
Stackoverflow Is A Difficult Community to Participate In - monksy
http://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2012/09/stackoverflow-is-a-difficult-community-to-participate-in/#.UEu2l1DNwcU.hackernews
======
thejerz
One of the biggest problems I see on SO is repliers tell the OP they are
"doing it wrong" and not answering the OP's question. Typically you'll see
some smartass reply with, "Why would you want to do that? You're doing it
wrong. Do it this way, here's how."

These replies infuriate me. The OP knows what his problem is and he's asking
for an answer. He doesn't need a new problem to solve. He doesn't need to know
what your opinion is about solving the problem. He needs a _solution._

One example: I was searching for how to solve a RVM and rails configuration
problem on OS X. I typed the error message from the console into google, and
found a SO question that was exactly the problem I was having. But instead of
providing an answer, the most upvoted comment was to uninstall everything and
use homebrew because "you're doing it wrong" without homebrew.

That's nice and all, but I've had a rails and rvm setup on my laptop for 2
years without homebrew, and, like the OP, I don't have time to set that up
now. I just want to fix this one configuration error _and get back to work._ I
quickly went back to Google and found the solution on another rails forum.

Granted, this is a problem with a lot of internet forums, not just SO. But it
drives me nuts.

~~~
redguava
I like those type of answers. If you are encountering an issue doing
something, and there is a better way of doing it (as opposed to just solving
the problem in your current method), I think it adds a lot of value to offer
those suggestions.

In your example, perhaps you didn't know about homebrew and this was going to
save you a lot of time, well that's great. There can still be other answers
that help your specific issue, but someone has thought outside the box and
offered a completely different way of doing it.

For me the value of SO would be greatly reduced if people didn't do that.

~~~
oillio
Explaining a "better" way is great as an addendum to an answer for the actual
problem asked. As you said, it can be very helpful to provide an out of the
box solution.

However, it is very annoying when I ask a question and the only answers are
some variant of, "you are doing it wrong." Multiple times I have had to write
an explanation that is longer than my actual question to convince people that
I actually do want an answer to the question I asked.

If you really think you understand my problem better than I do, based on a
simplified explanation, awesome. I would love to hear a better way to go about
what I am doing. But please, try to answer the actual question first (or at
least say you don't know the answer). There is a slim chance the "better" way
is not actually workable in the real world scenario.

------
suresk
It's clear that SO adds a ton of value in general, and I've frequently found
it useful when I'm working with a new and unfamiliar piece of technology and
can't quite figure something out. I've found it to be sort of annoying as an
answerer, though, and don't really hang out there looking for interesting
questions to answer anymore.

The biggest problem is that some people treat it like a game of _Jeopardy_ ,
except with no penalty for incorrect answers. This is especially true when the
questions are dealing with weird corner cases in languages or libraries - it
often looks like there is an obvious answer, but it isn't always so simple.

I used to take the time to get the code running on my machine (if it was
simple enough), figure out what was wrong, fix it, and then take the time to
try to educate the person asking, rather than simply telling them what code to
paste in to fix it.

This takes time, and in while I was working on it, you'd have someone come in,
and blurt out some guess as to why it wasn't working, then edit their answer a
bunch of times and maybe eventually get it right. I don't know why, but it
always bothered me to see someone who guessed around (and maybe looked at
better answers in the meantime) getting credit for really sloppy work.

I guess I don't know how you'd fix that, and it doesn't seem to be a big
enough of a problem to keep the site from being useful, but it is still kind
of annoying.

~~~
abecedarius
The incentive for quick sloppy answers comes from the bias of voters towards
what's already upvoted, which could be fixed just by showing them the answers
in random order without the scores. Maybe change the display mode after the
page settles down some, by some measure like time passed, pageviews, or answer
accepted.

I agree there's a problem, and used to participate anyway because more fun or
interesting questions were getting asked early on; I never seem to see new
ones when I peek in nowadays.

Added (heh): people also vote for sloppy answers just because they sound good.
I don't know what to do about this -- perhaps you could try to estimate a
voter's average vote quality, and weight them.

------
simonsarris
I don't think these points are _particularly_ fatal, and they don't exactly
make it hard per se to participate, just a little discouraging at times.

I take issue with his issue number one because I think the blame is placed on
new people FAR too often online. The way new people are treated on pretty much
every online community I've been a part of has been horrible, often downright
pointlessly mean.

If we want SO askers to have good manners its our duty to explain our customs.
When I answer a question from a new person I try to welcome them to SO or
applaud their question (if novel), and if they worded it poorly I might answer
what I think they meant and suggest better wordings to get help faster in the
future.

Reputation is a bit of a sore point for a lot of people. I only hound two tags
(canvas and html5) which are relatively unpopular, so my reputation will never
be as great as someone who simply peruses the JavaScript tag and gives
offhanded answers to very simple questions. A very detailed, analytical answer
to a difficult problem in an unpopular tag will see one or zero upvotes
compared to a flippant 5-second solution in a popular tag. This can be
discouraging, and I'm not really sure if it needs fixing or not, or how it
could be done.

I symapthize with the autor, but at the end of the day I choose to stay on SO
in spite of all its woes because the gratitude of the answerers[1] alone is
more than enough for me.

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/POZmt.png>

