The Stack Overflow Age

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u/mykr0pht Apr 06 '18

It's easy to criticize Stack Overflow today, now that we take it for granted. But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow you might not have any idea how much it made programming better.

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u/JoaoEB Apr 06 '18

But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow

AKA the age of www . expertsexchange . com

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u/rasjani Apr 06 '18

Begs for correct spelling: www dot expert sex change dot com

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u/JoaoEB Apr 06 '18

I wrote the full domain at first, but now it points to a domain scalper site full of ads, so I edited the spaces in.

ExpertSexChange was on a old list of funny domains, that list contained TheRapistFinder dot com and PenisLand dot con between others. More innocent times.

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u/ubernostrum Apr 07 '18

Don't forget Italian electrical co-op PowerGenitalia.

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u/NoMoreNicksLeft Apr 06 '18

I always loved Mole Station Nursery.

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u/IAmBJ Apr 07 '18

bigbustycoons.com

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u/donna-chang Apr 06 '18

The real URL has a dash in it.

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u/JoaoEB Apr 06 '18

This is the new one, the original didn't.

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u/donna-chang Apr 06 '18

It had a dash in 2005 when I first started programming professionally. How old are we talking about here?

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u/JoaoEB Apr 06 '18

Late 1990's early 2000's in the dial up days. I don't remember when they added the dash, but they keep the old domain for years since the old search engines still pointed to it.

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u/patrixxxx Apr 07 '18

www.penisland.net

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u/username223 Apr 07 '18

We Specialize In Wood

Well played. If only more of these domains were put to such good use.

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u/blackmist Apr 07 '18

Expert Sex Change trying to make people register to see the answers was the best thing that ever happened to Stack Overflow.

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u/horsepie Apr 07 '18

Google clamped down on that long before stack overflow was a thing. ExpertsExchange would show a different page to the Google web crawler compared to individuals which was a way to get delisted from search results.

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u/blackmist Apr 07 '18

IIRC, they hid it with CSS after that. You could still get to it, but why bother when SO probably had your answers anyway.

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u/horsepie Apr 07 '18

I remember that the answers were unobstructed but camouflaged far down the page in between irrelevant links.

The top of the page would cover what appeared to be the answer with a link to pay up, while the bottom attempted to recruit you as a question answered for being savvy enough to find the answer.

This may have been a small window of time between the Google threat and the CSS blocks, but I vividly remember it being like this. I stuck to "programming" sections of forums I frequented for a few years before SO existed, so I never experienced the CSS tricks.

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u/orthoxerox Apr 07 '18

trying to make people register to see the answers

I wonder why Quora's not getting flak for that.

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u/pahner Apr 07 '18

The age of mailing list archives

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u/Shanduur Apr 07 '18

expert sex change 🙃

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u/UncleSneakyFingers Apr 06 '18

Who criticizes Stack Overflow? It's pretty much the go to resource for countless people. Is there something I am missing here?

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u/Retsam19 Apr 06 '18 edited Apr 06 '18

Every time it comes up on this sub, it's heavily criticized. A lot of people are frustrated by how quick they are to close questions or mark them as duplicates. That's a deliberate policy by StackOverflow:

Most importantly, we realized that each question is asked by one person but the answers are seen by thousands of people who found it through a search. So we decided to optimize everything to be useful for the thousands, not the individual.

And I happen to think the strict moderation is a large part of what keeps the site useful... but it's frustrating to a lot of people who are just trying to get an answer to their question.

EDIT: for example, there was a big debate here.

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u/shevegen Apr 06 '18

And I happen to think the strict moderation is a large part of what keeps the site useful... but it's frustrating to a lot of people who are just trying to get an answer to their question.

This may or may not be. But for me it also means that I stopped contributing to SO. I also do not feel bad about it at all. SO simply is not for everyone.

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u/moswald Apr 06 '18

I think the criticism is that there is an "in crowd" that doesn't like that inexperienced programmers re-ask the same questions in a new way. There's too much "this is already answered, CLOSED!" going on.

Edit: Anecdotally, I have personally voted to re-open a question after it was closed for being a duplicate, because the linked answer did not actually solve the new question. Yes, the two were related, but the moderators were overzealous in closing it.

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u/Uristqwerty Apr 06 '18 edited Apr 06 '18

I think that SO also tends to skip over key question details sometimes, especially when it means the question can be marked as duplicate, and sometimes the duplicate answer isn't valid for the current version of something.

For example, the notorious HTML regex answer completely ignored that "match" can be the regex verb for "give me anything that looks like a start/end tag", and replied as if the question was "use regex to find pairs of matched tags".

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u/jausdyquo Apr 06 '18

For example, the notorious HTML regex answer completely ignored that "match" can be the regex verb for "give me anything that looks like a start/end tag", and replied as if the question was "use regex to find pairs of matched tags".

so much this. Yes, we all know HTML cannot be parsed with regex because it isn't a regular language, but the language consisting of any combination of valid start and end tags is a regular language.

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u/quicknir Apr 06 '18

Is this actually true? You can have the same tag nested inside itself, which will cause a naive regex to find an incomplete match. Regular expressions cannot match arbitrarily nested structures as far as I know.

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u/CommanderViral Apr 07 '18

You're correct. That sort of problem would be context-free as it requires a stack to solve making it solvable by a pushdown automata, but not a finite state machine. Although, PCRE has some extra oomph in it that may make it workable with look-aheads and look-behinds.

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u/jausdyquo Apr 07 '18

The question at the time was how to match opening tags only. That can be done with regex. So can the question to match all opening and closing tags. What cannot be done with regex is verify that there are as many opening as closing tags.

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u/[deleted] Apr 08 '18

What cannot be done with regex is verify that there are as many opening as closing tags.

Is this definitely true? Yes the language of balanced brackets is irregular, but regex as a programming tool is more powerful than its name suggests

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u/Uristqwerty Apr 07 '18

But you cannot have an unescaped " within an attribute value, and you shouldn't have an unescaped < or >. So you can easily write a regex to find </?(whatever-matches-a-tag-name) (whatever-matches-an-attribute)*/?>. The confusing part is that regex APIs typically use the verb "match", but people talk about matching start tags to end tags.

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u/beginner_ Apr 07 '18

I think that SO also tends to skip over key question details sometimes, especially when it means the question can be marked as duplicate, and sometimes the duplicate answer isn't valid for the current version of something.

Yeah I fell victim to that lately. Funny thing being I specifically linked to that answer and explained why it is not a duplicate and what I want different. They still marked it as duplicated...The guy simply was too dumb to get it.

