StackOverflow took the place of news/dejanews for me. It's a first place to stop whenever I have trouble with just about any piece of software or writing software, usually the answer is right there on the first place in a fairly easy to digest form. Along with wikipedia and the Khan academy it is a fantastic resource.
Amazing it is only 5 years old, it feels like it has been around forever, I recall coming across it for the first time while still in Canada and thinking 'this is neat'. I never contributed which is really a miss on my part but I try to keep the number of accounts that I have to an absolute minimum and stackoverflow is plenty useful as it is today. I really should do some community service there one of these days, it is only fair.
Hard to imagine that even google could not rescue usenet (or rather, dejanews) from the spam and the trolls.
>> I never contributed which is really a miss on my part
I love StackOverflow. However, I think the worst part of Stack Overflow is how hard it is to contribute as a new member. You need to build up reputation points and they can be very hard to get. Questions get 'sniped', answers get deleted or buried, and very often when you help another new user out, they never return to the site to accept your answer. It's very frustrating to take the time to answer a question and not receive any feedback.
The best way "in" as a newcomer is to have some knowledge that no one else has. In my case my first good answer (although it took months to get any rep at all) was an obscure bit of paypal sandbox knowledge. I actually came across the knowledge first, and since the problem I had hadn't been solved via StackOverflow I searched SO for the same problem I had been having and updated the old question with my new found solution.
That has since earned me 50 rep. This along with a few other bits took me to the 200 threshold which then gives 100 rep across all stackexchange sites. (Enough to upvote/comment.)
But the fact that "newbies" can't contribute what in all honestly is largely going to be misinformation or "me too" answers is also part of the genius, it gives real answers breathing room and keeps spam out.
My question asking has been less successful. I've asked 2 questions, one of which had no response whatsoever, and the other had an answer which answered the question in the community's mind but because I had been slack with my terminology didn't answer the issue I was really having.
For example I randomly answered a question outside of my primary domain because it was a relatively easy issue that I had encountered myself. I have since earned close to 2,000 rep from that simple answer alone and get 20-50 points a week from it despite it being over 2 years old.
On the other hand answers that I spent way too much time researching have hardly attracted any points at all.
Same experience here. Quick, one or two line answers to simple, common questions seem to do the best.
Although, those questions that I've poured the most time into and really tried to answer thoroughly are my favorites. Especially if it's something I had to do a bunch of research and/or testing to confirm. The lack of feedback is supplanted by the quenching of the thirst to learn something new. In fact, this quenching is my favorite part of the SE sites.
Definitely. Most of my rep is from Prolog answers. I can spend an hour on a lengthy, detailed answer, and the best I can hope for is <4 votes and (maybe) an acceptance. Average return on an answer is probably 20 rep. OTOH, if I squeak a Haskell answer in, average is more like 50-100 rep because there's simply a lot more eyes on Haskell answers. At the same time, this means while there's a good hour or two window between a Prolog question being asked, it's more like 2 minutes for a Haskell question. The community is just really good like that. So there's a limiting factor problem there. Competition for MySQL and Postgres answers is also really high so you have to be really fast with your answering, but all my "greatest hits" were in Postgres.
Question-askers benefit the most from this competitiveness, but without a niche it would be really hard to break in. For a little while it seemed like people were starting to treat S.O. activity as a test of your virtue or capabilities as a programmer. Today it seems absurd to judge someone for not having an account. It's just too hard to get started.
Interesting, you talk about the competition, breaking in, monitoring unanswered questions so you can answer first, etc... - What's the motivation behind it?
I guess it is not just contributing to the common knowledge, but maybe to show off your profile to potential employers or similar?
For me, I just like being helpful. The rep is nice too. Stupid internet points are pretty motivational, but I also review edits, and you don't get any rep for that. I would be flattered if an employer had noticed me on there, but I don't think it's likely to happen. I've been active on SO for longer than I've been active here, but I have gotten many friendly recruitment emails from here and none from there.
Prolog is an extremely small niche. Most of the questions are pretty basic and from students. I don't like seeing students being told odd things about Prolog, with a dismissive air of "Prolog makes no sense, you just have to feed it this nonsense to make it go." So another part of my motivation is to keep this sad religion alive and inviting. Haskell has a much larger community of people working very hard to make it inviting.
The hiring angle probably works better for other niches. Every Java EE question is answered by BalusC. I imagine that pays dividends for his consulting: he's the most helpful guy in that area and I'd hire him in a second if I were in charge of that kind of thing.
My experience: it is still possible to come in an hour and beat the quick answers, although I agree with the other comments about the rep being somewhat unpredictable.
it's got harder for everyone. i'm over 10k and mine isn't going up quickly any more. there are fewer interesting questions (partly because many have been asked, but also because the sites have fragmented and the policing is more strict) and more competition answering.
i'm less sure, but i think answers are getting worse too. it feels like the smarter people have disappeared.
I don't get much rep for answers. I get it for asking the right questions. My rep still isn't fantastic (a few hundred), but it's good enough to give a bounty when I need it.
If you are looking for something, and find older questions, try creating an updated answer for something, or even re-visiting your old answers. A lot of time an answer can change over time, new frameworks/tools etc... about half of my points come from the graveyard.
Try giving more general, more in-depth answers. Such answers, if correct, get dug up by search and keep bringing upvotes months, or even years, after having been written.
