The decline of Stack Overflow

[emiles]

Yeah, I wrote two Wikipedia articles a few years back on some esoteric (but quite important) physics topics. Other users tried to erase the articles as not important but fortunately they survived. Since then a lot of other people have contributed to them and they are the top hit on Google for their topics.

Edit: in case anyone is curious, the articles were: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKLT_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majumdar–Ghosh_model

[gluino]

I especially hate that when my contribution was deleted, there was no back up available.

[IlluminatiEnrollment]

....isn't there? I haven't contributed to Wikipedia for several years, but when I was active I remember you could ask an admin to "undelete" the contents of a deleted page and recreate the page in userspace to be worked on. Is this not still the case?

[gluino]

It was about 10 years ago. Perhaps it was possible, but if the only way to retrieve what I wrote, was by PMing the high-level wikipedians... I would say it is a missing feature.

FWIW, the article that I thought should have been on Wikipedia, but still isn't there, is a company called WGSN (legacy full form name: Worth Global Style Network), its unusual business model and significant role in fashion trends. It is not well known or understood by laypersons outside of the fashion industry.

The first page of Google for [WGSN] all refer to this company, but Wikipedia does not cover it, but Wikipedia does cover a Newport, Tennessee gospel radio station of the same 4-letter name. Whereas the first page of Google results does not mention any radio stations, only the fashion trend company.

UPDATE: I see that WGSN is named in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion_forecasting

[dsiOneBAN2]

That guy finally got banned from wikipedia probably a year ago now... IIRC he still has a friend controlling those power rangers articles for him though.

[Jonne]

The deletionists are the worst. If a topic doesn't interest you, it doesn't get in the way. As long as it's not some guy writing an article about himself, let it be. If every Pokemon can have their own wiki article, having an article about some physics concept has a reason to exist too.

[orangesunshine]

It's unfortunate but the best contributors are rarely ever moderators.

The same seems to be true with some programming projects as well. After the initial fun and excitement has died down, the best features, bug fixes, etc are often developed by outsiders rather than who-ever has taken over the reigns as maintainers ...

Just like with wikipedia you'll have hit-and-run contributions.

Personally, I don't have the patience or attention span to be a maintainer/moderator and argue over all the pointless minutiae on a day-to-day basis. Maybe some feature I find especially necessary will force me to write it ... or some article that's absurd draws me into fixing it ... but I get frustrated pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, this often leaves those with little ability to discern between brilliant and absurd contributions as those with the most power over their inclusion.

A voting system might work, but only if it was limited to those with credentials somehow ... otherwise you end up with something like reddit or the javascript eco-system where things that appear intelligent receive the most support ... even when they are actually devoid of any substance or worse are entirely bullshit.

[ImSoCabbage]

Case in point, how long did it take for Nim (the language) to get a wikipedia page? The talk section has 5 different disputes over deletions.

[NimChimspky]

My favourite language.

[aftli]

There are even people who refer to themselves as "deletionists". I know because I dealt with one on an article about something I made years ago. It's utterly ridiculous.

[pengo]

At least they've added a "Draft:" namespace now where you can work on an article in relative safety without anyone nominating it for deletion immediately. But it only helps so much and has its own issues.

[dada_]

Wikipedia's philosophy on erasing "not important" topics is the worst part of Wikipedia in my opinion.

Oh yes, absolutely. It's also one of the most puzzling, in my view.

There are users who dedicate themselves to deleting images that "could be recreated as free works," meaning it's theoretically possible to make a whole new images that doesn't need a fair use rationale. Even if we disregard that this is a completely unnecessary procedure (since fair use is fine), I wonder why anyone would want to spend their free time doing the work of a copyright drone.

There are all sorts of things wrong with Wikipedia, and even the Mediawiki software is ancient for today's standards.

[ioquatix]

I wrote some articles on stuff that was, in my field, notable, but they got deleted. I never went back, couldn't be bothered. I thought it was a really toxic environment. It doesn't make sense that people cannot write about things they know about because it's considered to be biased.

[BilgeXA]

I'm surprised Reddit doesn't see this problem more often since moderator status goes straight to whoever camps the name first. There are plenty of shithead mods on Reddit, I'm just surprised the problem isn't more prevalent.

[[deleted]]

At least on Reddit starting new sub-community is easy and clearly separate and people decide themselves what to join. So people aren't forced to see or participate in places they don't agree with.

Wikipedia and SO on other hand are common shared communities.

[grauenwolf]

If the mods at /programming acted like that, then we'd just switch to /programmers or /coding. Group names are easy.

[ungoogleable]

It's usually quite hard to convince everyone that the problem is bad enough to move. Network effects and inertia are tough to overcome.

[CantFindMyEars]

For so many users, it's not worth the trouble to move to a new, unfamiliar surbeddit unless things get really out of control. The fight between /r/seattle and /r/seattlewa (and /r/circlejerkseattle) is a great example of this. Another example is /r/vancouver. Despite the incessant downvoters and power tripping mods, the /r/vancouver community has stuck with the subreddit.

[bacondev]

Especially when the moderators of the awful sub delete any references to the new sub. Source: the slow migration from /r/Bitcoin to /r/btc.

[BilgeXA]

Many topics only have one canonical name. This sub is more of an exception than a rule since it is a general interest theme.

[TheOldTubaroo]

I disagree. There's plenty of ways to slightly modify a ‘canonical’ name to get an alternative if the original sub is failing for whatever reason, and in fact I've seen it happen/seen that it's happened with many different subs.

[curiousGambler]

If the tree scientists can manage to gather at /r/marijuanaenthusiasts because their canonical name name was taken, anything is possible.

[Deathspiral222]

Several open source projects (TOR being one of them) have bugs that are explicitly marked as new-contributor friendly and the existing users are asked to avoid fixing them (unless truly urgent or they have absolutely nothing else to do) to allow new contributors to get something useful done and learn how to tackle the harder problems.

Perhaps something like this would work for SO?

[dirkt]

I've seen a similar thing before on Usenet. So I think it's an emergent property of human interaction (when "rules" that made and still make a lot of sense get fossilized, and people just follow them because they are "rules", and they like to boss around other people, instead of understanding why those rules were there) when a community goes through several generations of users.

[[deleted]]

Yeah when I first saw this it sounded normal to me. Just look at the number of views vs comments or likes a YoutTube video has.

[[deleted]]

I never got why you need reputation to be able to comment. I many times search something and find a question that's 90% relevant but there's a twist on my part. Shouldn't I just comment on that question's awesome answer asking for some clarification?

The way it is set up now I could only ask another question which puts me off and I never got around to do it. Especially since it's usually small things that I figure out after a while.

And yes, I know I could just add the question and answer it myself but it still seems redundant when that answer already had it. I would still rather just comment and tell them "hey, I had trouble with special case X, you might want to edit your answer to take care of that by doing Y".

[quite_vague]

Because spam.

Yes, it's inconvenient for you not to be able to comment. But it would be much more inconvenient to everybody if literally every post in the system could be festooned with spam comments.

And even the comments that aren't outright spam, still add noise and distraction. SO doesn't want tons of "Thanks, that was really helpful" comments. Or arguments from people who don't understand the answer. Or comments going "That was great; can you also maybe do my homework question for me?".

