I’ve never needed to ask a question on SO since its inception, but I have found a few answers. I guess by the time I adopt a technology it’s already at the appropriate place in the hype cycle where all of the easy questions have been asked and answered.
SO is purposefully not meant for discussions - I am okay with that. But I’ve found Reddit to be pretty good just for discussions.
On the other hand, what has saved me in the last two years from having to depend on SO or Reddit for answers as I’ve gotten deep in the weeds with AWS and all of their proprietary “locked in” goodness, is our company’s business support plan with AWS. Their live support is excellent and are batting close to 100% not just for “something is wrong” (never had an issue) but as an “easy button” when I just don’t want to waste any more time trying to figure something out.
I can imagine if you are somewhere doing anything that comes close to the edge of your company’s competency, paid support would be a godsend.
On another note: I guess that’s another reason I don’t do side projects outside of the company. I have access to resources and support.
It's not just about the "hype cycle". It's about being one of the languages/platforms where SO has a critical mass of knowledgeable users.
For C# or JS, it's an amazing resource. I've tried to use it for Lisp, and it's a wasteland (half the questions are "help me with my Hello World", and most of the experts seem to avoid it). For macOS development, it's hit or miss -- occasionally I'll find a good answer, but I never get a good answer to something I ask, and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.
I always try to find something on a dedicated forum first, then SO, then whatever DDG suggest. Reddit is a last resort, because I suck at reddit. Every time I post something there will be ignorant people who don’t even bother educating themselves, take their “best” shot at you. On more opinionated subs like political subs, those ignorants are well represented on both sides. On the niche tech subs, I also feel like you have to agree with the ongoing mentality of the Sub’s running “cultist” majority.
> I can imagine if you are somewhere doing anything that comes close to the edge of your company’s competency, paid support would be a godsend.
I agree. I've tried alternatives to Matlab for technical computing at work. So far I have not found anything to match both the quality of the product and the fast technical support I can get from the Mathworks through our support contract.
I stopped participating in Stack Overflow and Server Fault a number of years ago. Something happened on the way to its popularity, especially on Server Fault. Questions were being asked and a number of highly rated users were closing them down as "not related to SysAdmin". I don't remember the exact nature of the questions, but one that I do remember was related to mobile phones. I argued that the question was valid because a lot of Sys Admins also had to manage phones in their environment.
There was also a general lack of compassion on the part of many, many users. I get that the sites strive to be full of "high quality" content, but there were a lot of legitimate questions asked, in broken English, that got closed immediately, or got closed because it seemed like it as academic exercise they were asking. IT has a reputation for lacking in people skills (deservedly so) and in SO's and SF's early days, that certainly stood out as a major turnoff of the sites. Admittedly, I have no idea if it's gotten any better.
>> This feels deeply unfair in some sense... Having said that, I’m not sure what Stack Overflow should do about this.
SO would benefit greatly by implementing a (relatively slow) decay function on all its reputation points. Technology inevitably moves forward, a great answer (or question) from 6,8,10 years ago is the most likely age to have a huge quantity of upvotes, while also most likely to be obsolete.
While rep alone shouldn't be the primary motivation for answering questions, when people see their point totals heading south after a few years, it might provide an incentive to get back on and reverse the negative flow by answering new questions and/or updating prior answers.
I'd also like to see the ability to re-ask questions after a few years without them being dismissed as duplicates.
There have been a few questions where the answers no longer worked due to being obsolete, and I had to figure out the new solution myself. And in some cases, the answer never worked properly but was accepted as the best known at the time, and I had one that worked. But there was no point posting, because the accepted answer from X years ago dominated, and it was unlikely that a contribution from little me would be noticed.
In fact that's why I never ended up joining SO despite being a heavy user - on each of the occasions I felt I could make a useful contribution, it happened to be a question that was old and "settled", and I felt it wouldn't be worth the effort.
I never thought about that. I actually think this is a great idea.
One big issue is a lot of people would be upset at the idea of their reputation getting smaller.
