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I think there's a lot of quality in your comment, but I think you're making a whole bunch of broad, generalized assumptions about the state of the entire SO com

I think there's a lot of quality in your comment, but I think you're making a whole bunch of broad, generalized assumptions about the state of the entire SO community. In my experience, it's still a highly-functional community with a wide range of interesting questions and answers. As a developer, a lot of questions I see on there during the day challenge me and force me to push the boundaries of my knowledge. Because of this, I understand the languages I code in much better than I did just several months ago. Furthermore, I'm exposed to many other languages that I would've never taken a look at had it not been for that Stack widget on my Android giving my lots of interesting questions. Just today, for example, I came across this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4619519/jquery-css-to-show-merge-style-relationship-between-two-columns-like-filemerge http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4619519/jquery-css-to-sho... At first I wanted to ignore it because I didn't really have enough time, but then I remembered some CSS3 monstrosity I saw on HN once where they got really clever with border radii and I wanted to see if I could do something similar. An hour later, I had come up with a halfway workable solution to his problem and everyone comes out a winner. (If it's not clear, I'm treeface on SO too) I typically don't care so much about karma...I care about being able to deeply understand the tools I'm using, and SO really forces me to see them from a huge number of angles.

joe_the_user 16y ago
I think there's a lot of quality in your comment, but I think you're making a whole bunch of broad, generalized assumptions about the state of the entire SO community. Yeah, it's really hard to analyze the communities/applications that have sprung up on the Internet. A generality is a view of giant table - it's won't tell you everything but it's better than nothing. When an internet community gets seriously big, it can be highly functional and highly disfunctional at the same time. Among other things, SO's current quality probably varies a lot depending on the language you use. I went from using Ruby to using Matlab and finally back to using c++ in the time I was writing about. That might have biased the sample I had of the infinite dimensional SO-space. SO/Ruby might be great still for all I know.

joe_the_user 16y ago

I think there's a lot of quality in your comment, but I think you're making a whole bunch of broad, generalized assumptions about the state of the entire SO community. Yeah, it's really hard to analyze the communities/applications that have sprung up on the Internet. A generality is a view of giant table - it's won't tell you everything but it's better than nothing. When an internet community gets seriously big, it can be highly functional and highly disfunctional at the same time. Among other things, SO's current quality probably varies a lot depending on the language you use. I went from using Ruby to using Matlab and finally back to using c++ in the time I was writing about. That might have biased the sample I had of the infinite dimensional SO-space. SO/Ruby might be great still for all I know.