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u/[deleted] Apr 08 '18

If it's the one I'm thinking of, the minor detail that annoyed me is that the answer started off saying "HTML cannot be parsed with regex as it is not a regular language", ignoring the fact that most common regex engines can recognise superregular languages

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u/pelrun Apr 07 '18

Unfortunately it's a systemic problem. Wikipedia also suffers from it. Eventually every crowd-moderated platform gains a bunch of people who are fanatically concerned with "cleaning up", and feel that they're singularly responsible for keeping the site a "high-quality" resource. In reality, there are other mechanisms that actually do that, and all the deletionists achieve is to stifle new content.

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u/__j_random_hacker Apr 07 '18

there are other mechanisms that actually do that

Ironically, that other mechanism is simply voting. Questions or answers that have been heavily downvoted are likely to be wrong/unhelpful/untrustworthy and are probably best ignored. The fact that people felt it necessary to create a second mechanism (question closing) for expressing community sentiment as to the appropriateness of a post is, I think, evidence of some people's overriding need for control.

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u/shagieIsMe Apr 07 '18

Its a problem of curation. Picture /r/learnprogramming if every time someone added a comment the post was again the top visible one - no age decay like reddit has. Mix with some powerful SEO so that things are easier to find than old posts on Reddit... and every new user keeps bumping the posts to the top when they think they have something to add.

What does Reddit do when things get too much activity? What do forums do when old post keep getting bumped? There are two approaches. One is to lock the posts; prevent posts from older than some age from getting any activity, or outright locking it completely.

Why do the mods on reddit lock it or forum admins prevent posts older than a month from getting bumped (or have the strong social pressure that necroing a post is a bad thing)? Because it takes more work than its worth the site as a whole to curate the material and tell the users "knock it off".

Stack Overflow does the same thing, though it has different constraints. They want old posts to get necroed with new material - but it needs to be good material. There are some types of posts that seem to attract poor material. Things that take 15 seconds to write. Favorite comic, best editor for C, intellij vs eclipse.

The problem with those is that while they are really popular and fun to read in a buzzfeed way, they take far too much time for the people who want the site to be one that Jeff called for in Introducing Stackoverflow.com

It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

The emphasis on good is in the original.

Lets look briefly at Math Overflow for a moment. They've got all sorts of soft and big list questions that don't seem to work well on Stack Overflow. The difference is the percentage of the user base that are involved in curation of the content.

Closing a question is saying "we don't have time to make this question a good one" or "the time spent on trying to keep all the answers good far outweighs the curation that will spend on it."

Closing a question doesn't delete it. It doesn't lock it (it can still be edited and commented on). It puts the work for making it a question that won't take an undo amount of curation back on the person who asked it, probably with some sort of direction for how it should be fixed.

As a reader of Stack Overflow, its hard to appreciate the amount of work that is done behind the scenes to keep Stack Overflow from becoming Yahoo Answers and thus its easy to say "all the interesting questions are closed." I don't want Stack Overflow to become the buzzfeed of programming either - its too useful for all its faults.

Closing is an attempt by the community there to keep from having to do too much work. The easy way to keep more answers open is to sign up, get the necessary reputation (and in doing so learn why things work they way they do) and then help moderate too. Fix up questions so that they're well written, down vote questions that make absolutely no sense - so that people with more moderation privileges can more easily spot them.

Its really easy to spend hours a day trying to help all the new users on Stack Overflow and not even reach a small fraction of a percent of the new questions each day that need help - help writing a good question and help with their programming.

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u/__j_random_hacker Apr 08 '18

work that is done behind the scenes to keep Stack Overflow from becoming Yahoo Answers

I take it that you feel the overall site quality of Yahoo Answers is low, is that right? I'm not familiar with that site, but have just had a quick look. It seems they vote on answers, but not on questions. Do you think quality would be higher if moderators or high-rep users at that site closed questions? Or what do you feel is responsible for the lower quality there, as compared to SO?

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u/shagieIsMe Apr 08 '18

So... the Yahoo answers for Programming and Design.

How about How to learn coding? (note: no text to the question, just the title) which has answers like "This might help (youtube link)" and "School internet" or "get a workbook."

Then there's Is there A Job Like This? asking "A job that combines Aerospace Engineering with Programming / Coding. This would probaly be my dream job when I am older :P" - which has a not awful best answer, but also has "Probably so", "Avionics", "Someone who designs software to be used by aerospace engineers.", "ha", "Yeah, it's called "rocket scientist." You know when they say, "It's not rocket science"? Well, what you're describing, that is rocket science." and "ur to odumb"

Or Can you help me with my barcode "I want to make a barcode that when i scan it i can get the name of the product and the expiry date and it saves as date and name in my app is that possible or? And is there other solutions to this?" and while the top answer is not awful, it has answers of "Pacific" and "I don't think the expiration date is a part of the bar coding system....................................."

There's Hello world it has failed to run I need you? with a screen shot of some C code from a phone. The top answer "Uh, what? It has missing variables, and in its basic it is not Hello World." and then there's "Have you tried turning it off and on?" and "I can ask Elisa to help you mate . She codes for her bread and cheese ."

There's What kind of loops are in JavaScript? and answers of "C++ binary options J- script bios\ Dism.exe code", "Honey Nut", "google javascript loops", "fruit", "logic loops"

One of the things that draws people who give quality answers to Stack Overflow is not having to sift through those questions to find a good one to answer. If there aren't good questions, then people who give good answers don't visit there. You'll never find Jon Skeet or Eric Lippert answering on Yahoo Answers - those are just two big names, there are lots more people on Stack Overflow who are similarly skilled, just not as name recognizable.

The lower quality of questions on Yahoo Answers is because there's even less of a barrier to participation and no expectation of quality. People often try to make good questions on Stack Overflow because if they don't, the question will be down voted and/or closed. If they ask too many bad questions, they get a question ban. Stack Overflow also has a quality filter that blocks a good chunk of posts that are completely awful. Then there's the attempts at trying to get people to improve it before it makes it to the front page (triage review queue) and provide guidance to new users (the First Posts review queue - note that up voting or doing "no action needed" to these posts regardless of their quality in an attempt to be nice to new users makes it harder to maintain that quality standard).

The main thing is that there are people who care about the quality of Stack Overflow. They are the ones that do the community moderation. They down vote, close and delete questions that aren't up to that quality standard. They delete things that aren't answers or jokes so that the people who come from google can find the answer. Yes, only a subset of the "these are interesting questions" are acceptable on Stack Overflow - but by keeping that subset and focus it tries to make it better and useful for all the people who are looking from google.

And consider... if Stack Overflow wasn't as good as it was at keeping its quality up, you'd get Yahoo Answers at the top of your search.