Maybe have a new "influence" or "helpfulness" score along with reputation that takes into account the decay you are talking about. Or maybe just have a different scoring mechanism altogether based on how knowledgeable and helpful your are to the SO community.
The thing I wish for most would be some mandatory versioning on the question and answer. If you are looking for a solution to Android 4.4, answers that are specific to 6.0 are worthless. I know it won't be 100% accurate but if people put in their best guess it could really help with filtering. I know they can put it in the title but you get mistyped and different names for things and I'd rather the tool make it mandatory but also quick and easy to just pick with just a few clicks.
An answer will already decay naturally if it goes out of date as people will downvote it for being wrong. There are plenty of relevent 10yr old questions and answers. Decaying old answers will just make good info harder to find.
imo they should get rid of the gamification. change the upvote to a "thanks" button and don't so the totals
A decay function on reputation might help, but I think the real issue is treating reputation as a precise indicator of user quality. But is a user with 40k rep really meaningfully better than a user with 35k rep?
An idea that I had was to hide reputation entirely from users and move to a flair system based on fuzzy metrics[1]. If the signal isn't precise, find ways to reflect that when displaying it.
[1] I imagine this as a system independent from badges, which are permanent and triggered by certain milestones/events.
I am more of thee type that creates a new account for answers/question from time to time, because I think the rep system is ridiculous as it is and I simply forget my login details. Neither do I know any names on SO, nor do I even look at the rep someone has that answered a question. Not being able to comment to get specifications to questions is bothersome, but at least the barrier is low.
One thing he forgot to mention is that SO has for some time been following a similar trend as Wikipedia. Namely, that there are a number of established "gatekeepers" who guard their realm of influence jealously, shutting down questions and answers that threaten their supremacy or their sense of aesthetics or affect an internal political order. It gets so infuriating that I've mostly stopped participating. And yes, I do know that this only exacerbates the problem, because when the good people leave, the bad people only strengthen their stranglehold...
I guess I'm the only one who doesn't seem to have any problems with wiki[1] or SO.
Every time this comes up people will shout about how unfairly they've been treated, and sure I've seen questions closed when they shouldn't have been, but often they're closed because they're dups or just homework which could have been found with a dab of googling.
Odd that these complainers never seem to link to a question of theirs to show us an example.
So I'll present my challenge again, to the parent @kstenerud and anyone else, if you say it's happened to you, post a link so we can judge.
[1] One exception, did meet a gatekeeper on a wiki article I questioned, in the end we sorted it out civilly.
I think stack overflow peaked a few years ago - its grown more and more useless over the last few years - the last questions I wrote 10 or so years ago have long been modded off topic and locked, despite being within the rules at the time - the culture of the site has got hostile - and no one answers any difficult questions any more and it's full of incorrect misleading out of date information.
I find the most useful information in github issues nowadays....
They wanted no duplicates, and only a single unique question/answer thread. But technology moves forward and there was never only one way to solve most issues anyway.
What we have today is e.g. JavaScript question/answers that pre-date ES6, are high in google search rankings, and also largely bad. People can reply with ES6 solutions to 6+ year old problems, but there's little rep' benefit so few do.
Ultimately SO is a "question/answer" site that's super hostile to new questions and most "answers" will just be a mod close/re-point to the "dupe." Plus they want questions so generic that they are rarely helpful to the question asker themselves.
I understand your sentiment (good tip about GH issues as well), but I found SO to be useful at times.
I agree with the culture, which is why I always state:
1. How my question is different from related questions.
2. How I searched on Google and what I tried.
3. Where my knowledge is lacking, and how it still might be a duplicate of something. I'd then always make the argument that my question is different from an SEO standpoint, which it always is as my question is more "noob friendly".
My questions get closed/locked/duped about one-thirds to half of the time. The other half is upvoted and in some rare cases my questions are really appreciated.
It could be better, but it cold also be worse. I find HN to be quite a good place to ask more opinionated questions (as you can see in my ask HN submissions).
