That boat sailed off into the sunset a really long time ago.
Whatever comes next should consider not starting by talking down to new users.
Source: I’m still pissed about a ten year old bug that threw out my helpful answer after I composed it because I didn’t have enough bullshit Internet points.
A decade later it doesn’t really feel like SO has fixed their fundamentally “asshole to new contributors” vibe.
I’m glad someone else contributes, but I can’t be arsed myself. And honestly, it doesn’t look like the staff at SO really care.
So I expect the current SO cohort will eventually age out and something new, with a new vibe, will replace it. I hope it has pokemon memes.
If that new thing is polite, I might contribute there.
Pro tip: I’m at least twice as likely to contribute to the next thing if they revive the domain ExpertSexChange.com.
SO has helped me countless times, so I can’t thank it enough. However, it just seems impossible to become an “expert” these days. I can’t even vote when a solution has helped me. I’ve tried raising my own legitimate questions, but at this point they’re going to be obscure & niche, so that no one interacts with it, and I don’t get magical internet points so that I can contribute myself. It’s actually really frustrating since I’ve actually wanted to give back to the community, and it just seems to work actively against me.
At one point I decided it was time for me to contribute by answering questions.
I sorted by new in PHP and found a brand new, really confusing & poorly written question. After about 5 times reading it through I finally understood what they needed, and wrote a full answer along with corrected code that I had tested.
Got an error when I submitted my answer that the question was locked. Just before I submitted my answer, a mod had locked it because it was a low quality question. I wasn’t allowed to submit my answer to their problem.
I haven’t tried writing an answer since. Just felt like a massive slap in the face for trying to finally contribute.
I had the exact same experience. First, I tried to ask a question and couldn’t for some reason (it was ~10 years ago). Then in an attempt to gain points that would allow me to ask questions (I think that was my issue) I kept getting rejected.
At the time I was active on Experts Exchange but, they were moving to a paid model. I thought I could find community on SO. You’re right it does feel like a slap in the face. I hate all of Stack because of SO.
Having a bunch of answers to very poor questions is not the goal.
If you managed to parse out a good question in there of general interest that has not been answered yet, you can submit it yourself and provide your own answer. That way you are actually adding something valuable to the site.
I agree that it is really hard to contribute in a meaningful way though.
Stack Overflow is in an impossible situation. You can’t both be a good meeting-place for experts and a good place for novices to get expert advice and an advertising venue. Those things have fundamentally incompatible requirements.
Any two of them, maybe.
You can’t both be a good meeting-place for experts and a good place for novices to get expert advice and an advertising venue.
I don’t agree. There is no clear cutout between what means to be an expert and a novice. What content you’re exposed to is the output of the service’s support for user profiling and search. It is simply not possible to get rid of an important subset of your customer base without causing false positives and generate ill-will. Finally, we should keep in mind that yesterday’s novice is today’s expert.
All of the comments seem to be quite vehemently against the proposals, so it seems that stack overflow is quite happy with its somewhat toxic nature disguised as organisation :/
Being against this specific proposal does not mean people are happy with the current state of things. Is it possible that this particular proposal is bad and does not address the issues? I mean, the first item of grievance is complaining about how StackOverflow curates content by removing duplicate questions and problems that cannot be reproduced, with vague complains that this is newbie-friendly. Is this a reasonable complaint? I don’t think so.
I’m surprised at how negative the reaction to SO is here! It just takes a while to get the site, which unfortunately doesn’t work if you jump right in without lurking. If you ask questions the moment you run into trouble, you kind of project a disrespect for the answerer’s time by not trying to solve it yourself first. If you ask as a last resort and list what you’ve tried, people are waayy nicer, even if your question sucks.
I think the real problem is that people’s expectations aren’t properly primed going in. The site could do a much better job about that. If you ask only as a last resort, you end up solving most of your problems yourself, and SO is REALLY good at helping you do that, in a way that leaves most other sites in the dust, in my opinion.
I think the issue is that, as a new dev, you also have no idea where to go for the type of help you need, and SO is always at the top of the search results. I’ve found that discord servers are better for helping newbies because it allows more experienced users to interactively teach them how to ask questions and how to read documentation. Handing someone a URL and saying “look it up” is pretty helpful for a newbie, but that’s discouraged on SO since answers are much more permanent and links degrade over time.
Maybe SO needs some way to direct those who “don’t get the site” to a more chat-room like community where they can get their very common questions answered quickly rather than posting a duplicate question that no one wants to take the time to fully explain in a single answer.
I base my opinion here on my experience with the Python discord, which is probably one of my favorite haunts these days. It excels at helping newbies, of which there are many each day, because their questions are quick to answer and can be handled almost instantly by any decently experienced active user. It’s the more specific or advanced questions that languish there, because it’s less likely that someone experienced with that particular domain will happen to be online. It doesn’t need to concern itself with archival quality because no one expects answers to be referenced later.
So I think both types of communities can play to their strengths without diminishing their quality. The chat rooms can answer the simple, open ended questions that don’t bring value to SO’s database of knowledge, and the more complex and advanced questions can have a better chance of being seen and answered with valuable insight on SO.
It just takes a while to get the site, which unfortunately doesn’t work if you jump right in without lurking.
I don’t really think that’s the problem here. It’s pretty clear that people answering most questions just want to be contrarian. Here’s a question I asked earlier this year (not on SO, but I’ve had the same exact problem on SO years ago) where I detailed literally everything I tried and instead of reading the post, the answerer literally said:
To be candid, this is much to lengthy and broad to follow. When you get the wait cursor (the spinning beachball of death), it means that the system is waiting for something before it can move on. It could be from either RAM or your disk or another application. Before you start taking drastic steps, boot into Safe Mode and see if the problem persists.
If they had literally read even a quarter of the way through the post they would have seen that I had already done what they suggested. It’s clear the problem is with the platform. Not the people asking the questions.
In fact if you look back at most of my questions you’ll find a majority of them not answered. Not because I didn’t provide enough information, but because SO rewards tagging and closing questions rather than answering the actually difficult questions. And because of that it’s just better to have a billion questions that get closed than answer a single question that might take more than a few minutes, even if that question comes with an example project to show the problem at hand
I’m curious as to what reward you believe that people are getting from closing questions?
there’s a bunch of badges for things that can only be accomplished by flagging.
You also get the nice ‘feeling’ of clearing your queue. The faster you do that the better you feel. It’s literally all rewards for putting as little effort in to get as much ‘reward’ as possible.
While I respect the degree of technical expertise you can get on SO, I am very much convinced this is a failed experiment which will slowly collapse on itself. And I think that because the organization of the site is completely at odds with it’s professed goal.
SO is not really a forum, because time is supposed to be irrelevant : a 12 years old answer takes precedence over a question asked now, failing to consider that, maybe, the context of this question has changed. Its ridiculous, especially in the context of software engineering.
On the other hand, it’s not a library either : a library is a collection of book, which are relatively self-contained knowledge systems. And in practice, the SO answers are not self-contained. They merely answer a specific point, with no guaranteed coherence from one to another, so a beginner cannot use them to build a broad understanding of a subject.
To take the analogy of the Cathedral and the Bazar, I am under the impression that SO members are trying to build a cathedral out of the stone sold by hundred of bazaar people, and refuse to see that fact that all stones all having different sizes and dimensions is maybe kind of a problem when you build a cathedral.
