer a hard one, you've saved hours or days.
One issue I run into is finding a Stack Overflow question that exactly matches the issue I've run into, find that it's been closed for being a duplicate, click the link to the question it's supposed to be a duplicate of, and find that the other question is completely unrelated. Not only can I not find the answer from SO at this point, but if I find the answer on my own I can't even help others.
Another issue I've run into is the minimum numbers of characters needed to edit an answer. Once I found the answer that was chosen and upvoted had code that didn't make any sense. It was something like an instance of a point object "point1" and an instance "newpoint" and they wrote "point1 = newpoint;" but actually meant "point1 = new point();". When I realized the problem I tried to change it but wasn't able to because I wasn't changing the answer enough (I think there's a minimum 6 character limit). I didn't want to make random changes elsewhere just to make the minimum needed to fix it, so I let it be.
I find Stack Overflow useful, but I don't try to participate in it anymore and don't stay signed in.
I taught myself to code using SO in just the last two years. I reference it almost daily. I've shipped production software in this time span using the information. I can't believe such a high quality source of information exists on the internet, it is a phenomenal public resource. Difficult to contribute to? Sure. Prickly moderators, who close questions I've found very useful? Definitely. Is it dying? I have no idea, I hope not. The creators of the site deserve some kind of medal, in addition to whatever valuation the company has. Really an incredible resource.
As others have said, the first objective of stackoverflow was to destroy expertexchange, which it has succeeded admirably at. Finding answers through search engines is now far easier.
I've posted very rarely on the software stackexchange, but I've been very active on the electronics stackexchange to the extent that I'm in the top 2% and rank #28. It has very aggressive moderation of 'bad' questions, and I sometimes wish there was somewhere chattier and less fussy we could gently steer the less well formed questions to. It does feel bad when someone asks a question and gets the door slammed in their face. But on the other hand there are a lot of repetitive 'bad' questions from people who've not yet understood what a resistor is.
Remember it's been gamified, so we might as well treat it as a game. Consider the motivation of the question-answerers.
(I also opportunistically karma-snipe the "hot network questions", so I have 1.4k rep on math.stackexchange from only two answers)
Top 2% here - I have used Stackoverflow this way for years. It has saved me hundreds of hours of searching over the years and still does.
One thing I'd add is I try to leave a thank you comment in addition to an upvote when I find an answer to a hard question.
Getting comments years later thanking you for a quick answer you jotted down at some point is so satisfying.
Agreed. This related to the misconception that "little or no activity on an open source project means that it's dead." That statement is frequently true, but not always.
If most of the common questions have been answered, then there will obviously be a correlated decline in the number of questions posted and subsequently answers posted. Esoteric questions aren't abundant, especially over a constant time frame.
Declining question/answer activity shows that the website is healthy. I've opened S/O a few times over the past year with the intention to answer questions, only to find duplicate/off-topic/low-effort/etc. questions.
Stackoverflow can be thought of a big cache for programming problems. A hit is a +1 on question/answer and walk away with the answer. A miss is when you have to find the answer someplace else (or figure it out yourself), then you make the cache bigger.
I've earned "Necromancer" about a dozen times and I don't think it's a coincidence that they're some of the answers I'm most pleased with. I don't even bother answering old questions unless I think there's a clear gap in the existing answers that I can help fill.
Stackoverflow is a good language resource for me -- if I don't know the language I'm working in as well yet, it's invaluable. For non-beginner questions I don't find your percentages to be accurate, apologies. In the latter case SO (and hell sometimes even googling the problem) are unhelpful, and whatever is on SO that is related isn't applicable enough to be helpful. In these cases sometimes I find myself asking SO questions, but more often than not after about ten minutes of searching I go offline in my quest and find a senior+ engineer who has a free moment to ask.
All the "works for me" answers like yours and the articles are just another example of what's wrong with SO.
I was tempted to qualify this more, but honestly, if you can't see why "works for me" is one of the worst kinds of answers you can give in tech, then i doubt i can convince you.
Exactly. And that's good enough. The question whether contributors "are welcome" is less relevant now than it was 5 years ago. But I think they still are.
SO is another area where I feel "out of sync" with the rest of the "programming world", in that I've...
* ...never posted a question to SO (because I've never found it either necessary or helpful to do so),
* ...only ever "copy-pasted" from SO once (it was a CSS polyfill for iOS having broken "support" for vh/vw)
* ...only attempted to answer questions on SO twice, exclusively out of a feeling of "am I missing something?"
I've been programming for 16 years, and doing so professionally for 7 of those. I've always seen StackOverflow as like a worse version of MDN or something: obscure API-specific stuff that should be in documentation for libXYZ or XYZService but for some reason isn't, with answers supplied by random internet people and "graded" by other, less-knowledgeable random internet people.
For more advanced stuff (like "what are higher-kinded types" or "how do monads help simplify concurrency"), online articles, tutorials, or IRC channels have always been a sufficient supplement to just trying stuff myself.
I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.
> I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.
