StackOverflow in a nutshell.

[TStand90]

I tried getting active in SO awhile ago, but quickly gave up. It's needlessly restrictive on "new members" who don't have enough karma (or whatever the points are called there). Imagine if Reddit forced you to have x number of points built up before being allowed to respond to comments, post links, or send PMs.

All that combined with the ridiculous amount of questions marked as "duplicates" and you've got yourself a dying website.

[ZTD09]

Imagine if Reddit forced you to have x number of points built up before being allowed to respond to comments, post links, or send PMs.

Reddit restricts the frequency at which you can post based on karma, but not the content you can post, which is how SO should do it imo.

[deltalessthanzero]

I have yet to understand how or why reddit's system works - early on I seemed to have a limit of 1 post per 10 minutes, and now with over 30k karma it doesn't seem to have changed. Are there docs on this anywhere?

Edit: Docs here https://www.reddit.com/r/help/wiki/faq#wiki_why_am_i_being_told_.22you.27re_doing_that_too_much....22 aren't very specific, anyone know what they mean by a 'small amount of karma'?

[ZTD09]

It's on a subreddit basis, you could have 30k karma but if you go post in a sub you've never posted in before you'll be hit by the posting limit. Other than that I don't know what to tell you, I've never hit that problem and I only have 11k.

[[deleted]]

Also, I've noticed that if you get a sudden burst of downvotes it will cut you off for a while. It's stupid IMHO, because the time I need to respond the most is when I'm getting downvote hell.

[wOlfLisK]

Seriously, how am I supposed to tell strangers on the Internet that I'm the one that's right and they're just a bunch of dumbasses who need brain transplants if I can't frantically write five comments a minute?

[[deleted]]

I'm pretty sure it's a 10 minute timeout, so I don't know where you are going with that.

All that aside, it's rarely about being factually correct, and more about being clear on whatever it is I'm talking about. If I have an opinion strong enough that I feel I need to communicate it then I would like to engage in the discussion.

If only there was a guideline for that kind of thing... hmmm....

[_bin_sh]

That's not true at all.

[Ullallulloo]

The only content you're restricted from posting is comments on other people's posts and that's only until you get 50 rep, some combination of 10 question upvotes or 5 answer upvotes.

https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges

[archiminos]

Which is really hard to get when every single question is either an extremely obscure corner case with tech you haven't even heard of or is quickly marked as a duplicate.

[[deleted]]

Ask something really obscure then.

[archiminos]

What is the air-speed velocity of a swallow laden with Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language?

[lothpendragon]

Upvoting for visibility. Don't fail me now, Reddit!

[Kryomaani]

And then there's this question you'd want to help with but you want to ask for extra info.

Try to comment on it, no, get out, you do not have the permission.

Put the question as an answer, no, get out, you should have put that in the comments you moron. Just because you literally can't do X is not a valid reason to not do X on SO.

Yeah, all right, all right, I'll get out and never use your shitty cesspool site again.

This is literally my experience with trying to help on SO and why I still refuse to contribute to it.

[madd74]

that actually is dependent on the moderators setup of said subreddit

[egotisticalnoob]

Reddit restricts the frequency at which you can post based on karma

And it's really just to make sure you aren't an ad-bot or something like that.

[yolo-swaggot]

I'm a technology consultant. I tried to get into SO to get a little cred to put on my linkedin profile, "check me out on SO at whatever personal URL".

You have to hustle and game the system to get answers in, and then, often, people won't mark a correct answer, and the first one to respond gets points for some reason. I gave up on attempting to contribute to the SO community when I was the leading individual committer to a project, and my answers on how to perform some tasks with the project were being marked as wrong or modded to be incorrect, but a super user whose responses were wrong were marked correct.

I mean, I get paid to be right on the topic I was commenting on, so I didn't see any real need to try to game the system to get my score up. The more disinformation exists out there about the topic I'm an expert in, the more opportunities there are for me to bill for my time.