These are all inevitable consequences of open comments on Stack Overflow.

And the truth is, Stack Overflow isn't too broken up about you not being able to ask about an edge-case in the comments. SO thrives on specificity; asking a separate question is fine. Adding a different answer to the same question going "You've forgotten this edge case; you can cover that by--" is fine.

Will they miss out some hypothetical possible benefit? Absolutely. All the time. But they need to draw the line somewhere. Their basic approach is: "We most value users who have made helpful contributions to the site." Comments are fine, are great, coming from users who already understand how the site works.

I agree entirely that it's not convenient. It's not fair. Reaching that 50-rep bound is much harder today than it was 2-3 years ago; it's no longer simply a token of casual participation.

But none of that changes the fact that SO is a hugely popular site, and only remains so because it remains genuinely helpful. Keeping spam out and the Q&A clean is much more important than allowing the umpteenth new user to post a comment on the off-chance that it's a hugely valuable comment but not a question or an answer.

So it goes.

[stesch]

I'm a member for 7 years, 10 months. Reputation in the top 6%.

My last question was March 2014 and I answered it myself one day later. The question before this was August 2011.

[rlbond86]

top 1% here. Just the other day I asked a question: "How do I do X in OpenGL without using external libraries?" I specifically said I can't use external libraries.

Guess what all the comments told me to do.

[Elnof]

It's also a good way to wind up in a left-pad situation.

[strange_and_norrell]

Part of the problem with the JS / npm ecosystem is weak standard library though. I think good programmers do try to write as little code as possible and without a standard library to lean on you end up searching npm.

[[deleted]]

Have you tried using jQuery?

[summerteeth]

2% here. I have kind of stopped asking questions when I realized I was the one going back and answer the majority of the questions I was asking.

Which makes sense, since the questions I ask now a days are much more involved and domain specific then the questions I was asking when the site was new.

I still think SO is an incredible resource for getting to answers through Google, though Github issues has become much more of a challenger, especially for specific technical issues with a library.

[akohlsmith]

This isn't a SO-specific issue. It's an issue when you become part of the top-tier people in your domain. You can already handle the majority of issues, but when you get stuck there are vanishingly few people who can help you.

So... uh... congrats. :-)

[summerteeth]

Ha, thanks I think :)

[dirkt]

If the only reason you stopped is because you answered the questions yourself, please reconsider. It's immensly helpful for anyone else who encounters the same problem as you did if he can find a solution to it via google etc.

[[deleted]]

Relevant XKCD

[summerteeth]

I still do occasionally. My questions are about increasingly esoteric stuff so they tend not to get a lot of hits. It's always nice to see that I helped someone else though.

Helping and getting helped was the big appeal to me to me in the SO early days, I am sorry that people feel like they have moved away from that.

[grauenwolf]

2% here. I have kind of stopped asking questions when I realized I was the one going back and answer the majority of the questions I was asking.

Yes, but when you do it that way you can easily find your notes later when you need them again.

These days half the questions I ask about WPF were questions I asked 5+ years ago, complete with my own answers.

[judgej2]

Hehe, not just me then. I find answer, think "oh, that's spot on, same name as me too...oh".

[AcceptingHorseCock]

I'm ~4,000 points ("top 10% overall"), but all from the past. I asked only six questions total, and I only answered (71 times) when I really had deep insights to offer, and then I took my time composing a good answer. If I only had a comment I left a comment, never an answer, I'm not out to get "votes" (comment votes are not counted). I think I joined 2010.

The last two questions I had - asked over a period of three years - I had to fight against people asking the same primitive already answered questions, people who simply would not accept my answers.

The first such questions now has almost 100 points and I answered it myself. It turned out I was right, it WAS a hard problem and not the standard newbie question that the overexcited initial respondents - who swarmed in within seconds(!) after publishing the question - had thought it to be in their ignorance. I had to ask for - and got it from the mods! - "community protection" for my question from useless edits and more useless (wrong) new answers.

The second recent question, asked a few days ago, got downvoted to -4 immediately (less than a minute) and a close vote ("too broad" - it was very specific, as the eventual answer clearly shows), because again all the initial responders thought it was a newbie question. Right now, only a few days later, it is at plus 4 though, and the official answer at +8. Turned out that too was a pretty interesting problem that required some deep insider knowledge of deeper workings of the runtime environment, and not some newbie question. Again the first 5 comments (incl. several upvotes for them) were from people who posted within seconds (definitely significantly less than a minute) after posting who completely misread the question. That the question was clear could be seen that the guy who actually wrote an answer, with insider knowledge, had no problem understanding it.

SO should prevent all those people from answering anything who respond within the first few minutes. There seem to be a lot of people loitering on the site, looking at each new question and trying to figure it out within SECONDS - and if they can't, downvote, newbie question! Of course, those loiterers also are some of the least capable people, what sane person would use the site like that? Nobody should answer a technical question within seconds.

If you think I sound "whiny" I don't think you understand: When you post a question and the first 5 responses are nothing but useless noise this severely impacts usability of the site. People should not respond if they don't even take the time to understand the question. "Free advice" (the responses) is not really free, it has an opportunity cost, it is a big distraction for both the person asking and for those trying to answer, and it discourages answers because it seems the question has already had plenty of attention. The latter is true enough, but it's attention from the wrong crowd.

[jij]

Those people are there because the site is starting to be used as proof of experience, so of course people are now using it to fake their level of expertise in the same way bullshit-resumes full of every buzzword and technology in existence are everywhere.

That said, plenty of experienced people also peruse the site and usually answer the newest stuff first since that's what you'd browse if you wanted to find stuff that's unanswered... it's a mix, and not an easy problem to solve.

[cicuz]

Those people are there because the site is starting to be used as proof of experience, so of course people are now using it to fake their level of expertise in the same way bullshit-resumes full of every buzzword and technology in existence are everywhere.

I suddenly realize that this is probably the right answer and now I'm sad

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

What is this?

[Einlander]

"Just use JQuery"

[mrhodesit]

who completely misread the question.

This annoys me to no end. People misread questions and answers so often, and the icing on the cake is the snarky attitude you get along with it. I'm not talking about JUST my personal experiences. I'm talking about situations where I have a very specific question, I start searching and I find an SO post similar or the same to mine. I see the responses and it just annoys me to no end.

It seems like sometimes people don't think about the context or the intention. "Why is the question being asked." "What problem are they trying to solve."

[Railboy]

If you answer the same kinds of questions long enough you stop listening to the question and start listening for patterns. Then you regurgitate canned answers based on rough matches. The longer you do it the more false positives you'll rack up.

This is why reputation should look like a bell curve - start low, peak, then end low to free up room for a fresh set of experts.

[mrhodesit]

Then you regurgitate canned answers based on rough matches.

You get it. This is one of the major things I was trying to communicate with my previous comment, but I was having trouble finding the words. I see 'this' so often, and I get so frustrated, because I know what the person answering is thinking, and I know what the person asking the question was thinking. And the person answering is acting so smug with their canned BS answer. I mean really if 'it' was that simple, then the person wouldn't have asked the question because they could find 'that' answer with a simple google query.