I don't get much rep for answers because usually someone else has already given a better answer than I'm able to give. I'm just saying you don't actually have to know anything to get rep. You can get it for asking good questions too. (But first search to check if someone else has already asked the same thing.)
I worked my reputation up to nearly 2000 at the start and then gradually fell off with considerable disgust.
Part of it is that it seems that within a year, the good questions were pretty much answered. It's notable that in the first year, especially the first six months, the site was carefully curated and had a friendly feel to it.
In the present SO, answering questions has become a matter of getting your low-quality answer to a low-quality question out extremely quickly or having some pretty obscure technical knowledge (even then, you're going to get karma only for obscure knowledge, not for a quality answer). And, yeah, I suppose you game things by creating a question similar to an existing high karma question (and this stuff also lowers average site quality too since the best answers kind of hide within ten similar questions).
Further, SO ironically turns out to be much useful when you Google than when you ask your own questions - questions beyond a given difficulty go wanting even if you give a high Karma reward. It seems the smart answers just skim for simplistic questions rather than spending time on any hard questions.
It seems like SO is now just kind of a low-quality-question fest because they've got a troove of good answers from their first year of existence.
I mean, one can claim hn has declined but any decline in hn is a thousand times less than the way StackOverflow has tanked as a site (but it's still great for googling all the good answers from yesteryear. When you're doing that, take note of the answer's dates, btw, I believe that it revealing).
I disagree. I have 5K rep, I am not quite a newbie myself so I rarely ask. But just this month I have been under a lot of pressure with a site launch so I did put in a few questions. When I've asked a tricky MySQL question someone came in like ten minutes, produced a working answer, soon edited to add a fiddle. The dude is programming almost longer than I am alive! I asked a regexp question -- someone with over 50k answered that. Where else would you find free advice like that? SO is amazing.
I made this site: www.rocketships.ca/fixmybug due to that very frustration. It doesn't in anyway replace SO, it's intended to help us help each other solve minor syntax errors and misunderstandings... the sort of thing that gets you banned from Stack Overflow. It's pretty quiet now though as I never got around to drumming up users.
Just a heads up for anyone tempted to run the code from the third question (bash script to play triforce through the system speaker), don't.
I know I'm an idiot for running random code, but I'll save you the suspense - it prints "rm -fr" but doesn't run it, and then prints a message berating you for running it, and insults the Q&A site.
Well, that's because a lot of people use SO as either "do my homework for me" or "I'm too lazy to RTFM, please read it for me" kind of site. But under the pile of this manure, real content is still there, real people with knowledge still answer real questions. But I admit it has become harder to contribute - even in areas that I have considerable knowledge, most questions aren't either interesting or worth the time, and those that are I'd be missing since I can't keep up with the inflow of low-value questions. I wonder if SO has any ideas how to fix it...
But under the pile of this manure, real content is still there, real people with knowledge still answer real questions.
No, not really, not in a density that makes it worth it from anyone. I mean I looked hard at several points for question answerers as well as attempting to be one. You yourself admit the place broken by the end of your post.
The obvious thing is that good answers that involve effort on the part of the answerer generally don't get you anything like the appropriate Karma.
Even more, SO actually reduced the amount of Karma you could get by asking questions so there's nothing to distinguish good questions from crap questions.
The purpose of Stack Overflow is not to serve the people who ask the questions, that's just a happy side-effect. The purpose is to create a resource to serve future Googlers.
There are less broadly-interesting new questions in areas of established technology, but that's fine: there's less need for new questions in areas that the site already serves well. Stack Overflow is not having any trouble getting good questions about new technology as it becomes out.
That's the kind of annoying part about trying to answer questions. Anything requiring a relatively modest amount of knowledge gets answered in seconds. Try to type up something good and comprehensive with links to documentation and all, and there will probably be 4 other answers by the time you're done. And a lot of the moderately challenging or obscure things have been asked and answered already.
Meanwhile, if you actually manage to answer or document some tricky, obscure thing, then often it never gets enough traffic to earn much reputation. Mine is still pretty low, but my highest-rep answer is a one-liner, telling somebody that Mercurial can't track files outside of the repository root directory structure. Meanwhile, an actual challenging, obscure answer, like the one on running ASP.NET with C++ dlls (hint: avoid if at all possible) gets very little.
Asking good questions helps too, but I usually find it faster to look it up or figure it out myself than to format a decent question and wait for responses.
Well this is a feature if you are looking at SO as a place to get answers. There are far more people looking for answers (by asking OR searching) to the basic simple questions.
So if you leave a good answer on something basic and simple, you have provided utility to far more people than if you are leaving a detailed answer to an obscure question.
This, incidentally, is what's lacking in the IRC channels of open source projects. In an IRC channel, questions that are not hard enough get ignored because they are not interesting to the experts in the channel.
So the IRC channel is good if you are hacking on the core, while SO is good if you are just trying to get something done, and the technology in question is a small part of your entire stack.
Patience in online discussions is probably the most valuable (and definitely the most unexpected) thing I've gained from spending time on SO.
Coming from a more traditional forum, I originally expected questions that had a highly-upvoted or "marked" answer to essentially be over and done with - the majority of people will already have read the thread, so relatively few new votes will come in...
