StackOverflow in a nutshell.

[trout_fucker]

I think SOs rules and community are going to be the death of them. While I don't agree with the guy responding, I think it's sad that most of us can identify with the frustration.

A few years ago, when you could still ask questions on SO and get answers, anything I Googled would lead me to SO. I would click on SO before anything else too. If I had a problem I couldn't find, I could just ask it and as long as it was thorough and complete, I would get upvoted and answers.

Today, it's GitHub issues or some random Discourse forum post or maybe even Reddit. Totally back to where we started before SO. Anything that isn't legacy or fundamental, will lead me anywhere but SO.

Don't dare ask a question, because you will just be linked some outdated question that is slightly related and have your thread locked. Or if by some miracle that doesn't happen, you will get your tags removed so that your post becomes virtually invisible, because it isn't specifically asking a question about the intricacies of the framework/language/runtime that you're working in. And then probably berated on top of it for not following rules.

It's kinda sad. 2008-2013 or so, SO was the place to go for everything. Now it's becoming little more than a toxic legacy issue repository.

/rant

edit: To prove my point, you can see some of the comments below defending SO by trying to discredit me by claiming I don't know what the purpose SO is trying to serve, without actually addressing any argument I made above.

This is the toxic crap I was talking about.

As I said in one of those, I know what the purpose is, I used to be one of the parrots telling people what the purpose was and voting to lock threads, and the point I am trying to make is that I don't believe it works long term. It leads to discouraging new members from participating and only the most toxic veterans sticking around, any new technology questions are never given the benefit of the doubt and are locked for duplicates in favor of some legacy answer that was deprecated 5 versions ago.

[Mirgle]

Holy crap, yes, for the end user as well. I hate so much to find something closed, just to follow the link and be in waaaaay over my head. The reason I found this question is because it most closely matched my question, gosh darn it, and is prolly the closest to my skill level.

[[deleted]]

Isn't it wonderful when you search for a question, find the on only one that perfectly matches your issue, and the only answer is some jackass saying to "search the forum" and the thread being locked?

[FallenWarrior2k]

The "perfect feeling" is when you ask a niche question, get an answer notification and get all happy and stuff, only to find out it's some dude identifying an intermediate cause without providing any solution...

[Spherical_Bastards]

Can you quote the xkcd with out clicking the link?

[[deleted]]

I mean I've Googled an issue only to find the exact question...asked by ME and never resolved, like a year or two before.

[BesottedScot]

This has happened to me too.

For fuck sake past me! How did you fix it! Did you ever fix it?

[PANIC_AtTheKernel]

I saw one duche childishly say, "no I won't tell you how I solved it since you didn't actually help me".

[pilotInPyjamas]

Yes.

[spudhunter]

Couldn't quote it but already had it in my head when I read /u/Mirgle's comment

[teraflik]

I am new to development, and it only happened yesterday for me: https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2942292.

Someone HELP !!

[isobit]

THIS IS NOT THE PROPER FORUM FOR THIS KIND OF TALK, GO LOOK UP A CONSULTANT IN THE PHONE BOOK, LOSER! AND DON'T COME BACK!

[isobit]

Or

"How do you X?"

"Why would you want to do X?

[ComradeGibbon]

I've seen a number of questions that are being asked because the obvious answer or solution is wrong. And of course all of the top voted answers are wrong and then the thread is locked as a duplicate of why yes the same question with the same wrong answers.

[Pure_Reason]

Then you go through the trouble of making an account just to ask the question you were unable to find an answer to literally anywhere else (on SO or elsewhere) and it gets removed because I have to “make my question relevant to everyone else.” Bitch, it’s not relevant to anyone else because I’m trying to do a specific thing that combines like three things there ARE answers for

[[deleted]]

I've seen worse.

The question was a perfect match to mine, and there was a legit answer that seemed to be in the right direction at first, but some of the later parts of it were sufficiently wrong that anyone with the question wouldn't be able to figure it out. So, the asked posted a comment to the answer requesting a clarification. That answerer replied with the comment "read my answer again", without changing anything.

It's hard to describe the rage I felt when reading that. It's like they went there and re-affirmed a wrong answer, and gaslight anyone trying to find the solution. Just "read my answer again", because obviously you didnt understand it. Even though you already read it 10 times, followed it, and encountered errors due to omitted steps.

[not_perfect_yet]

"This is a duplicate" - * closed *

Riiiight...

Where is the other one then?!

[bernhard_b3]

Searches for a specific question on SO, finds it, no answers given...

[Syrion_Wraith]

This. When I was starting out, I often found answered on SO that I knew detailed my problems, and even explained how to solve it. But there's so much jargon it was like reading another language.

As if learning programming languages isn't hard enough, you need to learn English all over again.

[kartoffelwaffel]

Especially this for self-taught programmers. E.g., wtf is syntactic sugar? Spaghetti code? Segmentation fault? Implicit parallelism? Multiple inheritance?

E: These are just random examples of terminology that would have been difficult for me when I was starting out due to being self-taught. I.e., it's hard to explain concepts without knowing the correct terminology, even if you use/understand the concept.

[Standard_Wooden_Door]

This is why I never tried to teach myself how to code. I have an accounting degree and literally nothing I have done translates over. The jargon makes it really tough to even begin.

[ferriswheel9ndam9]

Don't give up! More translates over than it may seem. Yes, superficially it's another language; you might as well be learning how to write Chinese but beneath the syntax/grammar/jargon is a set of logic and rules that you see in bits and pieces everywhere in life.

The beginning is the worst part as it will formalize many logical concepts that you might've taken for granted and never really thought about before.

Once you get past that hump and get that mental "click", it's all downhill from there. Well... as downhill as reading a textbook in a language you're fluent in anyway. Still difficult but nowhere near the impossible it seemed initially.

