9 ms·

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 curat

by 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. ;)
marcelluspye 10y ago
>SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good. While I'd say this is currently true, answers on SO tend to stick around for a long time, and the 'marked as duplicate'-heavy behavior means that even if the best practice to solving a given problem changes, the top SO google result won't. While this isn't a _huge_ problem right now, with the way the site is set up I only see it getting worse, to the point that some years down the line I imagine many SO answers will either cease to be relevant or push people down the wrong path when solving a problem.
- mattmanser 10y ago
  You can edit the top answer or post a new answer, I have got 50 odd votes from adding asp.net's encryption/decryption methods that were added in 3.5 to old .net encryption questions. I've done it on a few other answers too, if the top answer seems clunky or inelegant, I tend to dig a bit deeper to see if there's a better way. Also, scrolling down a bit in the answers you usually find new ways of doing something as answer 3 or 4. Just upvote it. Or edit the answer into the top answer.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    You can. Most people can't. As the site gets aggressive against newcomers and old timers decide they have better things to do, there will be less and less people available edit them. And don't think those editions are as high quality as the ones that come by the official channel, where literally anybody in the world with the needed knowledge can reply, and there is a robust process for vetting. Besides, despite any theoretical possibility, people mostly do not edit old SO answers. There are exceptions, but outdated answer mostly stay there.
    - mattmanser 10y ago
      I'm an incredibly lazy programmer, I remember nothing, it's simply not worth it imho. I hate man pages and specs and generally reading boring tech docs. I hate memorising stuff. I Google incredibly basic stuff like how to read files, how to read a web page (something that changes every 5 months in .Net), hell, even basic jQuery functionality. The difference is that I have the knowledge deep down, I just use SO and Google as a prompt. I know the correct answer as soon as I see it. I get exposed to a lot of basic answers on SO, and generally they're right. SO is generally good and is not suffering the problem you or the OP claim.
reitanqild 10y ago
> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time. > 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. People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on. Edit: broaden answer with first quote and answer.
- patja 10y ago
  I don't know that "the complete mess" is just about bullying and vile content, but more the horrible issues of signal to noise and the inability to filter out irrelevant responses. Forums, email lists, and Google Groups still have so many ill-informed and irrelevant non-sequitur responses crowding out the few pearls of wisdom.
  - Can_Not 10y ago
    My pet peeve is when you're trying to read an existing entry instead opening a new topic and half of the entries have extremely vague titles like "How do I do this?" and "Can someone help with problrm plz?" and I have to make the dreaded decision between reading all of them or risk skipping one that's actually relevant. Even when moderators could fix it, they usually don't. I always fix this in projects I maintain.
- jerf 10y ago
  "People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on." It wasn't bullying so much as low-quality content. It is quite likely you didn't have this problem, as I didn't very often either. If you know where to go, help has always been available for many languages/runtimes/environments/etc., and generally that help still is available today. If you know the right IRC channels, the right forums, the right mailing lists, the right other resources, you can get great, high-quality help. However, prior to SO if you just poked your query into Google you ran a decent risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads, locked behind obtaining accounts (to get your email for spam) if not outright paywalls, or expertsexchange. And this was more true for beginners; I didn't encounter this stuff while looking up an error message resulting from an obscure combination of hardware under Linux, I encountered this stuff while trying to refresh my memory about some particular Javascript intricacy. Yes, it really was bad for a lot of people. SO is still an improvement inasmuch as while the community may rub some people the wrong way, at least the answers are still there for free, uncluttered, and generally of high quality for the most-commonly searched things.
joekrie 10y ago
I find it to be a great resource if someone has already answered your question, especially if I find it via Google. As for asking questions, it's a bit off-putting to be immediately downvoted without explanation, and to not get a single answer. Point is, it's good resource to free-ride but not actively participate.
- city41 10y ago
