So, years ago I "used" Stack Overflow a lot. Now, rarely, if by "use" you mean "ask and answer questions". But, I find answers to my questions on it every day, and it is still far superior to other sources.
I've noticed a pattern in my attitude towards SO: when I ready an article about it on Hacker News, I get mad. When I'm actually on it, I get detailed, multiple answers to my question, written before I ever got there.
My suspicion is that many people noticed that a high rank on Stack Overflow was one way to generate a reputation that might get you freelance work, and then discovered that too many other people were trying to do the same thing, so it became competitive and trollish...for them. But all I want to do is find an answer to my question, that is more clear (and with better examples) than the one in the software's actual documentation (which reads like it was written for a textbook or maybe an AI, rather than the kind of answer you actually get from asking somebody for help).
SO still works, better than ever, for finding out the answer to your question. It just doesn't work as a social network or an interview/job board/advertising site. But, you know, I don't think that's a problem for me, and really, there are other websites out there for that.
Just look for the answer to your question, it's probably there, and if it isn't then it likely is not available anywhere else on the internet either, including the software documentation. Used this way, the SO internal politics is a non-issue.
Do you have any evidence (anecdotal or empirical) that people actually hire based on StackOverflow rankings? I'm sure it's happened in a few cases, but it seems backwards to me. If somebody came into an interview talking about their high SO rank or Reddit karma, I'd wonder if they would actually be focused on their work.
To me, hobbies and online activity aren't really credentials unless you've really built a strong personal brand that directly relates to your job.
Stack Overflow is declining, except it's still so well populated with moderators that the author of the article struggled to be able to answer a question quickly enough for it to matter, and he can find no alternatives to it that work as well.
I dont know anything about the internal politics of SO, and I dont think Ive ever asked (or answered) a question, but I use it every day.
It is absolutely the single best resource for developers on the internet, and thats amazing.
Yeah the guy has the mental consistency of pudding:
"The consequence thereof is that a lot of good questions not only get closed before anyone is able to respond, but that many of them end up vanishing into oblivion for eternity after merely 9 days."
This, merely a few paragraphs after claiming all questions are answered so quickly he has no opportunity to participate.
I wanted to share this article because, even as a user in the top 0.99%[1], I constantly get railroaded by "power trolls" -- I was extremely active on the site 6 years ago, but I barely answer/ask any questions anymore (maybe once or twice a year).
I have countless examples of some of my old questions or answers (with 100+ upvotes) being closed almost a decade later just so some new moderator can earn a few brownie points. After a while, it just gets old.
My biggest complain about SO is that with the expansion into other fields that questions that used to be welcome on SO (or get more visibility because of being on SO) are being shunted to SuperUser or ServerFault or other sites under the StackExchange umbrella. [1] I think the drive to keep SO purely about "programming" runs into issues similar to the "No True Scotsman" fallacy [2]. As a developer, sometimes I need answers about Amazon Web Services, Azure, Docker, or the Linux command line, as a consequence of programming, but those sorts of questions are, more modernly, marked off-topic for SO.
Yeah, one of the biggest problems with Stack Overflow is it has a fairly narrow definition of what's on-topic and really awful tools for shifting things to better forums.
Quora, by way of example, does not have the fragmentation issue Stack Exchange with its myriad of sites has.
This is definitely something that could be solved with Stack Exchange moderation tools. Questions could be moved to the appropiate site, the same way you'd move issues between GitHub repositories.
Half of the complaints quoted are about overzealous moderation, half are about low question quality. So it's unclear whether the article offers a coherent critique; if you're somewhere in the middle of the complaints then maybe you're doing it right.
I do think a coherent issue emerges here: much like wikipedia, stack overflow rewards and privileges those who do "meta" actions over and above those who make positive object-level contributions, when it should be the other way around. Answering a question should be more rewarding than closing it as a duplicate. Helping a newcomer should be more rewarding than driving them away.