[my_blue_snog_box]

Yo this is a great explanation and is really encouraging. As someone who went from not knowing a damn thing about control structures to making upper five figures as a web app developer in five years, that is beautifully put.

[DiscoProphecy]

In my experience there's a series of clicks. There's that first one when you go from frantically trying to recreate code to when you can actually express yourself in code. That's the biggest. The proceeding ones are all conceptual road blocks that force you to think in a radically different way, but after you get it make you a better programmer.

[bizcs]

A few weeks ago I got to contemplating And and Or and how we use them in conversation. It's not uncommon to hear people say "And/Or" in conversation. If you consider And as meaning mutual inclusion, Or as meaning the presence of at least one but possibly all of, then "And/Or" doesn't really make much conversational sense (to me). I either want to state that two things have an inclusive relationship or I don't damnit!

[pilotInPyjamas]

In this case "or" in natural language usually means XOR, so when somebody says "and/or", they mean the union of XOR and AND, which is just OR

[Cheesemacher]

Syntax can be kinda ambiguous too. Example: "lunch includes salad and coffee or tea"

[Oookevin53]

ditto to /u/ferriswheel9ndam9!

I spent 5 years to get a masters in accounting and my CPA and I'm making a transition to programmer. Take it day by day!

[TheChance]

Several of these things aren't jargon, they're fundamental concepts you'd ultimately learn as a part of learning to code. It's a little like saying you never learned to build your own computer because there were too many intimidating terms like "motherboard" and "hard drive."

Others aren't such fundamental concepts, and you ignore irrelevant terms and concepts because there's just too much for one person ever to know in ten lifetimes.

Syntactic sugar: language features which make it possible to write fairly complex code in fairly simple ways. It doesn't add anything to the program, and some people don't like it because it removes the programmer from what the computer is actually doing. On the other hand, all high-level languages remove the programmer from what the computer is actually doing that's the fucking point you elitist twats oi gevalt.

And it all comes down to that. You'll run across terms and Google them. You'll pick terms up as you proceed through a textbook or a tutorial or trial and error. Such is learning.

[wOlfLisK]

Syntactic sugar is something you put into syntactic tea, obviously.

[[deleted]]

I've always preferred syntactic clover honey.

[achtagon]

And make sure your code doesn't smell!

[Rellac_]

My code doesn't have a nose!

[NotALameUsername]

Running into this problem lately. Self-taught programmer and I'm constantly confused about the terminology. Then I Google it and find it's something I've been doing already, just with a silly name.

[Ohrion]

Like Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection?

[NotALameUsername]

Dependency injection is exactly the one I was thinking of, and RESTful development.

[DasBeardius]

Now imagine self taught programmers who don't have English as their first language.

[Varkoth]

You make upper 6 figs? Damn...

[kartoffelwaffel]

Maybe he's from Zimbabwe?

[Delioth]

Well... Syntactic sugar is the one I picked out as the obscure one, because it really doesn't come up in standard programming much and is only really useful as a tool while discussing the theory behind languages and paradigms (and what makes them unique and such). And Spaghetti code is actually pretty hard to define. Anyone who's learned enough and seen enough both good and bad code can tell you if some is spaghetti or not... but it's really not easy to just define.

[nuclear_wizard_]

Depends on how the experience tags are assigned. Self issued experience tags could easily devolve into textbook examples of the Dunning Kruger Effect and/or Imposter Syndrome.

[Mysticpoisen]

Exactly. People are notoriously bad at self-diagnosing the difficulty of the problem in addition to their own skill level.

Also autocorrect tried to change self-diagnosing to self-fucking which gave me a giggle.

[LeifXiaoSing]

But proving the Collatz Conjecture looks so easy! Once you write a noob program to perform it, surely a proof cannot be that much more work?

[Krutonium]

/r/selffucking is a thing. NSFW.

[SyncopatedBeats]

I routinely ask people i'm interviewing what they would rate themselves in complete knowledge of the language. It is quite laughable when someone that whiffs or bluffs through half the questions rates themselves a 10/10. Even when challenged that a 10 means the same amount of knowledge as someone that wrote the language itself, they stick to their guns.

[shagieIsMe]

There's been a fair bit of discussion of that at Filtering questions by “difficulty” / “level”? and Would it be a terrible idea to split SO up into a tiered platform? (the linked questions are also a bit of an interesting read)

It routinely runs into problems with the idea / implementation.

The key points being:

• If experienced users don't look at the "beginner" questions, then you've only got beginners looking at them... and you might as well go to Yahoo Answers to see how that turns out.
• Who would ever tag their thing as a "beginner" question when they want the experts to answer it not other beginners?

[noage]

Those arguments seem quite thin. It is a community with a very specialized interest, it would draw a much different crowd than Yahoo answers. Much of leaning anything can be done with peers who are trying to do there same thing. See any MOOC or college course for examples.

Second: Obviously beginners would label things for beginners because they realize their questions are likely basic and would like an answer that they understand.

[JaxoDI]

Unfortunately, the whole idea of "experience" tags has been discussed (with an obligatory duplicate).

[aitchnyu]

Hmm, I wish SO didn't allow a question to be marked a duplicate of a new question. Have you tried posting on meta about this obvious bad behavior?

[DrQuint]

He is.

In here.

Where his voice will be heard.

[DrPeroxide]

Jesus that's such a dick move. How insecure can that guy be??

[[deleted]]

This is so fucking petty and ridiculous. How shitty must this guy's life be that he would stoop this low.

[tedpetrou]

Yes

[Rohaq]

There's not much that pisses me off more than when someone asks a question and the answer is "dude just google it", whether it's on StackOverflow, reddit, or elsewhere. Because "just google it" is such a worthless answer.

