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What's wrong with Stack Exchange? I'm a Math Stack Exchange user and I think it's absolutely amazing for the knowledge seeker. It's a repository of high quality

What's wrong with Stack Exchange? I'm a Math Stack Exchange user and I think it's absolutely amazing for the knowledge seeker. It's a repository of high quality questions and answers that you're not going to answer yourself. You can instantly access hundreds of the smartest people in the world. You can spend a week thinking about something difficult and frequently get it answered in under an hour, sometimes 10 minutes. It's truly amazing.

sasaf5 3y ago
> What's wrong with Stack Exchange? Also with HN, many subreddits, millions of personal blogs and sites... I tried to find why the paper says that Wikipedia is "the last good place on the internet", but it doesn't seem to provide any reference for that. Is it a meme somewhere?
- hospitalJail 3y ago
  Yeah as much as 'blogs' used to have a bad reputation, they are basically the only place worth visiting that isnt a social media site.
- WhyOhWhyQ 3y ago
  I like the AskHistorians subreddit, but I haven't found much else. I think AskHistorians and Stack Exchange have a somewhat high "barrier to entry" for actually answering questions, which might be part of it. (I mean this in the sense that you're going to get down-voted to hell if you don't really know what you're doing on Stack Exchange, and I think you actually have to be a historian to answer on AskHistorians.) HN is more of a bad habit for me than anything else, unfortunately. I end up lurking comment sections just to disagree with everyone and turn it off.
  - some_random 3y ago
    The difference is that the answers to history related questions don't change with nearly the same frequency that tech related answers change, and even still r/askhistorians doesn't just lock "duplicate" questions so answers that are new or subtly different can still be submitted. Also it's worth noting that you do NOT need to be a professional historian to answer, you basically just have to provide sources that pass the sniff test.
Sharlin 3y ago
Yes, many SE sites are pretty great, but they probably wouldn't if they were as large as Stack Overflow itself. The failure modes of SO are well known. Still, given how invaluable a resource it has become to the large majority of programmers, it's certainly doing many things right.
trabant00 3y ago
There is nothing in the article mentioning anything other than Wikipedia. The title is completely unsupported and I think intentional click-bait. Trump is also mentioned several times in the article as well.
aroundtown 3y ago
> What's wrong with Stack Exchange? Every time I have posted a question on SE it is either flagged as already answered (when it's not) or people screaming "XY Problem!" My approach to SE now is "Look, Don't Touch".
- sockaddr 3y ago
  Exactly. It's such a pain in the ass to contribute knowledge there that I just don't even bother trying anymore. It's a collection of petty tyrants at this point. I can't wait for LLMs to just digest them whole.
- vcg3rd 3y ago
  SE has become (for a while now) the Platonic Form for RTFM. It doesn't matter how much effort one puts into researching and troubleshooting (including reading many F (man)uals and forums) before asking, nor does it matter how much detail you provide to show how X (which is supposed to do Y, and does on many machines), does Z on yours for some reason, and, BTW, here's my logs and output for foo[1-5], all you get is "asked and answered RTFM, n00b."
- derefr 3y ago
  I would love a place that works almost exactly like Stack Exchange, but which is geared toward polling experts' opinions on something (which is a thing that SE explicitly says it doesn't allow.) Like, I can solve most concrete single answer problems (the kind SE is "for") on my own by digging into the offending component's source code. Reverse engineering if necessary. The type of question that I really want to ask others, is when I have multiple options that all seem good to me as solutions, and I want guidance on which way to go — or, more deeply, which factors I should consider in my selection. (Example: "what should I use as a database for this project?") This is exactly the sort of decision that a manager on a product, would hire a lead engineer for that project for their expertise in, and so would expect said lead engineer to be able to lay out for them when asked. I feel like all the right people are there on SE to be able to answer this type of question. But SE itself just doesn't let them do it — or at least, isn't structured to incentivize them to do it.
pseudostem 3y ago
Math stack exchange IIRC is independent of stack exchange
- esafak 3y ago
  https://mathoverflow.net/ https://mathoverflow.net/
fumeux_fume 3y ago
Not all, but many of the SE elite are awful to deal with unless you want to spend more time following their arbitrary demands than providing helpful answers to people's questions.