Another problem that MANY moderated forums suffer from is too much focus on identity. If everytime you posted to SO or HN or /. or wkipedia or whatever, you were assigned a random id (consistent id for all responses to a specific story) rather than linking to your acct/post history/achievements, with a policy against posting with PII... the cliques might dissolve and the trolls do not benefit.
Probably has to do with Hacker Noon migrating from Medium to their own platform. Some of the formatting and metadata may have gotten malformed in the move.
Some mods are ridiculous. The profile of one tag maintainer for example read thus (paraphrased) "X is now a mature technology and all the meaningful questions have been asked so I spend most of my time editing and deleting questions".
ALL my questions got downvoted. So I stopped asking questions under that tag.
I occasionally ask and answer questions on StackOverflow, but I find the 'old system' of forums, mailing lists, and chat (now it's Slack sometimes instead of IRC) to be making a minor resurgence.
Recently when a question about Racket went unanswered I resorted to the Racket user mailing list and received exceptional advice. The #python IRC channel is unbeatable for help debugging small snippets (of the kind and size you'd normally put in a StackOverflow post), and the Elixir Forums are just fantastic - they go to great lengths as a community.
The support you'll get in those kinds of places is almost always better than the answers you'd receive on StackOverflow, but the downside is the inconvenience of decentralization. Take Racket for example - the user mailing list is by far the best resource for questions, but how would you know that? There is also an /r/racket subreddit, a [racket] StackOverflow tag, and a (pretty dead) official #racket IRC channel on Freenode. A user is as (if not more) likely to check those places before even thinking to hit the mailing list.
I myself had a StackOverflow post closed recently, but I don't think it's so dramatic. And some tags are certainly better than others. Asking a question on [react] will lead to a flood of poorly written answers from people seeking quick points, for example. [asm] on the other hand has Peter Cordes, who is like a code angel and veritable blessing to all of Hacker Kind.
No matter how bad Stack Overflow gets, it is wildly better than what came before it. If you are not old enough to remember the horrors of trying to get any useful information out of the old world of random forums, or expertsexchange (most of these have gone the way of geocities), take a gander through some of the older MSDN forums - posts from the mid 2000s still tend to show up if you're searching for somewhat obscure IIS or ASP.NET related stuff.
9 years ago I joined Superuser (it was in beta at the time IIRC) out of pure hatred for Experts Exchange and how every time I would put in a technical question in Google, their paywall site would come up.
I'm glad Stack Exchange beat Experts Exchange and will always contribute to it no matter what the politics. Because that's how much Experts Exchange pissed me off.
I never created an account there. I tried a couple times to add a comment or answer a question or ask a question and everything I wanted to do required more points than I had. I had no time or interest in building cred, just so I could help someone out or get help.
Thank you for your interest in this topic. Because it has attracted aggressive moderation, posting an answer now requires 10,000,000 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count), a signed note from your physician, and special dispensation from the pope.
Would you like to answer one of these other unrelated and very stupid unanswered questions instead?
Same. Thought I do ask questions, but I end up spending half a day researching and trying other alternatives to post a proper question in the hopes that it won't be closed. Mine rarely are.
But few people seem to put in the effort to ask questions.
It is funny that for a site which spent the better part of the last two years to be more welcoming (which they IMO approached unsuccessfully), this is still the prevailing strategy. And it works, so I can't disagree. Now I don't think SO is that bad, if you really try to write a good question, at least in my experience, the reception is good. But I know I'm the odd one out among my dev friends and colleagues about not being afraid of posting questions to SO. Others, like you say, don't dare.
Stack's problem, was and still is, it doesn't do a good job helping new users learn how to use the site.
When it first came out, the state of programming questions on the web was abysmal. The top answers were wrong, and required you to register to view. There were forum posts, and half the answers were basically "RTFM". In my early days, it was things like "How do you convert a string to an int in C++" asked on Usenet. This was asked so many times that Marshall Cline wrote an FAQ which became the defacto place to learn about C++.