...But after five years, I've had ample opportunity to realize this is a flawed way to look at threads - questions - when the vast majority of readers come in via Google in the months and years following its asking.
Being quick on the draw can be fun, but being useful is what nets you the most attention long-term. Folks with real problems tend to keep reading until an answer actually solves them. And the race is not always to the swift...
This is why, despite using the site since the beginning, I don't have an account. The effort required to get enough rep to do anything useful on the site is simply not worth it, and it remains just as useful to me as an anonymous lurker. The few times I have actually tried to build rep have been an exercise in frustration.
If you have no time or incentive to share your knowledge (which is totally OK), maybe staying anonymous is just the right strategy.
Still, to ask a question you have to have only 1 rep point. A really good question or two can get you 100-200 rep in just a few hours. Try it if when you have a good question at hand.
Just to be able to do the normal things you would expect to be able to do: vote down/up, flag things, edit a wiki. That's right, I couldn't even make it to 10 rep...
StackOverflow is intensely competitive when it comes to answering new questions on your favorite tags.
So you could just post answers to problems you debugged on your own and then search SO for a similar question and add your answer. Over a period of time, you'd be surprised when your answers gain votes organically.
Getting started as a new member is hard. Getting started as a new programmer is even harder. You have to ask questions carefully, and search for a previous answer like mad. It has taken my a year and I still feel like I am just barely a member.
I have mostly build my reputation (but it's only in three digits) by asking questions that were meaningful to my problems at hand. And sometimes answering my own questions later.
I agree, the community is somewhat elitist, I got banned from asking about two years ago (Because of low reputation, I was much more "noob") and I'm still waiting...
Wholeheartedly agree about the "feels like it has been around forever", which to me is the mark of a product which has changed the game. I simply can't recall what life was like before it. Conservatively speaking, I'm probably a good 2-3x as productive as I was pre SO.
The only Q&A I can recall before StackOverflow was finding answers on a message board _or_ finding the answers hidden behind a pay-wall. (e.g: ExpertsExchange, which I believe has been around since the 90s.)
the EE answers were never really behind a paywall, simply they were so hidden at the bottom of the page that a normal user did had the idea to scroll fully. After all, they needed to present the information to the google bot.
Did you ever try passing one of those links to a colleague? They were doing some referrer-checking at one point - if you weren't coming from Google, you didn't get the answer.
They did that for a while, but Google implemented a policy that what gets shown to the Googlebot has to be the same as what a user would actually see. EE got delisted from Google for violating that policy, and ever since then, they have the answer way at the bottom of the page no matter what.
Click through to this recently answered question from Google's search results[1] and scroll down to see the answer. Then open the resulting link[2] in an incognito tab and poof no answer
That had been Google's policy for some time, they just started enforcing it for a while. IIRC it was around the same time BMW and a couple of other big names were temporarily de-listed for keyword stuffing and similar shenanigans.
Yes, usually the answer is right there on the first page and it says "Closed as not relevant" (but fortunately it's usually been answered with a helpful answer anyway).
That's a good point. I never really got the 'not relevant' bit. After all, if a question was worth asking it was worth answering (there is no such thing as a stupid question or an irrelevant one, there are stupid answers though. The closest thing to an irrelevant question (or a stupid one) is a question that wasn't asked...).
SO would not suffer unduly from letting these not relevant questions be asked and answered anyway. Relevant Questions are like beauty, they are in the eye of the beholder.
>there is no such thing as a stupid question or an irrelevant one
I think that's where they disagree with you. Stack Overflow aims to keep discussions as minimal as possible and is not the place to weigh the pros and cons of programming language X against that of programming language Y. If you want more information, they cover their take on the issue in great depth on their podcasts (which are great to listen to, regardless).
I like what they've done. By closing all bad questions and a few good questions the site contains only good questions. The obvious downside is that the occasional interesting question is removed, but I think the trade-offs are worth it. And judging by the popularity of the site, I think most everyone else does too, even if they're not consciously aware of it.
SO would suffer, because the kind of question you're talking about is intrinsically debatable. Those questions aren't bad or wrong, but they are inappropriate for the medium of SO, which is about technical questions with concrete answers. SO is not the be-all, end-all of knowledge, but it is pretty close to perfect for technical questions with right answers, and I think it would suffer greatly if it developed an HN or reddit-like clubhouse atmosphere.
If it isn't obvious to you I doubt anybody will be able to "prove" it to your satisfaction. Besides, you can't create rules around impossible conditions like "close any question which will lead to endless debate" so instead you create rules around easily detected conditions like "close any question that isn't concrete."
I don't greatly love SO (though I like it more than I used to) but there are lots of alternatives that lack SO's irksome limitations (slant.co comes to mind). By now it is obvious that whether you like SO's formula or not, it clearly works.
A "not relevant" question is usually not a "bad" question, but just a question that can't have a good, definitive answer. SO are trying to be a site hosting such answers, not discussions.
So opinion-based questions are explicitly unwelcome on SO. They can collect lots of worthy information in comments, so such questions are usually closed but not deleted.
SO even tried to channel the discussions by developing discourse.org so that interested parties can get a them a discussion forum and continue there :)
It was Jeff Atwood (and friends), not SE, that developed discourse. One of the reasons he headed in that direction was because of the discussions that weren't appropriate for SE sites - but it wasn't SE trying to fill the discussion need.