I suspect that the part that you are "missing" has to do with the following belief:
> answers supplied by random internet people and "graded" by other, less-knowledgeable random internet people
You've inherently discounted the quality of content on the site, so it's no wonder you find nothing valuable there. The fact is that "crowd sourcing" actually can work, and "random internet people" are able to curate and raise visibility of quality content.
I think Stack Overflow is one of the best examples of this. Despite being inundated with terrible content, the system is able to consistently identify quality and float it to the top while mostly keeping the trash out of sight.
I have the same feeling. The official docs, experts' websites, code from relevant projects, and books are always better than getting a quick answer from SO. Sometimes when I've exhausted my available resources (often the case is that I don't have the necessary book), I'll click on an SO link... only to find that the question is closed because it's not a bite-sized chunk that fits the SO format.
I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.
You have bit of experience, Stack Overflow's usefulness applies mostly for novices. See the people who said they learned to program with SO in this thread, or otherwise find the material there useful. They're the target userbase, not you.
I suspect the audience is not limited on purpose. The work required to answer questions, and incentive system seems to select for questions that are already google-able but the person asking just doesn't have enough domain knowledge to productively google for that answer.
The only time I get a useful stack overflow google result is when I've jumped headfirst into an area outside my skillset and need to do a common operation but the toolset doesn't make obvious. The kind of questions where I'd be desperate enough to ask SO are either complicated and - at best - get "don't do it like that" answers. Or I'm looking to better understand the technical considerations going into a design decision, which is too opinion-based (or whatever SO calls it) to be asked.
It probably depends on the type of coding your doing, and your style of problem solving.
I've experienced a massive boost in productivity using StackOverflow to help resolve the sorts of issues that are too big to appear in the docs and too small to have a whole blog post. But perhaps it has something to do with the sort of software I work on that I happen to run into a lot of problems in that sweet spot.
What is wrong with getting answers from "random internet people". I've actually looked into some StackOverflow users and some of them are pretty accomplished software engineers in their own right.
I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.
I don't think you are.
Stack Overflow was an interesting idea, but I find it has a terrible signal/noise ratio today and one of the most unpleasant and unconstructive cultures of any tech discussion site, for basically the same reasons that many other comments here have already given.
The way they chose to co-opt search engines was also a brilliant move by the founders, but has also now become annoying to the point where I'd have the entire SO network removed from my search results pages by default if I could.
I also have never asked anything on SO, and never used SO as a reference. SO only seems to work for factual simple answers that are found in the documentation or manual pages.
For higher level discussion SO is not appropriate; mailing lists and IRC work best for that.
I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random stuff on SO works for them
I would love to use stackoverflow actively, but wasn't very successful so far.
It's great to use as a passive user. It's a great encyclopedia. But all my attempts to ask questions were unsuccessful.
I posted 3 questions where I did not receive any answers or clues at all. The questions seem to have a lot of views, so I tried to answer them myself later (in cases I found one). Which is ok, but makes it like an encyclopedia.
On two other occasions I needed help to figure out which way to attack a problem (which systems to use). I wrote a detailed description of my data, use case, restrictions, etc. Both questions were heavily downvoted as they're too subjective and not specific enough. Apart from downvotes I received some unhelpful spam so that I deleted the questions after a while. Luckily, I got more helpful answers on Reddit.
I understand that SO wants to keep discussions on topic, but why can't I ask questions about how to implement a problem, or which design to use best for a given data set?
So the problem is, I cannot use it for too specific questions (often receive no answer) but also not for too general ones (receive downvotes as being too subjective). Everything in the middle is covered already.
Some communities in the network seem to handle that much better, GIS for example has been a great help to me (as they allow open questions).
I’m the author of the article "The Decline of Stack Overflow". I initially published it in July 2015, when it got ±65,000 views in two days. I republished it @ Hackernoon this weekend at their request, which resulted in ±125,000 additional page views, bringing the total page views of the article since its publication in 2015 to ±245,000. The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations.
On SO, I currently have 11,914 rep, 9 gold badges, 66 silver badges and 73 bronze badges. I’ve posted 492 answers and 6 questions (that haven’t been deleted). I’ve been programming since 1999 and I’ve worked as an IT professional since 2006, and my experience ranges from PHP and JS to SAP and PL/SQL. I also released my own open source frontend framework and several other open source projects on Github. So I know how to program and understand many of SO’s intricate workings!
Those rare times I’m stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to find any useful answer on SO. My questions either get no answers at all or downvoted and/or closed (for arbitrary reasons) by people who clearly lack the experience to even remotely understand what I’m talking about.
During my time on SO, I’ve been bullied by 20+k users several times and even got a temporary ban by one of them moderators for no other reason but pointing out that another user was acting like “a little Hitler”… in a private conversation with moderation.
Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most privileged segments of its membership.
Considering the popularity of my article, I’m considering writing a follow-up and go in greater detail on my experiences with SO and how SO could be improved.
However, I’m quite busy these days, so it may take a while before it actually gets published… if it ever gets published.
Nevertheless, these are my 5 cents I’d like to add here…
> Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most privileged segments of its membership.
This strikes me as a key point that went unaddressed in the reply article. Yes, trolling is a standard feature of the internet. Yes, ignoring it is the right thing to do. But most places, trolling means an anonymous or throwaway account was rude, and will probably be removed/downvoted on any moderated site.