Stack solved that problem, AND fixed the issue of low-quality questions and answers.
These days, I find the answer to my question on Stack such that I rarely have to ask anything. Occasionally I'll be bored and answer a question.
Stack is still an amazing resource, just that the community and platform has matured, and there are less opportunities for new users to ask and answer basic questions.
Perhaps head over to Meta and suggest a Minor League Stackoverflow that will allow new users to ask the same basic questions over an over again, earn a fraction of rep, and graduate to the real site.
It might help if you were only allowed to downvote/edit/close on topics where you have proved yourself.
If have gained some reputation answering Java questions, maybe that does not make me qualified to decide if a C++ question is suitable for the site. A bit like the fact that reputation from SO does not carry to other StackExchange sites.
Some of the author's issues seem to be a result of not scaling the voting thresholds based on the sites size. For example, 5 votes needs to close a question: When the site had 100 users, 5 votes is 5% of the site - a meaningful proportion. When the site has 1,000,000 users, 5 votes is 0.0005% - which may have no information content at all, it could just be random noise and the votes to close wouldn't be meaningful representation of the communities viewpoint.
I've found the internet to be a pretty generous community.. of course with any community, there are bad actors that will attempt to commodify that generosity by subtly asking for more and more, all the while profiting on the generosity of humans as a whole. Stack overflow needs to start paying it's workers.
Philosophically I am with you. Though, I do think SO rewards its users in a tangential way. "Karma" is something you can advertise to prospective employers. Not just the score, but you can give examples of how you answer questions for people of different skill levels.
The work I've done on SO, which is frankly insignificant compared to many users, has enhanced my hire-ability as a lead or manager.
I can't stand when someone answers a question on SO by first admitting they know nothing about the subject then take a guess with an answer. Why bother answering if you don't know the subject?
[+] [-] rossdavidh|6 years ago|reply
I've noticed a pattern in my attitude towards SO: when I ready an article about it on Hacker News, I get mad. When I'm actually on it, I get detailed, multiple answers to my question, written before I ever got there.
My suspicion is that many people noticed that a high rank on Stack Overflow was one way to generate a reputation that might get you freelance work, and then discovered that too many other people were trying to do the same thing, so it became competitive and trollish...for them. But all I want to do is find an answer to my question, that is more clear (and with better examples) than the one in the software's actual documentation (which reads like it was written for a textbook or maybe an AI, rather than the kind of answer you actually get from asking somebody for help).
SO still works, better than ever, for finding out the answer to your question. It just doesn't work as a social network or an interview/job board/advertising site. But, you know, I don't think that's a problem for me, and really, there are other websites out there for that.
Just look for the answer to your question, it's probably there, and if it isn't then it likely is not available anywhere else on the internet either, including the software documentation. Used this way, the SO internal politics is a non-issue.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sarah180|6 years ago|reply
To me, hobbies and online activity aren't really credentials unless you've really built a strong personal brand that directly relates to your job.
[+] [-] bandushrew|6 years ago|reply
I dont know anything about the internal politics of SO, and I dont think Ive ever asked (or answered) a question, but I use it every day.
It is absolutely the single best resource for developers on the internet, and thats amazing.
[+] [-] asdfadfadsf|6 years ago|reply
"The consequence thereof is that a lot of good questions not only get closed before anyone is able to respond, but that many of them end up vanishing into oblivion for eternity after merely 9 days."
This, merely a few paragraphs after claiming all questions are answered so quickly he has no opportunity to participate.
[+] [-] dvt|6 years ago|reply
I have countless examples of some of my old questions or answers (with 100+ upvotes) being closed almost a decade later just so some new moderator can earn a few brownie points. After a while, it just gets old.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/users/243613/david-titarenco
[+] [-] alttag|6 years ago|reply
1: https://stackexchange.com/sites 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
[+] [-] astrodust|6 years ago|reply
Quora, by way of example, does not have the fragmentation issue Stack Exchange with its myriad of sites has.