~~~
monksy
I rarely ever get that thanks. On a decent % I don't even have it marked as an
answer when it actually is.

I tend to go for the computer vision and finance questions since thats what
interests me... but eh I can't participate due to those reasons anymore. I
just don't care, and its not worth my time. I will however still use it to ask
questions.

------
geuis
I have been finding SO much less useful recently (6 months). My primary
background is in javascript and I occasionally pop on and look for questions
to answer to help other folks out. However, I find most of the questions being
asked not necessarily being questions, but more statements. Among the actual
questions, they are more about this jquery plugin or that ASP.net thing. I
wish that SO had better enforcement of _how_ questions are submitted, along
with quality.

My other problem at the moment is that I am working on some objective-c stuff
and SO is mostly useless for finding answers. Being new to the language and
the APIs, I am sometimes lost and trying to get my bearings. A few questions
I've submitted have either been closed or ignored. Only one really got a good
answer, and when I tracked down the author I found he is very skilled and
helps out lots of people. But there only seem to be a few people like him.

And by the way, if you're in SF and know objective-c, I'll buy you a couple
beers in exchange for walking me through a couple things.

------
debaserab2
Although I often feel stackoverflow is less useful than it used to be, without
a doubt many of my google searches are answered immediately with a
stackoverflow post at the top of the results, removing the need for me to ask
a question in the first place. It's easy to discount how important SO still is
to my developer learning workflow.

I'm finding I'm starting to go back to mailing list for niche programming
topics (e.g., a specific framework or library) because nothing beats getting
an answer from a top contributor or owner. Most people don't sit on
StackOverflow all day waiting for questions, but they will respond to e-mails
that pop up on their mailing list.

------
cletus
This may touch on some points I've already addressed [1] but I have to say
something.

I was a frequent contributor to StackOverflow [2] but have largely stopped for
a number of reasons, the most important of which is I got a new job that took
up much more of my time.

But another reason is that for me, as a (then) frequent answerer, it got a
whole lot less _interesting_. This was due to two factors:

1\. A lot of the low-hanging fruit had been answered so the questions became
increasingly esoteric such that you were less likely to simply know an answer
and had to spend more time researching. That extra time meant you were also
less _rewarded_ for the answer because less people were in a position to state
that it was correct or not (if you consider karma a "reward"); and

2\. The ceaseless campaign against "interesting" questions due to increasing
closure due to "subjective and argumentative" and the fragmentation of SO into
the many StackExchange sites (causing a lot of questions to be migrated).

There are three basic errors that Joel has (and Jeff had) made (IMHO):

1\. Over-emphasis on editing.

In my mind there are three groups: askers, answerers and editors. Jeff & Joel
made statements about editors are important and how editing is super-
important, basically trying o elevate it to the same level as answering
questions.

This is a problem.

Editors are the bureaucrats of the StackOverflow ecosystem. The bureaucracy is
expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy [3]. The more editors
you have the less each has to do. Rather than doing less, the kinds of people
attracted to this kind of function prefer to simply _create_ work for
themselves.

What's more, from Meta StackOverflow, from interacting from the people who
edit a lot (and answer very little if anything), this simply reinforced my
view: these are the kinds of people who destroy communities.

Those who can, answer. Those who can't, edit.

I've seen many spurious edits to many of my higher voted answers. Some
capitalize something. Others come along and uncapitalize it. I've seen people
come and add lines to my answers saying I stole it from someone else
(seriously).

The net result is virtually any highly voted answer I have has been edited
into community wiki oblivion. That creates a strong disincentive for me to
spend time coming up with a good answer: I'll basically get limited credit
from it and then have to watch as wanna-be editors essentially vandalize it.