  That's basically the point of the site. I think SO's owners are ok with this trade off. FWIW it wasn't always like this. I have a lot of points on SO mostly acquired about 5 years ago. Back then SO was a much friendlier, and much more interesting place to participate in. I haven't actively participated in about 3 years or so.
- junke 10y ago
  Did you eventually find out why you were downvoted?
  - joekrie 10y ago
    Not really, but I did eventually get upvoted.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  I've always thought this described it best: SO is a great place to find answers to your questions, but SO is a terrible place to ask questions.
  - Latty 10y ago
    It's more that it turns out that asking questions is hard. Anyone who has had to work with others in tech knows the kind of crap you get. They don't give you the stack trace, they say 'I get an error' without giving the error message, they just say 'it doesn't work', it's not clear what they want, they post a screenshot of half a stack trace, etc... Again, it's a constant trade off where you are balancing the asker's needs with the thousand people who find this via Google, and the people answering the question.
tlogan 10y ago
The SO is in decline. And decline is caused by its own success. - The SO was great because answers for noob questions where hard to find. At this point of time (thanks to SO and their knowledge database) there are so many other resources to get these noob questions answered or they are already answered. And some of these other resources are updated to reflect the most recent technology changes while SO answers are static. - Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering. - People who got reputation and they are moderator (they made SO successful) do not know what they do not know.
- zajd 10y ago
  What evidence do you have that SO is in decline?
  - tlogan 10y ago
    No evidence. Just observation based on unscientific measurements. I could be very much wrong.
    - blowski 10y ago
      It's probably the same evidence that causes people to say Hacker News is in decline, the internet is in decline, society as a whole is in decline. Occasionally those predictions are right, but usually they're not.
      - enraged_camel 10y ago
        At the same time, it's sometimes a good idea to pay attention to qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) analysis, since certain abstract concepts like culture can only be analyzed that way.
- samastur 10y ago
  > Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering. I can't speak for others, but in my case it is not for lack of interest. I don't have enough 'reputation' to be allowed to answer questions and am too busy to find earning it a good use of my time.
grecy 10y ago
I agree. For the first time in a while, I've picked up a language I have not used for almost 15 years. Google is helping immensely, and I've been shocked at how often (>95%) of the time the first result is SO, and that answer is perfect. So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open. It might not be perfect, though I'd say it's the best by a massive margin.
- MichaelMoser123 10y ago
  > So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open. with all due respect but SO search isn't quite stellar.
  - dgregd 10y ago
    Yes, SO search is average quality. Therefore I add site:stackoverflow.com to all my google searches.
    - atultherajput 10y ago
      My SO experience is similar to yours.
- SiVal 10y ago
  Sorry, but I disagree. While, yes, I've found that Google searches often led me to answers on SO, I've also lost count of the number of times Google has decided that a question on a StackOverflow page was the MOST RELEVANT to the question I was asking, but SO mods had put a big, fat stamp at the top from moderators announcing that THEY weren't going to permit anyone to answer it. I don't know how many times I've scanned down a SO page hoping, hoping, hoping that someone managed to smuggle in the answer to my question before the red guards noticed and put a stop to it. Google simply wants to find the best answer it can to my question, while StackOverflow would rather try to find reasons to prevent it being answered. I don't want a forum where answering my question is a last resort, and their highest priority is finding a justification for not only not answering, but actually preventing anyone else who was willing to answer from answering. What we need is a developer forum that is totally open to questions, but with the amazing addition of Google-like search to do ranked prioritization of all answers instead of old-fashioned red guards to prevent answers they didn't like from ever existing, whether you needed those answers or not. You could ask anything you wanted, as long as you were polite, and the worst that could happen would be that your question would be re-tagged (ex: that's actually a DELPHI question, not PASCAL language, because it's not about the language.) People would then be free to answer or not, as they wished, with votes for answer quality and links to other answers that add to the quality measures. They could express opinions (horrors! opinions from people with experience that you lack! who would EVER want that) or quote the docs, or insert a link to another answer that (in their opinion only) probably answers your question, too, but they do so without preventing anyone else from going ahead and offering their own answer. Google manages to sort through an entire web full of comments that are "possible duplicates" or "primarily opinion based" and it's amazingly useful. A mini version of that is what we need for software Q%A.