Yeah, I actually find the sister sites more helpful. The main problem is that there are far too many people on that site with their own opinions about how things should be done. There's less traffic on the sister sites like unix and linux, superuser, vi, emacs etc. They should break up the main site for different programming languages and platforms like git as well.
SO questions and answers do sometimes seem ossified now, the ever-shifting flood plain of restrictions and gatekeeper culture having muted and chilled what used to be a more dynamic forum. I increasingly find more valuable and timely information poking around in the relevant subreddits.
New people can not answer questions anymore. One needs one or two reasonably positive questions (AFAIK, within their first 10, otherwise they are banned) before being able to answer anything.
This is completely ridiculous, and absolutely upside-down. The expected result is exactly what you say, questions demanding any effort or rare knowledge remain unanswered, while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone. The fact that questions are still being answered at all is a bit surprising.
Here's an idea. Instead of a two stage question and answer format, add a third stage. First is the question from a regular user like me. Second stage is someone with more knowledge re-phrases the question. Third is the answer. This would create a growing body of well-asked questions and good answers.
The problem is that stage 2 is impossible. The thing that makes the question unanswerable is missing information, or a genuine misunderstanding on the part of the asker. It's very rare for phrasing to be the problem.
I upvoted because I find the idea of an explicit third stage interesting. But SO does offer the ability for experts to edit questions already, in order to keep the simple Q&A format with two stages, so it's "by design". I'm not arguing which design is better... I'd actually like to see your idea implemented :)
I'm building an alternative to stackoverflow- thiscodeworks.com
Reasons why I felt the need to build an entirely new website for code snippets is because as somebody who was learning to code, I found the site incredibly daunting and unfriendly for newbies only favouring expert coders on the platform. Because:
- I can't upvote or post comments because I dont have enough reputation.
- If I'm confused, how do I ask for help if the only way to say something is post an answer?
- The snippets aren't recyclable. Meaning they are always in response to somebody else's problem. As somebody learning to code, how do I change this code to fit mine? Once again, I'm stuck figuring it out.
Anyhow my website (thiscodeworks.com) is a work in progress, but I hope I can resolve these problems & more for others like me. Suggestions welcome!
SO is the way it is because it is worse than useless to have a beginner friendly Q&A site. Many questions are so basic that they can be figured out with a minimum of effort or a quick look at documentation. A site full of low effort questions, quite possibly from CS majors looking for homework help, isn't doing anybody any favors.
If you can't be bothered to answer a couple of questions in the name of getting involved in the community, the community is probably better off without your input.
Unfortunately, a site like SO works because of network effects. It was bootstrapped as far as popularity because it had two well known founders - Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood.
I wish I had some ideas about how to get that first critical mass.
Good luck attracting experts to your site... without incentive for experts to participate it will likely just be the blind leading the blind (i.e. newbies helping newbies - which could possibly be a good thing!).
A little OT as I am not specifically talking about SO - when people ask me some technical question my expectation is that they would have done some upfront research and put some effort into it. Often I find people don't do that. I tell them nicely that I would be happy to help them but they should be prepared to answer the following -
1. Have you Googled the problem / solution? What did you find?
2. Tell me what all you have tried.
3. Tell me what do you think the next steps should be.
It's amazing how many people don't even to bother to do a cursory research before approaching someone with a technical question.
I am on SO and a few sister sites for 7 or 8 years now. Only 40k points or so.
I asked "dumb" questions on issues I could not really voice out as I was not understanding them clearly. In the vast majority of the cases I got helpful answers starting with "what you are looking for is called xxx". THANK YOU for these answers because I discovered new concepts.
I also asked questions with pseudo code telling what problem I have, togther with descriptions of the issue (and screenshots, tracebacks etc). I was using pseudocode because the codebase was large and it was not realistic to get a minimally working code.
But the problrm was not specific to my software, I knew it was more general but could not pinpoint the exact issue. “Post your code!" was the answer he explaining that it was notveasy was let with diwnvotes, close flags and whatnot.