Google obviously didn't even try; Even I could write a bayesian filter to eliminate 90% of the spam that shows up in their web interface, but apparently they didn't bother.
Interesting. I have an opposite view - for me it was easier to find answers before SO. One good example is when you need to get a library recommendation (which is quite a useful thing for a programmer). "SO is Q&A site and doesn't do library recommendations" (literal quote from someone who has closed such a question). The problem is that most of the programmers nowadays hang on SO, so other sites (where such questions would be allowed) have much less audience than they did pre-SO. Sure, I can disguise the question and hope that I will get library recommendations nevertheless, but that's an (ugly) hack.
There are countless other examples where well-researched, popular and in some way contributing questions were shot down because they are unfit for SO.
And as others have pointed out, most karma comes from answers to popular questions, which rewards generic questions which probably have tons of similar answers across the Internet. Domain specific answers however are less awarding.
I cope with that in my way. I ask the questions and treat fairly all who answer / comment, but I hold myself back when I see a question I know the answer to. Why would I answer and help SO? I really hope some alternative arises so I can share my knowledge there, but until then I will just try to survive with SO. And what "if all did that"? Well, I guess the alternative would come much sooner. I wouldn't be unhappy about it, far from it.
"SO is Q&A site and doesn't do library recommendations" (literal quote from someone who has closed such a question)"
Yeah SO is going the way of Wikipedia wrt rule nazi, trigger happy editors, it's very frustrating. Especially since many of those 'editors' have gotten much of their brownie points from farming them through answering 'soft' questions with popular answers, asking beginner-level but popular questions etc. When you look at the profiles of those voting for closing in cases like the one you cite, you very often see that their domain knowledge is very limited.
I've been sort of active on the site since the very beginning which has led me to have a few thousand points there. To my big frustration, a large part of them come from two answers: one in which I recommended the K&R for learning C, and another how to use the @ operator in PHP to suppress warning messages. I'm a bit disheartened every time I get yet another vote for those answers.
Anyway, what I was going to say was that I get the impression that when I ask or answer a question from that account (with several thousand points and active for 5 years), I'm treated differently than people on new accounts with few points, even when their question is worded exactly the same way I'd do it. It feels like bullying by low-quality users who through grinding stumbled upon editing powers. It certainly (mostly) stopped me from contributing a year or 2 ago; not even so much for the morality of it, but more the overall idea that a site run by the distinctly mediocre (even if there are a few very high quality contributors) just doesn't give me great confidence in the quality of what is on there.
Of course this is a widely documented phenomenon with any UGC (hey there's a buzzword we haven't heard since 2009!) site after it hits a certain critical mass, we just have to look at the very site we're reading now...
Nice to know I am not the only one - I have a similar answer that brings me enough points I can see my reputation safely (and undeservedly) rising.
However my biggest problem with SO is actually that it is narrow in scope, but due to its success other (broader reaching) sites don't have enough users. I still hope they will change their policies to allow broader (still well-researched) questions, but I am not holding my breath.
> Amazing it is only 5 years old, it feels like it has been around forever
Indeed, it seems like every programming question I input on Google gives me a (helpful) StackOverflow post. It and Wikipedia are probably my top two most common results on Google.
Yeah, usenet used to be the place where you could get any question answered (though often accompanied by a flamewar). I think I may have actually stopped using usenet around the time I started using Stackoverflow.
I find it to be an enormous productivity help too. Almost always it's the best hit from Google on any programming problem that I have.
The one thing I've noticed is I've switched from being a contributor to a consumer of information. I'm not sure if it's selfishness, or just that the easy questions have all been answered. I wonder if this is part of any larger trend.
Perhaps there's a way to measure the maturity of software by looking at the age and upvote distributions for its posts on StackOverflow. The common questions get answered well and stick around for quite a while, usually helped along by edits. New projects with "easy questions" yet to be asked should have a decent new question velocity without any mega-answers.
It (StackOverflow) is still one of the places for me to get valuable information as well. I find Hackernews to be valuable in terms of news articles but StackOverflow in terms of finding out information that I need then and there (When troubleshooting servers, etc).
Why didn't usenet take off on the Internet? I was wondering the same thing.
The only complaint I have about Stack Overflow is when you're looking for a library or toolchain and want to get a feel for some of the pros and cons of each of the tech currently being used. I understand the argument of why these questions are killed. But I also have to think that there is value in these conversations.
I share that feeling, but I also have to restrain it in the face of the fact that Stack Overflow doesn't seem like it's about discussion, or at least not open-ended discussion. It's about getting expert answers to focused questions, not polling for data or asking opinions.
However, I really wish someone would build and maintain a "Stack Overflow" for open-ended discussion. It'd basically be a classic forum (in terms of content) but with a different layout.
Yes, the distinction between discussion and expertise killed some of my enthusiasm as a contributor. In the end I decided to just enjoy the service as a user.
This looks awesome! One pet peeve: when I scroll all the way down and click "next", it should automatically scroll me back to the top, so I don't have to do it myself. Too many single-page apps make this mistake!
Thanks mate! Agreed on the scrolling, I'll file a bug :) if you have any other feedback or ideas I'd love to hear them, either here or at Stuart@slant.co
I suspect that the Stack Overflow community would agree that there's value in those conversations. And they'd also assert that they belong somewhere else, since Stack Overflow questions are meant to have right answers.
