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The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

• obj-g 10y ago
  I worship SO like the all-knowing deity it is, but I don't love it. It's a cruel god, like that of the Old Testament. I've never contributed to the site, though I've used it for years, and I never will -- simply because it's too arcane and silly and I don't wish to play the reputation game just to leave a simple comment or whatever. When a new god appears, I'll surrender completely.
• kjhughes 10y ago
  None of the Stack Overflow moderation irritations matter to me in the end. All that really matters to me is that SO has employed a reputation system that provides a strong quality signal for answers to questions that I have. This allows me to quickly assess the quality of any given answer based upon the reputation of the answerer and the upvotes that the answer has received. All other SO problems, including any aggravations encountered while trying to give back to that community, are relatively insignificant.
• okket 10y ago
  (2015) Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837442 (1 year ago, 39 comments)
  • wslh 10y ago
    More decline in 2016. Questions are not being answered in general or there are professionals responders who don't really understand what you are talking about. In the other hand there are exciting discussions in the other *.stackexchange.com sites (e.g. reverseengineering, ethereum).
    • tedmiston 10y ago
      I'm not so sure I agree. I've answered a few Python questions this year. Most of which have gotten several answers pretty quickly. If they didn't get answers, it was often a question that was a poor fit for Stack Overflow (e.g., very specific to a framework, something readily available in the docs).
    • gnudon 10y ago
      Yeah, I know I've engendered some unjust vitriol with SO questions (got referred to Hackers - same thing), where the question was non-nonchalantly labeled as polling - and I knew it wasn't because I'd spent hours going through Google Scholar and the ACM databases. But my elaboration only angered someone with a 10K ref who could downvote me all day long.
  • willvarfar 10y ago
    Another article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4131462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4131462 Even older, lots of comments :)
  • reitanqild 10y ago
    Doesn't get old. SO is so amazingly useful that I'd like to upvote discuss it weekly if it would result in either SO getting fixed or someone making a better one.
    • astrobe_ 10y ago
      I imagine the better/next one would be build around an AI that learns from users in order to answer to users, all through a chat-like interface. No up/downvote or moderation needed, the AI determines by interacting with the users what is useful and correct, and what is not.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• Latty 10y ago
  People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before. Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on that (a lot of the more hostile rule enforcement tropes are banned and filtered against), and it's a hard problem. SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good. If you want to kill it, please go ahead and solve the issue of explaining to users how to contribute quality content and getting them to take that in instantly. I used to contribute a lot, which tapered off as I had other things filling my time. Towards the end though, the help vampires were getting to me, and I understand why people are harsh towards new users in some situations, it's an easy trap to fall into. Trying to fix that problem by stopping the curation of the content is insane, however. That's a fast route to going from some people being turned away to having no decent content.
  • samfisher83 10y ago
    So many of the useful answers are closed. A lot of the stuff from google etc. are from 2009-2011. It seems like now most of people are a bunch of assholes trying to be elitists.
    • joekrie 10y ago
      It's especially irritating when these elitist types clearly don't know as much as they think they do.
      • dominotw 10y ago
        seems like a good outlet for nerdy power fantasies.
        • fuck_google 10y ago
          Seems like a good outlet for googlers. ;)
• dismantlethesun 10y ago
  I've found that if you go to Stackoverflow for a fast-moving topic like Javascript, the first answer isn't correct in modern terms. The next set of answers, without check marks, are likely more correct. So you have to read the entire page to get a glimpse of the truth. This can be bad if you're just looking for an immediate solution, however for learning its fantastic because it shows you a recorded history of how things evolved over time in a framework.
  • hjnilsson 10y ago
    I think the crusade against duplicates worsens this problem. If duplicates were more accepted, it would both make it more welcoming for newcomers to ask questions, and encourage people to update the answers to old questions (by answering the new questions).
    • notyourwork 10y ago
      I'm not sure what the right answer is but I agree duplicate answers allow me to garner different perspectives or approaches to the same problem. This can be very helpful as you might be missing a simple parameter that makes the checked answer not correct in your situation.
    • chipperyman573 10y ago
      I've found that if I acknowledge the duplicate (which is very easy considering when you post a new question it shows you similar posts) and state a reason it doesn't work any more (even if that is just, "has anything changed?") it rarely gets flagged as a dupe.
    • x1798DE 10y ago
      I don't totally understand why people worry so much about your question being marked as a duplicate. Questions marked as duplicates are not deleted and still show up in search results - the reason why duplicates are still kept around after being marked is because they sorta want duplicate questions on the site, because every person is going to state their query in slightly different language, and you want people searching using different terms to end up in the same place. Most of the time if your question is mostly a duplicate but the other question (or its answer) is missing some critical factor, then you can appeal and say, "I don't think this is a duplicate of <x> because <y>" (or modify your question with the stipulation that the answer solve the critical factor) and the duplicate marking will be removed. The other thing is, even when questions get marked as duplicates or closed, half the time I still see them accumulating their own answers, so really, what's the big issue?
• Dowwie 10y ago
  I disagree with this. SO helped me with Python, Postgres, and SQL countless times. If we are going to consider the value of SO, I would argue that it is a cornerstone.
  • joekrie 10y ago
    I find some topics are much better than others on SO. It's pretty useful for Python and SQL, from my experience.
  • marcosdumay 10y ago
    I've found the Postgres docs almost always more informative, clearer, and more correct than anything I find on SO. The only exceptions are for "how can I achieve this goal" questions, instead of the much more common "how can I implement this idea" ones. Most useful info about Python from SO are pointers to the official docs in content-free answers. What is very valuable, because the docs are hard to navigate, but not what is expected. About Haskell, C, or Perl, I currently ignore SO links, it's just less bother to go to the next result, and way more likely to get something useful. But for Javascript, .Net, MS SQL, and a lot of other random stuff, SO is unbeatable.
• dustingetz 10y ago
  Point based moderation generates toxicity, hacker news gets toxic too. Stack Overflow went all in on moderation before they understood the social consequences of it. There's an opportunity here for a social network with a moderation system that cares about how it makes people feel and how feelings impact user generated content.
