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My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

281 points by luu 12y ago

jph 12y ago
#1 on my StackOverflow wishlist is a way to make collaboration easier on answers. I see many questions and answers where the top answer mostly works, yet buried below there's a much better answer. I see this happening in areas where technology is in flux, such as languages with evolving syntax, or when toolchains are moving to new tools. Collaboration can improve this by enabling subsequent people to add additional information. Some examples: "This older answer is for version 1, and this newer answer is for version 2", or "This older answer is specifically for bash, and this newer answer is specifically for zsh".
- Veedrac 12y ago
  What would you look for that's not dealt with by comments and edits?
  - jph 12y ago
    For example: * Wiki-style editing of some kind, along with collaboration tooling, and users can annotate particular pieces of information within an answer. * Ability to combine/collaborate on multiple answers, such as beginning with introductory information relevant to all the answers, then having some kind of sectioning for specific information for each version. Two small steps can help toward this: * Mark an answer as applicable to a specific version number, or range, or date, or implementation. * Enable the question author to accept an additional new answer that is more current, without subtracting points from the original answer.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  It was supposed to be that way, but it hasn't worked out. Originally the idea was that there would be some wiki-like aspects to the site where collaboration could result in up to date and comprehensive answers to important or common questions. That hasn't worked out, instead the site has largely kept the same features it had in 2009.
carc 12y ago
Sure stack overflow isn't perfect, but shit... Do you know how much productivity would be lost on a global scale if the site suddenly disappeared? I still use it in some capacity almost every day. Sure some of the rules might be nit picky and can be obnoxious sometimes, but nothing is perfect.
- ProAm 12y ago
  We're not saying it's perfect, we are saying its usefulness/quality is going downhill. It was never perfect.
nvivo 12y ago
Even better when you post a question to stackoverflow and a moderator closes it with "this question should be on xyz.stackexchange.com". You remove your question and post it there just to get another moderator saying "this question should be on stackoverflow". It's obviously a great site, but as always most moderators are usually people with more spare time than real clue on how to organize things.
- Guvante 12y ago
  "Which site do I submit to" shouldn't be as hard of a problem for certain. Heck they removed a lot of options from that close reason to minimize this, as anything database related go punted to the DBA one (which is only for professional questions not minor schema questions).
  - _almosnow 12y ago
    Only problem with the sister sites is that their user base is much smaller than on SO and the value of SO pretty much boils down to "everyone's in there so someone may help me".
    - Guvante 12y ago
      I find the true value of SO to be "populating google with good answers to questions", but that is just me :).
- monksy 12y ago
  I call that the SU-SF shuffle.
_almosnow 12y ago
I used to love SO, but nowadays the proportion of assholes running the site is so big that it ruins everything. To give you an example, check out the last question I've asked there: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27510345/c-map-assignment-overload-for-different-types http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27510345/c-map-assignment.... 11 downvotes and closed within a few hours; apparently I pissed off one of the moderators (when asking him why is my question "off-topic") and he invited his gang to downvote me as well, some other guy even threatened to deactivate my account. That is SO now, and I no longer try to engage into that community. Edit: Looking at how the votes in my question are evolving as we speak, I see that some guys still go in and downvote it more. Read out the question, and check out the really good accepted answer, if you don't think that's valuable information for many programmers out there then I'm at a loss of words.
- itsbits 12y ago
  haha..gangs of Stackoverflow huh..i can see that happening..i dont have many friends thgh SO but I agree people groupup through SO chat rooms..
- 3JPLW 12y ago
  Well, you didn't just ask why it's off topic. You threw around insults and used very vulgar language. http://stackoverflow.com/posts/27510345/revisions http://stackoverflow.com/posts/27510345/revisions
  - _almosnow 12y ago
    Actually I did ask, strange you didn't notice that since it's right there in the link you posted. And yeah, you are right, I used the word 'cunt' after they started behaving like that, I'm sorry if that scared you; I did it because I was really pissed off by all their bs. Have you ever felt annoyed some time in your life? Apparently not, lucky you.
    - minitech 12y ago
      I’m happy to say that I downvoted you specifically for that! It’s what I always do whenever there’s a rude remark, regardless of question content. Glad to see you’re getting so many votes now, though.
claimstoknow 12y ago
Oh you have a problem with stack overflow? Sure i could help you with that, but what's the problem you're really trying to solve?
itsbits 12y ago
Hating this coz of few assholes?? There is no perfect world..
icehawk219 12y ago
I don't have a problem with Stack Overflow, I have a problem with its community and, as a result, have completely abandoned the site. I no longer ask questions there nor do I answer them. If I need help my circle of friends is often able to provide enough information for me and if I take to Google the vast majority of the time the first search result is a link to a Stack Overflow page with someone asking the exact question I'm trying to find an answer to. And it's closed as off topic. It's a great site and for a while had a great community, but these days it's just too toxic to be worth the bother.
jasode 12y ago
To me, I see this strange contradiction in how stackoverflow is evolving. Joel Spolsky (one of the founders) gave a very interesting presentation[1] in 2009. The key takeaway I've always remembered from his comments was the idea of "anthropology". The science of trying to really understand human behavior and make the website amplify good communities. What I see 6 years later is a lot of "why is this question closed as 'not constructive' when it has 500 upvotes?!?!" There is clearly a disconnect between the way the end users see stackoverflow and the way the moderators see it. These days, it seems like the stackoverflow guys (not necessarily Joel specifically) are inexplicably blind to human behaviors that was was highlighted in 2009. But, I don't have the whole story so maybe someone closer to the situation can explain. I don't know who is right or wrong. The thing I'd like to know is if stackoverflow still "works" for the quality contributors who invest their time writing extensive and insightful answers. Or, have a significant percentage abandoned the site because they wade through too many questions from homework, or outsourced sweatshop employees who don't even do modicum of googling, etc. On the other hand, are the majority of complaints distorted because they are mostly voiced by the Eternal September[2] crowd? So, is it experts leaving? Or newcomers overwhelming the site with bad questions? I don't know if one can gather from website analytics which of the 2 situations is dominant. [1]http://youtu.be/NWHfY_lvKIQ?t=3m18s http://youtu.be/NWHfY_lvKIQ?t=3m18s [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Shog9 12y ago
  It's both. The former is inevitable - most people, like the author of this article, spend the bulk of their time up-front: post a lot of answers, enjoy the experience, get tired of it, pull back to only answering the occasional post that piques their interest. So there's a fairly constant fall-off of activity from people who've previously posted a lot. And this gets worse when these folks find fewer questions that interest them, which brings us to... The number of questions posted on Stack Overflow every day is overwhelming. Over the past year, it's ranged from a low of about 5.5 thousand per day (Christmas holidays) to over 11 thousand per day; currently it's averaging around 8.5K. Depending on your interests, you might see very little of this (if you focus solely on a relatively obscure tag) or all of it (if, as many do, you drink from the firehose at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/?sort=newest http://stackoverflow.com/questions/?sort=newest) or some mixture (if you stick to the home page). The folks who stick it out long-term tend to have some pretty gnarly filters in place. Those who don't tend to become very bitter about the whole Eternal September thing, because that's most of what they see. The chance of dropping in on Stack Overflow over lunch & just stumbling upon a new question that covers some novel, interesting tech you've been working with lately is pretty slim, so if that's all you're answering anymore, well... You're probably not answering very much anymore. The trick here is to find a way of putting more interesting questions in front of the folks they're likely to interest, and showing fewer "here's my homework, verbatim" questions to... well, everyone. And it's a hard trick. Disclaimer: I work for Stack Exchange and have been hanging around Stack Overflow pretty much forever.
Goronmon 12y ago
I'm actually struggling to recall the last time I followed a link to a StackOverflow question where the question wasn't closed for some reason or another. It's gotten to the point where it feels like the only goal of the site is curate old content.
jarcane 12y ago
It has largely become more or less a standard expectation that every single question I come across on Stack Overflow through search engine results will be locked. This expectation is rarely contradicted, and then only usually within very small sub-niche topics (the Racket SO community is quite pleasant, frex). It has rather ensured that I never made any effort to contribute to that community. I do still use SO answers if Google or DDG happen to provide me with a link to one that answers my question, which in fairness is quite often, even most of the time. But when so many of those clearly helpful answers (often answering my own question to the letter), are downvoted/locked over some matter of bureaucratic principle or the opinion of a nameless moderator, it makes it abundantly clear that any contribution I might occasionally wish to proffer will be unwelcome, and any question I ask is as like to be met with censure as actual assistance. Actually participating in SO seems these days to be about as fruitless an endeavor as editing Wikipedia was.
- savanaly 12y ago
  I use it all the time for my work in Javascript, Angular and Node.js and rarely see locked questions. What subjects are/were you working in? Are you sure confirmation bias isn't causing you to overestimate the frequency of this happening?
  - davelnewton 12y ago
    Same here; the stuff I end up seeing is all over the map. I only rarely see locked questions, and those are usually older ones.
- fredley 12y ago
  A note on locking: Locking prevents edits and comments on an individual post. The reason for locking a post is nearly always spam edits/comments. Locks are finite in time. Questions that rank highly for popular search queries receive a lot of traffic, and locking is often necessary to prevent vandalism. On question closure, this is rarely done by moderators (users with a diamond ♦ after their name), but by 5 votes from regular users. Only moderators can lock posts. Disclosure: I am a Stack Exchange moderator
jarrettc 12y ago
I've always been uneasy about the fact that Stack Overflow users can edit each other's posts more or less arbitrarily. User A can edit user B's post to say something embarrassing, and most readers will attribute it to User B. I've had this happen with my posts. It's never been egregious, like a user inserting something inflammatory into my otherwise mundane programming question. Most often, the offending edits give the appearance that the original poster doesn't know how to write or doesn't know basic programming concepts. It's not unheard-of for potential employers to look at a programmer's accounts on Stack Overflow, Github, etc., so an unflattering edit could be problematic. Granted, one can use a pseudonymous account. But it would be better not to have to.
