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lots of people hate on Stack Exchange but I honestly think it’s a great service. StackOverflow is surprisingly bad and doesn’t really have good new questions,

lots of people hate on Stack Exchange but I honestly think it’s a great service. StackOverflow is surprisingly bad and doesn’t really have good new questions, that is true. But the other sites are much more helpful. You just have to understand that it’s a QA site for nontrivial questions (i.e you cannot solve by just googling or reading the docs), not a forum for discussion

kruuuder 4y ago
> StackOverflow [...] doesn’t really have good new questions What does that mean? Do you browse new questions for entertainment?
nine_k 4y ago
Second this. Specialized Stack Exchange sites are pretty helpful. The Emacs one specifically helped me many times, and people there seem to be quite knowledgeable.
AlbertCory 4y ago
[flagged]
- Zuider 4y ago
  Just how bad does a Reddit mod have to be in order to get fired?
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    I've seen people here boast about how they overthrew mods in certain subreddits. I don't know how they pulled that off -- maybe one of them can tell us?
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    typically they get arrested irl before there is any consideration of firing
- willbudd 4y ago
  SE isn't a social network. Trying to "socialize" on SE is like trying to start conversations with random strangers on the New York City Subway. That's just not what it's for.
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Thanks for illustrating my point.
icelancer 4y ago
Yeah, I generally agree with this. After accumulating about 15k points over there across 2-4 sites about 10 years ago, I now treat StackExchange's network as read-only. I never comment or contribute anymore because of the moderators and users. It's now just a repository of stuff that I click on when I Google for results, and I know what kind of site I'm getting. There's value there. I actually almost posted something this week due to some weird segfaults I was having with a third-party library, but the github maintainer was active and responded in his issues list. So, crisis averted.
- iKlsR 4y ago
  Same, I moderated https://blender.stackexchange.com https://blender.stackexchange.com for seven years from pre-inception [0] sinking many many hours into flushing out the community and amassing a proper resource for users. The closest thing to a community back then ~2013 was IRC and blenderartists which was really for showcase but in the later years kept getting distracted with people being offended, tiptoeing on eggshells around certain members of the community/mod team and just random crap all around not related to QA or improving the community. Got exhausted, left and haven't looked back. Despite staying in my small community the issues eventually seeped to other popular ones. It was around this time that several employees left and or were fired as well due to similar reasons, I don't remember all the details. One of my funniest stories from my time there is how I once closed a question as off-topic (it was) and several years later googled to find one result which was the same question flagged by yours truly (it was still off-topic but the irony wasn't lost). SE is really a great service especially the smaller niche sites, it just gets a bad rep by the small "elite" few. [0] - https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40377/blender https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40377/blender
  - arp242 4y ago
    A lot of it has to do with scale. Stack Overflow currently gets ~7k questions every day. This is actually lower than it was a few years ago when it was more like ~9-11k every day. The Blender site gets ~50 questions a day. The Emacs site gets ~6 questions a day (with a total of 25k questions in eight and a half years, only about a fortnight of Stack Overflow). It's just a completely different thing at those scales. It's the difference between a forum with maybe a few hundred people and Twitter.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wodenokoto 4y ago
Looking at "new" in Python isn't particularly interesting, but I almost always end up on SO when googling an answer. So calling it "surprisingly bad" isn't fair. I still think it is surprisingly good.

kruuuder 4y ago

> StackOverflow [...] doesn’t really have good new questions What does that mean? Do you browse new questions for entertainment?

nine_k 4y ago

Second this. Specialized Stack Exchange sites are pretty helpful. The Emacs one specifically helped me many times, and people there seem to be quite knowledgeable.

AlbertCory 4y ago

[flagged]

Zuider 4y ago
Just how bad does a Reddit mod have to be in order to get fired?
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  I've seen people here boast about how they overthrew mods in certain subreddits. I don't know how they pulled that off -- maybe one of them can tell us?
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  typically they get arrested irl before there is any consideration of firing
willbudd 4y ago
SE isn't a social network. Trying to "socialize" on SE is like trying to start conversations with random strangers on the New York City Subway. That's just not what it's for.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Thanks for illustrating my point.

icelancer 4y ago

Yeah, I generally agree with this. After accumulating about 15k points over there across 2-4 sites about 10 years ago, I now treat StackExchange's network as read-only. I never comment or contribute anymore because of the moderators and users. It's now just a repository of stuff that I click on when I Google for results, and I know what kind of site I'm getting. There's value there. I actually almost posted something this week due to some weird segfaults I was having with a third-party library, but the github maintainer was active and responded in his issues list. So, crisis averted.

iKlsR 4y ago
Same, I moderated https://blender.stackexchange.com https://blender.stackexchange.com for seven years from pre-inception [0] sinking many many hours into flushing out the community and amassing a proper resource for users. The closest thing to a community back then ~2013 was IRC and blenderartists which was really for showcase but in the later years kept getting distracted with people being offended, tiptoeing on eggshells around certain members of the community/mod team and just random crap all around not related to QA or improving the community. Got exhausted, left and haven't looked back. Despite staying in my small community the issues eventually seeped to other popular ones. It was around this time that several employees left and or were fired as well due to similar reasons, I don't remember all the details. One of my funniest stories from my time there is how I once closed a question as off-topic (it was) and several years later googled to find one result which was the same question flagged by yours truly (it was still off-topic but the irony wasn't lost). SE is really a great service especially the smaller niche sites, it just gets a bad rep by the small "elite" few. [0] - https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40377/blender https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/40377/blender
- arp242 4y ago
  A lot of it has to do with scale. Stack Overflow currently gets ~7k questions every day. This is actually lower than it was a few years ago when it was more like ~9-11k every day. The Blender site gets ~50 questions a day. The Emacs site gets ~6 questions a day (with a total of 25k questions in eight and a half years, only about a fortnight of Stack Overflow). It's just a completely different thing at those scales. It's the difference between a forum with maybe a few hundred people and Twitter.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wodenokoto 4y ago

Looking at "new" in Python isn't particularly interesting, but I almost always end up on SO when googling an answer. So calling it "surprisingly bad" isn't fair. I still think it is surprisingly good.