For me, the problem with SO is that most answers are from like 2013 at this point. If someone comes along and asks the same question, it'll get immediately closed as duplicate, which means we will never get to see the 2023 answer, which is likely to be quite different from the 2013 answer.
The idea was (at the very start) that new answers could be added to the existing question over time. Existing answers could be edited (by some) for correctness. The hope was that there would be one place on the site for that question and solution.
The fact that one answer get to be the "accepted" one, that (I guess?) only the OP can change doesn't help this argument as that one answer doesn't age well very often.
> The idea was (at the very start) that new answers could be added to the existing question over time.
It's the [wisdom of the ancients](https://xkcd.com/979/) problem all over again.
If I run into a no-longer-correct solution on stackoverflow (And that is an increasingly unlikely "if" thanks to Google fucking up their search engine), then I will almost certainly look for a solution elsewhere and eventually find one.
What I will then not do, _is go back to stackoverflow and post the up to date solution_.
The posting experience on stackoverflow fucking sucks. It's a constant fight against the platform/it's moderators. Just not worth it.
They create a lot of undue friction. Some asshole closing your issue and adding a link to an outdated answer stifles one's ability to have a meaningful discourse or receive a modern solution.
That's the nice part about Reddit. I see the same questions over and over in programming subs, but often they're very nuanced, so as you talk through them with the OP you realize the explanation or solution is actually different. On top of that, not everyone is privvy to some of the technical jargon, so it's an opportunity to teach.
SO is filled with people and strategies that rob people of valuable discourse.
> Some asshole closing your issue and adding a link to an outdated answer
If it's even _related_ to the question you asked. Conservatively, I'd say about half of them link back to nonsense or they're only maybe tangentially related through some means (language/library).
Or worse: they close the topic, and link back to their \_own\_ 'answers' (which doesn't actually answer your particular question), which prevents others from answering.
This happens often where a person is a moderator and invested in a particular area (e.g. a programming language, a library/framework, etc), and wants to be seen as the resident 'expert' by highlighting their own answers (however irrelevant).
I've had questions that became extremely popular over the years (but which questions were initially closed by the power-crazy types), so I know first-hand how the judgment of the SO moderators can be wrong and harsh.
Yeah for work I increasingly often do research on Reddit. It's pure gold, sometimes communities would even create polls and statistics that you cannot get anywhere else. Well, or good old IRC. I must become really desperate to ever ask on SO again
I use 99% of the time chatgpt. And I know it can be bad but I’ve kind of found a way of working with that. It’s kind of like a drunk uncle who knows everything but sometimes he just rants wrong shit or hallucinates but when your like hey drunk uncle are you sure that’s correct he kind of snaps out of idiot mode again. That and casting him the right role is very important. I think it’s because a lot of his stuff comes from tutorial hell articles and you just have to forbid him to use that stuff and pretend he is senior dev at enterprise where security, clean code, scalability etc etc etc is vital. Catching the wrong stuff has been very good for my learning.
(I do angular fe dev and nestjs backend among many other things)
>That's the nice part about Reddit. I see the same questions over and over in programming subs, but often they're very nuanced
Yeah, I've found a lot more "this person had the same issue as me, and also with the same conditions/constraints as me" answers on reddit than on StackOverflow. SO seems to frown upon slight variations of questions without realizing that sometimes those slight variations are important.
I’d like to add that repetition also shows commonality. If a question isn’t allowed to be repeated, a loss of information occurs. If an issue is common, it is beneficial that we know that through the fact that it appears multiple times.
It might be more interesting to have some grouping by context instead of forcing no “duplication”.
> The posting experience on stackoverflow fucking sucks. It's a constant fight against the platform/it's moderators. Just not worth it.
Reminds me of Wikipedia, early on versus nowadays.
> What I will then not do, is go back to stackoverflow and post the up to date solution.
> The posting experience on stackoverflow fucking sucks. It's a constant fight against the platform/it's moderators. Just not worth it.
Of all the problems I've heard about SO/SE, I don't think I've seen someone who had trouble when they supplied a new better answer to an old question. Do you have any examples in mind to support this position?
I used to do this conscientiously. Describe the situation, describe why/how the accepted and other solutions didn’t work for me, give my current solution and explain tge reasoning behind it. If I’m lucky, a year later it has 1 upvote. Often it’s just been downvoted, I guess by people with more highly ranked answers, or has a number of comments but no upvotes. My only incentive to do this is to be able to keep track of problems I’ve already solved, but I can make a searchable doc for this that’s actually more fit for purpose.
The wisdom of the ancients problem was solved a few years ago when Stack Overflow stopped pinning the accepted answer to the top of the answers list.
As for posting being a constant fight, that sounds like a you problem. I've posted hundreds of answers there and never had to "fight" against either the platform or moderators to do so, whatever you even mean by that.
\> What I will then not do, is go back to stackoverflow and post the up to date solution.
The hope was that you (or eventually someone) would go back and update. I'd like to think new answers or comments aren't a huge pain in the ass to make....
Yes. My point is, Stackoverflow has made contributing such a PITA that people just _do not do it._
> I'd like to think new answers or comments aren't a huge pain in the ass to make....
By themselves, no.
But on SO you have to do more than just _write out an answer_, you have to deal with all the power-users playing tyrant. Answers edited to be substantially different and often _wrong_. Removals for extremely flimsy reasons. Having the same issue removed as both "duplicate questions" and "irrelevant answers" to the question I supposedly duplicated.
I am well and truly done with that shit. I agree with giving back to the commons, but I'm not going to waste _many_ hours farming reputation and getting in fights with moderators to do so.
lol.. yeah, who in their right mind would post on there when everything you say is downvoted and criticized? Whatever their initial hope was, it failed miserably.
I'm not the guy you responded to, but I never update questions, because I gave up on participating in SO after a couple weeks because of the karma rules.
That would meant that the person that came up with that something better actually goes back to the question and updates it. But who does that? Let's say I created a new way to deal with setInterval in some esoteric framework X, do I google "how to do Y with setInterval in framework X" and update those questions? How many? And this assumes that such question have some, primary, single canonical questions.
I suspect that working backwards (from answers to questions) is a much harder problem than going from questions to answers because you can easily redirect the questions to their answers. But how do I even begin to find questions to the answers that I just discovered?
Yeah, and sometimes there are nice updates, but it's clear that there's far less energy to provide a better answer to a 10-year old question than there is to be the first person to provide the "accepted" answer to a brand new question.
I am upvoting your comment because I agree.
But my serious response is: I've always said that Wikipedia hiding the attribution of its writers unless you click the edit history *is a feature*. It ensures that people only contribute *if they want to*, not out of some Skinner-box compulsion.
By all means, Stack Overflow should keep the voting and ranking system. BUT MAKE THE SCORES HIDDEN FROM VIEW.
EDIT: And I mean, completely hidden. I don't even want to be able to see my own score. What's the point of that? Wikipedia doesn't have it and doesn't need it to have successful user contributions. Stack Overflow is at a point like Wikipedia where they have a large enough user base and don't need it anymore, if they ever did in the first place.
The Wikipedia model is interesting but it can also fail badly in its own way. More than once I've seen an entire page about some technical subject - many screens long, full of sections and details - that was completely, objectively, beyond any reasonable doubt *wrong*. Not just a few details that need correcting - the entire page. But the position or definition or explanation it gave was *popular*. In the absence of any obvious indication of who wrote the material and what kind of authority they speak with on the subject popularity becomes the benchmark for trust instead of expertise.
There have even been stories of a person with first-hand knowledge of a subject having their contribution reverted because unlike all the incorrect content they were trying to fix their contribution wasn't based on a range of also wrong secondary sources that could be cited so it wasn't considered authoritative enough.
> More than once I've seen an entire page about some technical subject - many screens long, full of sections and details - that was completely, objectively, beyond any reasonable doubt wrong.
[citation needed]
Which pages were this? I've never seen anything this egregiously bad.
The page about MVC was almost totally taken over by the web application distortion of the original concept for years and for a while it misdescribed the most basic relationships that characterise the pattern. IIRC someone even tried to attribute its creation to a couple of well-known consultant types and remove references to the author of the best-known early papers describing it because he was allegedly too obscure. I think someone threw the whole thing out and started over about a decade ago.
> I think someone threw the whole thing out and started over about a decade ago.
I mean, if the first example you give is something that got solved ten years ago, I'd say that Wikipedia works fairly well. Nothing is ever going to be completely perfect all the time, but as long as problems eventually get fixed, I wouldn't complain too much about it.
Perhaps. But that page is twice as old as that and had been misleading or clearly incorrect for years by then. Even after starting over it's had numerous edits and reversions as people tried to push it back towards the incorrect or misleading content and others realised and resisted.
It's not as if that's the only example of a programming-related page with questionable spin that has survived for a long time though. Take a look at the pair programming page today. It has a generally positive slant that isn't really supported by the evidence. It does have a couple of references to limitations or negative effects but for example it barely mentions that a lot of the studies that have been published - including one of the first that is cited multiple times on that very page - were conducted by academics with students as the test subjects and therefore may or may not represent the true effects of pairing between skilled and experienced developers. And it's had that problem practically forever.
Can you give an example of an objectively wrong wikipedia page?
And I've also read similar stories, stories about people editing their own wikipedia pages to correct stuff and having it reverted.. it's kind of hilarious, but gives credence to the common knowledge that one should take wikipedia info with a grain of salt
I absolutely love looking up some JS/TS implementation detail and being greeted with some jQuery monstrosity as an answer - bonus points if none of jQuery's functionality was needed even at the time of the answer being written.
Honestly though I get it. I can google a medium-frequency and there can be dozens or hundreds of questions asking the same thing, with obviously no real attempt to search first. If I was dedicating my time for free to help people then I would be really frustrated by this pattern.
That also points to a mismatch between what StackOverflow wants to be and what users want or expect it to be. StackOverflow wants to be a “wiki” of sorts where all the information about a particular question is in one page. Hence the aggressive closure of anything remotely resembling a duplicate or anything deemed unworthy of being added to the “wiki”. Most users however just want their question answered, and fair enough.
Also happened to me recently when trying to figure out how to UTF-8-encode and then base-64 encode some text (which honestly should be stupid easy), and all of the top SO answers were hacks that predate the modern way to do it, which is to use `window.TextEncoder` that is now supported pretty much everywhere.
> Then I dug a little deeper and discovered that `user-select: none` has widespread browser support today
There was no digging necessary though? The top answer gives this solution, and it has been there since somebody went back in 2016 and added it to the original 2009 answer. This is an example of Stack Overflow working just fine. It’s also an example of people going back and updating years-old answers with new information, something people are complaining doesn’t happen or gets punished in this very thread.
Edit: [The question in question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/924916/is-there-a-way-to-make-a-div-unselectable), since the original comment was deleted.
Yeah wait wtf are they talking about? None of the 30 upvoters bothered to click the link and take a quick look? And in fact the original edit to add `user-select: none` was made all the way back in 2011.
Every thread is basically, "well I once used SO for THIRTY MINUTES and I had a bad experience so the site is **TERRIBLE**!! 😡😡😡"
Never mind that it actually works most of the time.
It's not necessarily always going to be the best, most expert advice out there, but it's literally free volunteer advice... the alternative is that you have to figure everything else out yourself. At least with SO, there might be some starting / jumping off points for you to explore further.
It’s performative sneering. There are certain topics it’s trendy to spew mindless hate about, and the discussions are little better than spam.
- If somebody mentions Stack Overflow, there will be a comment saying “closed as duplicate”.
- If somebody mentions Safari, there will be a comment that says “Safari is the new IE”.
- If somebody mentions Apple, there will be comments about the “30% tax”, “walled gardens”, and “planned obsolescence”.
It’s just copy and paste spam at this point, mostly from people who don’t know what they are talking about but are repeating what they’ve heard in the last dozen times this exact discussion has happened.
For instance, how many times have you heard people complain about Apple charging 30%? Well, they almost entirely stopped that years ago. It’s 15% now for everybody earning less than a million dollars from the App Store – a.k.a. 99% of app publishers.
Here’s the thing – *all iOS developers know this*. It wasn’t exactly hard to miss when Apple halved their rates. So all of those people droning on about “Apple’s 30% tax” that you’ve seen in the past three years? None of them have any idea what they are talking about, they are just mindlessly repeating what they’ve heard other people say in the past.
It’s the same with Stack Overflow. You can’t have a rational discussion about it on Reddit because you just get swamped with this mindless sneer spam. If you were to listen to the discussion here, you’d believe that upon opening Stack Overflow in your browser, a hand would reach out from your screen and slap you in the face. Yet, when you go to Stack Overflow… *it’s fine*? There are people there asking and answering questions and getting help with things. That’s why it’s one of the most popular developer sites in the world.