- nraynaud 12y ago
  And people karma-whoring on your question. Nobody has the answer, but your question has been edited 10 times.
  - Shog9 12y ago
    Every edit "bumps" the post, giving it a bit more visibility. Some folks, upon encountering an unanswered question they also want an answer to, will do some quick copy-editing just to try & get a few more eyeballs on the problem.
  - davelnewton 12y ago
    There's only a specific group of people that "benefit" from editing questions. Most edits are an attempt to make it even slightly better and/or clearer in some way.
- ezyang 12y ago
  Does StackOverflow notify when your answer is edited?
  - fredley 12y ago
    It does. You will receive a notification in your inbox saying which post was edited so you can review it.
jofer 12y ago
First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ http://chat.stackoverflow.com/) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture around it has become rather toxic. It effectively gives anyone there an automatic close hammer. Furthermore, it's not the current "dupehammer", but a close hammer for any reason, as you can pretty instantly get 5 votes to close. Somehow, every question involving anything than popular web frameworks is apt to be closed as "too localized". I can't count the number of times I've been in the middle of answering an admittedly niche, but well-phrased and on-topic question, when it's closed before I can answer. The source of the sudden rash of close votes? Almost always a "cv-pls" in relevant tag's chat room.
- jobu 12y ago
  Wasn't there a similar debate over Quality vs Quantity with the Wikipedia community a few years back? It's been a while, but I remember seeing complaints about thousands of articles getting culled for being trivial (comic books, movies, anime, moderately famous people or places). It's hard to find many articles about it anymore, but I did find this from 2007: http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/ http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/
  - mkremins 12y ago
    You might get more results searching for "deletionism vs inclusionism", which seems to be the most widely used name for the debate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...
    - angersock 12y ago
      What's the current general stance on that these days I wonder? What's the prevailing wind?
Ensorceled 12y ago
My favourite is the upvoted "You should have Googled this" comment with an accompanying, and equally upvoted, "Google sent me here." SO seems to have not awakened to the fact that it is the defacto programming information site for all languages and developer capabilities and no longer the purview of elite.
- JeremyBanks 12y ago
  http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5280/embrace-the-non-googlers http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5280/embrace-the-non...
- jgh 12y ago
  I dunno these days it seems like Google is sending me to Chinese sites that just scrape SO and repost all the questions/answers.
balls187 12y ago
Is there a correlation between Atwood leaving, and the eventual take over of internet community zealotry? I've yet to participate in a forum where that doesn't occur.
lordnacho 12y ago
Quite often when I Google something, I end up on an SO page with exactly the answer I needed, and it's been closed due to some BS. And there's a bunch of comments about why it's closed. I think the moderators have gotten more and more zealous. Everything is looked at with the guidelines in mind, instead of common sense. I suspect there's a certain type of person who likes to apply stringent rules to everything, and common sense people just have enough and decide not to run in the elections. If SO was a billboard I could understand the need to only have the interesting stuff on. But SO doesn't have a space problem. If someone has posted a question, it's likely they're not the only noob wondering what the answer is. If the question is useful to people, Google will lead them there.
msoad 12y ago
> 6,900 users with a reputation of 10000 or more can delete questions. I have 20k reps and I can't delete questions. This is not correct.
- Veedrac 12y ago
  You can only vote to delete closed questions over a certain age. Eg: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16681587/some-bigger-rust-examples http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16681587/some-bigger-rust...
vorg 12y ago
> the Stack Overflow staff and moderators seem to take the attitude that the long-term content of the site is much more important Perhaps the Stack Overflow owners realize they can muscle in on the programming language documentation business. With the ongoing increase in programmers who learn a programming language at the same time as they're paid to write production code in it, the promoters of some languages will inevitably skip writing documentation that fully describes what it does and instead set up a basket of Stack Overflow users to plant lots of answered questions, which also gives the initial appearance of an existing community for that language. Eventually languages will even be designed and implemented without any thought given to documentation that explains it from beginning to end, but instead only the intention for it to be learnt in Stack Overflow-sized chunks, keyed to search engine keywords instead of documentation subheadings. And part of Stack Overflow's business model may be to host the primary documentation for these emerging types of programming languages. Dr Dobbs magazine described this phenomenon as a "conundrum" and used Groovy as an example of this new type of language: "The endless variety of features requires considerable documentation, which is simply not available, especially for the advanced features that give Groovy much of its benefit. And so, if you jump in today, you'll find the language is easy to learn, but hard to master". http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731 http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731
- 7952 12y ago
  People learn languages from different routes depending on their background. A complete beginner to programming probably needs tutorials and will not understand a language reference that is most useful for an experienced coder. Stack overflow is more like a recipe book that happens to let you list the ingredients. But that is a poor alternative to tutorials and proper documentation.
teh_klev 12y ago
I would like to defend Tim Post's meta-answer because it's quoted out of context. The OP's question was about the reduction in quality of questions being asked on SO, which I myself have noticed in my particular area of expertise [0]. I don't think Tim comes off as "elitist"/"cool kids" (also Tim is genuinely a really nice person, not at all uppity or "elitist" [1]). There is a rising deluge of utterly shit quality questions being asked on the site. As an "expert" I just can't be bothered any more trying to assist users who are missing so much fundamental knowledge and understanding about the tech they're working with. Hell, some of them can't even tell me which version of IIS they're using. It saps too much energy and is the reason why my own participation on the site has taken a nose-dive over the past couple of years. I do agree with the comment throttling timer and "@user" behaviour in comments, I think that was one of Jeff's personal things he got implemented much to the frustration of many folks on the site. I like Jeff but some of his ideas about how to solve certain types of problems were a bit peculiar. I still love SO, I still visit daily but it sure burned me out as an "answerer". [0]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/*iis* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/*iis* [1]: Disclosure: I'm an ex-diamond mod on the site - I would like to think I played fair, erring on the side of giving folks the benefit of the doubt and that their questions were asked in good faith (and with a tiny wee bit of upfront research).
- bigger_cheese 12y ago
  I have noticed the same thing I do not visit the site all that often I usually check it once a fortnight or so in my lunch break. I tend to browse the "Linux" section. Everytime I visit it feels like Deja-Vu the same questions keep appearing, there will almost always be questions like "How can I get my program to run as a daemon?", "Why am I seeing Zombie processes?" and some variation on "How can I get the PID of my running process?". Quite a lot of questions seem to have a negative score or are locked for seemingly no good reason and the ones that aren't are questions like the above that are easily googleable. A lot of the time it feels like the person asking the question hasn't bothered to a) read man page or b) do a google search beforehand or they lack basic knowledge about Linux - such as what the /proc file system is for.
erikb 12y ago
I don't use SO to ask questions any more, but it's really good for searching stuff you already know but don't like to remember, like if that method used camelCase() or under_score(), what the annoying workaround for that little quirk in the framework of your choice was, etc. I feel beside the new stuff that comes from new FWs and languages most questions seem to be answered. Therefore starting to focus on long term quality is not a bad thing. Most of my recent work in SO was also not asking questions but correcting/connecting answers that are already there.
jorjordandan 12y ago
As users of stack overflow, product hunt, & hacker news, we have to subject ourselves to the tyranny of the upvote. We have effectively banished unpopular questions and ideas. Or great ideas conveyed in an unpopular manner. Unfortunately, there is no better way to self-organize and moderate large masses of user generated information..
mmphosis 12y ago
SO seems like less of a discussion board, and more of a snapshot in time: 2009 seems about right. Once the so-called "moderators" started deleting, editing and locking most of the answers, I was definitely discouraged from contributing. There WAS some gold buried in some of the less upvoted posts and comments, but "no soup for you." One other little note, and don't know if anyone else noticed this, but SO is somehow biased a bit towards Microsoft. It's no big deal, but I thought I would mention it. http://blog.codinghorror.com/giving-up-on-microsoft/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/giving-up-on-microsoft/ As SO fossilizes, I think there might be an opportunity to create a new programming QA site.
- davelnewton 12y ago
  SO-the-infrastructure might be biased towards MS, but the people on it certainly don't tend to be, at least in the tags I'm involved in.
stickperson 12y ago
I've been using IRC to ask questions instead of Stack Overflow for some time now. Each room has its own character, but I've found people are generally very helpful.
- code_duck 12y ago
  It depends, I suppose. The last time I used IRC in a technical help channel, someone asked for a simple way to open a bare X screen. I gave the answer I knew, which I got from a mandrake system script. It has worked for me for years on Debian and Ubuntu: xinit -- /usr/bin/X :1 And right away, a group of 3-4 clueless people or trolls told the asker that I was attempting to harm their system and not to listen to me. It wasn't very productive or fun.
psp 12y ago
The recent funding news seemed really strange when I have been feeling like the author for a while. I think SO is going downhill fast and people running it don't even realize it. Joel, where are you? So sad, used to like SO when it came around and now the way it's being moderated makes you want to just leave.
O____________O 12y ago
