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I was in the beta of SO. I almost never interact with it anymore. Asking a question on SO is a last resort to me, and I get a horrid sinking feeling in my gut

by SCdF 9y ago

I was in the beta of SO. I almost never interact with it anymore. Asking a question on SO is a last resort to me, and I get a horrid sinking feeling in my gut when I feel forced to do so. The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out. You begin to realise no one is actually reading your question in good faith, so you start getting defensive: filling your questions with disclaimers about how your example code is just an example[2], how you know there are other ways you could do it but you're constrained toward this direction for various reasons[3], and so on and so forth, until you feel like you spend more time defensively shoring up your question from attacks than actually constructing the question in the first place[4] I still read SO, but as someone who was around before it existed I don't really feel like the quality of answers is any higher than the random forum posts of yore, it's just that they're all under the same URL now, and the same user interface. Which I suppose is something. [1] Not all people™, but definitely the general feeling tends this direction [2] classic situation: you simplify your code to Foo and Bar levels to show the problem cleanly, so people chastise you for having a complex data structure / worrying about performance / whatever for such simple code [3] e.g., "How do I achieve X" gets turned into people saying "Why would you want to achieve X, that's stupid" [4] This is not the same as researching the issue and trying as many things as you can think of, which is definitely helpful in any context of question asking