So the experience really depends on the day. Still I find that the knowledge people have and share is extraordinary, especially for amateur coders like myself.
Here's an idea: free to read and answer questions, but $0.10 to ask questions. This would eliminate a huge chunk of low-effort content by making the amount of friction to ask a question higher than the effort required to ask your TA or RTFM (or textbook, in the case of high school and CS 101 students).
I personally have used stack overflow in all my projects and the community helps in stating the questions correctly.
The guideline of asking the questions is also very helpful. Even if your questions get marked as irrelevant, it's great learning as they clearly state the reason for the rejection.
One lesson I've learned from 10 years using Stack Overflow is that its moderation is obnoxious. Eventually, in 2013 I started jotting down links to questions that were closed despite being well-written questions with thoughtful answers, whenever I encountered one in the normal course of my day to day work. I'm well past 20 at this point. And that's not counting the Serverfault article I just saw the other day where a user had a question about compiling php (a technical question that received a correct answer). The question was closed for being off-topic. Compiling web server software is apparently off topic on a site for system administrators, confirmed by multiple mods.
Stack Overflow's content is good because:
1. The site design is high-quality.
2. The users are high-quality, and early on received a lot of positive encouragement to ask good questions and provide good answers.
The site does not need much moderation, possibly apart from cleaning spam, harassment, other blatant violations of site policy, or possibly duplicate questions (mods should have the decency to actually read and understand similar questions before closing as dupes). The idea that closing stuff like "A vs B" comparison questions improves the site is just hogwash. The reason "A v B" comparisons on SO don't devolve into fact-free opinionated bloviating on SO is because (a) the site is so rigorously designed to encourage quality posts and (b) early on they attracted a large and serious userbase devoted to making high-quality contribution. Mods have nothing to do with it.
My personal policy on SO: (Almost) never downvote a question immediately; always explain first why something is missing or inappropriate - and also warn that downvotes are likely if it is not addressed because criticism on the site is harsh.
If that doesn't help, then either I can answer + edit at the same time, or I might downvote.
That's how I treat others - and that's how I hope to be treated, although usually that's not the case :-(
Stack Overflow is a crucial resource for me. I am not an "SO Copy/Pasta" guy, but the site has helped me to knock down many sticky wickets.
I've asked nearly twice as many questions as I've provided answers.
This is not because I'm an ungrateful leech. It's just that I don't think that it's appropriate to add to something unless I have something to add. Many questions that I could answer have already been answered far more effectively than I could do, and I often learn from other people's answers.
Occasionally, I may have something to append to an answer, extending or refining it, but usually, there are no situations that cannot be improved by my absence.
Also, I'm usually spending my time writing code for my projects. I don't spend any time scanning SO for questions to answer. I am not particularly concerned about getting a high SO score.
That said, it has saved my butt numerous times. Frequently, my questions are ones that I could answer, given a lot of time researching, but I often need an answer ASAP. I can get VERY fast closure from SO.
As someone who asks a lot more questions than gives answers, I have been treated...questionably. I used to get bent out of shape, and occasionally slap back in the passive-aggressive manner that SO requires, but I've just learned to say "Thank you sir! May I have another?" SO is the absolute worst place on earth for a pissing match. It isn't important at all for me to be any kind of big shot, there, so I won't gainsay anyone else's desire to be such.
I have learned to take some time to ask questions in a complete and fairly well-researched manner. Since I program Swift, I can add complete playground code, which is nice.
I'm not there to be BMOC or to get jobs. I'm there to solve my problems. Sometimes, I need to eat humble pie to get the problem solved, and that's fine.
: at first I was criticised because apparently I should have googled "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" first. The funny part was that years later a google of "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" gave a the first search result as the stack overflow question that I asked
> ... whenever I have a question ... I do a search, and almost every time I’ll find that someone already asked the exact same thing...