Every time I work on a project dealing with unusual C++/Windows/COM topics, I end up hitting a high percentage of highly relevant, closed questions. The worst are the ones where I figure out the convoluted solution, but I can't answer the existing question because it's closed. So, anyone after me will suffer the same aggravation or simply give up. The worst are the ones where some new mod has trolled through four-year-old questions closing them whenever possible. Makes me wonder how much great information has simply been deleted to give a new mod, what, a feeling of power? More history (ironically)? It's also darkly funny when a mod clearly doesn't understand the technology involved, and thus doesn't understand that it is, in fact, valid and properly worded. I suppose it's no different than the rest of the tech community, "blogosphere", social coding sites, etc., where it's a self-promotion-centric approach that dominates. You'll get further working on the latest and greatest stack than you will solving hard problems with an older tech stack.
- codinghorror 12y ago
  Do you mean closed or locked from vandalism by drive by users? A lot of popular stuff gets locked due to noise answers and bad edits.
  - Udo 12y ago
    Isn't that a UI problem? Punish people who do noise answers and bad edits, and see to it that garbage isn't featured prominently. Closing pages down is a desperate, blunt measure and in the long run it decays the value of your content instead of protecting it. If it's gotten so bad that this is preventing legitimate edits and answers from improving your content, you have a very serious problem - both culturally and technologically.
  - O____________O 12y ago
    Usually closed as non-constructive (I think that's S.O.'s wording).
- endgame 12y ago
  I've given up on SO as well. Like I said last time it came up here: > When it was young you could find veteran wizards who answered all sorts of obscure things because it was fun. The last straw for me was seeing a perfectly valid question about video memory in DOS get drive-by closed by some mod. You used to be able to find stuff about ZZT-OOP on SO. Not anymore. I don't know if you could call it an outright failure when it gets a ton of traffic, search engine cred etc., but it's certainly not a success for me.
bradleysmith 12y ago
This post has put in to words much of my own, un-reputable experience with SO and stack-exchange forums. The technical corrections and constant closing of questions by mods discouraged my asking of questions ages ago. There is a feeling that researching the details necessary to describe the question adequately takes away from research that may have yielded how to solve it by looking at similar questions or documentation. I know that this is partly the intention of the mods: go do your homework before asking. But, it can swing to be the flipside: homework of asking is as long or longer than deciphering your problem. In my experience, much of a questioners research to prepare their question was UNRELATED to their problem, so the amount of information included in the question is far above and beyond what is necessary to solve their variable typo, or whatever. Where this is a good thing for the long-term usefulness of SO, like the OP said it takes away from the short-term usefulness of the site for us plebian self-doubters. Having said that, previously asked questions on SO answer ~90% of my programming questions, so they're obviously doing something right. I've thought before that a 'staging area' for questions might be useful, where a question gets posted by _anon_idiot_user_ like me asking why thier code won't run because of something simple. It is marked as 'not useful' for whatever reason, but can still offer (diminished) reputation to answerers. After a particular amount of time, the question is removed from the SO 'canon' (i.e. unpublished and deleted), but the reputation sticks. Nobody's ego is hurt from having thier stupid question memorialized, and mods would be more forgiving to stupid questioners knowing it will go away once solved. just an idea. All in all, I'm eternally grateful to SO and it's 'asshole mods'. They've taught me more programming than any other entity on the web. EDIT: Clarity
- chc 12y ago
  The problem of bad questions isn't just "having stupid questions memorialized." It's that it takes away from good questions. There is a finite number of people who can answer a question, and these people have a finite amount of time. They don't necessarily know a question is going to be bad before they read it, so if a bad question stays, it continues wasting more and more people's time, and taking time from other people who did put in the effort to ask a good question. So instead, the question is closed while you improve it, and the idea is for it to be reopened when you're done.
dicroce 12y ago
I agree with everything said and I'd also like to add this: I used to enjoy visiting the site because quite often there was a nice general question on the front page that related to me in some way... Well, ALL of the general CS type questions are answered now... and any new ones are closed as dups almost immediately.. Which means the questions that survive these days are hyper specific, and not very useful or enjoyable...
elchief 12y ago
The worst part is the new users who don't have the faintest clue as to what they're doing, and the annoying duplicates. And sometimes I get shat on for asking the question not quite right. 1. Need to incentivize new users to read some real basic FAQs before posting. Not sure what the best solution is. Fascist Me wants to see them walk through a wizard, agreeing that they understand basic topic X before continuing, but that doesn't sound too user friendly. 2. Need some better text similarity with Latent Semantic Indexing or something to find duplicates. I'll see new questions that I know are recent duplicates, but then can't even find an example. Doh.
- hawleyal 12y ago
  I am constantly amazed how mods can find a duplicate I could not, and I consider myself a fairly savvy googler. Edit: Instead of forcing RTFM on every new user, I don't see why new users should not have immediate tryout without reprocussions and learn the guidelines from a kindly mod or other user replying with a reason why their question is not appropriate/duplicate or whatever. That is the point of upvotes/downvotes and active moderation. This is a learning community, not a cadre of elitists.
curiously 12y ago
the key to not getting your answered close is to copy paste large text of garbage code that these zealous mods won't bother reading through. the large wall of code allows the question to appear to carry merit and come across as a coding question, when in reality it has nothing to do with the question. This is what is happening. the quality of the questions has deteriorated so much instead of improving. the people providing quality answers have moved on. when the chicken leaves and the eggs start rotting, that's when you know, the decline is the beginning.
brudgers 12y ago
{Based on my recollection of something I heard listening through the StackOverflow/StackExchange Podcast archive.} The example of the Python question about angles is from 2011. I believe that subsequent to that time there were changes to both the close process and the reopening process. Part of the problem I think was that close votes accumulated and did not expire, so that they would stick even after a question was edited or months had passed since the vote was cast. The most recent podcast...about taking more Venture Capital...discussed some of the cultural issues that have developed at StackOverflow. There are two significant pools of users: those like me who know a little or nothing, and those who know a lot. One of the goals of the funding is to make StackOverflow work better for both...at least that was my impression from the podcast. At the top end, the gamification has problems. It doesn't matter how competitive or smart anyone is, they aren't going to catch John Skeet any time soon. So people make up things to entertain themselves. Anyone else remember the popular Meta about deliberately feeding bad algorithms to suspected homework questions? It's always been clear [you can listen to six plus years of Joel and Jeff and the gang yourself] that the longterm purpose of StackOverflow is not helping the person originally asking the question. It's making the internet better. It's also always been clear that there was a tension between questions that are interesting to experts and questions that are so basic that only an absolute beginner will ask them. The test case was: How do I move the Turtle in Logo? [1][2] It's simple, clear, to the point, and offensive to some programmers. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions?page=2 http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions?page=2 [2]: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=moving+a+turtle+in+logo&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=mov...
emodendroket 12y ago
I agree that SO gets overzealous about closing questions but I don't think I needed a page-long summary of the Market Basket saga (as if I didn't hear enough about it this summer) and the rest of it to get to that point.
eitland 12y ago
This comment at the end states it very well: "Stack overflow has failed to understand it’s mission. Stackoverflow exists to share technology information–not to curate it. Curation should be replaced by indexing and ranking. With Stack Overflow, it is as if google had decided on a primary strategy of deleting content from its index, rather than a primary strategy of ranking good content highest."
PythonicAlpha 12y ago
One of the "Soup Nazis" here: I can understand the author. Still I found out, that my name was also in one example of "Soup Nazis" (how embarrassing!). The point is, that with some experience, you are "invited" to review other posts. You can also see it as giving some of the benefit taken back. But as reviewer, you should take responsibility for the quality of questions and answers. And I must say, that there where many cases, where I wanted to vote differently but knew, that the system is intended differently -- the vote I made in the example was one of them. You are softly pressured by the system, to adhere to the "group standard". I think it is a little similar to the Wikipedia problem. Wikipedia also is less attractive to authors today, than it was, because many are chilled by the rigid system. The problem is, that some system is needed for the quality, but how could you reduce the chill factor for newcomers? I think, a little less rigid system would be beneficial to stackoverflow (as it does not need to be an encyclopedia). Some "Soup Nazi" behavior is fostered by any (more or less) rigid system. Here, more sense of understanding of the more experienced users (especially reviewers) would also be good.
strangename 12y ago
SO jumped the shark for me when its scope shifted hard from the original goals. I remember the original seedling goals that Spolsky posted; for example, a question is likely inappropriate for SO if its answer couldn't involve code. That got lost awful fast. Oh, and remember how it was going to be all Wikipedia of programming, where really good answers would be zipped together so that SO became the defacto good-idea repository? And could evolve over time? Such a good idea. Never materialized. Proper props for putting in the effort. Better than e-e. Usually, though definitely not always, better than isolated boards. But now we're in a good-enemy-of-best world where I still want some site or system addressing the original problems, but SO is so dominant I don't see how it could germinate.
- danielweber 12y ago
  SO has definitely out-stripped what came before. They were generation 1 and had gen-1 problems. SO is generation 2, better than generation 1. But it's having gen-2 problems. I think a lot of it is because they are so proud of having fixed the gen-1 problems that they refuse to see their gen-2 problems. Eventually we will see generation 3.
LeoPanthera 12y ago
I stopped using StackOverflow a year or so ago, when I was astonished to discover that people can edit your questions. I accept that this sometimes may be necessary, but I asked a question which was then edited to be a different question, so that the answers I got were entirely useless. I understand the need for moderation but surely they should not be able to change the meaning of what you posted.
- Latty 12y ago
  If that happens, you revert the changes. Editing to change the nature of the question is definitely not a valid edit. If people do it consistently, a mod should intervene.
  - reitanqild 12y ago
    Problem is it is the mods who do it, isn't it. New users cannot edit questions?
    - code_duck 12y ago
      New users can make suggested edits, which are sent into a moderation queue before being applied. Once you reach a certain level of reputation (2000), you can edit other users' content without moderation. http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/edit http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/edit
