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The problem with the karma of Stack Overflow is that the questions that are the most viewed, and thus are getting the most votes, tend to be very easy, like the
by S4M 12y ago
The problem with the karma of Stack Overflow is that the questions that are the most viewed, and thus are getting the most votes, tend to be very easy, like the ones you mention, or this one [0] about merging two dictionaries in Python. At the end of the spectrum, a very advanced python answer wouldn't get that much views so much, like this one [1] about extending python with C - I think the guy who answered put some efforts in it and has experience in writing C modules for python, which would make him a solid python programmer.
One way to disrupt Stackoverflow would be to have some way to access a question's difficulty and give karma points accordingly.
[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38987/how-can-i-merge-two-python-dictionaries-in-a-single-expression http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38987/how-can-i-merge-two...
[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4238154/how-to-extend-python-in-c http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4238154/how-to-extend-pyt...
- hasenj 12y agoStackoverflow was specifically built for the first type of questions: those that you have to google all the time, but which have a simple answer. Before stackoverflow, the answers to such questions were buried in forum discussions. Worse, sometimes the top google result is a forum thread where the answer is "google it"! Detailed/advanced questions don't really belong on Stackoverflow; it wasn't designed for them.
- brudgers 12y agoHaving listened to almost all the StackOverflow -> StackExchange podcasts, the idea was to cover both obvious questions (that was more Spolsky [1]) and long-tail questions where Spolsky and Atwood were both in agreement. Both were in agreement about the horror of forum threads. One of the direct targets however was ExpertSexChange's pseudo-pay wall. The big idea behind SO was reducing friction for finding answers to programming questions. Today, "What is REST?" would probably be killed because it is too broad for StackOverflow and better answered on WikiPedia. [1]: See Spolsky's famous How do I move the turtle in Logo: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the...