It's worse than that, there's pretty much no effective way to use the site to learn about a topic. It's a very effective Q&A site but that's all it is; it was meant to be slightly more but has never managed to achieve that. I'd say there's a very big opportunity in there for anyone who wants to try to compete.
Actually, I've used Stack Overflow to learn things by trying answering questions I don't know much about. Most of the time I don't succeed in answering them, but I always find out a lot while trying to research/figure it out.
My complaint is that almost every web-related javascript question is answered with "jQuery". I didn't ask about jquery, I asked about javascript god damnit. I understand it's the right answer in many cases, but the full answer should be: "You can do it like this or much easier using library like jQuery".
But then you have the power to make it abundantly clear that you don't want answers that depend on jQuery. If you do get a "but you can do this with jQuery" without also supplying a pure javascript answer, then downvote.
It probably doesn't work. It's like lots of Windows batch file questions get answered with "install cygwin and then use this arcane invocation". Given that I'm one of the few who who can competently answer such questions without installing anything else (with a slightly more arcane invocation) I often find that a little sad. I almost thought about going around answering Unix shell scripting questions with PowerShell answers, but Pash isn't that far yet.
True. But many questions that come up, that were already answered. And for years jQuery was fancy and most answers to JS questions are that way. Only recently people start to use pure vanilla JS 5. Thankfully the community adds new pure JS answers to old questions... though you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page.
I'm sure this won't get me any love, but I worked at Experts-Exchange at one point, and it's not the horrible place SO and Jeff Atwood have painted it as.
Spammy marketing tactics? Sure. Is SO better? Absolutely. But in the process of building SO, Jeff and company have basically trashed EE's name, and after seeing EE from the inside I'm one of the rare few who don't think EE is evil incorporated.
Eh, I hated EE long before I came across SO or heard of Jeff Atwood. My experience of it was basically just an annoying minigame in Google where you had to remember not to click certain results no matter how useful they sounded.
When it first arrived on the scene it was much like quora is now and I loved that. But then they started trying to trick people into signing up, etc. It just went from awesome to dagnabbit quickly. So when there was one place to find a bunch of other programmers that popped up, I jumped on it.
EE's business model was built in the early days of the internet, and before SO came around they had lots of paying customers. "Tricking people to sign up" was really just their attempt at monetizing content. It clearly did not pan out to be the best long-term strategy, but when you already have thousands of paying customers, it gets pretty difficult to "open up" to the general public vs. a company like SO which started open and monetized in other ways (Careers).
It's not necessary to be evil in your heart to nevertheless do things that are evil or have very negative consequences. EE was classic bait and switch. Moreover, they monetized cloud sourced answers without adding anything of value to the equation (compare this to stackexchange which put a lot of R&D into a system that facilitated better quality answers and also goes out of their way to keep their content open). Certainly that's not the worst crime anyone has ever committed but it's very scummy and has had a very real negative impact on a lot of people's lives. Thinking that the solution to your problem is available when it's not or finding out that it's behind a paywall (without even knowing if the "answer" actually works) is very disheartening.
Sorry, but this characterization is plain wrong. The experts on EE got VIP treatment when I was there, and they were getting good consulting work as a result of their answers.
EE also had teams working on improving the question/answer experience long before SO came around. I'd agree that SO is better now, but to say "no value added" is applying a blanket statement that isn't true.
EE's business model ended up losing out in the long term, but that's all that really happened. The characterizations and generalizations made about EE are pretty silly when you take a hard look at it.
To be honest, I really enjoyed EE. I answered enough questions to earn VIP and even had shirts and things sent to me.
However I ended up letting my experience lapse, and I lost my VIP status and from then on I was bummed.
If you aren't a VIP I couldn't imagine ever paying to see the answers.
If you were a VIP then the experience on EE was similar to SO.
Stackoverflow is so good.. anytime it's not stackoverflow, I'm sooo disappointed. A feature that I miss on stackoverflow would be a way to still use it on "incorrect" questions. For instance, someone asks "What's the best Linux distribution?". Obviously, it will be flagged and closed because it will most likely create a debate rather than having a strong and unique "best" answer.
However, it would still be interesting to have another tab, say "Discussion", where people could shoot arguments and the best ones could still be upvoted. So, yes, there wouldn't be "one best answer", but it would still be fun to read the best answers.
If there were discussions then it wouldn't be so good for exactly what it's good for, discovering good solid answers to obscure programming problems.
Where else to discover why date pickers don't always properly show up[1] or why the default printer doesn't stay in sync in VB6[2].
Discussions would quickly drown out the real content and it would degrade. I love the fact that from the start SO has been about real answers to real problems.
Isn't this what Quora is? I notice a vast amount of sentiment on HN about how we need a "subjective place to discuss" and yet you already have it (quora).
My reaction is - you don't. What's becomes more helpful than reading discussions about what $FRAMEWORK1 is better than $FRAMEWORK2 (that inevitably are not supposed to end) is to stop discussing and build yourself.
Quora looks and sounds great, but it's gathered a lot of ill will with its tactics - which Stack Overflow pointedly does not use, and so, me (and probably others) would like a Quora site with Stack Overflow-like openness.
This. It's the only avenue that a competitor could use to subvert Stackoverflow. Make a copy of SO, but allow subjective questions, and make it easy for people who are trying to discuss them to migrate from SO to your site.
