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I feel StackOverflow is a bad place even as a professional. I don't agree with 90% of "closing" of questions, frequently closing a question is the ultimate upvo

by froh42 11y ago

I feel StackOverflow is a bad place even as a professional. I don't agree with 90% of "closing" of questions, frequently closing a question is the ultimate upvote. StackOverflow seems to prefer questions that can be answered by just copying the fine manual - and frowns on those that might involve discussion. From time to time I still use it, but for me it has jumped the shark.

collyw 11y ago
Where do you go to for answers? I hate the over zealous moderators, but it does end up answering a lot of my programming related questions.
- jschwartzi 11y ago
  I'm not GP, but I often still go there via Google searches that turn up questions, and then discover that a useful question with a great answer has been closed as off-topic to the programming forum. 90% of the time it seems like a legitimate programming question.
  - froh42 11y ago
    Yes, I turn to google as well. That's what over 30 years of development experience give you: You know how to use google to turn up the correct answers. And as I use Java for a living - there's a great decompiler in my IDE. Use the source, Luke. By the way, showing a talented beginner where good documentation is - I think that's frequently the best way to help them along.
    - collyw 11y ago
      Most of the time Stack Overflow answers are top of my Google hits.
      - Piskvorrr 11y ago
        Google Search is an elegant tool of a more...civilized...age. A long time ago, it used to have more result pages than the first one. (Technically, it still has them - but nobody ever goes there: just click through the first page results, or try something else.) In other words: just because Google ranks a result best doesn't actually mean it is best for you: I have frequently found the actual result I was looking for two or three result pages down.
- speeder 11y ago
  Yesterday after I complained about Stackoverflow on IRC, and people on IRC could not help me, someone suggested that I asked on Quora. I did, and they replied :)
splintercell 11y ago
Same here. I feel like StackOverflow after nearly 10 years of closing questions such as 'Which is a better framework X or Y', should be honored at /r/DesirePath. Like at which point do they understand that maybe their desire conflicts with how most community wants to use SO as.
- sanderjd 11y ago
  I keep waiting to see a competitor take off because it starts by encouraging those sorts of questions, and then secondarily accepts all the other sorts of questions SO does. Of course it's more difficult to start a new community because of network effects, but a decent place to start might be to find a bunch of the popular closed questions on SO and reach out to the questioner and some of the good answerers to come participate on your site instead. If this exists already, I'd love a pointer to it!
  - splintercell 11y ago
    Have you looked into Slant.co (https://www.slant.co/ https://www.slant.co/)
- drinchev 11y ago
  You are right, although sometimes questions pass through the moderators and nothing happens. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16392260/which-websocket-library-to-use-with-node-js http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16392260/which-websocket-... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5062614/how-do-i-decide-when-to-use-node-js http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5062614/how-do-i-decide-w...
- Piskvorrr 11y ago
  Most of the community? [citation-needed]. Also, I severely doubt that SO === all teh internetz; the premise "if it's not immediately and precisely answered on SO, all hope is lost" is just absurd (and directly contradicts most of the article which sparked this discussion, btw).
- froh42 11y ago
  With a stackoverflow-like system (rating, moderation, editing of questions by moderators, accepted answer) even such questions would be productive. Subjective ramblings would be voted away, answers showing advantages/disadvantages or similiarities between between frameworks would be rated up. It's just stupid to reduce such a portal to only questions that can be answered by RTFM. Questions that need discussion due to missing information should be voted away, I agree on that. But some allow subjective answers - and those are frequently those that require experience. (What's the best way to solve this-and-that? It depends, in situation a use solution A because, in situation b use solution B because, ...) Such questions typically are being closed by the moderators as well. And frequently the person who asks is not aware of all the factors influencing a solution, so there's a lot of useful information in such questions.
cballard 11y ago
I asked a question on a Stack Exchange site (not SO) that was immediately reported as a duplicate. It wasn't, the duplicate wasn't even close in multiple ways, and someone else jumped in to defend the question - he was then upvoted by several people. Despite this, there is a permanent prompt to either accept that the question is a duplicate, or to edit my question and explain why it isn't. This is nonsensical, because the reason that it isn't a duplicate is inherent in the question itself. I'm not sure how I would edit it without writing a non-sequitur. Even though I've actually accepted a correct answer, I cannot get rid of the prompt.
- fossuser 11y ago
  Yeah - my experience with the Stack Overflow moderation community has been uniformly negative too, they basically get in the way of the users. Arbitrarily closing/rewriting questions, removing useful information etc. The site can be useful - but only in spite of the community tasked with running it (not because of them) and it makes it frustrating to use.
