I was in the beta of SO. I almost never interact with it anymore.
Asking a question on SO is a last resort to me, and I get a horrid sinking feeling in my gut when I feel forced to do so. The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out.
You begin to realise no one is actually reading your question in good faith, so you start getting defensive: filling your questions with disclaimers about how your example code is just an example[2], how you know there are other ways you could do it but you're constrained toward this direction for various reasons[3], and so on and so forth, until you feel like you spend more time defensively shoring up your question from attacks than actually constructing the question in the first place[4]
I still read SO, but as someone who was around before it existed I don't really feel like the quality of answers is any higher than the random forum posts of yore, it's just that they're all under the same URL now, and the same user interface.
Which I suppose is something.
[1] Not all people™, but definitely the general feeling tends this direction
[2] classic situation: you simplify your code to Foo and Bar levels to show the problem cleanly, so people chastise you for having a complex data structure / worrying about performance / whatever for such simple code
[3] e.g., "How do I achieve X" gets turned into people saying "Why would you want to achieve X, that's stupid"
[4] This is not the same as researching the issue and trying as many things as you can think of, which is definitely helpful in any context of question asking
It's interesting to compare Stack Overflow to Quora, which was similarly great a few years ago and is now almost worthless, but in a different way. Stack Overflow suffers from militant moderators who close and delete reasonable submissions and answers due to draconian rules. Quora, meanwhile, has been taken over by spammers and idiots, and has lost any sense of trustworthiness. Just today I visited a discussion on Quora about WordPress plugins [1]. The top answer is an advertisement, the second gives an answer but offers no justification (and is also an advertisement), the third is probably an advertisement, and the fourth is again an answer without any justification. Repeat ad absurdum.
It's weird that both sites' communities have made it difficult for old users to take part, but in completely different ways.
Seconding the impression of SO. More than once I saw a question where it was kinda obvious that it was a beginner who was facing a very specific issue. Let's say it's a question that's not very difficult to solve for a seasoned programmer because even if you don't know it right off the batch, your experience can guide you pretty quickly to a solution. So, I spend the five to ten minutes to come up with a solution that works reasonably well -- in parts because I'd like to help out someone but in parts also because it's informative for me as well to learn something I didn't know before -- but just as I'm typing up my findings, the question gets closed. And it's not possible to answer closed questions (the rationale for which does not reveal itself to me immediately).
I mean, I get that SO wants to be a programming resource (as in "archive") where people with a problem should find a solution - not by asking but through googling. And so they want question/answer pairs that have a sort of general value, not an individual answer to just one person.
But then again: why? What's the big deal? Someone has a very specific question, and maybe nobody in the universe will ever have the same question again, but I'm willing to help that person out -- why shouldn't I be allowed to do it? Are they really worried about too much noise on the site? Please, come on.
In the situation I sketched above, I will still walk away having learned something new, but the person who posed the original question is left with a very negative user experience AND is none the wiser regarding their specific problem. At the same time, I was never allowed to help that person which I wanted to do not for the potential credit points but rather for altruistic reasons. Way to go.
Are they really worried about too much noise on the site? Please, come on.
Is this really so hard to believe? I have been a member of the community for ten years now (https://goo.gl/JZkqSP) and have seen the number of low-quality questions rise to the point where I honestly don’t enjoy answering any more. People don’t care to ask well, they just want to get over their personal issue as quickly as possible and be done with it.
Even with relevant, unique, well-worded questions, there are a number of militant reviewers who will flag it as a duplicate of the first question they find on the same topic (even though its clearly not a dupe).
It may well be true that the number of low-quality questions is increasing (I believe it, some really are just garbage), but the number of low-quality reviewers has unfortunately also increased.
I agree with your sentiment, but I'd like to point out that I've seen examples of closed questions that were worded well, and interesting enough for me to answer.
I've been on Quora since 2011 when I wrote my first answer. I would easily spend hours back then reading incredible insights from all kinds of people. Sadly these days it's exactly as you say, a community filled with spammers and low-quality answers from popular personalities crowding out focused responses from people who are experience in that topic.
The product itself has also become 1000x worse to use and I think it's one of the biggest examples of a Silicon Valley company that remains successful despite the constantly bad product management.
Quora suffers from an extreme cult of personality where answers are primarily upvoted these days based on the popularity of the writer and rarely on the quality of the answer.
