4 ms·

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 wo

by 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.

by 0xmohit 10y ago

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.