The other thing these people do is close questions on the drop of a hat. They,
as a group, tend to have an incredibly festidious nature when it comes to the
enforcement of rules. They constantly seek some purer, higher standard and
don't quite get that those rules are _guidelines_ that are a means to an end
and not an end in themselves.

2\. "Subjective and argumentative".

Jeff and Joel from the outset wanted to prevent flame war type questions, the
kind of questions that have no definite answer. Questions like "Is Ruby better
than Python?" That's fine but it's been taken too far, in part by the very
editors I previously mentioned.

Questions like "Should I use Angular.js or Ember.js for developing a CRUD-type
Web application?" would be shut down in a minute. But the extra context
matters. You can answer that question by giving a list of comparative
advantages without being necessarily biased or inflammatory. That's actually
interesting content, particularly if you're trying to decide between a number
of new technologies, languages, etc. But alas SO seems keen on shutting that
down; and

3\. Fragmentation.

There is another thread today about the difficulty of music classification
[4]. The same goes for Q&A. Hierarchical classification schemes are too
limited for Q&A. There are SO questions that have bounced around between a
number of SE sites for this reason.

Just look at the Stack Exchange sites [5]. If I want to ask a question about
being a programmer do I ask on OnStartups, on the Programmer SE or elsewhere?

The pragmatic answer is that there are some question that naturally fit on
several sites. Yet the hierarchical pigeon-holing with esoteric and often
subjective rules means it's harder to find content, it's hard to find where to
place content and newbies inevitably get chastised for posting on the wrong
site.

There is a reason tagging exists and is successful. Describe the traits of the
question or, better yet, figure it out from the content, and show it when it's
relevant to someone. Don't make me hunt across sites for it. That's a
ridiculous solution.

I predict you'll see the rise of more tagging-oriented (at a higher level than
say Java or C++) and automatic classification Q&A sites in the future.

With that out of my system, let me address som eof the points the OP
specifically raised:

> The Eternal September Issue.

This one annoys me. And I don't mean new people. The negative reaction people
have to them (eg [6]). When a community starts chastising newbies, that
reflects badly on the community, not the newbies.

> Down voting as a means of closing a question.

The one part of downvoting I don't like is people use it as a means of saying
"I disagree with this" (on purely subjective grounds), which is not the
intended purpose. That problem seems to be nearly universal with voting
systems (even here). The one good thing SO does is "charge" you for downvotes.
That alone stops it being a huge problem (IMHO).

> This is another one of the odd cases on StackOverflow. A few of the “Exact
> Duplicate” questions are not duplicates due to minor, but important,
> differences.

True. The problem here again is that you have editors deciding to close things
that they don't necessarily know anything about. The same problem infests
Wikipedia (deleting articles on "notability" grounds).

> The value of reputation: After the global recalculation, the site’s creators
> made a bold statement that participation is not valued on the site.

I actually don't know what this is referring to but then again I've been
largely inactive. There have been several recalculations though (eg question
upvotes from 10 to 5 karma). I don't really have a problem with this. If
you're too obsessed with your karma, you're focusing on the wrong things. And
I like that the same rules apply to everyone (eg it's better than question
upvotes before X are 10, after X are 5).

I worried when SO took VC money that they were going to turn something that is
very successful in one segment and ruin it with attempts at making a general
Q&A platform. 2+ years on I'm still failing to see traction in the SE sites
beyond SO. This may yet still become a problem.

Perhaps the simplest answer here is that SO isn't a "community" as such. It
went with the Q&A format (over, say, forums) to discourage discussion. People
often criticized it for making discussion hard when that was kinda the point.

I certainly never went to SO to hang out. Some do I'm sure. The focus is (and
should be IMHO) on the content not the community.

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4413684>

[2]: <http://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus>

[3]: [http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/130452-the-bureaucracy-is-
ex...](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/130452-the-bureaucracy-is-expanding-to-
meet-the-needs-of-the)

[4]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493959>

[5]: <http://stackexchange.com/sites>

[6]: [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9953/could-we-
please...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9953/could-we-please-be-a-
bit-nicer-to-new-users)

~~~
Turing_Machine
It's pretty much guaranteed that any system with a privileged regulator
(moderator, editor, whatever) class will bog down in the long run. The basic
problem is that regulators get credit (however that gets measured in a
particular community) when they regulate, not when they leave things alone or
reduce the amount of regulation. Thus there's an incentive for regulation to
increase even when it may not be needed, and indeed even when it is
counterproductive.

There have been a couple of suggestions in science fiction that would be
interesting to see someone try. Heinlein suggested a special branch of
government whose purpose was to repeal laws and regulations promulgated by the
other branches. Frank Herbert went to an even greater extreme, by having an
quasi-official "Bureau of Sabotage".

Perhaps online communities should have a separate group charged with reversing
the decisions of editors/moderators/whatever they're called, with no
discussion or appeal permitted.