I generally agree with all your points, but I also remember the forum posts and I find that SO has at least one big advantage over those: it's really quick to pick out a good answer compared to a long thread. Just the fact that a) answers are clearly demarcated vs comments and b) the author can select a "correct" answer makes them way more skimmable than, say, a phpBB thread where every post looks the same.
I definitely see that side of those, though I think they both have pros and cons.
Especially in the JS space[1], there are lots of historic answers upvoted on SO that are now wrong and you have to scroll around (or find a slightly rephrasing of the same question that occurred more recently) to find a good answer. Unfortunately the longer a question is around both the more answers it has and the more likely the answers are to be wrong. On forums / mailing lists the question would just be reasked. On SO it is supposedly a wiki so new versions of the same question gets closed.
[1] Because it has evolved a lot, Rust has similar issues, as I'm sure lots of languages do
I really do try my hardest to keep old questions and answers relevant. Stack Overflow allows editing Q&A for a reason, and any time I stumble on an older post, I at least think about updating it.
One thing that I've occasionally found frustrating is that someone sees a question was asked 2 years ago and thus assumes that it must be invalid / out-of-date. They simply don't look at the edit dates.
Remember that Rust has a pretty strong backwards compatibility guarantee. Any answer using only the standard library in the last 3 years should still be valid (crates are a different concern). If you find a question you think has become stale, add a bounty to it to raise attention — that's the SO recommended path of action.
We also have a Rust chatroom on SO where a bunch of regulars hang out and people are welcome to pop in and ask if a Q&A is still valid.
Should the answers be edited? Everyones had to work with software on the job that wasn't the latest edition. If we edit answers to software after every update doesn't that just fuck over everyone who's not capable of updating?
As your other responses have stated, editing doesn't necessarily mean "destroy the old and replace it".
A lot of the editing I do is to improve the grammar, reduce fluff, use Rust-standard indentation, improve the formatting, include complete error messages, update links, etc. None of that should affect users of older versions other than to make it easier to get to the core content of the Q/A.
When a new Rust feature comes out, usually the original part of the answer gets a header denoting the compatibility. https://stackoverflow.com/a/28953618/155423 is such an example.
Note that SO does keep a revision log of edits (e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/posts/28953618/revisions) to a post. You can browse that if you think there might be something hidden that's worth exploring. This doesn't necessarily help with search engines, of course.
I often update my answers over time to cover multiple versions, usually as the result of someone leaving a comment pointing out a problem. It's pretty easy to do in a way that preserves the old information (eg. https://stackoverflow.com/a/1576221/8376).
You shouldn't necessarily erase history, but it's pretty easy to move your old text under an Old Answer banner or something, if you still think the info is relevant to someone or even that surfacing the delta between versions is educational.
To be clear, Rust is easily 10x better than JS in that regard, it was just an obvious example for me to use where <1.0 code is now weird and wrong :-)
I have nearly given up looking for JS answers in SO because they are such garbage these days. I am learning Rust right now and still find answers on there useful.
We actually have a specific tag for those cases (`rust-obsolete`), so if the question / answer cannot be rehabilitated for Rust 1.0, that's a useful thing (I also try to add an in-question disclaimer to make it easier to spot)
> there are lots of historic answers upvoted on SO that are now wrong and you have to scroll around (or find a slightly rephrasing of the same question that occurred more recently)
And how many of those slight rephrasings never got a chance to get a more relevant, correct, modern answer because they were marked as a duplicate?
Under the StackOverflow-as-Wikipedia model where it's a card catalogue of best answers, the right thing to happen is:
- they get marked as duplicates, so that all future people coming in via Google get funnelled to one place
- that place gets new modern, more relevant answers
- they get voted up because they're useful
- people add comments about answer compatibility
- they either overtake the other answers and the other answers stay around as history, or if they don't there is a single place where relevant answers can be found.
1 question with 10 answers is a lot more discoverable than 10 questions with 10 answers.
One leads to 9 answers to skim-read and ignore and 1 answer to use.
The other leads to you finding 6 questions and 6 answers you don't like and 0 answers to use and missing 4 you didn't know existed.
You misunderstood me, my points there are different.
In SO, re-askings are not allowed, but as the question becomes less and less similar at some point it will be allowed. The problem is that "canonical" question for that problem is really just the first one that came along, and there are no good tools for keeping it up to date. It doesn't matter how much karma you have, there are no tools for getting rid of highly upvoted or marked as correct answers that are now wrong / dangerous. So the trick is to find similar but different answers that approach the problem in a more modern way, but haven't been closed as being dupes.