  • clairity 10y ago
    this is a really important point. how do you curate for good content while not demoralizing contributors? and it's a more generalized social challenge. in coaching for example, you need to improve a player's abilities and instincts, which essentially implies that what they're currently doing is not so great. the easiest people to coach understand that they are not already perfect. those who are hardest to coach are those who already believe they are good enough. for the player, there's a tension between having the self-esteem to assert yourself while having the maturity to accept criticism. you need to be able to encourage both behaviors while maintaining a balance between them. as you point out, the challenge for an online moderation system is providing a similar balance to users/contributors. the social distance between contributors and moderators makes it hard not to become defensive.
    • shagie 10y ago
      With a dozen exceptions for the diamond (elected) mods, all the moderators are from the community and got to that point with contributions. Nearly all of the are still contributing and moderate as part of the process of trying to find things to answer.
  • pjc50 10y ago
    > moderation system that cares about how it makes people feel Definitely something that's very much needed. But I don't think anyone knows what it would look like and what the distribution of emotional labour would be.
• sylvinus 10y ago
  What most people fail to understand (but was explained very well by Joel in some talks) is that SO is primarily optimized for Google & read-only users just looking for the answer to a common issue. By that metric they are extremely successful. Many things people complain about are deliberate design choices that actually made SO popular in the first place.
  • reitanqild 10y ago
    AFAIK SO was wildly popular before the current behaviour.
• godelski 10y ago
  One interesting issue with the duplicate answers is that if you notice later a typo in your answer and edit it you get pushed to the bottom of the answer stack, despite having the first answer. This seems like an issue SO could solve to help contributors. I doubt many abuse the system to completely rewrite an answer and stay on top.
  • shagie 10y ago
    In what ordering do you see this feature? Votes, active, or newest. Answers that have the same score are randomly ordered when sorting by votes.
    • godelski 10y ago
      What I've noticed it on it like this example. Post quick answer to simple question. Someone comments on my post pointing out a really simple typo. Fix typo, answer sorts to the bottom of the stack of answers of the save vote number. It always seems to go to the bottom and not a random order, at least in my experience.
• firefoxd 10y ago
  No,SO is not declining. All the common questions have already been answered. The main problem is people don't research their problem for more then a minute before asking a question.
  • bdcravens 10y ago
    > All the common questions have already been answered. This is true if there are no new languages or frameworks. > The main problem is people don't research their problem for more then a minute before asking a question. This has been true since the beginning of time. However, it does feel that the responses on SO have gotten more trollish over time.
  • reitanqild 10y ago
    As someone who sometimes ask non-trivial questions that other people sometimes find useful I don't think this is the complete answer: I, and I guess others, can easily hesitate a full day, doing search after search after search, before asking on SO. On the other hand SO makes it really simple to create new accounts and ask questions. If they really were concerned about answering the same questions again and again they would implement some basic rules like limiting new users from asking questions untilntyey had been active for a full day or something. Weirdly enough it seems people like to complain about the workload while at the same time refusing to do anything to reduce it. In fact it is almost as if they enjoy moderating noobs :-|
  • qznc 10y ago
    So the next step is to add AI to answer duplicates automatically?
  • johnslegers 10y ago
    Try asking questions involving obscure or complex programming problems for which no previous questions exist. Try getting ANY answer at all.
• mhomde 10y ago
  I'm a bit divided about Stack Overflow. On one hand side it's simply one, if not the best, resource for programmers. On the other hand it's become somewhat toxic and counterproductive. The better you become as a programmer the less value you derive from it. The true niche experts are less and less to be found (ie Product/Project -owners and Microsoft/Google/Apple etc -employees) and the other replies will often be exasperating mixture of trying to give answers they've googled or complain about some meta-aspect of the question. Any community that reaches a certain size will face unique problems and I think Stack Overflow has some of the same problem as reddit does: you have to be very careful on how you give power to users. Power corrupts and becomes a goal/game in itself. Karma/power is a great incentive in the beginning of a community, but can become destructive in the long run. That some programmers have a certain type of personality is probably not helping either. There seems to be many småpåvar on Stack Overflow that loves to wield the small amount of power they've accrued without actually contributing that much. On the other hand you have to enforce rules and curation to keep quality up. It's a very fine balance and hard to get right. It's mostly about human psychology and incentives. I think there's some tweaks they could do to improve things but I also understand that from their perspective why change something that works? The danger is that the true experts stop helping/answering questions on Stack Overflow because they find the community becoming too toxic. Might turn into a downwards spiral until there's mostly trolls and newbies left.
  • shagie 10y ago
    You may find A Group Is It's Own Worst Enemy an interesting read http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem... - the things to design for and the things one must accept speak to some of your thoughts.
    • mhomde 10y ago
      Ahh, Shirky is always good, thanks for the link
  • teach 10y ago
    > The better you become as a programmer the less value you derive from it. This has been my experience exactly. I'd been coding for 20+ years before Stack Overflow even existed. I nevertheless find many good answers on SO via Google searches. But virtually all of my questions are either downvoted to oblivion or closed as "duplicates". I spend hours trying to solve the problem myself and spend even more time reducing the problem to the smallest reproducible test case before asking. And then some moderator closes as a duplicate because it looks similar enough to some other question he's seen before. It's incredibly frustrating, to the point that I've stopped participating at all other than to upvote good answers.
• AdrienChey 10y ago
  The article is probably right about some factors that explain the "77% of users only ask one question". But IMOHO it miss an important one: Most of the user find answer to their question only by searching. In fact once you get rejected (by a troll or not) for asking a question that you would have been able to find on SO, you became more careful before posting. Also don't forget that a huge majority of the net user are ghost / read only :)
• exabrial 10y ago
  It's the best resource by a mile, but the site is filled with grumpy people!
  • mwfunk 10y ago
    I guess I always figured those things were strongly related (in the causation sense, not just the correlation sense).