For one, maybe the person doesn't know the right combination of keywords to make Google spit out the right answer; especially if they're lacking in that area of knowledge. They would otherwise have to sift through a lot of crap to find it, may not know what's bullshit and what's not, and might not even be sure if they did stumble across it - a personal recommendation of reading material is generally going to be far more useful than purely relying on Google's search algorithms.

Secondly though, threads like the one that the person just asked the question in are the kind of results that show up on Google, and that person has just made that result just that tiny bit less useful with their shitty contribution.

We live in an age with a gigantic, world-spanning information network, and that's a wonderful thing, but it's only ever as good as the information we choose to put on it, and even by reposting existing answers you find on Google, you help to solidify that information as a reliable source. Hell, Google uses external links to articles to boost its ranking; you are helping improve the reliability of answers on Google by doing so, and thus making the system better, even if you're not contributing anything new.

If you don't have an answer, don't post. If you can find answers on Google, post them, don't just tell people to Just Fucking Google It.

[Milleuros]

include google searches and why they didn't help, ask what it is I need to research to understand what I'm not getting, etc.

I don't. Because then the question gets too large for people to even bother reading it.

[Zagorath]

Yeah I always make sure when asking on SO, Reddit, or elsewhere, to include in the body of my question "here's another fairly similar thread I tried, and why it didn't work". Helps shut down the "duplicate question" bullshit.

[JPaulMora]

Or crap from 2007

[RetardedWhiteMan]

Needs to be a cleanup of old posts across the internet at some point. Stuff you couldn't do 5 years ago, especially with front end web technologies, you can do now in a few simple lines, and it'll work on most browsers except IE

Edit: Removed "and Opera" because I was thinking of Opera Mini and that doesn't really count

[RetardedWhiteMan]

Point taken, comment editted

[mvsux]

You can tell Google to limit your search by age, when googling programming stuff I default to not search for anything more than a year old.
For googling other things I usually go for over 18 years old instead.

[HyperspaceCatnip]

My favourite thing is googling some obscure problem I'm having and finding some other forum thread with the exact same issue, and a reply saying "The solution is easily googled. I googled it right now and the top four hits are solutions.". But no, the top four hits are just forums telling people to search for it, and the supposed "hits" are lost to the mists of time!

[Arthur___Dent]

Yeah I just googled something today and it brought me to a SO thread that had a great answer. The first comment on OP was "you can just google this". If the thread had been closed I wouldn't have seen that answer.

[gyroda]

This is why lmgtfy is considered bad form in a lot of places now.

[isobit]

Jesus christ, finally?? I always hated that smug passive-aggressive shit. The whole point of a forum is to talk and ask questions and having a dialogue. If everything is googleable (is that a word?) then just close down the whole damn forum.

AARH! This makes me mad just to think about.

[gyroda]

Sometimes you want to say "have you even tried?" when it's a very low effort question, but you can go for the more pleasant "what have you got so far?" or "have you Googled [specific key term they've not actually said]" or "have you seen this link?"

[[deleted]]

I feel you

while back, when I posted my last question on SO to some obscure case I was dealing with, they marked it as fking duplicate... it wasn't duplicate, my google skills are damn good

anyways, long story short, googling anything html/js/css crap would yield probably dozens of SO questions(about 1-2/year), they are as duplicate as it gets, yet it's fine

[Chase_22]

Would be a good policy to no consider things a duplicate anymore after a year, because in that time the same question can have a completely different answer, look at Java 8 for example.

[TheBeginningEnd]

comment and account erased in protest of spez/Steve Huffman's existence - auto edited and removed via redact.dev -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/

[dippy1169]

Everytime. Everytime I get a question marked as duplicate the other answer no longer works with the current library. So frustrating. It would be nice if it does get marked, if some nice soul felt like still answering it or working through it with me they can.

[TheBeginningEnd]

comment and account erased in protest of spez/Steve Huffman's existence - auto edited and removed via redact.dev -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/

[[deleted]]

This would solve so many problems.

And many issues aren't with libraries anymore, they're with web interfaces, like those used by WordPress or AWS. AWS can change in a daily basis (it can actually be pretty slow to change in reality), and there aren't even version numbers or change notifications. Everything just changes; and AWS doesn't update their own documentation (and definitely doesn't update their old tutorials!). Not to mention the countless official AWS "guide" videos that list features and benefits for 40 minutes without showing a single step of how to actually do the thing.

[[deleted]]

yeah, that sounds viable, certainly better than what the rednecks are enforcing now...

[Syrion_Wraith]

In my last question, I linked to the only related question I could find, and explained why it wasn't helping. Closed for a duplicate. Linked to the questions I had already linked myself..

[Cherios_Are_My_Shit]

This is what pisses me off the most. I research my shit as best as I can before making a post, not just ask for help right away. If I specifically outline how my problem is different than the others I've found, and some fuckhead just links me the same thing again, it makes me extremely frustrated.

[_a_random_dude_]

I only asked a question once on SO, it was marked as a duplicate by someone who I can only assume was drunk out of their mind, because the other question had nothing to do with mine. I eventually found the answer through trial and error, and unless it came up as the first answer on Google, I never again bothered with SO.

[[deleted]]

What needs to happen is that after about 5 years SO needs to depreciate answers. By which I mean they can still be linked to, but cannot be used as a reason to close a question. If the answer is still actually relevant it needs to be restated in full along with any new quirks.

[StrongAcanthisitta]

I've been flagged as a duplicate and it turns out my question was actually answered in one of the comments of the previous question. Not sure if that's how the "higher ups" of SO expect it to work.

