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What do you think most StackOverflow answers are? It's a karma-paid labor pool where you can post questions and a lot of under-employed people will rush out and
by ergo98 16y ago
What do you think most StackOverflow answers are? It's a karma-paid labor pool where you can post questions and a lot of under-employed people will rush out and do the necessary Google searches, collating and slightly rewriting the results to yield the most votes.
Everyone is ripping off someone's content.
And just to be accurate here, SO content is creative commons (created by the community). Are those just cheap words?
- nervechannel 16y agoWhat do you think most StackOverflow answers are? It's a karma-paid labor pool ... said the comment on Hacker News, earning the poster 3 points so far.
- ergo98 16y ago2 points. I started at one. I desperately hope for more, though, as this is going to give me my big break. I'm trying to earn six more trophies, a ribbon, and link this profile on my resume.
- bigfudge 16y agoExcept that thare are some genuinely useful compilations on SO which you don't get elsewhere, e.g.: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a-developer-know-before-building-a-public-web-site http://stackoverflow.com/questions/72394/what-should-a-devel... These add significant value to the original content IMO
- ergo98 16y agoOf course there are. It is a community and discussions can be interesting. However most of the time that I and most people come across SO it's the top search hit for a technical question. The answers are seldom unique, but instead are usually pulled almost word for word from the online manual for the same. That is overwhelmingly the value of SO -- it benefits by collecting aggregated content from all over the web. It is, hilariously, by design exactly what many in here are complaining about. In that case instead of an automated process it's a mechanical turk. Hey I don't care because it gets me my answer, but I can see the hilarious paradox in some of the complaints. I was once searching on a problem -- one that I had faced years earlier but had then forgotten -- and the top link was a SO QA. The answer sounded oddly familiar, when I remembered that it was actually from a blog entry I had posted two years prior.
- robryan 16y agostackoverflow consistently provides high quality answers though. If someone was to come along, take the creative commons material and present it in a way that actually improved my experience of finding the answer I was after I'd be all for it. In my experience though the sites that are taking the content are ad ridden messes which remove value rather than add anything.
- ergo98 16y agoTotally agree with that. There is an opportunity for someone to take the content and actually improve on it somehow (e.g. an expert engine or something, or better machine driven ontological navigation, etc), however it thus far its just been improving the SEO of it.
- djhworld 16y agoIt's not the answers I'm bothered about, it's just how they spam my search feed. I whack in some queries to google and the first 10 results will just be the same SO question but spread over multiple different sites.
- jonhendry 16y ago" It's a karma-paid labor pool where you can post questions and a lot of under-employed people will rush out and do the necessary Google searches" Maybe it's like that in your field, but in Mac dev questions you're fairly likely to get answers from established OS X developers, and even Apple employees.