[+] [-] dessant|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|6 years ago|reply
I do think a coherent issue emerges here: much like wikipedia, stack overflow rewards and privileges those who do "meta" actions over and above those who make positive object-level contributions, when it should be the other way around. Answering a question should be more rewarding than closing it as a duplicate. Helping a newcomer should be more rewarding than driving them away.
[+] [-] Supermancho|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dashundchen|6 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fhackernoon.com%2F...
[+] [-] crystalPalace|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghostly_s|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graphicsRat|6 years ago|reply
ALL my questions got downvoted. So I stopped asking questions under that tag.
[+] [-] bigmit37|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seisvelas|6 years ago|reply
Recently when a question about Racket went unanswered I resorted to the Racket user mailing list and received exceptional advice. The #python IRC channel is unbeatable for help debugging small snippets (of the kind and size you'd normally put in a StackOverflow post), and the Elixir Forums are just fantastic - they go to great lengths as a community.
The support you'll get in those kinds of places is almost always better than the answers you'd receive on StackOverflow, but the downside is the inconvenience of decentralization. Take Racket for example - the user mailing list is by far the best resource for questions, but how would you know that? There is also an /r/racket subreddit, a [racket] StackOverflow tag, and a (pretty dead) official #racket IRC channel on Freenode. A user is as (if not more) likely to check those places before even thinking to hit the mailing list.
I myself had a StackOverflow post closed recently, but I don't think it's so dramatic. And some tags are certainly better than others. Asking a question on [react] will lead to a flood of poorly written answers from people seeking quick points, for example. [asm] on the other hand has Peter Cordes, who is like a code angel and veritable blessing to all of Hacker Kind.
[+] [-] thrower123|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tenebrisalietum|6 years ago|reply
I'm glad Stack Exchange beat Experts Exchange and will always contribute to it no matter what the politics. Because that's how much Experts Exchange pissed me off.
[+] [-] chimi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hartator|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] musicale|6 years ago|reply
Would you like to answer one of these other unrelated and very stupid unanswered questions instead?
[+] [-] yellowapple|6 years ago|reply
1. I tend to answer questions thoroughly, in keeping with the spirit of StackOverflow being a common target from web searches
2. I dare not ask a question, ever
[+] [-] 0xfeba|6 years ago|reply
But few people seem to put in the effort to ask questions.
[+] [-] tomashubelbauer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahbyb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balls187|6 years ago|reply
When it first came out, the state of programming questions on the web was abysmal. The top answers were wrong, and required you to register to view. There were forum posts, and half the answers were basically "RTFM". In my early days, it was things like "How do you convert a string to an int in C++" asked on Usenet. This was asked so many times that Marshall Cline wrote an FAQ which became the defacto place to learn about C++.
Stack solved that problem, AND fixed the issue of low-quality questions and answers.
These days, I find the answer to my question on Stack such that I rarely have to ask anything. Occasionally I'll be bored and answer a question.
Stack is still an amazing resource, just that the community and platform has matured, and there are less opportunities for new users to ask and answer basic questions.
Perhaps head over to Meta and suggest a Minor League Stackoverflow that will allow new users to ask the same basic questions over an over again, earn a fraction of rep, and graduate to the real site.
[+] [-] jpalomaki|6 years ago|reply
If have gained some reputation answering Java questions, maybe that does not make me qualified to decide if a C++ question is suitable for the site. A bit like the fact that reputation from SO does not carry to other StackExchange sites.
[+] [-] baud147258|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conscion|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thanatropism|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbyehl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trianglem|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monksy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrax|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jressey|6 years ago|reply
The work I've done on SO, which is frankly insignificant compared to many users, has enhanced my hire-ability as a lead or manager.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] weef|6 years ago|reply