I've been on SO for a couple years less, but - when I perform that search, I find something relevant about, oh, 75% of the time. And that means I ask 80-100 questions a year. A few of them get downvoted below zero, some are zero (often with no answers), and the rest are upvoted in what's probably a geometric distribution.
So I'd say YMMV and depends on your personality and what kind of programming you're doing.
80-100 questions a years seems WAY too high. Maybe I'm in the wrong industry, but I'm a working professional on embedded linux systems and I find I only need to ask a question maybe 3 times per year. I consume probably 500 answers per year though.
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
SO is purposefully not meant for discussions - I am okay with that. But I’ve found Reddit to be pretty good just for discussions.
On the other hand, what has saved me in the last two years from having to depend on SO or Reddit for answers as I’ve gotten deep in the weeds with AWS and all of their proprietary “locked in” goodness, is our company’s business support plan with AWS. Their live support is excellent and are batting close to 100% not just for “something is wrong” (never had an issue) but as an “easy button” when I just don’t want to waste any more time trying to figure something out.
I can imagine if you are somewhere doing anything that comes close to the edge of your company’s competency, paid support would be a godsend.
On another note: I guess that’s another reason I don’t do side projects outside of the company. I have access to resources and support.
[+] [-] ken|6 years ago|reply
For C# or JS, it's an amazing resource. I've tried to use it for Lisp, and it's a wasteland (half the questions are "help me with my Hello World", and most of the experts seem to avoid it). For macOS development, it's hit or miss -- occasionally I'll find a good answer, but I never get a good answer to something I ask, and blogs are generally much more likely to have the info I need.
[+] [-] Amygaz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OldGuyInTheClub|6 years ago|reply
I agree. I've tried alternatives to Matlab for technical computing at work. So far I have not found anything to match both the quality of the product and the fast technical support I can get from the Mathworks through our support contract.
[+] [-] gregd|6 years ago|reply
There was also a general lack of compassion on the part of many, many users. I get that the sites strive to be full of "high quality" content, but there were a lot of legitimate questions asked, in broken English, that got closed immediately, or got closed because it seemed like it as academic exercise they were asking. IT has a reputation for lacking in people skills (deservedly so) and in SO's and SF's early days, that certainly stood out as a major turnoff of the sites. Admittedly, I have no idea if it's gotten any better.
[+] [-] listenallyall|6 years ago|reply
SO would benefit greatly by implementing a (relatively slow) decay function on all its reputation points. Technology inevitably moves forward, a great answer (or question) from 6,8,10 years ago is the most likely age to have a huge quantity of upvotes, while also most likely to be obsolete.
While rep alone shouldn't be the primary motivation for answering questions, when people see their point totals heading south after a few years, it might provide an incentive to get back on and reverse the negative flow by answering new questions and/or updating prior answers.
[+] [-] jlokier|6 years ago|reply
I'd also like to see the ability to re-ask questions after a few years without them being dismissed as duplicates.
There have been a few questions where the answers no longer worked due to being obsolete, and I had to figure out the new solution myself. And in some cases, the answer never worked properly but was accepted as the best known at the time, and I had one that worked. But there was no point posting, because the accepted answer from X years ago dominated, and it was unlikely that a contribution from little me would be noticed.
In fact that's why I never ended up joining SO despite being a heavy user - on each of the occasions I felt I could make a useful contribution, it happened to be a question that was old and "settled", and I felt it wouldn't be worth the effort.
[+] [-] pinouchon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snarf21|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman2|6 years ago|reply
An answer will already decay naturally if it goes out of date as people will downvote it for being wrong. There are plenty of relevent 10yr old questions and answers. Decaying old answers will just make good info harder to find.
imo they should get rid of the gamification. change the upvote to a "thanks" button and don't so the totals
[+] [-] lazulicurio|6 years ago|reply
An idea that I had was to hide reputation entirely from users and move to a flair system based on fuzzy metrics[1]. If the signal isn't precise, find ways to reflect that when displaying it.
[1] I imagine this as a system independent from badges, which are permanent and triggered by certain milestones/events.
