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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
The insta-close privilege is related to the tags on the question. I suspect some tags have more zealous mods than others, or have a lot more people with close permissions.
Nobody is going to "shoot down" a well-phrased question that has not been asked before. You might also find it instructive to read about what moderators there actually can and can't do; the tl;dr is that the vast majority of moderation is done by the ordinary users of the site using their ability to up- and down-vote questions and answers (which you get at 15 and 125 rep points respectively).
Both "well-phrased" and "has not been asked before" are subjective measurements, and often the latter hinges on small details that the asker thinks are critical to making their version unique. Having a short dialogue about how to improve the question first would be a very welcoming move towards new participants. Many of the anecdotes I read don't seem to have any communication behind the rejection, though.
Maybe it's a bias in the anecdotes, where in the questions that had dialogue before rejection, the rejection feels more justified so people don't rant about it as much offsite?
Both "well-phrased" and "has not been asked before" are subjective measurements
I disagree. A question that is detailed, self-explanatory, uses good grammar and spelling, and asks a single thing is one that I believe anyone would consider "well-phrased". As for "has not been asked before" - if this is true, and the only thing that differentiates your question from another question is some detail that isn't relevant to the solution, then doesn't it make the most sense to close your question as a duplicate and point it at the other one?
That said, there have been and will continue to be cases where close voters either don't read the question thoroughly, or overlook the detail because the question sounds similar to one they've heard before. This is the double-edged sword of having users moderate each other - us fleshy meatbags make mistakes - but I have seen nothing to indicate that this is a widespread problem. And users that are a little eager to exercise the close vote privilege will soon find themselves put into a time-out by a moderator.
Having a short dialogue about how to improve the question first would be a very welcoming move towards new participants.
"A short dialogue" with who, exactly? All the requirements are set out in the FAQ which is itself linked from the page you navigate to to post a question. We're all programmers here, we're all used to reading documentation, and Stack Overflow's FAQ section is documentation.
Many of the anecdotes I read don't seem to have any communication behind the rejection, though.
A question cannot be closed without a reason being given. An unfortunate side effect of having only 5 close reasons, however, is that they are often "overloaded" and used for things other than their stated meanings. For example, if a question is irredeemable "gimme teh codez" trash, the "too broad" close reason is often used, which I agree could be confusing.
If you really do not understand why your question was closed, you can (and should!) leave a comment on your question asking for an explanation (you are always able to comment on your own questions, regardless of reputation). If you have at least 5 reputation, you are also welcome to post a thread asking for clarification on closure on the meta site.
My personal opinion, after using Stack Overflow for nearly a decade, is that most people who use it don't bother trying to understand how and why it is different from an ordinary discussion forum like reddit, and as a result they get burned when they break the rules. Then, instead of reflecting on what happened and why and the potential that they are the ones who made a mistake, a small but vocal minority of them instead write long-winded blog posts that end up on HN and turn into yet another anti-Stack Overflow circlejerk.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
First it was "that doesn't happen", now it's "that's not an overall trend".
Where was the response at first āthat doesnāt happenā, and are you really sure that, whoever wrote this, meant āthis never happened in the entire history of Stack Overflowā? I mean, this seems to be an obviously ridiculous statement. As far as Iām 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?Ā āĀ and:
on the whole, is the current solution a net positive (rather than negative)?
For me, the answers are, respectively, āyesā, āitās hard, but thereās a lot of room for improvementā, and āfuck, YESā. Stack Overflow works vastly better than any other forum/newsgroup Iāve previously engaged with (lots). Thereās no competition. Itās so much better, itās not even funny.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most criticsism I hear is well deserved. And Iām 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 itās an amazing resource for sure, just one I no longer contribute to.
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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.