4 ms·

Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to participate in. It's a shame.

by msftie 10y ago

grawlinson 10y ago
I'm split on this topic, I've often asked a few questions and got very hostile responses & topic closed. On the other hand, some of my questions have been answered in depth by some very nice contributors; Jon Skeet being one of these. In my opinion, it's just another unfortunate side effect of anonymity on the internet. It's terrible, and I wish people were nicer to each other.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- reitanqild 10y ago
  It has little to do with anonymity: local newspapers demand you sign off comments with your Facebook account. The result? The only people that comment are trolls with fake account, people who have too strong opinions or don't care about their next job interview or people with "correct" opinions. Meanwhile I rarely see anyone here or at the Ars Technica comment sections suggest we nuke one country or the other (and if anybody do we collectively moderate them beyond ground level.)
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  At this point I would rather go to reddit (reddit!!) with technical questions instead of stack overflow.
toyg 10y ago
I think it's a bit like Wikipedia: the more you hang around, the less you like it. It's understandable though; after the 12324th question that basically boils down to "please do my homework", even a saint would lose his shit. It's the inevitable fate of every "beginners' resource", from IRC to forums, in the long run. Personally, I had decent experiences in most cases. I never got over the fact that it refuses to become the de-facto point of reference for stacks, i.e. questions like "what are the best web libraries for $language", "what is the best practice for deploying $framework" are brutally rejected. And it's a shame, because those would have helped immensely -- it's very easy to learn a language, but it's really hard to figure out what you should use from the surrounding ecosystem.
- tajen 10y ago
  Where are we supposed to get opinions from? Would we have a success if we started "OpinionStack.com"? I believe if we did so, we should outdate the votes, so the top answer would be the most fashionable nowadays.
  - danbruc 10y ago
    Code Review [1] is a thing. But that comes with the same problems - nobody wants to review reading from a text file in language X over and over again. [1] http://codereview.stackexchange.com http://codereview.stackexchange.com
  - ricree 10y ago
    This seems like a good use case of their community wiki feature. List the major ones, and suggest the rationale and tradeoffs for the different major choices.
    - Shog9 10y ago
      You can actually find a few of these questions floating around marked as "wiki answer" and locked to prevent the otherwise inevitable flood of duplicate answers. Problem is that most people don't want to maintain these lists. The handful of exceptions stand out precisely because they have a few dedicated maintainers who've dutifully kept them relevant for years... Most of them, though, died from neglect and were eventually deleted out of mercy.
- Latty 10y ago
  If people really wanted or needed those lists, someone would create a site for that purpose. The reality is that such a site would fail terribly, because those kinds of lists are opinions people won't agree on, and go out of date incredibly quickly. If you search for such a thing, you'll find blog posts from people giving such lists, and most of them will be useless because they are out of date. StackOverflow is a good resource precisely because it's curated and maintained, including rejecting content that doesn't work on the site. Just like Wikipedia doesn't allow you to have your own page listing your opinions.
danbruc 10y ago
This kind of cuts both ways. I stopped answering Stack Overflow questions because now there is such a huge amount of trivial questions that are easily answered reading manuals or tutorials that it became hard to find interesting questions to answer. There are certainly other factors at play like me getting more experienced and therefore what I consider interesting shifted, Stack Overflow already has answers to a huge amount of questions and so on. But I am pretty sure that the kind of questions asked objectively shifted quite a bit towards trivial questions. Now it depends on what you think about what Stack Overflow is supposed to be. I personally think Stack Overflow should be focused on providing information that not already exists, I don't think it should try to replicate or link to every manual and tutorial out there. This stuff already exists and is hopefully actively maintained by the language and library developers, so what is the point of duplicating it? I think Stack Overflow should not be about teaching people how to code but help them to solve hard problems. What constitutes a hard problem of course heavily depends on one's experience and abilities so the line is kind of arbitrary but I would say that if it is in a beginners tutorial or the manual, then it is not a hard problem. I certainly unterstand the desire to get problems solved within minutes but I also think that is not really a good thing. No matter how good and experienced a developer you are, you will come across problems that take hours and days to solve again and again. Reading ten pages of a manual should really not be considered an annoyance but a valuable skill. Very often you will already have a rough idea of how you want to solve your problem and just look for some very specific information, but if you take the time to read about it you will often find that your initial solution is actually not that great and there is a different preferred way to do it. So if there is one advice I would give to beginners than it definitely is »Read the fucking manual!« and probably read it twice.

Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to participate in. It's a shame.

by msftie 10y ago

Amen. In my opinion, SO has become a very toxic and discouraging community to participate in. It's a shame.

I'm split on this topic, I've often asked a few questions and got very hostile responses & topic closed. On the other hand, some of my questions have been answered in depth by some very nice contributors; Jon Skeet being one of these. In my opinion, it's just another unfortunate side effect of anonymity on the internet. It's terrible, and I wish people were nicer to each other.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
reitanqild 10y ago
It has little to do with anonymity: local newspapers demand you sign off comments with your Facebook account. The result? The only people that comment are trolls with fake account, people who have too strong opinions or don't care about their next job interview or people with "correct" opinions. Meanwhile I rarely see anyone here or at the Ars Technica comment sections suggest we nuke one country or the other (and if anybody do we collectively moderate them beyond ground level.)
GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
At this point I would rather go to reddit (reddit!!) with technical questions instead of stack overflow.

toyg 10y ago

I think it's a bit like Wikipedia: the more you hang around, the less you like it. It's understandable though; after the 12324th question that basically boils down to "please do my homework", even a saint would lose his shit. It's the inevitable fate of every "beginners' resource", from IRC to forums, in the long run. Personally, I had decent experiences in most cases. I never got over the fact that it refuses to become the de-facto point of reference for stacks, i.e. questions like "what are the best web libraries for $language", "what is the best practice for deploying $framework" are brutally rejected. And it's a shame, because those would have helped immensely -- it's very easy to learn a language, but it's really hard to figure out what you should use from the surrounding ecosystem.

tajen 10y ago
Where are we supposed to get opinions from? Would we have a success if we started "OpinionStack.com"? I believe if we did so, we should outdate the votes, so the top answer would be the most fashionable nowadays.
- danbruc 10y ago
  Code Review [1] is a thing. But that comes with the same problems - nobody wants to review reading from a text file in language X over and over again. [1] http://codereview.stackexchange.com http://codereview.stackexchange.com
- ricree 10y ago
  This seems like a good use case of their community wiki feature. List the major ones, and suggest the rationale and tradeoffs for the different major choices.
  - Shog9 10y ago
    You can actually find a few of these questions floating around marked as "wiki answer" and locked to prevent the otherwise inevitable flood of duplicate answers. Problem is that most people don't want to maintain these lists. The handful of exceptions stand out precisely because they have a few dedicated maintainers who've dutifully kept them relevant for years... Most of them, though, died from neglect and were eventually deleted out of mercy.
Latty 10y ago
If people really wanted or needed those lists, someone would create a site for that purpose. The reality is that such a site would fail terribly, because those kinds of lists are opinions people won't agree on, and go out of date incredibly quickly. If you search for such a thing, you'll find blog posts from people giving such lists, and most of them will be useless because they are out of date. StackOverflow is a good resource precisely because it's curated and maintained, including rejecting content that doesn't work on the site. Just like Wikipedia doesn't allow you to have your own page listing your opinions.

danbruc 10y ago

This kind of cuts both ways. I stopped answering Stack Overflow questions because now there is such a huge amount of trivial questions that are easily answered reading manuals or tutorials that it became hard to find interesting questions to answer. There are certainly other factors at play like me getting more experienced and therefore what I consider interesting shifted, Stack Overflow already has answers to a huge amount of questions and so on. But I am pretty sure that the kind of questions asked objectively shifted quite a bit towards trivial questions. Now it depends on what you think about what Stack Overflow is supposed to be. I personally think Stack Overflow should be focused on providing information that not already exists, I don't think it should try to replicate or link to every manual and tutorial out there. This stuff already exists and is hopefully actively maintained by the language and library developers, so what is the point of duplicating it? I think Stack Overflow should not be about teaching people how to code but help them to solve hard problems. What constitutes a hard problem of course heavily depends on one's experience and abilities so the line is kind of arbitrary but I would say that if it is in a beginners tutorial or the manual, then it is not a hard problem. I certainly unterstand the desire to get problems solved within minutes but I also think that is not really a good thing. No matter how good and experienced a developer you are, you will come across problems that take hours and days to solve again and again. Reading ten pages of a manual should really not be considered an annoyance but a valuable skill. Very often you will already have a rough idea of how you want to solve your problem and just look for some very specific information, but if you take the time to read about it you will often find that your initial solution is actually not that great and there is a different preferred way to do it. So if there is one advice I would give to beginners than it definitely is »Read the fucking manual!« and probably read it twice.