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Every year I see a post complaining about how unfriendly Stack Overflow is, how their pet question got downvoted so unfairly, and how Stack Overflow is dying. E

Every year I see a post complaining about how unfriendly Stack Overflow is, how their pet question got downvoted so unfairly, and how Stack Overflow is dying. Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying. But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. And when I can't find an answer anywhere and I ask on SO I usually get a good answer quickly. (And when I don't I'm probably completely out of luck.) Stack Overflow provides clear guidance on how to ask a good question. (https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask) As someone who occasionally answers questions there, I do feel annoyed when someone clearly didn't take any time or effort. The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what? If they just said what they tried ("I expected it in `go help list` but didn't find it"), I think it would have been fine. The second question I don't see why anyone would want that on the site. There's 1001 Github pages of common interview questions and answers that are more interesting and better written. Who could this be useful for other than the rest of that particular CS class? Why do I want to help someone I've never met cheat at a class I don't know about for free?

DanBC 7y ago
> . Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying. But even Stack Overflow agrees, which is why they keep having projects to improve the site for new users.
- eitland 7y ago
  and it seems to work somewhat : Lately I've seen less abuse and I've even seen people corrected when they tried to abuse people who answered questions in good faith or similar.
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  > ...which is why they keep having projects to improve the site for new users. I've noticed that. Unfortunately, there's a sizeable contingent that actively rejects any attempt at softening the hard edges for new users (or effectively anyone that dares ask a question, really). They're so tightly wound-up about what they perceive as "the rules" that they can't bring themselves to have any empathy for anyone who violates the rules, as they inflexibly interpret them. You can sometimes see them take it out on meta with harsh rhetoric. SO as resource is so huge and influential. I expect its community dynamics to someday be researched at length by social scientists. There's a lot of interesting things going on in there. Maybe we can learn something from it.
mwfunk 7y ago
Agreed 100%. Wikipedia is similar, in that both SO and Wikipedia have clearly defined goals, and policies based on achieving those goals. But for as long as they've been around there have always been people who get worked up over those sites not being quite what they want them to be. And what they want want them to be is usually a place where anything goes, and/or a place where they can more effectively earn some form of imaginary internet points, or at least not have meanies downvote them or reject their contributions. I'm sure both SO and Wikipedia have their own dysfunction even within the constraints of their stated policies, which I'm sure is a constant struggle to deal with. But that's inevitable, communities always have issues to deal with. Those are different issues than users wishing a site had different goals. I'm all in favor of sites like SO or Wikipedia (or Reddit, or HN) having all sorts of constraints on what types of content they want and how they operate. Maybe it's frustrating sometimes for people who are set on relying on one of those sites for everything (and therefore want them to be all things to all people), but overall I think those types of self-imposed constraints are exactly what makes them useful and interesting, and allows them to grow in ways that are unique to the mission of the site.
- eitland 7y ago
  > But for as long as they've been around there have always been people who get worked up over those sites not being quite what they want them to be Problem is those sites used to be better. A number of us where fighting to keep good resources good. It feels we were steamrolled by people who enjoyed playing admins instead of actually asking or answering questions. If you look into S.O. you'll find a abandoned accounts with a large number of points. People who made tbe site work. I think a number of them gave up after trying to fight the bureaucracy.
  - Sacho 7y ago
    The opposite is true - the most common complaint from high-rep users, by far[0][1][2], is that there are too many garbage questions and not enough moderation. [0] - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-reputation-users-answering-fewer-questions https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-rep... [1] - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324072/how-to-lure-professionals-to-stack-overflow https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324072/how-to-lure-... [2] - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324243/the-life-of-answering-questions-on-stack-overflow https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324243/the-life-of-...
kstenerud 7y ago
"The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what?" This kind of commentary exposes why SO becomes so hostile. The exact question was: "Is there a way to list all standard Go packages? I have a list of packages and I want to figure out if this is a standard package." From this, it's rather obvious what they're trying to do and why they want to get a list of packages. So yes, the question is perfectly reasonable, and you're jumping on the least likely interpretation in order to have something negative to say. And you're not alone; this is a very common behavior on SO. "There's 1001 Github pages of common interview questions and answers that are more interesting and better written. Who could this be useful for other than the rest of that particular CS class? Why do I want to help someone I've never met cheat at a class I don't know about for free?" More needless negativity. Once again, it's easier to attack, and makes one feel important to do so. We're unfortunately dealing with human nature, and people really do seem blind to their own abuse. Without proper guidance and moderation, we see the worst come to light on public forums.
- PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
  Indeed. SO is like any other Internet forum: There are a few dicks with thousands upon thousands of posts who evidently monitor the site 24/7 for opportunities to be pedantic, condescending assholes.
- Rapzid 7y ago
  My favorite are the interrogations. Because surely the poster doesn't really want to list the standard packages; they must be needing something else and getting distracted by listing standard packages so if we press them hard enough they will spill the beans.. /s
  - benologist 7y ago
    I think they should employ a "no stupid questions" policy, like the /r/nostupidquestions subreddit, where the point is to share knowledge without discriminating against anyone. What happens if the same question gets asked 10,000 times? Absolutely nothing. Search engines will filter them for us. 5 more megabytes of text in SO's database. Pointless gatekeeping.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
I agree. It's got it's warts, but it's still the best out there. I think a lot of people get their feelings hurt there though, especially younger coders and coders with thin skins and big egos. It's a service, no one is forcing them to use it. They should just RTFM.
krilly 7y ago
I agree that when I search for a question online I very often find a SO question with my exact problem. But it seems like almost EVERY SINGLE TIME, the question has been locked for being unconstructive, off-topic, (wrongly) a duplicate, whatever. Despite having hundreds of upvotes and tens of thousands of views. So this page is at the top of the google search results for the query and it can never be updated with new info or given a better answer. I don't know anything about how the SO community works, but I suspect they resent the site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine results, and would rather all it's users to be active members of the community. I also think (and have seen) that the community dislikes questions that are answered in documentation or elsewhere on the internet. I often see comments on questions I arrive at through google saying 'just google it, here's the first google result it answers your question'. The source given is always inferior, and the SO question, with a much clearer and more concise format, has become the first google result. This seems like a good thing to me, but look, the question's locked. What exactly is the problem with SO being a more comprehensive knowledge store?
- protomyth 7y ago
  I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers.
  - eitland 7y ago
    Problem is a good number of helpful pages has ben locked. Removing it would remove thebonly good answer to that question from the Internet.
    - mentat 7y ago
      Which is the OP's point, that they shouldn't be locked.
      - protomyth 7y ago
        Yep. If it's locked then it shouldn't be useful. If it's locked and useful then there is a problem.
deepburner 7y ago
> But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. And when I can't find an answer anywhere and I ask on SO I usually get a good answer quickly. (And when I don't I'm probably completely out of luck.) This is the false dichotomy the article is referring to. Having good answers is not necessarily the result of the users being hostile. And in your last 2 paragraphs you're being condescending and dismissive in the exact same way the author is describing. You're making a lot of baseless assumptions about the person who asked the question even though they have adhered to the posting guidelines. Just because they don't fit your personal criteria of effort or importance doesn't mean that the question is invalid in some way. If people dislike answering basic questions so much maybe they shouldn't hang out at a Q&A forum.
cjensen 7y ago
You say that you search for info and Stack Overflow usually gets you the best answer. That's fair. That's your legit experience. My experience is very different. I'd guess 50% of the time if I get a Stack Overflow result I click it and it is closed as off-topic or dup or whatever. If it's a dup, there's a 10% chance the link to the question it dups actually answers the question. If I'm very lucky, someone answered the question before the closure. It's very frustrating for me. When it's good, it's soooo good.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
time and again when I search for an answer online the stack overflow is the best answer when - I have an error text about a popular tool - I would say about 50% of the time SO is the best, the rest of the time is either some blog post or more likely an issues thread on github for the tool. I really know a lot about the subject I am asking about so I know exactly how to ask to get a really good example bit of code doing what I want to do. - about 90% of the time SO gives the best answer. Of course it probably also gives a couple crap answers, almost always the answer I consider best in the response is not the one that is up highest. Actually maybe it does not give the best answer, but it definitely gives an adequate enough answer that I don't try to look any further. The question is really pretty simple - on the level of how do you concatenate strings in Language X - this happens when I need to ask something simple about something I don't know or again when I just want a simple syntax lookup. The problem is very complicated and it takes a lot of code even to provide a simple example of what you are trying to do - generally in such a case your