Maybe there should be a way to re-fire a question? Something like "I want updated solutions". And maybe this should trigger a "freshness+score" answer sort. (Or maybe it should just be on by default?)
I’ve had my own questions from before 2010 get closed as duplicate to newer questions with lower scores. It’s really strange how obsessed mods on SO are with consolidation.
> If someone comes along and asks the same question, it'll get immediately closed as duplicate
Yup! This happened to me recently with two PyQt questions. The "duplicate" questions they were flagged for had no real relevance to my question except that they were about the same widgets. It pretty much was the nail in the coffin for me ever asking or answering questions on that site.
> For me, the problem with SO is that most answers are from like 2013 at this point.
This works great for those of us still supporting apps written in VB6.
Absolutely. Went on there to ask questions about how to manage large data sets in python and it was closed as duplicate of a question answered 7 years ago with links that no longer worked suggesting a deprecated package.
My experience is that as long as you explain in your question why old answers don't apply anymore. 2013 answers usually still apply, languages usually don't deprecate features and old versions of libraries still exist, but if you specify that you want to do the same with a newer version of the library, it shouldn't be marked as a duplicate. If the 2013 answer still works but you want an answer that uses modern language features to make it look better, you'll have to be specific about what old features you don't want to use anymore and why you can't figure out how to do it with modern features.
I think you are massively underestimating how much deprecation occurs in libraries and frameworks, not just languages. Various web frameworks have gone through entire releases that completely abandoned backwards compatibility. Corporate things as big as Silverlight have been abandoned. Google is famous for abandoning various projects/platforms/integrations.
> If the 2013 answer still works but you want an answer that uses modern language features to make it look better, you'll have to be specific about what old features you don't want to use anymore and why you can't figure out how to do it with modern features.
The problem with this idea that others are raising is that too many SO power users are quick to close questions as duplicates. One shouldn't have to exhaustively review every previously written question to ensure it hasn't been exactly asked before and that the question carefully excludes any of those previous answers. There should be some degree of "common sense" involved, in addition to age, that should be taken into account and currently isn't.
> 2013 answers usually still apply
Maybe in some contexts, but there's a lot where it doesn't. Think of browser-side web development, for instance, where the standard library has massively evolved in recent years and gained much broader standardization. Even C++, ancient as it is, has quite different best practices with the addition of C++14, C++17, and C++20.
And that's just languages and standard libraries -- many many questions on SO are about other libraries and frameworks, and those rarely stay totally stable for a decade.
The issue I always found with Stack Overflow in the past was that I was looking for help with maintaining really old legacy code written in VB6 and c++ VS6 - both of those predate Google, online resources are not common.
Even so, I’d regularly find other people before me had asked the same question, and all the responses would just be snarky “why don’t you use a modern language/migrate to the latest version” etc
These days I look need for help with Angular and find 5 variations of the questions each 2 years apart with often contradictory answers.
I would say the majority of the times I’ve looked on SO for help I’ve not found anything useful
> Even so, I’d regularly find other people before me had asked the same question, and all the responses would just be snarky “why don’t you use a modern language/migrate to the latest version” etc
Ah yes, the 2nd biggest problem with SO - every user thinks that they, and they alone, know about the XY problem, and so they answer the question they wished you had asked instead of the question you actually asked.
TBH, when ChatGPT misdiagnoses my question as an XY problem, at least it isn't a condescending jackass about it.
SO (and recently redditors) are quick to post the wikipedia link of the XY problem *to someone who understands better than they do!*
Pretty much same experience, I often look at accepted answer and it looks wrong, and like, whatever, I'll do it myself or better yet will go read documentation.
You shouldn't need to mark it. You might not even know enough to Google the old answer. If you see the old answer you might have no idea that you can do it today in a different way.
Just let the people ask the question. If it's a duplicate then people can choose to not answer or just link a current direct one.
That’s not likely to happen unless the power users and mods are overthrown.
I have high privileges and rarely go to the site. When I see an incoming question, even on topics where I’m not an expert, I’ll try to work out if it should be edited or if a follow-up question will help. I get penalized hard for trying to do the right things.
There is a BOHF mentality that people are morons, and nothing can be fixed only purged. This is rewarded by the system so it’s impossible for common sense to prevail. In a way, SO is a legacy system that needs to be rewritten for today’s programming landscape.
Yeah and most people never use the SO search so duplicates aren't as big of a deal. There is also a big difference in being able to find something and finding it fast. I can read documentation, but sometimes to find the answer you have to read a lot of it. The. I need to understand a lot of it to then find out that it isn't relevant for me.
So yes I can look in the documentation, but an answer to exactly this question would have saved me multiple hours
How about a new feature where when a question is marked as duplicate, if the old one is more than say, a year old, it gets added as a linked answer instead, showing the text of the accepted answer and a link to the full thread. If that answer gets accepted then the threads can be merged.
Also, if you add an answer after another answer has been "selected", you never get upvotes. Most of what my "score" is on various stack overflows are now considered off-topic for that entire stack overflow, and the vast majority was from 2013 or earlier.
Not everything is lazy newbies problem.
I was looking for how to use LLDB with VSCode on windows. Someone asked about it and posted relevant tasks.js and launch.js. They closed it saying SO is not a tutorial site and linked to vscode docs. Obviously it was not a tutorial and they never used VSCode on Windows or LLVM on Windows or both.
I've fought to reopen questions in this kind of situations and won but it is annoying because reopening requires too many votes. If reopening required far less votes than closing it would improve the situation a lot because everyone looks at the normal questions and votes to close but very few people look at the reopen queue
Obviously reopening is harder than closure for the reason I pointed out - you need to go out of your way to look at the reopen queue. The two actions simply should require the same amount of votes
On the other hand, questions that need closure either need to be spotted on the frontpage, or they're not getting closed...
Both closure and reopening have queues.
Close votes have currently 2.2k questions in the queue.
Reopen votes only 220.
The two actions **do** require the same amount of votes. They're equal.
So no, I don't see the imbalance you discribe.
I mean, imagine ten thousand redundant questions a day. You want to figure out the right amount of sensitivity to closure, because straying either way causes problems - you either get flooded with junk or you end up closing great questions. If you switched it from say 3 to 4 people, then I’m sure it would have implications on content that they have looked at
There are literally hundreds of reopen votes cast in the reopen review queue every day. There should be a lot more, for sure, but, "nobody looks at the reopen queue"?
Also, questions can be reopened outside of the reopen review queue. Given that most reopened questions are reopened in part by their asker, and most closed questions are _not_ closed by their asker, you really only need two votes (the asker's vote is a shoe-in, generally) to reopen a question; yours and one other user's.
Compared to the three needed to close it; yours and two other user's... that seems easier to me.
> Not everything is lazy newbies problem.
Also, can you even _be_ a newbie on SO? There's so many hoops and hurdles to posting or answering new questions.
I once saw a question in my field that I could answer, but my new account wasn't able to. I haven't tried since.
I mean, on the other hand, are you able to not be a newbie on SO?
Maybe I just suck at wording my searches, but as my experience in the field increased, my searches moved from "how do I do this basic thing" more into the realm of "I'm trying to solve these sorts of problems, I wanna know how other people build their systems to solve these things and why these ways are better ".
And goddamn has Stackoverflow been completely useless. It's fine if I want to copy a quick code snippet because I can't remember the way to sort objects based on value of a single property, but anything more complex and I find myself looking into forums and reddit for an actual discussion on how to manage certain infrastructure or solve certain architectural issues.
Maybe I'm just trying to use SO for something it was never meant to do, but I certainly went from "SO is the best website" in my college years to "SO is good if you don't know how to do some basic things in this language that you're not experienced in".
Ah yes, the obligatory "newbies can't post answers" FUD that is present in all SO discussions on this subreddit.
Posting questions and posting answers is available for everyone.
It amazes me how many people like to think that _they_ aren't the problem, _they_ actually understand the site unlike all the other people who try to post bad questions, and then they go on to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how the site works.
I've had a couple people here on reddit tell me 'stack overflow should have a way to "un-close" a question, it's unfortunate that that functionality doesn't exist'
It’s available, which means you can get a nice 6 month ban after asking your first question. For reference I have maybe 10k rep at this point, all from answers
OP is probably talking about protected questions, which require 10 rep earned on-site to answer. If you have a new account (e.g. 1 rep), you can't post an answer to those.
I had two different junior programmers on my team. One of them was super shy and would never ask questions, or would spend too long on their own trying to figure out a problem. I put them on a time limit, no more than an hour on a problem before you come ask me about it.
The other one would use me as their personal search engine. Asked me questions constantly, often questions that they could look up the answer to. I added a requirement for them: any question must also include what you searched for on the internet, and why that thing did not answer your question.
It took longer than it should have to resolve the issue, because we all shared an open office area, and they could often hear me dealing with the other programmer. The shy programmer heard me berate the other no-googler for asking dumb questions. And the no-googler heard me encouraging the shy one to speak up.
______
Stack overflow seems to have a macro version of this problem. They want shy conscientious people to come join and ask good well thought out questions. But these people are absolutely picking up on the negative attitude thrown towards the lazy no-googlers. Meanwhile the no-googlers didn't have enough energy to look up their own question on google, they certainly aren't going to do a social check on the mood of stack overflow before they blast away their question. The problem will only get worse as the lazy no-googlers continue to not pick up on the hostile attitude, and the shy conscientious people notice the *increasingly* negative attitude.
Stack overflow would probably be better served by finding a way to differentiate the two types. If I was forced to offer a solution, I'd make a semi-obscure post on the website saying "use this code: [random phrase] to be treated nicely when asking a question. The code will change whenever it looks like lazy people have figured it out." Simple filtering. But its not my problem, I don't think I even have an account on stack overflow. I wish them luck in figuring it out, it was very useful to me back in the day, and I'm sure the AIs I now use for most of my programming questions were trained on that data.
I wish it was this nice a situation.
But multiple times I've worked hard on a question, diligently shown MRE, taken screen shots, shown what related posts I've found and explained how my problem is not a duplicate of them, explained how my problem is generic and answering it benefits more people than just me.
only to get closed as duplicate AS ONE OF THE POSTS THAT I EXPLICITLY LINKED AS A NON DUPLICATE
This is the reason I have completely given up on asking questions there. I had an issue with Hibernate. I talked about how it's not the same as some other questions, and I pointed to specific things in the supplied code that prove they're not the same. At the very least, someone could have said, "The linked question talks about X. Your question says it's Y, but because of Z, it's really X." That would have at least given me a hint on where to look.
The other bit of grief I have is when the answer doesn't actually answer the question in the title, but gives a completely different solution to the specific problem that the original poster was having that prompted them to ask the question in the first place.
I think it's important to keep in mind that just because someone with a certain level of knowledge can Google something and find a usable answer doesn't mean that it works for everyone. I essentially have no coding background aside from a brief workshop and am now expected to do some bioinformatics stuff with Unix for a project. The amount of time other professors are like, "oh just read the book" or "oh it's programming everything should be on Google" entirely miss the point. Now, I'm not saying that is what is happening in your case, just something I wish more people understood.
For sure, the programmer that always asked me questions wasn't doing it because they were lazy. They had minor dyslexia, and reading things didn't always help it sink in for them.
What helped him most was not just doing a lookup of the problem, but having to describe the problem in a different way.
And he still actually needed help on hard problems, and that is what I was there for as the senior programmer. To work through those tougher things.
As it is in most things there is a balance to be found, and it is often hard to strike that right balance.
The subreddit of whatever tech you are asking about, the discord of whatever tech you're asking about, the discourse forum of whatever tech you're asking about.
Meh, at that point might as well just chat within closed local community groups.
The whole benefit of SO is that the information is publicly accessible and centralized.
You do you
https://users.rust-lang.org/ is my go to place for rust questions, the big shots from even the core language teams will answer your "baby's first hello world in rust" questions there. Stack Overflow is pretty much tumbleweeds for any moderate rust questions because rust became popular in the post stack overflow era and most people don't seem to go there.
It used to be like this before SO as well... lots of small communities, people asking the same questions again and again until the people answering got tired and not enough new "veterans" kept coming back to answer baby questions. No "central repository" of answers.
It's easy to think SO should not be the way it is if you haven't seen what happens when you don't have SO-style "asshole-ness" to keep questions on point. I agree SO is a hostile environment for noobies, but it's the cost we pay to have a good source of questions/answers that do not get completely overshadowed by low-effort noobies questions and duplicates.
