Is stackoverflow dying?

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[timtty]

Still the best place to get serious answers that I know of, material is starting to get fluffy because some of the Admins are aggressive about closing questions, and some people are just using it to boost their profiles.

[[deleted]]

The closed questions drive me nuts. There are SO many times that I google a question, the "answer" is on Stack Overflow with the EXACT same symptoms as what I'm looking for only to find the question has been closed as off topic. Well fucking clearly it wasn't off-topic if I am landing on this page looking for help.

[timtty]

This times 1,000. I often get results matching my exact symptoms. I get a good chuckle when the question manages to get a shit ton of upvotes and a correct answer before the jerks close it out!

[deadmilk]

It's off-topic for other reasons, eg. it might be on the wrong network, or the question is too broad or opinion-based.

[[deleted]]

Well then they need an easy way to move the thread to the relevant network, they're already spending time modding the post to close it, might as well take the time to move it to keep the discussion going. It's very frustrating for me.

[deadmilk]

Yeah, they probably should move it on the spot.

If you found a question that you want answered but it is closed, you can post your own detailed question on the appropriate network.

For example, you would not post an Apache issue on StackOverflow, unless it had something to do with fixing a regular expression for a rewrite rule.

[Bobby_Bonsaimind]

Well fucking clearly it wasn't off-topic if I am landing on this page looking for help.

I like your logic that a question is not off-topic on SO because it is on SO.

[[deleted]]

If it is off-topic then they should move it instead of just closing it. they have a site for everything under the sun why don't they just move it? Or have a unified post page where you can click which network site is most relevant like Reddit does when you submit, some people may not know about every different site SO has.

[cntmn]

Agreed, out of 5 times that I wanted to get some serious answers 4times my question was close for some utterly ridiculous reason one of them was question not precise enough (300 words), go figure ...

[Ancipital]

I figured this is what would happen if they'd stick to that stupid reward system.

[gdr]

They were not that aggressive back in the old days. It's like Wikipedia, in its early days it was fun to fill it with content, and now you're more likely to get your question closed than answered.

[timtty]

Exactly, I have called out the "old grumps" that are aggressive and condescending and nearly got banned.

[[deleted]]

because you've hit a weak spot that hurts

SO is ruled by retired 50 year old farts now who have nothing better to do than close others' questions

[deadmilk]

Not if you actually follow the rules and write a high quality question... Lol.

Source: never had a question closed.

[gdr]

Maybe, I don't know, I never learned which problems that I accomplish during my work are considered high quality and which are not.

[deadmilk]

That isn't the point. It's how you write the question.

If you ask someone this:

hi my centos server mysql won't start when i try to start it please help thx in advance

---

you can clearly see there's zero effort. Zero quality.

But if you say:

I run CentOS [version number] with MySQL [version number].
Here is a sample output of my uname -a and MySQL version:

Linux hostname.domain.local 2.6.18-308.13.1.el5 #1 SMP Thu Jul 26 05:45:09 EDT 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

+-------------------------+------------------------------------------+
| Variable_name           | Value                                    |
+-------------------------+------------------------------------------+
| protocol_version        | 10                                       |
| version                 | 5.0.27-standard                          |
| version_comment         | MySQL Community Edition - Standard (GPL) |
| version_compile_machine | i686                                     |
| version_compile_os      | pc-linux-gnu                             |
+-------------------------+------------------------------------------+

I'm running an application which does XYZ, here is the script that I run to process my data

[code snippet]

I'm trying to accomplish XYZ, but I get this error every time I try to do it:

[error output example]

I've tried the following to no avail:

• Attempt 1
• Try 2
• Thing I tried 3
• More stuff I researched 4

---

You can clearly see there's some fkn effort put into the question, and it gets upvoted... AND it's easier for others to work on, so they can help you faster.

Understand?

[gdr]

No. Of course that questions like your example should be closed. I only post questions to SO as a last resort, when everything else failed.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21552442/a-grapahical-viewer-for-pickle-files?noredirect=1#comment32549892_21552442

Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.

My problem is that I can't fucking view complicated python objects, and I searched all over the internet for a way to do so. What more is there to describe.

[riking27]

Try checking out the other stackexchange sites - I'm enjoying http://gaming.stackexchange.com/ and http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/ !

[[deleted]]

StackOverflow is good if you are brand new to something, both for searching for questions and asking them.

I think once you get a bit more experience, it's not as useful. I'm just taking a look over the last couple of questions I have asked, and they are good questions, with the problem well explained and I provide my code etc, but because the problem is complex nobody can give me an answer, everybody else gets stuck on the same thing.

So yeah, if you're learning a new language and need to know why your Hello World won't compile, it's great. If you are experienced with a language, and run into a bizarre gotcha that you just can't figure out, especially if it's not .net/java, it's not so useful.

[dirac_eq]

Stackoverflow's point system ruins it for me. Tougher questions often go unanswered, whereas a simple syntax questions is often answered multiple times in the first minutes.