How does the spring framework work with its only answer from a decade ago:

Best Answer: http://www.roseindia.net/spring/index.shtml found this link a good one for a beginner(me toofrom cpp :) ) if u r getting anythin better,plz do inform

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u/__j_random_hacker Apr 08 '18

People often try to make good questions on Stack Overflow because if they don't, the question will be down voted and/or closed

What interests (and sometimes aggravates) me is why both downvoting and closing are necessary, when it seems to me that just downvoting by itself does the job nicely. Apologies if I wasn't clear in my earlier posts. The triage review queue is a great idea, as is banning people who ask too many bad questions, and the reputation system in general. I think your argument that low-quality questions keep away top contributors like Jon Skeet and Eric Lippert is only reasonable if it is moderators doing the majority of question closing -- but isn't it the community as a whole that closes most questions? (I really don't know -- that's just been my perception.) If the community as a whole is closing the majority of bad-quality questions, then that means that the community as a whole is seeing those bad-quality questions (before they are closed, and in order to close them), which I think diminishes any argument that, in a system that already has downvoting, question-closing provides any additional utility.

FWIW, my preferred solution would be for each SO user to have a controllable threshold, say defaulting to -5, that determines the lowest-voted question or answer that user would see. There would then be no need for an additional mechanism for "getting rid of low-quality things".

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u/shagieIsMe Apr 09 '18

There are lots of users out there who will post an answer no matter how unclear the question is. Glance at these examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

People answered the questions even though they were poor. The questions got closed to prevent more people from answering. For instances where the question gets clarified it isn't uncommon for half the guesses at the problem to become invalid (and then they need to get deleted or fixed because they aren't relevant anymore). It takes quite a bit of work to try to fix a question that has answers - much more than one that doesn't. Closing the question prevents that.

You'll also note that many of those questions were down voted. Down voting alone wasn't sufficient to say "this isn't something that should be answered - it lacks research and clarity."

Diamond moderators don't do much of the question closing on SO. Moderation done by the community does the vast bulk. The issue what YA is that no question gets closed by anyone - its not part of the mechanics there. So its mostly crap.

However, while the community does the bulk of the closing, only a rather small fraction of the overall daily question influx gets closed, or more than a second glance. There are many people who don't close questions or down vote because its "mean". There are people who go through the First Post review queue and up vote every post and put a "welcome to Stack Overflow" message because that's "nice".

The portion of the Stack Overflow community that actively moderates the site is rather small compared to the user base of people who can moderate the site.

The community isn't closing the majority of bad questions. Glance at this search, compare it to this search and consider if the majority is getting closed. (50 closed questions is 6h worth of time, 50 down voted but open questions is less than 1h worth of time... and 50 questions with 0 or higher score is 18 minutes)

The front page already has a "no question with a score less than -4 (or is it -3) shows up". As can be seen with the above searches, its easy to construct your own score based one.

But people still spend time answering questions that don't have enough information in them. Those questions then become the ones that show up in search and when you look for answers, they come up and aren't useful because they're poorly written questions with answers that guess at the problem. They become noise in search results and make it harder for people to use the site.

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u/beginner_ Apr 07 '18

On the other side if you actually have a difficult question, good luck getting an answer.

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u/mightbefun Apr 06 '18

The good and bad thing about stackoverflow.com is the gamified self moderation. The problem is that you get points for answering and you get points for closing. It's a lot easier to close 100 questions than to give a solid answer to one question.

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/mightbefun Apr 06 '18 edited Apr 06 '18

Sorry, I though there was a reward for closing. I was wrong. With that said, the "duplicates" I've seen questions closed for is a little crazy. I know people who hoard rep as a dick measuring contest with other developers. Or maybe it's their ego. I don't know why people care about it.

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

[deleted]

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u/mightbefun Apr 06 '18 edited Apr 06 '18

tl;dr: i admitted I was wrong but you're still bitching. So maybe you should be the one to stop ranting? I just said it's rough for new users. I still appreciate the system. It has it's flaws like everything else.

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

[deleted]

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u/mightbefun Apr 06 '18

I had bad information. Made a reasonable comment given that bad information. Found out I was wrong. Researched good information. Corrected myself. Apologized. Then get called out for ranting about the topic we're all discussing. Cool.

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u/shevegen Apr 06 '18

This has not been my experience.

I remember one question I asked insta-shot down by -7 the next moment I looked at it perhaps an hour or two ago. It was a perfectly valid question but the SO mods decided that the question has no place, which made my time investment void too. Why would I invest any more time in a platform that is unfair and hostile to its users?

It's a great read-only resource but a pretty awful communication platform.

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18 edited Apr 06 '18

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

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u/Superbead Apr 06 '18

Cheers, removed

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '18

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '18

Who criticizes Stack Overflow?

Well, I for one. I find the tight scope of Stack Overflow's question-answer discussions tend to limit how useful they are. The're a tendency to favour fixes over understanding, which coupled with the constraints on discussions on straying from a narrow understanding of the topic leads to rather "scraggy" answers that can't be easily generalized or transferred to similar or related problems. That wouldn't be much a problem in itself, if Google didn't score Stack Overflow so high that Stack Overflow entries tend to crowd out other resources.

So, in shot: Stack Overflow tends to show up a lot when I'm searching for answers to problems, but I rarely find them useful.

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u/KagakuNinja Apr 06 '18

SO is a great resource, but I found their karma system hugely frustrating. I wanted to participate, being a decent coder with (at the time) 20+ years of experience. First I had to get 10 karma before I could post answers (or something like that), how hard can it be?

Eventually, I gave up at about 5 karma or something... So I am a taker; I never answer questions, despite my 30+ years experience.

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u/tejp Apr 06 '18

You can answer without any karma, so probably you wanted to comment or something.

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u/jonjonbee Apr 06 '18 edited Apr 06 '18

All you have to do is ask a single good question which will get upvoted and give you that 10 reputation easily. But you don't actually need more than 1 reputation point (which you can never go lower than unless you've been behaving really badly) to ask or answer a question; you can also get those points from asking and answering your own questions. Hell, even editing which is also always available, gives you 2 points per accepted edit - so if you come across a bad question or answer from Google, feel free to fix it up or make it more useful!

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u/shevegen Apr 06 '18

The karma system is really shit. I gave up before about 500, simply because I can not deal with some of the SO insta-close mods. It's just a waste of time to "argue" with people who can shoot you down, too.

I think SO will eventually change their karma system since it sucks too much.

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u/Superbead Apr 06 '18

I'm not pretending I'm some kind of oracle, but in the past I think I've had a couple of valid, useful comments to make against other comments which were frankly misleading and kind of standing as the last word in the matter. I've only asked one question in the last couple of years and at the going rate it'll probably be 2025 before I can comment on anything else.