moberemk 9y ago
I generally agree with all your points, but I also remember the forum posts and I find that SO has at least one big advantage over those: it's really quick to pick out a good answer compared to a long thread. Just the fact that a) answers are clearly demarcated vs comments and b) the author can select a "correct" answer makes them way more skimmable than, say, a phpBB thread where every post looks the same.
- SCdF 9y ago
  I definitely see that side of those, though I think they both have pros and cons. Especially in the JS space[1], there are lots of historic answers upvoted on SO that are now wrong and you have to scroll around (or find a slightly rephrasing of the same question that occurred more recently) to find a good answer. Unfortunately the longer a question is around both the more answers it has and the more likely the answers are to be wrong. On forums / mailing lists the question would just be reasked. On SO it is supposedly a wiki so new versions of the same question gets closed. [1] Because it has evolved a lot, Rust has similar issues, as I'm sure lots of languages do
  - jodrellblank 9y ago
    Look at you praising forums where the same question would be re-asked while chastising stackoverflow where you have to look for re-askings of the same question. What.
    - SCdF 9y ago
      You misunderstood me, my points there are different. In SO, re-askings are not allowed, but as the question becomes less and less similar at some point it will be allowed. The problem is that "canonical" question for that problem is really just the first one that came along, and there are no good tools for keeping it up to date. It doesn't matter how much karma you have, there are no tools for getting rid of highly upvoted or marked as correct answers that are now wrong / dangerous. So the trick is to find similar but different answers that approach the problem in a more modern way, but haven't been closed as being dupes. In forums, re-askings are expected and if you ask a JS question 10 years later you will get answers relevant to the time. Posts are not expected to be evergreen, so you can look at when it was asked and have context as to the environment it was asked in, as opposed to SO where the date is sort of meaningless because it's sort of a wiki.
      - jodrellblank 9y ago
        Hmm. If you know the modern answer, you can downvote the bad old answer, add a comment saying "answer is wrong/dangerous", flag for moderator attention, or edit it and correct the answer, or add your own answer as well even though the question is 'answered'. Re-asking a question is worse - then there's that big famous first answer with 75 upvotes prominent on Google. And your question/answer with 1 upvote and a "correct" modern answer. Nobody will find that. But it's a good point - if you don't know the modern answer and want to, and you can't "re-ask" for new input, then what?
  - shepmaster 9y ago
    > Rust has similar issues I really do try my hardest to keep old questions and answers relevant. Stack Overflow allows editing Q&A for a reason, and any time I stumble on an older post, I at least think about updating it. One thing that I've occasionally found frustrating is that someone sees a question was asked 2 years ago and thus assumes that it must be invalid / out-of-date. They simply don't look at the edit dates. Remember that Rust has a pretty strong backwards compatibility guarantee. Any answer using only the standard library in the last 3 years should still be valid (crates are a different concern). If you find a question you think has become stale, add a bounty to it to raise attention — that's the SO recommended path of action. We also have a Rust chatroom on SO where a bunch of regulars hang out and people are welcome to pop in and ask if a Q&A is still valid.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > a) answers are clearly demarcated vs comments About that, there seems to be a recent trend that answer quality is so low that the only actual useful information is on the comments.
  - tneu89n43nth 9y ago
    I have the exact opposite experience. In my experience the quality of answers has been improving significantly recently.
  - daphneokeefe 9y ago
    I believe that you can't be down-voted, and therefore lose your hard-won points, by commenting. But if you answer, you can be down-voted. So for some participants, commenting is prudent.
    - mark-r 9y ago
      And then there are the poor souls who have a useful comment to make, but can't because you need reputation points to make comments. So they leave an answer instead, which is completely inappropriate and just leads to more discouragement.
- walshemj 9y ago
  Not in my experience on the workplace so - in some cases the answer the OP needs is "NO do not do that", but the highest rated answer is long one that really does give the answer that is needed. Sometimes you have to work out the underlying Q is and answer that even if the OP doesn't want to hear it.
  - boomlinde 9y ago
    I much prefer the answers that explain why, if you really shouldn't do something in addition to an answer to the actual question. Usually there are perfectly valid reasons to do things you "shouldn't" and until you know that there isn't one you should just answer the question.
  - Can_Not 9y ago
    > Sometimes you have to work out the underlying Q is and answer that even if the OP doesn't want to hear it. And often times you have people trying to "work out the underlying Q" leaving your question still open but with useless answers.
jodrellblank 9y ago
The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out. How dare they feel smart huff puff Because it really sucks to spend half an hour on an answer and then op goes "actually I'm doing this" and the spec shifts completely rendering your effort wasted. A few times of that, and "clarify your question so it's very clear what you're asking" is a lot cheaper.
- SCdF 9y ago