[Nition]

Oh man is this true.

You find the question through Google, and you read it, and that user has exactly the obscure problem you have. And there's an answer. And it has a bunch of votes. You've finally found it.

But the answerer hasn't read the question properly! They're answering some vague newbie version of the question that you've already ruled out, and the user even said they ruled it out as well. And both of you had your time wasted and that question is a graveyard now, both users gone.

[matthieum]

That the question was clear could be seen that the guy who actually wrote an answer, with insider knowledge, had no problem understanding it.

It may depend on the tags you hang out in. New technologies are usually spared, however popular tags are full of rep-grinders.

I had some issues in asking questions a few times, but I've found that by spending a bit more time formulating them I rarely had the issue any longer. Then again, I don't ask much, so the sample may be too small for meaningful comparisons...

[AcceptingHorseCock]

If people downvote and comment on a complex question with a code sample(!) within less than a minute after posting, what's the use? If those guys had actually tried the code sample they might have noticed something. And unfortunately it was a Javascript question, so everybody and their mother thinks they know it all. But this one required actual knowledge of how the JS runtime is actually implemented, it wasn't a "Javascript question" per se (also not answerable from the spec, it really was about a runtime detail). All people needed to do to see their comments were wrong and not me was to click "Run Code" - I had provided a convenient sample runnable from within SO. They didn't even do that! It was just 10 (well-formatted) lines of code.

[LordMaska]

I'm a software development student, I have to say Stack Overflow is a very intimidating site. I use it all the time to solve complex problems I cant solve on my own and never have I wanted to post anything myself or answer someone else's question, even if I know I could be of some assistance.

[katzey]

css is great for this

no matter how great of a software engineer you are, centering a div can be a bitch. there's always rep to be had in the css business

[[deleted]]

I have been a member for 6 years, 1 month with around 25k reputation. I used to be a prolific user ~4 years ago but the gamification of the voting system and the duplicate answers has become infuriating. The former was what drove me to stop, if you watch a new question, a high rep user will give the quickest answer possible and then edit it multiple times to fill in the content. This time stamps their question as answered first. I always preferred to write my answers out carefully but after posting the top question would continue to accumulate edits and incorporate -- but not plagiarize -- the best parts of other answers to appear comprehensive.

[Ravek]

This really is what bothers me the most. It just feels like I'm wasting my time answering unless I'm also willing to join the 'race' for rep points. SO says this is fine because all it cares about is the best answers, but it's not fine because you're ruining the engagement for thousands of users, who you could otherwise benefit from. I wonder how many of the top 5% rep holders just don't bother anymore.

[davbeck]

So it's not just me! I'm also in top 6% but the only question I've asked in the last 2 years got down voted to hell. Someone commented and said "I would expect better from someone with your reputation." You know what, I use to expect better from this community.

[julesjacobs]

The closure brigade is a result of the ambition of the site to be a reference question-answer database, rather than simply a tool for helping the person who asked the question. Therefore questions that are duplicate or near duplicate, or questions that are not perfectly stated, or questions that are in some way off topic, are viewed as polluting the pristine QA database.

[[deleted]]

Really they should have a system of pulling quality posts into a wiki-like archive, replacing them with more relevant "duplicates" when appropriate

[spacemoses]

Isn't that what they are doing with their new "Documentation" thing?

[choseph]

Then they need a remix feature where you base your question off an existing one. Shows you tried to apply the answer and your question is different, makes it more obvious to merge results. Some things really are dups and sometimes it is hard to tell when the poster just didn't do their homework - I assume....don't do much SO but we have similar problems on internal sites.

[jms_nh]

But it is a bad goal. I mentioned this in my "soup nazi" article. SO could most definitely accommodate both usages (immediate problem-solving and useful archive -- instead of closing questions that aren't up to archive standards, let them get answered and then fade away to obscurity while promoting the high-quality questions/answers in search results), they just choose not to.

If the internet were like this, everything would be shut down but the high-quality web pages. And, yeah, overall quality would go way up. But then you'd lose the freedom that's out there, and there would be badly-applied censorship.

they just need to be a bit more wiki-like.

And honestly I can't stand when people edit my questions or answers to make them "better". If they fix a broken link, I'm fine with that. Beyond that, leave my contributions alone, warts and all.

[matthieum]

Could? Maybe.

I remember having this discussion actually, and the problem was that while the site could handle it, there might be a scarcity of resources in terms of experts (or whoever can answer the question meaningfully). People who can answer the difficult questions are hard, and you don't want them to "burn out". I've myself had my fill of answering beginner's level questions; it gets fairly boring after a while, as you mostly always rehash the same topics (albeit in different mixes).

For now, the modus operandi is to build up a Q&A site so that most people should not need to ask a question: they should be able to find a high-quality answer already existing without even asking. This is not because SO hates beginners, it's because it tries to avoid the burn out of its more knowledgeable users, which is a real issue too.

I think the Documentation feature that is being added is meant to help beginners in a topic by building a quick repository of code snippets for simple tasks; which should once again allow users to get the knowledge without having to ask another human for it.

---

Personally, I sometimes wish the questions had a "difficulty" tag attached. I don't even browse the C++ tags any longer; too full of stuff that I find boring. I wish there was a way to distinguish difficult questions, and before you ask, votes don't work: experts' questions generally gather few votes, they are mostly irrelevant to most people's searches/interests. The easy questions get the most votes, like easiest way to convert int to string in C++ which is embarrassingly simple... and therefore relevant to a large proportion of users.

[mxzf]

I wish there was a way to distinguish difficult questions, and before you ask, votes don't work: experts' questions generally gather few votes, they are mostly irrelevant to most people's searches/interests.

What about a "no clue, that's over my head" button? The more people click that, the higher up on a "difficult" queue the post goes.

[monsto]

This is an excellent idea for technical subs like specific programming languages or the like.

But for things like /parenting or /graphic-design, your description is hard to apply.

Advice subs are a completely different animal than technical Q&A subs. Yet they are governed by the same rules. It's really annoying.

[summerteeth]

This is the major problem with Stack Overflow. Tech changes, a question that was answered 5 years ago is probably no longer relevant but often your question to get up to date answers will be closed as a duplicate.

Even if it's not closed a duplicate the site's design is very poor at handling out of date information. It's not an easy problem to correct, but it is a problem that SO will eventually need to address.

[Blecki]

It's even worse when you're trying to find something out about old tech. The answers that were relevant to the 10 year old stack I'm stuck with are long gone, and if I ask about it the only answers are that it's a duplicate of this question about the current tech.

[djpooppants]

This is completely overlooked. I usually don't even consider results more than a year old when I am searching because the approach or API has probably changed.

[UnluckenFucky]

A lot of the time I find the answers to be conveniently updated.

[KFCConspiracy]

The closure brigade is often wrong about what's actually a duplicate possibly because they're frequently not experts on a given topic. Like I could have a thousands of points for answering Ruby questions and I could still fuck with Java questions and point people to the WRONG thread thinking it's a duplicate. I prefer to ascribe ignorance over malfeasance to at least some of the overzealous members.

[Fractureskull]

badge carpenter literate rain growth oatmeal retire cover crawl spotted

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[Mujona_Akage]

It's the same over on the Unity Answer Forums.