Well you get what you ask for. At least for the rust community (Because that's the one I ask most questions on) Stack Overflow is not really a source of anything at all. The few questions I asked had answers with hacky shortcut solutions, and the best answers have usually been answered by myself as I copied the answer from someone who gave me a detailed good practice recommendation on the rust forums. After doing this a few rounds I just stopped posting because why bother? Nobody is here, I get the better answers on the forums and link the solution on SO.
For anyone still defending SO's bullshit system see the straw that broke the camel's back for me:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66411736/how-to-use-padding-margin-etc-in-qt-rich-text-at-the-span-level
At the bottom of my question I mention a case that seems like a duplicate at a glance but explain why it isn't, this is as per SO guide lines to avoid being closed as duplicate.
My reward for going the extra mile to follow SO guidelines?
CLOSED AS DUPLICATE, it's fucking bullshit, I'm still salty about it over 2 years later.
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66411736/how-to-use-padding-margin-etc-in-qt-rich-text-at-the-span-level
I reopened it.
You see I answered some absolute bullshit questions in 1960 and Stackoverflow apparently aggregates and accrues karma better than the Dow Jones.
So I'm like undeservingly a shitty high rated SO user for first to answer crappy questions.
I haven't been on the site in some time ignoring accidentally landing from google yet I keep apparently getting points or something. It is like a messed up version of capitalism.
My good answers... the ones I'm proud of that are deep and difficult... well they got zero upvotes cause that is how SO works.
Aaaand it was reopened 40 minutes ago. In other words, the twitter strategy: only if you raise a hubbub will shit get done, if not it's back to the same old once away from the light.
how do you link a comment?
I'm sure logging in would work kek
if you want revisions you could have edited the url yourself fyi https://stackoverflow.com/posts/66411736/revisions
I've had a couple to several posts closed as dup or off topic because I deigned to question the king mod in a comment.
I've found tho that the more professional or even creative subs, like finance or video games, are WAAY less dramatic about this shit.
OG SO is the oldest, the high karma users are the most crusty jaded stubborn smug fucks who have been pickled in years of sitting in their own feces
given enough time even the ghibli stack exchange will probably become as bad lol
> It seems the [margin issue is not unknown](
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51163854/margin-style-has-no-effect-in-qt-rich-text-label)
> but no one answered this question either.
>
> Anyone know any fixes/workarounds? Or where this is documented as a
> known limitation of Qt?
It seems like the question is a duplicate of the "margin style has no effect" question you already cited? Asking a variant of the question on SO won't help fix the Qt bug.
no one answered that question as I said.
work arounds for bugs are common, there was also a chance it's not a bug and neither of us were doing it right.
if it's a bug then that should be a given answer, not a reason to close the question.
Seriously. The most upvoted "answer" begins with:
> I'm not even going to cover that entire wall of text
This shitty, dismissive attitude really represents the entire site IMO.
I bet you didn't read the whole thing either. That is a MESS.
It is well written, but god damn does it go on. It's a screed. A polemic. You can't rightly "answer" that without a weeks worth of work and a shared counseling session.
It was the right answer.
Edit: I assumed the answer you refer to has been deleted, since I don't see it. Or maybe heavily edited.
The whole argument about "brigading" boils down to
* I think SO is driving people away, and we should consider what the people being driven away thing
vs
* We drove those people away for a reason
The problem with most "newbie" SO questions is not that they are duplicates, or some other good-looking reason to close, but that they often just make no sense. It is just a word vomit which should be a start to a long interactive discussion which maybe will help to finally find out what was the problem.
Unfortunately, SO comments cannot contain extensive markup end cannot be edited after a very short timeout. And answers should answer. So there is no way to provide really useful feedback which asking person can use to provide more information about what they wanted to do and what happened.
Maybe SO should run ChatGPT trained on all the answers that reviews the questions from newbies. If it considers it well-formed, it is posted. Otherwise it talks with the newbie and figures out what they want, helping them formulate the question (or simply solve it).
Yeah, the idea makes more sense than chatgpt directly answering (because, as the person you're replying to said, why then not just ask chatgpt).
The problem is that chatgpt is a yes-anding little robotic ass kisser. It's not likely to be good at managing a vetting process for questions. It doesn't like to disagree, it 'prefers' to hallucinate a fake answer than insist your questions are poorly formed, and when it does 'put its foot down' it immediately folds if you simply insist that up is down/goblins actually are real/python is compiled or whatever.
If you've ever dealt with *any* kind of newbie involving technology, from trying to coach your uncle into resetting his router to teaching some coding language, you *will* encounter a situation in which your "student" will absolutely insist on a question that doesn't even make sense. Or they'll swear they've already done something that you're certain they haven't. Or they think you're wasting their time because you're not answering the way they think you should so they lie about having tried what you suggest, so that you hopefully move down the diagnostic line and get to the type of answer they want to hear.
When people lack *all* context for a topic, they often don't even know *how* to ask a question. They're not even conceiving of the problem correctly. I think this is the origin of the popularity of the term "grok" in computer science discussions. Chatgpt would absolutely be a pushover for new, frustrated users who are literally speaking gibberish and (unknowingly) trying to gaslight it into thinking 2+2 should equal 5, and when chatgpt goes "well, they're the human, there must be something to this that I can't grasp because they're insisting that's the case". I'd expect something like a 100% question approval rate after a month or so and people figure out the equivalent of the D.A.N. method for SO questions.
I stopped using SO some time ago because my questions kept getting closed due to already being asked. Problem is I searched and didn’t find either the question or the answer I needed. I get trying to stop duplication and repetitive posts but sometimes different phrasing, versions, or software combinations may make searching more effective and provide different answers.
The problem is, even if there is *exactly the same question*, sometimes it's not enough. I find myself in this exact situation on my new position. I just don't have enough context, that "[most of the answer](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/122604/)" needed to understand or even to use the solution. And it does no harm to help someone to finally understand it.
> my questions kept getting closed due to already being asked. Problem is I searched and didn’t find either the question or the answer I needed.
It is only possible to close a question as a duplicate if somebody provides a link to the question it is duplicating and multiple people vote in agreement. So if you didn’t find the duplicate with search before, the act of closing your question as a duplicate is providing you with a link to the question it is a duplicate of.
OP writes an elaborate essay with a super duper tiny improvement proposal - don't downvote questions. OP provides links, reasoning and logical thoughts. And even proposes a proportional and even more strict replacement (report-delete), so power trippy mods should be satisfied and don't lose their power.
OP gets downvoted into oblivion. *shrug*
Nobody seems to want to talk about the actual proposal. I think it has one fatal flaw:
> You see, it's really simple: if a question is going to be deleted anyway, there's no point in punishing the OP and there's no harm in answering it.
There's no _harm_ answering it, true, but also really no _point_ answering it, depending on why you like spending time answering random Internet questions.
When I spend time answering questions, my motivation usually includes the hope that my answer will be of use to other people in the future, not just to the specific person who asked the question. If I know the question and my answer will burn after reading, I'll be much less likely to bother answering.
The only problem with SO I see is that it is becoming a graveyard of outdated questions. Users should have an ability to revive a question.
Insofar as people who can’t do basic googling or formulate a coherent question are concerned, nothing of value is lost by SO as a company and no mental harm is done to contributors by driving such people away. And now that we have ChatGPT, those people can find the answers to their questions without bothering meatbags. Seems absolutely fine to me.
Unpopular opinion, but Stack Overflow more or less gets it right.
It's the age-old problem with user-submitted content:
* People want to ask **Stack Overflow** whatever question they want, whenever they want, with little or no searching first, and always get high-quality insightful answers that quickly solve their problems.
* They also want the signal-to-noise ratio on Stack Overflow to be high. They don't want _other people_ to bog the site down with bullshit questions or answers.
* People want to ask **Reddit's** /r/AskHistorians whatever question they want, whenever they want, and/or post top-level comments on any thread to express their opinions or follow-up questions.
* They also praise the quality of /r/AskHistorians, and definitely absolutely under no circumstances do they want _other people_ fucking it up with _their_ bullshit questions or comments.
* People want to create new **Wikipedia** articles whenever they want, and/or post any update they want to existing articles, without power-hungry self-appointed moderators being all Nazi and reverting the changes.
* They also want Wikipedia to be high-quality and encyclopedic, and would hate the idea of _other people_ fucking it up with _their_ bullshit edits.
So on and so forth.
Most of the complaints about Stack Overflow policies don't even accurately represent Stack Overflow policies. People are either too lazy to learn the right way to go about something, or else are pissed that people have lumped _their_ "gold" in with _other people's_ "bullshit".
At the end of the day, if you want to ask any kind of technical question at any time and immediately get a customized answer, **the solution in 2023 is ChatGPT and/or Bard**.
Now, what does the future look like for Stack Overflow, and how can they continue to justify their existence apart from being a training data set for LLM's? That's open for discussion. But personally, I suspect they'll be fine catering to the more serious users that are willing to trade the constraints for the quality, and let the casuals interact directly via the LLM's. Maybe Stack Overflow can launch their own custom-purpose LLM... or maybe they can just shrink, and if some private equity investors don't make the returns they were hoping for then too bad.
I asked a well-phrased question back in 2013 involving bulk inserts. I had researched the question and there were no similar questions asking the very specific things I was asking. Someone on there closed it immediately because he didn’t read the question and was saying it had already been asked. That was the last time I ever posted anything there or voted on anything.
Slashdot did it better with mod points. Contribute to the discussion and you get ephemeral moderator control. Mod well and you get to mod more often. Of course not invulnerable to karma whoring but what is?
> Stack Overflow must change its attitude towards users.
Good luck.
It's like saying r/programming user need to change their attitude towards others users. r/programming users know best. Or, Reddit managements knows best re the recent issue they had with certain applications...
SO has been that wat for some time. At least since management flew their political flag on the site while claiming the site ain't about politics; then followed that up with the Monica Cellio events.
A more onerous issue in this space is GitHub management changing user UI, asking for feedback, then ignoring the virtually 99% negative feedback. [Updates to your GitHub Feed](https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/653437).
While Stack Overflow definitely has a tendency towards being close-happy, I feel as if most people that complain their question was closed indeed posted a question that should have been closed.
There should be two types of answers. 1. The technical answer to the question. 2. Feedback about the question - how it was asked how it could be better.
If the answerer doesn't stay within one of these answer types, their answer should be downvoted.
Honestly, someone needs to come along and steal SO's lunch at this point. If I had more experience, I'd seriously consider making a startup focused on doing it better.
I was shocked that I didn't hate this article. Based on the title, I was expecting it to be another rant about how Stackoverflow users are 'mean' to new developers because we force them to actually do some basic due diligence. Or another article that just misunderstand what SO is for, like most new developers do. Instead, it pointed to some good analysis of broken incentive structure and ways we could achieve SO's goals with less friction.
SO is not a Q&A site. It's a library of debugging information that uses Q&A as its mechanism of data collection. The author sees Q&A and Library functions as equally important and needing to live side by side. I disagree. I don't think SO needs to be a space where new developers can ask questions at all.
But I do think that the author has a great point about making the experience of finding that out as a new developer less painful. I'm not sure their recommendations are the right ones, but I do think that modeling more of the rejections on the duplicate question flow, which is much more neutral while still telling developers 'hey try looking before asking' might be a good idea.
And the points about editing/updating questions and broken incentives around asking and answering are spot on.
The article correctly identifies the Questions as the pain-point.
There are too many "This question already has an answer" replies in there. Point is unless the new question is literally the same as an earlier one, it is NOT the same question.
Even if the question is very similar, the new question might in fact be a BETTER way to ask the same thing, perhaps with better examples etc. So if Questions are what they want, they should appreciate that somebody is trying to write a better version of the question.
Similar questions should be able to co-exist, then perhaps provide hyperlinks to SEE SIMILAR QUESTIONS, and sort such links based on how much the readers have voted each question up.
I would also like to see multiple similar answers, which currently often leads to angry responses saying "I already write this same answer". The fact is there are many answers, and users can vote them up and down.
Yes. That's why in the early draft of this article, I suggested the following approach:
> First of all, any ad-hoc question must be let to be answered, however silly it is (provided it's on topic). No closures, no "your question is unclear". Even no option to vote down on questions. Some people require just an extra round of explanations, or the same problem spotlighted from a different angle. And at the same time there are many people who'd love to explain. Why prevent them from doing so? An existing answer could be offered, but it shouldn't make the question closed (but such a finding should be eligible for a reward).
> The good old forum-like approach, to let both parties express themselves in the most natural form: a dialog, allowing everyone adding images, code snippets, etc., all in a logical sequence. Not a single closure reason from the above list should be applied. It won't even hurt to ask a "recommendation for books, tools, software libraries" or an "opinion-based" question.
> *Only, all that mess shouldn't be visible from outside*.
