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Honestly, a lot of people's opinions on HN just seem like people getting more experienced with programming and not needing SO like they used to. How many times

Honestly, a lot of people's opinions on HN just seem like people getting more experienced with programming and not needing SO like they used to. How many times is "I rarely even go there anymore" going to be part of someone's criticism? I barely go there, too. You should see the questions I used to ask though. I was a beginner. Also, each time I learn a new language, I'm back on SO. Lately it's been Rust. I'm googling questions like how to concat strings and convert a byte array to base10 all over again. I have no doubt that SO has problems. But I wonder how much of the piling on I see in comments is just people who aren't serviced by it as much as they used to be, and then backsplaining it with "because it sucks." Also, a lot of the criticism I read here is extremely petty. People who got way too absorbed by SO and then blamed SO for their own kinda toxic behavior.

dcow 9y ago
Have you tried to ask a more finessed question on SO lately? It's neigh impossible. Someone (likely with less experience than you in the domain you're asking about) will fail to fully process your question and flag it as not relevant to the site, too broad, primarily opinion based, etc. because they didn't quite understand it or didn't take the time to, etc. It takes hours of arguing (worse: in public--where people don't want to be wrong) with people to make any progress and by that point people who could have helped answer your question skipped it because it's been sitting at -2 and flagged. And so SO has regressed to the mean. You're not wrong that SO is probably more useful in a DAU/MAU sense to a new programmer askers than seasoned askers. But what you're mistaking for "backsplaining" is experienced users saying it's hard to get meaningful help anymore because they have to fight the mob on the more rare occasions that they do ask a question. That is something SO can correct, but hasn't done a good job with, IMHO. The primary goal of SO should be to provide utility to its users. But many of us feel like it's only providing utility to well behaved newbs.
- always_good 9y ago
  As you gain experience, your questions are naturally going to have an increasingly niche market. By the time I'm asking something on SO, it's pretty damn esoteric and it's going to take some thought on the part of the answerer. I've never dealt with negative ratings nor does that sound like something I'd complain about. I've also never had to "fight the mob" -- that doesn't sound like nontoxic behavior to me, btw. What I've done is set a bounty on my question and hope someone with the experience can answer it. If so, awesome. If not, well, I'll have to find a free answer another way. I don't see how that's a community's fault unless I entitle myself to the time and expertise of others. It seems pretty natural to me that SO is going to have diminishing returns as your questions have finer and finer points on them. That's how it works in the real world, too.
  - dcow 9y ago
    I don't think that SO has to sacrifice the ends of the bell curve in order to cater to the middle. My point is not that SO should be equally useful to people asking more esoteric questions, but that it currently effectively discourages them as a byproduct of the drive-by moderation that is suitable for most of the questions resting around the center of the bell curve.
jxramos 9y ago
ditto for the new language thing, I often see my rep growing because I'm learning a new language and go crashing into a bunch of stuff. It's nice to find those 888 point questions that get asked over and over again for a language's basic features that come out very easily in QA format than drilling through documentation.

dcow 9y ago

Have you tried to ask a more finessed question on SO lately? It's neigh impossible. Someone (likely with less experience than you in the domain you're asking about) will fail to fully process your question and flag it as not relevant to the site, too broad, primarily opinion based, etc. because they didn't quite understand it or didn't take the time to, etc. It takes hours of arguing (worse: in public--where people don't want to be wrong) with people to make any progress and by that point people who could have helped answer your question skipped it because it's been sitting at -2 and flagged. And so SO has regressed to the mean. You're not wrong that SO is probably more useful in a DAU/MAU sense to a new programmer askers than seasoned askers. But what you're mistaking for "backsplaining" is experienced users saying it's hard to get meaningful help anymore because they have to fight the mob on the more rare occasions that they do ask a question. That is something SO can correct, but hasn't done a good job with, IMHO. The primary goal of SO should be to provide utility to its users. But many of us feel like it's only providing utility to well behaved newbs.

always_good 9y ago
As you gain experience, your questions are naturally going to have an increasingly niche market. By the time I'm asking something on SO, it's pretty damn esoteric and it's going to take some thought on the part of the answerer. I've never dealt with negative ratings nor does that sound like something I'd complain about. I've also never had to "fight the mob" -- that doesn't sound like nontoxic behavior to me, btw. What I've done is set a bounty on my question and hope someone with the experience can answer it. If so, awesome. If not, well, I'll have to find a free answer another way. I don't see how that's a community's fault unless I entitle myself to the time and expertise of others. It seems pretty natural to me that SO is going to have diminishing returns as your questions have finer and finer points on them. That's how it works in the real world, too.
- dcow 9y ago
  I don't think that SO has to sacrifice the ends of the bell curve in order to cater to the middle. My point is not that SO should be equally useful to people asking more esoteric questions, but that it currently effectively discourages them as a byproduct of the drive-by moderation that is suitable for most of the questions resting around the center of the bell curve.

jxramos 9y ago

ditto for the new language thing, I often see my rep growing because I'm learning a new language and go crashing into a bunch of stuff. It's nice to find those 888 point questions that get asked over and over again for a language's basic features that come out very easily in QA format than drilling through documentation.