I just usually try to avoid participating in Stack Overflow now because it's not worth it. If there is any way for people to abuse you passive aggressively, they will.
If you try to answer a question there is a good chance someone will come along and invalidate your effort somehow. Either pointing out a subtle issue that isn't really important, or copying your answer into a comment and voting the original question closed, or they will write a long-winded answer with a bunch of custom code that technically does what the original poster asked but is actually an outdated approach. Or any way to make your answer less important so they can get the points.
The other problem I have with Stack Overflow is that a lot of times the answer to a question is to use an existing module or library but if you write that someone will come after you reinventing the wheel with some custom code they are supposed to copy paste and then nail you to the wall for not including code. I mean part of the concept of Stack Overflow is actually outdated because it is based on the idea that we should reuse a ton of code by copying and pasting snippets. And I know people love to hate on dependencies but copying and pasting a hundred functions is not a better solution.
I like Stack Overflow. I agree with many of its criticisms, but I still think it's a huge gain for the programming community overall.
I think the worst aspect is the endless "your premise is flawed, you should do <this> instead" answers. I often formulate toy examples, or ask questions out of curiosity rather than practical need. Somehow, users always latch on to the irrelevant part of my question instead of answering the part I care about. It's gotten to the point where I put big disclaimers in my questions to steer users away from those useless (to me) responses.
I got so annoyed with this pattern that I now consciously avoid writing anything that's not a direct answer to the user's question. I wish others would do the same.
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.
What on earth is bad about using StackOverflow? You're expected to google around to find solutions anyway, if anything I would think much less of the programmer who tried to avoid it. It's stupid pride when it's such a valuable resource.
> Stack Overflow remain the site that, when you are looking for an actual answer to a technical question, is worth clicking on at least.
These days I'm skipping Stack Overflow entirely and jumping straight to the docs, unless it's a common question that I can never remember properly (like some esoteric git-fu command).
The answers on SO are outdated or crappy. When you can't ask questions about an evolving framework without it getting marked as duplicate, then the answers quickly lose all value. And the people that were answering because they wanted to give back (not because they want to farm karma) are leaving.
I've been a member for 10 years now. I racked up a few thousand points after I joined, before the novelty of gamification wore off for me. After a decade of steady usage, here's my take on Stack Overflow.
Stack Overflow is an excellent resource when you access it from a search engine. If you're looking for a particular bit of programming knowledge and you type your query into your search engine of choice, chances are excellent that Stack Overflow results will be plentiful on the first page and that more than one will be relevant and helpful.
Stack Overflow is good enough when you have a very concrete problem that nobody before has asked about before. For example, if you don't know how to do X in the framework Y, you can expect one of the following: 1) someone who did it before will tell you how, 2) someone who had the same problem and found that it actually has no solution will tell you that, or 3) nobody will answer.
Stack Overflow is absolutely terrible when you're trying to learn something new just because you want to learn it or you're asking for advice of any kind. If you're trying to become a better programmer, Stack Overflow is categorically not the tool for the job. The less practical your question , the more it's likely to receive votes to be closed.
My favorite example is a question that outlined a thing you can normally do in .NET and Java because they are executing bytecode and can do certain checks before deciding whether to allow the code to execute or not. The question then proceeded to ask whether there are any pre-existing solutions to do so when working with native code or whether you would have to do it yourself. It received a downvote and a vote to close within 2 minutes of being posted. The voter posted a comment recommending Software Engineering Stack Exchange as a better site. The same question posted on Software Engineering Stack Exchange got a bunch of comments, only one of which actually addressed a question to a certain degree, the rest being ideas on how to change the requirements, snarky sniping of other comments, one idea that was already outlined in the question, and one snarky recommendation to "brush up on your understanding of [concept]" where the [concept] is not the primary concern in question.
I wish I could say that last anecdote is an exception, but it's simply the most egregious example of what's prevalent on Stack Overflow and programming-related Stack Exchange sites. Interestingly enough, I haven't seen it on any non-programming Stack Exchange site, so it's definitely something in our culture as an industry.
1) I ask for the best way to accomplish something. It gets closed for being an opinion based question.
2) I ask how to do something. People ask for code. I post my bad half working solution. My question gets closed for being an opinion based question.
3) I ask how to do something. It get closed as a duplicate but the existing question is out of date and/or doesn't answer my question.
4) If my question is allowed on Stackoverflow, it usually doesn't get a response.
This stuff doesn't happen all the time, but it's often enough that I no longer enjoy using Stackoverflow and just ask on Reddit instead where I get a plethora of comments with answers and opinions.
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 like StackOverflow; whenever I have a question about how to code something I Google it and the answer is on StackOverflow about 95% of the time. I don't know what I would do without it. But I guess everyone here hates it? Seems a bit of an odd situation for a community of hackers to be in.
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.
I've seen more than one Stack Overflow answer straight copy-pasted into a single function, much of it leading to dead code anyway, and not cleaned up before being pushed into production.