  > Because it really sucks to spend half an hour on an answer and then op goes "actually I'm doing this" and the spec shifts completely rendering your effort wasted. This is exactly how I feel about asking a question! Except "Actually I'm doing this" is "why don't you do that" or "why are you doing this" etc. > Because it really sucks to spend half an hour on an answer My feeling is that they aren't answering the question though, not the core one, there finding a thing that you're wrong about and talking about that instead. It's like taking the above paragraph and refuting it by saying "*they're". Yes there is an (intentional) spelling mistake in there, but is that really the point of that it's trying to say?
  - jodrellblank 9y ago
    my feeling is that you're talking about questions that do seem clear to you and I'm talking about questions that don't seem clear to me. "How do I parse x from some text my code is (pile of code)" "you could do y approach (code with example test) but it might break in z condition will you have z condition?" "I'm trying to get a result from this" "Well if you'd said so there's a built in way to do that directly exasperated" Is that "not answering the core question"? That, I feel, leads to "why are you doing this?" style comments. Are you really talking about spelling nitpicks? Because anyone can edit questions to correct that kind of "clarification" and I do see people quietly doing that to help questioners with mangled markdown formatting and similar
    - SCdF 9y ago
      > my feeling is that you're talking about questions that do seem clear to you and I'm talking about questions that don't seem clear to me. Totally. > Are you really talking about spelling nitpicks? Sometimes. I'm trying to be vague because I don't want to pick on specific examples, but what I really mean is nitpicks that are irrelevant to the core question. For me the core pain felt like: - Askers working out how much context to bring to a question - Answerers not presuming there is more context to the question - The ensuing fight spread over answers, re-edits and comments, leaving a gross complicated passive aggressive mess at the end of it So you don't want to explain your entire life story, and when you encounter problems you usually aren't working on something that easily compresses into 20 lines of code. So there is expected and undestandable challenge in compressing your example. Not bringing too much context is also important, because you're trying to ask one specific question, not the hundreds of potential questions in your codebase. But often times I feel answerers will take your example, presume it's literally that, even with `foo` and `bar` as classnames or whatever, and take it completely as face value and then point out why it's obviously stupid, even when those stupid things are ancillary to the main point, and there only because it's compressed example code. Extra context to my opinions here: I haven't seriously contributed to SO in at least 5 years. I probably ask 1-2 questions a year now, and do so with great trepidation. Grain of salt and all that,
Permit 9y ago
>I still read SO, but as someone who was around before it existed I don't really feel like the quality of answers is any higher than the random forum posts of yore, it's just that they're all under the same URL now, and the same user interface. Hmm, we really remember things differently. I remember: - Answers locked behind paywalls (ExpertsExchange) - Searching pages of forum threads. - Answers spread across multiple posts - "Nvm, I solved it" https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/ In my experience, finding answers to programming questions is in a much, much better state of affairs now than it was in 2007.
- SCdF 9y ago
  I'll give you that last one, definitely.
- adventured 9y ago
  Correct on all accounts. SO is radically superior to what existed before. Faster, more comprehensive, tightly maintained, highly accurate. I routinely cringe at reading some of the comments on SO, the general smugness on there. However there's no comparison to the past options. It's better in every way. Forums of old were overflowing with plenty of smug behavior as well, SO didn't spawn that.
maxxxxx 9y ago
I often have good success finding a solution on SO although I have the feeling that most useful answers are several years old and not much new is happening. I never posted a question before but recently I have posted a few I had been struggling with for a while and I was a little surprised how unpleasant the responses were. They were all along the lines of "Why would you want to do such a thing?" or "If you don't know what you are doing, hire an expert" or stuff like that. After this experience I definitely won't ask anything there anymore.
the8472 9y ago
> [4] This is not the same as researching the issue and trying as many things as you can think of, which is definitely helpful in any context of question asking It would help showing that in your question. Often questions lack the necessary information to discern whether the asker has actually covered the basics > [...] how you know there are other ways you could do it but you're constrained toward this direction for various reasons Answerers are also programmers that like to apply best practices whenever possible. If you want to do something unusual which might smell a little without explanation your colleagues, code reviewers or similar would probably also ask "is this really necessary?". So you either have to write defensively from the start or deal with the patronizing-but-wellmeaning-comment-downvote-edit-reopen ordeal. It's unfortunate, but there is an information asymmetry. The answerers can only see what you write, while you have all the background information specific to your case.
sleavey 9y ago