- thomasahle 11y ago
  Did you try deleting it and asking it again, rewritten in a way that makes it totally clear why it isn't a duplicate?
- Shog9 11y ago
  I work for Stack Overflow: it might help to know that the prompt isn't permanent; it will go away in between 4-14 days (as the votes or flags that triggered it age away). We added that prompt because a huge number of people were asking questions that were either duplicates or were so poorly presented that the nugget of information that made them unique was obscured; either way, the asker wasn't getting an answer. It's been live for just under a year now, and the response has been incredible: more duplicate questions are confirmed by the askers themselves than are closed by voters; meanwhile, the number of people editing their questions has also gone up. Sorry you had a bad experience with it, but this is part of the work we've been doing to reduce the amount of conflict and frustration on the part of both askers and answerers.
jeremysmyth 11y ago
and frowns on those that might involve discussion No, it explicitly forbids questions that involve discussion. The point of Stack Overflow is (and to a large extent always was) to be the place for definitive answers (and their alternatives) to well-asked questions. It is not a place for discussions, ranked opinions, interesting conversations, or anything else that does not have a "right" or "best-guess" answer. It so happens that many questions are interesting to the community of people who visit Stack Overflow, but that doesn't mean they are contextually appropriate. If you want a discussion, go elsewhere. This isn't just a "if you don't like it, leave" judgement: it's explicit in the design and mission of the site[1]. There are better places to discuss things, just not on Stack Overflow. [1] "This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat...Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers.", from http://stackoverflow.com/tour http://stackoverflow.com/tour
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
hellofunk 11y ago
SO is definitely a club, and the guys who spend all day on that thing are not necessarily any more knowledgeable than others, despite their score. In fact, many of the most impressive developers I've gotten to know, like Rich Hickey and others, have low scores on the site. You can't judge the contributors by whether or not they know what they are talking about, just whether or not they are addicted to answering questions first before anyone else. And many of them just like the power they have over other users to close and moderate things, often in an unpredictable way. That said, many of the contributors are genuinely helpful and the site has helped me tremendously in the past. But just as many contributors are narcissistic and think they invented both chickens and eggs.
nine_k 11y ago
Some questions apparently don't belong to StackOverflow, because its stated purpose is to collect provably correct answers, not based on (mere) personal opinion. OTOH there is definitely a need for a forum for the questions that get closed on SO but collect a huge number of upvotes. These are important questions and answers, people want and need them, and keep asking and answering them. One important question is whether the approach to the site governance used on stackexchange sites would work on such a forum. Quora tries to somehow serve as such a forum, but it lacks the focus of SO.
nissehulth 11y ago
Indeed. Quite often I google a problem and the first result is a StackOverflow link. But, there's no answer. Someone asked about the same problem and got shut down by mods for some silly reason. Now, if there are other search results that look like they could give me an answer, I simply avoid the SO links.
speeder 11y ago
I was discussing this yesterday with some people on IRC, and thought of writing a blog post about this myself. Despite me being a very experienced programmer (I started to learn coding when I was 6 years old), I find SO extremely hostile. Examples: One question of mine from 2010 got vote closed in 2014 (yes, people will hunt down questions even that later!) and now has vote deletes, also the same question the most upvoted answer is a snarky answer (copy paste of the answer: "You can't eat your cake and have it too.") Recent questions: They all get downvoted and vote-duplicate even when they aren't. I made some questions about RDTSC, people kept arguing with me about how I was doing something wrong, my CTO is retarded, or that I was retarded, or whatnot... and all I wanted was to fix some games (RDTSC behaviour changed from counting CPU cycles, to count whatever arbitrary frequency the hardware wants, this break old games that rely on it counting literal CPU cycles). Another was when I asked details about some bizarre behaviour of Objective-C in recent versions of XCode, people said it was dupe (not exactly), that I was retarded, that it was all in the fucking manual, or that I could google it, and noone EVER replied with a single official answer. I asked then on Quora, found out that XCode DO have non-standard behaviour (ie: stuff that ins't in Obj-C standard, and ins't in official distribution of LLVM), and that the Apple manual is wrong, thus no wonder why I wasn't finding the info on the manual or on google. I asked about these issues on Stackoverflow Meta, got attacked, downvoted, deleted, etc... no meaningful discussion. I am impressed that some people went to great lengths to argue with me without posting a proper answer, one guy even wrote something I considered an answer in the comments, but lacking details, I asked him to expand in an actual answer so I could accept it, and he replied in the comments: "Nah, that would be a waste of bandwidth."