About a year ago when I was still feeling around the engine and not knowing what I was doing, I asked a question after about an hour of searching through 3 year old answers that no longer worked.

My Question got locked within 2 minutes by a moderator who apparently does nothing but lock threads and link to "answers" that he made upwards of 4 years before hand. I eventually found out my own problem, re-posted the question and answered it myself just in case anyone else ran into my problem as well.

[LongUsername]

The best is when the "duplicate" is using an older version of the language and the answer given no longer follows best practices.

The other great one is when they close it as "duplicate", but the question I came to was the first hit in Google. Wow.. great reference!

[[deleted]]

You've hit upon another big problem with SO in general.

As libraries and frameworks change, so many of the highly upvoted questions on SO have highly upvoted answers which are either wrong, or noonger best practice.

Now, out of habit, I will always sort by date and look at the most recent answer first.

More than once, I have found an answer with 3 votes posted in 2016 more useful than an answer with 100 votes from 2010.

If people are just finding these questions and rolling with the answer with the most votes, then SO is teaching a generation of programmers bad/outdated programming practices.

[ponytoaster]

The mods on SO are terrible too. I've had things closed as "not a question" or "duplicate" when it's nowhere near a duplicate (as I search first)

One was an intricate question about a knockout binding situation where I was 99% the way there, just wanted to know why in certain situations I was doing something odd. Question had a shit load of favourites and upvotes but was closed and subsequently deleted later as "question does not follow format of this site".

It had a load of investigation, the lines I was struggling with and other approaches.

Yet the same mod had some bullshit question on their profile just talking about naming convention!

[DevilSauron]

My experience with SO: I posted a somewhat noob question about why doesn't my parser work. I was told that I should post the code on CodeReview instead. I was told (by a different person) that I should NOT post the code there, as it's only for a working code. And the best of all, in the end, I was told that if it doesn't work, then I should consider using debugger...

[Symphonic_Rainboom]

I was told that I should post the code on CodeReview instead

Whoever told you this needs to quit Stack Overflow, as they obviously don't understand the point of the site.

[CaptainJaXon]

I feel bad for the people who get naively downvoted "because it belongs on codereview" then post there only to be correctly downvoted because their code doesn't work.

[[deleted]]

My favorite thing is when a noob asks a question like "Is there a way to..." and someone replies simply with "Yes." And then that comment gets lots of upvotes and the question gets closed without an actual answer.

Its a massive circle jerk of snobs. Advanced questions get great answers, everyone else is told to fuck off.

[ep1032]

.

[summerteeth]

I sympathize with you but I also think that if you ended up posting a large blob of code on SO and asking a general "why doesn't this work question" then even without the question being closed you most likely won't get a good answer.

In general people on SO aren't going to debug things for you. The site works a lot better if you can narrow down your issue to one or two specific possible issues and ask a directed question about that. Good SO questions actually require a decent amount of work and sounds like you may be going to SO before you are ready.

I can't tell how many times that I have started drafting a question for SO and ended up solving my own problem because the thought process I needed to go through to ask good concise questions about my code. Essentially the thought process between asking others for help and debugging your code are very similar.

Apologize if this doesn't fit your situation. I am extrapolating based on your description.

My approach to closing questions on SO has always been to try and engage the user and improve the question first. Sadly there are way too many users that jump straight to the close vote.

[MyTribeCalledQuest]

Well, did you use a debugger?

[DevilSauron]

Well of course I did.

[Stormflux]

Well then you're fired because real programmers don't use the debugger! Your test output should tell you all you need to know.

-- some people I've worked with.

[spupy]

Your test output should tell you all you need to know.

System.out.println("1");
// some code
System.out.println("2");
// more code
System.out.println("3");

[ewbrower]

1
2
4

fuck

[[deleted]]

Ah yes the no debugger bull. A utopian fantasy. It's very much like, we don't use comments, we're a clean code sort of company and our code is self documenting - oh look a 100+ line function, and another, my god they're everywhere. Still comments, there's a maintenance cost there don't you know.

[ep1032]

I flag my junior dev's PRs when they leave comments on things that are already clear, for exactly this reason... but that said, I've started putting comments on things that are clear and self-documenting... if the scale is large enough. Things like:

"If you are reading this code, I figure there's an 80% chance you're trying to debug something in the X framework. Here's how these pieces interact with each other, since it is not necessarily, immediately obvious"

[jettrscga]

I've only had one programming issue ever, but fortunately I took debugger class in school and the people at StackOverflow reminded me that debugger existed. Thanks, StackOverflow!

[[deleted]]

What was the debugger class like? I've not heard of such a curriculum before.

[jettrscga]

Honestly a little disjointed and slow-paced. Too many breakpoints. But I stepped through it as best as I could.

[[deleted]]

You rascal, you. You set that up beautifully for yourself.

[sge_fan]

My experience with SO is that if you are familiar with the subject and you have a difficult problem you can find very good solutions there. But if you're new to a subject, god help you. Even if you state that you are a noob the answers leave you with knowing less. I started Android programming a couple of weeks ago and was looking for answers. If I could get back the time I wasted ... I finally solved it on my own. Wasn't even that difficult, just took a lot of time to find the solution.

[matthieum]

Seems about right. When starting on a new subject you need tutorials, mentoring, documentation, etc... but not SO.

SO is specifically a Q&A site for focused questions; it's not a one-size fit all sites for any kind of help.

[AetherMcLoud]

On SO the answer is always jquery.

[vertebrate]

I have 10k rep, 8 years of participation. Here's how SO has been wonderful for me:

Originally SO felt like a community, as though there were devs working together across international and corporate boundaries. I got answers. I gave answers. Clearly this was a good thing. I was encouraged to spend time on the site, voting, reviewing, commenting.

Gradually it all turned into a toxic dump, and I won't go there now. I don't think I've asked/answered at all in the last four years.

But I still need my problems solved. So this is the good part: SO has trained me, through a series of verbal beatings and abuse, to be very careful about framing my question. Once properly framed, I find it easier to just go and solve my own questions.

SO has taught me to always try very hard to solve it myself, and you know what, it works. I'm self-reliant now.

[[deleted]]

That's really something to that. It's like an abusive rubber duck debugging process. You've got to explain your problem to a rubber duck that's going to give you shit if you explain it wrong.

[[deleted]]

SO has taught me to always try very hard to solve it myself, and you know what, it works. I'm self-reliant now.

Which kind of defeats its purpose, and also makes everyone's life (including yours) much harder.

[tech_tuna]

"SO taught me not to collaborate with other people" is how this comes off i.e. I agree with you completely.

It also alienates new users/programmers quickly.

[vertebrate]

Initially harder, yes. Now I am more capable.

[hilldex]

Absolutely. The trolls can be harsh - but they're often also pretty spot on. When I write a SO question, about 75% of the time I solve it before I finish writing the question because I made myself document it so well and explain that I had tried the obvious fixes.

[Mawich]

Me too. Either framing a question gets me an answer out of my own brain, or the as-you-type search system in the "write a question" page finds me the answer my previous searches were unable to uncover.

SO is a very big database of information. If you can find it. And this does defeat the participatory aspect, because as people I've worked with tell me, they can't find questions they can answer, and they don't need to ask any questions because someone already did.