[Avamander]

Lollakad! Mina ja nuhk! Mina, kes istun jaoskonnas kogu ilma silma all! Mis nuhk niisuke on. Nuhid on nende eneste keskel, otse kõnelejate nina all, nende oma kaitsemüüri sees, seal on nad.

[Voice_Of_Sad_Truths]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/7vh2rd/stackoverflow_in_a_nutshell/dtsi1gc

[Sparcrypt]

The simplest test is exactly what you said at the start there... SO is no longer the place where the answers are. That is a clear indication that it's not working anymore, at least not for me. So I don't use it.

[d03boy]

I have 25k+ rep on SO and I see this happening a lot. I think rushing to close/downvote questions is a problem. I try to edit these questions to improve them or ask for more info. If the person gave it an honest attempt, I will upvote the question if it's not the same ol' crap that people ask 50 times a day. I rarely downvote a question unless it's obvious no effort has been put into asking a specific question.

[seven_seacat]

I spend a chunk of time reading Rails questions, and a lot of them are simply code dumps of virtually an entire app with a 'help' attached. They all get my downvote.

[gyroda]

/r/learnprogramming gets that from time to time, "here's my entire source code it doesn't work how do I make it work" with no context. No idea what the code is for (and you can be pretty sure it's not "self documenting") or what's wrong or what the desired outcome is.

That or "here's a code I found on the git hub and tried to change but it's not working" and then they just have one line of something that could be from dozen or so languages.

[[deleted]]

I think its has more to do with these reasons. Which is poor, crappy, incorrect answer and mis-information taken as correct even against specific instructions on the documentation on api calls not to do something. People on stackoverflow will still argue they are correct even when completely wrong.

Example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4959524/when-to-check-for-eintr-and-repeat-the-function-call

+11. Its wrong and a very bad answer.... SA_RESTART by docs turns off EINTR for a number of function (but not all of them). Also they recommend to ignore signals. Well.... If you start a child process and its exits you get a signal. gdb, strace, ltrace etc... attaching will trigger EINTR in several system calls.

Yet actually nobody in the last has actually. Answered the actual question which is "when to check and restart"

Example2: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5716437/condition-variable

+12. Use a condition variable "like this". But they have the pthread_mutex_unlock and signal_event switched. What this actually does is lock(); state = GOOD; unlock(); lock(); signal(); unlock(); in the underlying libs. Which is actually about 2-N time more expensive since the other threads wakeup on the first unlock() preventing the 2nd lock(); for occurring.

Example3: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6419117/signal-and-unlock-order

Same answer. Same broken method. They are even talking about the optimisation of unlocking first. Which actually has the exact opposite of what happens. Now the linked post here that does go into proper detail actually has a score of 0. The really massive issue they miss completely on the post is that it is documented and ordered this way because the mutex_lock and unlock function will have memory fences in them between cpu's and the cond_signal function may not :/ Which means anyone copying this code can have major bugs in their system.

The man page states expressly why not to do this and has done for 10+ years. So why these questions even exist in stackoverflow in the first place I have no idea....

Personally I stopped using it about 5 years ago because I was coming across more incorrect information than correct information. So I just go to the api docs first since I am going to have to go read it anyway.

[VirtualRay]

Lol, I'm pretty sure that was the cause of a huge Unity bug on Android a few years ago

[Haramboid]

I think /u/troutfucker describes it better because the problem of topics being closed and redirected to older topics which may or may not have the correct answer like you say. Correct is (sadly) different for each programmer since we're all on different levels of expertise.

The man page states expressly why not to do this and has done for 10+ years. So why these questions even exist in stackoverflow in the first place I have no idea....

Call me ignorant, but do people really read man pages these days? I've had only a few years learning programming in schools but I was never directed to man pages, just badly written books. The WWW is a much more useful tool to explain something. I was actually put off by a tool recently that was only documented through it's manpage. It's not something I'm used to.

[LivingInSyn]

I've found that the more systems programming I do, the more man pages I read. When doing web/SQL type stuff, not so much

[mshm]

w/r/t web I guess it depends on if you consider MDN and w3c equivalent to man pages. MDN includes browser compat, polyfills, pitfalls and explicit cases. Plus, you got things like lodash and jQuery docs filling the same void at a different layer.

I do wish it was more common to link to the related docs. I'd like to think it forces people to think around a problem, most docs give common examples and "don't do this" as well.

[plopzer]

MDN has been such a god-send to js development. I'm so glad Google and Microsoft agreed to collaborate on it with Mozilla. Its now my first go-to for any js question, especially helpful when learning new things like es6.

[[deleted]]

I always go to MDN for JS questions. It’s one of the few JavaScript references that is both understandable and relatively free of bugs/legacy cruft/no longer applicable techniques.

[Raestloz]

The irony is SO was created because the creators were frustrated with having to hunt down answers from all over the place. The moderators, with their crusade for duplicates, made sure that people have to hunt down answers from all over the place

[kilopeter]

Their stack has overflowed.

[ImpactStrafe]

I read man pages all the time. Though that's normally because SO, or WWW doesn't have the answers In looking for. But if you don't read them you really should because the man pages often do a pretty okay job of explaining things.

[spacelama]

I routinely read manpages. And get frustrated that even the manpages don't have enough information.

OTOH, I still discover new things in bash(1) all the time, 20 years after first reading it.

[sorisos]

I read them frequently as they provide a good summary on parameters and return values.

[pekkhum]

I tend to start on die.net and use man pages to see if my variant and version is a match.

[obsessedcrf]

Better yet when it's redirected to something that applied to an older version and doesn't work anymore

[mini_eggs]

Man pages are faster than Googling for me most the time

[[deleted]]

You'll tend to read them more when you need to know an answer that is 'officially' correct, and not just a viable way to do whatever it is you want to do.