exstudent2 10y ago
The curation is far and away the worst part of SO. So many interesting threads killed for being off topic. I've never seen moderation add a thing to that site. Its success is in its structure and voting. They've done everything in their power to kill that from a moderation angle.
- lnanek2 10y ago
  Agreed. Often the questions they kill are the only ones that could possibly be useful to me. I don't need someone to regurgitate the manual/docs for me. I need answers to things like "what is the best ad library to use on Android?" that would have saved me a lot of trial and error and testing to come up with a good result. But "opinion" questions like that are not allowed.
- Latty 10y ago
  No, it's success is the curation. You just don't understand the site. There is a reason SO persists and is so popular, while so many clones that do exactly the same structure and voting fail miserably. The 'interesting threads' are exactly the problem. Those are discussions and they don't suit the format. If you want to talk about something, find a forum. SO does not have threads, it has questions and answers, and that is why it's useful. Turns out people hate wading through pages of outdated discussion. People are forgetting what it was like before SO. Stop expecting SO to be all things to all people - if you want a discussion, go register at a programming forum. SO does what it is trying to do well.
matt4077 10y ago
It's like Github... It's so good people forgot what it was like before. Seriously, go check out the swamp that is sourceforge...
rodgerd 10y ago
> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. For anything involving Linux, the Arch wiki is light-years ahead. It's not even a close competition.
- Latty 10y ago
  I mean, I'd argue they are doing very different things. The Arch wiki is a collection of full topics that give you an overview of the thing as a whole. SO is a collection of q&a. I find that I need the former much more than I need the latter when it comes to managing my system, and that's probably just the nature of the task at hand. Generally I want to perform a complete task, and having a guide through that means I'm unlikely to encounter a specific problem of the type that SO is good at answering. Also, the way in which Arch is as a system makes it less likely you have that kind of problem. Because you install and configure everything yourself, there is less 'magic' that is likely to go wrong in a way you don't know how to begin fixing it.
vram22 10y ago
>help vampires What is that?
- smarks 10y ago
  Essentially, someone who asks continual questions and who seems unwilling to do any work, research, or to put any effort into learning on their own. Overview is here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampire-problem http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampi... A common variation is someone who asks a reasonable question, gets an answer, then repeatedly modifies/extends the original question, or who asks a long series of follow up questions n comments. This variation is described here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/258279/1441122 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/258279/1441122
- mekoka 10y ago
  People who cannot be bothered to cover the simplest basics of a topic on their own. It's usually hard to explain anything to them because anywhere you try to start from they will need you to explain that topic first, and on, and on. If you ask them "what do you understand" in an attempt to join them in some common frame of comprehension, they look at you with a blank stare and reply "what do you mean". That's how they drain you of your life energy. Help vampires.
  - wruza 10y ago
    SO is also full of opposites: answer vampires. You put efforts into formulating your very specific question, correcting for english language rules, provide working examples only to see bunch of "we never did it like that, you do not need that" answers from old-boys that think they know everything. Ofc, if someone solved that issue the same way, he will show up and put his saving comment, but those beards form the community, force newcomers to think The Right Way. SO is great to search for snippets and tl;drs, though. Reference manuals fail to contain tl;drs way too often, and that was fixed, thanks SO.
    - wyclif 10y ago
      And just to add another layer to your observation: the effect you describe is accelerated depending on the technology or programming language if those things are specific to the question. So, for instance, if it's a Perl-related question (we never did it this way, there's 3,827 other ways to do it and your answer is not one of them so I'm voting to close) the Soup Nazi-ism is gonna be worse than, say, a TCP/IP question.