problem is somewhat unique and anyway you are not going to provide an example code because doing so will be too much work to put up with SO. Instead you just keep on going trying to fix it yourself. The question is very complicated and I know very little about the subject or problem domain. In such a case one is unlikely to produce an example code and as such SO is the wrong place to get help. So as a general rule SO is really useful for something that you pretty much know how to do but you need a little refresher or help with some of the trickier bits, so sort of like reading the documentation but quicker. If you really need help with something however SO is pretty much useless because when you really need help you need something like a forum where you can ask some high level no code questions on the issue to get some guidance and SO by design does not do that. Maybe you might even need to ask for that SO hobgoblin, an opinion as to which methods are best to use when trying to achieve your goal!
airstrike 7y ago
#python on freenode is my go-to alternative if I can't find an answer on SO or if I'm more interested in a brainstorming session and can't really ask for one in SO but then again not every problem I have involves Python, in which case I do feel I'm out of luck...
- lacampbell 7y ago
  Do they still have a NO LOL policy? (For those that don't know, #python used to have a bot that would sternly warn you if your messages contained "lol". Ten years later I still think it's unintentionally funny.)
- wyclif 7y ago
  #python on Freenode is probably the most high-quality IRC channel I join on a regular basis.
Carpetsmoker 7y ago
Yes, Stack Overflow is a success, but that's in spite of all of this, and not because of it. And "Stack Overflow is successful, therefore your complaints are invalid" doesn't strike me as a great argument to start with to be honest. > The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what? If they just said what they tried ("I expected it in `go help list` but didn't find it"), I think it would have been fine. You can poke holes in any question like this, and for most practical purposes all of this is pretty darn pedantic. either way, no one actually asked for these clarifications, so the OP is left with nothing but a bunch of downvotes and a feeling of frustration. > The second question I don't see why anyone would want that on the site. Whether or not it's a good question is besides the point; the point is that piling on downvotes like that is just a dick move, regardless of how off-topic or "stupid" the question may be.
- coryfklein 7y ago
  > either way, no one actually asked for these clarifications Which is actually contrary to SO guidelines. You are urged to leave explanatory comments when downvoting. It makes me wonder if adding some kind of free-form or multiple choice "Why did you downvote?" questionnaire would be productive.
keithnz 7y ago
I agree, so many people complain about SO. But the complainers are actually a percentage of the small percentage of askers/answerers. A huge amount of SO is the silent consumers. I started in the beginning of SO, have good rep, with a reach in the millions. I still contribute these days. SO does a good job of getting people to collaborate and produce useful results. There is no system that will be perfect and not be subject to the whims of emotive humans. I notice a lot of people saying what might work better with conviction about what results they'd get. Sorry, but I'm very skeptical of your convictions of the results you will get by changing the dynamics of collaboration. From what I've seen a lot of the complaints stem from confirmation bias, a few questions where it seemed to go wrong (which will happen). But if you looked across the many many questions on SO it mostly just works as intended. However its not without problems and the dynamics change over time, SO trys to adapt to these shifts, but it has to be careful on what levers it pulls.
dghughes 7y ago
There have been times when I've commented on someone's question but more to interact. I like collaboration I find I learn better asking people questions. That gets shut down immediately on Stack Exchange sites. Often by an unprofessional, terse, personal reply by a mod "This isn't your own IRC channel" or something to that effect.
qwerty456127 7y ago
> Why do I want to help someone If you don't want to help - just don't help, nobody forces you to do anything.
StrangeWill 7y ago
Two different perspectives: on the search engine end being a consumer... that's a pretty easy-going experience, Google filters out the large amount of noise because it's a good search engine, you get your answer, you're on your way. The other end of things, the users sitting on SO, weeding through the influx of questions, looking to grab bounties, etc. that is where working with SO is really rough. That is where we deal with a huge amount of garbage coming in. Also as someone that has written answers for esoteric questions before, it can be hugely frustrating when the moderation-by-community ends up causing you grief because they don't understand the subject material enough to do anything other than to rule-lawyer your post to death (I started ripping my answers off the site and posting them to my own instead, which yay, I guess nice traffic boost?). I stopped answering questions long ago unless it was referenced in a Github issue. --- On the more esoteric side of things, the duplicates can be really rough, if you have an error that is caused by something non-trivial but the same error can be caused by a trivial mistake you'll be fishing through hundreds of posts trying to find alternative answers and underlying causes, this is pretty much the only time that you find the trash heap bubbling up on the consumer side of things.
heavenlyblue 7y ago
>> But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. You are not searching for questions that may not be answered by reading documentation, then.