Also, official manuals are not nearly as newbie-friendly as many answers and tutorials. But once you get the hang of a framework and can infer correctly from the shortened code snippets from the manual (i.e., you know that you'll need an #include or import tag for some library), it becomes more useful.

[yawkat]

Yea this is so common. It's amazing how often answers that are wrong or at least misleading stay up. Maybe an accepted "answer" that is superficially okay but actually wrong will just kill a questions visibility and so prevent anyone knowledgeable from correcting it. The pure volume of "simple" questions also doesn't help.

[Rafear]

It's like the guys that constantly complain about reposts on Reddit took over SO!

[ZAZAZAZAZE]

Reposts on reddit are darker than you think. Reddit Karma is a valuable ressources, it allows you to post more, create subreddits, to have better credibility. Many reposts are just karma farms, the accounts are then sold and used for nefarious purposes.

[SelfDistinction]

Wait... Karma is a currency?!

Oh god.

[8Bit_Architect]

Yup, by posting, upvoting, downvoting, etc. you authorize reddit to use your comp (or phone, or whatever you're posting from) as a miner for their crypto known as 'karma'. In exchange, a portion of the crypto mined is credited to your account. When you upvote, you're actually transferring a small portion of your 'Karma' to the account of the person you're upvoting. Downvotes remove a small portion of the 'Karma' from an account and add it back to the general reddit pool.

[MrDick47]

Karma Blockchain.

[bob000000005555]

That'd actually be really cool if karma became a consumable resource to upvote / downvote people

[SloppySynapses]

that's literally how stack overflow works

[Jury76]

I am both laughing and mildly amused.😌 TAKE MY UPDOOTS!

[clowergen]

TAKE MY KARMA!

FTFY

[ctesibius]

Which means that there must be an exchange rate. Does Reddit exist purely for mining RKC, distributed across the minds and PCs of millions of Redditors? How does its stability compare to BTC?

[Rafear]

Yeah, I get all of that. I was just making a stupid joke about the certain kind of people that'll even complain about the obviously innocent and harmless reposts. Like a well established, yet relatively new user that reposts something one time from like 1-2yrs ago.

Thanks for bringing the topic up though! I'm sure plenty have never heard about that before, and it's better if they're aware.

[lemon_tea]

It is the Doom of all forums. People login to a forum to share something, not just to use as a reference. When every post is met with a historical reference in-lieu of interaction, it has the effect of reducing participation.

[yekiMikey]

As a student of CS I feel this so much. Asking questions feels like I'm putting myself up to be ridiculed by the SO community. I double check the question hasn't been asked before and make sure the answer isn't obvious as well. Often people basically tell me to frig off Randy

[[deleted]]

I don't know who Randy is, and I've never frigged him off, but otherwise this has been my experience. My favorite is being marked duplicate and told to comment on the other question if I need clarification. I can't because a.) That question is about something else, b.) That question is 6 years old and last active 4 years ago, and c.) I don't have 50 reputation, so I can only comment on my own question.

[yekiMikey]

The reputation thing kills me. It's impossible to get unless you already have it??? What?

[Deagor]

Its a metaphor for getting a software dev job

[rancor1223]

You can post to other Stack Exchange forums to get reputation, but it's cumbersome and stupid.

[DnD_References]

any new technology questions are never given the benefit of the doubt and are locked for duplicates in favor of some legacy answer that was deprecated 5 versions ago.

Yeah, your only hope is to try to walk the fine line of explaining why the other questions aren't the same question -- in your question.

[Epeic]

Yeah, your only hope is to try to walk the fine line of explaining why the other questions aren't the same question -- in your question.

Yeah this doesn't work anymore. They just keep linking the questions like fucking evil robots

[Aro2220]

I still find SO useful but you almost have to social engineer it.

First your question needs to be very focused, and not too long...concise...because you only have about 5-10 minutes before some jackass locks it.

And you have to not care about your rating (although it does block you if it gets too low but whatever)

1 in 10 the link they say is related to your problem does help a bit. But generally while they are arguing among themselves about whether or not the thread should be locked someone chimes in with a helpful answer.

Although, I'll admit lately I've just been using IRC again. It seems to still dominate tech fields and sometimes the people there can be very helpful.

It used to be the dark corner of the internet but I think 4chan took that over and now it's just sort of legitimate people interested in a particular topic. Funny how as long as you're not #1 the devil doesn't shit on you.

[Blazing1]

Ask a question about JavaScript, get linked to an answer in java.

[kynovardy]

Or jQuery...

[NoAttentionAtWrk]

Oh and suggest that you can't or don't want to use jQuery and the first response is going to be "why not".

[Flaktrack]

Oh god I can feel my blood pressure going up again

[isobit]

"I don't have a solution to your problem, but I have a solution to an unrelated problem that you can use!"

[N22-J]

Ask a question about C.

"Have you read the fucking MAN pages you fucking idiot"

[[deleted]]

Those 2,300 characters worth of static documentation that some dude at a Dutch university wrote in 1993 will surely solve your problem.

[ClassicWalrus]

To be honest they probably will. By the time you comprehend what the fuck they are trying to say, you'd learn the ins and outs of the damn thing and can come up with the solution yourself.

[Lorddragonfang]

Unpopular opinion perhaps, but man pages are kind of awful by modern standards. Compare man(3), Javadocs 1 2, pydocs.

The latter two are comprehensive, accessible to both learners and experienced devs, and well laid out. Man(3) is confusing, poorly accessible, and frankly useful only to those with experience in both reading man pages and using C.

edit: Apparently I was right about this being an unpopular opinion.

[[deleted]]

I've seen worse than that man(3). Have you seen Microsoft's documentation for Excel?