mekoka 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. I don't know, I've always felt that the apparent decline in usefulness came from the strict curation (and I do insist on the word "apparent"). In the past the site felt more natural to me as a big hodge-podge of various technology related topics. Questions came from various aspects of the tech world, whether they related to sys admins (e.g. linux configs, installations, scripting, etc), super users (e.g. text editors and other tools), programming languages (e.g. how to use a library or language feature), comp sci (e.g. algorithms), databases, or even networking. To me it all kinda related to how we all use the set everyday. Then came what I can only describe as over-categorization. Instead of relying on the machine to search stuff for us, they split the content into specific websites and changed their standard of what's relevant or less so (which is why you have closed questions that thousands of users still find useful). Google figured this out years ago with gmail, don't waste time organizing, just search. Case in point, how many people actually search any of the stackexchange websites directly? I'd bet that most users get there from google. And it's not unusual to be searching for a topic that intersects with any two or more of these communities. But none of them will refer to any other to tell you that the topic has a related thread in a sibling community. Only google gives you a clue, because it looks at it as the afore-mentioned hodge-podge. It's not to say that the site didn't need any curation, I just think it somehow became a bit too systematic and oblivious of our instinct as human users. I also have the strong suspicion that people who feel that SO is declining are way off, but I doubt that the rise (if any) of its relevancy has much to do with the heavy handed curation.
oconnor663 10y ago
Agreed. Quote from the original article: > The consequence thereof is that many good questions not only get closed before anyone is able to respond, but that many of them end up vanishing into oblivion for eternity after merely 9 days. Yes, any cutoff time has the downside that you lose posts. But it's not like SO makes rules for no reason. Where's the discussion of the problem that that rule is solving? How do we know they're not worse than this problem?
jakub_g 10y ago
Some advice from me to ease your experience on SO: 1. Earn some reputation first in order to see how stuff works from the other side. When you join a new company, you don't come the first day and tell everyone how they're doing it wrong before learning about the project, about the tradeoffs etc. Same here. Having rep above certain threshold gives you additional privileges (commenting, editing etc.). Also, when you have a rep over few hundred, I'm more likely to even read your question. Most questions from 0-rep users are very basic same-stuff-again / low-quality questions that are not challenging to answer. Moreover, when you have some points, you can put a bounty on your question, which means you really want to have a good answer for that and can make a sacrifice, and makes the question stand out (on a separate bounty-enabled-questions page). This gives more incentive to others to look at your question. There's nothing more soul crushing on SO than taking time to write an elaborate answer and getting 0 upvotes, because the guy forgot to upvote or whatever because he doesn't care. 2. It's a misconception that you need to "respond very fast" to the questions to get the rep. Everyone has a different strategy, and well I spent some time a few years ago using this strategy to get some initial reputation. But I stopped some 5 years ago. I almost never play the "fastest gun in the west". I google things that I encounter during my normal daily work, and keep the tab open. If the best answer is not satisfactory, and later I come up with something better, I write it down as a new answer, and perhaps if I found similar problem in multiple SO questions, I put a comment with a cross-link to my answer in other thread. You really need very little effort to get SO rep as a part of your normal daily work, yet everything I talk to seem amazed "wow how come you have so much rep on Stack!". Just create a damn account, be always logged in, and don't keep your solutions for yourself. 3. Try to put up an exhaustive question, write down a SMALL, reproducible scenario, explore some options yourself (ask yourself "what did I try?"). A lot of newcomers put very vague questions, very little information, it's not fun to ask someone a ten clarifying questions. 4. I felt really bad when I got my first downvote but it was indeed a bad answer, to a different question than the OP asked. I learnt the lesson and I don't read in haste anymore. It's good to be humbled sometimes. Regarding "closing as duplicate", it's true some mods are too eager, but if it makes sense, I believe dupe questions should be closed - duplication is not good (DRY) and best code is no code, if possible.
- WhitneyLand 10y ago