It's interesting to compare Stack Overflow to Quora, which was similarly great a few years ago and is now almost worthless, but in a different way. Stack Overflow suffers from militant moderators who close and delete reasonable submissions and answers due to draconian rules. Quora, meanwhile, has been taken over by spammers and idiots, and has lost any sense of trustworthiness. Just today I visited a discussion on Quora about WordPress plugins [1]. The top answer is an advertisement, the second gives an answer but offers no justification (and is also an advertisement), the third is probably an advertisement, and the fourth is again an answer without any justification. Repeat ad absurdum. It's weird that both sites' communities have made it difficult for old users to take part, but in completely different ways. [1] https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-WordPress-plugin-to-send-new-post-notification-to-subscribers https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-WordPress-plugin-to-...
- kleiba 9y ago
  Seconding the impression of SO. More than once I saw a question where it was kinda obvious that it was a beginner who was facing a very specific issue. Let's say it's a question that's not very difficult to solve for a seasoned programmer because even if you don't know it right off the batch, your experience can guide you pretty quickly to a solution. So, I spend the five to ten minutes to come up with a solution that works reasonably well -- in parts because I'd like to help out someone but in parts also because it's informative for me as well to learn something I didn't know before -- but just as I'm typing up my findings, the question gets closed. And it's not possible to answer closed questions (the rationale for which does not reveal itself to me immediately). I mean, I get that SO wants to be a programming resource (as in "archive") where people with a problem should find a solution - not by asking but through googling. And so they want question/answer pairs that have a sort of general value, not an individual answer to just one person. But then again: why? What's the big deal? Someone has a very specific question, and maybe nobody in the universe will ever have the same question again, but I'm willing to help that person out -- why shouldn't I be allowed to do it? Are they really worried about too much noise on the site? Please, come on. In the situation I sketched above, I will still walk away having learned something new, but the person who posed the original question is left with a very negative user experience AND is none the wiser regarding their specific problem. At the same time, I was never allowed to help that person which I wanted to do not for the potential credit points but rather for altruistic reasons. Way to go.
kvz 9y ago
Agreed, but imho not so much a SO problem as how developers tend to enjoy treat eachother, or so I’ve witnessed. It often seems the most joy that can be had out of interacting with one another is leaving the interaction with a feeling of superiority.
GordonS 9y ago
I have over 6k rep, but I've come to hate it too - often within minutes of asking a question, some over-zealous numpty who plainly hasn't bothered to read the question, will flag it as a duplicate - despite it being no such thing. I swear these people must sit F5-spamming their review queue, just itching to flag every question possible. They really make it an unpleasant place nowadays.
- mark-r 9y ago
  When I find questions with a poorly placed close vote, I try to immediately leave a comment why I disagree in the hopes that others will see it before too many votes are cast.
  - Chaebixi 9y ago
    Whenever I ask a SO question, I have to brace myself to spend the next several hours defending my question and correcting misunderstandings that I'd already anticipated and addressed in the question. It's exhausting.
  - GordonS 9y ago
    I do this too, especially when my own questions are incorrectly flagged - but the dodgy reviewer invariably ignores me, and others soon follow suit without bothering to actually check what they are flagging - and if they don't, my question is ignored and buried: I assume nobody wants to spend time answering a question that has a close vote.
- DCoder 9y ago
  > I swear these people must sit F5-spamming their review queue, just itching to flag every question possible. Hey, you have to earn those sweet internet points somehow... Gamification has its downsides like this.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
>The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out. // This is how the system is designed, IMO. It's the encouraged behaviour.
walshemj 9y ago
Another problem on some of the more generalist advice ones workplace for example is you get people who tend to assume that the world is identical to the USA! This does not help when offering basic advice on employment out side the USA you will see I highly rated posts go on about "right to work" - this has Zero if not negative value and could actively cause harm.
- gbacon 9y ago
  Judging by the links from Workplace.SE that show up in the Hot Network Questions list, the place seems to be full of handwringers. How are the posts you mentioned actively harmful?
  - walshemj 9y ago
    One for a UK employee where it was an open and shut case of breach of contract (unpaid wages) where the answer basically sided with the employer and the OP should just take the loss.
hungerstrike 9y ago
> The people...who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out. And you don't feel the same thing when you comment on HN? I honestly think every point you made about SO can also be said of HN, reddit and almost any other place where people congregate online.
- gbacon 9y ago
  Where they congregate online and fire off downvotes like pew-pew!
zebraflask 9y ago
Don't be so hard on yourself. StackOverflow has saved the shit out of so many developers. What would a junior engineer do without an SO thread?
- gnulinux 9y ago
  Really? I'm a junior software engineer. I used a lot of SO before college/freshman college etc but then I realized last few years I never use SO. I really cannot think of problem that I couldn't solve reading the manual, man-page, info-page, project wiki, archlinux wiki etc... I'm not shit talking SO, I definitely read it rarely, but it doesn't seem like an irreplacable thing for me.

