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StackOverflow lost a lot of trust with me. It used to be the goto place to find answers to programming questions, but they must've gotten the incentives wrong,

StackOverflow lost a lot of trust with me. It used to be the goto place to find answers to programming questions, but they must've gotten the incentives wrong, or something, and it just took a long time to surface. In my naive view, you can't post anything on there without it being scrutinized to death. I don't know what the impetus is that brought this on. Was it people gaming the system for reputation?

_nalply 10y ago
Not only. There were (and still are) too many help vampires and they killed something in StackOverflow's community.
- lukasm 10y ago
  I used to be addicted to SO while I was at Uni. Amazing source of knowledge. Wanna learn Python? Go to top 20 questions and answers from `python` tag and read all (e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/231767/what-does-the-yield-keyword-do-in-python http://stackoverflow.com/questions/231767/what-does-the-yiel...) I don't care about "help vampires" I learn from their questions as well. What is more problematic is the SO equivalent of grammar nazi. For example http://stackoverflow.com/questions/652788/what-is-the-worst-real-world-macros-pre-processor-abuse-youve-ever-come-across http://stackoverflow.com/questions/652788/what-is-the-worst-... this is considered a bad question even though I learnt from it a lot.
  - dionidium 10y ago
    Your second example highlights an additional philosophical problem with SO: they think that opinions are distinguishable from facts to a degree not supported by the messiness of reality. Or maybe it's merely that they assume developers are in need of facts more than they are opinions. Either way, I think it's a mistake.
    - barking 10y ago
      "they think that opinions are distinguishable from facts to a degree not supported by the messiness of reality" Upvoted you because this is mine now.
forgottenpass 10y ago
and it just took a long time to surface Stack overflow is good at crowdsourcing the effort to take a google-able question and dig down to the Nth page of results, clean up the answer, and stick it onto a domain that will show up in the first page of results. Anything beyond that is beyond the ability of the crowdsourced labor. It can manifest as controlling editors, pedants, or needless scrutiny. I think those are just symptoms of reaching the extent of the unpaid labor's skills and interests.
- ProAm 10y ago
  You mean re-write the manual? It seems their goal is to seriously have people write the manual vs just posting "RTFM"
Fifer82 10y ago
This so many times. A few months ago, I was trying to wrap my head around a specific bounding volume problem, and honestly, all of the responses sickened me. Not responses to the question, but actual just the SO Nazi's looking for internet points. "Can you please prove what you did" "This is not a good fit, try Programming" "Duplicate" "Downvoted". I just stopped bothering with the whole thing.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  > Not responses to the question, ... I'm surprised. Try an experiment: ask elementary questions in popular tags such as Python. You're bound to see at least half a dozen answers on the question. Your observation is likely to hold true when the question isn't as easy to answer or when the question isn't framed well.
  - TheGRS 10y ago
    SO can be great for general problems, but in all truth you can usually find the answers you're looking for with those on "learn to program" sites or even the documentation (especially in regard to Python). I think where SO shines is when you encounter stuff that the documentation or general programming guides don't answer very well. Usually when I encounter a problem like this I google it and lo-and-behold there's an SO post with the same question, with a detailed answer. I think SO is the best for really specific issues that you encounter where a collective of people can look at the question and one of them goes "oh yea! I had this time problem 2 years ago, here's how you get around that..." The reward system on SO, however, is structured to answer the easy questions quickly or point out that a question is a duplicate from something answered 5+ years ago (which may only be tangentially related). This isn't helpful. Either let someone else answer the question or provide a useful answer. One of the best models I've seen for question/answer stuff so far is on Reddit, surprisingly, on the /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians sub-reddits. They actively encourage duplicate questions because sometimes the facts and interpretations change. Much better and more friendly than SO where it quickly digresses into "have you used the search bar?"
mathattack 10y ago
I think this is deliberate crowd-sourcing the process. They incentives were put there by design to optimize for single-sourcing questions and answers for the benefit of future askers. They have to balance helping the initial questioner versus people 2 through 2 million who may ask the same question in Google search, and want the 1 best answer. They are dramatically favoring the second group. Whether they've gone too far is open for question, but I believe it's deliberate.
0xmohit 10y ago
I gave up on contributing to Stack Overflow a couple of years back. The site comprises of questions that can be mostly categorized as: - FAQs (a single FAQ would have scores of questions, if not more, at least in the popular tags; the same set of contributors would happily copy/paste their answers to similar questions) - too-specific problems (those that would rarely help a visitor; more of a lack of effort on the part of OP or the OP being too lazy) - extremely poorly written questions This doesn't imply that one doesn't get to see good quality posts on the site, but that the majority of the posts are continuously deteriorating in quality. -- You'd also find meta posts that mention issues: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506/question-quality-is-dropping-on-stack-overflow http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506/question-qual... http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/171172/stack-overflow-technology-makes-me-write-bad-answers http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/171172/stack-overflo...
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  I stopped contributing too. I'd add - overly opinionated mods - a question can be clearly popular, useful and have some exceptionally good answers, but still get deleted because some new mod decides years later it's not a proper question. Similar happened to cause the removal of the whole of onstartups. - No attempt to manage time and versioning. It's not a duplicate when all the answers refer to a previous OS or language version. On documentation, I really don't want sub-topics (such as say C++ preprocessor topics), especially those with many, ordered by votes. I'd prefer one of the more "traditional" documentation layouts, but with social aspects, such as voted comments, and perhaps crowdsourced explanations. So for me great idea, poor implementation - lose the format built for Q&A and try again.
  - nulagrithom 10y ago
    > No attempt to manage time and versioning This is super annoying when dealing with JavaScript, especially in a Node.js environment. Often times I'll see an answer using jQuery, and maybe somewhere buried in the comments someone will say "In ES6 you'll be able to `code`". I'm not sure what the solution to that problem is, but it's frustrating.