charlieflowers 12y ago
I can't think of another site that had such a huge gap between its very high potential and its very low fulfillment of that potential.
- zem 12y ago
  twitter? pre-cesspool twitter had a lot of potential
EdSharkey 12y ago
I think the mandate is pretty clear: quality writing of the original question is a must. If you can't write in clear english, or you have a whiff of snark in your question, or your question falls below what many people think of as a valuable contribution, then your question probably deserves to be closed. Why is that not fair? I think it is fair! Be professional! Sometimes you get very cool superusers like BalusC who will edit a sub-par question for clarity or formatting rather than delete it out of hand. Most of the time, I look at his edits and I like what he does with the question. Add value, add value, add value. BalusC makes JSF a joy to research on and work with.
- reitanqild 12y ago
  Agreed. As much as I found JSF horrible, BalusC has made it less so for years it seems. What he does isn't rep-farming using google but rather putting effort into being helpful. Same goes for others. Contrast this to what people refer to as drive-by downvoters: people who seems to routinely troll the forums looking for anything that can be closed.
MilnerRoute 12y ago
Hacker News faced some of the same issues when people complained about excessive down-voting. I remember some of the solutions proposed were a higher threshold for downvotes as the site grew, and the requirement that an actual explanation be typed in with every anonymous downvote or deletion.
aaronchall 12y ago
I feel you, seems like too much soup-nazi. I think maybe I've burned some friends I myself have encouraged to try to get started on the site. But it's the nature of the site. No one else is doing it. Maybe that's because it's not easy. Maybe you should compete with them. I have a feeling there's a lot of people here who've been burned by SO. I know I have. But you can't argue with success. So I've thickened my skin and hardened my resolve, and I'm in the top 3% of users now. I expect my current body of work on the site to put me in the top 1% within a year or so, with no further work from me. The answer to this is to build a better StackOverflow, if you can. But I don't think you can.
- sergiotapia 12y ago
  At this point I think it's hard to compete with SO because it's so clear-cut and full of questions and answers for common things. "Running out of questions." comes to mind. Also, off-topic, I don't think being in a top percentage is something to brag about or a sign of merit. I've done nothing but ask stupid questions on SO and I was lucky to be there when the site was new (lots of high-coin questions!) and I'm in the top 5%.
  - aaronchall 12y ago
    That's a good point, but the top 1% (where I expect to be in a year or two) is close to the end of a long tail. Not many people get there by asking questions, and I only started contributing about a year and a half ago. That percentile rank is a foot in the door in a lot of situations. If someone who is interested in me finds out it's because I give comprehensive smart answers with strong communication, in spite of the fact that I wasn't around when there were lots of easy questions to be had, I think I've got something pretty good to brag about. That's not to say that I wouldn't consider someone who asks lots of good questions too. That requires communication skills as well as technical skills. I personally find it harder to ask good questions than to give good answers.
tempestn 12y ago
Just a thought, but how about letting privileged users vote to keep a question open, which would negate some number of close votes? (As well as a delay before closing, even once the votes were obtained.) Also if someone is in the process of writing an answer, that should count against closing. I tend to agree with the OP that sorting and filtering are a better solution to maintaining quality than unnecessarily closing marginal questions. However, some questions certainly need to be closed. The problem (or at least a problem) seems to be that with such a large number of privileged users, hitting a 5 vote threshold is not difficult, even if the question doesn't deserve to be closed. Increasing the threshold would be one solution, but would make unnecessary moderation work. A don't-close vote seems like potentially a better solution. Edit: Unsurprisingly, looks like I'm not the first one to have this idea: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125/how-about-a-vote-not-to-close-option-to-counter-the-vote-to-close https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125/how-about-a-vot...
greggman 12y ago
I really wish there were better options on SO for dealing with "offtopic" questions Sometimes a question seems like someone is just asking for an answer, like posting their homework, and hasn't tried anything or even googled at all for help. Maybe those questions should be closed and deleted with prejudice but if I was giving the benefit of the doubt I'd prefer to move them to "pergatory.stackoverflow.com". I guess that's what they are by closing them but. But, often there are noob questions that are similarly frustrating but giving the person the benefit of the doubt maybe they really don't know where to start. If wish I could click a button that said [Move to noob.stackoverflow.com] or something like that where people with more patience or that just like helping noobs could be more helpful. I also wish it was easier and required when marking as duplicate to provide a link to the duplicate.
jrochkind1 12y ago
I think I may just be becoming a grumpy old man programmer, But my frustration with stack overflow lately is with how many people ask ill-formed questions because they don't understand what they're talking about -- and don't seem to _want_ to understand what they're talking about, they just want a copy-paste solution. (Worse is when the answers are from people who similarly have no idea what they're talking about) Rails is not an end-user app. It's a framework for developers. You use it to program. If you don't know what you're doing, copy-paste from reddit/SO aren't actually going to get you very far. Now, what might make it an "SO community" issue, is that when I try to explain the fundamental concepts involved (which I actually kind of enjoy doing, when I'm in the mood), my answers -- or the questions themselves -- are likely to be closed/deleted as inappropriate. Now, many questioners aren't even interested in this kind of answer, it's true, they just want a copy-paste. Sometimes you can give them one (even if it doesn't serve them very well because they are trying to do the wrong thing, or dont' even know what they're trying to do), sometimes their question is so off that it's not even possible. But for those who are -- maybe we need a place where people can actually get fundamental conceptual things explained, like you'd do in a professor or TA's office hours. And SO doesn't seem to want to be that place?
rrggrr 12y ago
Im so grateful for stack overflow. Big thanks to everyone who contributes. Those of us who need to get stuff done owe you our lives, almost literally.
phkahler 12y ago
One of the examples he gives falls under computational geometry even if its a basic question. Categorically those have become off-topic even though there is a tag for it. Seriously, go find something that requires some dot or cross products to compute and ask it - but not anything that resembles a graph, because they like graph theory.
ryan-allen 12y ago
I reckon about 20% of the things I find on Stack Overflow while searching via Google are questions that have been closed for being irrelevant. And my favourite questions are often those ones in the 20%, for example, when you type "1nf vs 2nf vs 3nf" into Google, the top page, is this StackOverflow post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723998/what-are-1nf-2nf-and-3nf-in-database-design http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723998/what-are-1nf-2nf-a... Despite the fact that the top answer has 218 upvotes, the question has been closed as 'not constructive' (which is cearly not the damn case, it's the top hit in Google for fuck sake!). Stack Overflow should either stop this from happening somehow, or back their own goddamn policy and deindex or remove this content from the site. That answer can no longer be improved upon, despite the fact it has such high search ranking, because some idiot deemed it 'not constructive'. What hogwash. There is clearly a gap in the market right here that Stack Overflow either needs to plug, or someone else will (and at their expense).
Falkon1313 12y ago
Sounds like early Wikipedia. It started out fun - people from all over working together and helping each other out to create something that was going to change the world. My contributions may not have been the best quality possible, but others would edit or offer suggestions for improvement. Sometimes others would start something and get stuck, and I could offer an edit or suggestion to get them going again. To see the entries grow and improve, and be a part of a group helping each other to become better and achieve more, was one of the great things about it. Together, we made something from nothing. Of course, it wasn't long before obnoxious pedantic tyrants swarmed in and took over, reveling in their chance to get a cheap power trip. Volunteering to contribute wasn't fun under a constant barrage of rudeness from people who contributed nothing and couldn't even be bothered to offer alternatives or suggestions while insulting and deleting other people's contributions. It would be an interesting case study for someone to find out how Wikipedia survives despite the best efforts of its own moderators to destroy it.
damian2000 12y ago
The thing that pisses me off the most is when you put the effort into a question that doesn't have an existing solution anywhere on the Internet, including on SO. Within a few seconds of posting, it gets a downvote but no comment. Getting a downvote results in immediate loss of visibility. It really puts you off using the site again. Its happened to the last several questions I've posted.
mmorett 12y ago
After reading all these (good) comments, I thought I'd go to SO now and try and pitch in and answer a question or two in my domain of expertise. You know...give back to the community. Be a part of the solution. I found a question that could easily be answered and would be of value to users hitting this issue. Here's that question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28541540/how-to-generate-report-in-excel-or-pdf-format-in-groovy/28549845#28549845 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28541540/how-to-generate-... I could not stop laughing at how this confirms the insanity being discussed here. "Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam..." Yes. And 238 million people saw Dez Bryant catch that ball notwithstanding the NFL's rule-which-must-be-followed-to-the-letter-of-the-law. Some guy, or woman, won't get their question answered that could have helped them. It was a reasonable question. And people are willing to help them. In some way, I suspect StackOverflow is incredibly proud they prevented that...but stuck to the letter of the law on their policy. You win StackOverflow.
z3t4 12y ago
About the question about "this" in JavaScript. And how to "get rid of it". I always give it another name! Like car = this. Then I'll write car.engine instead of this.engine. It makes life much easier as I do not have to worry about "car" changing in sub-functions. And it's much easier to search and replace if I want to change the variable name.
kbart 12y ago
SO is one of the best things that has happened on Internet, but lately it became really annoying due to all these closed questions by over-zealous moderators. More often than not, my questions are closed just because they are not mainstream (for example, embedded related) or slightly reassembles existing questions, that ask totally different things. One solution, that comes to my mind could be not to allow all moderators close all questions, but only these, that are in moderator's area of expertise. For example, if you want to close a question tagged "Java", you must have >5000 or so reputation in Java field.