[+] [-] raxxorrax|6 years ago|reply
I think you could scrap it as a whole.
[+] [-] frosted-flakes|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] random_cynic|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tomc1985|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kstenerud|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tempguy9999|6 years ago|reply
Every time this comes up people will shout about how unfairly they've been treated, and sure I've seen questions closed when they shouldn't have been, but often they're closed because they're dups or just homework which could have been found with a dab of googling.
Odd that these complainers never seem to link to a question of theirs to show us an example.
So I'll present my challenge again, to the parent @kstenerud and anyone else, if you say it's happened to you, post a link so we can judge.
[1] One exception, did meet a gatekeeper on a wiki article I questioned, in the end we sorted it out civilly.
[+] [-] andrepd|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] docflabby|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone1234|6 years ago|reply
They wanted no duplicates, and only a single unique question/answer thread. But technology moves forward and there was never only one way to solve most issues anyway.
What we have today is e.g. JavaScript question/answers that pre-date ES6, are high in google search rankings, and also largely bad. People can reply with ES6 solutions to 6+ year old problems, but there's little rep' benefit so few do.
Ultimately SO is a "question/answer" site that's super hostile to new questions and most "answers" will just be a mod close/re-point to the "dupe." Plus they want questions so generic that they are rarely helpful to the question asker themselves.
[+] [-] mettamage|6 years ago|reply
I agree with the culture, which is why I always state:
1. How my question is different from related questions.
2. How I searched on Google and what I tried.
3. Where my knowledge is lacking, and how it still might be a duplicate of something. I'd then always make the argument that my question is different from an SEO standpoint, which it always is as my question is more "noob friendly".
My questions get closed/locked/duped about one-thirds to half of the time. The other half is upvoted and in some rare cases my questions are really appreciated.
It could be better, but it cold also be worse. I find HN to be quite a good place to ask more opinionated questions (as you can see in my ask HN submissions).
[+] [-] random_cynic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redler|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|6 years ago|reply
New people can not answer questions anymore. One needs one or two reasonably positive questions (AFAIK, within their first 10, otherwise they are banned) before being able to answer anything.
This is completely ridiculous, and absolutely upside-down. The expected result is exactly what you say, questions demanding any effort or rare knowledge remain unanswered, while high-reputation users stay on their comfort zone. The fact that questions are still being answered at all is a bit surprising.
[+] [-] analog31|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark-r|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumoro|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magical_mishka|6 years ago|reply
Reasons why I felt the need to build an entirely new website for code snippets is because as somebody who was learning to code, I found the site incredibly daunting and unfriendly for newbies only favouring expert coders on the platform. Because:
- I can't upvote or post comments because I dont have enough reputation.
- If I'm confused, how do I ask for help if the only way to say something is post an answer?
- The snippets aren't recyclable. Meaning they are always in response to somebody else's problem. As somebody learning to code, how do I change this code to fit mine? Once again, I'm stuck figuring it out.
Anyhow my website (thiscodeworks.com) is a work in progress, but I hope I can resolve these problems & more for others like me. Suggestions welcome!
[+] [-] darkerside|6 years ago|reply
If you can't be bothered to answer a couple of questions in the name of getting involved in the community, the community is probably better off without your input.
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
I wish I had some ideas about how to get that first critical mass.
[+] [-] umvi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monster_group|6 years ago|reply
1. Have you Googled the problem / solution? What did you find?
2. Tell me what all you have tried.
3. Tell me what do you think the next steps should be.
It's amazing how many people don't even to bother to do a cursory research before approaching someone with a technical question.
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|6 years ago|reply
I asked "dumb" questions on issues I could not really voice out as I was not understanding them clearly. In the vast majority of the cases I got helpful answers starting with "what you are looking for is called xxx". THANK YOU for these answers because I discovered new concepts.
I also asked questions with pseudo code telling what problem I have, togther with descriptions of the issue (and screenshots, tracebacks etc). I was using pseudocode because the codebase was large and it was not realistic to get a minimally working code.