StackOverflow is the website that changed my life the most. It's second only to Google Search. Google Maps is third. Facebook and Twitter could die tomorrow for all I care.
For me, Twitter is actually very usual tool for keeping up to date on industry news, blog posts, articles etc, I use it ONLY for work and not for personal stuff. Using TweetDeck, I find it invaluable (and I never thought I would before I started using it) since it let's be keep a watch on specific hashtags.
Do you mind if I ask how you are able to use Twitter to keep on top of stuff? I only really have HN and Reddit to keep up with work related news. I've never been able to figure out how to use Twitter for anything useful. It's total gibberish to me.
Not the guy you asked, but it's all about who you follow. You can't use Twitter like Facebook (i.e. "friending" everyone you tangentially know) without getting a useless flood of information overload.
Twitter is literally only as good as who you follow. You know the types that deride twitter as "Morons posting what they had for lunch" or similar? The answer is "don't follow people who post moronic food-based tweets".
Treat it more like an RSS feed with incidental two-way communication and you'll have a grand time.
Like Karunamon said, it's all about who you follow. I use Twitter exclusively for work, Facebook for personal use. Remember, Twitter is completely open, so think of it as an extension to your work persona.
Using Tweetdeck, I have a few columns set up, one displays everyone I follow, another few which aggregate specific hashtags. Since I work with a specialist piece of .Net software, I can have a column serve only tweets for that area. I had no value in Twitter before this and found out about more stuff relevant to me than through HN or Reddit. It does depend on how you use it, e.g. setting up a #aspnet search would likely yield to many irrelevant results, but follow someone like Scott Hanselman or Jon Skeet and you may learn a few crazy things!
I don't use Twitter the way it's supposed to be used.
However, I've found its search function useful for tracking breaking news. E.g., you can get to see the perp's mug shot an hour before the world does. Or pull up his LinkedIn before it gets deleted. Or find his Facebook page without doing the spadework yourself. You'll also come across random factoids that you can use to sharpen up your Google searches.
It's also useful for keeping up with certain technical areas. E.g., you can do a search on golang, scan through the results and happen upon stuff you might not come across otherwise.
Completely agree with all the "feels like it's been around forever" sentiment. I was surprised to read this post and be reminded that it's only been five years!
One of the things if feels like people have overlooked in the comments is the power of gamification. I know it's kind of a passe buzzword these days, but StackOverflow really innovated: reputation not just for questions but for everything, badges, bonuses for everything from editing your answers a lot to sticking around for a year. When I started contributing, I was surprised at how "hooked" it felt. I know I should feel a bit ambivalent about this, but it's a big part of the secret sauce that's made it a really effective community.
As a new developer, stack overflow has been an invaluable resource. My boyfriend (who's been a developer for many years now) always tells me I don't know how nice I have it every time he sees me open stack overflow up to figure something out. "In my day... I had to walk to school in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways..." But although I don't know from personal experience how much harder things were pre- stack overflow - I can certainly appreciate it! It's taken a lot of the headache out of learning for me and is a great safety net when I'm unsure.
A lot of people like to hate on Stack Overflow for closing questions and editing questions / answers, bit I really like it. It's much better than anything that came before.
They may not drive the traffic of Stackoverflow, but from what I've seen most of them are great sources of information for their particular topics. There are several other Stackexchanges I personally have found quite useful (ubuntu, tex, cooking, gaming, and homebrew mainly). I also enjoy just reading popular questions and answers from various sites as they can be quite interesting. Some examples:
I think programmers are always very trendy concerning new services. Think about how reddit was mostly programmers/startups at first or how facebook evolved from being a very specific audience. It'll take some time but in a few years everyone will be as quick as programmers to "google it". And when that happens, the other stackoverflow will certainly get a big bump.
Also, I think for some stackoverflow, it's not enough to tweak the colors.. Some of them might need a real disruptive tool to make it happen. For instance, the cooking one could have a hardware adapters to be used in the kitchen. Ok, that was a silly example, but I hope you get the idea.
It's not likely to ever produce another massive category product hit like Stackoverflow. Such success requires very high levels of specialization and dedication (not to mention a category big enough to begin with; all of which are already dominated by very large competitors, eg cooking / recipes).
Why would cooking experts or financial pros be drawn to Stack Exchange? They won't be. They'll stick to sites dedicated to those things that possess a very narrow focus, where the quality of content is likely to be higher.
It was an interesting attempt on Stack's part to spread out, but who really thought the end result would be them taking over every category?
Just take a look at Personal Finance / Money. That's a huge category that is very lucrative. Yet they're getting a whopping 5 questions per day for a three year old site, and a mere 7,200 visits per day. Why? Because "money.stackexchange.com" can never be promoted properly as a brand, it can never carry any kind of reputation as a separate product. An average person isn't going to buy into the notion that that site possesses authority on personal financial matters.
Guess it's a different viewpoint. Does everything need to dominate other areas? Why not focus on one thing (in this case question-answer) and simple become the best in that area?
I prefer if companies and sites focus on becoming the best in their area rather than continually pivoting to seek more eyeballs/profit.