dionidium 10y ago
The problem is philosophical. StackOverflow is what you get when you accept the proposition that there exists one canonical way to ask each possible question and that there's one corresponding best answer to it. This approach was revolutionary, but, once accepted fully, leads to all sorts of silly limits on behavior.
- d0mine 10y ago
  It is false. There may be multiple ways to ask a question. There may be multiple answers. StackOverflow does not delete duplicate questions i.e., there is a builtin support for asking the exact same question multiple times in various ways. The system supports more than one answer. The accepted answer is not necessarily the best answer (whatever it means) — try http://stackoverflow.com/tour http://stackoverflow.com/tour In contrast, there is a single article per title per language on Wikipedia.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    > StackOverflow does not delete duplicate questions i.e., there is a builtin support for asking the exact same question multiple times in various ways. The second does not follow from the first, because SO does lock duplicate questions and prevent people from answering.
    - d0mine 10y ago
      Yes. Answers to the same question are collected in a single place i.e., it provides the best of both worlds: - it allows to ask the same question using different ways (different people may use different vocabularies to express the exact same problem) - the answers are not scattered -- they can be updated and improved in a single place.
bakhlawa 10y ago
+1 StackOverflow remains a valuable resource but there has been a very clear shift in the responses from nurturing, supporting to snarky and mean. Perhaps it was the intention but I now think twice before posting a question and half expect the first few comments to be along the lines of "Duplicate", "What's with the lame use of <fill in blank>", etc. It really sucks the fun out of coding but alas it has far more positives than negatives.
- recursive 10y ago
  If your goal is to find an answer to your question, then getting a link to a duplicate question that presumably already has good answers seems at least as good as getting your own answers.
  - ProAm 10y ago
    Absolutely untrue. People learn in different manners, sometimes hearing the same answer, phrased or worded differently, makes all the difference in the world in understanding. It doesn't hurt anything to answer a similar question again, it benefits the answerer with practice, and helps the questioner with getting the answer they need.
    - JimDabell 10y ago
      > sometimes hearing the same answer, phrased or worded differently, makes all the difference in the world in understanding. If you don't understand the answer, leave a comment asking for clarification. > It doesn't hurt anything to answer a similar question again Having people ask you the same questions over and over again who don't care at all about wasting your time drives away the people most able to answer questions. It's happened time and time again with every type of developer discussion forum I've seen – either the rules are strict to encourage people to try their best and avoid wasting human effort, or the experienced developers eventually get fed up being treated like search engines and leave, resulting in a forum far less able to answer questions. I can't think of a place that's not ended up in one of these two situations.
sametmax 10y ago
It's the wikipedia syndrom. Old timers enforcing rules, more and more rules being added, the bar is raised to new commers.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  It's certainly better than the alternative. You can see what happens to the quality of discussion on subreddits that started small, then became big.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    I don't see the horrific wasteland others do on those subreddits which I participate in. In fact, I am significantly more likely to ask my own questions there than SO.
maccard 10y ago
I was looking for an answer to something this afternoon. The question I found was closed as a duplicate. The question it was marked as was also closed as a duplicate, and the question _it_ referred to had the answer, under a long list of comments explaining why the user should do something different. Said question was also flagged as a duplicate, of the other two questions I had gone through to get there. Anything simple enough to be answered is marked Ada duplicate, and anything not duplicated doesn't get answered..
- adelarsq 10y ago
  I was thinking that was only me that notice that... sad
VikingCoder 10y ago
Your reply has been Cursed to Hades for not being stack overflowy enough, even though it was the accepted answer, and has received hundreds of votes. Also the whole question has been Excommunicated for not being (mumble-mumble-mumble) enough. Even though it was the highest voted question of all time, with thousands of responses from beloved members of the community. You both should feel ashamed of yourselves. -by Vlad The Impaler, Feb 2 '14 at 20:41
blakeyrat 10y ago
I've never successfully had a question answered in StackOverflow. I have had one question "answered" by a person who obviously didn't at all read the question. I think this is because the only people on that platform are the people who love getting imaginary Internet Reputation Pointzzz next to their name, and those people will never answer difficult questions because the same amount of work could get a more points if applied to a dozen simple questions. And I never ask a question until I'm truly stumped, i.e., it's difficult. In theory, I could put a "bounty" on the question to get it answered, but since I don't give a crap about Internet Pointzzz I don't bother spending hours building up my points on easy questions just so when a difficult question comes along I can spend those points to try and get other people to answer it. Anyway, it's just Wikipedia all over again. If you "gamify" a site, after a few years, the only people left are the people who care about the Internet Pointzzz, who have driven all the people who cared about the original mission away. (In the case of Wikipedia, by edit wars, in case of StackOverflow by voting to close literally everything.)
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  I participated in SO just enough to have a couple of solid, accepted responses, then lost interest.
- jaredsohn 10y ago
  As a point of contrast, I have posted questions about Chrome extensions that weren't answered anywhere and had people help diagnose the quirks with me. I didn't create a bounty.
- DanBC 10y ago
  > Anyway, it's just Wikipedia all over again. I'm not a huge fan of either site, but Wikipedia is considerably worse than SE precisely because Wikipedia's meta stuff is out of control, and SE started with the concept of "meta is death". There's easily hundreds of thousands of words of meta-discussion about whether to use n dash, m dash, hyphen or minus between words like "Mexican American War". They're both somewhat hostile to new users of the site.
type0 10y ago
> Was it people gaming the system for reputation? It is more of the system gaming the users, even Atwood criticized it for having evolved to rely on too much of gamification aspects.
bmer 10y ago
I would still highly recommend the StackExchange network in general. A lot of the sites on the network are programming related, and if your question fits in on StackOverflow, its possible it might fit in on one of the related network sites---post your question there instead, for better feedback and answers.