DanBC 7y ago

> . Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying. But even Stack Overflow agrees, which is why they keep having projects to improve the site for new users.

eitland 7y ago
and it seems to work somewhat : Lately I've seen less abuse and I've even seen people corrected when they tried to abuse people who answered questions in good faith or similar.
crispyambulance 7y ago
> ...which is why they keep having projects to improve the site for new users. I've noticed that. Unfortunately, there's a sizeable contingent that actively rejects any attempt at softening the hard edges for new users (or effectively anyone that dares ask a question, really). They're so tightly wound-up about what they perceive as "the rules" that they can't bring themselves to have any empathy for anyone who violates the rules, as they inflexibly interpret them. You can sometimes see them take it out on meta with harsh rhetoric. SO as resource is so huge and influential. I expect its community dynamics to someday be researched at length by social scientists. There's a lot of interesting things going on in there. Maybe we can learn something from it.

mwfunk 7y ago

Agreed 100%. Wikipedia is similar, in that both SO and Wikipedia have clearly defined goals, and policies based on achieving those goals. But for as long as they've been around there have always been people who get worked up over those sites not being quite what they want them to be. And what they want want them to be is usually a place where anything goes, and/or a place where they can more effectively earn some form of imaginary internet points, or at least not have meanies downvote them or reject their contributions. I'm sure both SO and Wikipedia have their own dysfunction even within the constraints of their stated policies, which I'm sure is a constant struggle to deal with. But that's inevitable, communities always have issues to deal with. Those are different issues than users wishing a site had different goals. I'm all in favor of sites like SO or Wikipedia (or Reddit, or HN) having all sorts of constraints on what types of content they want and how they operate. Maybe it's frustrating sometimes for people who are set on relying on one of those sites for everything (and therefore want them to be all things to all people), but overall I think those types of self-imposed constraints are exactly what makes them useful and interesting, and allows them to grow in ways that are unique to the mission of the site.

eitland 7y ago
> But for as long as they've been around there have always been people who get worked up over those sites not being quite what they want them to be Problem is those sites used to be better. A number of us where fighting to keep good resources good. It feels we were steamrolled by people who enjoyed playing admins instead of actually asking or answering questions. If you look into S.O. you'll find a abandoned accounts with a large number of points. People who made tbe site work. I think a number of them gave up after trying to fight the bureaucracy.
- Sacho 7y ago
  The opposite is true - the most common complaint from high-rep users, by far[0][1][2], is that there are too many garbage questions and not enough moderation. [0] - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-reputation-users-answering-fewer-questions https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-rep... [1] - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324072/how-to-lure-professionals-to-stack-overflow https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324072/how-to-lure-... [2] - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324243/the-life-of-answering-questions-on-stack-overflow https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324243/the-life-of-...

kstenerud 7y ago

"The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what?" This kind of commentary exposes why SO becomes so hostile. The exact question was: "Is there a way to list all standard Go packages? I have a list of packages and I want to figure out if this is a standard package." From this, it's rather obvious what they're trying to do and why they want to get a list of packages. So yes, the question is perfectly reasonable, and you're jumping on the least likely interpretation in order to have something negative to say. And you're not alone; this is a very common behavior on SO. "There's 1001 Github pages of common interview questions and answers that are more interesting and better written. Who could this be useful for other than the rest of that particular CS class? Why do I want to help someone I've never met cheat at a class I don't know about for free?" More needless negativity. Once again, it's easier to attack, and makes one feel important to do so. We're unfortunately dealing with human nature, and people really do seem blind to their own abuse. Without proper guidance and moderation, we see the worst come to light on public forums.