The problem stackexchange faces now isn't failure, failure is easy to spot and often straightforward to fix. Instead they risk not living up to their potential, and not by a small amount but by orders of magnitude. With enough effort they could be the new backbone of q&a and forums on the entire web, but they've instead settled into a much smaller niche where they feel more comfortable.
The niche sites are comparatively tiny, but they are useful - I've found answers I needed, and if they weren't there (since the post count is low, as you say), I got great, rapid answers when I asked them.
Stackoverflow is my favorite example of how crappy I am at predicting things. When Joel announced it, I had 0 doubt that it will be a flop. I think 2 months later I visited it and it was completely clear to me that I was wrong. Rare case when I am super happy to be wrong. Happy Birthday!
StackOverflow remains not only my #1 resource, but the resource I give to people when tutoring them. I encourage using it not only as a helper for bugs, but also for questions like "how best to do X". The sooner they use StackOverflow for their programming issues, the sooner they start understanding what they're doing.
What really helped me out when I was first starting doing web development was that no matter the question, people had the same problem as me -- usually VERBATIM. I can't stress how nice it is to copy and paste something into Google and get back the answer.
On a final note, I encourage everyone to try to give back a little into StackOverflow. I've been going for about 2 years and have around 4 thousand reputation built up, mostly on Rails questions. But at the same time, I'm starting to notice that there are a lot of rookie answers (although this might be a Rails-specific issue)... and this is coming from someone who's still in college and not a full time web dev yet. If you're good, answer a few questions.
Stack overflow is great but I have mostly stopped trying to contribute to it because my questions or answers are often closed or whatever. Or some mod or someone just comes and insults me on the basis that they thought my question was stupid or not right somehow.
Congratulations to SO!! In addition to being a great resource for developers worldwide, I think the most powerful impact that it has made can be summed up by the following in the post:
"An incredible number of people jumped at the chance to help a stranger"
This. The idea that you are able to help someone across the world in a matter of seconds is incredible. In case of SO, it applies to programming and technology but imagine if we had other SOs that did the same for poverty, hunger, education and world peace. Just a thought!!
I don't like posting on SO because it doesn't matter how careful I am to word my questions I always get asked to "show your code". Even when I'm asking about general usage of an API or theory.
Usually I end up posting my code and these people disappear without answering my question.
People seem to be only interested in questions where they can spot missing semi colons and get some easy points.
I agree, a lot of the time your code would be too long and involved or too confidential to post.
So, what you need to do is boil your problem down to an essential few lines sufficient to make the bug happen or illustrate what you are trying to do. A lot of times, when you do that, you find your answer along the way.
Sometimes it can be difficult, however. E.g., you may have a race condition that shows up in your actual code but which you can't make happen in your short example. Then you just have to explain your question as best you can.
I appreciate Stack Overflow even more when I think about it in terms of a broader trend.
A paper published earlier this year showed that online comments can affect Americans' perceptions of science. In fact, the comments posted on science articles can persuade readers more than the articles themselves. [0]
This got me thinking: every year more people are turning to the Internet for advice about serious subjects — medical advice, technical advice, a basic understanding of science. This fact, combined with the findings about the persuasiveness of comments, suggests that comments are tied to a growing ethical responsibility.
In other words, if you manage a website that deals with, say, health care, science or technology, you have an ethical obligation to a) recognize the potential harm that can result from misinformation in comments; b) take action to minimize that harm and facilitate a productive dialogue.
This brings me to Stack Overflow, which has a responsibility to offer accurate, useful feedback about programming. The stakes can be high, considering that a malicious or misinformed user could easily convince others to execute harmful code.
I think Stack Overflow is an excellent example of how sites can use rewards systems to encourage positive feedback and punish (i.e. downvote) those who disseminate misinformation or off-topic questions. The feedback as a whole seems very focused and accurate.
I hope other sites that offer serious advice will become more aware of their responsibility to solicit accurate comments. Now that we know comments can seriously affect readers' perceptions, it seems that an anything-goes comment form can be unethical. Stack Overflow may be a great role model in this respect.
I've got over 15k rep on SO and I've found more and more difficult to make an impact on there. Questions have either been asked or are answered instantly. All the time I'm getting answers and questions closed down and deleted as mods are gardening. I don't know what the answer is but its grown to the point where I find it too much effort too much.
Having said all that I'm just glad that its there. I remember coding without the internet (and I don't just mean a router failure) and that had its own challenges but SO has got me answers typically with in minutes and now instantly as the Q. base has grown. It's an amazing resource. If they can work out how people can contribute easily again it will be here for years to come.
Besides all the bad things and malicious behaviour of the big players (yes, all of them) the internet has brought to us, there're still sites that have changed the world to a better place. Especially StackOverflow has contributed largely to increase the equaly of opportunities. Due to the lack of basic education and access to hardware and the internet not yet everybody, but a massivly increased number of people can become great developers. At some point you need help from the experienced. Books and online documentation don't help anymore, that's where SO comes into play. It made me a 2-3 times better developer and kept my spirit up when I couldn't solve a problem by myself.
Congratulations. I remember following the Joel/Jeff podcast and signing up to SO as soon as I could. Even before it started I had a feeling it would be a great place and I still think SO is one of the few places that got gamification right.
I can't believe its only 5 years old, it feels like its been there for a long time.