~~~
Zigurd
Thinking through the likely consequences of "volunteer bureaucrats" should
send a shiver down the spine of anyone designing a crowdsourced resource. Even
without a formal system of recognizing the work such people do, their own
gratification inevitably rests on wielding the power they have.

So, yes, a system of meta-moderation, and preferably one that is mechanical
and resistant to being gamed, is needed. As fascinating as it is to see
emergent cultures in Wikipedia editing and reddit moderation, it ends up being
dysfunctional, and that doesn't serve the goals of the communities from which
those sites derive their value.

------
rossjudson
I get annoyed when I go looking for the answer to a particular technical
question and find that the most precise related question has been closed as
"too specific", whatever the hell that is. Well, yeah -- after questions about
geometric methods and proper etiquette are answered, you get into more
specific stuff.

I do the only thing I can. Upvote the question (which can still be done on
closed questions), and tell the questioner it's good, and the moderator is
being an ass. Which they usually are.

The kinds of questions that annoy me aren't "do my homework"; they're real
questions that focus on specific issues that I'm encountering and wasting time
on. Some brownie-point seeking moderator is engaged in exactly the type of
behavior that other comments note.

------
doktrin
As a reader, I find SO quite useful. From the outside, however, the community
appears particularly unwelcoming. For lack of a better term, it seems as
though participants are walking on eggshells. Standards are enforced extremely
rigorously, quite possibly to the detriment of the site as a whole.

I have not yet contributed, in no small part due to the above. I don't need SO
karma to prove my knowledge in a given domain, and therefore my only reason to
actively participate would be if I find it intrinsically rewarding - which
does not currently appear to be the case.

~~~
teh_klev
"As a reader, I find SO quite useful."

"Standards are enforced extremely rigorously"

Do you see the link?

~~~
doktrin
If you'll revisit my comment you'll note it was a statement regarding _my_
reasons for not participating on SO.

------
michaelhoffman
> Down voting should be a way of saying, this is either wrong information,
> misleading, or not helpful.

Many people claim that down-voting should only be used in very specific cases,
but The Stack Overflow guideline seen while mousing over the down arrow is
"This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not
useful." I think that (especially the insufficient research part) is pretty
broad.

~~~
monksy
I argue about this with Shog9 [a newer mod] on meta. His response was that it
should be dead on, completely right [despite hidden assumptions]. Even if it
was correct [and maybe not related: lets say that someone is asking about how
to opt c++ code, most advice will say to improve the design, but an answer on
gcc opt flags is relivant just not exactly what was asked] it should be
downvoted.

I called him out on that insanity, he was a big member on CodeProject, as was
I. His excuse for that "codeproject turned in a shithole, lets not make this
place like that" [not exactly what he said but it sums up many of his
responses].

~~~
m_myers
It would probably be relevant to mention that your conversations with Shog9
[1] [2] took place nearly three years ago, long before he was hired (he's a
community coordinator, not a moderator).

[1]: <http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/29024/13531> [2]:
<http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/36401/13531>

~~~
monksy
Ahh! You found it. I could have sworn he was a mod then. Oh well, he had a
rather large role at the time. [Not something easily obtained]

------
elchief
I agree, it is tough. I have 8000 pts, have been on there for years, but most
of my questions get seriously shat upon. It's pretty frustrating.

I can see why though, there are so many damn dumb questions, the moderators
have to be sick of them by now.

It's a lot easier in the newer sites like DBA.

------
melling
I quit the site in July when I got 16 down votes (actually there were more) on
my question because it got closed then I had the audacity to complain about it
on Meta.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-
elisp...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp-
function-to-convert-url-to-html-link)

I think the "we will teach you a lesson when you disagree" attitude is pretty
juvenile. It also seems like it's bad for business. People won't ask questions
so there will be fewer search results directing people to the site.

~~~
teh_klev
The community expects folks posting questions to have done at least a tiny
modicum of work before asking for help. You even admitted in the comments from
back then that:

"@event_jr. Screw you. I'm looking for a quick elisp solution not your
opinion. No one is doing my homework. I'm just getting a answer to something
that I thought would be useful. Thanks correct. I don't want to put a lot of
work into it. I have a Perl solution that'll do."

and

"I did zero, zippo. No work before asking."