by froh42 11y ago

collyw 11y ago

Where do you go to for answers? I hate the over zealous moderators, but it does end up answering a lot of my programming related questions.

jschwartzi 11y ago
I'm not GP, but I often still go there via Google searches that turn up questions, and then discover that a useful question with a great answer has been closed as off-topic to the programming forum. 90% of the time it seems like a legitimate programming question.
- froh42 11y ago
  Yes, I turn to google as well. That's what over 30 years of development experience give you: You know how to use google to turn up the correct answers. And as I use Java for a living - there's a great decompiler in my IDE. Use the source, Luke. By the way, showing a talented beginner where good documentation is - I think that's frequently the best way to help them along.
  - collyw 11y ago
    Most of the time Stack Overflow answers are top of my Google hits.
    - Piskvorrr 11y ago
      Google Search is an elegant tool of a more...civilized...age. A long time ago, it used to have more result pages than the first one. (Technically, it still has them - but nobody ever goes there: just click through the first page results, or try something else.) In other words: just because Google ranks a result best doesn't actually mean it is best for you: I have frequently found the actual result I was looking for two or three result pages down.
speeder 11y ago
Yesterday after I complained about Stackoverflow on IRC, and people on IRC could not help me, someone suggested that I asked on Quora. I did, and they replied :)

splintercell 11y ago

Same here. I feel like StackOverflow after nearly 10 years of closing questions such as 'Which is a better framework X or Y', should be honored at /r/DesirePath. Like at which point do they understand that maybe their desire conflicts with how most community wants to use SO as.

sanderjd 11y ago
I keep waiting to see a competitor take off because it starts by encouraging those sorts of questions, and then secondarily accepts all the other sorts of questions SO does. Of course it's more difficult to start a new community because of network effects, but a decent place to start might be to find a bunch of the popular closed questions on SO and reach out to the questioner and some of the good answerers to come participate on your site instead. If this exists already, I'd love a pointer to it!
- splintercell 11y ago
  Have you looked into Slant.co (https://www.slant.co/ https://www.slant.co/)
drinchev 11y ago
You are right, although sometimes questions pass through the moderators and nothing happens. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16392260/which-websocket-library-to-use-with-node-js http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16392260/which-websocket-... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5062614/how-do-i-decide-when-to-use-node-js http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5062614/how-do-i-decide-w...
Piskvorrr 11y ago
Most of the community? [citation-needed]. Also, I severely doubt that SO === all teh internetz; the premise "if it's not immediately and precisely answered on SO, all hope is lost" is just absurd (and directly contradicts most of the article which sparked this discussion, btw).
froh42 11y ago
With a stackoverflow-like system (rating, moderation, editing of questions by moderators, accepted answer) even such questions would be productive. Subjective ramblings would be voted away, answers showing advantages/disadvantages or similiarities between between frameworks would be rated up. It's just stupid to reduce such a portal to only questions that can be answered by RTFM. Questions that need discussion due to missing information should be voted away, I agree on that. But some allow subjective answers - and those are frequently those that require experience. (What's the best way to solve this-and-that? It depends, in situation a use solution A because, in situation b use solution B because, ...) Such questions typically are being closed by the moderators as well. And frequently the person who asks is not aware of all the factors influencing a solution, so there's a lot of useful information in such questions.

cballard 11y ago

I asked a question on a Stack Exchange site (not SO) that was immediately reported as a duplicate. It wasn't, the duplicate wasn't even close in multiple ways, and someone else jumped in to defend the question - he was then upvoted by several people. Despite this, there is a permanent prompt to either accept that the question is a duplicate, or to edit my question and explain why it isn't. This is nonsensical, because the reason that it isn't a duplicate is inherent in the question itself. I'm not sure how I would edit it without writing a non-sequitur. Even though I've actually accepted a correct answer, I cannot get rid of the prompt.