On Stack Overflow, we're frequently talking about reputable power users mocking novices, and being rewarded for that behavior. When a novice programmer shows up and is promptly insulted by someone with a decade more experience, something has gone terribly wrong.
Obviously something has to be done to help control the tide of "fix my voodoo code" posts that come through, but right now the 'cure' is largely insulting non-answers from major users. That's a terrible, antisocial way to address the problem.
> The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations.
I disagree. Many people simply view an article to understand the author's opinion (my case). IMO the "new user" experience on StackOverflow really depends on the topic addressed.
Maybe that's just programmer personality speaking, I wish someone would do a study on the traits of programmers depending on their language / line of work...
I've been getting the same vibe but have nowhere near the amount of experience in the industry as you.
Many times I've seen other users link answers from a previously asked question to a newly asked question, so I thought I was allowed to do the same....
Nope! Someone told me I was "plagiarizing" (I had clearly linked the old post and quoted the text containing the answer) and shortly after I had a moderator in the thread talking to me...
Later that day I got a message from a different moderator about the same issue to which I replied, but it's been a few days and still no reply...
Many of the down-votes my answers receive are from users who incorrectly answered the OP's question, but they still negatively impact me considering I only have ~35 rep at this point.
I never even STARTED contributing to Stack Overflow, because of the high barrier to entry for new users. Since now you essentially can't post a question without answering several yourself, I didn't bother asking questions about certain thorny technical issues. I tried a couple of times, ran into the barrier, and gave up. Maybe some of these could have been the kind of thought-provoking questions that the blog post's author would have enjoyed. Who knows how many other would-be Stack Overflow users have had a similar experience. Could Stack Overflow be cutting off its own long tail by having such restrictive barriers to entry for casual, minor would-be contributors like myself?
Fortunately, many of the questions I've needed help with have already asked and answered by others on S.O. But I've had to find help for my more exotic questions elsewhere.
I don't quite agree as someone with few points on StackOverflow the mods can be quite hostile and inflexible when it comes to the rules.
For instance I found a browser bug in the code submitted on a stack overflow answer [1] and I edited it and it got rejected because it wasn't in the spirit of what the original author intended or something like that.
I also had no way of replying to the rejection motivating what my reasoning was and maybe reinstating it luckily the original author got in touch and fixed it himself later on.
At that point I wasn't even able to comment on the reply since I didn't have enough points so I would ague the barrier to entry is quite high if all you want to do is just fix a few mistakes you spot while using the site.
Also there are multiple communities like Ask Ubuntu, Server Fault each with their own points which means I run into the same problem over and over again even though I have proven myself on anther sister community.
> At that point I wasn't even able to comment on the reply
That's the root cause of the problem. Once that's fixed, I think commenting is better than editing the answer.
As a mod I often can't know - having no time to verify - whether an edit such as yours actually fixes some bug or not. It has nothing to do with being hostile.
I agree that you should be able to simply leave a comment (new users used to have the right to comment once, if that's no longer the case, I find it quite stupid) that points something out, while keeping it clear who states what.
Then if your fix is helpful, the comment gets upvoted, and everybody's happy.
The author of the answer will typically acknowledge it by editing their answer, or risk getting downvotes otherwise (since now it's apparent that the answer isn't fully correct).
There are three ways to use stackoverflow - ask, answer and lurk.
Asking is hard as the admins are quite intolerant of anything that doesn't abide by the rules, in their opinion. That said, small quick queries, those that would get shot down when posted as questions, are best asked in chat rooms and you will get a useful answer. The notification comes in handy when a chat room question is answered after an extended period of time.
Answering is harder, as questions are usually highly problem specific (due to the rules), mostly particular framework or domain related, and only those who have faced similar issues can make meaningful posts. Often times the multi hundred thousand rep kings can get away with non answers (some even get accepted) in spite of a lesser rep king complaining about that in the comments.
That leaves with lurking. Lurking has benefited me immensely. It seems every problem you have is already answered in like 2010.
The programmers.stackexchange is much better as it allows opinion based, discussion oriented posts although the admins seem to be getting intolerant there lately, which is a bit odd.
I've recently began using SO more actively (providing answers).
Most of the questions I've found and tried to answer were duplicates, but since I didn't have enough reputation to mark it as duplicate. (or enough rep to comment on a post to ask for more information on a poorly asked question)
It's fairly depressing to attempt to try to be active on a site like SO when it's setup for failure in the beginning. It's irritating when users with 10k+ reputation can more easily gain reputation by commenting, editing, and "moderating" new questions.
The other issue I have is that for new questions it's more about being first to answer a question rather than what is actually correct.
I also dislike providing answers to new questions, and the OP is a brand new user asking a question and never marks an answer as correct...
I wish it was easier and less frustrating to be active, but I suppose I'll keep trying.
One of my least favorite SO patterns is seeing a top answer with ~150 points that's simply wrong, and then a second or third answer with ~20 points that's actually correct.