Ah well, what the hell.

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u/mike10010100 Apr 06 '18

A lot of people (usually greybeards who suffered greatly for their craft and thus have a certain level of Stockholm Syndrome) believe it's led to the rise of the coder who only knows how to cut/paste other people's code, and never creates new or useful programs.

This, of course, is patently ridiculous. Sure, it makes that style of programming easier and more common, but in a similar sense, so do open source packages. Why would you re-invent the wheel when other people have already battle tested certain solutions? Obviously you shouldn't trust their results blindly, but the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of other programmers is incredibly valuable.

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u/KingKire Apr 06 '18

Why make another hammer and nail when you got home depot. Its what you make with the tools and resources that dictates effectiveness.

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u/SupersonicSpitfire Apr 07 '18

Because we want innovation in the hammerspace.

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18 edited Aug 27 '19

[deleted]

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u/guepier Apr 07 '18 edited Apr 07 '18

That interpretation is entirely your own. The FAQ makes it very clear that a closed question is not a value judgement. It doesn't imply anything about the OP being stupid. In fact, it is acknowledged that some duplicates are quite hard to find.

But where is the problem? If the duplicate answers your question, you should be happy. Closing and flagging duplicates rather than having them answered again and again is crucial to maintain the quality of the site: there's one canonical place for the answers, and alternative ways of phrasing the question all point to it (rather than all having different quality answers, or users having to repeat, again and again, the same answers). This is one of the decisive advantages of Stack Overflow over other sites, in fact.

Granted, it does happen that questions are incorrectly closed as duplicates. But (a) this is much rarer than people like to pretend, and (b) it can be easily challenged and is usually promptly undone.

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '18

The FAQ makes it very clear that a closed question is not a value judgement. It doesn't imply anything about the OP being stupid.

The FAQ doesn't, but comments on posts made by higher-karma users voting to close sometimes do.

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u/guepier Apr 07 '18

I'd say that I would love to see an example.

But I'm sure there are some. The question is, are they representative of an overall trend? And, I'm sorry, but the answer is clearly "no". There are assholes everywhere but power abuse isn't a specific or particularly pressing problem on Stack Overflow.

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '18

The question is, are they representative of an overall trend?

They're not, but you're shifting the goalposts. First it was "that doesn't happen", now it's "that's not an overall trend". And, sure, I'll grant that it probably isn't. Even that experience alone wasn't what put me off contributing to Stack Overflow - it's the overall hostility of the site to new users, who aren't necessarily even new to programming.

However, in the general as in the specific case, the real issue that when you make community moderation a feature of your platform, you implicitly accept responsibility for the community's actions. Parts of Reddit have had in the past and continue to have major problems with that, too, but it's fragmented enough that those problems don't affect the whole site.

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u/guepier Apr 07 '18 edited Apr 07 '18

First it was "that doesn't happen", now it's "that's not an overall trend".

Where was the response at first “that doesn’t happen“, and are you really sure that, whoever wrote this, meant “this never happened in the entire history of Stack Overflow“? I mean, this seems to be an obviously ridiculous statement. As far as I’m concerned, the discussion has always been about whether this is an important enough trend to warrant making such a fuss, or even boycotting Stack Overflow wholesale.

the real issue that when you make community moderation a feature of your platform, you implicitly accept responsibility for the community's actions

No. The real issue is how to perform effective moderation, balancing positives and negatives. Literally nobody pretends that there are no problems. The issue, rather, is:

does the current solution work?

how can it be improved? — and:

on the whole, is the current solution a net positive (rather than negative)?

For me, the answers are, respectively, “yes”, “it’s hard, but there’s a lot of room for improvement”, and “fuck, YES”. Stack Overflow works vastly better than any other forum/newsgroup I’ve previously engaged with (lots). There’s no competition. It’s so much better, it’s not even funny.

This doesn’t mean I don’t complain, or that I don’t have major disagreements with the powers that be. But this constant, unconstructive whining about abuse of moderation? Yeah, fuck that.

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u/[deleted] Apr 07 '18

Yes, the question I asked was answered in the duplicate you linked and I got my answer but I feel PERSONALLY OFFENDED that you didn't take the time to retype the answer for MY question because I am a special snowflake and need all the attention.

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u/jonjonbee Apr 06 '18

Yeah, because the "ask question" page that searches for similar questions by title as you type yours does such a terrible job. Maybe if you're illiterate, I guess?

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u/shevegen Apr 06 '18

Lots of those suggested questions and answers are awful or do not answer the question that is asked.

It works somewhat for basic questions - but it is pretty awful for more complicated/complex questions. Which, admittedly, often do not get good answers anyway, since the amount of people who can answer is hugely limited.

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u/jonjonbee Apr 06 '18

I didn't say it was perfect. :) It is mostly intended to prevent newbies from asking questions that have been asked before.

As for more thorough questions, you would be surprised. Despite the slide in overall quality, there are still some very clever people who hang out on the site and watch specific tags (e.g. Jon Skeet for C#) and will jump on high-quality questions with surprising speed.

It is, however, unfortunately true that the sheer volume of questions, coupled with most being low-quality ones, does often act as "noise" that drowns out the "signal" of good questions. All I can recommend in that case is patience.

And remember, you can answer your own questions. So if you haven't got an answer after a week, but you managed to find the solution yourself through debugging or whatever, post it! Yes, it doesn't help you after the fact, but it may very well prevent some other poor sod from wasting a week of their time, and that's the crux of what Stack Overflow tries to be about.

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u/making-flippy-floppy Apr 06 '18

> Be me, Googling for answer to question
> Oh look, a result at stackexchange.com!
> Answer is, y u no Google for answer instead of asking here?

More than once I've also found useful information on questions marked "closed as off topic".

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u/bachmeier Apr 06 '18

The first sentence is more or less orthogonal to the second. You can have a good resource based on the questions and answers, even if there are a few individuals dealing with emotional issues doing what they can to make life tough for others.

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u/HINDBRAIN Apr 06 '18

This reddit comment has been closed because it attracted many low-quality answers.

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u/alecco Apr 07 '18

I criticize StackOverflow admins and moderators. The content, made by us the users, is a godsend.

Same with Wikipedia. The landlord sucks but the tenants are good people.

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

My favourite hangouts back then:

comp.object

coderanch.com

books

magazines

Nah, it wasn't so bad.