In forums, re-askings are expected and if you ask a JS question 10 years later you will get answers relevant to the time. Posts are not expected to be evergreen, so you can look at when it was asked and have context as to the environment it was asked in, as opposed to SO where the date is sort of meaningless because it's sort of a wiki.
If you know the modern answer, you can downvote the bad old answer, add a comment saying "answer is wrong/dangerous", flag for moderator attention, or edit it and correct the answer, or add your own answer as well even though the question is 'answered'.
Re-asking a question is worse - then there's that big famous first answer with 75 upvotes prominent on Google. And your question/answer with 1 upvote and a "correct" modern answer.
Nobody will find that.
But it's a good point - if you don't know the modern answer and want to, and you can't "re-ask" for new input, then what?
Not in my experience on the workplace so - in some cases the answer the OP needs is "NO do not do that", but the highest rated answer is long one that really does give the answer that is needed.
Sometimes you have to work out the underlying Q is and answer that even if the OP doesn't want to hear it.
I much prefer the answers that explain why, if you really shouldn't do something in addition to an answer to the actual question. Usually there are perfectly valid reasons to do things you "shouldn't" and until you know that there isn't one you should just answer the question.
I believe that you can't be down-voted, and therefore lose your hard-won points, by commenting. But if you answer, you can be down-voted. So for some participants, commenting is prudent.
And then there are the poor souls who have a useful comment to make, but can't because you need reputation points to make comments. So they leave an answer instead, which is completely inappropriate and just leads to more discouragement.
I have over 6k rep, but I've come to hate it too - often within minutes of asking a question, some over-zealous numpty who plainly hasn't bothered to read the question, will flag it as a duplicate - despite it being no such thing.
I swear these people must sit F5-spamming their review queue, just itching to flag every question possible. They really make it an unpleasant place nowadays.
When I find questions with a poorly placed close vote, I try to immediately leave a comment why I disagree in the hopes that others will see it before too many votes are cast.
Whenever I ask a SO question, I have to brace myself to spend the next several hours defending my question and correcting misunderstandings that I'd already anticipated and addressed in the question. It's exhausting.
I do this too, especially when my own questions are incorrectly flagged - but the dodgy reviewer invariably ignores me, and others soon follow suit without bothering to actually check what they are flagging - and if they don't, my question is ignored and buried: I assume nobody wants to spend time answering a question that has a close vote.
I often have good success finding a solution on SO although I have the feeling that most useful answers are several years old and not much new is happening. I never posted a question before but recently I have posted a few I had been struggling with for a while and I was a little surprised how unpleasant the responses were. They were all along the lines of "Why would you want to do such a thing?" or "If you don't know what you are doing, hire an expert" or stuff like that. After this experience I definitely won't ask anything there anymore.
> [4] This is not the same as researching the issue and trying as many things as you can think of, which is definitely helpful in any context of question asking
It would help showing that in your question. Often questions lack the necessary information to discern whether the asker has actually covered the basics
> [...] how you know there are other ways you could do it but you're constrained toward this direction for various reasons
Answerers are also programmers that like to apply best practices whenever possible. If you want to do something unusual which might smell a little without explanation your colleagues, code reviewers or similar would probably also ask "is this really necessary?". So you either have to write defensively from the start or deal with the patronizing-but-wellmeaning-comment-downvote-edit-reopen ordeal.
It's unfortunate, but there is an information asymmetry. The answerers can only see what you write, while you have all the background information specific to your case.
Agreed, but imho not so much a SO problem as how developers tend to enjoy treat eachother, or so I’ve witnessed. It often seems the most joy that can be had out of interacting with one another is leaving the interaction with a feeling of superiority.
>The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out. //
This is how the system is designed, IMO. It's the encouraged behaviour.
>I still read SO, but as someone who was around before it existed I don't really feel like the quality of answers is any higher than the random forum posts of yore, it's just that they're all under the same URL now, and the same user interface.
Hmm, we really remember things differently. I remember:
Correct on all accounts. SO is radically superior to what existed before. Faster, more comprehensive, tightly maintained, highly accurate.
I routinely cringe at reading some of the comments on SO, the general smugness on there. However there's no comparison to the past options. It's better in every way. Forums of old were overflowing with plenty of smug behavior as well, SO didn't spawn that.
Another problem on some of the more generalist advice ones workplace for example is you get people who tend to assume that the world is identical to the USA!
