6 ms·

I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read when you go to stackoverflow.com is: > Find the best answer to your technical question, help others

by _gabe_ 4y ago

I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read when you go to stackoverflow.com is: > Find the best answer to your technical question, help others answer theirs And here's one of the first snippets on their about page: > Stack Overflow helps people find the answers they need, when they need them. We're best known for our public Q&A platform that over 100 million people visit every month to ask questions, learn, and share technical knowledge. Stack Overflow's website says nothing about this when you're looking at it briefly. They highlight the fact that it's primarily a Q&A site. The people that insist that SO is _not_ a Q&A site are needlessly defending the gatekeepers that have ruined the site. Finally, it's funny that everyone always says that SO is supposed to produce high quality answers, because it stopped producing any high quality answers around 7-8 years ago. The new answers on the site suck. My usual routine is: 1. Google question 2. Click 5-6 different SO links 3. Get pissed off because the answers are all crap 4. Go to the documentation 5. Spend an hour to find the one small doc reference that actually gives me the correct answer. I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves.

siwatanejo 4y ago
IME, I indeed sometimes reach step5 (other times SO answers are okish) but if I do reach step5, I add a step6 for good measure that consists of adding my own answer. It's how I gained a lot of reputation in SO, not by marking questions as duplicate.
- metabagel 4y ago
  I never considered asking and answering my own question. I didn't even realize it was allowed.
  - shagie 4y ago
    It is. Note that it takes some skill at writing to do a self answered question well. Often these falls into either: 1. Lots of material in question. Very simple unexplained answer. 2. Sparse material in question. Want to be multi part blog in the answer. Neither of those are received well. The key is to have a question that is good, helpful, and reproducible by others too (so they can try it out or find it if they have similar problems) and enough, but not too much detail in the answer. The answer is the tricky part because people get caught with not explaining anything because they already understand the domain in the question or explaining every nuance of the solution even though it is unnecessary for the solution itself.
    - metabagel 4y ago
      This makes a lot more sense to me than how SO presents itself. It's a forum to post your own questions to which you already found the answers. I do see value in that. But, there's almost no value in posting questions and hoping for an answer back. If that's what you want, then the right place is wherever the folks hang out who work on that technology - IRC, Discord, email list, etc.
      - shagie 4y ago
        The issue of "hoping for an answer back" is because too many people have questions and it has scaled poorly over the years. https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#questionsperday https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#questionsperday - look at "questions per day" and the "answered%" (which is down from its peek of over 7000 questions per day). The fourth most visited site on the network gets under 100 questions per day. The site that I used to be active on (back when I was active) got about 50 per day (which was completely manageable for a dozen people to read every question every day, fix the ones that had problems and close the unanswerable ones) and is now down to under 5 per day. But Stack Overflow is still getting thousands of questions per day. Each question, unless its really good to start with and shows that it can be answerable and isn't just someone trying to get someone else to do their work is only a tiny blip in the overall firehose of questions. At the start, when there were fewer questions per day and more people were interested in answering the questions and moderating the content - that is when the site thrived. But as it got more popular and the quality of the questions has gone down, people don't care about answering questions as much and those who worked to try to keep what is there interesting have left. If you look at https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422885/2022-a-year-in-moderation https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422885/2022-a-year-... and pull up the google doc for the "community moderation in time" ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1upnX9UX8ab8rde8DrGnOkZNnMqK0Qce0MgpLVTFUTUE/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1upnX9UX8ab8rde8DrGnO... ) you'll see that most of the moderation tasks that were done by the community have dropped year over year over year. That makes it harder for the good questions to get noticed and get answers since the poorly written ones remain on the site longer. And yes, I do believe that other sources with people more familiar with that technology are better places to ask. If there's a discord for it - working with the devs there is likely helpful. If its hosted on GitHub and the team uses Discussions there - that's a much better and more focused Q&A format for that technology.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Depending on your reputation, the rules keep changing and you may or may not be allowed today.
  - Too 4y ago
    It’s not just allowed, it’s encouraged. You are contributing to the common pool of knowledge. As long as the question and answer themselves are good.
arp242 4y ago