• executesorder66 10y ago
  What we need instead of SO is a wiki similar to the Arch wiki, but for all IT related troubleshooting problems. Instead of removing "duplicate questions" we can just refine the details of that section of the wiki with more information.
  • Gracana 10y ago
    The c2.com wiki is a nice alternative in this space. It's not quite what you're describing, but I think it's worth checking out of your after a general-software-stuff wiki.
• ams6110 10y ago
  Sounds very much like the wikepedia problem: a bunch of long-term members working as mods don't have patience for new people and are hostile to people who aren't already in the club.
• sklivvz1971 10y ago
  Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the community. After a few years, I've heard it all.
  • Eupolemos 10y ago
    What do you mean by "vampires"? I have an interest in forums, but I'm not familiar with that "category".
    • sklivvz1971 10y ago
      People that post a whole program that does not work and ask the community to fix it for them... "Give me teh codez..." etc
      • Eupolemos 10y ago
        Ah, thank you.
    • discreditable 10y ago
      Help Vampires are users who incessantly ask simple and/or previously-answered questions and provide nothing of value to the community. Over time, they can drive valuable contributors away. http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/ http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/
      • DanBC 10y ago
        And here's the meta discussion: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampire-problem http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampi...
      • exstudent2 10y ago
• jawarner 10y ago
  Similar community problems happened on Wikipedia. Give many users moderation power, and they'll each enforce their own view of what the site should be.
• yladiz 10y ago
  Sure, Stack Overflow kind of sucks sometimes and people are sometimes really up their own asses about things being exactly right and having a question worded explicitly, but it is by far the best resource for programmers to find help from other programmers due to its ubiquitousness in the programming community. I haven't found any other alternatives better; Quora isn't useful for programming questions (a general Q&A/opinion style question is better suited for Quora, but not "What's wrong with my code?"), and I wouldn't use ExpertsExchange. Are there any other notable places to ask these kinds of questions? So it sucks, but there's no resources to replace it. You might not like it and because it's not something that you have to help with you are free to stop contributing (e.g. you can't just say, "I don't like this, I'm going to stop working on it" at work), but why not help everyone and contribute, either to Stack Overflow or by making a new, better resource, rather than being grumpy and only helping your pessimistic self feel better? An aside: The header image lags considerably when I scroll (on Safari 10)... Why isn't it just a static image on the page, and have JS to detect when the aspect ratio changes on a page level rather than an image level?
• oskarth 10y ago
  > However, a 2013 study has found that 77% of users only ask one question, 65% only answer one question, and only 8% of users answer more than 5 questions. With this article, I’m exploring the likely reasons for that very, very low percentage. This is a power law distribution. It is to be expected.
• StreamBright 10y ago
  I am not sure why but I am very luck with StackOverflow, almost always. It might be due to the fact that I ask detailed questions that are 99% of the time valid questions and I am using languages that has welcoming nice community and usually not extremely popular so trolling is minimal.
• nicholassmith 10y ago
  I'm a top 4% user for the year apparently, I've asked 40 questions & posted 318 answers. SO is a minefield. It's an excellent resource and I've found so much value out of it, but the moderation is hyper-aggressive at times and often duplicate marks are for old behaviour in old libraries. I think it needs a clean sweep at some stage, leaving the current content but drop everyone back to 0.
• CrocODundee 10y ago
  Let's be honest, Stack Overflow and that network of sites has been in decline for years. Sadly it has turned into a vast and wide content farm and SEO ploy that is full of search spam and and users who copy/paste material from legitimate sources. To top it off, Stack Overflow uses "nofollow" on the outbound links to make sure the true source of material gets no credit in the eyes of Google, Bing, etc. Rinse and repeat for years, and spammers have taken over the asylum, with some trolls for good measure too, and that's unfortunately much of Stack Overflow today. How did this happen? In short, they appeared to receive preferential treatment from Google after complaining very publicly and loudly about not ranking at the top of search results. Ever since then they have widely dominating search results for any vaguely related technical query. Ironically, at that point in time their primary complaint was about other content farms scraping their content. https://blog.codinghorror.com/trouble-in-the-house-of-google/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/trouble-in-the-house-of-google... http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-qa-quora-may-be-turning-down-billion-dollar-offers-but-its-still-losing-to-this-guy-2011-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-qa-quora-may-be-tur... >> JS: All of these sites that go to Stack Overflow, scrape our content, and reprint it with garbage ads, Google Adsense-encrusted pages.They're basically producing worse versions of our pages and they use these slimy SEO techniques, so they actually rank higher than us. >> For a long time, we were getting enormous complaints from our own users that they'd search on Google and they'd find Stack Overflow content that had been stripped from its useful form but SEO'd like crazy and encrusted in ads and thrown up willy-nilly. And these sites were getting a lot of traffic. So that was his complaint and of course he phrased it in this larger frame of "Is Google losing their edge, etc. etc.?" >> BI: It got a lot of attention. Do you think Google's doing a good job of fixing this sort of problem? >> JS: They fixed it. They called us up at the time and said, "Thank you for bringing that up. You have lit a fire under the team that is supposed to be working on that problem that has not been delivering." Matt Cutts, then the head of Google Web Spam, posted to Hacker News about this to "fix" the problem of sites outranking Stack Overflow. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286 What seemed like newly preferential treatment directly impacted hundreds of other sites that lost huge volumes of their traffic to the newly crowned king-of-search Stack Overflow. For example: https://www.daniweb.com/digital-media/digital-marketing/search-engine-strategies/news/459242/stackoverflow-stole-all-our-search-traffic https://www.daniweb.com/digital-media/digital-marketing/sear... >> As many of you know, DaniWeb was hit by a Google algorithm update back in November 2012 and we lost about 50% of our search traffic. In investigating the issue, I discovered that DaniWeb, in addition to most other programming forums out there, all lost their google traffic to StackOverflow. That, in turn, perpetuated the reposting/scraping activity and blatant spam posts to the StackOverflow network, since the site network ranks dominantly in every vaguely related query. Now years later, an even larger volume of material on Stack Overflow is not original content and doesn't even pretend to be. It's absolutely littered with copied/pasted content and blatantly spammy/promotional posts from around the web. From the outside looking in, it appears that Stack Overflow has become exactly what they once actively complained about.
