At this point, I have no desire to participate in or help stackoverflow. The attitudes there are such hostile, elitist garbage, where someone is incapable of asking a question, because it will instantly be closed by the mods. God forbid they are a newbie to the site. Responses essentially amount to go RTFM.
I used to contribute a lot to Stack Overflow, but then I noticed that I’d get flamed for even asking simple questions; stuff that can really stand between actually getting somewhere with your code, and where a helpful comment could really make a difference.
At some point regular replies were replaced by administrators and mods who are seemingly far more interested in finding faults with your question rather than to actually answer it. The worst one was probably those times I’d ask a question, and then it got labelled “not a question.” Honestly, this unhelpful, bureaucratic, and down right nasty attitude has really disgusted me with the site.
Apparently new users are having even bigger problems, and they get flamed really hard for asking newbie questions. Often people are rudely asked to read the manual, when the entire cause of their problems is that the manual is so poorly written that it’s impossible to make any sense for it—even if answering questions like that is the “raison d’être” of a place like Stack Overflow...
Now, with the prevalence of ChatGPT and services that will give you great answers to almost any code-related question, I honestly think that the fall of Stack Overflow is well deserved.
I contributed to StackOverflow a little when it first got started, got frustrated by the heavy-handed censorship (too aggressive about closing question), and then gave up and left.
It seems any moderation-based community eventually has that flaw. If you deviate from whatever the majority believes, you will get disgusted and leave, and eventually you're left with a core that all act the same.
I'll read Stackoverflow sometimes, but I'm never again contributing.
I agree the initial reply may have been a bit harsh, but you must see the irony in saying
> There are allot of uniformed assumptions being made here...
followed by
> What most people do know is that Stack Overflow is a shit show in decline.
As somebody who contributes regularly to StackOverflow, I understand where you are coming from. That said, you have to understand that the people answering your questions are under no obligation to do so. If a question comes from a newcomer who has never yet contributed anything, why should I be motivated to put any effort into figuring out the problem and answering if the asker hasn't put in any effort either?
Once I made an account and tried to be more active. I got told off for asking questions about issues I was having or because my answers weren't liked by someone with high rep.
I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account. I use stackoverflow on a daily basis, to find preexisting issues around what I am working on and read possible solutions, but thats it. I don't consider logging in and asking about an issue I am having, let alone help anyone else.
I feel like the toxicity around the community has led me into that. I do feel like people on stackoverflow are elitists, thats what I am getting about it. I feel like they are playing on a different league than me and they make me feel lesser although I am pretty certain that am competent enough to succeed.
I am grateful for stackoverflow, but I definitely don't see using an account on there anytime soon, and its going to take a long long time for stackoverflow to win me over as a contributor :/
P.S - Out of about 30 devs I worked with in the past / working now with etc I've only seen 3 of them using stackoverflow by contributing to it, or when they get an issue they post about it. The rest of them use stackoverflow the same way I use it which proves a pattern here, at least on my personal circle.
I've been using stackoverflow for over 4 years. I have asked hundreds of questions. Over those years, it has become virtually impossible to ask questions because it "does not fit the guidelines".
I've grown so frustrated by the negative experience, I have visited that site less and less and my engagement has fallen off.
I've complained about this issue for years ago on meta.stackexchange, that new users will experience negativity from the cynical comments if not the discouragement from the censorship (downvoting and closing the question) regarding the context of the question being asked, and that the mods are taking the questions literally as it is written without the human compassion of trying to understand. As if on cue, the question was downvoted to damnation and I found myself fighting a flame war with angry set of engineers and was eventually blocked from adding to the discussion as if some verdict has been drawn. It didn't help that lower reputation members agreed with what I was saying, because your reputation on SO is measured by how many accepted questions you can show to your potential employer (btw many employers seem to dislike finding leads on careers.stackoverflow.com for some reasons).
the chat at stackoverflow is even worse. I don't know if it's the "brogrammers" slacking off at work or just university kids trolling, lot of the starred comments in the chat are vulgar. Even the high reputation members seem no different at times.