sasaf5 3y ago

> What's wrong with Stack Exchange? Also with HN, many subreddits, millions of personal blogs and sites... I tried to find why the paper says that Wikipedia is "the last good place on the internet", but it doesn't seem to provide any reference for that. Is it a meme somewhere?

hospitalJail 3y ago
Yeah as much as 'blogs' used to have a bad reputation, they are basically the only place worth visiting that isnt a social media site.
WhyOhWhyQ 3y ago
I like the AskHistorians subreddit, but I haven't found much else. I think AskHistorians and Stack Exchange have a somewhat high "barrier to entry" for actually answering questions, which might be part of it. (I mean this in the sense that you're going to get down-voted to hell if you don't really know what you're doing on Stack Exchange, and I think you actually have to be a historian to answer on AskHistorians.) HN is more of a bad habit for me than anything else, unfortunately. I end up lurking comment sections just to disagree with everyone and turn it off.
- some_random 3y ago
  The difference is that the answers to history related questions don't change with nearly the same frequency that tech related answers change, and even still r/askhistorians doesn't just lock "duplicate" questions so answers that are new or subtly different can still be submitted. Also it's worth noting that you do NOT need to be a professional historian to answer, you basically just have to provide sources that pass the sniff test.

Sharlin 3y ago

Yes, many SE sites are pretty great, but they probably wouldn't if they were as large as Stack Overflow itself. The failure modes of SO are well known. Still, given how invaluable a resource it has become to the large majority of programmers, it's certainly doing many things right.

trabant00 3y ago

There is nothing in the article mentioning anything other than Wikipedia. The title is completely unsupported and I think intentional click-bait. Trump is also mentioned several times in the article as well.

aroundtown 3y ago

> What's wrong with Stack Exchange? Every time I have posted a question on SE it is either flagged as already answered (when it's not) or people screaming "XY Problem!" My approach to SE now is "Look, Don't Touch".

sockaddr 3y ago
Exactly. It's such a pain in the ass to contribute knowledge there that I just don't even bother trying anymore. It's a collection of petty tyrants at this point. I can't wait for LLMs to just digest them whole.
vcg3rd 3y ago
SE has become (for a while now) the Platonic Form for RTFM. It doesn't matter how much effort one puts into researching and troubleshooting (including reading many F (man)uals and forums) before asking, nor does it matter how much detail you provide to show how X (which is supposed to do Y, and does on many machines), does Z on yours for some reason, and, BTW, here's my logs and output for foo[1-5], all you get is "asked and answered RTFM, n00b."
derefr 3y ago
I would love a place that works almost exactly like Stack Exchange, but which is geared toward polling experts' opinions on something (which is a thing that SE explicitly says it doesn't allow.) Like, I can solve most concrete single answer problems (the kind SE is "for") on my own by digging into the offending component's source code. Reverse engineering if necessary. The type of question that I really want to ask others, is when I have multiple options that all seem good to me as solutions, and I want guidance on which way to go — or, more deeply, which factors I should consider in my selection. (Example: "what should I use as a database for this project?") This is exactly the sort of decision that a manager on a product, would hire a lead engineer for that project for their expertise in, and so would expect said lead engineer to be able to lay out for them when asked. I feel like all the right people are there on SE to be able to answer this type of question. But SE itself just doesn't let them do it — or at least, isn't structured to incentivize them to do it.

pseudostem 3y ago

Math stack exchange IIRC is independent of stack exchange

esafak 3y ago
https://mathoverflow.net/ https://mathoverflow.net/

fumeux_fume 3y ago

Not all, but many of the SE elite are awful to deal with unless you want to spend more time following their arbitrary demands than providing helpful answers to people's questions.