by SCdF 9y ago

moberemk 9y ago

I generally agree with all your points, but I also remember the forum posts and I find that SO has at least one big advantage over those: it's really quick to pick out a good answer compared to a long thread. Just the fact that a) answers are clearly demarcated vs comments and b) the author can select a "correct" answer makes them way more skimmable than, say, a phpBB thread where every post looks the same.

SCdF 9y ago
I definitely see that side of those, though I think they both have pros and cons. Especially in the JS space[1], there are lots of historic answers upvoted on SO that are now wrong and you have to scroll around (or find a slightly rephrasing of the same question that occurred more recently) to find a good answer. Unfortunately the longer a question is around both the more answers it has and the more likely the answers are to be wrong. On forums / mailing lists the question would just be reasked. On SO it is supposedly a wiki so new versions of the same question gets closed. [1] Because it has evolved a lot, Rust has similar issues, as I'm sure lots of languages do
- jodrellblank 9y ago
  Look at you praising forums where the same question would be re-asked while chastising stackoverflow where you have to look for re-askings of the same question. What.
  - SCdF 9y ago
    You misunderstood me, my points there are different. In SO, re-askings are not allowed, but as the question becomes less and less similar at some point it will be allowed. The problem is that "canonical" question for that problem is really just the first one that came along, and there are no good tools for keeping it up to date. It doesn't matter how much karma you have, there are no tools for getting rid of highly upvoted or marked as correct answers that are now wrong / dangerous. So the trick is to find similar but different answers that approach the problem in a more modern way, but haven't been closed as being dupes. In forums, re-askings are expected and if you ask a JS question 10 years later you will get answers relevant to the time. Posts are not expected to be evergreen, so you can look at when it was asked and have context as to the environment it was asked in, as opposed to SO where the date is sort of meaningless because it's sort of a wiki.
    - jodrellblank 9y ago
      Hmm. If you know the modern answer, you can downvote the bad old answer, add a comment saying "answer is wrong/dangerous", flag for moderator attention, or edit it and correct the answer, or add your own answer as well even though the question is 'answered'. Re-asking a question is worse - then there's that big famous first answer with 75 upvotes prominent on Google. And your question/answer with 1 upvote and a "correct" modern answer. Nobody will find that. But it's a good point - if you don't know the modern answer and want to, and you can't "re-ask" for new input, then what?
- shepmaster 9y ago
  > Rust has similar issues I really do try my hardest to keep old questions and answers relevant. Stack Overflow allows editing Q&A for a reason, and any time I stumble on an older post, I at least think about updating it. One thing that I've occasionally found frustrating is that someone sees a question was asked 2 years ago and thus assumes that it must be invalid / out-of-date. They simply don't look at the edit dates. Remember that Rust has a pretty strong backwards compatibility guarantee. Any answer using only the standard library in the last 3 years should still be valid (crates are a different concern). If you find a question you think has become stale, add a bounty to it to raise attention — that's the SO recommended path of action. We also have a Rust chatroom on SO where a bunch of regulars hang out and people are welcome to pop in and ask if a Q&A is still valid.
marcosdumay 9y ago
> a) answers are clearly demarcated vs comments About that, there seems to be a recent trend that answer quality is so low that the only actual useful information is on the comments.
- tneu89n43nth 9y ago
  I have the exact opposite experience. In my experience the quality of answers has been improving significantly recently.
- daphneokeefe 9y ago
  I believe that you can't be down-voted, and therefore lose your hard-won points, by commenting. But if you answer, you can be down-voted. So for some participants, commenting is prudent.
  - mark-r 9y ago
    And then there are the poor souls who have a useful comment to make, but can't because you need reputation points to make comments. So they leave an answer instead, which is completely inappropriate and just leads to more discouragement.
walshemj 9y ago
Not in my experience on the workplace so - in some cases the answer the OP needs is "NO do not do that", but the highest rated answer is long one that really does give the answer that is needed. Sometimes you have to work out the underlying Q is and answer that even if the OP doesn't want to hear it.
- boomlinde 9y ago
  I much prefer the answers that explain why, if you really shouldn't do something in addition to an answer to the actual question. Usually there are perfectly valid reasons to do things you "shouldn't" and until you know that there isn't one you should just answer the question.
- Can_Not 9y ago
  > Sometimes you have to work out the underlying Q is and answer that even if the OP doesn't want to hear it. And often times you have people trying to "work out the underlying Q" leaving your question still open but with useless answers.

jodrellblank 9y ago

The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out. How dare they feel smart huff puff Because it really sucks to spend half an hour on an answer and then op goes "actually I'm doing this" and the spec shifts completely rendering your effort wasted. A few times of that, and "clarify your question so it's very clear what you're asking" is a lot cheaper.