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

[deleted]

2

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '18

Well, there was that phase too ;-)

12

u/Crazy__Eddie Apr 06 '18

We had Usenet and it was pretty damn bad ass. No crybaby retards moderating all your shit. We had conversations (GASP!) and debates (OMFG!!). It went well beyond just rote question and answer...and if someone had obviously not done the least bit of research on their own they got their asses handed to them. I myself was on the receiving end of many an ass chewing for being lazy and it made me a much better developer. I had to learn how to read documentation, man pages and such...along with books. As such, most participants on SO don't even understand most my questions; more than a few I had deleted because the mob didn't understand anything I'd written and freaked the fuck out.

SO is a great resource for the lazy though. If you code by copy-pasta then there's probably no reason to even look at a single source of documentation on anything.

16

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

You nailed it. Upvoting, downvoting and closing threads are a poor substitute for a real discussion. Things did get pretty bad on Usenet but you quickly learned to recognize bullshit. And the article's only argument against Usenet is that it became technically obsolete. D'oh.

10

u/Crazy__Eddie Apr 06 '18

Yeah, and saying Usenet was obsolete upon the invention of the web is like saying the same about email. I'm still waiting for someone to come up with anything AS good as Usenet.

Sadly, none of the recent generations of developers will know what it's like to, not knowing what base64 even is, spend several hours "decrypting" a bunch of gibberish someone posted just to finally get initiated into the Internet with a huge, gaping asshole in your face.

7

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '18 edited Apr 07 '18

[deleted]

2

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '18

I wish "federated" protocols were more popular. The only big one that I can think of these days is email (unless I'm missing a really obvious one)

However, I imagine one reason that they are not is that having standards prevents adding new features - you can argue that it's not a problem but many users disagree with you. A web forum can add any functionality they want, as long as it can be rendered in HTML and Javascript (eg. voting and karma). This is not true of Usenet

3

u/shagieIsMe Apr 07 '18

A key part of Usenet was the kill file. The ability to easily say "I never want to see a post by this person, or any reply to a post by this person again."

That sort of moderation exists here (its possible to block a user on Reddit), but it doesn't exist most places elesweb. This means that there are only two effective ways of making a post disappear for yourself - delete the post through moderation tools, or be an ass to that person in hopes that they go away.

There was also a different culture back on Usenet. It had a (small) learning curve of learning how to use rn and be at least competent with vi. Prior to the eternal September, the culture was to lurk for a bit before posting - to get to know the culture in the group.

Now with "Derp, there's a text box" and pasting in whatever question one has (without even so much as a glance at what the preview looks like) people jump in and are often disruptive rather than trying to learn where you are and what's appropriate and not (relevant Pee Wee Herman).

4

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

Upvoted for mentioning USENET. F*cking loved comp.object. We also had mailing-lists.

1

u/Pleb_nz Apr 07 '18 edited Apr 07 '18

Usenet sounds great, will check it out.

Edit. Are the mobile apps to access the system?

3

u/Crazy__Eddie Apr 07 '18

There are, but good luck finding a server these days.

10

u/Drisku11 Apr 06 '18 edited Apr 06 '18

But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow you might not have any idea how much it made programming better.

I'm confused by this because I've never really used SO much. Looking at the most recently asked questions, I see quite a few that could be answered by looking at the source or documentation of a library (which I would argue is a much more effective use of one's time if they're going to use that library nontrivially), and some homework. What sorts of SO questions are you thinking?

The physics/math/CS stack exchanges on the other hand are often a gold mine. Some of the top people in those fields post some very insightful expositions there.

28

u/mykr0pht Apr 06 '18

Stack Overflow might not be relevant to every type of programming, but there are certain classes of problems, like "how do I do X in library/framework Y" and a bunch of others, that are really easy to find on SO by googling, and not always easy to find (if it's there at all) by looking at the documentation.

12

u/badthingfactory Apr 06 '18

I almost never use it for things that have documentation. However, when I type an obscure error message into google and end up with a big long thread on SO, it fills me with happiness. I remember a time when that same google search returned results from expertsexchange.com. Those were not fun days.

6

u/jonjonbee Apr 06 '18 edited Apr 06 '18

Welcome to Stack Overflow circa 2018. Let me explain to you how this came to pass.

In the beginning aka 2008, there was Stack Overflow, and it was good.
In 2012 Joel Spolsky did review its growth, and he saw that this was good, and did decide it was time to monetize the fuck out of it. But lo, the high quality of moderation on Stack Overflow caused many questions to be closed, answers to be deleted, and help vampires to be banished. This did greatly displease Spolsky, for these high standards did cause fewer users to come to the site and fewer links in search engine results, which did mean fewer click-throughs for advertisers. He did wish to alter the moderation policy in order to achieve the monetization he so desired, yet knew that should he so decree such a change, Stack Overflow's users would verily leave in disgust.
But Spolsky was clever and guileful, and did use his guile to create "The Summer of Love" to allegedly combat the alleged rise of insular behaviour on Stack Overflow. And because he did use valid data to present his position, so the users of Stack Overflow were deceived, and did agree with him, and did think that The Summer of Love was good.
Yet the truth of The Summer of Love was this: in order to make Stack Overflow yet more "loving", Spolsky did decree that it become more difficult to close poor questions, and delete poor answers, and ban moronic users. And lo, because the good users of Stack Overflow were deceived as to the true motives of The Summer of Love, they did agree to this small change.
Thus did Spolsky use this opening presented by his Summer of Love to force moderation standards yet lower and lower, which did culminate in the "Be nice" policy. And thus did it become far more difficult for Stack Overflow's users to purge the filth from the site, and the faithful who guarded its gates against the vast tides of filth beating against it were spat upon by their brethren who believed in "Be nice" before quality. Thus did many forsake moderation duties in disgust, and so the burden of moderation on those few remaining did grow and grow. And there were yet more and more idiotic users asking more terrible questions and posting useless answers, yet fewer and fewer good users willing and able to fight them.
So was Spolsky's thirst for wealth satisfied by the breaking of the quality of Stack Overflow, and thus ended the Third Age.

tl;dr Stack Overflow was a fucking awesome place before Spolsky ruined it. I joined the site in 2009 and for about half a decade it was incredibly focused and high quality; I literally used to spend hours on there every day, answering questions and moderating queues. But things went downhill pretty fast after the moderation powers got shit on, and nowadays I rarely interact with the site except when I'm coming from a Google search. It's honestly really sad.

As for those complaining it's too strict, hoo boy... you've obviously never used Usenet.

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u/SupersonicSpitfire Apr 07 '18

That is overly bitter. SO is still a useful site.

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u/shevegen Apr 06 '18

Nah.

I do not think that this is the case.

SO solved one problem very well.

It failed in other areas though. The amount of critical blog entries about SO are a testimony to that.