For high-profile questions this gets sorted out eventually, but it sometimes persists indefinitely for niche questions, and it's really unfortunate. I know "first mover advantage" is hard to solve (cf. Reddit), but it's a really big deal for SO.
FYI those moderators with 10k+ of rep are not gaining rep any longer for editing questions. You only get that +2 rep bump per edit when you are <1k (or <2k I forget) of rep. And Commenting never gets you any rep.
i can understand the reasoning but i left SO when they broke it into pieces with StackExchange network
i actually enjoyed stuff like code golfs, joke questions (minus endless flow of repetitive xkcd references)
have always been interested in THAT programming part where problem meets consciousness meets technology. spent a lot of time puzzling around questions on design, patterns - more ethereal side of programming
nowadays stuff like that gets quickly eliminated
and more technical questions often gets spammed with shallow bullshit i've already checked couple of times
interestingly I thought that breaking things up helped a lot and that they could do better by continuing that trend..
For me a big part of the problem of SO (as opposed to other SE sites) is that it's too big for the mods to really have much option other than applying blanket rules without exception.
On the smaller sites there seems to be more scope for a more flexible approach to moderation as the question/answer flow is more manageable.
Also I think it lets more people get engaged by feeling to be a key part of a smaller community where on SO their contribution would be very unlikely to be noticed as the site is soo big..
It's easy to nitpick and find fault with Stack Overflow, but it is hard to argue with the results. The site has done something amazing: it has harnessed the wild democracy that is the internet and produced something of great and lasting value to a lot of people.
It didn't do that by being a wild-west open-to-anything community. If that's what you want, go to Reddit. But you'll be hard pressed to find quality content that goes beyond "16 Animal Memes That Speed Up Your PHP And Improve Your Sex Life". It's the structure that allows Stack Overflow to succeed.
Cut the string from the kite and it doesn't fly up to the clouds, it comes streaking down to the ground.
For me the biggest problem with SO is that it's hard to get answers to advanced questions in some areas. Not a lot of people could answer the question in the first place, because it's about some obscure and rarely encountered problem, and these experts are constantly spammed with basic questions from inexperienced programmers. Though it depends on the area you're interested in - I've got almost no answers to advanced Rails-related questions and got pretty good responses to Scala-related stuff I'm interested in (but maybe it's because Scala questions were about more basic stuff)
I don't think you're looking at it from the right angle. SO is a great resource that's amassed a lot of simple questions. My personally favourite use of it is to find boiler plate code, or to get answers to simple questions in languages I'm not an expert in, but unfortunately get forced to use for whatever reason. The same is true for sysadmining tasks. I'm wearing far too many hats to remember how to change hostname on 4 different operating systems - it's far easier to just google and click the SO link than to read manuals every time I have a simple task.
Additionally, your answer regarding:
> On the other hand, even the simplest questions are not closed just because they are simple. One of my favourite examples is the question whether you need a null check before calling an instanceof. My answer is number 2, with a sarcastic comment that this could be tested in an IDE for a minute. And a very good comment points out that it takes less than that to get the answer on Stackoverflow.
Is particularly bad. "Test in an IDE" is not a valid response when the question pertains to a JVM implementation. Your Sun JVM may be different than my Apache JVM, different than JoeShmoe JVM. A better answer might be to refer to lines in the official JVM specification, and note if there's an ambiguity, and that most implementations follow X, but not necessarily...
I still use SO every day, and also have enough rep to be an editor, and I don't think it's in decline. But I have also stopped answering to questions. Mostly because the race to be the first to answer easy questions to get rep stopped being fun very early on, and there are only a few interesting questions among all the "do my homework for me" and barely comprehensible questions.
As for editing, editors come in all shape and form, and let's be honest, developers can often be opinionated so and so's who can spend hours debating tabs vs. spaces. I think the moderating reflects what we are as a community, I'm afraid. For example, I always reject any edit that only changes the format of the code because I find it a complete waste of time. I am sure there are other mods who would do the opposite, and actually go and reformat code in as many questions as they can find. Who's to say one approach is right and the other wrong? There aren't actually any guidelines in the modding pages.
It does get annoying sometimes; for example, I was refused the tag vanilla-js because of reasons by someone who didn't even seem to be a js developer. Had a few heated discussions, in the end the mods won. But hey, you know what? Who cares, the site is still useful
Stackoverflow is a little more boring for contributors now than
it was before (which is why I gradually stopped answering),
simply because most of the general questions have already been
answered.
This sums it up. I'd not find it fun to answer the same questions over and over. Doesn't imply that no-one should answer those; just that it leads one to wonder the value being added.
BTW: Do competition sites have an army of downvoters to bury leaked questions (it's kind of frustrating when one spends time answering one of the rare more interesting questions and it gets downvoted into oblivion because of a duplicate that wasn't answered properly and then also disappears...)
I agree, most normal questions are answered on Stackoverflow already. There is a lot of opportunity in the edge cases though. And it's true that these are the answers that take experts and time. Maybe SO should advertise more experienced people to share their knowledge as well.
Hold on what the hell - I just skimmed through the 'decline of...' article referenced by the above article to look for the one of the reason for those 2013 stats being that there are users that can find the answers to the questions they need without asking and without answering. I am within the 8% that have answered more than 5 questions but I don't have time to actively contribute but do use it everyday and am voting on questions and answers everyday. If there are more like me then how is it in decline?