_nalply 10y ago

Not only. There were (and still are) too many help vampires and they killed something in StackOverflow's community.

lukasm 10y ago
I used to be addicted to SO while I was at Uni. Amazing source of knowledge. Wanna learn Python? Go to top 20 questions and answers from `python` tag and read all (e.g. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/231767/what-does-the-yield-keyword-do-in-python http://stackoverflow.com/questions/231767/what-does-the-yiel...) I don't care about "help vampires" I learn from their questions as well. What is more problematic is the SO equivalent of grammar nazi. For example http://stackoverflow.com/questions/652788/what-is-the-worst-real-world-macros-pre-processor-abuse-youve-ever-come-across http://stackoverflow.com/questions/652788/what-is-the-worst-... this is considered a bad question even though I learnt from it a lot.
- dionidium 10y ago
  Your second example highlights an additional philosophical problem with SO: they think that opinions are distinguishable from facts to a degree not supported by the messiness of reality. Or maybe it's merely that they assume developers are in need of facts more than they are opinions. Either way, I think it's a mistake.
  - barking 10y ago
    "they think that opinions are distinguishable from facts to a degree not supported by the messiness of reality" Upvoted you because this is mine now.

forgottenpass 10y ago

and it just took a long time to surface Stack overflow is good at crowdsourcing the effort to take a google-able question and dig down to the Nth page of results, clean up the answer, and stick it onto a domain that will show up in the first page of results. Anything beyond that is beyond the ability of the crowdsourced labor. It can manifest as controlling editors, pedants, or needless scrutiny. I think those are just symptoms of reaching the extent of the unpaid labor's skills and interests.

ProAm 10y ago
You mean re-write the manual? It seems their goal is to seriously have people write the manual vs just posting "RTFM"

Fifer82 10y ago

This so many times. A few months ago, I was trying to wrap my head around a specific bounding volume problem, and honestly, all of the responses sickened me. Not responses to the question, but actual just the SO Nazi's looking for internet points. "Can you please prove what you did" "This is not a good fit, try Programming" "Duplicate" "Downvoted". I just stopped bothering with the whole thing.