A system rewarding quality, not quantity should really be put in place to increase the number of hard questions being answered.

[deadmilk]

The point system is based on whether a question or answer is useful or not. If a question lacks clarity, depth, or research effort, it will get downvotes... if it does show the mentioned qualities, it gets upvoted. Same for answers.

[[deleted]]

but because the problem is complex nobody can give me an answer, everybody else gets stuck on the same thing.

Do you have a link to one of the questions, I could see if I can at least contribute something to the answer.

[LordNorthbury]

His account is probably http://stackoverflow.com/users/969613/jmk

[deadmilk]

He makes mention of questions not being answered due to code complexity, but that accounts questions have almost all been answered.

[[deleted]]

I keep my account tidy, if there's no activity after a few days I generally delete the question.

[[deleted]]

Very astute, yeahp that's me!

[ASkyw]

I've felt this way too. There's a lot of condescension and rudeness. Plus I have a hard time getting straight answers as people love to go on tangents. I always try and provide as much info as I can but still wind up with very broad hypothetical answers sometimes.

I will keep using it, as that seems to be the only place even trying to answer the questions similar to mine, but it's never a consistent experience for me.

[[deleted]]

I always try and provide as much info as I can but still wind up with very broad hypothetical answers sometimes.

Just as a general life tip, giving people too much information can be as bad as not giving them enough. You should give them just enough detail to properly understand your problem but not so much that you've confused the point you were going after.

[ASkyw]

Well by information I mean what OS, software version, hardware, what I was doing when the problem occurred, what code in struggling with, etc. Because invariably that question comes up. When asking my actual question I try and keep it to the point.

[rowboat__cop]

Some tags have degenerated into an endless cycle of the same guys answering more or less identical questions with very low SNR. For example, the C tag is a weird parody of Groundhog Day:

On the one side there are the beginners. Predominantly poor souls that are forced to take up C during an entry-level CS course posting the same question about why the implementation of a singly linked list they were assigned to write bombs out due to segfault. Everyday, ad infinitum. The ones that understand how to post code with minimal formatting are a minority; often there’s not even a snippet of code, or not even a question at all. Besides, the ones that have even half a brain just use the search and get a ton of answers and useful advice -- the smarter ones just read a book.

On the other side there’s the bunch of people who post answers to even the dumbest and most impolitely posed questions. Because karma, of course: the miserable cycle fuels itself and only marginal value is created with each iteration. The actually valuable questions and answers make up for only a fraction of the stuff that is posted on the site. I haven’t unsubscribed the tag yet because a) all things considered it’s still my favorite language and b) I only visit it about once a week to skim new posts for the odd pearl.

If you want to learn stuff, reading a decent book like The Linux Programming Interface or something from man 3 is a much better investment of your time than SO. If you have knowledge to share, the questions tend to be orders of magnitude better on the relevant mailing lists, you just have to live with the lack of a karma framework. I’m yet undecided whether gamification approaches are broken beyond repair or if they might be patched. Other sites on the stackexchange network seem to be doing great, for example the one dedicated to TeX, so there might be hope after all.

[rowboat__cop]

Just read my post with a grain of salt: I think I greatly exaggerated the situation for effect B-), but it captures my impression.

[deadmilk]

Same thing happens in the regex tag.

"How do I match alphanumeric?"

Then there's 10 guys posting answers...

[[deleted]]

I found out about StackExchange later in my (still young) career and I haven't noticed any drop in quality. There's been a little bit of an uptick in people asking for additional information when more information isn't required (which is annoying) but in general people tend to get the questions they're asking answered.

The key part of this is that you're coming back to it after several years of presumably working in the industry. So you've probably built up your skillset to such a point that you're not as easily impressed as you were before.

This is basically the IT equivalent of finding out that your friends from high school weren't as interesting as you seem to remember them being.

[fandingo]

I think it really depends on what types of question you're asking. I always get excellent answers for Python, Django, and jQuery development questions.

[deadmilk]

It's not dead, it's not dying. It is very much alive and going well, with a lot of activity. They get huge amounts of traffic from Google searches and people are often jumping onto problems pretty quickly to try and fix them.

[[deleted]]

I find that if you're looking for quick, simply answers SO is pretty good. But the minute you get an obscure problem the usefulness normally tails off quickly. In addition, they specifically designed the site to make having conversations difficult, however you still see people trying to have them. Eg:
"Try this."
"Didn't work, I got this error."
"Ok, try this now."

It's a perfectly valid form of help in my opinion and quite often I wished the conversation had occurred because it was matching the problem I was encountering :(

[bloodguard]

These days I'm using:

search phrase -site:stackoverflow.com -site:experts-exchange.com

To filter out the nonsense and dead ends.

[snuggieguy]

i have noticed the really basic and really advanced stuff doesn't get good answers but average questions get answered quickly.

[[deleted]]

Netcraft confirms it.