Is it just me or has the quality and quantity of answers dropped in the past year or so?
I find SO perfect for the simple problems you have when you're new to a language/framework/whatever but when you get into the real nitty gritty problems its like nobodys home.
I have found lots of good answers on SE sites (almost all completely via Google) and I don't think it's getting any worse. I do find it hard to participate in the sites as I almost never have a question that is not already answered, which is a drag because without sufficient rep you can't vote on answers, and I don't want to just add comments because it feels like I'm just adding noise.
I did finally get enough rep on Server Fault that I can upvote things, which may help there. But I don't want to go through a concerted effort on each and every SE site I care about in order to participate. Maybe that's what SE wants (I know they want strong communities, I listened to the SE podcast since the very beginning) but it feels like a limiting factor to me.
You can vote before you can comment (15 and 50 rep generally speaking).
Once you get over 200 rep anywhere in the network, you'll automatically get a +100 rep bonus on other sites you join so you don't have to "grind it out" for the basic privileges.
The low rep hurdles (anything < 100) are basically "know how everything works" bars (the number of people who mistake "answer" for "forum-style reply" and "community close votes" as "moderators" backs up the need for such hurdles), the high ones (down vote, edit, close, etc.) are the "strong community" ones.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of some of those numbers. I still find the question hurdle to be the biggest... I personally just haven't found the time or energy to go and find questions I can answer, or do research necessary to answer.
My gut feeling is that SE's post structure, handling of reputation and permissions is overly complex... feature creep in a way.
I am glad to hear that your rep can affect other sites rep. I feel like the fractured approach doesn't work very well and it is good to see some improvements in account handling from the beginning like:
- Easier account creation and management(openid feels very arcane and this has smoothed out a lot since the beginning I think)
- Logging you back on when you visit (I guess they changed how they did session cookies or something, I get these 'welcome back' messages now)
- Cross-site notifications and relationships
Maybe if they had gone with centralized SE accounts at the beginning with per-site reputations it would have been simpler. The current method might be because of how SE evolved from the 'original trilogy'.
edit: curse firefox and my "reply before reading every relevant tabs" habit, you are the poster I had in mind :)
Hasn't the subject been touched recently on HN ? I think I remember a commenter stating that SO degraded because its popularity attracted a flock of "police of the forum mentality kind" posters who would close or move subject based on wording or overzealous sorting of questions in order to get gaming points and that made old and experienced posters go away in reaction.
No, this was always the case. I never bothered asking any particularly advanced questions, because even the vaguely-advanced questions I asked met with tumbleweed and whistling wind.
But realistically, what else should one expect? The cost/benefit ratio just isn't worth it for the person writing the answer. It won't garner you enough points to be worth the time creating an answer that most readers won't even have the skills or knowledge to assess one way or the other. Far better to throw in your 2p by answering an everyday question with a workaday opinion that's shared by thousands of others. Don't frighten the horses, and wait for the waves of groupthink to buoy your score ;)
(I used to read and answer a fair number of questions in the C++ section, and after a while a definite party line became apparent, presumably due to the same incentives.)
No, sorry, I had my account deleted in April 2011, and I can't remember what they were. (And last I went hunting for my user page, based on my old user number, it seemed to have been deleted.) I'd long given up asking by that point.
Having only recently realized just what StackExchange is and how to use it (I'd been running across it in Google searches for a while), one frustration for me, in looking for questions to answer, is an inability to tick off questions I'm not interested in answering, which continue to clutter my view of the site.
At web scale, everything is crud to 5 nines. Give me noise controls. The good stuff's in there, but you need to be able to surface it.
"Ignored tags" just greys out posts with the tags I'm not interested in.
I have to explicitly limit myself to specific tags I'm interested in, and even then, I can't mute the idiot posts. I'll check if downvoting a question does this. But that's not always appropriate -- there are fair questions that just don't pique my interest.
1. Can you link example questions?
2. Do you personally try to answer such questions?
3. If you get no answer, and subsequently figure something out, do you answer your own question as a help to the next person?
If you answered "no" to both 2 and 3, I would like to gently suggest that the community is only as good as its members make it.
This is the basic problem with the current path most startups take, and indeed a real problem with business in America today. Venture Capital kills companies. The money changes it all.
This applies to just about any business venture that involves investment by outside parties. There are obviously exceptions but usually when money gets involved, compromises start being made to make more money.
This has disillusioned me for my entire 16yr career... I have never found a company that wasn't internally corrupted by money.
Can you clarify what you are referring to by using the word "This" as the first word of each of your paragraphs? I can't make any connection between your post and the one you are replying to.
I find SO perfect for the simple problems you have when you're new to a language/framework/whatever but when you get into the real nitty gritty problems its like nobodys home.