I think it strongly depends on the tags of the question. In particular I think you will poor quality answers on popular, high volume tags like JavaScript.
I think it depends on how you phrase the question. If the question can be easily answer (or even have an answer) and is properly written, people will be more keen to answer back.
But things that are too subjective or easily find on google, you will probably not get many answers..
A little above 5k [1]. I used to be quite active in Java, Android and Python department when I was still learning a lot on those topics. Now when I'm a bit more proficient in them I usually do not have motivation to answer questions, for they mostly don't seem interesting enough to be worth the hassle. Ironically, my "best" answer [2] is related to JavaScript & jQuery - something that I don't really use all that much.
Probably the biggest problem I find with SO is the speed-typing contest that many questions introduce if they are (1) relatively simple to answer (2) posted under popular tag. I admit I am "guilty" of using this to my advantage few times, but after a while it loses its appeal. For one, it doesn't really encourage posting comprehensive and well thought answer, as you are very likely to lose the "race" this way. Although posting a simple answer fast and iterating it through edits alleviates this issue somewhat, it still feels more like a trivia contest with speed limit rather than an attempt to teach someone a small but valuable lesson.
It's interesting how great a baring the quality of the question has on the quality of the answer. Good questions get (usually) good answers. I regularly get caught in the crossfire resulting from poor questions resulting on poor answers.
I think so, yes. Even in niche subreddits (arch linux, say) if you ask a question, you'll only get stock answers, as if the other person had done a quick web search, picked the top result from google, and pasted it in.
Yeah but... at the risk of sounding like a dick... is stack overflow the best place to guage opinion on such things? I mean we’re essentially asking the people who post questions like “why is my HTML table not look right?” To posit an opinion on what they consider best of class in a whole bunch of categories that they’re probably novices at.
I think it’s pretty clear that the people with the best opinions on SO are vastly outnumbered by people with unqualified opinions. Surely something like Simpson’s law can be applied here. Like - of the people with n amount of accepted answers for any given tag - what is their opinion on something related to that tag?
Don't get hung up about the rep, this mostly depends on how many people your answers are useful for, rather than how hard the question was to answer. I have answered some hard questions, but get 90% of my rep from a single answer which is the first Google hit for a commonly encountered .Net exception.
Interesting that the article mentions SO being better for noobs but really, the quality is so variable that it is hard for a noob to tell a good answer from a workaround from a terrible answer.
If they fixed the reputation system so it more accurately reflected quality, it would be easier but some people have 10K+ reputation for asking a simple question that lots of people upvoted and others who have added high quality replies to more specific questions might only have a few hundred.
I wouldn't be swayed either way by a high Stack Overflow rating.
That said, asking and answering technical questions can be really beneficial. It's much harder to write about something clearly than some people realise, and a great skill to develop.
Also, rather than the whole reputation, I might take interest in particular answers: a single solid answer to a difficult question demonstrates a lot more than many point scoring answers to easier ones.
For a simple user of SO you could only care about de quality of answers, but for someone hiring it can be a very useful information. I agree with you that special care should be taken to avoid SO take a bag stance about new users to keep power.
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