• menacingly 10y ago
  Stack Overflow is useful, but a lot of that usefulness comes from its complete dominance of search results. By keyword stuffing in the sidebar (and last I checked the nofollow links) they maintain a strong search presence for virtually every topic. So, this position as top tech knowledge hub is sort of artificially propped up at this point. You type in your query, arrive at a page with something vaguely like the question you asked, are faced with pedantic flags about how the question you came to have answered is somehow unfit, and maybe some useful info. Also maybe some outdated info with real unaccepeted answers below it. I'm not aware of another site that so heavily depends on content it itself seems to consider unworthy, siloed into so many vaguely overlapping sub-sites
• drinchev 10y ago
  Well can we just think the other way around. StackOverflow is a community driven website for a society that is used to follow rules and be disciplined. Nowadays, the popularity of the website put it in a bad position. Handling millions of impolite, pseudo-developers, who've heard that it can help them with their problem. In other words the community and popularity changed, not StackOverflow. And no it's not dying, it's just working! Sorry for some of us that remember the times where questions were mostly high-quality, but I don't think there is a way to prevent collateral damage in this case. I prefer to read "opinionated question", instead of 10 paragraphs about a problem that in the end is unsolvable by logical decision.
• jimjimjim 10y ago
  stack overflow is one of the best dev resources available. do people not remember the dark days before trying to unblock the answers in expert sexchange?
  • gdulli 10y ago
    For more than a decade before SO existed I was searching the internet and successfully finding answers to questions. There were good sites and bad sites then, good sites and bad sites now. SO didn't change anything. If it didn't exist the information would still be out there and searchable through other sites. Usenet/DejaNews (pre-acquisition) were my favorite incarnation but there's never been a time that the makeup of sites at the time didn't result in the right information being easy to get.
    • jimjimjim 10y ago
      true, the info has always been there. what SO bought was ux. kind of like slackhq being valued at a bil even though irc/chat has been around for decades. and yep, usenet was great especially for older languages like c. more recently searching in safaribooksonline.com has become my first step.
• a3n 10y ago
  I've idly wondered how I could restrict queries to questions that have been closed as too <whatever> or not enough <whatever>, as those are often the most interesting and educational items, even if they don't answer my specific question.
  • wool_gather 10y ago
    http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/218999/high-scoring-questions-that-have-been-closed-as-being-out-of-scope http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/218999/hig... Also, I'm pretty sure Google picks up the text in the close banner, so you could do a search that includes a term for the reason you're interested in.
• makecheck 10y ago
  While StackOverflow is still an outstanding resource, they never really solved the “why bother?” problem for the really difficult subjects. Your choices are: answer a trivial JavaScript question and get a million points, or spend an hour painstakingly explaining a hard problem for maybe one point (where, half the time, the original submitter doesn’t even bother to “accept” your answer so you lose even that small point boost). There needs to be some scaling factor. For example: if the number of questions anywhere on a certain topic is quite small then popular answers in that area could receive more credit; or, perhaps individual parts of a post could be voted on to increase value (say, you see a really detailed example so you “tip” that answer for taking the time to write it all out).
  • notyourwork 10y ago
    > Your choices are: answer a trivial JavaScript question and get a million points, or spend an hour painstakingly explaining a hard problem for maybe one point (where, half the time, the original submitter doesn’t even bother to “accept” your answer so you lose even that small point boost). I don't agree with this, there are long winded answers with a massive amount of points and/or bounty awarded to them. The problem you describe exists in any market, majority of an audience will always go for a low hanging fruit. That's why the few who answer those complicated questions are usually subject matter experts and sit in the >1% of SO.
  • greenhatman 10y ago
    You can use bounty for difficult, niche or obscure questions. http://stackoverflow.com/help/bounty http://stackoverflow.com/help/bounty
  • IshKebab 10y ago
    I usually answer the difficult questions because I've been googling how to do the same thing, found an unanswered SO question and eventually worked out how to do it myself. May as well post the answer.
  • ourmandave 10y ago
    There's a lot of people that don't care about points or badges. They like to answer questions for the challenge or to learn the language themselves. And they are being actively discouraged.
• fiatjaf 10y ago
  I'm for more hostility. There should be more difficult to ask questions, there are way too much people asking idiot questions there. Allowing this makes the site worse for people who really have important questions.
• k__ 10y ago
  For most of my bugs I switched to read the source on Github. Works better for me
• TheHippo 10y ago
  I'm apparently in the top 0.54% for this year. Whoever says SO hates new user have never used the moderation tools and read the stuff new users write on this page.
• pknerd 10y ago
  Couldn't agree more! The way SO is being moderated, soon it's gonna be next Expert Exchange. IYKWIM
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• justinlardinois 10y ago
  I don't really agree with this article's assessment. If your question isn't clear, it's not possible to get good answers. If your question is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the technology you're using, the best possible answer is "You're fundamentally misunderstanding the technology you're using." Stack Overflow encourages users to edit other people's questions for clarity and formatting, which I think is helpful for a lot of new users that don't know how the site works yet. And my experience has been that when there isn't enough information in a question, you tend to get comments asking for more, which is productive. I do agree that Stack Overflow can be a bit daunting for new users, especially because you're not allowed to comment right off the bat. I believe the threshold is 50 reputation, which can be hard to get early on, because questions get answered so quickly on Stack Overflow that it's hard to find questions that still need an answer.