I love stack overflow, I love the idea, etc. What I don't like, and what I think is the real problem, which the author gets at, is that the site is becoming more and more fragmented. Programming is a very broad topic and it drives me NUTS when I post a question on SO, and get several replies telling me its more suitable for another SE site, then eventually someone decides to close it and I have to find the other site to re-ask. More effort gets put in by the control freaks to tell you what stack overflow is for and that you're wrong for posting your question there than to actually just answer it in the first place.
I'm a bit divided about Stack Overflow. On one hand side it's simply one, if not the best, resource for programmers. On the other hand it's become somewhat toxic and counterproductive. The better you become as a programmer the less value you derive from it. The true niche experts are less and less to be found (ie Product/Project -owners and Microsoft/Google/Apple etc -employees) and the other replies will often be exasperating mixture of trying to give answers they've googled or complain about some meta-aspect of the question.
Any community that reaches a certain size will face unique problems and I think Stack Overflow has some of the same problem as reddit does: you have to be very careful on how you give power to users. Power corrupts and becomes a goal/game in itself. Karma/power is a great incentive in the beginning of a community, but can become destructive in the long run. That some programmers have a certain type of personality is probably not helping either.
There seems to be many småpåvar on Stack Overflow that loves to wield the small amount of power they've accrued without actually contributing that much. On the other hand you have to enforce rules and curation to keep quality up.
It's a very fine balance and hard to get right. It's mostly about human psychology and incentives. I think there's some tweaks they could do to improve things but I also understand that from their perspective why change something that works?
The danger is that the true experts stop helping/answering questions on Stack Overflow because they find the community becoming too toxic. Might turn into a downwards spiral until there's mostly trolls and newbies left.
The most frequent reason I turn to stack overflow, is for solutions to things I just don’t care about right now. Like, for example, how do I get bootstrap to work in webpacker for rail, etc. I don’t really care about this, I’d rather just be writing ruby code. And even in these cases, SO isn’t that helpful half the time because either the answer is 3 years old and outdated or there used to be a relevant answer but it has been deleted for some violation.
and I still would argue you should never copy from stack overflow!! Instead understand why the answer is correct and then write your code based on that understanding, even if it produces the exact same code in the end.
Wow, so much hate for SO on this thread. Stack overflow has been a core part of my life as a developer for many years. Not all questions are answered well but, to some extent, you have to be a connoisseur. The first answer may not be correct, or it may be out of date but chances are that some answer, maybe far downstream, will be invaluable and save hours of research. Ask questions. Answer questions. Don’t do it for the ranking do it because someone did it for you.
I am afraid that stackoverflow has become a very hostile environment for the sake of some delusive over optimization as a code bank for every single question out there. The thing about questions is that although there are similarities, they often are not placed in the same context, stackoverflow mods zealously flag even relevant questions like "what libraries should I use for X" because it's not a really answerable question but they are forgetting that this optimization by downvoting (negative user experience) and censuring the question asker leaves a very bad taste in new comers experience.
Even I, as an old timer on stackoverflow get harassed (the usual passive aggressive and cold hearted engineer style) with time to time by people who otherwise do not have any reason to be commenting on the question itself such as "if OP doesn't know this, it's a miracle that he does X" or other ad hominem remarks.
Stackoverflow really has become a hostile place to ask questions provided they don't censure you for variety of subjective rules.
These days I find Ask HN to be far better user experience.
After ~12 years of development, StackOverflow has gone from invaluable to irrelevant.
These days my questions are either so niche nobody answers them, or like you, I get a tonne of abuse for asking in the wrong place, or at the wrong time, or not including the right info, or whatever it may be.
The accumulated corpus of Stack Overflow content is probably worth less than you think. There is a lot of outdated code on SO.
It’s a growing issue for the platform as the community prefers to direct people to existing answers, and Google tends to reward older URLs that still attract traffic. The result is that a lot of searchers are learning how things were done years ago, instead of how they are best done now.
Platforms change, APIs change, languages change. That means the “answer” to how to do things changes too.
Imagine asking “what would happen if libraries threw away all their outdated computer books?” Obviously they do, and it’s good for their patrons as long as there are updated books replace them.
If Stack Overflow went away tomorrow, one of the many other places where people can talk about coding would become the go-to place to get answers. A more ephemeral approach to answers would probably be better in the long run.
If you try to answer a question there is a good chance someone will come along and invalidate your effort somehow. Either pointing out a subtle issue that isn't really important, or copying your answer into a comment and voting the original question closed, or they will write a long-winded answer with a bunch of custom code that technically does what the original poster asked but is actually an outdated approach. Or any way to make your answer less important so they can get the points.
The other problem I have with Stack Overflow is that a lot of times the answer to a question is to use an existing module or library but if you write that someone will come after you reinventing the wheel with some custom code they are supposed to copy paste and then nail you to the wall for not including code. I mean part of the concept of Stack Overflow is actually outdated because it is based on the idea that we should reuse a ton of code by copying and pasting snippets. And I know people love to hate on dependencies but copying and pasting a hundred functions is not a better solution.
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