Before you can ask your first question you're shown https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask/advice https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask/advice Note how you have the check "thanks, I will keep these tips in mind when asking" before being able to proceed. This has been shown for years and isn't a new thing. Maybe some things should be clearer; as I mentioned in another comment[1] I think Stack Overflow lacks a clear vision, but people are certainly given more information beyond the tagline. You can take any tagline to its extreme. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887632 > I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves. Don't brand people are "liars" because they have a different view of things.
- tomrod 4y ago
  I agree with parent to your comment. It's not a different view if they've branded themselves with the first words of their site. To defend this as "different views" when their brand clearly suggest otherwise is, I believe, a bit disingenous. To the parent commenter's point, the community friction and aggressive closure of "seeming" but poorly identified duplicates are compounded by often poor searchability on the site itself. So the issue really is the gatekeeping that occurs by moderators who are operating against the vision the site itself communicate (Ed: regardless of how consistently or inconsistently the vision is current or historically communicated).
  - junofan 4y ago
    I dunno, what do you want them to say? It’s like Wikipedia billing itself as the encyclopedia anybody can edit. The 0.3% of people who try to contribute content discover there are rules pretty quickly. The 99.7% who consume get the info they want.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Wikipedia doesn't place itself as an either/or. Defenders of the gatekeeping behavior present SO as only one way, whereas SO presents itself differently.
mananaysiempre 4y ago
> I hear this strawman all the time. Is it a strawman if it appears (among other places) in the 2008 launch blog post of one of the two cofounders[1]? > Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question. Or here’s the other cofounder’s 2018 retrospective[2]: > Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time. Reasonable people may disagree on how well SO accomplishes that goal, but I think it’s well established that it converged on having it as a goal fairly quickly and has had it in sight for basically all of its existence—unlike other initial positions which are known to have changed[3,4]. In no way is this meant as an endorsement of gatekeeping[5]; it’s just that it’s never been not about giving you the perfect answer to your question, for any value of you including me. (SO calling itself a Q&A site is perhaps a little tautological, given it more or less defined the term. But Q&A as envisioned there is, in particular, not[6] a forum, which would be about answering or discussing a specific poster’s question.) [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-launches/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-to-be-when-it-grows-up/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-... [3] https://blog.codinghorror.com/meta-is-murder/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/meta-is-murder/ [4] https://blog.codinghorror.com/listen-to-your-community-but-dont-let-them-tell-you-what-to-do/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/listen-to-your-community-but-d... [5] https://blog.codinghorror.com/stack-overflow-none-of-us-is-as-dumb-as-all-of-us/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/stack-overflow-none-of-us-is-a... [6] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exc...
- shagie 4y ago
  Jeff's announcement can be seen at https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ > Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. Some formatting that isn't quite clear there. First sentence is bold. "good" is italicized in the original too.
Fatnino 4y ago
You should add an "ask chatgpt" step. Sometimes it gets it right. More often it gets you close enough to be able to Google the rest of the way. And sometimes it just makes stuff up out of thin air... At least it is easy for you to check that the code it gave doesn't work.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
> Finally, it's funny that everyone always says that SO is supposed to produce high quality answers, because it stopped producing any high quality answers around 7-8 years ago. The new answers on the site suck. My usual routine is: > 1. Google question > 2. Click 5-6 different SO links > 3. Get pissed off because the answers are all crap > 4. Go to the documentation > 5. Spend an hour to find the one small doc reference that actually gives me the correct answer. Actually, ChatGPT is going to be really good for helping you with finding the tiny detail in a large body of documentation, as long as their docs were published prior to 2020
knighthack 4y ago
I'm on SO almost everyday. Almost all my visits render useful, fruitful information, across various different languages, for current information/documentation rather than just "7-8 years ago". I notice that the "gatekeepers" of different language communities span from hostile to friendly, so to tar the entire site of Stack Overflow as being the same smacks of prejudice, rather than fact. So what language are you doing work in? Anyone who doesn't preface sentences of anger with the language of their worfklow - especially when the questions, answers, feel and brainshare of SO communities are divided by language - is offering an opinion of pure sentiment, rather than rational assessment.
PaulHoule 4y ago
I could never to stand to play the SO game to get enough karma to be able to fully play the SO game.