281 points by luu 12y ago

jph 12y ago

#1 on my StackOverflow wishlist is a way to make collaboration easier on answers. I see many questions and answers where the top answer mostly works, yet buried below there's a much better answer. I see this happening in areas where technology is in flux, such as languages with evolving syntax, or when toolchains are moving to new tools. Collaboration can improve this by enabling subsequent people to add additional information. Some examples: "This older answer is for version 1, and this newer answer is for version 2", or "This older answer is specifically for bash, and this newer answer is specifically for zsh".

Veedrac 12y ago
What would you look for that's not dealt with by comments and edits?
- jph 12y ago
  For example: * Wiki-style editing of some kind, along with collaboration tooling, and users can annotate particular pieces of information within an answer. * Ability to combine/collaborate on multiple answers, such as beginning with introductory information relevant to all the answers, then having some kind of sectioning for specific information for each version. Two small steps can help toward this: * Mark an answer as applicable to a specific version number, or range, or date, or implementation. * Enable the question author to accept an additional new answer that is more current, without subtracting points from the original answer.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
It was supposed to be that way, but it hasn't worked out. Originally the idea was that there would be some wiki-like aspects to the site where collaboration could result in up to date and comprehensive answers to important or common questions. That hasn't worked out, instead the site has largely kept the same features it had in 2009.

carc 12y ago

Sure stack overflow isn't perfect, but shit... Do you know how much productivity would be lost on a global scale if the site suddenly disappeared? I still use it in some capacity almost every day. Sure some of the rules might be nit picky and can be obnoxious sometimes, but nothing is perfect.

ProAm 12y ago
We're not saying it's perfect, we are saying its usefulness/quality is going downhill. It was never perfect.

nvivo 12y ago

Even better when you post a question to stackoverflow and a moderator closes it with "this question should be on xyz.stackexchange.com". You remove your question and post it there just to get another moderator saying "this question should be on stackoverflow". It's obviously a great site, but as always most moderators are usually people with more spare time than real clue on how to organize things.

Guvante 12y ago
"Which site do I submit to" shouldn't be as hard of a problem for certain. Heck they removed a lot of options from that close reason to minimize this, as anything database related go punted to the DBA one (which is only for professional questions not minor schema questions).
- _almosnow 12y ago
  Only problem with the sister sites is that their user base is much smaller than on SO and the value of SO pretty much boils down to "everyone's in there so someone may help me".
  - Guvante 12y ago
    I find the true value of SO to be "populating google with good answers to questions", but that is just me :).
monksy 12y ago
I call that the SU-SF shuffle.

_almosnow 12y ago

I used to love SO, but nowadays the proportion of assholes running the site is so big that it ruins everything. To give you an example, check out the last question I've asked there: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27510345/c-map-assignment-overload-for-different-types http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27510345/c-map-assignment.... 11 downvotes and closed within a few hours; apparently I pissed off one of the moderators (when asking him why is my question "off-topic") and he invited his gang to downvote me as well, some other guy even threatened to deactivate my account. That is SO now, and I no longer try to engage into that community. Edit: Looking at how the votes in my question are evolving as we speak, I see that some guys still go in and downvote it more. Read out the question, and check out the really good accepted answer, if you don't think that's valuable information for many programmers out there then I'm at a loss of words.

itsbits 12y ago
haha..gangs of Stackoverflow huh..i can see that happening..i dont have many friends thgh SO but I agree people groupup through SO chat rooms..
3JPLW 12y ago
Well, you didn't just ask why it's off topic. You threw around insults and used very vulgar language. http://stackoverflow.com/posts/27510345/revisions http://stackoverflow.com/posts/27510345/revisions
- _almosnow 12y ago
  Actually I did ask, strange you didn't notice that since it's right there in the link you posted. And yeah, you are right, I used the word 'cunt' after they started behaving like that, I'm sorry if that scared you; I did it because I was really pissed off by all their bs. Have you ever felt annoyed some time in your life? Apparently not, lucky you.
  - minitech 12y ago
    I’m happy to say that I downvoted you specifically for that! It’s what I always do whenever there’s a rude remark, regardless of question content. Glad to see you’re getting so many votes now, though.

claimstoknow 12y ago

Oh you have a problem with stack overflow? Sure i could help you with that, but what's the problem you're really trying to solve?

itsbits 12y ago

Hating this coz of few assholes?? There is no perfect world..

icehawk219 12y ago

I don't have a problem with Stack Overflow, I have a problem with its community and, as a result, have completely abandoned the site. I no longer ask questions there nor do I answer them. If I need help my circle of friends is often able to provide enough information for me and if I take to Google the vast majority of the time the first search result is a link to a Stack Overflow page with someone asking the exact question I'm trying to find an answer to. And it's closed as off topic. It's a great site and for a while had a great community, but these days it's just too toxic to be worth the bother.

jasode 12y ago

To me, I see this strange contradiction in how stackoverflow is evolving. Joel Spolsky (one of the founders) gave a very interesting presentation[1] in 2009. The key takeaway I've always remembered from his comments was the idea of "anthropology". The science of trying to really understand human behavior and make the website amplify good communities. What I see 6 years later is a lot of "why is this question closed as 'not constructive' when it has 500 upvotes?!?!" There is clearly a disconnect between the way the end users see stackoverflow and the way the moderators see it. These days, it seems like the stackoverflow guys (not necessarily Joel specifically) are inexplicably blind to human behaviors that was was highlighted in 2009. But, I don't have the whole story so maybe someone closer to the situation can explain. I don't know who is right or wrong. The thing I'd like to know is if stackoverflow still "works" for the quality contributors who invest their time writing extensive and insightful answers. Or, have a significant percentage abandoned the site because they wade through too many questions from homework, or outsourced sweatshop employees who don't even do modicum of googling, etc. On the other hand, are the majority of complaints distorted because they are mostly voiced by the Eternal September[2] crowd? So, is it experts leaving? Or newcomers overwhelming the site with bad questions? I don't know if one can gather from website analytics which of the 2 situations is dominant. [1]http://youtu.be/NWHfY_lvKIQ?t=3m18s http://youtu.be/NWHfY_lvKIQ?t=3m18s [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Shog9 12y ago
It's both. The former is inevitable - most people, like the author of this article, spend the bulk of their time up-front: post a lot of answers, enjoy the experience, get tired of it, pull back to only answering the occasional post that piques their interest. So there's a fairly constant fall-off of activity from people who've previously posted a lot. And this gets worse when these folks find fewer questions that interest them, which brings us to... The number of questions posted on Stack Overflow every day is overwhelming. Over the past year, it's ranged from a low of about 5.5 thousand per day (Christmas holidays) to over 11 thousand per day; currently it's averaging around 8.5K. Depending on your interests, you might see very little of this (if you focus solely on a relatively obscure tag) or all of it (if, as many do, you drink from the firehose at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/?sort=newest http://stackoverflow.com/questions/?sort=newest) or some mixture (if you stick to the home page). The folks who stick it out long-term tend to have some pretty gnarly filters in place. Those who don't tend to become very bitter about the whole Eternal September thing, because that's most of what they see. The chance of dropping in on Stack Overflow over lunch & just stumbling upon a new question that covers some novel, interesting tech you've been working with lately is pretty slim, so if that's all you're answering anymore, well... You're probably not answering very much anymore. The trick here is to find a way of putting more interesting questions in front of the folks they're likely to interest, and showing fewer "here's my homework, verbatim" questions to... well, everyone. And it's a hard trick. Disclaimer: I work for Stack Exchange and have been hanging around Stack Overflow pretty much forever.

Goronmon 12y ago

I'm actually struggling to recall the last time I followed a link to a StackOverflow question where the question wasn't closed for some reason or another. It's gotten to the point where it feels like the only goal of the site is curate old content.

jarcane 12y ago

It has largely become more or less a standard expectation that every single question I come across on Stack Overflow through search engine results will be locked. This expectation is rarely contradicted, and then only usually within very small sub-niche topics (the Racket SO community is quite pleasant, frex). It has rather ensured that I never made any effort to contribute to that community. I do still use SO answers if Google or DDG happen to provide me with a link to one that answers my question, which in fairness is quite often, even most of the time. But when so many of those clearly helpful answers (often answering my own question to the letter), are downvoted/locked over some matter of bureaucratic principle or the opinion of a nameless moderator, it makes it abundantly clear that any contribution I might occasionally wish to proffer will be unwelcome, and any question I ask is as like to be met with censure as actual assistance. Actually participating in SO seems these days to be about as fruitless an endeavor as editing Wikipedia was.

savanaly 12y ago
I use it all the time for my work in Javascript, Angular and Node.js and rarely see locked questions. What subjects are/were you working in? Are you sure confirmation bias isn't causing you to overestimate the frequency of this happening?
- davelnewton 12y ago
  Same here; the stuff I end up seeing is all over the map. I only rarely see locked questions, and those are usually older ones.
fredley 12y ago
A note on locking: Locking prevents edits and comments on an individual post. The reason for locking a post is nearly always spam edits/comments. Locks are finite in time. Questions that rank highly for popular search queries receive a lot of traffic, and locking is often necessary to prevent vandalism. On question closure, this is rarely done by moderators (users with a diamond ♦ after their name), but by 5 votes from regular users. Only moderators can lock posts. Disclosure: I am a Stack Exchange moderator

jarrettc 12y ago

I've always been uneasy about the fact that Stack Overflow users can edit each other's posts more or less arbitrarily. User A can edit user B's post to say something embarrassing, and most readers will attribute it to User B. I've had this happen with my posts. It's never been egregious, like a user inserting something inflammatory into my otherwise mundane programming question. Most often, the offending edits give the appearance that the original poster doesn't know how to write or doesn't know basic programming concepts. It's not unheard-of for potential employers to look at a programmer's accounts on Stack Overflow, Github, etc., so an unflattering edit could be problematic. Granted, one can use a pseudonymous account. But it would be better not to have to.

