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There was a time (first 6 months in the life of StackOverflow) where pretty much all questions would get answers within minutes. I was somewhat active on it and

by hasenj 14y ago

There was a time (first 6 months in the life of StackOverflow) where pretty much all questions would get answers within minutes. I was somewhat active on it and to me it was like an RPG game of trying to get more and more points. It was damn addictive. Then, somehow it got boring and complicated, and I stopped playing. I don't exactly remember what or how that happened, but it was a mixture of new rules and confusing features. I haven't played there for more than 2 years, but I'm still in the top 2%, and best of all, I still get points from all my previous contributions. When I stopped, I had around 8k points; now I have 19k points. StackOverflow was way more fun (and useful) at the beginning. I think a major factor is that simply, all the basic and interesting questions already got asked. New questions these days tend to be very specific and complicated.

objclxt 14y ago
"and best of all, I still get points from all my previous contributions. When I stopped, I had around 8k points; now I have 19k points" Me too: it's the Bank of Stack Overflow. Like you, I was quite active a few years ago, back when iOS development was quite new (that's my speciality). But you're right, many questions now are very specific ("my code crashes at X", etc), which isn't inherently a bad thing but doesn't float my boat.
a3_nm 14y ago
> There was a time (first 6 months in the life of StackOverflow) where pretty much all questions would get answers within minutes. This is now the case on younger sites of the StackExchange network. For instance, <http://french.stackexchange.com/unanswered&#62 http://french.stackexchange.com/unanswered> is pretty much always empty.
- hasenj 14y ago
  SO used to have new questions every 20 minutes or so. The French Exchange seems to have (on average) few questions per day.
  - m_myers 14y ago
    SO now has new questions every 20 seconds or so (not an exaggeration - an understatement if anything). A high percentage are still answered, but in absolute terms, the number of unanswered questions is obviously increasing.
forrestthewoods 14y ago
"StackOverflow was way more fun (and useful) at the beginning." Wait, what? How could SO possibly be less useful today than it was a few years ago. Anytime I have any programming question I immediately google it and odds of a StackOverflow answer are very high. I started iOS dev when it was fairly new and it sucked. So many bugs, gotchas, and misc shortcoming of the dev environment, Obj-C, or the SDK. Every single issue I ran into has now been cleanly answered on SO. Things I wasted dozens of hours on then would take me mere minutes as a new dev today. I sympathize with it not being as fun to answer questions today, but I have no idea how you can say it was more useful then than it is now.
- hasenj 14y ago
  I meant useful for getting answers to new questions. Meaning, if you're having a problem with something, and you googled it but didn't find answers ... I don't think you'll get useful results by posting the question to SO. But of course it's still tremendously useful for the archive of questions and answers that it hosts.
  - wilfra 14y ago
    "if you're having a problem with something, and you googled it but didn't find answers ... I don't think you'll get useful results by posting the question to SO." I disagree. I just joined recently and that is exactly how I've used SO and in every instane I've gotten an answer to my question - and fast. Very fast.
  - joelthelion 14y ago
    Posting with a 500 point bounty still does wonders. I once had a guy write a patch to the mercurial DVCS (small, but still) to answer a question. Of course you have to wait for two days before you can offer a bounty.
- megablast 14y ago
  He is clearly talking about it from the answering questions side, that is why he is talking about it as a game. Clearly SO is a great resource. But I am guessing you never found iphonedevsdk.com, it had all the answers before SO did. Although SO has better explained answers.
wslh 14y ago
Yes. I just found ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9535809/best-cms-support-for-twitter-bootstrap-2 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9535809/best-cms-support-... ) that one of my questions recently voted up was closed. Beyond discussing if it was correctly closed or not, this situation reminds me of Wikipedia rules where you don't only contribute but lose your time arguing in favor of your changes. For me, it is much more productive to write a blog article than waste time arguing in favor of your contributions.

by hasenj 14y ago

objclxt 14y ago

"and best of all, I still get points from all my previous contributions. When I stopped, I had around 8k points; now I have 19k points" Me too: it's the Bank of Stack Overflow. Like you, I was quite active a few years ago, back when iOS development was quite new (that's my speciality). But you're right, many questions now are very specific ("my code crashes at X", etc), which isn't inherently a bad thing but doesn't float my boat.

a3_nm 14y ago

> There was a time (first 6 months in the life of StackOverflow) where pretty much all questions would get answers within minutes. This is now the case on younger sites of the StackExchange network. For instance, <http://french.stackexchange.com/unanswered&#62 http://french.stackexchange.com/unanswered> is pretty much always empty.

hasenj 14y ago
SO used to have new questions every 20 minutes or so. The French Exchange seems to have (on average) few questions per day.
- m_myers 14y ago
  SO now has new questions every 20 seconds or so (not an exaggeration - an understatement if anything). A high percentage are still answered, but in absolute terms, the number of unanswered questions is obviously increasing.

forrestthewoods 14y ago

"StackOverflow was way more fun (and useful) at the beginning." Wait, what? How could SO possibly be less useful today than it was a few years ago. Anytime I have any programming question I immediately google it and odds of a StackOverflow answer are very high. I started iOS dev when it was fairly new and it sucked. So many bugs, gotchas, and misc shortcoming of the dev environment, Obj-C, or the SDK. Every single issue I ran into has now been cleanly answered on SO. Things I wasted dozens of hours on then would take me mere minutes as a new dev today. I sympathize with it not being as fun to answer questions today, but I have no idea how you can say it was more useful then than it is now.

hasenj 14y ago
I meant useful for getting answers to new questions. Meaning, if you're having a problem with something, and you googled it but didn't find answers ... I don't think you'll get useful results by posting the question to SO. But of course it's still tremendously useful for the archive of questions and answers that it hosts.
- wilfra 14y ago
  "if you're having a problem with something, and you googled it but didn't find answers ... I don't think you'll get useful results by posting the question to SO." I disagree. I just joined recently and that is exactly how I've used SO and in every instane I've gotten an answer to my question - and fast. Very fast.
- joelthelion 14y ago
  Posting with a 500 point bounty still does wonders. I once had a guy write a patch to the mercurial DVCS (small, but still) to answer a question. Of course you have to wait for two days before you can offer a bounty.
megablast 14y ago
He is clearly talking about it from the answering questions side, that is why he is talking about it as a game. Clearly SO is a great resource. But I am guessing you never found iphonedevsdk.com, it had all the answers before SO did. Although SO has better explained answers.

wslh 14y ago

Yes. I just found ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9535809/best-cms-support-for-twitter-bootstrap-2 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9535809/best-cms-support-... ) that one of my questions recently voted up was closed. Beyond discussing if it was correctly closed or not, this situation reminds me of Wikipedia rules where you don't only contribute but lose your time arguing in favor of your changes. For me, it is much more productive to write a blog article than waste time arguing in favor of your contributions.