SO has always helped me a great deal. I remember when I first started going to SO for answers, soon I had an urge to contribute back to the SO community, whatever little I could. I used to work with .net and SQL Server those days, and I used to have Linqpad open and ready right from the morning, looking for questions that I could answer. As soon as I found a question I can answer, I would verify it as quickly as possible and post it. I still remember how annoying it was to get the answer right and to realize someone posted a similar answer just seconds before I did. Good old days.
My biggest pet peeve is the 'trigger happy mods' at Stackoverflow. They jump at the opportunity to lock a question. Often questions are well suited for SO & there's no better place to find a credible answer.
Google should learn from the SO duplicate questions finder. I have often been surprised at how good it works. In contrast to that, Google doesn't have anything like this on Google Code bug trackers (most importantly for their own products) or its support forums. The amount of unnoticed duplicate Chrome bug reports is huge.
Stack Overflow fills the void all the other ranking sites couldn't or didn't. They put the people and content first and grew an amazing network in a short amount of time. I'm even concatenating `stackoverflow` to the end of my searches sometimes when I know the format I want my answer in.
It was around when I started coding. So it literally seems like forever to me.
I have definitely hated the attitudes of a lot of people over there and also the unusual closing of questions, but its inarguable that this site is probably one of the most important things on the internet for programmers.
I'm amazed that it's only 5 years old. In those years, it's redefined both how software development works and the terminology we use to describe it. Honestly, it's helped me to become a better developer in so, so many ways.
I managed to get around 2.5k rep, but since my higher-level questions don't get enough attention, I offer bounties - losing the rep. Even if I then answer my own question, the rep remains gone. This never makes sense to me.
I cannot remember giving a bounty that was actually worth it (in the low six figures of rep by now). Sometimes you have a question and no answer turns up in a few days. You put a bounty up and suddenly you get answers, but they're just grasping for straws, or the bounty in that case, by simply answering anything that could be helpful. At least for my unanswered questions a bounty never turned up a good answer.
StackOverflow and the StackOverflow community shaved years off my quest to learn to develop software. I can't express enough how much I owe to the people who made SO and make SO thrive.
Rise of SO and time span of its rising is really amazing!!
It's going to be part of classic cs literature. already recruiters ask for SO reputation before hiring.
That's not really true. Look at "grinding" in MMOs. I don't think people enjoy the process of grinding, just the end result (some virtual coins or whatever). It's really a Pavlovian brain hack.
Stackoverflow has been immensely useful for someone who is curious or stuck on coding related topics. I have asked close to 500 questions over the course of 3 years having checked it almost daily with some months of hiatus.
The amount of knowledge gained from questions alone is immense. I have answered about 20 questions but I found it a lot less attractive as I'd rather learn new things than recite from memory solutions.
The questions are growingly become more and more strict in terms of moderation and for new comers it's frustrating experience to have your questions closed because existing members like to taunt newbies. I don't see SO taking off anymore, rather finding on news.ycombinator means it has peaked. The very people that flock to SO are shunned for asking questions that are not clear. Rather than aid them, questions are closed. This leaves a very bad taste in a newbies mouth. The massive traffic is from the previous accumulation of users but again the overly zealous moderators have ruined the welcoming community image.
Long ago someone asked about intended meaning vs literal meaning in questions. This received massive amount of downvotes (existing gurus) but I saw this is something critical that SO founders have completely missed.
Remember in Pakistan, during the 1971 war with India. The civilians that have put Bhutto in power have become so alienated from socialist policies of the leader, failing to see that it's the people that put an individual in power. He was ousted by the CIA but it wouldn't have been possible without the general animosity and betrayal from the public.
>>> have your questions closed because existing members like to taunt newbies
I don't think anybody likes to taunt newbies. However, people that donate their time to SO want their time to be used efficiently, and usually fixing badly written question is not the most efficient use of one's expert knowledge and time. People want common investment - you invest in good question, they invest in good answer, everybody wins. Of course, newbies may not know what "good question" is, and experts may have seen so many bad questions over their tenure that their temper has been worn thin, thus sometimes misunderstandings happen. But I think approaching it with understanding that it is a common investment, and asker has to invest first to get their investment back with sizeable profit of a good answer may be helpful here.
what is the entire internet? it's a collection of servers talking to each other an agreed upon and standardized protocols that browsers running on operating systems can understand. I would SO close this question right now (pun intended) ;)
>the overly zealous moderators have ruined the welcoming community image.
I'm glad someone said it. Before they would at least leave a comment, or ask the user to elaborate or rephrase the question, now they just close. I see so many questions closed INSTANTLY, with no explanation, and most of the time it's not even rightly so.
Of course the vague rule about rules defined by the community allow them to do anything. Once again, moderation has ruined another website.
Not to mention that it's not noobies that are affected. I've had many questions closed and only to be reopened once I made my case. I've had comments where people THANKED me for asking it because they had the exact same question and that I had reopened it. I got sick and tired of doing this so I pretty much unmotivated to post any new questions (or maybe 500 questions is enough)
Amazing it is only 5 years old, it feels like it has been around forever, I recall coming across it for the first time while still in Canada and thinking 'this is neat'. I never contributed which is really a miss on my part but I try to keep the number of accounts that I have to an absolute minimum and stackoverflow is plenty useful as it is today. I really should do some community service there one of these days, it is only fair.
Hard to imagine that even google could not rescue usenet (or rather, dejanews) from the spam and the trolls.