So you know, you only had yourself to blame there.

~~~
melling
I'm not debating the value of my question. Between two different accounts,
I've asked over 150 questions since the beginning. You can have whatever rules
you want. I disagreed and quit StackOverFlow. I'm not contributing to the
site. I've been on the Internet for over 20 years. I know where and how to get
answers.

At the moment, I'm pointing out the the juvenile "beat downs" that happen
certainly don't make the site appealing to a certain group of people. I'm sure
that I'm not the only person who has quit in frustration.

Btw, it's great that you found my deleted comments. Can you also include his
snarky comment to which I'm responding?

------
Illotus
Early on Stackoverflow was a great place, because you could ask any
programming related question and you basically got a good answer or someone
pointing you in the right direction quickly. Nowadays you first need to figure
out where to ask. For some reason too granular classifications seem to be
connected with programmer mindset. Also earlier lot of subjective and
interesting questions were allowed, nowadays anything like that is closed
quickly.

That said, nowadays I mostly browse ux.stackexchange which isn't as nitpicky
yet.

------
zem
the most annoying thing, for me, is seeing obvious newbie questions closed as
(inexact) duplicates of some other question, when it is patently clear that
the questioner does _not_ have the ability to apply the other question and its
answers to his problem.

~~~
simonsarris
Because of this the policy now is that some duplication is good[1]. Though a
lot of users are still rabid about closing, I always try to answer inexact
duplicates, and if the their title doesn't lead to duplicates, point out the
things they _should_ have searched for (ie, object picking, hit testing and
point in path are three names for very similar things)

[1] [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-
how-...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-i-
learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-duplication/)

~~~
monksy
Eh. I'm to the point where I see an attempt to "fix things" on their end ... I
just hear "we're sorry its broke, heres a fix that should have been there a
long time ago."

------
archangel_one
I was quite keen on SO at first, but have gotten much less so over the past
year or two. The most recent incident that really put me off was a month or
two ago when I found what I considered a pretty ideal SO question; ie. a "how
to do X programmatically". Someone (a relatively new user) had already
commented that it was a dupe of another question which it clearly wasn't;
several of us simultaneously corrected him, and all seemed fine. Until a few
hours later when some drive-by mod arbitrarily closed the question as a dupe;
they obviously had enough ninja power to do that off their own bat, but it
needed four or five of us to vote to reopen and the last I saw it'd only
gotten to two or three. The original questioner seemed fairly demoralised by
it; I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't come back.

I'm sure there are plenty of other cases of good moderation, but to me it
highlights a serious problem with the site. One loose cannon (who I can only
assume either was a badly written bot, didn't speak English, or was just
trolling) and one overactive mod managed to ruin that question for everyone,
and the rest of us had little power to really help.

I don't know what the answer to this is; it bears a lot of resemblance to
Wikipedia, and they still struggle with it.

~~~
teh_klev
So someone closes one question and you decide that's it?

You know, there's a flag link under every post. If you thought a question was
wrongly closed by the community or a mod then flag it and explain why. Nothing
is irreversible.

------
zvrba
I was an active user once, but got tired and bored by the recent flood of
'questions' that are best answered by "Learn how to use a debugger" or "RTFM".
I'm especially annoyed by people pasting a rather large chunk of code with a
vague description of the problem and expect others to debug it for them.

I even have moderator privileges, but I don't have the time or desire to
bother anymore...

I also started a discussion on meta-SO about "fix my code" questions with a
concrete proposal [1], but didn't get anywhere. The most operational (and
upvoted) answer/comment there was that the "close question" system was
intended for this and that no other mechanism was needed. Well and nice, but
maybe we'd then also need a filter that would filter-out questions with 2 or
more votes to close. (You could still opt-in to see these questions, by they
shouldn't be on the frontpage by default.)

[1] [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/122951/sanction-
user...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/122951/sanction-users-
dumping-code-and-requesting-debugging)

------
teh_klev
Maybe the author could back up these claims by citing specific cases for each
of the complaints?

~~~
monksy
Meh. Its an opinion that was formed from observation after a long period of
time. I don't have the time to find individual instances, and I really don't
want to dig through that site anymore.

Also: if I did mention support for each of the points whats stopping those
examples from being edited, deleted, or someone from aruging "those are
extreme cases"?

------
adastra
The real value of an SO answer is probably best approximated by how many
people it helped. In my experience, SO is incredibly useful when I'm learning
a new language or framework, and I want to quickly blast through hurdles
caused by non-intuitive syntax or functionality. In those situations I'm on
there almost constantly. For popular languages like Objective-C for iOS, there
are thousands of people who are in that same situation.

Surely there must be a way to capture the value-added for all those thousands
of people in the reputation system? Many people get to these answers from
google, so it sounds like a simple matter of pinging them to (sign-in) and
upvote the answer that helped them out.

If, on the other hand, as the author says SO is no longer actually values
reputation, and is screwing with their algorithms accordingly, that is a
serious problem. Not sure what can be done about that.