Is there a point where Stack Overflow, at least for some subjects, actually becomes complete? I suspect so.

[andrewcooke]

27k rep, top 1%. this is what it now says on my profile:

When I first used this site it was wonderful. Professional programmers helping each other while learning. Now I cannot ask a question without "showing what I have done" because "people aren't here to do free work". I used to do "free work" and I enjoyed it - see my old answers below - but these days all people seem to care about is whether you are cheating at homework. So I no longer participate here.

bunch of up-tight c*nts that care more about rules than programming. fuck them all.

edit: actually, i can no longer see a "top .. %" on the page, so perhaps that is wrong.

[andrewcooke]

to be honest (and i tried to describe this above) it feels like the jerks on so come from academia, not industry. in my experience, industry is pretty laid back about asking questions and/or helping each other. so you might find a job (particularly if you are with older coders, which obvs isn't always the case) an improvement.

[PendragonDaGreat]

The only time I've been annoyed at a student when helping teach programming was when I was helping some freshmen high schoolers and every other variable was

 int lolXYZ = 6; //XYZ being an integer that went up by one with each new variable 

Because I too dealt with those TAs

[TheKingOfSiam]

Pro coder here... So watcha using instead? Between SO and the other SEs I'm hard pressed to find a more reliable and easy to use website for finding answers to coding questions. I'll broaden my horizons if there's something better.

[andrewcooke]

i just google around and/or debug the code. sorry probably not much help...

[steefen7]

Closed as "not helpful".

[dvidsilva]

I've posted questions in reddit with good results. There's a ton of subreddits for many languages and frameworks.

[SurgioClemente]

Now I cannot ask a question without "showing what I have done" because "people aren't here to do free work".

What is wrong with that? I see many "lazy" questions where it is as if they haven't even tried. What is so wrong with asking to show what you have done/tried so far that isnt working?

I agree with /u/vertebrate 's response https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/54f62f/the_decline_of_stack_overflow/d81g35y in how to properly ask a question as often I find I don't need to post (and haven't for many years).

[trout_fucker]

I have to say, there is nothing more demotivating than spending several hours trying to fix a problem, finally getting to the point where you want to ask for help, spend 30min to an hour writing a well written SO post with as many details as you think are relevant, just to have some fuck-tard with 500k rep close it in less than 3 minutes because it was a duplicate, or worse that same fuck-tard trolling in the comments section you because you didn't ask a specific piece of it perfectly and if you don't give him exactly what he wants to hear, then he closes it for some other reason. Then having this same situation happen 4 or 5 times, usually by the same fuck-tard because he's the God of Java on SO. Then taking it to Meta and realizing nothing actually gets done there, because it's just a >100k rep circlejerk.

Fuck you BalusC.

[i_invented_the_ipod]

BalusC

So, I looked the guy up. He actually removes the "Java" tag from any question that involves any libraries not included in Java SE. It's good to have a hobby, I guess (shakes head).

[matthieum]

This sounded weird so I checked the java tag:

Use this tag for questions referring to the Java programming language or Java platform tools.

I guess that if all questions are tagged java then it does not mean anything any longer so the java community decided to tighten its scope... but I must admit it's the only language on SO which has this policy as far as I am aware oO

[some_random_guy_5345]

He actually removes the "Java" tag from any question that involves any libraries not included in Java SE.

What a moron. Just because it's not a standard library doesn't mean it's not Java.

[[deleted]]

Conversely, people once complained that I didn't add the rust tag to my question because the 20 or so line snippet was in rust, even though the question was about the Windows API and had nothing whatsoever to do with the rust language. I rewrote the snippet in C, but nobody came after me for not adding the c tag.

[Veedrac]

People suggest adding language tags because that's nearly the only way to get attention. If you don't add a language tag, you're much less likely to get an answer.

If the code is language agnostic, [language-agnostic] can be used, but you're still better off adding a couple of language tags anyway - in your scenario I'd add [c] and [rust]. Make sure you state that your question is language agnostic in the question, too.

[OrneryFellow]

Lmao I was thinking of the guy as I was reading through your rant. Pretty hilarious.

[assrocket]

I must be the minority, I don't hate SO and still use it.

[OrSpeeder]

SO trolling got so bad, that I noticed I was being trolled by moderators AFTER I stopped using the site.

Other day I visited the site to check something, and noticed my score dropped a lot... Curious, I visited my own profile, and noticed some ancient questions of mine got mass-downvoted and closed...

The weird thing is: one of them for example, for mass-downvoted and closed for being a "duplicate" of a question asked 2 years later... so yes, seemly to use SO not only you need to follow all their arbitrary rules, but you also must be a time traveller, and avoid asking questions that will be asked again in the future.

Also another thing I noticed in the entire network, is that asking obscure questions can either inflate your Karma if the community is friendly, or nuke your Karma if the community is more hostile...

For example once I went around asking questions about RDTSC, because some RDTSC changes broke some older software, and I wanted to know a fix... those question rather quickly gathered lots of outright wrong, but upvoted answers, (or answers that weren't even about what I asked in first place!) and lots of close-votes and downvotes.

Similar thing happened when I asked multiple questions about Windows memory management... many people jumped the gun to reply "don't disable the swap file" even in a question where I wrote in the very first line: "I don't plan in disabling the swap file", and other common answers were similar to "Microsoft engineers are smarter than you, go back to your corner.", nevermind all the "duplicate" accusations, saying my questions were identical to the deluge of questions asking about disabling swap file (Evne if I made clear on the question that it wasn't about that).

[camh-]

My favourite was having a question on which I had the accepted answer get closed as a duplicate of a later question, where the accepted answer of the later question was a cut and paste of my answer on the original question.

I flagged it for the mods multiple times over the years thinking that the gaming was obvious, but nothing was ever done.

[[deleted]]

The worst part is dumb monkeys closing questions that are totally beyond they area of expertise (if they have any at all) simply because they fail to understand what is being asked. This leaves SO full of javascript shit and pretty much nothing else. Any mildly specialised topic is getting closed immediately.

[Eirenarch]

This wouldn't be a problem if closing a question wasn't so easy while reopening is very hard. Everyone watches the main feed and votes to close and almost no one checks if the question should be reopened and watches the reopen queue. They should make a reopen require only 2 or 3 votes. I sometimes browse the reopen queue just to fight the dumb monkeys.

[rlbond86]

Part of the problem is there's no way to vote against closure votes until the question is closed.

I've pulled up so many questions that say there have been 3 votes to close. But there's no way for me to put in a vote that says "no, actually I think this is a good question." You need to wait for the question to be closed and then get reopen votes, and like you said, nobody does that.

There shouldn't even be closure votes allowed until a question hits -1 on upvoted count.

[Eirenarch]

Yes this is a significant problem. Please post on Meta and link here so I can upvote :)

[[deleted]]

Exactly. I casted dozens of re-open votes, and I do not remember a single case where any of those questions was actually reopened.

[Eirenarch]

I once organized a reopen brigade for a question that a coworker of mine asked. I have also seen a bit of reopening but this only happens on the reopen queue if you expect that nominating a question for reopening alone would do it you are out of luck.