That the referenced article doesn't cover this then undermines the other arguments about its attitude to users (arguments I largely disagree with).
you can’t easily ask a question without having it downvoted,
marked as duplicate, or commented on in a negative way
I wouldn't really agree. If the question is clear and even if it is a FAQ, then you'd not receive answers but also upvotes (for posting a FAQ) especially in popular tags such as python, regex, java.
That said, there are several other problems with SO:
- too many poor quality questions
- too many poor quality accepted and highly upvoted answers
- activity in a limited number of tags
- the reputation (apparently virtual bitcoins) cause the overall answer quality to decline (search for "Fastest gun in the west problem" on meta SE)
I have 851 reputation (top 39% of all users), I have answered 15 questions, about 50% haven't received any points, a few have received a minimal amount, and two or three have received a bunch of points.
My answers are generally to quite niche topics, I have never gone out of my way to answer questions, I typically post an answer when I have invested a good chunk of time to find the solution to something and then see a question about the same issue. I sometimes see questions I could answer (or improve existing answers), but do not provide an answer as I find it hard to justify the time, I feel that if I wanted to rack up points on stackoverflow it wouldn't be that hard to post several answers a day.
My reputation has gone up pretty much steadily, for the last three years, with an average of about 3 or 4 posts per year. I am a pretty light user, and being in the top 39%, if anything, surprises me as I could easily imagine being in the top 80%.
I find stackoverflow very useful, I work in games development which is quite a broad subject, in an ideal world I'd have very in depth knowledge about hundreds of topics, but in reality stackoverflow allows me to get quick answers to a huge amount of questions/problems, which in turn gives me more time to devote on area which I feel are most important. I haven't noticed stackoverflow going down hill in the time I have used it.
This is my experience as well. I'm in the top percentile and I almost never answer any more. The points keep coming though, for a handful of popular questions/answers.
Answering is way less rewarding than a few years ago, but SO is working fine. From the opposite point of view, I have asked one question on SO to which I never received an answer, probably because it's not possible (it had to do with Flash streaming).
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|9 years ago|reply
1) When you've got a problem, Google it. 98% of the time the answer will be in top 5 links to stackoverflow or documentation. You upvote the answer and question.
2) 1.5% of the time, stackoverflow will have a related question, but either it doesn't have an answer, or the answer has issues.
You figure it out yourself, so you post a comment or answer or just the crappy workaround you used because you ran out of time to figure it out completely.
3) The remaining 0.5% of the time, you get nothing. You post a question, but of course nobody answers because it's an esoteric, hard question. 24 hours later you post an answer to your own question, or more likely a crappy workaround.
And eventually somebody posts a great answer to your question. (Once this happened to me >3 years after I posted it!) It's way too late for you, but it will help the next person with the same problem.
You don't get a lot of karma quickly this way since you're posting esoteric stuff, but you do tend to pick up some badges that are designed to reward this sort of behaviour, like "Populist" and "Necromancer". You do pick up karma slowly and steadily, though. What's satisfying is seeing an answer tick over from zero to one ~12 months after you posted it, realising that you saved somebody hours of frustration.
If you answer an easy question, you've saved somebody a few minutes. When you answer a hard one, you've saved hours or days.
[+] [-] Chathamization|9 years ago|reply
Another issue I've run into is the minimum numbers of characters needed to edit an answer. Once I found the answer that was chosen and upvoted had code that didn't make any sense. It was something like an instance of a point object "point1" and an instance "newpoint" and they wrote "point1 = newpoint;" but actually meant "point1 = new point();". When I realized the problem I tried to change it but wasn't able to because I wasn't changing the answer enough (I think there's a minimum 6 character limit). I didn't want to make random changes elsewhere just to make the minimum needed to fix it, so I let it be.
I find Stack Overflow useful, but I don't try to participate in it anymore and don't stay signed in.
[+] [-] lmg643|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|9 years ago|reply
I've posted very rarely on the software stackexchange, but I've been very active on the electronics stackexchange to the extent that I'm in the top 2% and rank #28. It has very aggressive moderation of 'bad' questions, and I sometimes wish there was somewhere chattier and less fussy we could gently steer the less well formed questions to. It does feel bad when someone asks a question and gets the door slammed in their face. But on the other hand there are a lot of repetitive 'bad' questions from people who've not yet understood what a resistor is.
Remember it's been gamified, so we might as well treat it as a game. Consider the motivation of the question-answerers.
(I also opportunistically karma-snipe the "hot network questions", so I have 1.4k rep on math.stackexchange from only two answers)
[+] [-] epaga|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fixermark|9 years ago|reply
They were not good days.
[+] [-] zamalek|9 years ago|reply
If most of the common questions have been answered, then there will obviously be a correlated decline in the number of questions posted and subsequently answers posted. Esoteric questions aren't abundant, especially over a constant time frame.
Declining question/answer activity shows that the website is healthy. I've opened S/O a few times over the past year with the intention to answer questions, only to find duplicate/off-topic/low-effort/etc. questions.
