4 ms·

Stackoverflow is stuck in time. They wanted to create an "encyclopedia" using a Q&A site. To do that they banned duplicate questions (and therefore answers). T

Stackoverflow is stuck in time. They wanted to create an "encyclopedia" using a Q&A site. To do that they banned duplicate questions (and therefore answers). That means that if you search for a topic you're going to time-travel back to the oldest point when that was first asked, get ten year old answers, and that's it. But technology changes, so an answer from ten years ago might be very different from an answer today. But SO is a really bad version of Wikipedia, so once something is "the solution" it is now that forever. Sure, you can tack on a comment or additional non-solution answers, but the site actively penalises you for doing so. So, yeah, in answer to your question. Between SO's wildly out-of-date content, toxic community, and Google search results also becoming worse year upon year, it is a difficult site to use, or even want to use.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago
The problem is that votes don't age away. It's just really simplistic "answer A has more votes than B". I answered an old (2009) Ruby on Rails question in 2014 as all existing answers were outdated. It's still only the third answer with +30 votes. The two posts above it have been outdated since 2014, and the top one horribly so (but it's "accepted" so pinned to the top). A lot of Stack Overflow employees recognize these problems, but some don't and lack of management meant thing have been at a standstill for years because everyone can veto everyone else. Now there's new management, but they seem more concerned about fighting with the community over pronouns than improving the platform, so not holding my breath there either. I think a lot of the core ideas are still good, it just needs tweaking and adjusting in various places, and it's just stupid that this isn't happening.
Buttons840 7y ago
Ran across this gem the other day: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301885/calculate-value-of-n-choose-k https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301885/calculate-value... The question is: how can I calculate "n choose k" (aka, the binomial coefficient)? It's an interesting problem because there are some big factorials to calculate if you just naively program the mathematical definition. So someone asked that good question, and then a mod came along and closed the question as a duplicate of the question "how can I enumerate n choose k?", ridiculous! As though we cannot count things in computer science without counting one thing at a time. As though the only way to know the answer to "2000 choose 1000" is to enumerate all (approximately) 10^600 possible answers.
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  > a mod came along and closed the question It wasn't closed by a mod, but by the community: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/15301885/timeline#history_d9d75f00-f169-4a29-8d50-dda62ce96c62 https://stackoverflow.com/posts/15301885/timeline#history_d9... The way close voting works is that a question will be closed as long as there are five (now three!) random people from the community who feel a question should be closed. This is good since there really are many duplicates that should be marked as such, but some people are not very good in carefully judging questions, and the system doesn't recover from these kind of mistakes well and includes almost no punishments for clearly erroneous close votes. Like I mentioned in my other comment, there are a few comparatively minor fixes that could be done to improve the experience here too, but nothing gets done. Sigh...

Carpetsmoker 7y ago

The problem is that votes don't age away. It's just really simplistic "answer A has more votes than B". I answered an old (2009) Ruby on Rails question in 2014 as all existing answers were outdated. It's still only the third answer with +30 votes. The two posts above it have been outdated since 2014, and the top one horribly so (but it's "accepted" so pinned to the top). A lot of Stack Overflow employees recognize these problems, but some don't and lack of management meant thing have been at a standstill for years because everyone can veto everyone else. Now there's new management, but they seem more concerned about fighting with the community over pronouns than improving the platform, so not holding my breath there either. I think a lot of the core ideas are still good, it just needs tweaking and adjusting in various places, and it's just stupid that this isn't happening.

Buttons840 7y ago

Ran across this gem the other day: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301885/calculate-value-of-n-choose-k https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15301885/calculate-value... The question is: how can I calculate "n choose k" (aka, the binomial coefficient)? It's an interesting problem because there are some big factorials to calculate if you just naively program the mathematical definition. So someone asked that good question, and then a mod came along and closed the question as a duplicate of the question "how can I enumerate n choose k?", ridiculous! As though we cannot count things in computer science without counting one thing at a time. As though the only way to know the answer to "2000 choose 1000" is to enumerate all (approximately) 10^600 possible answers.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago
> a mod came along and closed the question It wasn't closed by a mod, but by the community: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/15301885/timeline#history_d9d75f00-f169-4a29-8d50-dda62ce96c62 https://stackoverflow.com/posts/15301885/timeline#history_d9... The way close voting works is that a question will be closed as long as there are five (now three!) random people from the community who feel a question should be closed. This is good since there really are many duplicates that should be marked as such, but some people are not very good in carefully judging questions, and the system doesn't recover from these kind of mistakes well and includes almost no punishments for clearly erroneous close votes. Like I mentioned in my other comment, there are a few comparatively minor fixes that could be done to improve the experience here too, but nothing gets done. Sigh...