nraynaud 12y ago
And people karma-whoring on your question. Nobody has the answer, but your question has been edited 10 times.
- Shog9 12y ago
  Every edit "bumps" the post, giving it a bit more visibility. Some folks, upon encountering an unanswered question they also want an answer to, will do some quick copy-editing just to try & get a few more eyeballs on the problem.
- davelnewton 12y ago
  There's only a specific group of people that "benefit" from editing questions. Most edits are an attempt to make it even slightly better and/or clearer in some way.
ezyang 12y ago
Does StackOverflow notify when your answer is edited?
- fredley 12y ago
  It does. You will receive a notification in your inbox saying which post was edited so you can review it.

jofer 12y ago

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ http://chat.stackoverflow.com/) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture around it has become rather toxic. It effectively gives anyone there an automatic close hammer. Furthermore, it's not the current "dupehammer", but a close hammer for any reason, as you can pretty instantly get 5 votes to close. Somehow, every question involving anything than popular web frameworks is apt to be closed as "too localized". I can't count the number of times I've been in the middle of answering an admittedly niche, but well-phrased and on-topic question, when it's closed before I can answer. The source of the sudden rash of close votes? Almost always a "cv-pls" in relevant tag's chat room.

jobu 12y ago
Wasn't there a similar debate over Quality vs Quantity with the Wikipedia community a few years back? It's been a while, but I remember seeing complaints about thousands of articles getting culled for being trivial (comic books, movies, anime, moderately famous people or places). It's hard to find many articles about it anymore, but I did find this from 2007: http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/ http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/
- mkremins 12y ago
  You might get more results searching for "deletionism vs inclusionism", which seems to be the most widely used name for the debate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...
  - angersock 12y ago
    What's the current general stance on that these days I wonder? What's the prevailing wind?

Ensorceled 12y ago

My favourite is the upvoted "You should have Googled this" comment with an accompanying, and equally upvoted, "Google sent me here." SO seems to have not awakened to the fact that it is the defacto programming information site for all languages and developer capabilities and no longer the purview of elite.

JeremyBanks 12y ago
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5280/embrace-the-non-googlers http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5280/embrace-the-non...
jgh 12y ago
I dunno these days it seems like Google is sending me to Chinese sites that just scrape SO and repost all the questions/answers.

balls187 12y ago

Is there a correlation between Atwood leaving, and the eventual take over of internet community zealotry? I've yet to participate in a forum where that doesn't occur.

lordnacho 12y ago

Quite often when I Google something, I end up on an SO page with exactly the answer I needed, and it's been closed due to some BS. And there's a bunch of comments about why it's closed. I think the moderators have gotten more and more zealous. Everything is looked at with the guidelines in mind, instead of common sense. I suspect there's a certain type of person who likes to apply stringent rules to everything, and common sense people just have enough and decide not to run in the elections. If SO was a billboard I could understand the need to only have the interesting stuff on. But SO doesn't have a space problem. If someone has posted a question, it's likely they're not the only noob wondering what the answer is. If the question is useful to people, Google will lead them there.

msoad 12y ago

> 6,900 users with a reputation of 10000 or more can delete questions. I have 20k reps and I can't delete questions. This is not correct.

Veedrac 12y ago
You can only vote to delete closed questions over a certain age. Eg: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16681587/some-bigger-rust-examples http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16681587/some-bigger-rust...

vorg 12y ago

> the Stack Overflow staff and moderators seem to take the attitude that the long-term content of the site is much more important Perhaps the Stack Overflow owners realize they can muscle in on the programming language documentation business. With the ongoing increase in programmers who learn a programming language at the same time as they're paid to write production code in it, the promoters of some languages will inevitably skip writing documentation that fully describes what it does and instead set up a basket of Stack Overflow users to plant lots of answered questions, which also gives the initial appearance of an existing community for that language. Eventually languages will even be designed and implemented without any thought given to documentation that explains it from beginning to end, but instead only the intention for it to be learnt in Stack Overflow-sized chunks, keyed to search engine keywords instead of documentation subheadings. And part of Stack Overflow's business model may be to host the primary documentation for these emerging types of programming languages. Dr Dobbs magazine described this phenomenon as a "conundrum" and used Groovy as an example of this new type of language: "The endless variety of features requires considerable documentation, which is simply not available, especially for the advanced features that give Groovy much of its benefit. And so, if you jump in today, you'll find the language is easy to learn, but hard to master". http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731 http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731

7952 12y ago
People learn languages from different routes depending on their background. A complete beginner to programming probably needs tutorials and will not understand a language reference that is most useful for an experienced coder. Stack overflow is more like a recipe book that happens to let you list the ingredients. But that is a poor alternative to tutorials and proper documentation.

teh_klev 12y ago

I would like to defend Tim Post's meta-answer because it's quoted out of context. The OP's question was about the reduction in quality of questions being asked on SO, which I myself have noticed in my particular area of expertise [0]. I don't think Tim comes off as "elitist"/"cool kids" (also Tim is genuinely a really nice person, not at all uppity or "elitist" [1]). There is a rising deluge of utterly shit quality questions being asked on the site. As an "expert" I just can't be bothered any more trying to assist users who are missing so much fundamental knowledge and understanding about the tech they're working with. Hell, some of them can't even tell me which version of IIS they're using. It saps too much energy and is the reason why my own participation on the site has taken a nose-dive over the past couple of years. I do agree with the comment throttling timer and "@user" behaviour in comments, I think that was one of Jeff's personal things he got implemented much to the frustration of many folks on the site. I like Jeff but some of his ideas about how to solve certain types of problems were a bit peculiar. I still love SO, I still visit daily but it sure burned me out as an "answerer". [0]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/*iis* http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/*iis* [1]: Disclosure: I'm an ex-diamond mod on the site - I would like to think I played fair, erring on the side of giving folks the benefit of the doubt and that their questions were asked in good faith (and with a tiny wee bit of upfront research).

bigger_cheese 12y ago
I have noticed the same thing I do not visit the site all that often I usually check it once a fortnight or so in my lunch break. I tend to browse the "Linux" section. Everytime I visit it feels like Deja-Vu the same questions keep appearing, there will almost always be questions like "How can I get my program to run as a daemon?", "Why am I seeing Zombie processes?" and some variation on "How can I get the PID of my running process?". Quite a lot of questions seem to have a negative score or are locked for seemingly no good reason and the ones that aren't are questions like the above that are easily googleable. A lot of the time it feels like the person asking the question hasn't bothered to a) read man page or b) do a google search beforehand or they lack basic knowledge about Linux - such as what the /proc file system is for.

erikb 12y ago

I don't use SO to ask questions any more, but it's really good for searching stuff you already know but don't like to remember, like if that method used camelCase() or under_score(), what the annoying workaround for that little quirk in the framework of your choice was, etc. I feel beside the new stuff that comes from new FWs and languages most questions seem to be answered. Therefore starting to focus on long term quality is not a bad thing. Most of my recent work in SO was also not asking questions but correcting/connecting answers that are already there.

jorjordandan 12y ago

As users of stack overflow, product hunt, & hacker news, we have to subject ourselves to the tyranny of the upvote. We have effectively banished unpopular questions and ideas. Or great ideas conveyed in an unpopular manner. Unfortunately, there is no better way to self-organize and moderate large masses of user generated information..

mmphosis 12y ago

SO seems like less of a discussion board, and more of a snapshot in time: 2009 seems about right. Once the so-called "moderators" started deleting, editing and locking most of the answers, I was definitely discouraged from contributing. There WAS some gold buried in some of the less upvoted posts and comments, but "no soup for you." One other little note, and don't know if anyone else noticed this, but SO is somehow biased a bit towards Microsoft. It's no big deal, but I thought I would mention it. http://blog.codinghorror.com/giving-up-on-microsoft/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/giving-up-on-microsoft/ As SO fossilizes, I think there might be an opportunity to create a new programming QA site.

davelnewton 12y ago
SO-the-infrastructure might be biased towards MS, but the people on it certainly don't tend to be, at least in the tags I'm involved in.

stickperson 12y ago

I've been using IRC to ask questions instead of Stack Overflow for some time now. Each room has its own character, but I've found people are generally very helpful.

code_duck 12y ago
It depends, I suppose. The last time I used IRC in a technical help channel, someone asked for a simple way to open a bare X screen. I gave the answer I knew, which I got from a mandrake system script. It has worked for me for years on Debian and Ubuntu: xinit -- /usr/bin/X :1 And right away, a group of 3-4 clueless people or trolls told the asker that I was attempting to harm their system and not to listen to me. It wasn't very productive or fun.

psp 12y ago

The recent funding news seemed really strange when I have been feeling like the author for a while. I think SO is going downhill fast and people running it don't even realize it. Joel, where are you? So sad, used to like SO when it came around and now the way it's being moderated makes you want to just leave.