But the problrm was not specific to my software, I knew it was more general but could not pinpoint the exact issue. “Post your code!" was the answer he explaining that it was notveasy was let with diwnvotes, close flags and whatnot.
So the experience really depends on the day. Still I find that the knowledge people have and share is extraordinary, especially for amateur coders like myself.
[+] [-] umvi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rangerranvir|6 years ago|reply
The guideline of asking the questions is also very helpful. Even if your questions get marked as irrelevant, it's great learning as they clearly state the reason for the rejection.
P.S: I am a big fan of their yearly survey.
[+] [-] Goladus|6 years ago|reply
Stack Overflow's content is good because:
1. The site design is high-quality.
2. The users are high-quality, and early on received a lot of positive encouragement to ask good questions and provide good answers.
The site does not need much moderation, possibly apart from cleaning spam, harassment, other blatant violations of site policy, or possibly duplicate questions (mods should have the decency to actually read and understand similar questions before closing as dupes). The idea that closing stuff like "A vs B" comparison questions improves the site is just hogwash. The reason "A v B" comparisons on SO don't devolve into fact-free opinionated bloviating on SO is because (a) the site is so rigorously designed to encourage quality posts and (b) early on they attracted a large and serious userbase devoted to making high-quality contribution. Mods have nothing to do with it.
[+] [-] einpoklum|6 years ago|reply
If that doesn't help, then either I can answer + edit at the same time, or I might downvote.
That's how I treat others - and that's how I hope to be treated, although usually that's not the case :-(
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|6 years ago|reply
Stack Overflow is a crucial resource for me. I am not an "SO Copy/Pasta" guy, but the site has helped me to knock down many sticky wickets.
I've asked nearly twice as many questions as I've provided answers.
This is not because I'm an ungrateful leech. It's just that I don't think that it's appropriate to add to something unless I have something to add. Many questions that I could answer have already been answered far more effectively than I could do, and I often learn from other people's answers.
Occasionally, I may have something to append to an answer, extending or refining it, but usually, there are no situations that cannot be improved by my absence.
Also, I'm usually spending my time writing code for my projects. I don't spend any time scanning SO for questions to answer. I am not particularly concerned about getting a high SO score.
That said, it has saved my butt numerous times. Frequently, my questions are ones that I could answer, given a lot of time researching, but I often need an answer ASAP. I can get VERY fast closure from SO.
As someone who asks a lot more questions than gives answers, I have been treated...questionably. I used to get bent out of shape, and occasionally slap back in the passive-aggressive manner that SO requires, but I've just learned to say "Thank you sir! May I have another?" SO is the absolute worst place on earth for a pissing match. It isn't important at all for me to be any kind of big shot, there, so I won't gainsay anyone else's desire to be such.
I have learned to take some time to ask questions in a complete and fairly well-researched manner. Since I program Swift, I can add complete playground code, which is nice.
I'm not there to be BMOC or to get jobs. I'm there to solve my problems. Sometimes, I need to eat humble pie to get the problem solved, and that's fine.
[+] [-] zubairq|6 years ago|reply
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580650/how-can-i-reload...
: at first I was criticised because apparently I should have googled "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" first. The funny part was that years later a google of "How can I reload .emacs after changing it?" gave a the first search result as the stack overflow question that I asked
[+] [-] einpoklum|6 years ago|reply
> ... whenever I have a question ... I do a search, and almost every time I’ll find that someone already asked the exact same thing...
I've been on SO for a couple years less, but - when I perform that search, I find something relevant about, oh, 75% of the time. And that means I ask 80-100 questions a year. A few of them get downvoted below zero, some are zero (often with no answers), and the rest are upvoted in what's probably a geometric distribution.
So I'd say YMMV and depends on your personality and what kind of programming you're doing.
[+] [-] umvi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gesman|6 years ago|reply
Staying under the radar of nazi-moderators that are trigger happy to close relevant, valuable and interesting questions under lame excuses.
[+] [-] GrumpyNl|6 years ago|reply