fossuser 11y ago
Yeah - my experience with the Stack Overflow moderation community has been uniformly negative too, they basically get in the way of the users. Arbitrarily closing/rewriting questions, removing useful information etc. The site can be useful - but only in spite of the community tasked with running it (not because of them) and it makes it frustrating to use.
thomasahle 11y ago
Did you try deleting it and asking it again, rewritten in a way that makes it totally clear why it isn't a duplicate?
Shog9 11y ago
I work for Stack Overflow: it might help to know that the prompt isn't permanent; it will go away in between 4-14 days (as the votes or flags that triggered it age away). We added that prompt because a huge number of people were asking questions that were either duplicates or were so poorly presented that the nugget of information that made them unique was obscured; either way, the asker wasn't getting an answer. It's been live for just under a year now, and the response has been incredible: more duplicate questions are confirmed by the askers themselves than are closed by voters; meanwhile, the number of people editing their questions has also gone up. Sorry you had a bad experience with it, but this is part of the work we've been doing to reduce the amount of conflict and frustration on the part of both askers and answerers.

jeremysmyth 11y ago

and frowns on those that might involve discussion No, it explicitly forbids questions that involve discussion. The point of Stack Overflow is (and to a large extent always was) to be the place for definitive answers (and their alternatives) to well-asked questions. It is not a place for discussions, ranked opinions, interesting conversations, or anything else that does not have a "right" or "best-guess" answer. It so happens that many questions are interesting to the community of people who visit Stack Overflow, but that doesn't mean they are contextually appropriate. If you want a discussion, go elsewhere. This isn't just a "if you don't like it, leave" judgement: it's explicit in the design and mission of the site[1]. There are better places to discuss things, just not on Stack Overflow. [1] "This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat...Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers.", from http://stackoverflow.com/tour http://stackoverflow.com/tour

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

hellofunk 11y ago

SO is definitely a club, and the guys who spend all day on that thing are not necessarily any more knowledgeable than others, despite their score. In fact, many of the most impressive developers I've gotten to know, like Rich Hickey and others, have low scores on the site. You can't judge the contributors by whether or not they know what they are talking about, just whether or not they are addicted to answering questions first before anyone else. And many of them just like the power they have over other users to close and moderate things, often in an unpredictable way. That said, many of the contributors are genuinely helpful and the site has helped me tremendously in the past. But just as many contributors are narcissistic and think they invented both chickens and eggs.

nine_k 11y ago

Some questions apparently don't belong to StackOverflow, because its stated purpose is to collect provably correct answers, not based on (mere) personal opinion. OTOH there is definitely a need for a forum for the questions that get closed on SO but collect a huge number of upvotes. These are important questions and answers, people want and need them, and keep asking and answering them. One important question is whether the approach to the site governance used on stackexchange sites would work on such a forum. Quora tries to somehow serve as such a forum, but it lacks the focus of SO.

nissehulth 11y ago

Indeed. Quite often I google a problem and the first result is a StackOverflow link. But, there's no answer. Someone asked about the same problem and got shut down by mods for some silly reason. Now, if there are other search results that look like they could give me an answer, I simply avoid the SO links.

speeder 11y ago

I was discussing this yesterday with some people on IRC, and thought of writing a blog post about this myself. Despite me being a very experienced programmer (I started to learn coding when I was 6 years old), I find SO extremely hostile. Examples: One question of mine from 2010 got vote closed in 2014 (yes, people will hunt down questions even that later!) and now has vote deletes, also the same question the most upvoted answer is a snarky answer (copy paste of the answer: "You can't eat your cake and have it too.") Recent questions: They all get downvoted and vote-duplicate even when they aren't. I made some questions about RDTSC, people kept arguing with me about how I was doing something wrong, my CTO is retarded, or that I was retarded, or whatnot... and all I wanted was to fix some games (RDTSC behaviour changed from counting CPU cycles, to count whatever arbitrary frequency the hardware wants, this break old games that rely on it counting literal CPU cycles). Another was when I asked details about some bizarre behaviour of Objective-C in recent versions of XCode, people said it was dupe (not exactly), that I was retarded, that it was all in the fucking manual, or that I could google it, and noone EVER replied with a single official answer. I asked then on Quora, found out that XCode DO have non-standard behaviour (ie: stuff that ins't in Obj-C standard, and ins't in official distribution of LLVM), and that the Apple manual is wrong, thus no wonder why I wasn't finding the info on the manual or on google. I asked about these issues on Stackoverflow Meta, got attacked, downvoted, deleted, etc... no meaningful discussion. I am impressed that some people went to great lengths to argue with me without posting a proper answer, one guy even wrote something I considered an answer in the comments, but lacking details, I asked him to expand in an actual answer so I could accept it, and he replied in the comments: "Nah, that would be a waste of bandwidth."