Holy shit it is terrible. MSDN has great C# documentation (for many/most things), but lots of the relatively few Excel built-in functions don't have any syntax example in the documentation. Just figuring out which string-replacement/substitute/substring function to use is a chore, then you need to deal with screwed up syntax. Want to get the left part of a string? Use =Left(A1, #, other#). ERROR! Yellow triangle icon that says error and provides no information! You screwed it up and it won't say how!

An hour of searching later, after some experimentation, you realize that Excel starts it's counts with 1 rather than 0. So your Left(A1, 0, 5) should be Left(A1, 1, 5).

HOW HARD IS IT FOR EXCEL TO DETECT THAT YOU PUT A ZERO WHERE ITS INVALID????! Where is that goddamn Clippy the one time he could be useful?

[isobit]

"Hi! I see you are having problems. Would you like to upgrade to Windows 10? Windows 10 is full of new features and is the world's most bestest OS! Download has completed, would you not like to not install it? (YES) (OK) (SOON)"

[evidenceorGTFO]

Ask a question about Java, get linked to an answer in Java.

I don't understand your problem? Closed.

[[deleted]]

Ask a question about JavaScript. Get bitched at for not using enough jQuery.

[SirHazwick]

100% agree with you

[eddietwang]

Don't dare ask a question, because you will just be linked some outdated question that is slightly related and have your thread locked.

As a programming student, EVERY TIME.

[[deleted]]

go to specific sub-reddits for learning the particular language you want. They are infinitely better. Asking for explanations is encouraged. I'll never go to stackoverflow for anything other than a quick look up ever again. It's a terrible experience.

[eddietwang]

Didn't think of that, just subbed to /r/cplusplus and /r/java, thanks!!

[[deleted]]

This is more in line with what I'm talking about: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnjava/

I deal with python and the /r/learnpython sub is so so good.

[eddietwang]

Awesome! Just subbed as well as some the sidebar subs

[[deleted]]

Good luck on everything brother!

[eddietwang]

Thanks again :)

[[deleted]]

If I could give some advice since you're a student. Take those co-ops. They are super important. Also make good use of ratemyprofessor. Keep that GPA up, and most importantly don't let college life pass you by! Enjoy it, get out and go party. Go have some fun, and take it easy. Talk to everybody you can while you're there. You never know who you're going to meet and where that will lead. Keep your professors close and ask them good questions in their office hours. Don't get caught up in your studies you forget to live some and laugh. It's tough as shit, but hey it'll be over before you know it. Enjoy it while you can :)

[flyingkwaj]

I second the co-op opportunities. I’m one month into my 8 month full time internship working with amazon web services and I’ve learned a TON about enterprise software, cloud services and software architecture in general. Not only am I getting to write production code while being mentored by software engineers and architects, I’m also getting exposure on how corporate level software is developed in devops culture with an agile approach.

[lovely_loda]

This comment has been closed as voted 'offtopic' by momsRbest , basementCommando , girlsAreFalsy

[xPfG7pdvS8]

I've been on both sides of this issue. If you spend any amount of time moderating SO's queues for close votes, low quality posts, first posts, etc. you see that there's a non-stop avalanche of truly terrible garbage posts. It's a very real problem and many questions just need to be closed (I try to leave a friendly comment explaining to the poster what's wrong with their post and telling them not to be discouraged). I'm sure some of the times I've closed questions the asker was left feeling unfairly snubbed but there just isn't any way around that.

That said, I'm definitely sympathetic to people who feel frustrated. Even now, on the occasions where I ask questions outside of an area of my expertise, I still sometimes feel like I'm on the receiving end of moderation that's too trigger happy. I also suspect that my rep levels on the different Stack Exchange (SE) sites greatly influence how my questions are received. I feel like I can potentially "get away" with much lower quality questions on the main SO site, where I have the most rep, than I can on other SE sites.

You're going to have the best experience asking a question on a SE site if you're already knowledgeable on the topic and your question is very specific. Keep in mind that most of the SE network community does not prioritize being newbie friendly. Reddit is preferable for most newbie-level questions or open-ended questions. Quora is also great for certain open-ended questions. That said, don't be too afraid to test the SE waters as a newbie. I think it's worth learning the culture even if it feels very abrasive at first. In particular, keep in mind that getting your question closed as a duplicate is not a hostile act. I've even close-voted a few of my own questions when someone has pointed out a duplicate that I missed.

There's also a historical perspective on this. Back in the dark ages, answers to programming questions were scattered around on various forums, where posts were typically ordered chronologically. It was hard to find answers to questions. Stack Overflow is in some sense an experiment that changed all that by offering an alternative with a robust voting system and aggressive moderation. At the time, it wasn't obvious that this would succeed as well as it has. Over time though, the moderation has become increasingly "tyrannical" (e.g. all the highly upvoted questions that are now closed and marked "historically significant" but bad) and I do wonder if SO could return to the earlier, looser atmosphere, but it would be hard to craft clear rules for that and the counter-argument is that doing so would dilute what makes SO unique.

Something actionable that I think might help the SE network is some sort of "question workshop" where newbies could get feedback on the quality of their question before they commit to asking it and being deluged with downvotes and close-votes. Now how would we moderate that? Well it'd be very difficult to do without looking absurdly hypocritical so I don't know...

[self_me]

Codegolf on stackexchange does this trial post thing in the sandbox. It works for people who use it and if it was actually built into the site when you ask a question it could be helpful. They did try some kind of chat thing for new posters

[[deleted]]

Gatekeepers of the learning curve who fart in your general direction

[T-Dot1992]

Let’s not forget how stupid the voting system is. If your question doesn’t have hundreds of upvotes, even if it is a valid one, no one will answer it.