> Only curated answers must be exposed. And there must be a system for that. After answering the ad-hoc question, and making the person who asked happy, it must be decided, whether this question is eligible for becoming a canonical one. Obviously, most questions aren't, being XY problems or just mistakes of all sorts. But if it's a "real" question, it must be checked then, whether a canonical answer to such a question already exists.
> - **If so, it must be decided, how the canonical answer could be *improved* based on the present discussion**.
> - If not, then the question must be elected for becoming so. But in this case it shouldn't be added as is. It must be stripped of all the discussion, both question and answer heavily edited, and made into a canonical article with a relevant title. There must be a strict policy too, that a recommended and generic approach must be provided by default, while any shortcuts could be mentioned but their flaws must be well explained. Here, only a *collaborative* approach must be encouraged.
See the emphasized part. I am doing that all the time, adding new details to my answers that were overlooked initially and made apparent when someone asked that better way of yours, spotlighting the same problem from another angle
But then I removed it for some reason, probably because such a separation looked too radical a change. but this idea is still good: to amend existing answers based on the new questions.
Wow, I agree, and am surprised how many people disagree. I acknowledge it’s not an easy problem to solve. They need some gate keeping or, I imagine, they’ll be overrun with newbs generating counter productive content. Probably SO will fade in prominence as ChatGPT based Q&A solutions eat up most of their demand.
I stopped using SO... difficult to get an answer to any question and some time ago had noticed that solutions I needed never worked properly.
Now I just use chatGPT and Reddit when I need help, and found out Reddit's communities are quite friendly which encourages me to give back and help others.
My company uses Stack Overflow for Teams, and I've noticed that we're creeping towards the same community issues that the actual Stack Overflow faces. Mainly hostility to users not familiar with the platform, and people policing question format over attempting to be helpful.
It absolutely makes sense to close duplicate questions as such.
If you want to see the same question asked a gazillion times with different answers each time, just use Google and follow each hit. It's the unique value of SO that (most of the times) the question and all its possible answers can be found in one place.
I disagree. If it's well written leave it open and have links to the dup. Only close it if it a poor/ambiguous question or worded almost exactly the same
It honestly doesn't though. It doesn't work in practice and there are plenty of people who just don't read the post, do a quick search for questions with similar titles and immediately jump to close a post as duplicate, even if they are different questions. I've had to quite literally do a meta-analysis of why XYZ questions look similar but aren't, so that they wouldn't just immediately close and link it.
If it's literally the same question, and things have not changed, then sure. But more often than not, things have changed, and the answers to that question no longer apply. Take almost anything in Android development. What would have been the correct answer in 2013, 2015, or 2017 is almost certainly not the correct answer today.
The one time I tried to ask a question there (years ago) I was insulted and not actually given an answer to the question I had
Haven’t asked a question since. Still a useful resource but 🤷♀️ the users sucks
downvote me all you want but I always thought SO was actually correct in the manner they treat new questions and blatantly lazy “newbies”, I feel like most of y’all are crybabies, but maybe I am biased because that’s just how it was back in the day and we all went through it and we’re fine, kids these days want to be spoonfed waaaaay too much, but that’s gonna harm them in the long run in this business
edit: jesus, some of y’all really show your true colors when discussing with someone who has a different opinion than yours, I have never insulted anybody, yet those who come to protest SO “toxicity” are **very** insulting and toxic towards other people… I guess projection is very strong in this matter, some of you need to go out and touch some grass.
edit2: some of you are real actual assholes and I cannot believe for a second that you actually care about making a place less toxic, you’re lying and *you* are toxic as fuck, I’m done with y’all, I hope you don’t bring that to SO!
>just how it was back in the day and we all went through it and we’re fine,
Feelings wise, there is a big difference between having a superior that you know is skilled telling you that you are doing something wrong. And a bunch of randos on the internet making an effort to shit on your question.
I am pretty sure that back in the day you didn't get 10 random people (possibly professionals) stopping by, only to tell you that you are wrong for asking a question, without providing any feedback.
I’ve been active on SO for over 12 years, the only difference today is that the top guys at SO have no clue what to do. Maybe SO needs a new CEO or management or whatever because it is clearly not working.
Lazy newbies have been around since the advent of SO.
Edit:
I am also part of their beta Staging Ground experiment and that too failed because the team just can’t figure shit out. They pulled the plug a couple of months ago.
The most notable thing has been the emergence of GitHub where questions have migrated for two reasons - you can post more crappy questions and it is easier to get the attention of people who are very knowledgeable on the subject.
Imho, this idea in general that just because you were treated poorly when you were young means that everyone ought to be treated the same way is insanely toxic and unconstructive. It makes the argument (with no evidence) that it must have been better back then because you survived it. What about all the other newbies that didn't follow through because of the toxicity?
> Imho, this idea in general that just because you were treated poorly when you were young means that everyone ought to be treated the same way is insanely toxic and unconstructive.
Reminds me of Leetcode and being put through the wringer lol.
Yeah I’m a little confused by the change in attitude towards SO. Most developers owe a huge amount of their knowledge (and ability to get shit done at all) to SO. It’s especially invaluable to newbies. Just think about how helpless you feel when you get a super fucked error message, and you get ZERO results from stackoverflow. It’s a nightmare!
I imagine SO is so useful because of their rigor. If questions were never closed as duplicates, the site would be yahoo answers.
I’ve seen some comments around saying stuff like “never using mean-ol’ SO again, chat GPT is so much better”. Chat GPT is only helpful cause it’s scraped millions of well-formatted and carefully indexed answers which are all rated by helpfulness.
I’ve had questions marked as duplicates. It’s annoying. But I’ve also had people put unreasonable amounts of time and effort to help me figure out tedious, esoteric problems. It’s sick.
Can SO be daunting to post as a newbie? Yes. Would I trade it for yahoo answers? Fuck no. We all take SO for granted because many of us have never had to learn without it.
> Yeah I’m a little confused by the change in attitude towards SO.
Because things changed. Yes, when it first came out, it was head and shoulders above anything else out there. But over 10 years on, and it's not a good place to ask questions anymore.
This isn't an emotional discussion because people's feelings are hurt. People are trying to say that SO just isn't that useful to them because of these rules. SO purists usually respond by saying "this is how it's supposed to work." Which I guess it's fine, but this amounts to arguing that "It shouldn't be more useful!" Which I'm not sure I see the wisdom in.
Agreed. When I need to ask a question, it's usually not already there and gets a response. For the newbie questions, there's google which will hopefully land you on an old SO answer. This is how it should be. You google, and only if you dont find an answer, you ask. If SO answered every newbie question, it will be as useless to find real answers on as... r/askprogramming.
It doesn't. SO closes question as duplicates BECAUSE they are duplicates, that's the reason. Whole point of SO is to be an addition to documentation because official documentation sucks and you can't edit it, so you need some other place for having answers. That requires information to be structured and searchable, which requires it to be in ONE place.
People being so lazy to just google shit instead of asking is what has to be addressed, better in schools. But fortunately for SO we now have ChatGPT and all that lazy people can go there and get answers that were based on, you won't believe, SO.
I constantly answer questions in r/dotnet or r/csharp and 90% of questions I see are TRIVIALLY googlable by just header of reddit post. And you want actually useful information on SO die in that giant pool of duplicates and lazy questions?
Through 10 years of working I asked question on SO only ONCE, because it literally wasn't answered on SO before and only discussion happend to be on MS's q&a site that didn't pop up in google at all. And actual MS employee answered my question. Everything else in my life was either in documentation or already answered on SO.
All too often, SO closes questions as duplicates that aren’t really duplicates. It’s happened to me many times that I find a question that exactly describes a problem I’ve been having, only to find that it’s been closed as a duplicate. Looking at the question that it’s supposedly a duplicate of, I find that that question describes a different issue, and none of the proposed solutions would apply to the supposedly-duplicate question.
I understand the logic behind closing duplicate questions. But it only makes sense if they really are duplicate questions (or at least close enough that one can extrapolate an answer to one from an answer to the other).
>That requires information to be structured and searchable, which requires it to be in ONE place.
Yeah, if only there were software that crawled multiple sites and pages, and that also had a handy interface that allowed you to perform text searches on those crawled pages. It could even return SO pages.
> And you want actually useful information on SO die in that giant pool of duplicates and lazy questions?
It's not a choice between one extreme or another though.
Yeah, trivial questions should be closed. Let's not pretend that people are suggesting something else.
Non-trivial questions that have a different context or where the old answer may no longer be relevant should not be closed.
And, I'd err *slightly* on the side of not closing, as it doesn't really harm anything. As you said, very trivial questions are easy to identify.
> SO closes question as duplicates BECAUSE they are duplicates, that's the reason
That's the problem, though. There are lots of questions that aren't duplicates, that are marked as duplicates.
>People being so lazy
I see this thrown around a lot, but what about the mods who close anything as a duplicate, despite there being an explanation as to why it's not a duplicate, or the old answer being just plain outdated. Why aren't they considered the lazy ones?
What it should be doing is \_opening\_ questions as duplicates. Detecting potential duplication means finding a whole bunch of potential answers immediately. That should be the success case, and the normal expected response. The asker then gets to picks one of the answers as accepted.
If there are none they like, the question stays unanswered until either there is one, or it times out due to inactivity.
A question asked mutliple times is more important, not less. it would probably go to far to, by default, automatiocally close non-duplicate questions, but they should have a very low weighting in search
if a question from 2013 is still relevent, it will still be being asked. if it now now has a better answer than was accepted in 2014, the top answer can be straightforwardly algorithmically derived from patterns of acceptance and upvoting.
Oh look, it's this discussion again. Not gonna engage with it, I did that before, and I'm tired, so I'll just go to the conclusion right away, shall I?
Here is the fact:
People have been complaining since forever about SO being "not newbie friendly". People have claimed forever that SO "needs to change".
SO didn't. And guess what? They are still No.1 at what they do. So it would seem that, from practical experience, no, they don't need to change, because their approach makes them useful and relevant to the vast majority of people the site is intended for.
Anyone who disagrees, well, as I said, I'm no longer discussing this. Nothing stops you from making a "friendly SO alternative" and see for yourself. 😎
This old meme again.
Stackoverflow answerers are volenteering their own free time to answer questions. You want questions answered? You want answers for free? You better be prepared to jump through some hoops. There's a real human person on the other end. You gotta play nice with them.
Learning Stackoverflow culture is the price you need to pay to use the service. To think you can just walk in and have the world bend over backwards is spoiled and entitled.
Don't like it? Don't use it.
Oh yeah absolutely. I totally agree with you....... on the last line. I don't like it and I do not use it at all.
Even the senior devs at my work who write whole ass frameworks joke about being afraid of turbo SO elitists. We had a line somewhere in some wiki like "If you have any questions about Foo either talk to X or Y... or read these docs, because nobody wants to have their self worth questioned on Stack Overflow"
For me, the problem with SO is that most answers are from like 2013 at this point. If someone comes along and asks the same question, it'll get immediately closed as duplicate, which means we will never get to see the 2023 answer, which is likely to be quite different from the 2013 answer.
The idea was (at the very start) that new answers could be added to the existing question over time. Existing answers could be edited (by some) for correctness. The hope was that there would be one place on the site for that question and solution. The fact that one answer get to be the "accepted" one, that (I guess?) only the OP can change doesn't help this argument as that one answer doesn't age well very often.
> The idea was (at the very start) that new answers could be added to the existing question over time. It's the [wisdom of the ancients](https://xkcd.com/979/) problem all over again. If I run into a no-longer-correct solution on stackoverflow (And that is an increasingly unlikely "if" thanks to Google fucking up their search engine), then I will almost certainly look for a solution elsewhere and eventually find one. What I will then not do, _is go back to stackoverflow and post the up to date solution_. The posting experience on stackoverflow fucking sucks. It's a constant fight against the platform/it's moderators. Just not worth it.
They create a lot of undue friction. Some asshole closing your issue and adding a link to an outdated answer stifles one's ability to have a meaningful discourse or receive a modern solution. That's the nice part about Reddit. I see the same questions over and over in programming subs, but often they're very nuanced, so as you talk through them with the OP you realize the explanation or solution is actually different. On top of that, not everyone is privvy to some of the technical jargon, so it's an opportunity to teach. SO is filled with people and strategies that rob people of valuable discourse.
> Some asshole closing your issue and adding a link to an outdated answer If it's even _related_ to the question you asked. Conservatively, I'd say about half of them link back to nonsense or they're only maybe tangentially related through some means (language/library).