PunksATawnyFill 7y ago
Indeed. SO is like any other Internet forum: There are a few dicks with thousands upon thousands of posts who evidently monitor the site 24/7 for opportunities to be pedantic, condescending assholes.
Rapzid 7y ago
My favorite are the interrogations. Because surely the poster doesn't really want to list the standard packages; they must be needing something else and getting distracted by listing standard packages so if we press them hard enough they will spill the beans.. /s
- benologist 7y ago
  I think they should employ a "no stupid questions" policy, like the /r/nostupidquestions subreddit, where the point is to share knowledge without discriminating against anyone. What happens if the same question gets asked 10,000 times? Absolutely nothing. Search engines will filter them for us. 5 more megabytes of text in SO's database. Pointless gatekeeping.

stjohnswarts 7y ago

I agree. It's got it's warts, but it's still the best out there. I think a lot of people get their feelings hurt there though, especially younger coders and coders with thin skins and big egos. It's a service, no one is forcing them to use it. They should just RTFM.

krilly 7y ago

I agree that when I search for a question online I very often find a SO question with my exact problem. But it seems like almost EVERY SINGLE TIME, the question has been locked for being unconstructive, off-topic, (wrongly) a duplicate, whatever. Despite having hundreds of upvotes and tens of thousands of views. So this page is at the top of the google search results for the query and it can never be updated with new info or given a better answer. I don't know anything about how the SO community works, but I suspect they resent the site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine results, and would rather all it's users to be active members of the community. I also think (and have seen) that the community dislikes questions that are answered in documentation or elsewhere on the internet. I often see comments on questions I arrive at through google saying 'just google it, here's the first google result it answers your question'. The source given is always inferior, and the SO question, with a much clearer and more concise format, has become the first google result. This seems like a good thing to me, but look, the question's locked. What exactly is the problem with SO being a more comprehensive knowledge store?

protomyth 7y ago
I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers.
- eitland 7y ago
  Problem is a good number of helpful pages has ben locked. Removing it would remove thebonly good answer to that question from the Internet.
  - mentat 7y ago
    Which is the OP's point, that they shouldn't be locked.
    - protomyth 7y ago
      Yep. If it's locked then it shouldn't be useful. If it's locked and useful then there is a problem.

deepburner 7y ago

> But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. And when I can't find an answer anywhere and I ask on SO I usually get a good answer quickly. (And when I don't I'm probably completely out of luck.) This is the false dichotomy the article is referring to. Having good answers is not necessarily the result of the users being hostile. And in your last 2 paragraphs you're being condescending and dismissive in the exact same way the author is describing. You're making a lot of baseless assumptions about the person who asked the question even though they have adhered to the posting guidelines. Just because they don't fit your personal criteria of effort or importance doesn't mean that the question is invalid in some way. If people dislike answering basic questions so much maybe they shouldn't hang out at a Q&A forum.

cjensen 7y ago

You say that you search for info and Stack Overflow usually gets you the best answer. That's fair. That's your legit experience. My experience is very different. I'd guess 50% of the time if I get a Stack Overflow result I click it and it is closed as off-topic or dup or whatever. If it's a dup, there's a 10% chance the link to the question it dups actually answers the question. If I'm very lucky, someone answered the question before the closure. It's very frustrating for me. When it's good, it's soooo good.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

time and again when I search for an answer online the stack overflow is the best answer when - I have an error text about a popular tool - I would say about 50% of the time SO is the best, the rest of the time is either some blog post or more likely an issues thread on github for the tool. I really know a lot about the subject I am asking about so I know exactly how to ask to get a really good example bit of code doing what I want to do. - about 90% of the time SO gives the best answer. Of course it probably also gives a couple crap answers, almost always the answer I consider best in the response is not the one that is up highest. Actually maybe it does not give the best answer, but it definitely gives an adequate enough answer that I don't try to look any further. The question is really pretty simple - on the level of how do you concatenate strings in Language X - this happens when I need to ask something simple about something I don't know or again when I just want a simple syntax lookup. The problem is very complicated and it takes a lot of code even to provide a simple example of what you are trying to do - generally in such a case your problem is somewhat unique and anyway you are not going to provide an example code because doing so will be too much work to put up with SO. Instead you just keep on going trying to fix it yourself. The question is very complicated and I know very little about the subject or problem domain. In such a case one is unlikely to produce an example code and as such SO is the wrong place to get help. So as a general rule SO is really useful for something that you pretty much know how to do but you need a little refresher or help with some of the trickier bits, so sort of like reading the documentation but quicker. If you really need help with something however SO is pretty much useless because when you really need help you need something like a forum where you can ask some high level no code questions on the issue to get some guidance and SO by design does not do that. Maybe you might even need to ask for that SO hobgoblin, an opinion as to which methods are best to use when trying to achieve your goal!

