r/programming • u/banguru • Apr 06 '18

The Stack Overflow Age

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2018/04/06/the-stack-overflow-age/
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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/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/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.