Honestly, I think that stackoverflow has shot itself in it's own foot. It's feeling less like a community and more like a system of cold engineers ready to rip a newcomer's question apart or how well they can emulate a computer.
I don't like Quora because I dislike the fact that you have to be logged in to view more of the answer or other stuff.
I've sought refuge in Ask HN because so far, no "but this is not efficient obviously OP doesn't know what he's doing" type of comments often seen on stackoverflow, stackexchange sites.
Everytime I ask a question on stackoverflow I feel like I'm walking across a minefield and I've been a member for over 4 years.
I agree with you on this being peak stackoverflow. It's a shame how these people install themselves as mods and just run amok. What a shame. The first year or two of stackoverflow was the best times. You could actually have great conversations with professionals.
I don't have a problem with Stack Overflow, I have a problem with its community and, as a result, have completely abandoned the site. I no longer ask questions there nor do I answer them. If I need help my circle of friends is often able to provide enough information for me and if I take to Google the vast majority of the time the first search result is a link to a Stack Overflow page with someone asking the exact question I'm trying to find an answer to. And it's closed as off topic. It's a great site and for a while had a great community, but these days it's just too toxic to be worth the bother.
Stack overflow is great but I have mostly stopped trying to contribute to it because my questions or answers are often closed or whatever. Or some mod or someone just comes and insults me on the basis that they thought my question was stupid or not right somehow.
I consider myself a fairly seasoned programmer. I have written countless lines of code, work on a few projects with friends, and automated most of my computer-related tasks. I've been doing this since I was 12, and I am 19 at the time of writing this.
I can say with confidence, I have never been able to successfully ask a question on stack overflow. I think I have been banned at least once, or they deleted my account.
I've asked questions ranging from implementation of 3D matrix manipulation to avoid gimbal lock to writing a python client-side application that needs to be able to edit a google docs file.
Everything has been closed, locked, or down voted. Each time I followed standard procedures that we are all familiar with for reporting bugs.
- Include output
- Sample code
- Explanation of what the current code does and what I want it to do
- Pictures/Diagrams if helpful
I have NEVER gotten a single useful response. Granted it's a great resource for programming information. I use it as a library: I can go there and look at all the books frozen in time, all with good information on a wide variety of topics. But I know, if I attempted to write one of these books or jot down my feelings on the side of a page I'd just get yelled at by the librarians.
There are two things that I have noticed about stack overflow: it's one of a few sites that for some reason prides your identity over your work. Your 'karma' is displayed just as big as your name, and it seems to be implied that the bigger that number is, the more right you are. I have also noticed that most of the resources that are indeed helpful are either locked, closed for 'read only', or every reply is down voted even though the responses and questions are still valid.
I jokingly tell people who are going into CS at my college that "you are not a programmer until you have gotten banned from stack overflow for asking perfectly reasonable questions". Whenever I say that, I can almost hear a sub-audible sigh of relief from everyone in the room including some professors from other departments attempting to learn CS.
Stack overflow is presented as a site for the end user learning how to program. It is not.
This culture is why I've never contributed to Stack Overflow.
I'm a reasonably senior engineer, I've been lucky to experience an extraordinary breadth of technology in my career, and I love helping people learn to program... but I just don't have the time or emotional energy for SO's top posters to pick apart the minutia of every word I say in an answer. The ROI for me is nil.
Stack Overflow is teeming with jerks and tinpot Napoleons such as g00glen00b who make it miserable for even experienced developers. I use the information there on occasion but never contribute. It's not worth it.
I like the idea of StackOverflow, hell I even like trying to answer a question from time-to-time... but I really hate StackOverflow.
There's this sort of like weird hierarchy on the site of people who essentially are there, to climb over others, socialize, and enforce their metaphorical "wet-dreams" of fatous pedantry to its absolute maximum.
1.) Lately, as I've been re-upping my frontend skills, I see questions from n00bs are totally shit on by moderators pointing to answers which are totally overkill, or nearly-incomprehensible for them sweet lil' baby n00bs...