[+] [-] pinouchon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dionidium|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sporkenfang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asimuvPR|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mithaldu|9 years ago|reply
I was tempted to qualify this more, but honestly, if you can't see why "works for me" is one of the worst kinds of answers you can give in tech, then i doubt i can convince you.
[+] [-] fiatjaf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bozho|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubertaco|9 years ago|reply
* ...never posted a question to SO (because I've never found it either necessary or helpful to do so),
* ...only ever "copy-pasted" from SO once (it was a CSS polyfill for iOS having broken "support" for vh/vw)
* ...only attempted to answer questions on SO twice, exclusively out of a feeling of "am I missing something?"
I've been programming for 16 years, and doing so professionally for 7 of those. I've always seen StackOverflow as like a worse version of MDN or something: obscure API-specific stuff that should be in documentation for libXYZ or XYZService but for some reason isn't, with answers supplied by random internet people and "graded" by other, less-knowledgeable random internet people.
For more advanced stuff (like "what are higher-kinded types" or "how do monads help simplify concurrency"), online articles, tutorials, or IRC channels have always been a sufficient supplement to just trying stuff myself.
I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.
[+] [-] onewaystreet|9 years ago|reply
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6246719/what-is-a-higher-...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27190934/implementation-f...
These are only two questions of many on these topics.
[+] [-] coryfklein|9 years ago|reply
I suspect that the part that you are "missing" has to do with the following belief:
> answers supplied by random internet people and "graded" by other, less-knowledgeable random internet people
You've inherently discounted the quality of content on the site, so it's no wonder you find nothing valuable there. The fact is that "crowd sourcing" actually can work, and "random internet people" are able to curate and raise visibility of quality content.
I think Stack Overflow is one of the best examples of this. Despite being inundated with terrible content, the system is able to consistently identify quality and float it to the top while mostly keeping the trash out of sight.
[+] [-] Gracana|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgottenpass|9 years ago|reply
You have bit of experience, Stack Overflow's usefulness applies mostly for novices. See the people who said they learned to program with SO in this thread, or otherwise find the material there useful. They're the target userbase, not you.
I suspect the audience is not limited on purpose. The work required to answer questions, and incentive system seems to select for questions that are already google-able but the person asking just doesn't have enough domain knowledge to productively google for that answer.
The only time I get a useful stack overflow google result is when I've jumped headfirst into an area outside my skillset and need to do a common operation but the toolset doesn't make obvious. The kind of questions where I'd be desperate enough to ask SO are either complicated and - at best - get "don't do it like that" answers. Or I'm looking to better understand the technical considerations going into a design decision, which is too opinion-based (or whatever SO calls it) to be asked.
[+] [-] acjohnson55|9 years ago|reply
I've experienced a massive boost in productivity using StackOverflow to help resolve the sorts of issues that are too big to appear in the docs and too small to have a whole blog post. But perhaps it has something to do with the sort of software I work on that I happen to run into a lot of problems in that sweet spot.
[+] [-] ceres|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Silhouette|9 years ago|reply
I don't think you are.
Stack Overflow was an interesting idea, but I find it has a terrible signal/noise ratio today and one of the most unpleasant and unconstructive cultures of any tech discussion site, for basically the same reasons that many other comments here have already given.
The way they chose to co-opt search engines was also a brilliant move by the founders, but has also now become annoying to the point where I'd have the entire SO network removed from my search results pages by default if I could.
[+] [-] 4ad|9 years ago|reply
I also have never asked anything on SO, and never used SO as a reference. SO only seems to work for factual simple answers that are found in the documentation or manual pages.
For higher level discussion SO is not appropriate; mailing lists and IRC work best for that.
I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random stuff on SO works for them
[+] [-] dx034|9 years ago|reply
It's great to use as a passive user. It's a great encyclopedia. But all my attempts to ask questions were unsuccessful.
I posted 3 questions where I did not receive any answers or clues at all. The questions seem to have a lot of views, so I tried to answer them myself later (in cases I found one). Which is ok, but makes it like an encyclopedia.
On two other occasions I needed help to figure out which way to attack a problem (which systems to use). I wrote a detailed description of my data, use case, restrictions, etc. Both questions were heavily downvoted as they're too subjective and not specific enough. Apart from downvotes I received some unhelpful spam so that I deleted the questions after a while. Luckily, I got more helpful answers on Reddit.
I understand that SO wants to keep discussions on topic, but why can't I ask questions about how to implement a problem, or which design to use best for a given data set?
So the problem is, I cannot use it for too specific questions (often receive no answer) but also not for too general ones (receive downvotes as being too subjective). Everything in the middle is covered already.
Some communities in the network seem to handle that much better, GIS for example has been a great help to me (as they allow open questions).
[+] [-] johnslegers|9 years ago|reply
On SO, I currently have 11,914 rep, 9 gold badges, 66 silver badges and 73 bronze badges. I’ve posted 492 answers and 6 questions (that haven’t been deleted). I’ve been programming since 1999 and I’ve worked as an IT professional since 2006, and my experience ranges from PHP and JS to SAP and PL/SQL. I also released my own open source frontend framework and several other open source projects on Github. So I know how to program and understand many of SO’s intricate workings!