by Latty 10y ago

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. ;)

marcelluspye 10y ago

>SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good. While I'd say this is currently true, answers on SO tend to stick around for a long time, and the 'marked as duplicate'-heavy behavior means that even if the best practice to solving a given problem changes, the top SO google result won't. While this isn't a _huge_ problem right now, with the way the site is set up I only see it getting worse, to the point that some years down the line I imagine many SO answers will either cease to be relevant or push people down the wrong path when solving a problem.

mattmanser 10y ago
You can edit the top answer or post a new answer, I have got 50 odd votes from adding asp.net's encryption/decryption methods that were added in 3.5 to old .net encryption questions. I've done it on a few other answers too, if the top answer seems clunky or inelegant, I tend to dig a bit deeper to see if there's a better way. Also, scrolling down a bit in the answers you usually find new ways of doing something as answer 3 or 4. Just upvote it. Or edit the answer into the top answer.
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  You can. Most people can't. As the site gets aggressive against newcomers and old timers decide they have better things to do, there will be less and less people available edit them. And don't think those editions are as high quality as the ones that come by the official channel, where literally anybody in the world with the needed knowledge can reply, and there is a robust process for vetting. Besides, despite any theoretical possibility, people mostly do not edit old SO answers. There are exceptions, but outdated answer mostly stay there.
  - mattmanser 10y ago
    I'm an incredibly lazy programmer, I remember nothing, it's simply not worth it imho. I hate man pages and specs and generally reading boring tech docs. I hate memorising stuff. I Google incredibly basic stuff like how to read files, how to read a web page (something that changes every 5 months in .Net), hell, even basic jQuery functionality. The difference is that I have the knowledge deep down, I just use SO and Google as a prompt. I know the correct answer as soon as I see it. I get exposed to a lot of basic answers on SO, and generally they're right. SO is generally good and is not suffering the problem you or the OP claim.

reitanqild 10y ago

> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time. > 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. People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on. Edit: broaden answer with first quote and answer.

patja 10y ago
I don't know that "the complete mess" is just about bullying and vile content, but more the horrible issues of signal to noise and the inability to filter out irrelevant responses. Forums, email lists, and Google Groups still have so many ill-informed and irrelevant non-sequitur responses crowding out the few pearls of wisdom.
- Can_Not 10y ago
  My pet peeve is when you're trying to read an existing entry instead opening a new topic and half of the entries have extremely vague titles like "How do I do this?" and "Can someone help with problrm plz?" and I have to make the dreaded decision between reading all of them or risk skipping one that's actually relevant. Even when moderators could fix it, they usually don't. I always fix this in projects I maintain.
jerf 10y ago
"People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on." It wasn't bullying so much as low-quality content. It is quite likely you didn't have this problem, as I didn't very often either. If you know where to go, help has always been available for many languages/runtimes/environments/etc., and generally that help still is available today. If you know the right IRC channels, the right forums, the right mailing lists, the right other resources, you can get great, high-quality help. However, prior to SO if you just poked your query into Google you ran a decent risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads, locked behind obtaining accounts (to get your email for spam) if not outright paywalls, or expertsexchange. And this was more true for beginners; I didn't encounter this stuff while looking up an error message resulting from an obscure combination of hardware under Linux, I encountered this stuff while trying to refresh my memory about some particular Javascript intricacy. Yes, it really was bad for a lot of people. SO is still an improvement inasmuch as while the community may rub some people the wrong way, at least the answers are still there for free, uncluttered, and generally of high quality for the most-commonly searched things.

joekrie 10y ago

I find it to be a great resource if someone has already answered your question, especially if I find it via Google. As for asking questions, it's a bit off-putting to be immediately downvoted without explanation, and to not get a single answer. Point is, it's good resource to free-ride but not actively participate.