SCdF 9y ago
> Because it really sucks to spend half an hour on an answer and then op goes "actually I'm doing this" and the spec shifts completely rendering your effort wasted. This is exactly how I feel about asking a question! Except "Actually I'm doing this" is "why don't you do that" or "why are you doing this" etc. > Because it really sucks to spend half an hour on an answer My feeling is that they aren't answering the question though, not the core one, there finding a thing that you're wrong about and talking about that instead. It's like taking the above paragraph and refuting it by saying "*they're". Yes there is an (intentional) spelling mistake in there, but is that really the point of that it's trying to say?
- jodrellblank 9y ago
  my feeling is that you're talking about questions that do seem clear to you and I'm talking about questions that don't seem clear to me. "How do I parse x from some text my code is (pile of code)" "you could do y approach (code with example test) but it might break in z condition will you have z condition?" "I'm trying to get a result from this" "Well if you'd said so there's a built in way to do that directly exasperated" Is that "not answering the core question"? That, I feel, leads to "why are you doing this?" style comments. Are you really talking about spelling nitpicks? Because anyone can edit questions to correct that kind of "clarification" and I do see people quietly doing that to help questioners with mangled markdown formatting and similar
  - SCdF 9y ago
    > my feeling is that you're talking about questions that do seem clear to you and I'm talking about questions that don't seem clear to me. Totally. > Are you really talking about spelling nitpicks? Sometimes. I'm trying to be vague because I don't want to pick on specific examples, but what I really mean is nitpicks that are irrelevant to the core question. For me the core pain felt like: - Askers working out how much context to bring to a question - Answerers not presuming there is more context to the question - The ensuing fight spread over answers, re-edits and comments, leaving a gross complicated passive aggressive mess at the end of it So you don't want to explain your entire life story, and when you encounter problems you usually aren't working on something that easily compresses into 20 lines of code. So there is expected and undestandable challenge in compressing your example. Not bringing too much context is also important, because you're trying to ask one specific question, not the hundreds of potential questions in your codebase. But often times I feel answerers will take your example, presume it's literally that, even with `foo` and `bar` as classnames or whatever, and take it completely as face value and then point out why it's obviously stupid, even when those stupid things are ancillary to the main point, and there only because it's compressed example code. Extra context to my opinions here: I haven't seriously contributed to SO in at least 5 years. I probably ask 1-2 questions a year now, and do so with great trepidation. Grain of salt and all that,

Permit 9y ago

>I still read SO, but as someone who was around before it existed I don't really feel like the quality of answers is any higher than the random forum posts of yore, it's just that they're all under the same URL now, and the same user interface. Hmm, we really remember things differently. I remember: - Answers locked behind paywalls (ExpertsExchange) - Searching pages of forum threads. - Answers spread across multiple posts - "Nvm, I solved it" https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/ In my experience, finding answers to programming questions is in a much, much better state of affairs now than it was in 2007.

SCdF 9y ago
I'll give you that last one, definitely.
adventured 9y ago
Correct on all accounts. SO is radically superior to what existed before. Faster, more comprehensive, tightly maintained, highly accurate. I routinely cringe at reading some of the comments on SO, the general smugness on there. However there's no comparison to the past options. It's better in every way. Forums of old were overflowing with plenty of smug behavior as well, SO didn't spawn that.

maxxxxx 9y ago

I often have good success finding a solution on SO although I have the feeling that most useful answers are several years old and not much new is happening. I never posted a question before but recently I have posted a few I had been struggling with for a while and I was a little surprised how unpleasant the responses were. They were all along the lines of "Why would you want to do such a thing?" or "If you don't know what you are doing, hire an expert" or stuff like that. After this experience I definitely won't ask anything there anymore.

the8472 9y ago

> [4] This is not the same as researching the issue and trying as many things as you can think of, which is definitely helpful in any context of question asking It would help showing that in your question. Often questions lack the necessary information to discern whether the asker has actually covered the basics > [...] how you know there are other ways you could do it but you're constrained toward this direction for various reasons Answerers are also programmers that like to apply best practices whenever possible. If you want to do something unusual which might smell a little without explanation your colleagues, code reviewers or similar would probably also ask "is this really necessary?". So you either have to write defensively from the start or deal with the patronizing-but-wellmeaning-comment-downvote-edit-reopen ordeal. It's unfortunate, but there is an information asymmetry. The answerers can only see what you write, while you have all the background information specific to your case.

sleavey 9y ago

It's interesting to compare Stack Overflow to Quora, which was similarly great a few years ago and is now almost worthless, but in a different way. Stack Overflow suffers from militant moderators who close and delete reasonable submissions and answers due to draconian rules. Quora, meanwhile, has been taken over by spammers and idiots, and has lost any sense of trustworthiness. Just today I visited a discussion on Quora about WordPress plugins [1]. The top answer is an advertisement, the second gives an answer but offers no justification (and is also an advertisement), the third is probably an advertisement, and the fourth is again an answer without any justification. Repeat ad absurdum. It's weird that both sites' communities have made it difficult for old users to take part, but in completely different ways. [1] https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-WordPress-plugin-to-send-new-post-notification-to-subscribers https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-best-WordPress-plugin-to-...