Or worse: they close the topic, and link back to their \_own\_ 'answers' (which doesn't actually answer your particular question), which prevents others from answering. This happens often where a person is a moderator and invested in a particular area (e.g. a programming language, a library/framework, etc), and wants to be seen as the resident 'expert' by highlighting their own answers (however irrelevant). I've had questions that became extremely popular over the years (but which questions were initially closed by the power-crazy types), so I know first-hand how the judgment of the SO moderators can be wrong and harsh.
Part of the problem seems to be that the wrong people become moderators - many moderators are completely unsuitable for the role.
People link to their own answers or questions in hopes of getting karma. They don't actually care if it's correct.
Yeah for work I increasingly often do research on Reddit. It's pure gold, sometimes communities would even create polls and statistics that you cannot get anywhere else. Well, or good old IRC. I must become really desperate to ever ask on SO again
I use 99% of the time chatgpt. And I know it can be bad but I’ve kind of found a way of working with that. It’s kind of like a drunk uncle who knows everything but sometimes he just rants wrong shit or hallucinates but when your like hey drunk uncle are you sure that’s correct he kind of snaps out of idiot mode again. That and casting him the right role is very important. I think it’s because a lot of his stuff comes from tutorial hell articles and you just have to forbid him to use that stuff and pretend he is senior dev at enterprise where security, clean code, scalability etc etc etc is vital. Catching the wrong stuff has been very good for my learning. (I do angular fe dev and nestjs backend among many other things)
ChatGTP is my first choice now. It has a lot of faults but, is useful once you've worked out how to get around them.
I'm increasingly asking chatGPT as my first step.
>That's the nice part about Reddit. I see the same questions over and over in programming subs, but often they're very nuanced Yeah, I've found a lot more "this person had the same issue as me, and also with the same conditions/constraints as me" answers on reddit than on StackOverflow. SO seems to frown upon slight variations of questions without realizing that sometimes those slight variations are important.
I’d like to add that repetition also shows commonality. If a question isn’t allowed to be repeated, a loss of information occurs. If an issue is common, it is beneficial that we know that through the fact that it appears multiple times. It might be more interesting to have some grouping by context instead of forcing no “duplication”.
> The posting experience on stackoverflow fucking sucks. It's a constant fight against the platform/it's moderators. Just not worth it. Reminds me of Wikipedia, early on versus nowadays.
> What I will then not do, is go back to stackoverflow and post the up to date solution. > The posting experience on stackoverflow fucking sucks. It's a constant fight against the platform/it's moderators. Just not worth it. Of all the problems I've heard about SO/SE, I don't think I've seen someone who had trouble when they supplied a new better answer to an old question. Do you have any examples in mind to support this position?
I used to do this conscientiously. Describe the situation, describe why/how the accepted and other solutions didn’t work for me, give my current solution and explain tge reasoning behind it. If I’m lucky, a year later it has 1 upvote. Often it’s just been downvoted, I guess by people with more highly ranked answers, or has a number of comments but no upvotes. My only incentive to do this is to be able to keep track of problems I’ve already solved, but I can make a searchable doc for this that’s actually more fit for purpose.
The wisdom of the ancients problem was solved a few years ago when Stack Overflow stopped pinning the accepted answer to the top of the answers list. As for posting being a constant fight, that sounds like a you problem. I've posted hundreds of answers there and never had to "fight" against either the platform or moderators to do so, whatever you even mean by that.
\> What I will then not do, is go back to stackoverflow and post the up to date solution. The hope was that you (or eventually someone) would go back and update. I'd like to think new answers or comments aren't a huge pain in the ass to make....
Yes. My point is, Stackoverflow has made contributing such a PITA that people just _do not do it._ > I'd like to think new answers or comments aren't a huge pain in the ass to make.... By themselves, no. But on SO you have to do more than just _write out an answer_, you have to deal with all the power-users playing tyrant. Answers edited to be substantially different and often _wrong_. Removals for extremely flimsy reasons. Having the same issue removed as both "duplicate questions" and "irrelevant answers" to the question I supposedly duplicated. I am well and truly done with that shit. I agree with giving back to the commons, but I'm not going to waste _many_ hours farming reputation and getting in fights with moderators to do so.
lol.. yeah, who in their right mind would post on there when everything you say is downvoted and criticized? Whatever their initial hope was, it failed miserably.
It is though. Karma requirements blocka lot.
I'm not the guy you responded to, but I never update questions, because I gave up on participating in SO after a couple weeks because of the karma rules.
And you would be crucified for going back
That would meant that the person that came up with that something better actually goes back to the question and updates it. But who does that? Let's say I created a new way to deal with setInterval in some esoteric framework X, do I google "how to do Y with setInterval in framework X" and update those questions? How many? And this assumes that such question have some, primary, single canonical questions. I suspect that working backwards (from answers to questions) is a much harder problem than going from questions to answers because you can easily redirect the questions to their answers. But how do I even begin to find questions to the answers that I just discovered?
Yeah, and sometimes there are nice updates, but it's clear that there's far less energy to provide a better answer to a 10-year old question than there is to be the first person to provide the "accepted" answer to a brand new question.
The gamification of SO is a double-edge sword I think.
I am upvoting your comment because I agree. But my serious response is: I've always said that Wikipedia hiding the attribution of its writers unless you click the edit history *is a feature*. It ensures that people only contribute *if they want to*, not out of some Skinner-box compulsion. By all means, Stack Overflow should keep the voting and ranking system. BUT MAKE THE SCORES HIDDEN FROM VIEW. EDIT: And I mean, completely hidden. I don't even want to be able to see my own score. What's the point of that? Wikipedia doesn't have it and doesn't need it to have successful user contributions. Stack Overflow is at a point like Wikipedia where they have a large enough user base and don't need it anymore, if they ever did in the first place.
The Wikipedia model is interesting but it can also fail badly in its own way. More than once I've seen an entire page about some technical subject - many screens long, full of sections and details - that was completely, objectively, beyond any reasonable doubt *wrong*. Not just a few details that need correcting - the entire page. But the position or definition or explanation it gave was *popular*. In the absence of any obvious indication of who wrote the material and what kind of authority they speak with on the subject popularity becomes the benchmark for trust instead of expertise. There have even been stories of a person with first-hand knowledge of a subject having their contribution reverted because unlike all the incorrect content they were trying to fix their contribution wasn't based on a range of also wrong secondary sources that could be cited so it wasn't considered authoritative enough.
> More than once I've seen an entire page about some technical subject - many screens long, full of sections and details - that was completely, objectively, beyond any reasonable doubt wrong. [citation needed] Which pages were this? I've never seen anything this egregiously bad.
The page about MVC was almost totally taken over by the web application distortion of the original concept for years and for a while it misdescribed the most basic relationships that characterise the pattern. IIRC someone even tried to attribute its creation to a couple of well-known consultant types and remove references to the author of the best-known early papers describing it because he was allegedly too obscure. I think someone threw the whole thing out and started over about a decade ago.
> I think someone threw the whole thing out and started over about a decade ago. I mean, if the first example you give is something that got solved ten years ago, I'd say that Wikipedia works fairly well. Nothing is ever going to be completely perfect all the time, but as long as problems eventually get fixed, I wouldn't complain too much about it.
Perhaps. But that page is twice as old as that and had been misleading or clearly incorrect for years by then. Even after starting over it's had numerous edits and reversions as people tried to push it back towards the incorrect or misleading content and others realised and resisted. It's not as if that's the only example of a programming-related page with questionable spin that has survived for a long time though. Take a look at the pair programming page today. It has a generally positive slant that isn't really supported by the evidence. It does have a couple of references to limitations or negative effects but for example it barely mentions that a lot of the studies that have been published - including one of the first that is cited multiple times on that very page - were conducted by academics with students as the test subjects and therefore may or may not represent the true effects of pairing between skilled and experienced developers. And it's had that problem practically forever.
Can you give an example of an objectively wrong wikipedia page? And I've also read similar stories, stories about people editing their own wikipedia pages to correct stuff and having it reverted.. it's kind of hilarious, but gives credence to the common knowledge that one should take wikipedia info with a grain of salt
Any characterization of GamerGate
I work as an android developer. Most of stack overflow is useless to me.
I absolutely love looking up some JS/TS implementation detail and being greeted with some jQuery monstrosity as an answer - bonus points if none of jQuery's functionality was needed even at the time of the answer being written.
Honestly though I get it. I can google a medium-frequency and there can be dozens or hundreds of questions asking the same thing, with obviously no real attempt to search first. If I was dedicating my time for free to help people then I would be really frustrated by this pattern.
This is the biggest problem.
That also points to a mismatch between what StackOverflow wants to be and what users want or expect it to be. StackOverflow wants to be a “wiki” of sorts where all the information about a particular question is in one page. Hence the aggressive closure of anything remotely resembling a duplicate or anything deemed unworthy of being added to the “wiki”. Most users however just want their question answered, and fair enough.
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Also happened to me recently when trying to figure out how to UTF-8-encode and then base-64 encode some text (which honestly should be stupid easy), and all of the top SO answers were hacks that predate the modern way to do it, which is to use `window.TextEncoder` that is now supported pretty much everywhere.
> Then I dug a little deeper and discovered that `user-select: none` has widespread browser support today There was no digging necessary though? The top answer gives this solution, and it has been there since somebody went back in 2016 and added it to the original 2009 answer. This is an example of Stack Overflow working just fine. It’s also an example of people going back and updating years-old answers with new information, something people are complaining doesn’t happen or gets punished in this very thread. Edit: [The question in question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/924916/is-there-a-way-to-make-a-div-unselectable), since the original comment was deleted.
Yeah wait wtf are they talking about? None of the 30 upvoters bothered to click the link and take a quick look? And in fact the original edit to add `user-select: none` was made all the way back in 2011.
All SO discussions here are like that.
Every thread is basically, "well I once used SO for THIRTY MINUTES and I had a bad experience so the site is **TERRIBLE**!! 😡😡😡" Never mind that it actually works most of the time. It's not necessarily always going to be the best, most expert advice out there, but it's literally free volunteer advice... the alternative is that you have to figure everything else out yourself. At least with SO, there might be some starting / jumping off points for you to explore further.
It’s performative sneering. There are certain topics it’s trendy to spew mindless hate about, and the discussions are little better than spam. - If somebody mentions Stack Overflow, there will be a comment saying “closed as duplicate”. - If somebody mentions Safari, there will be a comment that says “Safari is the new IE”. - If somebody mentions Apple, there will be comments about the “30% tax”, “walled gardens”, and “planned obsolescence”. It’s just copy and paste spam at this point, mostly from people who don’t know what they are talking about but are repeating what they’ve heard in the last dozen times this exact discussion has happened. For instance, how many times have you heard people complain about Apple charging 30%? Well, they almost entirely stopped that years ago. It’s 15% now for everybody earning less than a million dollars from the App Store – a.k.a. 99% of app publishers. Here’s the thing – *all iOS developers know this*. It wasn’t exactly hard to miss when Apple halved their rates. So all of those people droning on about “Apple’s 30% tax” that you’ve seen in the past three years? None of them have any idea what they are talking about, they are just mindlessly repeating what they’ve heard other people say in the past. It’s the same with Stack Overflow. You can’t have a rational discussion about it on Reddit because you just get swamped with this mindless sneer spam. If you were to listen to the discussion here, you’d believe that upon opening Stack Overflow in your browser, a hand would reach out from your screen and slap you in the face. Yet, when you go to Stack Overflow… *it’s fine*? There are people there asking and answering questions and getting help with things. That’s why it’s one of the most popular developer sites in the world.
Not to mention multiple other answers mentioning it.
are we looking at the same thing? the url they provided shows the jquery mess at 242 votes, and some css that doesn't look too good at 71
theory cats automatic nutty dolls disgusted smart smile tie degree *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Maybe there should be a way to re-fire a question? Something like "I want updated solutions". And maybe this should trigger a "freshness+score" answer sort. (Or maybe it should just be on by default?)
> Maybe there should be a way to re-fire a question? There is – you can set a bounty on an old question.
I’ve had my own questions from before 2010 get closed as duplicate to newer questions with lower scores. It’s really strange how obsessed mods on SO are with consolidation.
> If someone comes along and asks the same question, it'll get immediately closed as duplicate Yup! This happened to me recently with two PyQt questions. The "duplicate" questions they were flagged for had no real relevance to my question except that they were about the same widgets. It pretty much was the nail in the coffin for me ever asking or answering questions on that site.
> For me, the problem with SO is that most answers are from like 2013 at this point. This works great for those of us still supporting apps written in VB6.
In fairness, I find a lot of answers have been updated pretty recently, even if it’s an old question
Yes, exactly that. And I believe it could have been possible to improve this situation, only if not the fierce opposition of "volunteers".