• tedmiston 10y ago
  > However, a 2013 study has found that 77% of users only ask one question, 65% only answer one question, and only 8% of users answer more than 5 questions. Is this actually a problem? I've always viewed Stack Overflow as a "write once, read many" community. For top questions, it looks kind of like Quora. Checking my own stats: I've been a member for 7 years, asked 4 questions, and given 45 answers while reaching ~86k people [1]. My karma is not super high at 936. However, I've gleaned so much value from the SO community (and saved so much time), that these numbers only begin to scratch the surface. Using these numbers as metrics doesn't reflect the value of SO's knowledge base. I don't think Stack Overflow is on the decline at all. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/tedmiston?tab=profile http://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/tedmiston?tab=profile
  • nwjtkjn 10y ago
    I have asked 0 questions, given 0 answers, and reached 0 people, giving an overall Reputation of 101 (the 100 bonus coming from activity on MathOverflow). That being said, I probably hit StackOverflow at least once a month for my job, and if I'm working on a personal side project it's probably more like once an hour.
  • keithnz 10y ago
    I've asked 88 questions, answered 992, rep 28k, reach of over 2 million people. But, my coworkers, use SO all the time, and don't even have an account. Most of the issues are with people trying to participate with low quality questions and answers, it can feel like a negative experience, but that's only a tiny fraction of people in the scheme of things. High frequency noise that won't make it to where it becomes useful.... search results. While it isn't a perfect system, it's results are great. If you feel burnt by SO, just don't take it personally, keep participating .... or not, if you really don't like it, go contribute on forums in a more casual non curated manner.
• DrNuke 10y ago
  It's natural that complex, evolving organisms have more and more entropy but their decline, as for what you HNers are saying here, is due to the unavoidable predominance of more and more web-idiots, mostly coming from 3rd and 4th world countries, which I however understand in full: they are looking for recognition as human beings in a global world, guidance to make their talents work and opportunities in richer environments while starting from nothing. It's the same reason a lot of web-idiots, me among them, are writing here on HN from 1st and 2nd world countries. That said, noise is reduced by stricter filters or by changing the definition of noise and your attitude towards it. Your choice.
• fma 10y ago
  One person has a few bad experience, says it's in decline. I'll counter his bad experiences with my positive experiences of both asking and answering questions - and finding more answers there anywhere else. There - now the universe is back in balance.
• monksy 10y ago
  I'm the author of the SKH/SO article (Link was right here: https://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-is-a-difficult-community-to-participate-in/ https://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-i...) So far. I still haven't participated in SO very much. For the most part it isn't even worth asking a question. (It's a good thing and a bad thing) Also I have noted that they try to prevent you from deleting. After you click that submit button it's their property apparently.
• cezarywojcik 10y ago
  On the opposite end of the "new user" perspective that is trying to ask a good question, as someone who is seeking to sometimes answer questions, it is pretty hard to actually find a good question. The vast majority of the questions I run into _are_, in fact, duplicates, poorly worded/incomprehensible, far too broad, etc. (one example that has stuck with me is "how do I install HTML/JavaScript on my computer?"). Though perhaps there are good, legitimate questions out there, it is also conceivable that some frustrated new users think that their question is appropriate for SO when it is not. This most often happens, from what I've seen, in the "far too broad" category. Just looking at SO right now, for example, I saw a question that was asking how to pass data on an iOS app from one place to another. In that user's mind, he/she has probably been trying to figure out the basics of making an iOS app, and this seems a legitimate question. However, this is an incredibly broad architecture/design question. SO isn't a resource to hand-hold you when you're learning something new. It's a resource for asking specific questions when you can't find the solution anywhere else (and you've actually tried).
  • kwhitefoot 10y ago
    > SO isn't a resource to hand-hold you when you're learning something new. It's a resource for asking specific questions when you can't find the solution anywhere else (and you've actually tried). Why not? A lot of people need help, why not just politely point them in the right direction. Or if you feel that that is beneath you just ignore them. If someone asks a question like "Which is the best tool for solving problem x" they question is closed with a note saying that is has been closed because it will only attract opinion based answers. Well that is exactly what the question was asking for, an opinion from someone who might know better than the person asking the question. I would much rather have the supercilious answers removed. I have in mind the ones that instead of answering the question simply tell you that you shouldn't approach the problem that way at all even when the person asking has made it clear that they have no choice in that (corporate choice of platform, IDE, DB, etc., for instance).
    • wnoise 10y ago
      > Why not? Well, that's not the problem the site owners were trying to solve, and it appears that trying to solve it would impact what they are trying to do.
• mbroshi 10y ago
  It's funny, because many of the points made about SO in this article remind me of my experiences with HN. My first couple of comments were downvoted, as I did not yet know the HN etiquette and unspoken rules of discourse, and that can be pretty discouraging for newcomer. I'm still pretty reticent to comment for fear of being downvoted. There is also the familiar rush to be the first to post some news story, which is almost impossible. All that said, I've had extremely overall positive experiences on both SO and HN. The breadth of collective expertise and depth of comments on both sites is really awe-inspiring. I view the strict rules of engagement as a feature, not a bug.
• tedmiston 10y ago
  To me this reads as if the author is not asking questions in a way consistent with Stack Overflow's guidelines [1]. They make these guidelines really explicit and clear in the FAQ. > How do I ask a good question? > Search, and research > Write a title that summarizes the specific problem > Introduce the problem before you post any code > Help others reproduce the problem > Include all relevant tags > Proof-read before posting! > Post the question and respond to feedback > Look for help asking for help However, writing questions in this way where you provide a MCVE, explain everything you've tried, and relate it to existing questions to help reviewers is time consuming. It shifts part of the time burden of a good question onto the asker vs reviewers or early answerers. As someone who's done many reviews on Stack Overflow, I think following these guidelines is the best way to not get downvoted or flagged. [1]: How do I ask a good question? http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask
• throw2016 10y ago
  There is an air of arrogance in SO that is unpleasant. Help is supposed to be about being open, friendly and relaxed, not arcane rules, criterias and deciding you know best. If experts are uptight and arrogant the desire to learn quickly vanishes. Being friendly does not preclude being firm. I have noticed many questions being closed in an arbritrary manner and worse in a mean spirited way. The first may be ok but the second is simple unacceptable. Who are all these people on power trips and why does SO allow it?