by _gabe_ 4y ago

siwatanejo 4y ago

IME, I indeed sometimes reach step5 (other times SO answers are okish) but if I do reach step5, I add a step6 for good measure that consists of adding my own answer. It's how I gained a lot of reputation in SO, not by marking questions as duplicate.

metabagel 4y ago
I never considered asking and answering my own question. I didn't even realize it was allowed.
- shagie 4y ago
  It is. Note that it takes some skill at writing to do a self answered question well. Often these falls into either: 1. Lots of material in question. Very simple unexplained answer. 2. Sparse material in question. Want to be multi part blog in the answer. Neither of those are received well. The key is to have a question that is good, helpful, and reproducible by others too (so they can try it out or find it if they have similar problems) and enough, but not too much detail in the answer. The answer is the tricky part because people get caught with not explaining anything because they already understand the domain in the question or explaining every nuance of the solution even though it is unnecessary for the solution itself.
  - metabagel 4y ago
    This makes a lot more sense to me than how SO presents itself. It's a forum to post your own questions to which you already found the answers. I do see value in that. But, there's almost no value in posting questions and hoping for an answer back. If that's what you want, then the right place is wherever the folks hang out who work on that technology - IRC, Discord, email list, etc.
    - shagie 4y ago
      The issue of "hoping for an answer back" is because too many people have questions and it has scaled poorly over the years. https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#questionsperday https://stackexchange.com/sites?view=list#questionsperday - look at "questions per day" and the "answered%" (which is down from its peek of over 7000 questions per day). The fourth most visited site on the network gets under 100 questions per day. The site that I used to be active on (back when I was active) got about 50 per day (which was completely manageable for a dozen people to read every question every day, fix the ones that had problems and close the unanswerable ones) and is now down to under 5 per day. But Stack Overflow is still getting thousands of questions per day. Each question, unless its really good to start with and shows that it can be answerable and isn't just someone trying to get someone else to do their work is only a tiny blip in the overall firehose of questions. At the start, when there were fewer questions per day and more people were interested in answering the questions and moderating the content - that is when the site thrived. But as it got more popular and the quality of the questions has gone down, people don't care about answering questions as much and those who worked to try to keep what is there interesting have left. If you look at https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422885/2022-a-year-in-moderation https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422885/2022-a-year-... and pull up the google doc for the "community moderation in time" ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1upnX9UX8ab8rde8DrGnOkZNnMqK0Qce0MgpLVTFUTUE/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1upnX9UX8ab8rde8DrGnO... ) you'll see that most of the moderation tasks that were done by the community have dropped year over year over year. That makes it harder for the good questions to get noticed and get answers since the poorly written ones remain on the site longer. And yes, I do believe that other sources with people more familiar with that technology are better places to ask. If there's a discord for it - working with the devs there is likely helpful. If its hosted on GitHub and the team uses Discussions there - that's a much better and more focused Q&A format for that technology.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Depending on your reputation, the rules keep changing and you may or may not be allowed today.
- Too 4y ago
  It’s not just allowed, it’s encouraged. You are contributing to the common pool of knowledge. As long as the question and answer themselves are good.

arp242 4y ago

Before you can ask your first question you're shown https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask/advice https://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask/advice Note how you have the check "thanks, I will keep these tips in mind when asking" before being able to proceed. This has been shown for years and isn't a new thing. Maybe some things should be clearer; as I mentioned in another comment[1] I think Stack Overflow lacks a clear vision, but people are certainly given more information beyond the tagline. You can take any tagline to its extreme. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887632 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887632 > I wish people would stop propagating this lie that gatekeepers are necessary for "high quality". It's a lie propagated by gatekeepers to defend themselves. Don't brand people are "liars" because they have a different view of things.