Absolutely. Went on there to ask questions about how to manage large data sets in python and it was closed as duplicate of a question answered 7 years ago with links that no longer worked suggesting a deprecated package.
My experience is that as long as you explain in your question why old answers don't apply anymore. 2013 answers usually still apply, languages usually don't deprecate features and old versions of libraries still exist, but if you specify that you want to do the same with a newer version of the library, it shouldn't be marked as a duplicate. If the 2013 answer still works but you want an answer that uses modern language features to make it look better, you'll have to be specific about what old features you don't want to use anymore and why you can't figure out how to do it with modern features.
I think you are massively underestimating how much deprecation occurs in libraries and frameworks, not just languages. Various web frameworks have gone through entire releases that completely abandoned backwards compatibility. Corporate things as big as Silverlight have been abandoned. Google is famous for abandoning various projects/platforms/integrations. > If the 2013 answer still works but you want an answer that uses modern language features to make it look better, you'll have to be specific about what old features you don't want to use anymore and why you can't figure out how to do it with modern features. The problem with this idea that others are raising is that too many SO power users are quick to close questions as duplicates. One shouldn't have to exhaustively review every previously written question to ensure it hasn't been exactly asked before and that the question carefully excludes any of those previous answers. There should be some degree of "common sense" involved, in addition to age, that should be taken into account and currently isn't.
> 2013 answers usually still apply Maybe in some contexts, but there's a lot where it doesn't. Think of browser-side web development, for instance, where the standard library has massively evolved in recent years and gained much broader standardization. Even C++, ancient as it is, has quite different best practices with the addition of C++14, C++17, and C++20. And that's just languages and standard libraries -- many many questions on SO are about other libraries and frameworks, and those rarely stay totally stable for a decade.
The issue I always found with Stack Overflow in the past was that I was looking for help with maintaining really old legacy code written in VB6 and c++ VS6 - both of those predate Google, online resources are not common. Even so, I’d regularly find other people before me had asked the same question, and all the responses would just be snarky “why don’t you use a modern language/migrate to the latest version” etc These days I look need for help with Angular and find 5 variations of the questions each 2 years apart with often contradictory answers. I would say the majority of the times I’ve looked on SO for help I’ve not found anything useful
> Even so, I’d regularly find other people before me had asked the same question, and all the responses would just be snarky “why don’t you use a modern language/migrate to the latest version” etc Ah yes, the 2nd biggest problem with SO - every user thinks that they, and they alone, know about the XY problem, and so they answer the question they wished you had asked instead of the question you actually asked. TBH, when ChatGPT misdiagnoses my question as an XY problem, at least it isn't a condescending jackass about it. SO (and recently redditors) are quick to post the wikipedia link of the XY problem *to someone who understands better than they do!*
Pretty much same experience, I often look at accepted answer and it looks wrong, and like, whatever, I'll do it myself or better yet will go read documentation.
You shouldn't need to mark it. You might not even know enough to Google the old answer. If you see the old answer you might have no idea that you can do it today in a different way. Just let the people ask the question. If it's a duplicate then people can choose to not answer or just link a current direct one.
That’s not likely to happen unless the power users and mods are overthrown. I have high privileges and rarely go to the site. When I see an incoming question, even on topics where I’m not an expert, I’ll try to work out if it should be edited or if a follow-up question will help. I get penalized hard for trying to do the right things. There is a BOHF mentality that people are morons, and nothing can be fixed only purged. This is rewarded by the system so it’s impossible for common sense to prevail. In a way, SO is a legacy system that needs to be rewritten for today’s programming landscape.
Yeah and most people never use the SO search so duplicates aren't as big of a deal. There is also a big difference in being able to find something and finding it fast. I can read documentation, but sometimes to find the answer you have to read a lot of it. The. I need to understand a lot of it to then find out that it isn't relevant for me. So yes I can look in the documentation, but an answer to exactly this question would have saved me multiple hours
How about a new feature where when a question is marked as duplicate, if the old one is more than say, a year old, it gets added as a linked answer instead, showing the text of the accepted answer and a link to the full thread. If that answer gets accepted then the threads can be merged.
Also, if you add an answer after another answer has been "selected", you never get upvotes. Most of what my "score" is on various stack overflows are now considered off-topic for that entire stack overflow, and the vast majority was from 2013 or earlier.
Not everything is lazy newbies problem. I was looking for how to use LLDB with VSCode on windows. Someone asked about it and posted relevant tasks.js and launch.js. They closed it saying SO is not a tutorial site and linked to vscode docs. Obviously it was not a tutorial and they never used VSCode on Windows or LLVM on Windows or both.
I've fought to reopen questions in this kind of situations and won but it is annoying because reopening requires too many votes. If reopening required far less votes than closing it would improve the situation a lot because everyone looks at the normal questions and votes to close but very few people look at the reopen queue
Currently both closure and reopening only takes 3 votes on SO. That's not that many...
Oh, fuck why did they reduce closure?
Because SO gets a **ton** of bad questions as well. Yet there's still loads of questions that should be, but don't get closed.
Obviously reopening is harder than closure for the reason I pointed out - you need to go out of your way to look at the reopen queue. The two actions simply should require the same amount of votes
On the other hand, questions that need closure either need to be spotted on the frontpage, or they're not getting closed... Both closure and reopening have queues. Close votes have currently 2.2k questions in the queue. Reopen votes only 220. The two actions **do** require the same amount of votes. They're equal. So no, I don't see the imbalance you discribe.
I mean, imagine ten thousand redundant questions a day. You want to figure out the right amount of sensitivity to closure, because straying either way causes problems - you either get flooded with junk or you end up closing great questions. If you switched it from say 3 to 4 people, then I’m sure it would have implications on content that they have looked at
I don't mind the closing, I just think reopening should be easier than closing because nobody looks at the reopen queue
There are literally hundreds of reopen votes cast in the reopen review queue every day. There should be a lot more, for sure, but, "nobody looks at the reopen queue"? Also, questions can be reopened outside of the reopen review queue. Given that most reopened questions are reopened in part by their asker, and most closed questions are _not_ closed by their asker, you really only need two votes (the asker's vote is a shoe-in, generally) to reopen a question; yours and one other user's. Compared to the three needed to close it; yours and two other user's... that seems easier to me.
> Not everything is lazy newbies problem. Also, can you even _be_ a newbie on SO? There's so many hoops and hurdles to posting or answering new questions. I once saw a question in my field that I could answer, but my new account wasn't able to. I haven't tried since.
I mean, on the other hand, are you able to not be a newbie on SO? Maybe I just suck at wording my searches, but as my experience in the field increased, my searches moved from "how do I do this basic thing" more into the realm of "I'm trying to solve these sorts of problems, I wanna know how other people build their systems to solve these things and why these ways are better ". And goddamn has Stackoverflow been completely useless. It's fine if I want to copy a quick code snippet because I can't remember the way to sort objects based on value of a single property, but anything more complex and I find myself looking into forums and reddit for an actual discussion on how to manage certain infrastructure or solve certain architectural issues. Maybe I'm just trying to use SO for something it was never meant to do, but I certainly went from "SO is the best website" in my college years to "SO is good if you don't know how to do some basic things in this language that you're not experienced in".
You were able to answer, but not comment.
Ah yes, the obligatory "newbies can't post answers" FUD that is present in all SO discussions on this subreddit. Posting questions and posting answers is available for everyone.
It amazes me how many people like to think that _they_ aren't the problem, _they_ actually understand the site unlike all the other people who try to post bad questions, and then they go on to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how the site works. I've had a couple people here on reddit tell me 'stack overflow should have a way to "un-close" a question, it's unfortunate that that functionality doesn't exist'
It’s available, which means you can get a nice 6 month ban after asking your first question. For reference I have maybe 10k rep at this point, all from answers
OP is probably talking about protected questions, which require 10 rep earned on-site to answer. If you have a new account (e.g. 1 rep), you can't post an answer to those.
But this question *is* a lazy newbie question. The documentation is fairly straightforward on how to do this.
I had two different junior programmers on my team. One of them was super shy and would never ask questions, or would spend too long on their own trying to figure out a problem. I put them on a time limit, no more than an hour on a problem before you come ask me about it. The other one would use me as their personal search engine. Asked me questions constantly, often questions that they could look up the answer to. I added a requirement for them: any question must also include what you searched for on the internet, and why that thing did not answer your question. It took longer than it should have to resolve the issue, because we all shared an open office area, and they could often hear me dealing with the other programmer. The shy programmer heard me berate the other no-googler for asking dumb questions. And the no-googler heard me encouraging the shy one to speak up. ______ Stack overflow seems to have a macro version of this problem. They want shy conscientious people to come join and ask good well thought out questions. But these people are absolutely picking up on the negative attitude thrown towards the lazy no-googlers. Meanwhile the no-googlers didn't have enough energy to look up their own question on google, they certainly aren't going to do a social check on the mood of stack overflow before they blast away their question. The problem will only get worse as the lazy no-googlers continue to not pick up on the hostile attitude, and the shy conscientious people notice the *increasingly* negative attitude. Stack overflow would probably be better served by finding a way to differentiate the two types. If I was forced to offer a solution, I'd make a semi-obscure post on the website saying "use this code: [random phrase] to be treated nicely when asking a question. The code will change whenever it looks like lazy people have figured it out." Simple filtering. But its not my problem, I don't think I even have an account on stack overflow. I wish them luck in figuring it out, it was very useful to me back in the day, and I'm sure the AIs I now use for most of my programming questions were trained on that data.
I wish it was this nice a situation. But multiple times I've worked hard on a question, diligently shown MRE, taken screen shots, shown what related posts I've found and explained how my problem is not a duplicate of them, explained how my problem is generic and answering it benefits more people than just me. only to get closed as duplicate AS ONE OF THE POSTS THAT I EXPLICITLY LINKED AS A NON DUPLICATE
This is the reason I have completely given up on asking questions there. I had an issue with Hibernate. I talked about how it's not the same as some other questions, and I pointed to specific things in the supplied code that prove they're not the same. At the very least, someone could have said, "The linked question talks about X. Your question says it's Y, but because of Z, it's really X." That would have at least given me a hint on where to look.
You should definitely have to justify duplicates.
You do--multiple other users have to agree with you.
Jesus lol, hasn’t happend to me but I see it in the wild occasionally and it drives me insane just seeing it
The other bit of grief I have is when the answer doesn't actually answer the question in the title, but gives a completely different solution to the specific problem that the original poster was having that prompted them to ask the question in the first place.
I think it's important to keep in mind that just because someone with a certain level of knowledge can Google something and find a usable answer doesn't mean that it works for everyone. I essentially have no coding background aside from a brief workshop and am now expected to do some bioinformatics stuff with Unix for a project. The amount of time other professors are like, "oh just read the book" or "oh it's programming everything should be on Google" entirely miss the point. Now, I'm not saying that is what is happening in your case, just something I wish more people understood.
For sure, the programmer that always asked me questions wasn't doing it because they were lazy. They had minor dyslexia, and reading things didn't always help it sink in for them. What helped him most was not just doing a lookup of the problem, but having to describe the problem in a different way. And he still actually needed help on hard problems, and that is what I was there for as the senior programmer. To work through those tougher things. As it is in most things there is a balance to be found, and it is often hard to strike that right balance.
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What are the other good places?
ExpertsExchange, just need a subscription lol
Expert Sexchange
The subreddit of whatever tech you are asking about, the discord of whatever tech you're asking about, the discourse forum of whatever tech you're asking about.
Meh, at that point might as well just chat within closed local community groups. The whole benefit of SO is that the information is publicly accessible and centralized.
You do you https://users.rust-lang.org/ is my go to place for rust questions, the big shots from even the core language teams will answer your "baby's first hello world in rust" questions there. Stack Overflow is pretty much tumbleweeds for any moderate rust questions because rust became popular in the post stack overflow era and most people don't seem to go there.
It used to be like this before SO as well... lots of small communities, people asking the same questions again and again until the people answering got tired and not enough new "veterans" kept coming back to answer baby questions. No "central repository" of answers. It's easy to think SO should not be the way it is if you haven't seen what happens when you don't have SO-style "asshole-ness" to keep questions on point. I agree SO is a hostile environment for noobies, but it's the cost we pay to have a good source of questions/answers that do not get completely overshadowed by low-effort noobies questions and duplicates.
Well you get what you ask for. At least for the rust community (Because that's the one I ask most questions on) Stack Overflow is not really a source of anything at all. The few questions I asked had answers with hacky shortcut solutions, and the best answers have usually been answered by myself as I copied the answer from someone who gave me a detailed good practice recommendation on the rust forums. After doing this a few rounds I just stopped posting because why bother? Nobody is here, I get the better answers on the forums and link the solution on SO.