  • DanBC 10y ago
    > why does SO allow it? If you know the right incantation you can bring it up on meta and maybe they'll filter it out. Or maybe people will downvote you and yell at you. http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/172758/what-have-you-tried-epidemic http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/172758/what-have-you...
• Cozumel 10y ago
  SO is an invaluable resource but I don't ask questions because of the hostility there, plus a lot of times in thinking about a question to phrase it properly I end up answering it myself. But one of the major problems that I see there are the people who comment solely for the sake of commenting, it seems like they must get paid by the word they comment so much and it's never helpful, always snarky and irrelevant.
• rodgerd 10y ago
  The complaint is essentially describing how it's turned into Wikipedia, where the author is describing a space where "working the rules" is more important than trying to achieve the goal those rules are meant to enable.
• gjvc 10y ago
  Just buy (and read) a book :-)
• superJimmy64 10y ago
  There are obvious exceptions however I have come to understand the greatness that is SO. All that is needed is a well-thought question with a little bit of work to show on the side. I have a theory about why many complain about SO (please don't comment about this line, there are obviously exceptions): There has been a ridiculous sense of entitlement with the growth and recent appeal of tech jobs in the past 5 years. All this crap about "trolling" getting out of hand, not enough diversity (THE FIELD WAS PRIMARILY FILLED WITH NERDS OFTEN LACKING ANY SOCIAL SKILLS, no one else wanted to look or hang out with "that guy who is good with computers") etc. It's a field that was mainly driven out of the desire and enjoyment that would be had messing around on CPU's. Therefore most of the good ones (among the diluted masses of "experts" nowadays) spent a great deal of time on these things. I'm not surprised that somebody would get pissed off if another came around and started asking for the answers to things without any real effort or drive being shown. SO will forever be a poor resource for the huge incoming population of coders.
• nojvek 10y ago
  I've some very bad experiences with stack overflow. They are very hostile towards new users and the 50 point system that doesn't allow commenting is very absurd. If I ask a question, I should be able to comment for a clarification right? I wonder if they ever A/B test their point system. I only use stack overflow when Google points me to it. I think SO can do a much better job at making users actually ask/answer questions rather than just use it as a read only site.
  • rmtew 10y ago
    Worse than that, I used to be very knowledgeable about a topic and having not played the game and not scored any points, it was too frustrating to answer questions there. The unfortunate thing is that people often see it as the github of project support, and choose to go there to ask questions rather than a project's mailing list.
  • wool_gather 10y ago
    You can comment on your own posts and on answers to your own questions regardless of your points.
• throwaway1974 10y ago
  Has everyone forgotten "Sexperts Exchange" ? SO is very much useful
• djfm 10y ago
  the question about "this" really is dumb
• chain18 10y ago
  It seems like many people are talking only about their experiences as users looking for answers and not from the perspective as a user answering questions.
• ijafri 10y ago
  Glad someone brought it up., I had guessed it was only the case with me., it's still a great resource to 'search' answers., but posting your own... only would lead you to humiliation with down-votes. What I had guessed and stopped posting any question, that they only want to answer anything that's general... not 'specific' at least at this point, i still use SO a lot but only search for possible answers, I have never dared again after being trolled and downvotes.
• tomc1985 10y ago
  A large portion of my rep comes from questions I wrote that were (considerably later) marked "closed", for various reasons. All of them continue to accumulate thousands of views and the occasional point or two... that's never made much sense. Kind of a statement on how nonsensical StackOverflow's become. It feels almost like the variables in their little machine are out of tune. If they scaled back the free privileges and hire some trained moderators they could probably clean things up a bunch.
• hellofunk 10y ago
  A bizarre problem I have had on SO is that, after years of gaining reputation into the 5 digits, now if I ask a question on a topic that is new to me, I often get the response that I should know better if I have a high reputation. It's weird. If I have my colleague ask the same question, a guy with much less reputation, the answers are helpful. It's as if the quality of the question is judged by how much the asker must already know. Which is ridiculous if you explore a lot of different technologies. Then there are genuine trolls who, despite massive reputation, seem to have the sole goal of proving everyone wrong. It's also weird. This image has never rung more true to me then when interacting with so many "power" users: http://i.imgur.com/Oy6mA.jpg?fb http://i.imgur.com/Oy6mA.jpg?fb
  • oliwarner 10y ago
    Never feel afraid to take people to task for stupid comments, if only to point out that their comment only managed to waste both your time. I completely agree with you though. I find I have to be very defensive with my question asking these days. I spend time explaining what I've searched for. You still get people telling you it's so obvious a monkey could have found it, but there's generally less talk of me being lazy. Just stupid. FWIW I'm a moderator on another big SE site and I try to put those sorts of people in their place. It's completely counter productive to be so combative with question-askers... But some people just want to moan.
• V-2 10y ago
  > Someone at Hacker News expressed a common experience for many programmers (experienced or not) when trying to participate on Stack Overflow. Okay... > 4 — Respond to comment about a missing semicolon that got deleted when I was cutting/pasting/formatting my code. (Despite the error msg making it clear that the missing semicolon isn’t the issue) Who cares. I would just ignore this. > Duplicate answer person complains that their entry was posted first. I advise them that the timestamp indicates the other poster was first and they reply that it is a time zone bug. Yes, very "common experience" ;) Anyway, who cares? I wouldn't waste my time on such an idiotic argument at all > 10 — Check back one more time and see that someone has downvoted my question > 11 — Email the mods to get the downvote removed Oh for the love of God, who cares??? So it got downvoted, big deal, why do you need to bother the mods about it... (Did you wonder how they can get cranky sometimes?) Some people really should chill out, or consider themselves lucky for having way too much free time on their hands
  • shagie 10y ago
    If someone grabs the code to try to reproduce the error and gets unrelated sytanx errors, that's their time wasted. The comment about the error helps others from wasting their time too... until the problem is fixed. As there is a taboo of modifying someone else's code, this is best done with a comment and hope the OP will fix it.