O____________O 12y ago

Every time I work on a project dealing with unusual C++/Windows/COM topics, I end up hitting a high percentage of highly relevant, closed questions. The worst are the ones where I figure out the convoluted solution, but I can't answer the existing question because it's closed. So, anyone after me will suffer the same aggravation or simply give up. The worst are the ones where some new mod has trolled through four-year-old questions closing them whenever possible. Makes me wonder how much great information has simply been deleted to give a new mod, what, a feeling of power? More history (ironically)? It's also darkly funny when a mod clearly doesn't understand the technology involved, and thus doesn't understand that it is, in fact, valid and properly worded. I suppose it's no different than the rest of the tech community, "blogosphere", social coding sites, etc., where it's a self-promotion-centric approach that dominates. You'll get further working on the latest and greatest stack than you will solving hard problems with an older tech stack.

codinghorror 12y ago
Do you mean closed or locked from vandalism by drive by users? A lot of popular stuff gets locked due to noise answers and bad edits.
- Udo 12y ago
  Isn't that a UI problem? Punish people who do noise answers and bad edits, and see to it that garbage isn't featured prominently. Closing pages down is a desperate, blunt measure and in the long run it decays the value of your content instead of protecting it. If it's gotten so bad that this is preventing legitimate edits and answers from improving your content, you have a very serious problem - both culturally and technologically.
- O____________O 12y ago
  Usually closed as non-constructive (I think that's S.O.'s wording).
endgame 12y ago
I've given up on SO as well. Like I said last time it came up here: > When it was young you could find veteran wizards who answered all sorts of obscure things because it was fun. The last straw for me was seeing a perfectly valid question about video memory in DOS get drive-by closed by some mod. You used to be able to find stuff about ZZT-OOP on SO. Not anymore. I don't know if you could call it an outright failure when it gets a ton of traffic, search engine cred etc., but it's certainly not a success for me.

bradleysmith 12y ago

This post has put in to words much of my own, un-reputable experience with SO and stack-exchange forums. The technical corrections and constant closing of questions by mods discouraged my asking of questions ages ago. There is a feeling that researching the details necessary to describe the question adequately takes away from research that may have yielded how to solve it by looking at similar questions or documentation. I know that this is partly the intention of the mods: go do your homework before asking. But, it can swing to be the flipside: homework of asking is as long or longer than deciphering your problem. In my experience, much of a questioners research to prepare their question was UNRELATED to their problem, so the amount of information included in the question is far above and beyond what is necessary to solve their variable typo, or whatever. Where this is a good thing for the long-term usefulness of SO, like the OP said it takes away from the short-term usefulness of the site for us plebian self-doubters. Having said that, previously asked questions on SO answer ~90% of my programming questions, so they're obviously doing something right. I've thought before that a 'staging area' for questions might be useful, where a question gets posted by _anon_idiot_user_ like me asking why thier code won't run because of something simple. It is marked as 'not useful' for whatever reason, but can still offer (diminished) reputation to answerers. After a particular amount of time, the question is removed from the SO 'canon' (i.e. unpublished and deleted), but the reputation sticks. Nobody's ego is hurt from having thier stupid question memorialized, and mods would be more forgiving to stupid questioners knowing it will go away once solved. just an idea. All in all, I'm eternally grateful to SO and it's 'asshole mods'. They've taught me more programming than any other entity on the web. EDIT: Clarity

chc 12y ago
The problem of bad questions isn't just "having stupid questions memorialized." It's that it takes away from good questions. There is a finite number of people who can answer a question, and these people have a finite amount of time. They don't necessarily know a question is going to be bad before they read it, so if a bad question stays, it continues wasting more and more people's time, and taking time from other people who did put in the effort to ask a good question. So instead, the question is closed while you improve it, and the idea is for it to be reopened when you're done.

dicroce 12y ago

I agree with everything said and I'd also like to add this: I used to enjoy visiting the site because quite often there was a nice general question on the front page that related to me in some way... Well, ALL of the general CS type questions are answered now... and any new ones are closed as dups almost immediately.. Which means the questions that survive these days are hyper specific, and not very useful or enjoyable...

elchief 12y ago

The worst part is the new users who don't have the faintest clue as to what they're doing, and the annoying duplicates. And sometimes I get shat on for asking the question not quite right. 1. Need to incentivize new users to read some real basic FAQs before posting. Not sure what the best solution is. Fascist Me wants to see them walk through a wizard, agreeing that they understand basic topic X before continuing, but that doesn't sound too user friendly. 2. Need some better text similarity with Latent Semantic Indexing or something to find duplicates. I'll see new questions that I know are recent duplicates, but then can't even find an example. Doh.

hawleyal 12y ago
I am constantly amazed how mods can find a duplicate I could not, and I consider myself a fairly savvy googler. Edit: Instead of forcing RTFM on every new user, I don't see why new users should not have immediate tryout without reprocussions and learn the guidelines from a kindly mod or other user replying with a reason why their question is not appropriate/duplicate or whatever. That is the point of upvotes/downvotes and active moderation. This is a learning community, not a cadre of elitists.

curiously 12y ago

the key to not getting your answered close is to copy paste large text of garbage code that these zealous mods won't bother reading through. the large wall of code allows the question to appear to carry merit and come across as a coding question, when in reality it has nothing to do with the question. This is what is happening. the quality of the questions has deteriorated so much instead of improving. the people providing quality answers have moved on. when the chicken leaves and the eggs start rotting, that's when you know, the decline is the beginning.

brudgers 12y ago

{Based on my recollection of something I heard listening through the StackOverflow/StackExchange Podcast archive.} The example of the Python question about angles is from 2011. I believe that subsequent to that time there were changes to both the close process and the reopening process. Part of the problem I think was that close votes accumulated and did not expire, so that they would stick even after a question was edited or months had passed since the vote was cast. The most recent podcast...about taking more Venture Capital...discussed some of the cultural issues that have developed at StackOverflow. There are two significant pools of users: those like me who know a little or nothing, and those who know a lot. One of the goals of the funding is to make StackOverflow work better for both...at least that was my impression from the podcast. At the top end, the gamification has problems. It doesn't matter how competitive or smart anyone is, they aren't going to catch John Skeet any time soon. So people make up things to entertain themselves. Anyone else remember the popular Meta about deliberately feeding bad algorithms to suspected homework questions? It's always been clear [you can listen to six plus years of Joel and Jeff and the gang yourself] that the longterm purpose of StackOverflow is not helping the person originally asking the question. It's making the internet better. It's also always been clear that there was a tension between questions that are interesting to experts and questions that are so basic that only an absolute beginner will ask them. The test case was: How do I move the Turtle in Logo? [1][2] It's simple, clear, to the point, and offensive to some programmers. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions?page=2 http://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions?page=2 [2]: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=moving+a+turtle+in+logo&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=mov...

emodendroket 12y ago

I agree that SO gets overzealous about closing questions but I don't think I needed a page-long summary of the Market Basket saga (as if I didn't hear enough about it this summer) and the rest of it to get to that point.

eitland 12y ago

This comment at the end states it very well: "Stack overflow has failed to understand it’s mission. Stackoverflow exists to share technology information–not to curate it. Curation should be replaced by indexing and ranking. With Stack Overflow, it is as if google had decided on a primary strategy of deleting content from its index, rather than a primary strategy of ranking good content highest."

PythonicAlpha 12y ago

One of the "Soup Nazis" here: I can understand the author. Still I found out, that my name was also in one example of "Soup Nazis" (how embarrassing!). The point is, that with some experience, you are "invited" to review other posts. You can also see it as giving some of the benefit taken back. But as reviewer, you should take responsibility for the quality of questions and answers. And I must say, that there where many cases, where I wanted to vote differently but knew, that the system is intended differently -- the vote I made in the example was one of them. You are softly pressured by the system, to adhere to the "group standard". I think it is a little similar to the Wikipedia problem. Wikipedia also is less attractive to authors today, than it was, because many are chilled by the rigid system. The problem is, that some system is needed for the quality, but how could you reduce the chill factor for newcomers? I think, a little less rigid system would be beneficial to stackoverflow (as it does not need to be an encyclopedia). Some "Soup Nazi" behavior is fostered by any (more or less) rigid system. Here, more sense of understanding of the more experienced users (especially reviewers) would also be good.

strangename 12y ago

SO jumped the shark for me when its scope shifted hard from the original goals. I remember the original seedling goals that Spolsky posted; for example, a question is likely inappropriate for SO if its answer couldn't involve code. That got lost awful fast. Oh, and remember how it was going to be all Wikipedia of programming, where really good answers would be zipped together so that SO became the defacto good-idea repository? And could evolve over time? Such a good idea. Never materialized. Proper props for putting in the effort. Better than e-e. Usually, though definitely not always, better than isolated boards. But now we're in a good-enemy-of-best world where I still want some site or system addressing the original problems, but SO is so dominant I don't see how it could germinate.

danielweber 12y ago
SO has definitely out-stripped what came before. They were generation 1 and had gen-1 problems. SO is generation 2, better than generation 1. But it's having gen-2 problems. I think a lot of it is because they are so proud of having fixed the gen-1 problems that they refuse to see their gen-2 problems. Eventually we will see generation 3.

LeoPanthera 12y ago

I stopped using StackOverflow a year or so ago, when I was astonished to discover that people can edit your questions. I accept that this sometimes may be necessary, but I asked a question which was then edited to be a different question, so that the answers I got were entirely useless. I understand the need for moderation but surely they should not be able to change the meaning of what you posted.