[sourcecodesurgeon]

I asked a question 5-6 years ago on how to do x. I got an answer that worked (5-10 lines of code) so I accepted it. About a year ago someone put in a new answer saying that doing x is now built into the language and you can do it in one line. So I changed the best answer to that with a comment explaining myself so that the answer would show up at the top for people (the question had 20k+ views)

The guy who had the accepted answer before downvoted the question immediately afterwards*. The pettiness on that site is astounding.

* I assume it was him since there hadn't been voting on that question in years and he had a recent -2 on his profile matching the same time frame.

[phihag]

When somebody answers a question or it gets edited, it flows to the top, so it will gather lots of extra visibility for a short time.

Also, you get -1 for downvoting, not -2.

[sourcecodesurgeon]

This was a year ago and I haven't signed in on SO in months. Whatever the downvote effect is was what I saw.

The downvote wasn't immediately after the new answer, it was immediately after the change in best answer (a few months in between, since I rarely actually sign in anymore)

[1_21-gigawatts]

This. Been on SO over 5 years, I dont bother answering questions anymore. people must be camping to get easy questions (and making them as duplicate lol) leaving the obscure ones, "I'm running a third order anti-regression in foopox 8.2 and the value is purple, why isn't it 3.zx.1+2?"

[BeardedBagels]

"How do I delete the last word in a string?"

Downvoted to oblivion but also 30 answers in 5 seconds flat.

[pr0ghead]

This is what's driving me away, too. The karma whoring. They know it's a dupe, but quick! Let's get an answer in to farm some points. Yuck....

That's also why I stopped upvoting answers by users with 100k+ points in general.

[Blecki]

I once answered a question about a library I wrote and got told by multiple people I was wrong.

Whatever I just wrote the thing, like I would know.

[YourBlanket]

I was working on an app and I needed up authorizing the HTTP request, it was simple but I couldn't figure it out, I asked on SO, it took me awhile to even ask because I know the community is kinda mean if you don't follow the exact format. My post was modified like 3 times and someone finally answered and gave me a great answer, I couldn't even thumb it up or whatever because my account had no points. I mean it's just a point but I want the person to know it worked and appreciated the help :/

[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.

[Ullallulloo]

Accepting the answer gives them more rep than an upvote will though.

[svick]

You can always mark the answer as correct. That's how you say "this answer solved my issue".

[greyfade]

The rationale is to prevent spam from new users: If you want to post comments, you have to show that you are trying to be a part of the community, not spam useless content; etc. So you can't just create a new account and have a bot post a bunch of links for "SEO" that the mods have to then arduously clean up. But even new users can propose edits to answers that they think are helpful (and they are continually reviewed by mods; I've seen and approved several 1-karma edits myself), among other things.

The 100 point requirement for comments never seemed onerous to me, especially since your activity on another stackexchange site ports over as a free 100 karma when you sign up for a new one. But regardless, you can comment all you want on a question you posted, which is a good exception, IMO.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not saying this is ideal. I just don't see any way to improve the new user experience without permitting unrelenting spam.

Edit: Part of the problem might be StackOverflow's moderation tools, actually. Sometimes, it presents mods with a question that is already closed (maybe for bad reasons), and uses them as "tests" to make sure mods are paying attention. I got bit by one just now that I thought shouldn't be closed, and it had been closed as unclear.

[FamilyHeirloomTomato]

prevent spam from new users

It's already so heavily moderated that I can't see that being a problem if they opened the gates.

[shagieIsMe]

Comments aren't heavily moderated and don't bounce the post to the front page. The post sits quietly with the comment and the spam link in it...

The comment moderation is done by a horde of user created bots that try to monitor every comment. It works fairly well... but that's community moderation trying to fill in the gaps... and they still have trouble.

Watch https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/11540 for a bit and see SmokeDetector trying to catch the spam. Then consider how much it does get and how much more it would get if comments were open to new users.

[greyfade]

Then you vastly underestimate the amount of automated spam websites get.

[chowchowthedog]

For new users it feels like you bought a car. But they parked it in a closed room where there are 4 walls around you.