0xmohit 10y ago
> Not responses to the question, ... I'm surprised. Try an experiment: ask elementary questions in popular tags such as Python. You're bound to see at least half a dozen answers on the question. Your observation is likely to hold true when the question isn't as easy to answer or when the question isn't framed well.
- TheGRS 10y ago
  SO can be great for general problems, but in all truth you can usually find the answers you're looking for with those on "learn to program" sites or even the documentation (especially in regard to Python). I think where SO shines is when you encounter stuff that the documentation or general programming guides don't answer very well. Usually when I encounter a problem like this I google it and lo-and-behold there's an SO post with the same question, with a detailed answer. I think SO is the best for really specific issues that you encounter where a collective of people can look at the question and one of them goes "oh yea! I had this time problem 2 years ago, here's how you get around that..." The reward system on SO, however, is structured to answer the easy questions quickly or point out that a question is a duplicate from something answered 5+ years ago (which may only be tangentially related). This isn't helpful. Either let someone else answer the question or provide a useful answer. One of the best models I've seen for question/answer stuff so far is on Reddit, surprisingly, on the /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians sub-reddits. They actively encourage duplicate questions because sometimes the facts and interpretations change. Much better and more friendly than SO where it quickly digresses into "have you used the search bar?"

mathattack 10y ago

I think this is deliberate crowd-sourcing the process. They incentives were put there by design to optimize for single-sourcing questions and answers for the benefit of future askers. They have to balance helping the initial questioner versus people 2 through 2 million who may ask the same question in Google search, and want the 1 best answer. They are dramatically favoring the second group. Whether they've gone too far is open for question, but I believe it's deliberate.

0xmohit 10y ago

I gave up on contributing to Stack Overflow a couple of years back. The site comprises of questions that can be mostly categorized as: - FAQs (a single FAQ would have scores of questions, if not more, at least in the popular tags; the same set of contributors would happily copy/paste their answers to similar questions) - too-specific problems (those that would rarely help a visitor; more of a lack of effort on the part of OP or the OP being too lazy) - extremely poorly written questions This doesn't imply that one doesn't get to see good quality posts on the site, but that the majority of the posts are continuously deteriorating in quality. -- You'd also find meta posts that mention issues: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506/question-quality-is-dropping-on-stack-overflow http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506/question-qual... http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/171172/stack-overflow-technology-makes-me-write-bad-answers http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/171172/stack-overflo...

anexprogrammer 10y ago
I stopped contributing too. I'd add - overly opinionated mods - a question can be clearly popular, useful and have some exceptionally good answers, but still get deleted because some new mod decides years later it's not a proper question. Similar happened to cause the removal of the whole of onstartups. - No attempt to manage time and versioning. It's not a duplicate when all the answers refer to a previous OS or language version. On documentation, I really don't want sub-topics (such as say C++ preprocessor topics), especially those with many, ordered by votes. I'd prefer one of the more "traditional" documentation layouts, but with social aspects, such as voted comments, and perhaps crowdsourced explanations. So for me great idea, poor implementation - lose the format built for Q&A and try again.
- nulagrithom 10y ago
  > No attempt to manage time and versioning This is super annoying when dealing with JavaScript, especially in a Node.js environment. Often times I'll see an answer using jQuery, and maybe somewhere buried in the comments someone will say "In ES6 you'll be able to `code`". I'm not sure what the solution to that problem is, but it's frustrating.

dionidium 10y ago

The problem is philosophical. StackOverflow is what you get when you accept the proposition that there exists one canonical way to ask each possible question and that there's one corresponding best answer to it. This approach was revolutionary, but, once accepted fully, leads to all sorts of silly limits on behavior.

d0mine 10y ago
It is false. There may be multiple ways to ask a question. There may be multiple answers. StackOverflow does not delete duplicate questions i.e., there is a builtin support for asking the exact same question multiple times in various ways. The system supports more than one answer. The accepted answer is not necessarily the best answer (whatever it means) — try http://stackoverflow.com/tour http://stackoverflow.com/tour In contrast, there is a single article per title per language on Wikipedia.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  > StackOverflow does not delete duplicate questions i.e., there is a builtin support for asking the exact same question multiple times in various ways. The second does not follow from the first, because SO does lock duplicate questions and prevent people from answering.
  - d0mine 10y ago
    Yes. Answers to the same question are collected in a single place i.e., it provides the best of both worlds: - it allows to ask the same question using different ways (different people may use different vocabularies to express the exact same problem) - the answers are not scattered -- they can be updated and improved in a single place.