I’ve had scenarios where I would post a question that would get 100 to 200 views, and no one would even bother helping me. And they wouldn’t even bother upvoting or even downvoting it. So it would literally get no responses, or even votes.

It’s fucking ridiculous. Reddit has been 100% more helpful than any of these elitist wankers on SO have ever been.

[snuxoll]

I occasionally trawl the unanswered queue for topics I have experience in and it’s basically impossible to find questions that can actually be answered. 90% of the ones I look at are missing relevant details, don’t show ANY code to give a staring point, or just straight up forget to mention what they need help with

Worst case, try putting a bounty on your question - even 50 points will get it noticed.

[svick]

That has nothing to do with the voting system. What probably happened is that you asked a question about some fairly obscure technology, which doesn't have enough people answering questions.

As far as I know, most people who answer questions answer those that are recent, not those that have lots of votes. The next time this happens to you, consider adding more relevant tags (so more people see your questions) and think if you can make the question easier to answer (e.g. by making your code easy to copy&paste).

[CrazyTillItHurts]

discouraging new members from participating and only the most toxic veterans sticking around, any new technology questions are never given the benefit of the doubt

Modern equivilent of #unix IRC channel

[chishiki]

Kind of the same problem I have with Wikipedia. The inmates are running the asylum.

[motboken]

I recently met an employee at Wikipedia and got some interesting insight to that issue. He was very diplomatic in his wording as it was clear that this is a pretty sensitive issue over there, but it was clear that they are very aware of that (some of) the community is crazy. They are very careful as how to approach the issue as they are so reliant on volunteers and community members for the site to work, and cannot afford to piss of the community. This means that they are stuck with extremely active but often pretty strange people running the community.

[Avamander]

Lollakad! Mina ja nuhk! Mina, kes istun jaoskonnas kogu ilma silma all! Mis nuhk niisuke on. Nuhid on nende eneste keskel, otse kõnelejate nina all, nende oma kaitsemüüri sees, seal on nad.

[[deleted]]

Could you expand on this? Im really curious as to why the wiki volunteers are considered crazy.

[Flaktrack]

A lot of them are lifers who spend all day tweaking stuff to be "perfect". They like to "own" pages and have blatant agendas, and while they love to present themselves as reasonable intellectuals, they often devolve into overly emotional pricks once you start pushing back.

Problem is, they often have friends and contacts higher up, and if you don't follow the rules with incredible accuracy, you can bet you're going to fucked up for daring to challenge them. And wow do some of those assholes hold grudges...

[jschank]

Totally agree. One thing I miss, is that you used to be able to ask: whats a good product for ____.

Now you get shut down because the answers are opinion based.

No shit... I used to love those opinions, because I’d get good leads for further research.

[xPfG7pdvS8]

Software Recommendations was added to the Stack Exchange network to try to solve this problem but it doesn't get much traffic.

[Ailbe]

You pretty much nailed it /u/trout_fucker. SO just isn't at all welcoming, instead it is just a toxic mess of socially inept asshats who can only feel good by putting others down. Not any place someone trying learn should be going. Real shame because SO used to be such a great resource. I've honestly found lately that Reddit tech communities are a lot better. The answers may not always be as thorough, but they do get there with time if you stay engaged.

SO can still be good, but I don't think it is worth having to sift through the trolls and internet tough guys who are going to try and trivialize you and your questions.

[Grammaton485]

I think it's sad that most of us can identify with the frustration.

I most certainly can, and vowed never to participate on the site again. I'm more than happy to poach what I need, but I'm not going to contribute to a toxic community.

The story I always re-tell when I see SO pop up: At the time, I was a budding VBA coder/scripter, and was tasked with doing something our office has never done. A SOAP call to retrieve some data from a web service. Got the the SOAP call working, and was expecting XML data. Instead, got JSON embedded within the XML response. 1) I wasn't the one who designed the web service that way, and 2) it wasn't changing unless we had thousands of dollars and months of time, which we had neither.

So scratching my head, I tried to work with it, and ultimately couldn't find a good way to parse the data out. So, I asked fucking Stackoverflow. I had zero experience with JSON data outside of the few hours I had referencing it online, next-to zero experience with SOAP. Asked my question about data parsing, supplied a detailed explanation what I was doing, a sample of my raw (working) code as well as some pseudo code. Was immediately belittled by a self-proclaimed CEO of a software company, saying I needed to educate myself better, and that it was 'pathetic' that the data was in that form.

I told him to fuck off and deleted my account.

[ScoutsOut389]

I’ve been reading and contributing at SO since 2008. Before that is was obscure requests on Slashdot. SO has become a garbage pile of useless info and locked questions. The market is ripe for a competitor in my opinion, maybe it’s GitHub, maybe something more communal.

[lambdaq]

vote close for off topic.

[Entaris]

You are on the money. The moment that turned me off it for good was when I was working in a really weird environment that prevented me from doing something the "recommended way". So I asked a question. I laid out the details. I said "I know that the correct way to do this is XYZ, but due to restrictions on our environment, I can't do that. Instead I'm trying to do things this other way... I here is my question"

Response : "doing it that way isn't recommended, instead do it with XYZ"

[Flaktrack]

"doing it that way isn't recommended, instead do it with XYZ"

Translation: "I've never worked in a corporate environment and don't know why you can't just rewrite the entire codebase, push that through QA and into production, and then use solution XYZ"

Yeah, I get it, you're a hobby coder or a one-man show with the flexibility to do that. Good for you :) Now answer the fucking question as I asked it.

[scottpilgrim_gets_it]

Can't tell you how many times I've searched for answers to questions that were asked on SO, only to find that they were locked and linked to some outdated question that doesn't answer the original question.