city41 10y ago
That's basically the point of the site. I think SO's owners are ok with this trade off. FWIW it wasn't always like this. I have a lot of points on SO mostly acquired about 5 years ago. Back then SO was a much friendlier, and much more interesting place to participate in. I haven't actively participated in about 3 years or so.
junke 10y ago
Did you eventually find out why you were downvoted?
- joekrie 10y ago
  Not really, but I did eventually get upvoted.
CaptSpify 10y ago
I've always thought this described it best: SO is a great place to find answers to your questions, but SO is a terrible place to ask questions.
- Latty 10y ago
  It's more that it turns out that asking questions is hard. Anyone who has had to work with others in tech knows the kind of crap you get. They don't give you the stack trace, they say 'I get an error' without giving the error message, they just say 'it doesn't work', it's not clear what they want, they post a screenshot of half a stack trace, etc... Again, it's a constant trade off where you are balancing the asker's needs with the thousand people who find this via Google, and the people answering the question.

tlogan 10y ago

The SO is in decline. And decline is caused by its own success. - The SO was great because answers for noob questions where hard to find. At this point of time (thanks to SO and their knowledge database) there are so many other resources to get these noob questions answered or they are already answered. And some of these other resources are updated to reflect the most recent technology changes while SO answers are static. - Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering. - People who got reputation and they are moderator (they made SO successful) do not know what they do not know.

zajd 10y ago
What evidence do you have that SO is in decline?
- tlogan 10y ago
  No evidence. Just observation based on unscientific measurements. I could be very much wrong.
  - blowski 10y ago
    It's probably the same evidence that causes people to say Hacker News is in decline, the internet is in decline, society as a whole is in decline. Occasionally those predictions are right, but usually they're not.
    - enraged_camel 10y ago
      At the same time, it's sometimes a good idea to pay attention to qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) analysis, since certain abstract concepts like culture can only be analyzed that way.
samastur 10y ago
> Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering. I can't speak for others, but in my case it is not for lack of interest. I don't have enough 'reputation' to be allowed to answer questions and am too busy to find earning it a good use of my time.

grecy 10y ago

I agree. For the first time in a while, I've picked up a language I have not used for almost 15 years. Google is helping immensely, and I've been shocked at how often (>95%) of the time the first result is SO, and that answer is perfect. So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open. It might not be perfect, though I'd say it's the best by a massive margin.

MichaelMoser123 10y ago
> So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open. with all due respect but SO search isn't quite stellar.
- dgregd 10y ago
  Yes, SO search is average quality. Therefore I add site:stackoverflow.com to all my google searches.
  - atultherajput 10y ago
    My SO experience is similar to yours.
SiVal 10y ago
Sorry, but I disagree. While, yes, I've found that Google searches often led me to answers on SO, I've also lost count of the number of times Google has decided that a question on a StackOverflow page was the MOST RELEVANT to the question I was asking, but SO mods had put a big, fat stamp at the top from moderators announcing that THEY weren't going to permit anyone to answer it. I don't know how many times I've scanned down a SO page hoping, hoping, hoping that someone managed to smuggle in the answer to my question before the red guards noticed and put a stop to it. Google simply wants to find the best answer it can to my question, while StackOverflow would rather try to find reasons to prevent it being answered. I don't want a forum where answering my question is a last resort, and their highest priority is finding a justification for not only not answering, but actually preventing anyone else who was willing to answer from answering. What we need is a developer forum that is totally open to questions, but with the amazing addition of Google-like search to do ranked prioritization of all answers instead of old-fashioned red guards to prevent answers they didn't like from ever existing, whether you needed those answers or not. You could ask anything you wanted, as long as you were polite, and the worst that could happen would be that your question would be re-tagged (ex: that's actually a DELPHI question, not PASCAL language, because it's not about the language.) People would then be free to answer or not, as they wished, with votes for answer quality and links to other answers that add to the quality measures. They could express opinions (horrors! opinions from people with experience that you lack! who would EVER want that) or quote the docs, or insert a link to another answer that (in their opinion only) probably answers your question, too, but they do so without preventing anyone else from going ahead and offering their own answer. Google manages to sort through an entire web full of comments that are "possible duplicates" or "primarily opinion based" and it's amazingly useful. A mini version of that is what we need for software Q%A.