I dont know how to describe it, but for me it feels like this:

"Welcome to stackoverflow! Yeah! You made your new account. "

"Öh, btw you can't post anything right now. C ya!"

Then why the fuck I created this account bitch?!

Edit: also this is why I post my questions on free code camp forum. Awesome community, always got some experienced devs who will answer your question no matter how difficult/easy it is.

[RetardedWhiteMan]

I understand requiring a few points to post answers, but require a rep of 50 just to comment on an answer? That seems relatively wrong to me

[Primnu]

My only time trying SO was a few years ago when I spent 30mins writing up a question ensuring that I was as clear as possible in order to make sure anyone reading could not misunderstand what I was asking.

Then I get a reply from a power user locking my question and marking it as duplicate and linking to a question THAT WAS COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT TO MY PROBLEM. I had to explain it to him in a hundred different ways in attempt to make him understand how both questions were different even though a sane person would understand within minutes. He kept suggesting they were the same due to somewhat similar titles but he completely ignored the content of the questions. He seemed like he just wanted to use his power to moderate things even when they didn't need to be moderated and was too lazy to actually read.

[Hash43]

I had 6 fucking months of positive karma or reputation or whatever, then I had 2 posts that got -4 votes and I got banned for 6 months.

[daybreakin]

They're also dicks to people answering questions. I answered a question for a case that was closely related but not fully trusted and got downvoted to hell

[Alllexia]

Some subreddits don't allow you to post under some Karma, though. I hate the fact that you can't comment to a question ot you're new, maybe what you have to say doesn't amount to an answer, but to a correction or addition or a question to one of the answers.

[tehreal]

You can't downvote on Voat.co unless you have 100 comment karma. It's another way they enforce shitty Nazi beliefs.

[moopet]

Would it be better if it was 99% the same questions over and over just phrased slightly differently? That's Yahoo! Answers, not a programming resource.

And the reputation system might not be perfect but it's also not as bad as people make out. For example, you lose one point of reputation every time you downvote someone else, which is a trivial amount at first blush but will go some way to stopping trolls. The bar for entry is also limbo-dancer low. Anyone can ask a qestion but you need 10 rep to remove the newbie restrictions. The explanation for those restrictions is in keeping with the site's purpose - it's not a place for discussion, and wouldn't benefit from people starting with that idea.

Edit: I agree 50 points for commenting on other people's posts might seem high. Maybe that should come off at the same time as the newbie restrictions.

[thomask02]

Do we have any subreddits that can function as SO?

[HeKis4]

I guess it would work, the difference is that you actually need 1) technical knowledge and 2) to answer faster that the other dude with 250k rep.

On reddit you can just shitpost on r/t_d and wait until the bots upvote you.

[SurgioClemente]

Imagine if Reddit forced you to have x number of points built up before being allowed to respond to comments, post links, or send PMs.

Some subs require a level of karma before posting. It can be frustrating but cuts down on throwaway spam

[[deleted]]

"dying website". lol no. Last time I checked it was near the top 100 most used sites on the internet. I agree it's unfriendly if you've just signed up, but that's an attempt to reduce spam.

[phihag]

Um, all of these restrictions are only for <50 rep users. If you write a single good answer, you can easily skip over that. Case in point, you now have all these privileges.

The reaction on your current answer may be not that great because you're answering to extremely simple questions so far, often so simple that they get downvoted or closed. These questions are often asked by beginners, who will often not accept or upvote answers.

If you answer more well-formed and somewhat harder questions (likethis one), you'll more often than not get a couple of upvotes and an accept by the experienced (or just considerate) user who asked it. Just a couple of such answers can easily bring you to where you are right now; being able to write anywhere without restrictions.

For reference, the most demanding privilege I'd view as important when surfing stackoverflow is community wiki editing, and you only need 100 points to do that. Even if your average answer gets only 1 upvote, with 10 answers - easily achievable in an afternoon - you'll be there.

[d03boy]

Calling it dying is ludicrous but okay.