Pretty much every time I search for Stack Overflow type questions online I find a good answer on Stack Overflow.
And pretty much every time I find a good answer on Stack Overflow, it's heaped with derision from Stack Overflow users and the system. I can't remember the last time I landed on a question that wasn't "closed" for "low quality" or whatever the various negative treatments are there, and piled with negative comments and possibly a snarky answer.
This doesn't give me a good impression of Stack Overflow, a site I've never signed up for or felt interested in signing up for.
Every year I see a post complaining about how unfriendly Stack Overflow is, how their pet question got downvoted so unfairly, and how Stack Overflow is dying. Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying.
But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. And when I can't find an answer anywhere and I ask on SO I usually get a good answer quickly. (And when I don't I'm probably completely out of luck.)
Stack Overflow provides clear guidance on how to ask a good question. (https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask) As someone who occasionally answers questions there, I do feel annoyed when someone clearly didn't take any time or effort.
The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what? If they just said what they tried ("I expected it in `go help list` but didn't find it"), I think it would have been fine.
The second question I don't see why anyone would want that on the site. There's 1001 Github pages of common interview questions and answers that are more interesting and better written. Who could this be useful for other than the rest of that particular CS class? Why do I want to help someone I've never met cheat at a class I don't know about for free?
Stackoverflow has of a lot of terrible answers that get voted up by people who aren't equipped to evaluate them properly, and closed threads when anyone starts actual substantive discussions. It also suffers from lack of decent rewards for contribution. That's not what I would consider a good community.
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 love stack overflow, however I also hate it. I have asked some, I thought very reasonable question on there, and they got shot down and removed. The elitism, in this day & age of nearly infinite search and data storage capabilities makes me not feel all that sorry for them though. I do hate that we are doomed to AI generated trash answers on google now for at least a decade though.
I never really got stack overflow. When I look for something I know, I find all the most upvoted answers kinda bad and/or suboptimal. Sometimes look like written by experienced beginners.
Do I live in a different world than everyone here? Stack Overflow is awesome and I don't think I've ever had a bad experience with it (seriously). The response time is like 10 minutes or less since everyone there is so hungry for karma. The complaints about "closing questions" never really hit me because, when a question is closed, they usually point you towards an answer that helps anyways. They've always answered my stupid questions from years ago like "why does my program crash when I put a 1MB object on the stack" and "please make this CMake setup work for me," and if they didn't, they point me to a duplicate question that does. Just set aside your ego, fuck karma, and you'll be fine. I really don't see how people can find this site toxic.
The article summarizes a study that "confirms [the authors'] hypothesis as well as the community perception that the system was flooded by content that nobody cared about, while really interesting content was getting rarer" and presents this as a problem to be solved.
I think this is actually not a problem, because most users can still successfully find the answers they need on Stack Overflow.
Here's how I believe I and other users use Stack Overflow. We have a problem. We Google that problem (or occasionally search on Stack Overflow). We usually find a fairly popular (and high-quality) question with a fairly popular answer. We're satisfied by that answer.
The article points out that the number of good questions has remained constant, but the number of bad questions has increased. Maybe there's really a close-to-constant number of good, searchable questions that can be asked at any given time, and the declining average quality is just a result of Stack Overflow's popularity.
The problems I’ve noticed with Stack Overflow are a few and hard for me to narrow down but basically:
- google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago
- moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively shutting it down for not being “on topic” enough or whatever.
- because of the previous bullet, oftentimes the best answer is buried in comments and has very negative feedback despite answering the exact question
Due to a combination of these things, filtering against the noise for what I wanted became increasingly more difficult and often the solution to my problem was easier found searching github comments or random blogs.
It's true: Stack Overflow has changed. It's not bad (yet?), but it is different. The discussion on the linked page focuses a lot on bad questions, and there are plenty. But it's also much, much harder to ask good questions. To some extent the site is a victim of its own success: whereas I used to ask a basic question [1] and get several up-votes and a good answer, now I ask a basic question [2] and get almost as many down-votes as up-votes, plus the answers themselves get as many down-votes as up-votes, including some answers I actually liked but the community decided were so bad they couldn't just leave them at 0, they had to push them down to -1 and into the leper colony.
Tons of comments and answers insist I had an XY problem [3] when I did not.
Some of it is because "The good questions have all been asked and answered," and some of it is that the legitimate complaints about absurdly low-quality questions have gotten people into such a mood that a so-so question from a veteran user makes them spend their own reputation to down-vote each others' answers.
Stack Overflow has an XY problem: the real problem is that a lot of questions are just bad because the barrier to entry has remained too low for too long, but it thinks the problem is the XY problem.
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?
Am I the only programmer who finds Stack Overflow to be highly overrated? I used it recently for the first time in several years as I was learning a new technology, and the most valuable answers should have just been in the documentation (or maybe they were in the documentation but Stack Overflow covered up the results.) But the majority of the time I find the documentation just significantly better and give up on SO.
To say nothing about how outdated some of the results are. I tried exactly what Joel suggested. I typed "Rich Text Editor" and searched stackoverflow.com. All top three results were at least a decade old (okay, the youngest was like 9 years 7 months, but I'm going to round it up). They were closed, jut clogging up search results with deprecated answers.
In the time before Stack Overflow, I agree there were many good sources online. I also agree that the printed PDFs of sources that some people passed off as books were horrible. But I do remember a lot of very good books at Barnes and Noble.
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.
People seem to hate Stack Overflow atmosphere which they deem "toxic". They think members with reputation are jerks who don't want to help, make snarky comments, downvote without reason, and edit and moderate the questions to hell.
Maybe there are cocky tech snobs out there, but the reality is that many questions are pure thrash.
In general I just search on Google for something, then arrive on SO, read and after that mind my own business.
If something is really hard and I don't have much time to research it, if the answer isn't already on SO, I might ask a question. Sometimes I get answers, sometimes I don't. But I do not get angry as nobody has the duty to reply to my questions. Is it even very possible that people who can reply to my questions haven't seen them.
So, years ago I "used" Stack Overflow a lot. Now, rarely, if by "use" you mean "ask and answer questions". But, I find answers to my questions on it every day, and it is still far superior to other sources.
I've noticed a pattern in my attitude towards SO: when I ready an article about it on Hacker News, I get mad. When I'm actually on it, I get detailed, multiple answers to my question, written before I ever got there.
My suspicion is that many people noticed that a high rank on Stack Overflow was one way to generate a reputation that might get you freelance work, and then discovered that too many other people were trying to do the same thing, so it became competitive and trollish...for them. But all I want to do is find an answer to my question, that is more clear (and with better examples) than the one in the software's actual documentation (which reads like it was written for a textbook or maybe an AI, rather than the kind of answer you actually get from asking somebody for help).
SO still works, better than ever, for finding out the answer to your question. It just doesn't work as a social network or an interview/job board/advertising site. But, you know, I don't think that's a problem for me, and really, there are other websites out there for that.
Just look for the answer to your question, it's probably there, and if it isn't then it likely is not available anywhere else on the internet either, including the software documentation. Used this way, the SO internal politics is a non-issue.
And pretty much every time I find a good answer on Stack Overflow, it's heaped with derision from Stack Overflow users and the system. I can't remember the last time I landed on a question that wasn't "closed" for "low quality" or whatever the various negative treatments are there, and piled with negative comments and possibly a snarky answer.
This doesn't give me a good impression of Stack Overflow, a site I've never signed up for or felt interested in signing up for.
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