exstudent2 10y ago

The curation is far and away the worst part of SO. So many interesting threads killed for being off topic. I've never seen moderation add a thing to that site. Its success is in its structure and voting. They've done everything in their power to kill that from a moderation angle.

lnanek2 10y ago
Agreed. Often the questions they kill are the only ones that could possibly be useful to me. I don't need someone to regurgitate the manual/docs for me. I need answers to things like "what is the best ad library to use on Android?" that would have saved me a lot of trial and error and testing to come up with a good result. But "opinion" questions like that are not allowed.
Latty 10y ago
No, it's success is the curation. You just don't understand the site. There is a reason SO persists and is so popular, while so many clones that do exactly the same structure and voting fail miserably. The 'interesting threads' are exactly the problem. Those are discussions and they don't suit the format. If you want to talk about something, find a forum. SO does not have threads, it has questions and answers, and that is why it's useful. Turns out people hate wading through pages of outdated discussion. People are forgetting what it was like before SO. Stop expecting SO to be all things to all people - if you want a discussion, go register at a programming forum. SO does what it is trying to do well.

matt4077 10y ago

It's like Github... It's so good people forgot what it was like before. Seriously, go check out the swamp that is sourceforge...

rodgerd 10y ago

> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. For anything involving Linux, the Arch wiki is light-years ahead. It's not even a close competition.

Latty 10y ago
I mean, I'd argue they are doing very different things. The Arch wiki is a collection of full topics that give you an overview of the thing as a whole. SO is a collection of q&a. I find that I need the former much more than I need the latter when it comes to managing my system, and that's probably just the nature of the task at hand. Generally I want to perform a complete task, and having a guide through that means I'm unlikely to encounter a specific problem of the type that SO is good at answering. Also, the way in which Arch is as a system makes it less likely you have that kind of problem. Because you install and configure everything yourself, there is less 'magic' that is likely to go wrong in a way you don't know how to begin fixing it.

vram22 10y ago

>help vampires What is that?

smarks 10y ago
Essentially, someone who asks continual questions and who seems unwilling to do any work, research, or to put any effort into learning on their own. Overview is here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampire-problem http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampi... A common variation is someone who asks a reasonable question, gets an answer, then repeatedly modifies/extends the original question, or who asks a long series of follow up questions n comments. This variation is described here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/258279/1441122 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/258279/1441122
mekoka 10y ago
People who cannot be bothered to cover the simplest basics of a topic on their own. It's usually hard to explain anything to them because anywhere you try to start from they will need you to explain that topic first, and on, and on. If you ask them "what do you understand" in an attempt to join them in some common frame of comprehension, they look at you with a blank stare and reply "what do you mean". That's how they drain you of your life energy. Help vampires.
- wruza 10y ago
  SO is also full of opposites: answer vampires. You put efforts into formulating your very specific question, correcting for english language rules, provide working examples only to see bunch of "we never did it like that, you do not need that" answers from old-boys that think they know everything. Ofc, if someone solved that issue the same way, he will show up and put his saving comment, but those beards form the community, force newcomers to think The Right Way. SO is great to search for snippets and tl;drs, though. Reference manuals fail to contain tl;drs way too often, and that was fixed, thanks SO.
  - wyclif 10y ago
    And just to add another layer to your observation: the effect you describe is accelerated depending on the technology or programming language if those things are specific to the question. So, for instance, if it's a Perl-related question (we never did it this way, there's 3,827 other ways to do it and your answer is not one of them so I'm voting to close) the Soup Nazi-ism is gonna be worse than, say, a TCP/IP question.