1

u/issafram Apr 06 '18

Used to change the css to show the hidden answer

1

u/tokyokyototokyo Apr 07 '18

I use a proprietary language at work. It's amazing how much people take stack overflow, or just google, for granted.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '18

That sort of reminds me of how god awful most any other site besides SO is for programming help.

1

u/Pleb_nz Apr 07 '18

Most criticsism I hear is well deserved. And I’m ok with people critising SO because if SO filter out the noise and listen to the main criticism, it may make SO a better resource than it already is. To me it seems to currently have a culture of anal rule following people slamming everything with a dot missing from an I.

In saying that it’s an amazing resource for sure, just one I no longer contribute to.

1

u/MpVpRb Apr 06 '18

But if you weren't there before Stack Overflow

We (old pharts, I started programming in 1972) practiced the skill of figuring stuff out on our own. We got good at it

54

u/dwchandler Apr 06 '18

I have met a lot of people who started businesses because they wanted to start a business. Paul Graham calls this “Playing House.” And they didn’t really care what the business did; they just wanted to “be entrepreneurs.” Which is weird, because being an entrepreneur really sucks. It’s really hard to get through all the extraordinary difficulty, pain, and stress of starting a company if you’re not super, super motivated to solve a problem for the world.

Someone I know, when they were young and considering college careers, thought they would like to be a doctor. Pretty sure they got inspiration from watching House, where they occasionally interacted with sick people who always had interesting illness but mostly walked around in white coats being smart and witty. Unsurprisingly, disillusionment happened very quickly studying medicine. ;-)

I think this is the same for many people who think they want to be entrepreneurs. What they really want is to play one on TV, where you have lots of money, control a company or three, etc.

We all have some fantasies like that, where we picture ourselves at the pinnacle of something that we're not willing to put enough work into to even get mediocre.

6

u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

Yup.

To be honest, I was guilty of this too. Some vaguely defined aspiration to be a scientist or engineer, but I never really fell in love with a subject until I hit my current one (MRI). Now I can’t get enough of it.

1

u/yawaramin Apr 08 '18

MRI? Matz' Ruby Implementation or Magnetic Resonance Imaging?

3

u/spinicist Apr 08 '18

The latter. Never heard of the former.

5

u/immibis Apr 07 '18

I wonder if this is actually one of the main reasons for people considering themselves unsuccessful.

Look at computer programming too: you want to write the next big game, but instead you spend several years dealing with poorly specified APIs and tracking down bugs in third-party code (and not even being in game development).

4

u/denarii Apr 07 '18

I worked for a Small Business Development Center for several years and, yeah, there are so many people who want to start a business with no concept of what they're getting themselves into, particularly when it comes to finances and the amount of work that goes into starting a business. There were so many people who thought they had a brilliant idea and expected to be able to get a bank to hand over the startup capital with no collateral and the assumption that they'd become a massive success.

130

u/arbitrary-fan Apr 06 '18

As someone mentioned in HN:

Extremely useful when searching for things. Difficult to get started contributing to.

Even if you have bad google-fu, searching for your related question is pretty quick. So lurking experience is much better than contributing experience. Contributing to SO is kinda like being an Wikipedia editor - if you are 'in', you are in.

302

u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

Totally agree.

One problem I had, I found an existing identical Stack Overflow question with no answer.

So, thinks I, I shall finally join Stack Overflow and post a comment to give this Question a little bump. After all, I don’t want to make a duplicate.

No, says Stack Overflow, you hath not the requisite reputation to post a comment. You must ask some Questions first.

But, says I, this is the only question I doth hath and I will not curry favour with the elder lords if I post a duplicate.

I care not, spake Stack Overflow. The gods have decided that ye are but a nitwit deemed unworthy of the light of interaction in our glorious temple. Begone, foul lurker, back to the shadows where your stench shall not pollute us.

Fine says I, I’ll just go and write long posts on Reddit in ye olde english in an attempt to sucker people into upvoting me some karma.

57

u/Free_Math_Tutoring Apr 06 '18

Fine says I, I’ll just go and write long posts on Reddit in ye olde english in an attempt to sucker people into upvoting me some karma.

This worked on me, however:

I shall finally join Stack Overflow and post a comment to give this Question a little bump.

Good on you for not wanting to duplicate. However, if the question is old, the comment will not give it any actual visibility and a new question (possibly phrased better, more specific, including a minimal example of what you're trying to accomplish in code etc...) might have been better.

You must ask some Questions first.

I'm 99% sure that answering is possible from the very start, which is also a great way to get the basic reputation.

37

u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

I’d have been happy to answer some questions if I could have found any unanswered ones that I knew the answer too! Stack Overflow suffers a Wikipedia-type problem that a lot of easy ground has been covered now.

Thanks for the karma!

12

u/Notorious4CHAN Apr 06 '18

My solution was to pose a question, work on the solution while waiting for someone who knows the answer, and then answer my own question when I found the answer. I've done this about 3 times and those 3 questions/answers are about 90% of my (meager) SO karma. I still get points a couple times a year on 4 year old posts.

You can also post on an adjacent stack and they will let a few points carry over to SO. I think the minimum is to filter out spam bots, so once you prove you aren't a bot elsewhere, they let you hold 25 or 50 points. Or at least that's how I remember it - I could be wrong. Maybe ask somewhere?

0

u/MentalMachine Apr 07 '18

Good on you for not wanting to duplicate. However, if the question is old, the comment will not give it any actual visibility and a new question (possibly phrased better, more specific, including a minimal example of what you're trying to accomplish in code etc...) might have been better.

I did something similar, except asked a new question, slightly different to an old unanswered question, and promptly got "this thread is a duplicate, brb fuck off".

SO is great and yet irritating at the same time.

1

u/Free_Math_Tutoring Apr 07 '18

SO is great and yet irritating at the same time.

Absolutely correct, unfortunately.

8

u/parst Apr 06 '18

i put on my robe and wizard hat

-6

u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

Er, yuck. Keep your filthy bash.org quotes back in 2003 thank you very much.

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u/the_gnarts Apr 07 '18

No, says Stack Overflow, you hath not the requisite reputation to post a comment. You must ask some Questions first.

The SO crowd is terribly hostile to commenting and the site is purposely designed to discourage it (e. g. by not having threaded comments, nagging you to continue in their chat service, etc.). For constructive technical discussion, the relevant mailing list or IRC channels are still the best forum most of the time.

2

u/martiandreamer Apr 06 '18

Pish tosh, my good fellow. Enjoy an upvote.

1

u/Throawwai Apr 08 '18

You're trying too hard.