    • V-2 10y ago
      Yeah, well, that's a good point too. That's another possibility. At any rate, whether the reason for someone to point out a missing semicolon is because they couldn't run the code straight away, or only because they didn't bother to read the question carefully - I fail to see why either scenario would be specific to StackOverflow and its peculiar community. Surely on any QA site in existence you could come across someone acting on either of these possible reasons??
• ourmandave 10y ago
  A lot of SO people down vote a new users question with the intention of removing the down vote once it's improved. But the person getting down voted to hell doesn't know that! They just see a community telling them to go to hell. Think they'll stick around to read the friendly guide lines?
• bsder 10y ago
  The bigger problem I have with SO is that it's answers are static--they are stuck in amber for eternity. This is not fine for something like Rust which has changed significantly within the last year or two. Many of the highest voted answers are now WRONG, but there is no way to dislodge them.
  • bboreham 10y ago
    That question already has an answer here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326095/please-unpin-the-accepted-answer-from-the-top http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326095/please-unpin-... (Actually many answers. But no resolution.)
• achikin 10y ago
  I've answered 21 questions, got upvotes on 15 answers, 3 answers accepted by owners, asked 2 questions by myself and both were upvoted. I have no idea what these people in the article are talking about. SO is super friendly and super helpful.
  • reitanqild 10y ago
    You never found a super-useful question that mods had tried to kill?
    • achikin 10y ago
      Here it is[1]. I've answered it six months after the first time I came across it. It is so specific that some people considered it nonprogramming and tried to close it. Am I complaining? No. For me, the main purpose of SO is to share specific programmer's knowledge that is not covered by documentation and can only be obtained by experience. The only way to share the knowledge is to communicate with the other people, and sometimes you get rejected this way or the other if you failed to communicate your problem or solution clearly. Taking into consideration the amount of help I've got from SO and the satisfaction from watching my answers being upvoted, I'm ok with being rejected from time to time. [1]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3326955/remove-usb-host-controller-driver-from-linux/4864315#4864315 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3326955/remove-usb-host-c...
      • shagie 10y ago
        Looking at its history ( http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3326955/revisions http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3326955/revisions ) one can see all of the closes and reopens. This question has not been closed. And it might have been a better question to ask on SuperUser (or now Unix and Linux) instead. Just because it is something that can be done in the process of debugging doesn't make it a programming question (the question "how do you edit a file" is not a programming question - even if the file is named "hello.c").
• shagie 10y ago
  Consider this on the "I keep finding closed and interesting questions on SO" - the "what is the best linter for PHP" or "What is your favorite cartoon" or "where is the best place to meet female programmers (for romance)" (ref http://i.stack.imgur.com/x9ik2.jpg http://i.stack.imgur.com/x9ik2.jpg ) - why not ask those questions _here_? If the answer to that is "because that isn't a good place to ask those questions" or "because HN isn't set up for answering those types of questions" then consider the possible response of "maybe SO isn't set up for answering those types of questions well either?" When there is more noise than signal in a question and answer page, it is useless. Go dig around https://community.oracle.com/community/java https://community.oracle.com/community/java and consider why you don't put site:community.oracle.com in your search (or for that matter, see how well one can find the answer to an error message in /r/javahelp). When there are dozens of answers that consist of "try libXyz" it isn't useful - you're going to have to dig through each of those to see if it works or not for you... and you might as well have done a google search instead. When the questions are "how do you make a triangle with '*'" a dozen times over in September, those questions need to be closed so they don't waste the time of people who are trying to find good questions to answer.
• soyiuz 10y ago
  I think a part of SO's problem is its size. There are many other smaller communities in the Stack Exchange network that seem to be more friendly. The size of SO prevents it from becoming a community as such, which manifests in the lack of shared norms and ethics which can then be meaningfully enacted in practice.
  • johnslegers 10y ago
    philosophy.SE is much smaller than SO and the problem is actually far worse over there. Due to the inherent subjectivity of even what qualifies as philosophical, the mostly Judeo-Christian moderation over there bullies everyone into oblivion for no other reason but disagreement with their ignorant worldview.
• tomrod 10y ago
  I agree to a lot of this, despite the criticisms being seen as cliche. I've found the reddit programming communities to be more helpful as a user, even though finding similar enough content is difficult. Further, I've noticed reddit and blogs edging in on SO's Google results. I wonder if this will be the trend. SO has been great for so long because the content was trustworthy. The trolls are removing that edge.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• kwhitefoot 10y ago
  I think SO should ponder the old saying: There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.
• kwhitefoot 10y ago
  I think some people on SO should ponder the adage: There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• notacoward 10y ago
  Every user that has high karma/reputation/whatever on a site - including this one - should be forced to experience it from a noob's perspective once in a while. It can be a real eye-opener, as the experience for the in-group and the out-group can be almost totally different. How many times have even regular users of a site - not just noobs - pointed out a problem only to be downvoted, harassed, or even banned by the "senior users" who don't see the problem precisely because they are so senior? They're like the "senior architects" on a software project, who no longer contribute actual code (or novel opinions on this side of the analogy) but always sit in judgment of others'. I guess it's a universal human tendency, but the point is that karma systems should be designed to attenuate it instead of reinforcing it.
• employee8000 10y ago
  The one thing missing from most sites is the meta-evaluating of the mods, the way slashdot had. That was one of the more innovative things about slasdot back in the day. It would randomly ask users how accurate a mod was for a particular mod that he or she made. I'm supposing that if enough people voted against the mod, their mod would be reversed and privileges removed. Places like Reddit and SO need this in order to control the mods themselves.
• WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Interesting that one of the people called out as ruining SO may be in prison for some scary sex/murder fantasies/photos involving minors. Is this the same guy? http://www.thenewscenter.tv/home/headlines/Belpre-Sentencing.html http://www.thenewscenter.tv/home/headlines/Belpre-Sentencing... http://stackoverflow.com/users/237838/andrew-barber http://stackoverflow.com/users/237838/andrew-barber
• twblalock 10y ago
  It sucks when questions answered five years ago are considered the final word on the topic, and newer questions about the same topic are marked as duplicates. I want to know the best way to solve the problem in 2016, not five years ago. In that time, we've gone from Java 6 to Java 8, almost everything in the JavaScript world has changed, etc.