kleiba 9y ago
Seconding the impression of SO. More than once I saw a question where it was kinda obvious that it was a beginner who was facing a very specific issue. Let's say it's a question that's not very difficult to solve for a seasoned programmer because even if you don't know it right off the batch, your experience can guide you pretty quickly to a solution. So, I spend the five to ten minutes to come up with a solution that works reasonably well -- in parts because I'd like to help out someone but in parts also because it's informative for me as well to learn something I didn't know before -- but just as I'm typing up my findings, the question gets closed. And it's not possible to answer closed questions (the rationale for which does not reveal itself to me immediately). I mean, I get that SO wants to be a programming resource (as in "archive") where people with a problem should find a solution - not by asking but through googling. And so they want question/answer pairs that have a sort of general value, not an individual answer to just one person. But then again: why? What's the big deal? Someone has a very specific question, and maybe nobody in the universe will ever have the same question again, but I'm willing to help that person out -- why shouldn't I be allowed to do it? Are they really worried about too much noise on the site? Please, come on. In the situation I sketched above, I will still walk away having learned something new, but the person who posed the original question is left with a very negative user experience AND is none the wiser regarding their specific problem. At the same time, I was never allowed to help that person which I wanted to do not for the potential credit points but rather for altruistic reasons. Way to go.

kvz 9y ago

Agreed, but imho not so much a SO problem as how developers tend to enjoy treat eachother, or so I’ve witnessed. It often seems the most joy that can be had out of interacting with one another is leaving the interaction with a feeling of superiority.

GordonS 9y ago

I have over 6k rep, but I've come to hate it too - often within minutes of asking a question, some over-zealous numpty who plainly hasn't bothered to read the question, will flag it as a duplicate - despite it being no such thing. I swear these people must sit F5-spamming their review queue, just itching to flag every question possible. They really make it an unpleasant place nowadays.

mark-r 9y ago
When I find questions with a poorly placed close vote, I try to immediately leave a comment why I disagree in the hopes that others will see it before too many votes are cast.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  Whenever I ask a SO question, I have to brace myself to spend the next several hours defending my question and correcting misunderstandings that I'd already anticipated and addressed in the question. It's exhausting.
- GordonS 9y ago
  I do this too, especially when my own questions are incorrectly flagged - but the dodgy reviewer invariably ignores me, and others soon follow suit without bothering to actually check what they are flagging - and if they don't, my question is ignored and buried: I assume nobody wants to spend time answering a question that has a close vote.
DCoder 9y ago
> I swear these people must sit F5-spamming their review queue, just itching to flag every question possible. Hey, you have to earn those sweet internet points somehow... Gamification has its downsides like this.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago

>The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out. // This is how the system is designed, IMO. It's the encouraged behaviour.

walshemj 9y ago

Another problem on some of the more generalist advice ones workplace for example is you get people who tend to assume that the world is identical to the USA! This does not help when offering basic advice on employment out side the USA you will see I highly rated posts go on about "right to work" - this has Zero if not negative value and could actively cause harm.

gbacon 9y ago
Judging by the links from Workplace.SE that show up in the Hot Network Questions list, the place seems to be full of handwringers. How are the posts you mentioned actively harmful?
- walshemj 9y ago
  One for a UK employee where it was an open and shut case of breach of contract (unpaid wages) where the answer basically sided with the employer and the OP should just take the loss.

hungerstrike 9y ago

> The people...who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out. And you don't feel the same thing when you comment on HN? I honestly think every point you made about SO can also be said of HN, reddit and almost any other place where people congregate online.

gbacon 9y ago
Where they congregate online and fire off downvotes like pew-pew!

zebraflask 9y ago

Don't be so hard on yourself. StackOverflow has saved the shit out of so many developers. What would a junior engineer do without an SO thread?

gnulinux 9y ago
Really? I'm a junior software engineer. I used a lot of SO before college/freshman college etc but then I realized last few years I never use SO. I really cannot think of problem that I couldn't solve reading the manual, man-page, info-page, project wiki, archlinux wiki etc... I'm not shit talking SO, I definitely read it rarely, but it doesn't seem like an irreplacable thing for me.