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In my experience, StackOverflow has become oversaturated, while IRC is as good as it ever was. There's so many questions on StackOverflow these days you're cou
by ken 8y ago
In my experience, StackOverflow has become oversaturated, while IRC is as good as it ever was.
There's so many questions on StackOverflow these days you're counting on luck that someone (qualified) sees your question. Most questions I've asked in the past year never get to even 10 views, or 1 answer. Another problem is that you're not supposed to respond unless you have The Answer, so if you don't happen to get an expert to read it, you often get nothing at all. Some fields seem to be perpetually full of beginners -- Lisp-related tags are often loaded with "help with hello world" questions.
StackOverflow also has the Close Police, who seem to patrol questions looking for any excuse to close it. Even after 10 years, I can't predict when a question might be flagged.
On IRC, there might be only 5 people actively participating in a channel, but 100 lurkers. When you ask a question, people respond with suggestions even if they don't have The Answer, and this often leads to a workable solution.
The average quality of response on IRC is much higher, as well. A lot of the lurkers are actually semi-famous developers. On more than one occasion, I've asked how to do something like $(app) does, and someone says "$(dev) here wrote $(app), just ask them!".
StackOverflow is from the social media generation of software, where you need a pretty avatar, and accumulate points, and there's rules you must not break. IRC is from the pre-web generation of software, where there are no absolute rules, and you just want to get shit done.
- l0b0 8y agoWeird. I was on IRC for many years before Stack Overflow (and crap alternatives like Experts Exchange, Yahoo! Answers, etc) existed, and I have pretty much the exact opposite experience. For example, while SO tags certainly have different distributions of expertise, out of my most recent 30 questions (involving mainly Python, Django, Docker, Rust and WebExtensions) only four have no answers yet. > StackOverflow is from the social media generation of software, where you need a pretty avatar, and accumulate points, and there's rules you must not break. Unlike IRC, where people need to learn and adopt the particular culture of a channel, and (in extreme cases) need to supplicate before the right people to get a civil response. Stack* is about questions and answers, learning and doing.
- ken 8y ago> Unlike IRC, where people need to learn and adopt the particular culture of a channel, and (in extreme cases) need to supplicate before the right people to get a civil response. All (software) IRC channels have basically the same culture. It's essentially what you mean when you say StackOverflow "naturally encourages all the good behaviour". I have no idea what you mean by "supplicate before the right people to get a civil response". I don't think I've ever seen that. Unlike StackOverflow, you have the option to ask one person directly, but you're never obligated to.