airstrike 7y ago

#python on freenode is my go-to alternative if I can't find an answer on SO or if I'm more interested in a brainstorming session and can't really ask for one in SO but then again not every problem I have involves Python, in which case I do feel I'm out of luck...

lacampbell 7y ago
Do they still have a NO LOL policy? (For those that don't know, #python used to have a bot that would sternly warn you if your messages contained "lol". Ten years later I still think it's unintentionally funny.)
wyclif 7y ago
#python on Freenode is probably the most high-quality IRC channel I join on a regular basis.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago

Yes, Stack Overflow is a success, but that's in spite of all of this, and not because of it. And "Stack Overflow is successful, therefore your complaints are invalid" doesn't strike me as a great argument to start with to be honest. > The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what? If they just said what they tried ("I expected it in `go help list` but didn't find it"), I think it would have been fine. You can poke holes in any question like this, and for most practical purposes all of this is pretty darn pedantic. either way, no one actually asked for these clarifications, so the OP is left with nothing but a bunch of downvotes and a feeling of frustration. > The second question I don't see why anyone would want that on the site. Whether or not it's a good question is besides the point; the point is that piling on downvotes like that is just a dick move, regardless of how off-topic or "stupid" the question may be.

coryfklein 7y ago
> either way, no one actually asked for these clarifications Which is actually contrary to SO guidelines. You are urged to leave explanatory comments when downvoting. It makes me wonder if adding some kind of free-form or multiple choice "Why did you downvote?" questionnaire would be productive.

keithnz 7y ago

I agree, so many people complain about SO. But the complainers are actually a percentage of the small percentage of askers/answerers. A huge amount of SO is the silent consumers. I started in the beginning of SO, have good rep, with a reach in the millions. I still contribute these days. SO does a good job of getting people to collaborate and produce useful results. There is no system that will be perfect and not be subject to the whims of emotive humans. I notice a lot of people saying what might work better with conviction about what results they'd get. Sorry, but I'm very skeptical of your convictions of the results you will get by changing the dynamics of collaboration. From what I've seen a lot of the complaints stem from confirmation bias, a few questions where it seemed to go wrong (which will happen). But if you looked across the many many questions on SO it mostly just works as intended. However its not without problems and the dynamics change over time, SO trys to adapt to these shifts, but it has to be careful on what levers it pulls.

dghughes 7y ago

There have been times when I've commented on someone's question but more to interact. I like collaboration I find I learn better asking people questions. That gets shut down immediately on Stack Exchange sites. Often by an unprofessional, terse, personal reply by a mod "This isn't your own IRC channel" or something to that effect.

qwerty456127 7y ago

> Why do I want to help someone If you don't want to help - just don't help, nobody forces you to do anything.

StrangeWill 7y ago

Two different perspectives: on the search engine end being a consumer... that's a pretty easy-going experience, Google filters out the large amount of noise because it's a good search engine, you get your answer, you're on your way. The other end of things, the users sitting on SO, weeding through the influx of questions, looking to grab bounties, etc. that is where working with SO is really rough. That is where we deal with a huge amount of garbage coming in. Also as someone that has written answers for esoteric questions before, it can be hugely frustrating when the moderation-by-community ends up causing you grief because they don't understand the subject material enough to do anything other than to rule-lawyer your post to death (I started ripping my answers off the site and posting them to my own instead, which yay, I guess nice traffic boost?). I stopped answering questions long ago unless it was referenced in a Github issue. --- On the more esoteric side of things, the duplicates can be really rough, if you have an error that is caused by something non-trivial but the same error can be caused by a trivial mistake you'll be fishing through hundreds of posts trying to find alternative answers and underlying causes, this is pretty much the only time that you find the trash heap bubbling up on the consumer side of things.

heavenlyblue 7y ago

>> But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. You are not searching for questions that may not be answered by reading documentation, then.