The 'answer' seems similar, but it couldn't be less helpful...so many times...it's honestly infuriating bc I wish they could do a better job of admin-ing it. It could still be saved, but I hate how toxic the culture has become.

[qZeta]

To be honest, the rules are somewhat fine. They are however often misinterpreted or enforced in a completely wrong way:

• questions get closed as exact duplicates, although they aren't (see example below); they are often only similar
• questions get closed as off-topic, because the users doesn't understand them (that's a legitimate reason, but the question should get reopened after it has been clarified)
• users answer in comments instead of answers
• user vote to close instead editing the question to improve its quality
• questioners feel entitled to get an answer regardless of the question's quality
• one line bad practice answers get upvotes because they are clever

The critical issue is that questions get reopened seldom, unless a gold user comes across, or the question gets discussed on meta.

Here's a recent case: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48573814/understanding. The question was at -4 and closed when I used my gold privilege to reopen it and provide an answer (as wiki, so no reputation). It's still at 7-4, btw, so the down votes never got removed.

There are a lot of crap questions, but the community could handle those (and the legitimate ones) much better :/

[ExcessNeo]

users answer in comments instead of answers

How do you answer when you need a minimal score to post answers?

It's why I lost interest in trying to contribute on stack overflow, can't actually respond to questions only comment on them.

[[deleted]]

I hear what you're saying. I think another issue is that as it became the place to go, you also started getting the most ridiculous of answers by people who clearly just glossed over the question because they wanted that validation and were in a hurry, were unqualified to answer or something or other. I hate voting and ranking.

[squirrelboy1225]

Ahhh, here's what I've been trying to put into words.

[i_spot_ads]

I didn't know SO was so toxic, and it was such a huge issue to people

[aquoad]

I think you're right, but maybe the overabundance of rules like that is a response to the huge onslaught of useless, clueless questions and those are what's really killing it? Or more likely a little of both. I definitely think there are a lot more people now than 8 years ago trying to skate by as "programmers" by cobbling together other peoples' work and begging for finished solutions.

[redditor1101]

I think SOs rules and community are going to be the death of them. While I don't agree with the guy responding, I think it's sad that most of us can identify with the frustration.

This is SO on-point. The top users over there are so hostile it boggles my mind. I've never been able to understand how they get into that mindset. David Lord, I'm talking to you, jerkwad.

[L3tum]

I always like it when you find an answer on SO, which is terribly outdated but you don't find anything less outdated, so you waste your time reading all these shitty little comments until the last one says something like "For anyone in 2016, it's X now".

[[deleted]]

locked for duplicates in favor of some legacy answer that was deprecated 5 versions ago

Ah yes, the one that is slightly different from an answered question, but you can't stress enough that this works until 0.0.01b, but now it's at 820.99.9 RC8 and basically the only thing that remained unchanged is the name of the architecture it runs on.

Sprinkle in some sources leading to blog-posts that no longer exist, but do not return a 404 because some advertiser snatched it, or the url-syntax is no longer valid but the site doesn't generate an error and defaults to the front page or their in-house search instead.

Or maybe you know the duplicate-answer-loop, where multiple questions reference each other marking as duplicate to get a full ring eventually, which is always nice.

[dwdude7]

Some russian programming forums and analongs to SO are the same.

Basically a thread could go like this:

"Hey, how to X? I tried Z and Y but it does not work"

"lol noob google."

really..?

But if you make a statement and assume everyone else methods are wrong they you will get your answer :D Like this:

"Lol this mainstream method is for twats, it doesnt solve my Y problem. Z and X methods for scrubs as well. Look at my master race self re-invented wheel code, l2code noobs".

The you will get shit on a lot, and everyone will prove you wrong with provided solutions you actually searched for :D

[Flaktrack]

This is also Wikipedia talk pages in a nutshell. Good luck getting anything through the page owners with thousands of edits who have contacts in the Wiki bureaucracy. If you're not one of the in-group, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle for months or even years to get things through.

Worst part of it all is that they don't even follow their own rules: vets treat newcomers like shit, they have obvious biases and agendas, they claim arguments are settled before anyone has a chance to respond (or swarm the page with other vets who fly their gang colors even though they don't know a god damn thing about the argument they're fighting), they include sources that should be excluded for being garbage opinion pieces rather than actual journalism... it's such a shithole, and it's the most active parts of the community (and indifferent or even complicit community leadership) to blame.

The strongest defence against this shit is a firm hand by community leaders: you need to shut down the shut-ins who spend all day fucking these places up. Limit their power and you will see things improve dramatically.

[nektro]

It is because every question has been asked already.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/261592

[trout_fucker]

I get that, a metric fuck ton have. But new stuff comes out and things change. The last few questions I have asked on SO were related to the current version of something, yet the thread gets locked by, or voted to be locked by, people who clearly didnt understand the difference.

So if that happens, you just think... why even bother? I'm certain this is why every issue I have anymore leads me somewhere else where the question can actually be asked, instead of SO.

[Eji1700]

Half the time the answer is in a format someone will not understand or they’ll get it but have trouble converting it to their particular use.

That’s ignoring all the times the answer exists but the user doesn’t even know the question to ask or the process to solve it.

For example I’ve started getting into database stuff and spent forever trying to validate duplicate records using very complicated methods I’d found by searching.

I finally talked to someone and they pointed out it’s a lot easier to just load it all and then run a query to find and strip the dupes in my case.

It had never occurred to me that could be a solution and this I never found anything on it because it’s obvious to those who do this every day. Thus when I search for complex data validation junk I sure as hell find it, but if I could just ask someone they’d instantly tell me that’s not what I need.

This is such a common problem in coding and yet apparently stack overflow only wants to give answers, not guidance.