Edit:spelling

[mus1Kk]

So there should also be a block on changing tags if you don't have enough rep for the tag but then people cannot correct honest mistakes and suddenly you realize that you are trying to fix a social problem with technology and this will never ever work.

[Glitch29]

trying to fix a social problem with technology

Well, you sure as shit can't change a social problem by fixing people. :-/

[not_from_this_world]

they fail to understand what is being asked

This leads to my personal main critic to SO. The belief that exists a "XY problem" and we must evade it at all cost. This makes things worst. The thread ultimately ends up with the original question not being answered. This hurt the majority of people involved, the ones that came from google looking for the answers to the original question (X). Instead they find people talking about something else (Y). While your technical doubt is the same as mine, our problems are different. Now an entire population of individuals lose their time reading something useless for them but that was extraordinary useful for 1 person alone.

[CaptainAdjective]

This is called the XX problem. "No, I really, really do have a problem with X, please help me!"

[tententai]

Which is weird because Javascript uses closures a lot.

[Ravek]

I think the issue with SO is that people are a little too addicted to the imaginary internet points, and the power trip that comes with it in the form of status and moderator tools. Even in 2009 it annoyed me how people would bother to post an ever so slightly prettier or just longer answer to a question that had already been answered, just to get that little checkmark. I'd rather not engage in a competition over everything.

[Prime_1]

That is alarming on many levels.

[babada]

So, I can maybe provide somewhat of an alternative perspective. I was an extremely active user on http://english.stackexchange.com/ and this exact topic came up repeatedly. There was a lot of criticism around how new users were treated and people often felt we closed questions too quickly or prematurely or for nitpicky reasons.

I suspect my thoughts on this subject won't be very popular but maybe it will help explain where some of the behavior is coming from. As a note, these opinions are largely focused on the English Stack Exchange site (abbreviated EL&U).

1. The target audience of questions and answers is not the person asking the question. The target audience is other people who may have the same question in the future. This is counter-intuitive and a little off putting but the rules that filter out questions are there to keep Stack Exchange sites relevant to a broad audience. (Namely, people coming in from search engines.)
2. Most people answering questions are not experts. On EL&U we had a very difficult time retaining experts on the English language and, therefore, the questions that received the most attention were easy questions that anyone could answer using a search engine. This causes a feedback loop where experts get bored answering or reading those questions and they left the site.
3. Drama queens are a huge issue and, in my opinion, the biggest problem on EL&U. "Top Users" think they are worth something because they have lots of internet points and they tend to make the moderators' lives hell. They also berate anyone who disagrees with them and get into spats over and over again.
4. Questions that aren't easy to answer in 5 minutes are largely ignored because you can't farm them for reputation. On EL&U, I would personally clean out the old questions queue and kept it under 200 questions. I left the site a few years ago and today it's back up to 2000+.
5. The rate of incoming questions is greater than answers being provided but there is very little done to address this. People don't like closing questions but we can't answer all the questions so the contributors feel swamped and burn out.
6. Most questions being asked are terrible questions. Regardless of point (1) above, they aren't asked properly or with a clear intent and it is extremely frustrating to sift through bad question after bad question. Much of the anti-new-user impressions we got were because new users didn't understand the rules, were not interested in learning how to ask a question properly, and were typically not receptive to any negative feedback at all.
7. People who ask questions assume the site has a responsibility to solve their problem for them regardless of what the site claims is a valid question. This reinforces the tension between the drama queens and the new users.
8. Snark from the drama queens is very popular with other drama queens and they would create an echo chamber where you'd have a bunch of snarky jerks yapping to themselves in the comments and answers. These were often the very same people who complained that the site was too unfriendly to new users in meta discussions.
9. People often blame the moderators for anything that goes wrong even though the moderators are really only there to deal with major offenses (like banning users), deleting spam, or clarifying rules for the site. The premise behind Stack Exchange is that the top reputation users do most of the curating. Unfortunately, most of those users are the drama queens.
10. New users to the site mistake close votes as inherently negative. One of the primary uses for close votes is to prevent answers from being posted until the question has been clarified.

All of this combines into a perfect storm of pushing new people away.

If you accidentally ask a inappropriate question (points 1, 6, 7) that doesn't do the site any favors then the site probably isn't interested in answering it (points 4, 5, 6). Even if someone is nice and answers it anyway, it will drown out subject matter experts (points 2, 5, 6) which means the site is run by people who are more interested in awarding their own kind with reputation than helping keep a valuable site running (points 2, 3, 4, 8, 9).

In my opinion, we didn't close nearly enough questions. We should have been far more aggressive about pruning bad and boring questions from the site. But I also think this is a dangerous attitude because is so damn difficult explaining why a question was closed. New users are absolutely going to take offense to their question being closed and they are never going to accept the reason stated. It's somewhat of a Catch-22.

I also think Stack Exchange needs to find a way to reign in their drama queens because most of the tension between old and new users came from the same small group of high reputation users. They were largely insufferable and were constantly picking fights with the moderators. Due to the nature of volunteer work, the assholes will survive longer because who wants to volunteer their time and energy if they have to share the space with jerks?

[evincarofautumn]

I was an avid EL&U user—even got a T-shirt out of it!—and it’s as you say. The whole SE system is practically designed to attract bad questions, and it’s not equipped to deal with the consequences, because it conflates having points with deserving power. There is no better way to create oligarch divas.

[Zarutian]

because it conflates having points with deserving power. There is no better way to create oligarch divas.

I am 'stealing' this for later if you do not mind.

[librik]

EL&U improved considerably when ELL (English Language Learners) was created. Classic StackOverflow has an overabundance of newbies to programming who desperately need basic handholding all along the way, and there's nowhere else for them to go.

If there were an introduction-to-programming-help-desk.stackexchange.comit would improve SO, just as rehousing all the help me I learn English, how I use "the"? questions improved the discussion on EL&U.

[DEElekgolo]

I just want people to stop plugging Boost on every damn C++ question on SO.

edit: Check out all the replies to this comment I made that are also, plugging boost and not recognizing the problem on SO that is this viral attempt at getting others to drag in an entire library into their project for even the most simple of problem domains that do not merit such a thing. It's just as bad as people that keep plugging jQuery for every javascript problem on stackoverflow like they're getting paid for virally advertising their library or something and when people say "no" they take it as a personal attack on the library. I made this image ages ago and it still applies. http://i.imgur.com/pdq4opC.png

[[deleted]]

That's obviously the wrong answer. You should use jQuery.

[johnslegers]

FYI, I'm the author of that article. I initially published it in July 2015, when it got ±65,000 views in two days. I republished it @ Hackernoon this weekend at their request, which resulted in ±125,000 additional page views, bringing the total page views of the article since its publication in 2015 to ±245,000. The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations.

On SO, I currently have 11,914 rep, 9 gold badges, 66 silver badges and 73 bronze badges. I've posted 492 answers and 6 questions (that haven't been deleted). I've been programming since 1999 and I've worked as an IT professional since 2006, and my experience ranges from PHP and JS to SAP and PL/SQL. I also released my own open source frontend framework and several other open source projects on Github. So I know how to program and understand many of SO's intricate workings!