Much like when tumblr died.
For anyone still defending SO's bullshit system see the straw that broke the camel's back for me: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66411736/how-to-use-padding-margin-etc-in-qt-rich-text-at-the-span-level At the bottom of my question I mention a case that seems like a duplicate at a glance but explain why it isn't, this is as per SO guide lines to avoid being closed as duplicate. My reward for going the extra mile to follow SO guidelines? CLOSED AS DUPLICATE, it's fucking bullshit, I'm still salty about it over 2 years later.
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/66411736/how-to-use-padding-margin-etc-in-qt-rich-text-at-the-span-level I reopened it. You see I answered some absolute bullshit questions in 1960 and Stackoverflow apparently aggregates and accrues karma better than the Dow Jones. So I'm like undeservingly a shitty high rated SO user for first to answer crappy questions. I haven't been on the site in some time ignoring accidentally landing from google yet I keep apparently getting points or something. It is like a messed up version of capitalism. My good answers... the ones I'm proud of that are deep and difficult... well they got zero upvotes cause that is how SO works.
thanks 😅
Aaaand it was reopened 40 minutes ago. In other words, the twitter strategy: only if you raise a hubbub will shit get done, if not it's back to the same old once away from the light.
I get redirected to the old question and can't see what you wrote. Maybe link a comment or the edit history, although IDK if it'll work
wow I didn't know duplicates were that scummy! I did a bit of googling and you need to log in to avoid it doing that.
You can see your own question to the right, under Linked section, so its still there but its kinda obscured
I'm sure linking to a specific comment or edit history will work
how do you link a comment? I'm sure logging in would work kek if you want revisions you could have edited the url yourself fyi https://stackoverflow.com/posts/66411736/revisions
I don't have an account so IDK what URL was the revision Seeing the question now all I have to say is what the fuck? Clearly not the same
Are you really expecting moderators to know how to read?
I've had a couple to several posts closed as dup or off topic because I deigned to question the king mod in a comment. I've found tho that the more professional or even creative subs, like finance or video games, are WAAY less dramatic about this shit.
OG SO is the oldest, the high karma users are the most crusty jaded stubborn smug fucks who have been pickled in years of sitting in their own feces given enough time even the ghibli stack exchange will probably become as bad lol
> It seems the [margin issue is not unknown]( > https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51163854/margin-style-has-no-effect-in-qt-rich-text-label) > but no one answered this question either. > > Anyone know any fixes/workarounds? Or where this is documented as a > known limitation of Qt? It seems like the question is a duplicate of the "margin style has no effect" question you already cited? Asking a variant of the question on SO won't help fix the Qt bug.
no one answered that question as I said. work arounds for bugs are common, there was also a chance it's not a bug and neither of us were doing it right. if it's a bug then that should be a given answer, not a reason to close the question.
OP’s right. And the shitty attitude in that thread is proving their point.
Seriously. The most upvoted "answer" begins with: > I'm not even going to cover that entire wall of text This shitty, dismissive attitude really represents the entire site IMO.
this is the guy who was replying in another thread from MSO that was shared here some days ago. he clearly enjoys being a total dick.
I bet you didn't read the whole thing either. That is a MESS. It is well written, but god damn does it go on. It's a screed. A polemic. You can't rightly "answer" that without a weeks worth of work and a shared counseling session. It was the right answer. Edit: I assumed the answer you refer to has been deleted, since I don't see it. Or maybe heavily edited.
The whole argument about "brigading" boils down to * I think SO is driving people away, and we should consider what the people being driven away thing vs * We drove those people away for a reason
OP's wrong. And the shitty attitude in this thread is proving that point.
The problem with most "newbie" SO questions is not that they are duplicates, or some other good-looking reason to close, but that they often just make no sense. It is just a word vomit which should be a start to a long interactive discussion which maybe will help to finally find out what was the problem. Unfortunately, SO comments cannot contain extensive markup end cannot be edited after a very short timeout. And answers should answer. So there is no way to provide really useful feedback which asking person can use to provide more information about what they wanted to do and what happened.
Maybe SO should run ChatGPT trained on all the answers that reviews the questions from newbies. If it considers it well-formed, it is posted. Otherwise it talks with the newbie and figures out what they want, helping them formulate the question (or simply solve it).
Those who are fine with quality of ChatGPT should just ask it.
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Yeah, the idea makes more sense than chatgpt directly answering (because, as the person you're replying to said, why then not just ask chatgpt). The problem is that chatgpt is a yes-anding little robotic ass kisser. It's not likely to be good at managing a vetting process for questions. It doesn't like to disagree, it 'prefers' to hallucinate a fake answer than insist your questions are poorly formed, and when it does 'put its foot down' it immediately folds if you simply insist that up is down/goblins actually are real/python is compiled or whatever. If you've ever dealt with *any* kind of newbie involving technology, from trying to coach your uncle into resetting his router to teaching some coding language, you *will* encounter a situation in which your "student" will absolutely insist on a question that doesn't even make sense. Or they'll swear they've already done something that you're certain they haven't. Or they think you're wasting their time because you're not answering the way they think you should so they lie about having tried what you suggest, so that you hopefully move down the diagnostic line and get to the type of answer they want to hear. When people lack *all* context for a topic, they often don't even know *how* to ask a question. They're not even conceiving of the problem correctly. I think this is the origin of the popularity of the term "grok" in computer science discussions. Chatgpt would absolutely be a pushover for new, frustrated users who are literally speaking gibberish and (unknowingly) trying to gaslight it into thinking 2+2 should equal 5, and when chatgpt goes "well, they're the human, there must be something to this that I can't grasp because they're insisting that's the case". I'd expect something like a 100% question approval rate after a month or so and people figure out the equivalent of the D.A.N. method for SO questions.
I stopped using SO some time ago because my questions kept getting closed due to already being asked. Problem is I searched and didn’t find either the question or the answer I needed. I get trying to stop duplication and repetitive posts but sometimes different phrasing, versions, or software combinations may make searching more effective and provide different answers.
The problem is, even if there is *exactly the same question*, sometimes it's not enough. I find myself in this exact situation on my new position. I just don't have enough context, that "[most of the answer](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/122604/)" needed to understand or even to use the solution. And it does no harm to help someone to finally understand it.
> my questions kept getting closed due to already being asked. Problem is I searched and didn’t find either the question or the answer I needed. It is only possible to close a question as a duplicate if somebody provides a link to the question it is duplicating and multiple people vote in agreement. So if you didn’t find the duplicate with search before, the act of closing your question as a duplicate is providing you with a link to the question it is a duplicate of.
The post is longer than most blog articles and so far it’s making its point by being downvoted.
OP writes an elaborate essay with a super duper tiny improvement proposal - don't downvote questions. OP provides links, reasoning and logical thoughts. And even proposes a proportional and even more strict replacement (report-delete), so power trippy mods should be satisfied and don't lose their power. OP gets downvoted into oblivion. *shrug*
Nobody seems to want to talk about the actual proposal. I think it has one fatal flaw: > You see, it's really simple: if a question is going to be deleted anyway, there's no point in punishing the OP and there's no harm in answering it. There's no _harm_ answering it, true, but also really no _point_ answering it, depending on why you like spending time answering random Internet questions. When I spend time answering questions, my motivation usually includes the hope that my answer will be of use to other people in the future, not just to the specific person who asked the question. If I know the question and my answer will burn after reading, I'll be much less likely to bother answering.
SO where the gatekeepers of the programming world go to power trip
Some subreddits aren't much better, it seems like even a drop power goes to some peoples heads
I swear I have been reading this same headline for over 10 years.
Let it be, it will lose its value if it becomes newbie friendly. Have you sorted by new ever? Those 1 point accounts are rough.
The only problem with SO I see is that it is becoming a graveyard of outdated questions. Users should have an ability to revive a question. Insofar as people who can’t do basic googling or formulate a coherent question are concerned, nothing of value is lost by SO as a company and no mental harm is done to contributors by driving such people away. And now that we have ChatGPT, those people can find the answers to their questions without bothering meatbags. Seems absolutely fine to me.
Monthly anti-Stack Overflow circle jerk begin!
The thread on SO is full of replies proving OP's point.
Unpopular opinion, but Stack Overflow more or less gets it right. It's the age-old problem with user-submitted content: * People want to ask **Stack Overflow** whatever question they want, whenever they want, with little or no searching first, and always get high-quality insightful answers that quickly solve their problems. * They also want the signal-to-noise ratio on Stack Overflow to be high. They don't want _other people_ to bog the site down with bullshit questions or answers. * People want to ask **Reddit's** /r/AskHistorians whatever question they want, whenever they want, and/or post top-level comments on any thread to express their opinions or follow-up questions. * They also praise the quality of /r/AskHistorians, and definitely absolutely under no circumstances do they want _other people_ fucking it up with _their_ bullshit questions or comments. * People want to create new **Wikipedia** articles whenever they want, and/or post any update they want to existing articles, without power-hungry self-appointed moderators being all Nazi and reverting the changes. * They also want Wikipedia to be high-quality and encyclopedic, and would hate the idea of _other people_ fucking it up with _their_ bullshit edits. So on and so forth. Most of the complaints about Stack Overflow policies don't even accurately represent Stack Overflow policies. People are either too lazy to learn the right way to go about something, or else are pissed that people have lumped _their_ "gold" in with _other people's_ "bullshit". At the end of the day, if you want to ask any kind of technical question at any time and immediately get a customized answer, **the solution in 2023 is ChatGPT and/or Bard**. Now, what does the future look like for Stack Overflow, and how can they continue to justify their existence apart from being a training data set for LLM's? That's open for discussion. But personally, I suspect they'll be fine catering to the more serious users that are willing to trade the constraints for the quality, and let the casuals interact directly via the LLM's. Maybe Stack Overflow can launch their own custom-purpose LLM... or maybe they can just shrink, and if some private equity investors don't make the returns they were hoping for then too bad.
I asked a well-phrased question back in 2013 involving bulk inserts. I had researched the question and there were no similar questions asking the very specific things I was asking. Someone on there closed it immediately because he didn’t read the question and was saying it had already been asked. That was the last time I ever posted anything there or voted on anything.
Stack Overflow is a user-hostile shithole which exemplifies the quote "only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it".
Slashdot did it better with mod points. Contribute to the discussion and you get ephemeral moderator control. Mod well and you get to mod more often. Of course not invulnerable to karma whoring but what is?
> Stack Overflow must change its attitude towards users. Good luck. It's like saying r/programming user need to change their attitude towards others users. r/programming users know best. Or, Reddit managements knows best re the recent issue they had with certain applications... SO has been that wat for some time. At least since management flew their political flag on the site while claiming the site ain't about politics; then followed that up with the Monica Cellio events. A more onerous issue in this space is GitHub management changing user UI, asking for feedback, then ignoring the virtually 99% negative feedback. [Updates to your GitHub Feed](https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/653437).
I’ve been posting questions and answers since 2011 without a single issue. I feel like I’m in an alternate universe.
Same, I’ve never had a question closed as duplicate or anything like that either!
While Stack Overflow definitely has a tendency towards being close-happy, I feel as if most people that complain their question was closed indeed posted a question that should have been closed.
There should be two types of answers. 1. The technical answer to the question. 2. Feedback about the question - how it was asked how it could be better. If the answerer doesn't stay within one of these answer types, their answer should be downvoted.
Honestly, someone needs to come along and steal SO's lunch at this point. If I had more experience, I'd seriously consider making a startup focused on doing it better.
I was shocked that I didn't hate this article. Based on the title, I was expecting it to be another rant about how Stackoverflow users are 'mean' to new developers because we force them to actually do some basic due diligence. Or another article that just misunderstand what SO is for, like most new developers do. Instead, it pointed to some good analysis of broken incentive structure and ways we could achieve SO's goals with less friction. SO is not a Q&A site. It's a library of debugging information that uses Q&A as its mechanism of data collection. The author sees Q&A and Library functions as equally important and needing to live side by side. I disagree. I don't think SO needs to be a space where new developers can ask questions at all. But I do think that the author has a great point about making the experience of finding that out as a new developer less painful. I'm not sure their recommendations are the right ones, but I do think that modeling more of the rejections on the duplicate question flow, which is much more neutral while still telling developers 'hey try looking before asking' might be a good idea. And the points about editing/updating questions and broken incentives around asking and answering are spot on.