bakhlawa 10y ago

+1 StackOverflow remains a valuable resource but there has been a very clear shift in the responses from nurturing, supporting to snarky and mean. Perhaps it was the intention but I now think twice before posting a question and half expect the first few comments to be along the lines of "Duplicate", "What's with the lame use of <fill in blank>", etc. It really sucks the fun out of coding but alas it has far more positives than negatives.

recursive 10y ago
If your goal is to find an answer to your question, then getting a link to a duplicate question that presumably already has good answers seems at least as good as getting your own answers.
- ProAm 10y ago
  Absolutely untrue. People learn in different manners, sometimes hearing the same answer, phrased or worded differently, makes all the difference in the world in understanding. It doesn't hurt anything to answer a similar question again, it benefits the answerer with practice, and helps the questioner with getting the answer they need.
  - JimDabell 10y ago
    > sometimes hearing the same answer, phrased or worded differently, makes all the difference in the world in understanding. If you don't understand the answer, leave a comment asking for clarification. > It doesn't hurt anything to answer a similar question again Having people ask you the same questions over and over again who don't care at all about wasting your time drives away the people most able to answer questions. It's happened time and time again with every type of developer discussion forum I've seen – either the rules are strict to encourage people to try their best and avoid wasting human effort, or the experienced developers eventually get fed up being treated like search engines and leave, resulting in a forum far less able to answer questions. I can't think of a place that's not ended up in one of these two situations.

sametmax 10y ago

It's the wikipedia syndrom. Old timers enforcing rules, more and more rules being added, the bar is raised to new commers.

antisthenes 10y ago
It's certainly better than the alternative. You can see what happens to the quality of discussion on subreddits that started small, then became big.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  I don't see the horrific wasteland others do on those subreddits which I participate in. In fact, I am significantly more likely to ask my own questions there than SO.

maccard 10y ago

I was looking for an answer to something this afternoon. The question I found was closed as a duplicate. The question it was marked as was also closed as a duplicate, and the question _it_ referred to had the answer, under a long list of comments explaining why the user should do something different. Said question was also flagged as a duplicate, of the other two questions I had gone through to get there. Anything simple enough to be answered is marked Ada duplicate, and anything not duplicated doesn't get answered..

adelarsq 10y ago
I was thinking that was only me that notice that... sad

VikingCoder 10y ago

Your reply has been Cursed to Hades for not being stack overflowy enough, even though it was the accepted answer, and has received hundreds of votes. Also the whole question has been Excommunicated for not being (mumble-mumble-mumble) enough. Even though it was the highest voted question of all time, with thousands of responses from beloved members of the community. You both should feel ashamed of yourselves. -by Vlad The Impaler, Feb 2 '14 at 20:41

blakeyrat 10y ago

I've never successfully had a question answered in StackOverflow. I have had one question "answered" by a person who obviously didn't at all read the question. I think this is because the only people on that platform are the people who love getting imaginary Internet Reputation Pointzzz next to their name, and those people will never answer difficult questions because the same amount of work could get a more points if applied to a dozen simple questions. And I never ask a question until I'm truly stumped, i.e., it's difficult. In theory, I could put a "bounty" on the question to get it answered, but since I don't give a crap about Internet Pointzzz I don't bother spending hours building up my points on easy questions just so when a difficult question comes along I can spend those points to try and get other people to answer it. Anyway, it's just Wikipedia all over again. If you "gamify" a site, after a few years, the only people left are the people who care about the Internet Pointzzz, who have driven all the people who cared about the original mission away. (In the case of Wikipedia, by edit wars, in case of StackOverflow by voting to close literally everything.)

LyndsySimon 10y ago
I participated in SO just enough to have a couple of solid, accepted responses, then lost interest.
jaredsohn 10y ago
As a point of contrast, I have posted questions about Chrome extensions that weren't answered anywhere and had people help diagnose the quirks with me. I didn't create a bounty.
DanBC 10y ago
> Anyway, it's just Wikipedia all over again. I'm not a huge fan of either site, but Wikipedia is considerably worse than SE precisely because Wikipedia's meta stuff is out of control, and SE started with the concept of "meta is death". There's easily hundreds of thousands of words of meta-discussion about whether to use n dash, m dash, hyphen or minus between words like "Mexican American War". They're both somewhat hostile to new users of the site.

type0 10y ago

> Was it people gaming the system for reputation? It is more of the system gaming the users, even Atwood criticized it for having evolved to rely on too much of gamification aspects.

bmer 10y ago

I would still highly recommend the StackExchange network in general. A lot of the sites on the network are programming related, and if your question fits in on StackOverflow, its possible it might fit in on one of the related network sites---post your question there instead, for better feedback and answers.