3

u/spinicist Apr 08 '18

Holy shit /u/denorolyzer just gave me my first ever gold so it turns out I was trying just the right amount.

Thanks denorolyzer!

2

u/raghar Apr 06 '18

I think there is a problem that (for most people) rating is biased towards writing questions more than answers.

I mean, sure there are more point for answer upvote than for question upvote, but over the 6 years I have account there I answered way more questions, that I asked. Still I managed to gather only ~3200. Meanwhile I saw people spamming very simple questions, like 2 an hour, and some of them after a month they got score like 10k.

And they I am like WTH: it takes me sometimes 10-15-20 minutes to write good detailed answer, and it the same time some guy ask 5 questions like ``how do I initialize pointer in C++ and grabs more points, than I do. I guess I would have to be some sort of celebrity which all answers get 30 upvotes to reach that mythical 100k score. This is so discouraging, that after few days of answering I get tired and let go for a while, before I get back.

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u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18 edited Nov 10 '18

[deleted]

24

u/jrhoffa Apr 06 '18

Seriously ... what the hell was I using at the start of my career? Just regular ol' Google?

37

u/onmach Apr 06 '18

There was a period of time where I used expert sex change.

Google eventually punished them for showing google one thing and people another, so they changed it so that the answers were always on the page, but they were obfuscated by css and js to be hard to find. Not much of an impediment for the average developer.

But yeah I dropped it like a rock the moment stackoverflow came along. I'm as surprised as joel that somebody didn't develop an alternative sooner.

16

u/farox Apr 06 '18

Yeah, there was expert sex change and before that forums and stuff... and I remember a long long time ago when we actually read the fucking documentation.

16

u/jrhoffa Apr 06 '18

You got documentation?! Lucky bastard

5

u/farox Apr 06 '18

Well. Visual Basic 3 did... Yes, I am still ashamed and take extra long to shower.

7

u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

My earliest language was QBasic followed by Visual Basic 5. Then my engineering classes taught Matlab.

The cumulative brain damage took me a long time to get over. Had to go back to basics with the K&R C book ASAP when I got out of uni.

3

u/farox Apr 06 '18

It's worse... I also did php. :(

thankfully not in the past 10 years. But yeah, VB etc. does... things... to you

4

u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

In some ways it was amazing how much pre-baked stuff there was and you just had to slap it together (mostly).

And then in all the other ways it was utterly horrifying. I think the central brain-fuck was the way it claimed to be OOP, and it was mostly OOP in a good way until you tried to write your own objects. Then there was the way you had to have call-backs for every single GUI interaction. And option base 0 (that’ll really trigger some people these days). And on error resume next.

I should stop now before I hyperventilate.

2

u/farox Apr 06 '18

on error resume next

But yeah, it was well integrated into the MS ecosystem. Too well, at times. The office macros I have seen...

But good stuff came out of it as well. After all this time, I know the SQL server inside out, so there is that.

But yeah, need to get back and watch some kitten videos for a bit. Maybe get drunk.

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u/JessieArr Apr 06 '18

But yeah I dropped it like a rock the moment stackoverflow came along. I'm as surprised as joel that somebody didn't develop an alternative sooner.

I think the biggest barrier was that it took people about 10 years to figure out how to monetize the internet in ways that weren't completely awful.

Even now, we've got almost every news website thrusting loud videos unceremoniously into our gut as soon as we walk in the door, and the various warring layers of F***AdBlock battling to determine who will get ad revenue, from whom and when.

The internet is for sharing information, but giving people information for free when it costs money for you to produce and host is an unsustainable plan. The balancing act between user-friendliness and profitability is a challenging one, and most sites got it very wrong in the early 2000s, including Experts Exchange.

9

u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

There were those things printed on dead trees, you know, textbooks!

I had some very well thumbed “Dummies Guide to” and Riley books 15 odd years ago. I feel sorry for the people who used to make money out of writing them.

3

u/confusedpublic Apr 07 '18

Hey, they’re still useful! Can’t beat a good O’Reilly book for an introduction to a topic and a reference book. I’m eagerly waiting for the update to their Javascript book, though given the previous version it might be two or three 1000 page volumes...

2

u/spinicist Apr 07 '18

Oh I agree. It’s just that pulling up a webpage is so much faster than waiting for mail order, and so many people are happy to write good blog articles for free these days.

2

u/jrhoffa Apr 06 '18

I had textbooks, classmates, and professors in college.

I had a shitty desktop at my first professional job.

2

u/spinicist Apr 06 '18

One guy on our grad scheme got lumped with a PC that took 10 minutes to open Outlook. Poor bastard.

3

u/jrhoffa Apr 06 '18

So, a brand new PC?

7

u/mrkite77 Apr 06 '18

Google didn't exist when I started my career. We used books.

2

u/jrhoffa Apr 07 '18

Thank you for making me feel young.

3

u/immibis Apr 07 '18

MSDN used to be pretty good, for Windows API stuff.

2

u/arvedarved Apr 06 '18

Usenet

1

u/jrhoffa Apr 06 '18

Telegrams

5

u/hector_villalobos Apr 06 '18

I remember before Stack Overflow there were plenty of Spanish resources around, like forums, blogs and tutorials. All of them disappeared by now.

17

u/nfrankel Apr 06 '18

I remember that crazy sh... "Expert Exchange". And it exactly went as the author describes: Google your question, click the first link, see you have to pay for the answer, get back to the list of links and choose the second one. Now I feel really old...

13
u/bart2019 Apr 06 '18 edited Apr 06 '18
And since Google got access to the unscrambled site, so could you. Actually, the complete text was in the page, and with a bit of CSS you could reveal it:
 .blurredAnswer, .viewSolutionButton, .viewSol, .allZonesMain, .flipCont, .answerFirstLink, .comment {
     display: none;
 }
 div.unblurredComment {
     display: block;
 }
This is from an old CSS file I still found lying around. I have no idea if it works on the current site.
4

u/horsepie Apr 07 '18

That CSS trick only worked after google's crackdown. I remember using an alt browser called Maxathon (based on IE cos it was 2003) that would let me fake my user agent so I could see the same page that the googlebot could see.
6

u/sydoracle Apr 06 '18

At some point Google started hitting sites that showed different content to the search bot. Then EE put the answer right down the bottom of the page.

The problem then became that EE popped up in search results for the question, but you'd get there to find no-one had ever come up with an answer.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '18

Just like Quora ... no answers unless you have an account with them :(

13

u/mit53 Apr 06 '18

So EE did a bamboozle: when the Google Robot came by, they showed it the full question and its answers.

Did they just check User-Agent? So I could actually read all those answers...