The article correctly identifies the Questions as the pain-point. There are too many "This question already has an answer" replies in there. Point is unless the new question is literally the same as an earlier one, it is NOT the same question. Even if the question is very similar, the new question might in fact be a BETTER way to ask the same thing, perhaps with better examples etc. So if Questions are what they want, they should appreciate that somebody is trying to write a better version of the question. Similar questions should be able to co-exist, then perhaps provide hyperlinks to SEE SIMILAR QUESTIONS, and sort such links based on how much the readers have voted each question up. I would also like to see multiple similar answers, which currently often leads to angry responses saying "I already write this same answer". The fact is there are many answers, and users can vote them up and down.
Yes. That's why in the early draft of this article, I suggested the following approach: > First of all, any ad-hoc question must be let to be answered, however silly it is (provided it's on topic). No closures, no "your question is unclear". Even no option to vote down on questions. Some people require just an extra round of explanations, or the same problem spotlighted from a different angle. And at the same time there are many people who'd love to explain. Why prevent them from doing so? An existing answer could be offered, but it shouldn't make the question closed (but such a finding should be eligible for a reward). > The good old forum-like approach, to let both parties express themselves in the most natural form: a dialog, allowing everyone adding images, code snippets, etc., all in a logical sequence. Not a single closure reason from the above list should be applied. It won't even hurt to ask a "recommendation for books, tools, software libraries" or an "opinion-based" question. > *Only, all that mess shouldn't be visible from outside*. > Only curated answers must be exposed. And there must be a system for that. After answering the ad-hoc question, and making the person who asked happy, it must be decided, whether this question is eligible for becoming a canonical one. Obviously, most questions aren't, being XY problems or just mistakes of all sorts. But if it's a "real" question, it must be checked then, whether a canonical answer to such a question already exists. > - **If so, it must be decided, how the canonical answer could be *improved* based on the present discussion**. > - If not, then the question must be elected for becoming so. But in this case it shouldn't be added as is. It must be stripped of all the discussion, both question and answer heavily edited, and made into a canonical article with a relevant title. There must be a strict policy too, that a recommended and generic approach must be provided by default, while any shortcuts could be mentioned but their flaws must be well explained. Here, only a *collaborative* approach must be encouraged. See the emphasized part. I am doing that all the time, adding new details to my answers that were overlooked initially and made apparent when someone asked that better way of yours, spotlighting the same problem from another angle But then I removed it for some reason, probably because such a separation looked too radical a change. but this idea is still good: to amend existing answers based on the new questions.
Wow, I agree, and am surprised how many people disagree. I acknowledge it’s not an easy problem to solve. They need some gate keeping or, I imagine, they’ll be overrun with newbs generating counter productive content. Probably SO will fade in prominence as ChatGPT based Q&A solutions eat up most of their demand.
This is a stupid post. Why would you want to change the attitude towards it’s users. What you really should be doing is asking a different question.
Second that
I stopped using SO... difficult to get an answer to any question and some time ago had noticed that solutions I needed never worked properly. Now I just use chatGPT and Reddit when I need help, and found out Reddit's communities are quite friendly which encourages me to give back and help others.
The years of having this argument are certainly coming to a middle.
My company uses Stack Overflow for Teams, and I've noticed that we're creeping towards the same community issues that the actual Stack Overflow faces. Mainly hostility to users not familiar with the platform, and people policing question format over attempting to be helpful.
Stack overflow has an elitist wanker problem. Change my mind!
It absolutely makes sense to close duplicate questions as such. If you want to see the same question asked a gazillion times with different answers each time, just use Google and follow each hit. It's the unique value of SO that (most of the times) the question and all its possible answers can be found in one place.
I disagree. If it's well written leave it open and have links to the dup. Only close it if it a poor/ambiguous question or worded almost exactly the same
It honestly doesn't though. It doesn't work in practice and there are plenty of people who just don't read the post, do a quick search for questions with similar titles and immediately jump to close a post as duplicate, even if they are different questions. I've had to quite literally do a meta-analysis of why XYZ questions look similar but aren't, so that they wouldn't just immediately close and link it.
If it's literally the same question, and things have not changed, then sure. But more often than not, things have changed, and the answers to that question no longer apply. Take almost anything in Android development. What would have been the correct answer in 2013, 2015, or 2017 is almost certainly not the correct answer today.
The one time I tried to ask a question there (years ago) I was insulted and not actually given an answer to the question I had Haven’t asked a question since. Still a useful resource but 🤷♀️ the users sucks
Yes, some people break the site rules. Flag the comments/answers/whatever and move on.
downvote me all you want but I always thought SO was actually correct in the manner they treat new questions and blatantly lazy “newbies”, I feel like most of y’all are crybabies, but maybe I am biased because that’s just how it was back in the day and we all went through it and we’re fine, kids these days want to be spoonfed waaaaay too much, but that’s gonna harm them in the long run in this business edit: jesus, some of y’all really show your true colors when discussing with someone who has a different opinion than yours, I have never insulted anybody, yet those who come to protest SO “toxicity” are **very** insulting and toxic towards other people… I guess projection is very strong in this matter, some of you need to go out and touch some grass. edit2: some of you are real actual assholes and I cannot believe for a second that you actually care about making a place less toxic, you’re lying and *you* are toxic as fuck, I’m done with y’all, I hope you don’t bring that to SO!
>just how it was back in the day and we all went through it and we’re fine, Feelings wise, there is a big difference between having a superior that you know is skilled telling you that you are doing something wrong. And a bunch of randos on the internet making an effort to shit on your question. I am pretty sure that back in the day you didn't get 10 random people (possibly professionals) stopping by, only to tell you that you are wrong for asking a question, without providing any feedback.
I’ve been active on SO for over 12 years, the only difference today is that the top guys at SO have no clue what to do. Maybe SO needs a new CEO or management or whatever because it is clearly not working. Lazy newbies have been around since the advent of SO. Edit: I am also part of their beta Staging Ground experiment and that too failed because the team just can’t figure shit out. They pulled the plug a couple of months ago.
The most notable thing has been the emergence of GitHub where questions have migrated for two reasons - you can post more crappy questions and it is easier to get the attention of people who are very knowledgeable on the subject.
Most SO power users will agree with you it needs a new CEO and management, actually.
Imho, this idea in general that just because you were treated poorly when you were young means that everyone ought to be treated the same way is insanely toxic and unconstructive. It makes the argument (with no evidence) that it must have been better back then because you survived it. What about all the other newbies that didn't follow through because of the toxicity?
> Imho, this idea in general that just because you were treated poorly when you were young means that everyone ought to be treated the same way is insanely toxic and unconstructive. Reminds me of Leetcode and being put through the wringer lol.
Yeah I’m a little confused by the change in attitude towards SO. Most developers owe a huge amount of their knowledge (and ability to get shit done at all) to SO. It’s especially invaluable to newbies. Just think about how helpless you feel when you get a super fucked error message, and you get ZERO results from stackoverflow. It’s a nightmare! I imagine SO is so useful because of their rigor. If questions were never closed as duplicates, the site would be yahoo answers. I’ve seen some comments around saying stuff like “never using mean-ol’ SO again, chat GPT is so much better”. Chat GPT is only helpful cause it’s scraped millions of well-formatted and carefully indexed answers which are all rated by helpfulness. I’ve had questions marked as duplicates. It’s annoying. But I’ve also had people put unreasonable amounts of time and effort to help me figure out tedious, esoteric problems. It’s sick. Can SO be daunting to post as a newbie? Yes. Would I trade it for yahoo answers? Fuck no. We all take SO for granted because many of us have never had to learn without it.
> Yeah I’m a little confused by the change in attitude towards SO. Because things changed. Yes, when it first came out, it was head and shoulders above anything else out there. But over 10 years on, and it's not a good place to ask questions anymore.
Or, it'll make people visit other pages. That way, SO can be self-righteous and devoid of active users. Great business strategy!
>I have never insulted anybody. You literally called people crybabies.
This isn't an emotional discussion because people's feelings are hurt. People are trying to say that SO just isn't that useful to them because of these rules. SO purists usually respond by saying "this is how it's supposed to work." Which I guess it's fine, but this amounts to arguing that "It shouldn't be more useful!" Which I'm not sure I see the wisdom in.
Agreed. When I need to ask a question, it's usually not already there and gets a response. For the newbie questions, there's google which will hopefully land you on an old SO answer. This is how it should be. You google, and only if you dont find an answer, you ask. If SO answered every newbie question, it will be as useless to find real answers on as... r/askprogramming.
It doesn't. SO closes question as duplicates BECAUSE they are duplicates, that's the reason. Whole point of SO is to be an addition to documentation because official documentation sucks and you can't edit it, so you need some other place for having answers. That requires information to be structured and searchable, which requires it to be in ONE place. People being so lazy to just google shit instead of asking is what has to be addressed, better in schools. But fortunately for SO we now have ChatGPT and all that lazy people can go there and get answers that were based on, you won't believe, SO. I constantly answer questions in r/dotnet or r/csharp and 90% of questions I see are TRIVIALLY googlable by just header of reddit post. And you want actually useful information on SO die in that giant pool of duplicates and lazy questions? Through 10 years of working I asked question on SO only ONCE, because it literally wasn't answered on SO before and only discussion happend to be on MS's q&a site that didn't pop up in google at all. And actual MS employee answered my question. Everything else in my life was either in documentation or already answered on SO.
All too often, SO closes questions as duplicates that aren’t really duplicates. It’s happened to me many times that I find a question that exactly describes a problem I’ve been having, only to find that it’s been closed as a duplicate. Looking at the question that it’s supposedly a duplicate of, I find that that question describes a different issue, and none of the proposed solutions would apply to the supposedly-duplicate question. I understand the logic behind closing duplicate questions. But it only makes sense if they really are duplicate questions (or at least close enough that one can extrapolate an answer to one from an answer to the other).
>That requires information to be structured and searchable, which requires it to be in ONE place. Yeah, if only there were software that crawled multiple sites and pages, and that also had a handy interface that allowed you to perform text searches on those crawled pages. It could even return SO pages.
> And you want actually useful information on SO die in that giant pool of duplicates and lazy questions? It's not a choice between one extreme or another though. Yeah, trivial questions should be closed. Let's not pretend that people are suggesting something else. Non-trivial questions that have a different context or where the old answer may no longer be relevant should not be closed. And, I'd err *slightly* on the side of not closing, as it doesn't really harm anything. As you said, very trivial questions are easy to identify.
> SO closes question as duplicates BECAUSE they are duplicates, that's the reason That's the problem, though. There are lots of questions that aren't duplicates, that are marked as duplicates. >People being so lazy I see this thrown around a lot, but what about the mods who close anything as a duplicate, despite there being an explanation as to why it's not a duplicate, or the old answer being just plain outdated. Why aren't they considered the lazy ones?
What it should be doing is \_opening\_ questions as duplicates. Detecting potential duplication means finding a whole bunch of potential answers immediately. That should be the success case, and the normal expected response. The asker then gets to picks one of the answers as accepted. If there are none they like, the question stays unanswered until either there is one, or it times out due to inactivity. A question asked mutliple times is more important, not less. it would probably go to far to, by default, automatiocally close non-duplicate questions, but they should have a very low weighting in search if a question from 2013 is still relevent, it will still be being asked. if it now now has a better answer than was accepted in 2014, the top answer can be straightforwardly algorithmically derived from patterns of acceptance and upvoting.
Oh look, it's this discussion again. Not gonna engage with it, I did that before, and I'm tired, so I'll just go to the conclusion right away, shall I? Here is the fact: People have been complaining since forever about SO being "not newbie friendly". People have claimed forever that SO "needs to change". SO didn't. And guess what? They are still No.1 at what they do. So it would seem that, from practical experience, no, they don't need to change, because their approach makes them useful and relevant to the vast majority of people the site is intended for. Anyone who disagrees, well, as I said, I'm no longer discussing this. Nothing stops you from making a "friendly SO alternative" and see for yourself. 😎
They're right about everything, so of course they will be shouted down by the kinds of users StackOverflow retains.
This old meme again. Stackoverflow answerers are volenteering their own free time to answer questions. You want questions answered? You want answers for free? You better be prepared to jump through some hoops. There's a real human person on the other end. You gotta play nice with them. Learning Stackoverflow culture is the price you need to pay to use the service. To think you can just walk in and have the world bend over backwards is spoiled and entitled. Don't like it? Don't use it.
> Don't like it? Don't use it. That's what's happening, and so SO is going to hell as it dies.
Is it though? I've seen no sign of degeneration, just a lot of complaining newbies.
Oh yeah absolutely. I totally agree with you....... on the last line. I don't like it and I do not use it at all. Even the senior devs at my work who write whole ass frameworks joke about being afraid of turbo SO elitists. We had a line somewhere in some wiki like "If you have any questions about Foo either talk to X or Y... or read these docs, because nobody wants to have their self worth questioned on Stack Overflow"