Latty 12y ago
If that happens, you revert the changes. Editing to change the nature of the question is definitely not a valid edit. If people do it consistently, a mod should intervene.
- reitanqild 12y ago
  Problem is it is the mods who do it, isn't it. New users cannot edit questions?
  - code_duck 12y ago
    New users can make suggested edits, which are sent into a moderation queue before being applied. Once you reach a certain level of reputation (2000), you can edit other users' content without moderation. http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/edit http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/edit

charlieflowers 12y ago

I can't think of another site that had such a huge gap between its very high potential and its very low fulfillment of that potential.

zem 12y ago
twitter? pre-cesspool twitter had a lot of potential

EdSharkey 12y ago

I think the mandate is pretty clear: quality writing of the original question is a must. If you can't write in clear english, or you have a whiff of snark in your question, or your question falls below what many people think of as a valuable contribution, then your question probably deserves to be closed. Why is that not fair? I think it is fair! Be professional! Sometimes you get very cool superusers like BalusC who will edit a sub-par question for clarity or formatting rather than delete it out of hand. Most of the time, I look at his edits and I like what he does with the question. Add value, add value, add value. BalusC makes JSF a joy to research on and work with.

reitanqild 12y ago
Agreed. As much as I found JSF horrible, BalusC has made it less so for years it seems. What he does isn't rep-farming using google but rather putting effort into being helpful. Same goes for others. Contrast this to what people refer to as drive-by downvoters: people who seems to routinely troll the forums looking for anything that can be closed.

MilnerRoute 12y ago

Hacker News faced some of the same issues when people complained about excessive down-voting. I remember some of the solutions proposed were a higher threshold for downvotes as the site grew, and the requirement that an actual explanation be typed in with every anonymous downvote or deletion.

aaronchall 12y ago

I feel you, seems like too much soup-nazi. I think maybe I've burned some friends I myself have encouraged to try to get started on the site. But it's the nature of the site. No one else is doing it. Maybe that's because it's not easy. Maybe you should compete with them. I have a feeling there's a lot of people here who've been burned by SO. I know I have. But you can't argue with success. So I've thickened my skin and hardened my resolve, and I'm in the top 3% of users now. I expect my current body of work on the site to put me in the top 1% within a year or so, with no further work from me. The answer to this is to build a better StackOverflow, if you can. But I don't think you can.

sergiotapia 12y ago
At this point I think it's hard to compete with SO because it's so clear-cut and full of questions and answers for common things. "Running out of questions." comes to mind. Also, off-topic, I don't think being in a top percentage is something to brag about or a sign of merit. I've done nothing but ask stupid questions on SO and I was lucky to be there when the site was new (lots of high-coin questions!) and I'm in the top 5%.
- aaronchall 12y ago
  That's a good point, but the top 1% (where I expect to be in a year or two) is close to the end of a long tail. Not many people get there by asking questions, and I only started contributing about a year and a half ago. That percentile rank is a foot in the door in a lot of situations. If someone who is interested in me finds out it's because I give comprehensive smart answers with strong communication, in spite of the fact that I wasn't around when there were lots of easy questions to be had, I think I've got something pretty good to brag about. That's not to say that I wouldn't consider someone who asks lots of good questions too. That requires communication skills as well as technical skills. I personally find it harder to ask good questions than to give good answers.

tempestn 12y ago

Just a thought, but how about letting privileged users vote to keep a question open, which would negate some number of close votes? (As well as a delay before closing, even once the votes were obtained.) Also if someone is in the process of writing an answer, that should count against closing. I tend to agree with the OP that sorting and filtering are a better solution to maintaining quality than unnecessarily closing marginal questions. However, some questions certainly need to be closed. The problem (or at least a problem) seems to be that with such a large number of privileged users, hitting a 5 vote threshold is not difficult, even if the question doesn't deserve to be closed. Increasing the threshold would be one solution, but would make unnecessary moderation work. A don't-close vote seems like potentially a better solution. Edit: Unsurprisingly, looks like I'm not the first one to have this idea: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125/how-about-a-vote-not-to-close-option-to-counter-the-vote-to-close https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125/how-about-a-vot...

greggman 12y ago

I really wish there were better options on SO for dealing with "offtopic" questions Sometimes a question seems like someone is just asking for an answer, like posting their homework, and hasn't tried anything or even googled at all for help. Maybe those questions should be closed and deleted with prejudice but if I was giving the benefit of the doubt I'd prefer to move them to "pergatory.stackoverflow.com". I guess that's what they are by closing them but. But, often there are noob questions that are similarly frustrating but giving the person the benefit of the doubt maybe they really don't know where to start. If wish I could click a button that said [Move to noob.stackoverflow.com] or something like that where people with more patience or that just like helping noobs could be more helpful. I also wish it was easier and required when marking as duplicate to provide a link to the duplicate.

jrochkind1 12y ago

I think I may just be becoming a grumpy old man programmer, But my frustration with stack overflow lately is with how many people ask ill-formed questions because they don't understand what they're talking about -- and don't seem to _want_ to understand what they're talking about, they just want a copy-paste solution. (Worse is when the answers are from people who similarly have no idea what they're talking about) Rails is not an end-user app. It's a framework for developers. You use it to program. If you don't know what you're doing, copy-paste from reddit/SO aren't actually going to get you very far. Now, what might make it an "SO community" issue, is that when I try to explain the fundamental concepts involved (which I actually kind of enjoy doing, when I'm in the mood), my answers -- or the questions themselves -- are likely to be closed/deleted as inappropriate. Now, many questioners aren't even interested in this kind of answer, it's true, they just want a copy-paste. Sometimes you can give them one (even if it doesn't serve them very well because they are trying to do the wrong thing, or dont' even know what they're trying to do), sometimes their question is so off that it's not even possible. But for those who are -- maybe we need a place where people can actually get fundamental conceptual things explained, like you'd do in a professor or TA's office hours. And SO doesn't seem to want to be that place?

rrggrr 12y ago

Im so grateful for stack overflow. Big thanks to everyone who contributes. Those of us who need to get stuff done owe you our lives, almost literally.

phkahler 12y ago

One of the examples he gives falls under computational geometry even if its a basic question. Categorically those have become off-topic even though there is a tag for it. Seriously, go find something that requires some dot or cross products to compute and ask it - but not anything that resembles a graph, because they like graph theory.

ryan-allen 12y ago

I reckon about 20% of the things I find on Stack Overflow while searching via Google are questions that have been closed for being irrelevant. And my favourite questions are often those ones in the 20%, for example, when you type "1nf vs 2nf vs 3nf" into Google, the top page, is this StackOverflow post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723998/what-are-1nf-2nf-and-3nf-in-database-design http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723998/what-are-1nf-2nf-a... Despite the fact that the top answer has 218 upvotes, the question has been closed as 'not constructive' (which is cearly not the damn case, it's the top hit in Google for fuck sake!). Stack Overflow should either stop this from happening somehow, or back their own goddamn policy and deindex or remove this content from the site. That answer can no longer be improved upon, despite the fact it has such high search ranking, because some idiot deemed it 'not constructive'. What hogwash. There is clearly a gap in the market right here that Stack Overflow either needs to plug, or someone else will (and at their expense).

Falkon1313 12y ago

Sounds like early Wikipedia. It started out fun - people from all over working together and helping each other out to create something that was going to change the world. My contributions may not have been the best quality possible, but others would edit or offer suggestions for improvement. Sometimes others would start something and get stuck, and I could offer an edit or suggestion to get them going again. To see the entries grow and improve, and be a part of a group helping each other to become better and achieve more, was one of the great things about it. Together, we made something from nothing. Of course, it wasn't long before obnoxious pedantic tyrants swarmed in and took over, reveling in their chance to get a cheap power trip. Volunteering to contribute wasn't fun under a constant barrage of rudeness from people who contributed nothing and couldn't even be bothered to offer alternatives or suggestions while insulting and deleting other people's contributions. It would be an interesting case study for someone to find out how Wikipedia survives despite the best efforts of its own moderators to destroy it.

damian2000 12y ago

The thing that pisses me off the most is when you put the effort into a question that doesn't have an existing solution anywhere on the Internet, including on SO. Within a few seconds of posting, it gets a downvote but no comment. Getting a downvote results in immediate loss of visibility. It really puts you off using the site again. Its happened to the last several questions I've posted.

mmorett 12y ago

After reading all these (good) comments, I thought I'd go to SO now and try and pitch in and answer a question or two in my domain of expertise. You know...give back to the community. Be a part of the solution. I found a question that could easily be answered and would be of value to users hitting this issue. Here's that question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28541540/how-to-generate-report-in-excel-or-pdf-format-in-groovy/28549845#28549845 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28541540/how-to-generate-... I could not stop laughing at how this confirms the insanity being discussed here. "Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam..." Yes. And 238 million people saw Dez Bryant catch that ball notwithstanding the NFL's rule-which-must-be-followed-to-the-letter-of-the-law. Some guy, or woman, won't get their question answered that could have helped them. It was a reasonable question. And people are willing to help them. In some way, I suspect StackOverflow is incredibly proud they prevented that...but stuck to the letter of the law on their policy. You win StackOverflow.

z3t4 12y ago

About the question about "this" in JavaScript. And how to "get rid of it". I always give it another name! Like car = this. Then I'll write car.engine instead of this.engine. It makes life much easier as I do not have to worry about "car" changing in sub-functions. And it's much easier to search and replace if I want to change the variable name.

kbart 12y ago

SO is one of the best things that has happened on Internet, but lately it became really annoying due to all these closed questions by over-zealous moderators. More often than not, my questions are closed just because they are not mainstream (for example, embedded related) or slightly reassembles existing questions, that ask totally different things. One solution, that comes to my mind could be not to allow all moderators close all questions, but only these, that are in moderator's area of expertise. For example, if you want to close a question tagged "Java", you must have >5000 or so reputation in Java field.