Those rare times I’m stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to find any useful answer on SO. My questions either get no answers at all or downvoted and/or closed (for arbitrary reasons) by people who clearly lack the experience to even remotely understand what I’m talking about.
During my time on SO, I’ve been bullied by 20+k users several times and even got a temporary ban by one of them moderators for no other reason but pointing out that another user was acting like “a little Hitler”… in a private conversation with moderation.
Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most privileged segments of its membership.
Considering the popularity of my article, I’m considering writing a follow-up and go in greater detail on my experiences with SO and how SO could be improved.
However, I’m quite busy these days, so it may take a while before it actually gets published… if it ever gets published.
Nevertheless, these are my 5 cents I’d like to add here…
[+] [-] Bartweiss|9 years ago|reply
This strikes me as a key point that went unaddressed in the reply article. Yes, trolling is a standard feature of the internet. Yes, ignoring it is the right thing to do. But most places, trolling means an anonymous or throwaway account was rude, and will probably be removed/downvoted on any moderated site.
On Stack Overflow, we're frequently talking about reputable power users mocking novices, and being rewarded for that behavior. When a novice programmer shows up and is promptly insulted by someone with a decade more experience, something has gone terribly wrong.
Obviously something has to be done to help control the tide of "fix my voodoo code" posts that come through, but right now the 'cure' is largely insulting non-answers from major users. That's a terrible, antisocial way to address the problem.
[+] [-] jmcomets|9 years ago|reply
I disagree. Many people simply view an article to understand the author's opinion (my case). IMO the "new user" experience on StackOverflow really depends on the topic addressed.
Maybe that's just programmer personality speaking, I wish someone would do a study on the traits of programmers depending on their language / line of work...
[+] [-] kzisme|9 years ago|reply
Many times I've seen other users link answers from a previously asked question to a newly asked question, so I thought I was allowed to do the same....
Nope! Someone told me I was "plagiarizing" (I had clearly linked the old post and quoted the text containing the answer) and shortly after I had a moderator in the thread talking to me...
Later that day I got a message from a different moderator about the same issue to which I replied, but it's been a few days and still no reply...
Many of the down-votes my answers receive are from users who incorrectly answered the OP's question, but they still negatively impact me considering I only have ~35 rep at this point.
[+] [-] domador|9 years ago|reply
Fortunately, many of the questions I've needed help with have already asked and answered by others on S.O. But I've had to find help for my more exotic questions elsewhere.
[+] [-] Fuxy|9 years ago|reply
For instance I found a browser bug in the code submitted on a stack overflow answer [1] and I edited it and it got rejected because it wasn't in the spirit of what the original author intended or something like that.
I also had no way of replying to the rejection motivating what my reasoning was and maybe reinstating it luckily the original author got in touch and fixed it himself later on.
At that point I wasn't even able to comment on the reply since I didn't have enough points so I would ague the barrier to entry is quite high if all you want to do is just fix a few mistakes you spot while using the site.
Also there are multiple communities like Ask Ubuntu, Server Fault each with their own points which means I run into the same problem over and over again even though I have proven myself on anther sister community.
[1](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12131273/twitter-bootstra...)
[+] [-] V-2|9 years ago|reply
That's the root cause of the problem. Once that's fixed, I think commenting is better than editing the answer.
As a mod I often can't know - having no time to verify - whether an edit such as yours actually fixes some bug or not. It has nothing to do with being hostile.
I agree that you should be able to simply leave a comment (new users used to have the right to comment once, if that's no longer the case, I find it quite stupid) that points something out, while keeping it clear who states what.
Then if your fix is helpful, the comment gets upvoted, and everybody's happy.
The author of the answer will typically acknowledge it by editing their answer, or risk getting downvotes otherwise (since now it's apparent that the answer isn't fully correct).
[+] [-] p333347|9 years ago|reply
Asking is hard as the admins are quite intolerant of anything that doesn't abide by the rules, in their opinion. That said, small quick queries, those that would get shot down when posted as questions, are best asked in chat rooms and you will get a useful answer. The notification comes in handy when a chat room question is answered after an extended period of time.
Answering is harder, as questions are usually highly problem specific (due to the rules), mostly particular framework or domain related, and only those who have faced similar issues can make meaningful posts. Often times the multi hundred thousand rep kings can get away with non answers (some even get accepted) in spite of a lesser rep king complaining about that in the comments.
That leaves with lurking. Lurking has benefited me immensely. It seems every problem you have is already answered in like 2010.
The programmers.stackexchange is much better as it allows opinion based, discussion oriented posts although the admins seem to be getting intolerant there lately, which is a bit odd.
[+] [-] kzisme|9 years ago|reply
Most of the questions I've found and tried to answer were duplicates, but since I didn't have enough reputation to mark it as duplicate. (or enough rep to comment on a post to ask for more information on a poorly asked question)
It's fairly depressing to attempt to try to be active on a site like SO when it's setup for failure in the beginning. It's irritating when users with 10k+ reputation can more easily gain reputation by commenting, editing, and "moderating" new questions.