2.) Related to #1, linked-to answers are often times incomplete or wrong because of outdated information, but newer versions are marked dupes... I can't imagine how many people new to JavaScript, probably spend the first year reading shit that literally doesn't work or hasn't been needed since 2011 because of an answer on StackOverflow.
3.) Edits for quite literally no reason. People will change the language of things to sometimes be flat-out incorrect ~5-10% of the time, and the other ~90% its purely cosmetic illustrating only the moderator's aforementioned lust for pedantry.
4.) Comments and suggestions which are clearly outside of scope. Personal example from this weekend.
I posted an answer to someone who I could tell was quite new due to their very strange looking HTML (which works, but wasn't semantically correct) and JS asking about how to bind an event to an element (a span). I replied with with how to bind their event, and had quite consciously decided against mentioning their usage of HTML could be better because I don't want to overwhelm them. I've taught folks before and too much information isn't useful..
What happens next is all to regular, I get a comment to my answer saying my answer is simply wrong; _because_, I didn't address the author's "mis-use" of HTML even though I actually answered their fucking question.
To me, it feels like StackWhatever, has a fucking giant culture problem somewhere and it's not being addressed or fixed on any level. There's no way this isn't a problem from the top-down... to be honest, I honest think their gamification may be part of the problem as it leads social-strata being created by the community, in a way that can only exclude instead of include.
> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either.
Great, so you've learnt something for next time.
> Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place.
Sorry, but no. "Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, people who write code because they love it." Stack Overflow's biggest problem is that frequent contributors are getting fed up with the torrent of newbie questions from people who haven't programmed for a month.
Imagine joining Math Overflow because you're an enthusiast mathematician... only 19 of every 20 questions are about how to multiply two digit numbers. Imagine joining a DIY group after years of practice only to find that you spend most of your time building cubes out of playdough and sticks. Have you tried reading the new queue on Stack Overflow? What does this[1] even mean? (I'm actually kind'a shocked about how good it's looking right now; only about half of the questions are utterly irredeemable.)
People from the outside don't see this. There are filters in place and people who care to make them work. So all you see is the hostility and none of the reason. But please believe me when I say that it's not just us being cronies. We really do care about the site, and we just don't want to lose it.
Top 3%er here and I rarely use Stack Overflow anymore. I got so tired of the snarky answers to questions (both mine and others) and peoples' ability to downvote you without giving any justification. I've been there for 12 years but fortunately, in that time, I've become a good enough developer that I can generally figure out my own problems. And if I get stuck, I'll go to the relevant Google group or to a sub Reddit. Stack Overflow is no longer relevant to me.
Wow you're really quite negative regarding Stack Overflow. Is there a reason? Many many many people find it an excellent resource for their problems, and others find it a great place to sharpen their tools. Do you have the same attitude towards wikipedia?
The problem with StackExchange is that it's turned into the Eve Online of technology forums. It's fun for the few people who managed to get in early or got lucky and asked a question or posted an answer with lots of upvotes. And, simultaneously, it has a forbidding learning curve for everyone else.
I was involved in StackOverflow when it was still fairly young (before the whole StackExchange concept had taken off). I asked questions, I answered questions, I got up to ~1k points and then I stopped going for a while. When I returned, I felt distinctly unwelcome. The social mores had shifted to such a degree, I felt like I was coming in as a new user rather than one with some experience at the site. The experience was very off-putting, and I consider a large part of the reason why I haven't made any contributions to StackOverflow in a long while.
Stack Overflow is declining, except it's still so well populated with moderators that the author of the article struggled to be able to answer a question quickly enough for it to matter, and he can find no alternatives to it that work as well.
I dont know anything about the internal politics of SO, and I dont think Ive ever asked (or answered) a question, but I use it every day.
It is absolutely the single best resource for developers on the internet, and thats amazing.
This sums it up well.
https://hackernoon.com/the-decline-of-stack-overflow-7cb69fa...
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