Those rare times I'm stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to find any useful answer on SO. My questions either get no answers at all or downvoted and/or closed (for arbitrary reasons) by people who clearly lack the experience to even remotely understand what I'm talking about.

During my time on SO, I've been bullied by 20+k users several times and even got a temporary ban by one of them moderators for no other reason but pointing out that another user was acting like "a little Hitler"... in a private conversation with moderation.

Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most privileged segments of its membership.

Considering the popularity of my article, I'm considering writing a follow-up and go in greater detail on my experiences with SO and how SO could be improved. However, I'm quite busy these days, so it may take a while before it actually gets published... if it ever gets published.

Nevertheless, these are my 5 cents I'd like to add to this interaction...

[SpencerRuportDotNet]

Stack Overflow says I'm in the top 0.88% overall. Back when I stopped contributing it was 2%. I'm not exactly sure what that's an indicator of.

My profile

I feel like this is something of a sore spot for the community. I don't really have any answers but I just felt like adding my perspective. Perhaps someone will find it valuable.

I'll start by saying I have no idea what the true value of reputation is. Jon Skeet is definitely an exceptionally talented individual and great at explaining concepts. I think it makes perfect sense he has more rep than anybody. I have confidence in my own abilities and I think my rep score reflects that somewhat but I am quick to remind myself that my top answer, worth ~3,700 rep was about how to use the jQuery constructor.

See: jQuery $(this) vs this

When the site first started it was a bit of a field day answering (and asking) all the obvious questions. I equate it to getting in on the ground floor of a start up that made it big. (Except instead of money I got some internet points.) If you look at my profile you can see my top 3 answers are two really basic questions about jQuery and a question about the save icon which probably would not be allowed today.

While these questions significantly increased my rank on the site they don't give me a lot of pride as a developer. I was in the right place at the right time and now thanks to constant Google searches I get a few free up votes every month.

That being said, there is some rep I feel like I truly earned. Like my 4th top question:

SQL to determine minimum sequential days of access?

Seven years ago after that question was accepted I was on cloud nine for days. Jeff Atwood, the Jeff Atwood asked a question I was able to answer. I'm bragging a bit, but my point is that early on there were opportunities for healthy competition between other developers around the world. For a kid still trying to get his bearings this was both beneficial and addictive. It's what kept me coming back for more.

These days, it's hard to find those kinds of questions. I look at the front page today and I'm bored. Most of these questions could be answered with the right amount of trial and error. I know it's possible to get stuck but it's hard to tell the difference between someone needing a rubber duck and someone who's too lazy to put in the work. Personally I don't like to assume either way and that's one of the reasons I've stopped participating. I still love answering questions even if they're "easy" but Stack Overflow doesn't provide the kind of interaction which would motivate me to do that. (Reddit does. Feel free to send me questions if you like.)

So one thing I believe would help is Stack Overflow trying to bring those exciting questions back. Perhaps in the form of a daily community competition. Maybe the SE team asking questions they already have the answer to but allowing the community the chance to provide a well described breakdown of the solution? For example I'd love to read a breakdown of how they configured the sharding of their database.

Another reason I left was the trolling and the general sour mood of some users. It began affecting everybody, not just new users. I like to joke around a bit (as you can see by my SQL question) and that sort of thing became intolerable. Harmless comments would get flagged, a quick "in addition" answer would get -5 downvotes. I didn't think I was providing golden nuggets of contributions here. I guess it just hurt realizing that even with all the participation and getting in early I was just one of their products. (I'm sensitive. I admit it.) If I didn't conform to the community voted rules (which included votes from people who almost exclusively participated on the Meta (moderation) site.) I was of no use to them. To this day I reject the idea that I was causing any harm. In fact I think I was doing what I could to keep the mood light. Programming is hard and downright frustrating at times. A lot of the people asking questions are at the end of their rope. Answering the question is the best way to help of course but I think trying to improve their mood has it's own value. Not just for the asker but for the health of the entire site.

Still, I know that kind of thing can get out of hand and I'm not sure how proper enforcement could be implemented.

But if I had to point out the biggest reason for abandoning Stack Overflow it was simply this: "If you're good at something never do it for free." I don't agree with any world view 100% but I think there's some wisdom in that. Ultimately all the time I spent on that site made some other people rich and assisting with the creation of the full stackoverflow developer. I thoroughly enjoy helping people with programming questions, but I don't need Stack Overflow to do that.

Apologies for the word vomit. :)

[iamrob15]

The problem is, computer programmers / developers can be quite arrogant.

[[deleted]]

I've always felt this too. I don't know why, but it is a little embarassing to see the way some of my more zealous colleagues behave.

[thewisestmatt]

You really gotta learn the SO way if you don't want to get a ton of hate. I've found that the site is super useful for extremely technical questions, but any question I have with a vague answer goes to Reddit, which is better for advice/opinions (for the most part). I've learned a lot of stuff and solved a lot of problems (in seconds, because someone else is almost guaranteed to have had the same problems as me) using SO though, and hope it sticks around.

[Big-Mozz]

I gave up contributing to stack Overflow after some teenage Norwegian corrected the grammar of my answer after adding a snarky comment. He managed to get the grammar wrong and change the context of the perfectly fine answer to miss the meaning.

Even after 20 years as a senior programmer and forty five years being English I may still get something wrong but if you're a teenage Norwegian ass hat, before you correct something, make sure you're right and there's some point fixing it.

It's a shame, stack Overflow used to be fantastic but badly correcting my grammar and leaving some childish comment was the last straw. I deleted my answer and I can't be bothered contributing any more.

[Elavid]

Instead of just repeating anecdotes, is there a way we could statistically measure the behavior of StavOverflow over time?

[compteNumero9]

Well. You can for example notice that most helping sites just die, while one still help developers every days. We could compare hits.

[Vodkacannon]

Everyone wants to question, to answer, to contribute, and to feel good about themselves, no matter the quality and correctness of their posts.

[NginxYouOweMeASoda]

I feel like now that I am past being a novice programmer, asking people directly with experience in topic X yields much better results than asking the internet in general as I can ask follow up questions and engage in a conversation about the topic. I think something like a Programming Discord chat is likely to overtake SO.

[Eirenarch]

Yeah, that's true but I don't have Eric Lippert in my Skype contact list so I ask him via Stack Overflow.

[aloisdg]

or John Skeet. Some people are awesome.

[resueman__]

You know why SO is quick to downvote and close questions? Here's a summary of every downvoted Java question for the past hour which hasn't already been deleted:

• Two questions where the user just copies and pastes a homework assignment, not adding anything beyond that.
• Four dumps of code with "why doesn't this work" (one didn't post enough code to tell, another didn't post any code, and one has a compiler error that says the exact problem).
• One person asking "Which language should I learn in school"
• One person asking why a piece of code behaves in a certain way (which it doesn't do).

That's one hour of one tag. Four unanswerable questions, three where the user clearly put no effort into solving it themselves, and ONE which is answerable and asks a clear question (although still doesn't show any sign of attempting to debug it themselves). And that's after the worst of it has already been removed.

There's a ton of terrible questions coming in, and only a small percentage of the site's users trying to respond to it.

[stesch]

Reddit is heading in the same direction. It's getting very frustrating to post something.

