I think you can argue the psychology and the merits of various ranking systems all day every day. I don’t think there is one correct answer and might work one moment on one population might not work for another population for even the same population at a later date.
The OP might just be getting burned out on stack overflow -maybe time to take a break, scale back, or just do something new.
I think stack overflow is a great resource and has a lot of life left in it. Long ago when I first started out there was no resource like Google, Stack Overflow, Experts Exchange, or Wikis. When I had a question I usually had to find a more knowledgeable peer, explain in excruciating detail exactly what I was doing, and then only if they agreed with me one hundred percent would they answer my question. If I deviated from the way they would do something then my question would go unanswered. Real PITA. But it was a great motivator to develop deep knowledge so that I wasn’t limited to replicating what my peers had done.
Today when I have questions it’s all too easy to get an answer without all of the overhead I mentioned. Though I’ve noticed my younger peers often lack deep knowledge and instead have various aptitudes for finding relevant information and deriving a solution from similiar circumstances.
I suspect the author hit the Indian downvote brigades as well. The big issue I currently have with the Stack Overflow is that it seems like it has become some form of "scoring metric" for Indian programmers--presumably the consulting companies like Wipro. As such, if you don't immediately give a positive vote/response to even garbage answers, you get a downvote brigade burying the question. I suspect disallowing Indian IP's would improve Stack Overflow immensely, at this point.
The structural problem I have with Stack Overflow is that there is no way to wipe out outdated answers. There are lots of heavily upvoted answers that were correct but are now wrong, and there is no way to mark that.
The OP might just be getting burned out on stack overflow -maybe time to take a break, scale back, or just do something new.
I think stack overflow is a great resource and has a lot of life left in it. Long ago when I first started out there was no resource like Google, Stack Overflow, Experts Exchange, or Wikis. When I had a question I usually had to find a more knowledgeable peer, explain in excruciating detail exactly what I was doing, and then only if they agreed with me one hundred percent would they answer my question. If I deviated from the way they would do something then my question would go unanswered. Real PITA. But it was a great motivator to develop deep knowledge so that I wasn’t limited to replicating what my peers had done.
Today when I have questions it’s all too easy to get an answer without all of the overhead I mentioned. Though I’ve noticed my younger peers often lack deep knowledge and instead have various aptitudes for finding relevant information and deriving a solution from similiar circumstances.
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