But bringing up that specific page was not the basis of my generalization. It was rather a direct case to my observation. It felt like racing, and not fun.

I'll definitely improve the stuff I find useful on SO, but I won't hunt unanswered questions anymore.

I answered a several dozen questions over a month, years ago. Now my answers have paid "dividends" for years, increasing my Stack Overflow Points. This is slightly odd, but I'll take it :)

But seriously, SO is a good tool for learning if you don't get excited by points, and just use it as a "this is what language/feature X is about" -- a method for zeroing in on your chosen topic.

Totally agree. Explaining something to somebody else is a great way to learn, too.

That was my experience on early SO, and it was great. I'd just browse a tag I knew, and pick questions where I knew most of the answer, and the act of explaining it would be useful to me, too.

Now I find doing so neither fun nor fulfilling. First there's lots of garbage questions that are impossible to answer. When you do finally find something good, it's hard to get it before it gets closed as dupe or someone else answers. And if it's from a new user, there's still a good chance they'll never come back to accept the answer and awards your fake internet points.

I'd love to see a SO that encourages more new users to actually answer those "dupe" questions (instead: hide them from search and older users)

The biggest problem is that some people treat it like a game of Jeopardy, except with no penalty for incorrect answers. This is especially true when the questions are dealing with weird corner cases in languages or libraries - it often looks like there is an obvious answer, but it isn't always so simple.

I used to take the time to get the code running on my machine (if it was simple enough), figure out what was wrong, fix it, and then take the time to try to educate the person asking, rather than simply telling them what code to paste in to fix it.

This takes time, and in while I was working on it, you'd have someone come in, and blurt out some guess as to why it wasn't working, then edit their answer a bunch of times and maybe eventually get it right. I don't know why, but it always bothered me to see someone who guessed around (and maybe looked at better answers in the meantime) getting credit for really sloppy work.

I guess I don't know how you'd fix that, and it doesn't seem to be a big enough of a problem to keep the site from being useful, but it is still kind of annoying.

1. You learn a lot more about the code by directed research than by random or linear reading.

2. You will earn respect and a good reputation on the list, assuming you do good research.

3. When you are wrong, someone will correct you http://xkcd.com/386/ and both you and the original questioner will learn from that.

Ironically, I've found quite often a question will go unanswered for days, but when I post an answer it often stimulates others to respond with clarifications, expansions, and corrections that they otherwise would not have posted.

I wonder why people here dislike them so much, is a mystery to me. I also try to answer old questions when the answer in stackoverflow was no good (this way I don't have to fear the mighty editors)

The user asks a question that can be answered quite easily, and dozens of people post answers claiming that this is the wrong way to do it and that they should use some other tech to solve the problem.

Some people on Stack Overflow care more about showing off how smart they are rather than answering questions, and I think the point system attracts these people.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

I asked "dumb" questions on issues I could not really voice out as I was not understanding them clearly. In the vast majority of the cases I got helpful answers starting with "what you are looking for is called xxx". THANK YOU for these answers because I discovered new concepts.

I also asked questions with pseudo code telling what problem I have, togther with descriptions of the issue (and screenshots, tracebacks etc). I was using pseudocode because the codebase was large and it was not realistic to get a minimally working code.

But the problrm was not specific to my software, I knew it was more general but could not pinpoint the exact issue. “Post your code!" was the answer he explaining that it was notveasy was let with diwnvotes, close flags and whatnot.

So the experience really depends on the day. Still I find that the knowledge people have and share is extraordinary, especially for amateur coders like myself.

Anyway, have been using SO for 12 years and still think it's great.

I also like books that have questions at the end of each section or chapter. As the original article states, it’s easy for the reader to mislead themselves into thinking that they’re familiar with the subject area while reading – or re-reading – the text. It’s not until they’ve finished reading and attempt to answer questions that they know how well they’ve actually retained the material.

(And to head off the obvious karma steal at the pass - Because sometimes the answer isn't in stackoverflow yet. Duh)

The only even mildly negative experience I’ve had was once a high-level user pattern-matched one of my questions to a much simpler already-answered question and closed it along with a dismissive comment, but as soon as I commented highlighting the discrepancy he apologized and answered my question.

Yeah, this. It hurts my eyes to see that most of my rep on SO I got from A) Recommending the K&R for a starters' C book, and B) for explaining how the @ works for error message suppression in PHP.

While the numerous questions I answered that took actual experience and hard work, hardly ever get an upvote, let alone an 'accept', presumably because whoever asked it doesn't care enough about the issue to do the work required to solve a hard problem, even if the principles are handed to him.

This is one of the main reasons I hardly use SO anymore, myself.

I've found that it is somewhat harder to get reputation now since a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been consumed. I still check on it from time to time and think it's a great resource.

Actually, I’m a little ashamed to admit that my most recent points are for a typescript question I didn’t even answer totally correctly. It explains something useful about typescript, but I didn’t really address the question properly. People still upvote it, perhaps because it explains something people might need to know if they’re asking the original question anyway. I should edit the answer to address that now that I noticed.

One of my best answers stands the test of time. It just explains how to optimize images for the web, but explains it fairly agnostically by describing compression techniques and image content and how they combine well (or don’t). Not a lot has changed in that arena since 2010.

I would love to help people like I was helped early in my career, but I find SO fairly useless as a platform to do that these days. It doesn’t feel collaborative or constructive when I use it. It’s like a race to get the best answer to avoid throwing insight and knowledge into the void. Not to mention a plethora of other reasons it can be fairly miserable. I tried moderation for a while and I guess that was the final nail in the coffin.