This does not help when offering basic advice on employment out side the USA you will see I highly rated posts go on about "right to work" - this has Zero if not negative value and could actively cause harm.
Judging by the links from Workplace.SE that show up in the Hot Network Questions list, the place seems to be full of handwringers. How are the posts you mentioned actively harmful?
One for a UK employee where it was an open and shut case of breach of contract (unpaid wages) where the answer basically sided with the employer and the OP should just take the loss.
Really? I'm a junior software engineer. I used a lot of SO before college/freshman college etc but then I realized last few years I never use SO. I really cannot think of problem that I couldn't solve reading the manual, man-page, info-page, project wiki, archlinux wiki etc... I'm not shit talking SO, I definitely read it rarely, but it doesn't seem like an irreplacable thing for me.
The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out.
How dare they feel smart huff puff
Because it really sucks to spend half an hour on an answer and then op goes "actually I'm doing this" and the spec shifts completely rendering your effort wasted.
A few times of that, and "clarify your question so it's very clear what you're asking" is a lot cheaper.
> Because it really sucks to spend half an hour on an answer and then op goes "actually I'm doing this" and the spec shifts completely rendering your effort wasted.
This is exactly how I feel about asking a question! Except "Actually I'm doing this" is "why don't you do that" or "why are you doing this" etc.
> Because it really sucks to spend half an hour on an answer
My feeling is that they aren't answering the question though, not the core one, there finding a thing that you're wrong about and talking about that instead.
It's like taking the above paragraph and refuting it by saying "*they're". Yes there is an (intentional) spelling mistake in there, but is that really the point of that it's trying to say?
my feeling is that you're talking about questions that do seem clear to you and I'm talking about questions that don't seem clear to me.
"How do I parse x from some text my code is (pile of code)"
"you could do y approach (code with example test) but it might break in z condition will you have z condition?"
"I'm trying to get a result from this"
"Well if you'd said so there's a built in way to do that directly exasperated"
Is that "not answering the core question"?
That, I feel, leads to "why are you doing this?" style comments.
Are you really talking about spelling nitpicks? Because anyone can edit questions to correct that kind of "clarification" and I do see people quietly doing that to help questioners with mangled markdown formatting and similar
> my feeling is that you're talking about questions that do seem clear to you and I'm talking about questions that don't seem clear to me.
Totally.
> Are you really talking about spelling nitpicks?
Sometimes. I'm trying to be vague because I don't want to pick on specific examples, but what I really mean is nitpicks that are irrelevant to the core question.
For me the core pain felt like:
- Askers working out how much context to bring to a question
- Answerers not presuming there is more context to the question
- The ensuing fight spread over answers, re-edits and comments, leaving a gross complicated passive aggressive mess at the end of it
So you don't want to explain your entire life story, and when you encounter problems you usually aren't working on something that easily compresses into 20 lines of code. So there is expected and undestandable challenge in compressing your example. Not bringing too much context is also important, because you're trying to ask one specific question, not the hundreds of potential questions in your codebase.
But often times I feel answerers will take your example, presume it's literally that, even with `foo` and `bar` as classnames or whatever, and take it completely as face value and then point out why it's obviously stupid, even when those stupid things are ancillary to the main point, and there only because it's compressed example code.
Extra context to my opinions here: I haven't seriously contributed to SO in at least 5 years. I probably ask 1-2 questions a year now, and do so with great trepidation. Grain of salt and all that,
Asking a question on SO is a last resort to me, and I get a horrid sinking feeling in my gut when I feel forced to do so. The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out.
You begin to realise no one is actually reading your question in good faith, so you start getting defensive: filling your questions with disclaimers about how your example code is just an example[2], how you know there are other ways you could do it but you're constrained toward this direction for various reasons[3], and so on and so forth, until you feel like you spend more time defensively shoring up your question from attacks than actually constructing the question in the first place[4]
I still read SO, but as someone who was around before it existed I don't really feel like the quality of answers is any higher than the random forum posts of yore, it's just that they're all under the same URL now, and the same user interface.
Which I suppose is something.
[1] Not all people™, but definitely the general feeling tends this direction
[2] classic situation: you simplify your code to Foo and Bar levels to show the problem cleanly, so people chastise you for having a complex data structure / worrying about performance / whatever for such simple code
[3] e.g., "How do I achieve X" gets turned into people saying "Why would you want to achieve X, that's stupid"
[4] This is not the same as researching the issue and trying as many things as you can think of, which is definitely helpful in any context of question asking