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I feel like Stack Overflow has gotten less useful to me as a programmer over the years, and these days I more often find the answers I need on a forum geared to

by skohan 8y ago

I feel like Stack Overflow has gotten less useful to me as a programmer over the years, and these days I more often find the answers I need on a forum geared toward whatever technology I have a question about. I have a hard time telling whether this reflects a change in developer culture online over the years, or a change in the types of questions I tend to ask as I have become a more experienced programmer.

Insanity 8y ago
I feel the same way. Questions I have are more specialized to the domain I'm working in rather than general programming questions. No longer of the kind "X in language Y". Most of the questions about the system that I'd have nowadays can also be answered by colleagues over slack with the domain knowledge.
Someone1234 8y ago
The way SO is moderated encourages out of date information. For example, if you find a question from 2015, with all out of date answers, if you ask it again today it will be flagged as duplicate with a link to the 2015 answers and no further discussion is allowed. The older SO gets the worse the content gets. They're trying to make a "Wiki site" but in a Q&A format, it doesn't work and doesn't make sense. Until they realize that their moderation policies are going to keep driving away questions that would warrant modern/fresh answers. For example try searching SO but set your Google to only show content from the last 12 months, the results are simply low quality with half mod-dead. Most of the good content is from two years ago or more, back before the site switched from Q&A to "confused Wiki-site."
- codinghorror 8y ago
  Per the wiki comparison, there's an edit button on every answer and question -- it works even if you're not logged in. Try it! I'm starting to think that calling the edit button "improve this answer" and "improve this question" was a mistake..
  - ndnxhs 8y ago
    I always had the idea that the edit button was for minor corrections or clarifications of the post and not to radically change the post itself.
    - codinghorror 8y ago
      if the information in the answer is incorrect as of a certain version of the library / environment, it's perfectly fine for anyone with a web browser to edit that additional information into the post.
  - rcxdude 8y ago
    Does this allow you to flag a question in a way which means it shows up in the queue of unanswered questions and is thus likely to attract an answer from someone monitoring the relevant tags? I didn't see an obvious way to do this from a quick experiment.
fweespeech 8y ago
> a change in the types of questions I tend to ask as I have become a more experienced programmer. That is probably 50% of it. I find myself using google to solve problems about once a day these days. When I first started, it was easily 5-10x that. > I have a hard time telling whether this reflects a change in developer culture online over the years SO no longer really tolerates hard questions that an experienced programmer asks. For the past 4 years, every question I've had that I couldn't find the answer to I've had the question closed or the answers being badly flawed. Admittedly, my sample size is only ~12 questions. The reason for this is they really, really want to restrict the playing field to questions that are jr to mid-level with clear, math/code correct answers. When you get into more complex problems, there is usually trade-offs involved that cause moderators to close questions. (i.e. How do you X as securely as you can while still enabling Y use case that breaks the most secure option available? This isn't ideal obviously but the trade off is acceptable.) The other problem is this discourages answers for "new" stuff because they'll often close questions as duplicates even if you are asking about Version 8 and the answer from 2 years ago is about Version 7. The problem is, if you are experienced, you already know how to solve answers for Version 7 (because you've used it for 2 years) while Version 8 is new.
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  Stack exchange has another site called softwareengineering which accepts questions like the one you gave as an example while stack overflow sticks to questions that have an objectively correct answer.

by skohan 8y ago

Insanity 8y ago

I feel the same way. Questions I have are more specialized to the domain I'm working in rather than general programming questions. No longer of the kind "X in language Y". Most of the questions about the system that I'd have nowadays can also be answered by colleagues over slack with the domain knowledge.

Someone1234 8y ago

The way SO is moderated encourages out of date information. For example, if you find a question from 2015, with all out of date answers, if you ask it again today it will be flagged as duplicate with a link to the 2015 answers and no further discussion is allowed. The older SO gets the worse the content gets. They're trying to make a "Wiki site" but in a Q&A format, it doesn't work and doesn't make sense. Until they realize that their moderation policies are going to keep driving away questions that would warrant modern/fresh answers. For example try searching SO but set your Google to only show content from the last 12 months, the results are simply low quality with half mod-dead. Most of the good content is from two years ago or more, back before the site switched from Q&A to "confused Wiki-site."

codinghorror 8y ago
Per the wiki comparison, there's an edit button on every answer and question -- it works even if you're not logged in. Try it! I'm starting to think that calling the edit button "improve this answer" and "improve this question" was a mistake..
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  I always had the idea that the edit button was for minor corrections or clarifications of the post and not to radically change the post itself.
  - codinghorror 8y ago
    if the information in the answer is incorrect as of a certain version of the library / environment, it's perfectly fine for anyone with a web browser to edit that additional information into the post.
- rcxdude 8y ago
  Does this allow you to flag a question in a way which means it shows up in the queue of unanswered questions and is thus likely to attract an answer from someone monitoring the relevant tags? I didn't see an obvious way to do this from a quick experiment.

fweespeech 8y ago

> a change in the types of questions I tend to ask as I have become a more experienced programmer. That is probably 50% of it. I find myself using google to solve problems about once a day these days. When I first started, it was easily 5-10x that. > I have a hard time telling whether this reflects a change in developer culture online over the years SO no longer really tolerates hard questions that an experienced programmer asks. For the past 4 years, every question I've had that I couldn't find the answer to I've had the question closed or the answers being badly flawed. Admittedly, my sample size is only ~12 questions. The reason for this is they really, really want to restrict the playing field to questions that are jr to mid-level with clear, math/code correct answers. When you get into more complex problems, there is usually trade-offs involved that cause moderators to close questions. (i.e. How do you X as securely as you can while still enabling Y use case that breaks the most secure option available? This isn't ideal obviously but the trade off is acceptable.) The other problem is this discourages answers for "new" stuff because they'll often close questions as duplicates even if you are asking about Version 8 and the answer from 2 years ago is about Version 7. The problem is, if you are experienced, you already know how to solve answers for Version 7 (because you've used it for 2 years) while Version 8 is new.

ndnxhs 8y ago
Stack exchange has another site called softwareengineering which accepts questions like the one you gave as an example while stack overflow sticks to questions that have an objectively correct answer.