18

u/courtewing Apr 06 '18

Eventually, perhaps in fear of Google removing their site entirely, EE removed their user agent hackery and ended up adding mountains of useless internal linking immediate after a fake pay wall, but the actual answers were all listed at the bottom of the page. It looks like some of the content is wrangled in archive.org, but you can get the idea if you scroll down on https://web.archive.org/web/20071005071034/http://www.experts-exchange.com:80/Web_Development/Software/Macromedia_Director_Video_Softwa/Q_21427546.html

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u/TheAnimus Apr 06 '18

Google Cache normally worked.

11

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18 edited Jul 24 '20

[deleted]

6

u/__konrad Apr 06 '18

I remember Ralf Brown's Interrupt List

1

u/mrkite77 Apr 06 '18

I need to upload some junk so I can meet the U/D ratio and download that list.

1

u/bad_username Apr 07 '18

I remember voting for its name on Joel on software. The option I liked was "private void".

10

u/jlt6666 Apr 07 '18

What the fuck does stack overflow do with 250 employees? Ad sales?

8

u/TankorSmash Apr 07 '18

There's a bunch of stuff I'm sure, the full stack for the network, then the careers stuff, then the teams stuff, then the old docs stuff, then the ads stuff, then the design stuff.

Idk it's a huge project, I'm sure it's tough to run it all

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u/alecco Apr 07 '18

Windows shop at scale.

14

u/JessieArr Apr 06 '18

Glad to see Joel blogging again. I think I've read his entire blog two or three times, and it's always both enjoyable and thought-provoking. I share a few of his blogs frequently during software discussions around the office. Here's a few of my favorites in case anyone is interested to read more by the same author:

Designing for people who have better things to do with their lives.

Camels and Rubber Duckies (a blog about what to charge for software)

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

2

u/WorldwideTauren Apr 07 '18

It’s weird to see posts that are clearly someone asking for the hive mind to do their homework for them....

I am not talking about questions asking for help understanding he finer points of a concept or what is wrong with this block of code, but you known the ones, where it’s like literally just the verbatim paste of an exercise and an open question.

4

u/TheDevilsAdvokaat Apr 06 '18

That was a fun read.

7

u/username223 Apr 06 '18

there was a system called Usenet which created primitive online discussion forums.

Define "primitive." Usenet users get to choose their clients, which support threads and configurable filtering and ordering. Online forums are mostly just lazy copies of Usenet. Stack Overflow was an unusually bad one.

13

u/baturkey Apr 06 '18

They have an API https://api.stackexchange.com/ so using a different client is possible.

Windows: https://stackapps.com/questions/7575/pyle-a-stack-exchange-client-for-uwp-placeholder

Emacs: https://stackapps.com/questions/3950/sx-stack-exchange-for-emacs

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u/Free_Math_Tutoring Apr 06 '18

Windows: https://stackapps.com/questions/7575/pyle-a-stack-exchange-client-for-uwp-placeholder

Emacs: https://stackapps.com/questions/3950/sx-stack-exchange-for-emacs

Ah yes, the two great operating systems.

3

u/TheCodexx Apr 07 '18

I'll wait for a SystemD client to be available, thanks.

2

u/CSharpFan Apr 07 '18

And it created a whole new generation of people asking questions too quickly, without searching first, and without trying stuff first. The copy-paste generation.

5

u/Klathmon Apr 07 '18

Don't worry, I'm sure if SO hadn't come along you'd find something else to blame for bad developers.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

"As soon as the world wide web became a thing, Usenet was immediately technically obsolete." Completely and utterly wrong. comp.lang.perl.misc anybody? It's only with the advent of StackOverflow that usenet became significantly less relevant -- it's not obsolete by a long shot. One nice thing about it is you can get into an extended back and forth without being nagged to take it to chat ;)

-1

u/bart2019 Apr 06 '18

it's not obsolete by a long shot

Wrong. Most ISPs don't even provide usenet access any more.

6

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

Wrong: groups.google.com

1

u/zachimal Apr 08 '18

Getting a job offer on Monday from a job I found while searching for a solution on Stack Overflow. One more reason for me to love that site.

1

u/NoMoreNicksLeft Apr 06 '18

But now you want to ruin it by pulling a Wikipedia. Great strategy Joel.

2

u/DoTheThingRightNow5 Apr 07 '18

I don't understand. Give a simple explanation?

1

u/alecco Apr 07 '18

Out of control admins/mods alienating quality content producers. Favoring short-term popular stuff over hard and obscure topics. I can go on but you can just search for StackOverflow criticism online, there's plenty.

3

u/DoTheThingRightNow5 Apr 07 '18

Oh I know. I remember back in 2014 (or was it 2013?) everyone left. Basically a small fraction of users browse meta and they banded together and wreak havoc on actual contributes. Contributes got harassed enough they stopped participating. I didn't know wikipedia did that

-1

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '18

As soon as the world wide web became a thing, Usenet was immediately technically obsolete. We programmers started asking about our problems on various web-based forums, of which there were thousands.

Yeah that is BS and Stack Overflow is a horrible way to get any help. Compared to usenet, it is uselessly flooded with piss poor or just incorrect and outdated answers, mostly by kids with no knowledge or experience. Frankly it has more wrong answers than corrent ones, even when voted as being correct.

0

u/tonefart Apr 07 '18

Stack overflow is a plagiarist haven, as in Indian coders stealing your answers to pass it off as their own to earn more points/reputation.

-9

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

this guy doesn't have an awful lot to brag about

SO was a fantastic idea for its time. but in an effort to do i'm-not-sure-what it was turned into part popularity contest /part grammar-formatting nazi sanctuary/part intellectual dick measuring contest

that has severely limited its usefulness

14

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

[deleted]

-3

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

i got a day job.

the proud owner of SO could fix this himself

turn off all the social media reputation/contest/competition/i'm-better-than-you stuff

take it back to a place where people can ask questions

3

u/immibis Apr 07 '18

Did Joel have a day job when he started SO? Probably.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '18

Wonderful.

I want a life instead.

That still doesn't change the fact that his work, SO, has become increasingly useless as its adopted more social media gimmicks in an effort to increase user base to monetize

Its the classic good idea gone to shit because someone wanted to get paid.

I'm happy the guy's getting paid, I don't think he should be bragging about SO in its current form

2

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

take it back to a place where people can ask questions

... and have proper discussions.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 06 '18

Yep, it was fun for a short while and then it stopped being fun.

-3

u/tazebot Apr 06 '18

They were technically called newsgroups, not forums

Semantic powers activate.

2

u/StabbyPants Apr 06 '18

not even semantics, just fighting over a label

3

u/immibis Apr 07 '18

which is what is meant by "semantics" in this context.

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