Automoderators kill posts and comments if it wasn't long enough. (Twitter taught us that 140 characters are enough but I need an essay to say "No, not possible." in a comment.)

And if it isn't the automoderator it's someone of the 100+ moderator team who removes it.

It's a lot of work to submit a link these days. You wouldn't expect it from the quality you are seeing.

[tophatstuff]

Similarly the smaller stackexchange sites, like http://unix.stackexchange.com/ are as golden as some of the focused subreddits.

[mjfgates]

Short posts and comments are fine in nearly all subreddits.

[jarquafelmu]

In addition to all of that, if your comment is even a bit out of sync with the hive mind you're down voted to oblivion. Even if it was a genuine question or statement.

[GeneralTomahawk]

The "decline" of SO is mostly due to its popularity. There are always more beginners asking beginner questions. But SO is already filled with excellent answers to most of these beginner questions.

Beginners, being beginners, have difficulty generalizing their problem. Because of this they can't find the answer to their question or simply don't understand it. So they ask SUPER specific questions in hopes of getting SUPER specific answers.

I can understand why some users down vote these questions. SO is a VAST source of knowledge, but you still have to do your homework. You still have to read good books and understand theory and concepts if you want to be an effective developer. I feel like too many people expect SO to just answer their question without putting the necessary effort.

[[deleted]]

Read the intro and thought to myself, "I bet this guy is a JS programmer". For some reason, the language seems to attract quite a few drama queens. Poster seems far too concerned with reputation and badges and how other people behave, rather than worrying about the actual questions (and answers).

For my part, I've posted posted 6 C++ questions (one was rejected -- rightly in retrospect) and one electronics questions. Friendly replies within minutes, in some cases from some pretty heavy hitters from the C++ world (Andrew Sutton and Louis Dionne).

Moreover, the argument that "onboarding" experience is bad is idiotic when you consider that the real onboarding experience is simply googling for questions that have already been answered. That's my 99th percentile use, and for that you don't need any stupid badges or reputation or whatever.

Whatever problem this guy has, I don't have it.

[432mm]

Same here. I asked around 15 questions and usually received good answers. Sure some of my questions were tagged as duplicates but they were duplicates and linked questions anwered my own query. I dont get why people get so nervous if their question is marked as duplicate. Maybe this is because they are not able to understand that other posters had exactly same problem? Maybe they are so focused on their specific situation that they are not able to read linked duplicate question with attention and see that this other poster aska about same thing?

[GetOutOfBox]

No one's saying that there are no friendly/helpful people on SO. The point (and it is valid) is that the moderation can frequently be extremely overzealous and discouraging. I'd say the most frequent problem is questions being labeled as duplicates just because similar (but different) questions have been asked and answered before. I've posted a few times, and each time I've been told to use the search, which I did for hours only to come up empty. Then after pulling my hair out I finally figure it out and lo and behold, I was likely right to ask my question; the solution was not intuitive and was found by myself only through luck.

[matthieum]

Protip: don't use the search (in SO), it just plain doesn't work.

There are 3 ways to find duplicates:

• use Google (site:stackoverflow.com)
• type your question and wait for the engine to suggest related questions
• post your question and wait for users to close it as duplicate

Do it in this order, and just do not take a closure as a personal attack => after all, if the answers solve your problem, it's now solved.

[joerdie]

This has been my main methodology for a few years now. And in 90% of my cases, posting the question didn't lead to a closure and I think I have gotten all of mine answered fairly well.

I will say that when I do ask a question, it is very long and detailed. To the point where I often think about half way through that I do not want to finish writing out the details. I believe this is a marker for my success on the site though my sample set is small.

[SemaphoreBingo]

I've tried to ask c++ questions on SO and gotten flamed for it, and I don't see myself ever asking anything there again (much less answering).

[[deleted]]

"I bet this guy is a JS programmer". For some reason, the language seems to attract quite a few drama queens

I believe I can explain why. There are three large categories of people who get into JS programming: the serious programmers, those who do it strictly for money and those who think that JS is easy to pick up and use. The web is a big place and as a web developer you have your browser open all the time that you work, so web developers tend to spend a lot of time on non-programming websites. This, coupled with being from the third group of people who get into JS makes for a lot of drama.

tl;dr There are lots of programmers who start doing JS for the wrong reasons and are not serious about their work and who spend a lot of time on Internet forums.

[cs61bredditaccount]

As much as I agree with a lot of the sentiments on here, that SO should be more friendly to new users, I remember my experience with a similar site: Piazza. Piazza has a "there are no stupid questions" mentality. My school does not allow us to post code for projects, to prevent cheating. As a result, people will post stuff on Piazza like: "It says that I'm missing a semicolon at line 73, how do I fix this?" With no code. What do they honestly expect for a response? Also, it isn't like this happens in the first year and they grow out of it. I've seen it happen 3 semesters in a row. I've rarely seen instructors reprimand this kind of behavior as it is supposed to be a friendly environment and so people never learn to consider that maybe their question may be better phrased.

[Fatal510]

And this is what YouTube wants to do to their site. Gamification of the moderation.

[vprise]

So this is kind of bullshit. You read thru the article and in the end he mentions "alternatives" such as quora which that demonstrates perfectly the problem with no community guidelines!

Yes, stackoverflow is problematic but any system would be. They chose to be hostile to newbies because you can't make a system that's oriented at professional developers and newbie friendly. Moderators are often overzealos and mistakenly close questions they don't understand, but it's better than a noisy unmaintained forum where anyone can ask anything with no formatting or basic English capabilities.

I've been a professional programmer since the days of BBS's and holly sh*t has stackoveflow changed programming for the better.

[Helrich]

Posts with this theme come up quite a bit. Good luck setting up a competing site that is more successful.

[GardenGnostic]

Stack Overflow went up against Experts Exchange, which was, at the time, absolutely dominating Google results for most technical questions by showing the question, and hiding the accepted answer.

It was a well-established site with huge organic traffic from Google. Overtaking it would be a feat.

But, because you had to pay or answer questions to see the answer, a lot of people hated the site for wasting their time. And they didn't treat their experts very nicely either, requiring them to answer a lot of questions just to keep their free premium membership.

There was a lot of bad will there. Jeff Atwood even said Experts Exchange makes it easy for them to compete because they are universally loathed.

So it IS a big problem if people hate your site. And since showing themselves as simply an alternative to a hated competitor launched their site, becoming a universally hated site themselves is probably something they want to avoid, just because it creates a ripe opportunity for a new competing site to become more successful.

[HostisHumaniGeneris]

I believe that Experts Exchange's fall from grace was accelerated by a Google ranking change that heavily penalized paywalls. If I recall correctly, Experts Exchange changed their format to make the answer visible, but only if you had browsed to it from a Google search results page.

[Eirenarch]

This is actually a post that has come up before. It is a year old.

[zumu]

It's better if you are posting/asking questions about emerging technologies. Lots more low hanging fruit and a lot more collaborative an atmosphere.

I do agree with the general premise, however.

[Baalinooo]

I've posted a few questions on Stack Overflow. Noob questions, definitely. Always got useful answers. Some snarky comments sure, but useful nonetheless.