tomrod 4y ago
I agree with parent to your comment. It's not a different view if they've branded themselves with the first words of their site. To defend this as "different views" when their brand clearly suggest otherwise is, I believe, a bit disingenous. To the parent commenter's point, the community friction and aggressive closure of "seeming" but poorly identified duplicates are compounded by often poor searchability on the site itself. So the issue really is the gatekeeping that occurs by moderators who are operating against the vision the site itself communicate (Ed: regardless of how consistently or inconsistently the vision is current or historically communicated).
- junofan 4y ago
  I dunno, what do you want them to say? It’s like Wikipedia billing itself as the encyclopedia anybody can edit. The 0.3% of people who try to contribute content discover there are rules pretty quickly. The 99.7% who consume get the info they want.
  - tomrod 4y ago
    Wikipedia doesn't place itself as an either/or. Defenders of the gatekeeping behavior present SO as only one way, whereas SO presents itself differently.

mananaysiempre 4y ago

> I hear this strawman all the time. Is it a strawman if it appears (among other places) in the 2008 launch blog post of one of the two cofounders[1]? > Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question. Or here’s the other cofounder’s 2018 retrospective[2]: > Stack Overflow ultimately has much more in common with Wikipedia than a discussion forum. By this I mean questions and answers on Stack Overflow are not primarily judged by their usefulness to a specific individual, but by how many other programmers that question or answer can potentially help over time. Reasonable people may disagree on how well SO accomplishes that goal, but I think it’s well established that it converged on having it as a goal fairly quickly and has had it in sight for basically all of its existence—unlike other initial positions which are known to have changed[3,4]. In no way is this meant as an endorsement of gatekeeping[5]; it’s just that it’s never been not about giving you the perfect answer to your question, for any value of you including me. (SO calling itself a Q&A site is perhaps a little tautological, given it more or less defined the term. But Q&A as envisioned there is, in particular, not[6] a forum, which would be about answering or discussing a specific poster’s question.) [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-launches/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-to-be-when-it-grows-up/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-... [3] https://blog.codinghorror.com/meta-is-murder/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/meta-is-murder/ [4] https://blog.codinghorror.com/listen-to-your-community-but-dont-let-them-tell-you-what-to-do/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/listen-to-your-community-but-d... [5] https://blog.codinghorror.com/stack-overflow-none-of-us-is-as-dumb-as-all-of-us/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/stack-overflow-none-of-us-is-a... [6] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exchange-sites-forums https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/are-stack-exc...

shagie 4y ago
Jeff's announcement can be seen at https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/ > Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. Some formatting that isn't quite clear there. First sentence is bold. "good" is italicized in the original too.

Fatnino 4y ago

You should add an "ask chatgpt" step. Sometimes it gets it right. More often it gets you close enough to be able to Google the rest of the way. And sometimes it just makes stuff up out of thin air... At least it is easy for you to check that the code it gave doesn't work.

pcthrowaway 4y ago

> Finally, it's funny that everyone always says that SO is supposed to produce high quality answers, because it stopped producing any high quality answers around 7-8 years ago. The new answers on the site suck. My usual routine is: > 1. Google question > 2. Click 5-6 different SO links > 3. Get pissed off because the answers are all crap > 4. Go to the documentation > 5. Spend an hour to find the one small doc reference that actually gives me the correct answer. Actually, ChatGPT is going to be really good for helping you with finding the tiny detail in a large body of documentation, as long as their docs were published prior to 2020

knighthack 4y ago

I'm on SO almost everyday. Almost all my visits render useful, fruitful information, across various different languages, for current information/documentation rather than just "7-8 years ago". I notice that the "gatekeepers" of different language communities span from hostile to friendly, so to tar the entire site of Stack Overflow as being the same smacks of prejudice, rather than fact. So what language are you doing work in? Anyone who doesn't preface sentences of anger with the language of their worfklow - especially when the questions, answers, feel and brainshare of SO communities are divided by language - is offering an opinion of pure sentiment, rather than rational assessment.

PaulHoule 4y ago

I could never to stand to play the SO game to get enough karma to be able to fully play the SO game.