mekoka 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. I don't know, I've always felt that the apparent decline in usefulness came from the strict curation (and I do insist on the word "apparent"). In the past the site felt more natural to me as a big hodge-podge of various technology related topics. Questions came from various aspects of the tech world, whether they related to sys admins (e.g. linux configs, installations, scripting, etc), super users (e.g. text editors and other tools), programming languages (e.g. how to use a library or language feature), comp sci (e.g. algorithms), databases, or even networking. To me it all kinda related to how we all use the set everyday. Then came what I can only describe as over-categorization. Instead of relying on the machine to search stuff for us, they split the content into specific websites and changed their standard of what's relevant or less so (which is why you have closed questions that thousands of users still find useful). Google figured this out years ago with gmail, don't waste time organizing, just search. Case in point, how many people actually search any of the stackexchange websites directly? I'd bet that most users get there from google. And it's not unusual to be searching for a topic that intersects with any two or more of these communities. But none of them will refer to any other to tell you that the topic has a related thread in a sibling community. Only google gives you a clue, because it looks at it as the afore-mentioned hodge-podge. It's not to say that the site didn't need any curation, I just think it somehow became a bit too systematic and oblivious of our instinct as human users. I also have the strong suspicion that people who feel that SO is declining are way off, but I doubt that the rise (if any) of its relevancy has much to do with the heavy handed curation.

oconnor663 10y ago

Agreed. Quote from the original article: > The consequence thereof is that many good questions not only get closed before anyone is able to respond, but that many of them end up vanishing into oblivion for eternity after merely 9 days. Yes, any cutoff time has the downside that you lose posts. But it's not like SO makes rules for no reason. Where's the discussion of the problem that that rule is solving? How do we know they're not worse than this problem?

jakub_g 10y ago

Some advice from me to ease your experience on SO: 1. Earn some reputation first in order to see how stuff works from the other side. When you join a new company, you don't come the first day and tell everyone how they're doing it wrong before learning about the project, about the tradeoffs etc. Same here. Having rep above certain threshold gives you additional privileges (commenting, editing etc.). Also, when you have a rep over few hundred, I'm more likely to even read your question. Most questions from 0-rep users are very basic same-stuff-again / low-quality questions that are not challenging to answer. Moreover, when you have some points, you can put a bounty on your question, which means you really want to have a good answer for that and can make a sacrifice, and makes the question stand out (on a separate bounty-enabled-questions page). This gives more incentive to others to look at your question. There's nothing more soul crushing on SO than taking time to write an elaborate answer and getting 0 upvotes, because the guy forgot to upvote or whatever because he doesn't care. 2. It's a misconception that you need to "respond very fast" to the questions to get the rep. Everyone has a different strategy, and well I spent some time a few years ago using this strategy to get some initial reputation. But I stopped some 5 years ago. I almost never play the "fastest gun in the west". I google things that I encounter during my normal daily work, and keep the tab open. If the best answer is not satisfactory, and later I come up with something better, I write it down as a new answer, and perhaps if I found similar problem in multiple SO questions, I put a comment with a cross-link to my answer in other thread. You really need very little effort to get SO rep as a part of your normal daily work, yet everything I talk to seem amazed "wow how come you have so much rep on Stack!". Just create a damn account, be always logged in, and don't keep your solutions for yourself. 3. Try to put up an exhaustive question, write down a SMALL, reproducible scenario, explore some options yourself (ask yourself "what did I try?"). A lot of newcomers put very vague questions, very little information, it's not fun to ask someone a ten clarifying questions. 4. I felt really bad when I got my first downvote but it was indeed a bad answer, to a different question than the OP asked. I learnt the lesson and I don't read in haste anymore. It's good to be humbled sometimes. Regarding "closing as duplicate", it's true some mods are too eager, but if it makes sense, I believe dupe questions should be closed - duplication is not good (DRY) and best code is no code, if possible.

WhitneyLand 10y ago