• Safety1stClyde 10y ago
  There is a problem with giving moderation powers to entrenched individuals who are not experts. I've seen this on the English language stack exchange, the Japanese language stack exchange, the Physics stack exchange, and on stack overflow. The people who are there on the site gathering points and up and down voting aren't necessarily experts, and in many cases they're amateurs or people who know something about one thing, yet have moderation powers over things they really don't know about. The same applies to the dustier corners of Wikipedia, where entrenched non-experts often reduce articles to the level of their own ignorance. Since nobody is getting paid for their participation in these sites, it's hardly surprising that these people end up predominating.
• kozikow 10y ago
  I recently replied to SO question with a "New feature have been added that supports your use case: link" that was genuinely solving a problem. Reply got removed by a moderator saying that I need to describe solution and can't just provide the link. I didn't bother. Currently the only answer suggests sub-optimal solutions and I am not replying to SO questions again. It felt like a land grab - it wouldn't help the questioner, but it would help SO, by bringing more data to their platform.
• bootload 10y ago
  "77% of users only ask one question, 65% only answer one question, and only 8% of users answer more than 5 questions." Old SO user, started during the beta (user:2092), never asked a question. I don't bother with SO because a) sub-standard login (oauth), b) the time to answer a question correctly with sufficient details means it eats into time I can do other things; c) SO mods/response are mostly arseholes. I also hate how original authoritative documentation is drowned out on google with crappy code examples or empty questions, locked, down voted or ignored.
• fbreduc 10y ago
  I've never been a user of SO, i don't find it useful except really obscure stuff; I always reach for docs first and those usually have my answer, and typically a better answer.. There are many occasions when co-workers will come and say "LOOK HERE's THE SO ANSWER THE GOLDEN KEY" and that answer many times was just wrong.. or half the time didn't apply at all to what was happening
• inanutshellus 10y ago
  I found myself a little incensed at this article, rather than by it. Yup, there are limits on new users' privileges. Yes, there are users that play The Reputation Game. Yes, there are many questions that don't get answered to one's satisfaction. Yes, there are trolls. Yes, there are disillusioned users. Yes, yes, yes. Even so, I also find all of this to be Perfect-As-Enemy-of-Good whinging. Instead it could've been a plea full of suggestions. A Call To Action! So let's do that now, though I may come off as a prick here because I kinda think all of this whining is the real problem of the internet. > The privilege limits IMHO they're are rational and reasonable, but your specific use-case was about new folks not being able to leave comments. So how could we solve this? Perhaps new users ought to be able to, but only the author'd be able to see them. When either the Q or A author upvoted it, it'd become visible to the world? > Troll responses to your bad/incorrect/misleading answer That sounded like a bummer. You know you can flag these comments already so... punish these bad actors in the provided way and move on. > Respond to comment that says my question is a duplicate (it’s not, which I clarify to avoid “closed as duplicate”) > [...] > Another issue with this is that duplicates show up despite the crotchety moderators complaining about it. You can't have your cake and eat it too. It's casual, usually-helpful internet folk doing their (usually) altruistic best to help. Most of the time, this works great. Blog posts like this point out the exception, and are valuable, and they're very enticing clickbait. But when they offer only boo-hoo's and no ah-hah's, move on.
  • johnslegers 10y ago
    Yes, my article needs a follow-up that goes in greater detail on the causes of the issues and suggests some actual improvements. Point taken. I'll look into that as soon as I find the time for it!
    • inanutshellus 10y ago
      I look forward to the follow-up post!
• emodendroket 10y ago
  Frankly I'm tired of reading these pieces. For one thing, they always focus on being mean to new users, which in my opinion isn't the problem. My biggest complaint about Stack Overflow is that you get the same amount of points for answering an easier question or a hard one, so complex questions languish while "please write a regex for me" questions get five answers in half an hour.
• erikpukinskis 10y ago
  When I first started trying to post and vote, I had the same experience: why is this web site trying to prevent me from using it? Ohh. They're trying to gamify answering programming questions. Ain't nobody got time for that. But then a year or so later I logged in and somehow I had cleared all of the caps without having really done anything. I guess some comments or voted on some things and some stuff got voted up. Regardless all of the sudden I could just do whatever I wanted. Doesn't seem like the incentives are set up right, at least anecdotally in this case. The reward I received was not connected to any sort of earnest attempts at helping the site out. Those were rebuffed. And now I guess I can contribute, but I spent a good while thinking of Stack Overflow as a read-only site that I'm not really in the habit of thinking that way.
• thewhitetulip 10y ago
  I have learned Go language on my own and have written an introductory book on it, but never once did I find help on SO, it was always on Reddit. Somehow reddit community was so helpful that I didn't have to go to SO, didn't even think of going there!
• johnslegers 10y ago
  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...
  • debacle 10y ago
    > Those rare times I'm stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to find any useful answer on SO. That's because when you get stuck, it's on non-trivial, sometimes edge case-y things. When most others get stuck, it's because they are doing something obviously wrong or have a common issue. I have the same problem. I've asked <5 SO questions, but many of them have been last resort, "Lets see if the Internet knows" type of scenarios. Generally those aren't nearly as rewarding or easy to answer.
• rhapsodic 10y ago
  I won't dispute any of the criticisms of Stack Overflow, but in its defense I'll say that life as a developer in the Stack Overflow era is much easier than it was in the pre-SO era. You could find solutions to your problems online back then, but it took a lot more work. Now, I enter a question or some keywords into Google, click the top SO result, and more often than not, find a well-written and complete answer to my question. I hope that doesn't go away.
• prirun 10y ago
  I posted once on SO. The response was shitty enough that I would never post again.