The other issue I have is that for new questions it's more about being first to answer a question rather than what is actually correct.
I also dislike providing answers to new questions, and the OP is a brand new user asking a question and never marks an answer as correct...
I wish it was easier and less frustrating to be active, but I suppose I'll keep trying.
[+] [-] Bartweiss|9 years ago|reply
For high-profile questions this gets sorted out eventually, but it sometimes persists indefinitely for niche questions, and it's really unfortunate. I know "first mover advantage" is hard to solve (cf. Reddit), but it's a really big deal for SO.
[+] [-] bhandziuk|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lapsa|9 years ago|reply
i can understand the reasoning but i left SO when they broke it into pieces with StackExchange network
i actually enjoyed stuff like code golfs, joke questions (minus endless flow of repetitive xkcd references)
have always been interested in THAT programming part where problem meets consciousness meets technology. spent a lot of time puzzling around questions on design, patterns - more ethereal side of programming
nowadays stuff like that gets quickly eliminated
and more technical questions often gets spammed with shallow bullshit i've already checked couple of times
[+] [-] raesene6|9 years ago|reply
For me a big part of the problem of SO (as opposed to other SE sites) is that it's too big for the mods to really have much option other than applying blanket rules without exception.
On the smaller sites there seems to be more scope for a more flexible approach to moderation as the question/answer flow is more manageable.
Also I think it lets more people get engaged by feeling to be a key part of a smaller community where on SO their contribution would be very unlikely to be noticed as the site is soo big..
[+] [-] coryfklein|9 years ago|reply
It didn't do that by being a wild-west open-to-anything community. If that's what you want, go to Reddit. But you'll be hard pressed to find quality content that goes beyond "16 Animal Memes That Speed Up Your PHP And Improve Your Sex Life". It's the structure that allows Stack Overflow to succeed.
Cut the string from the kite and it doesn't fly up to the clouds, it comes streaking down to the ground.
[+] [-] pavlik_enemy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eugenekolo2|9 years ago|reply
Additionally, your answer regarding:
> On the other hand, even the simplest questions are not closed just because they are simple. One of my favourite examples is the question whether you need a null check before calling an instanceof. My answer is number 2, with a sarcastic comment that this could be tested in an IDE for a minute. And a very good comment points out that it takes less than that to get the answer on Stackoverflow.
Is particularly bad. "Test in an IDE" is not a valid response when the question pertains to a JVM implementation. Your Sun JVM may be different than my Apache JVM, different than JoeShmoe JVM. A better answer might be to refer to lines in the official JVM specification, and note if there's an ambiguity, and that most implementations follow X, but not necessarily...
[+] [-] gotofritz|9 years ago|reply
As for editing, editors come in all shape and form, and let's be honest, developers can often be opinionated so and so's who can spend hours debating tabs vs. spaces. I think the moderating reflects what we are as a community, I'm afraid. For example, I always reject any edit that only changes the format of the code because I find it a complete waste of time. I am sure there are other mods who would do the opposite, and actually go and reformat code in as many questions as they can find. Who's to say one approach is right and the other wrong? There aren't actually any guidelines in the modding pages.
It does get annoying sometimes; for example, I was refused the tag vanilla-js because of reasons by someone who didn't even seem to be a js developer. Had a few heated discussions, in the end the mods won. But hey, you know what? Who cares, the site is still useful
What are the realistic alternatives? Quora?
[+] [-] 0xmohit|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dukoid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] br3w5|9 years ago|reply
That the referenced article doesn't cover this then undermines the other arguments about its attitude to users (arguments I largely disagree with).
[+] [-] 0xmohit|9 years ago|reply
That said, there are several other problems with SO:
- too many poor quality questions
- too many poor quality accepted and highly upvoted answers
- activity in a limited number of tags
- the reputation (apparently virtual bitcoins) cause the overall answer quality to decline (search for "Fastest gun in the west problem" on meta SE)
[+] [-] scraft|9 years ago|reply
My answers are generally to quite niche topics, I have never gone out of my way to answer questions, I typically post an answer when I have invested a good chunk of time to find the solution to something and then see a question about the same issue. I sometimes see questions I could answer (or improve existing answers), but do not provide an answer as I find it hard to justify the time, I feel that if I wanted to rack up points on stackoverflow it wouldn't be that hard to post several answers a day.
My reputation has gone up pretty much steadily, for the last three years, with an average of about 3 or 4 posts per year. I am a pretty light user, and being in the top 39%, if anything, surprises me as I could easily imagine being in the top 80%.
I find stackoverflow very useful, I work in games development which is quite a broad subject, in an ideal world I'd have very in depth knowledge about hundreds of topics, but in reality stackoverflow allows me to get quick answers to a huge amount of questions/problems, which in turn gives me more time to devote on area which I feel are most important. I haven't noticed stackoverflow going down hill in the time I have used it.
[+] [-] yesbabyyes|9 years ago|reply
Answering is way less rewarding than a few years ago, but SO is working fine. From the opposite point of view, I have asked one question on SO to which I never received an answer, probably because it's not possible (it had to do with Flash streaming).