~~~
waiwai933
> Surely there must be a way to capture the value-added for all those
> thousands of people in the reputation system? Many people get to these
> answers from google, so it sounds like a simple matter of pinging them to
> (sign-in) and upvote the answer that helped them out.

This happens if you're already logged-in and got to the site through a Google
search (although only under certain circumstances—I think you have to have not
visited SO in the past few hours/days?)

> If, on the other hand, as the author says SO is no longer actually values
> reputation, and is screwing with their algorithms accordingly, that is a
> serious problem. Not sure what can be done about that.

The only changes to the reputation system that I can think of are:

\- Making question upvotes worth +5 instead of +10 (March 2010:
[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-
pearls-...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-not-
sand/))

\- Making answers on downvotes free (June 2011:
[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-
pearls-...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-not-
sand/))

Beyond that, you can now gain rep from suggesting edits (+2, max +1000 from
suggested edits or when you gain editing privileges), but that's not a change
so much as an addition to the system.

------
brownbat
Slightly off topic, but am I the only person who cringes when people complain
about duplicate posts?

Can't think of another issue where the angst is so disproportionate to the
underlying problem.

I know, duplicate posts take up system resources, and we all remember when
Technet and Usenet were DoSed by one too many duplicate posts (or did that not
ever happen?). But duplicate posts also make common issues /usability problems
more visible, and illustrate how terrible every forum's search is.

And besides, we've been trying to stop duplicate questions in tech forums
since what, the first BBSes in the 70s? It hasn't worked, the fight is not
worth fighting.

~~~
JeremyBanks
That's why duplicates on Stack Overflow usually aren't supposed to be deleted.
They're supposed be _closed_ with a link to a canonical question, so that all
answers are available in one place, but they'll remain open to help people who
are searching.

------
BrandonM
I completely agree with the Eternal September point, or maybe it's just a
problem of non-makers tearing down others instead of doing something more
worthwhile.

I recently solved a tricky bug in some Java code that we eventually realized
only happened after de/serialization upon server restart. Seeing no related
questions on SO, I took the time to create a self-contained test case as part
of a question[1] and also to answer that question with a solution that showed
how to use reflection to set the value of final fields[2].

For my trouble, several SO members[3] trolled or ridiculed me. This doesn't
exactly encourage future participation. My time is too important to waste it
helping self-important, ungrateful jerks.

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12324472/a-transient-
fina...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12324472/a-transient-final-field-
used-as-a-lock-is-null)

[2] <http://stackoverflow.com/a/12324473/1237044>

[3] nicholas.hauschild trolled me for answering my own question (deleted by
Anna Lear), and you can see EJB's discouraging comments.

~~~
teh_klev
It's a shame you had to experience that. Unfortunately, there are some folks
who still haven't gotten the "it's ok to answer your own questions" memo [1].

But don't be discouraged. Ignore the trolls, flag for mod attention and we'll
sort out crap like that.

[1] [http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/05/encyclopedia-stack-
exc...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/05/encyclopedia-stack-exchange/)

~~~
melling
Hi teh_klev, M-x here again... I always added my own answers if no one else
came up with a good one. e.g.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9272244/uisplitviewcontro...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9272244/uisplitviewcontroller-
on-ipad-with-storyboards)

Personally, I think StackOverFlow isn't worth the effort. What people there
don't get is that what's really important is simply getting great questions
and great answers. That's it. Period!

------
pknerd
All I know that whenever I needed a help, the SO community generously came
forward and helped me. Thanks Joel and His Team

------
guelo
I find it weird that people use Stackoverflow as a community where they hang
out and spend time. The obvious way to use Stackoverflow is when you're having
trouble figuring something out you get there via google. While doing your
research you might come accross an unanswered question that you know the
answer to so you write it up. That's it. It's a very useful site but there's
no need to get emotionally involved with the reputation score.

As far as using the score to get a job, I don't buy it. If you're actually
good at some topic you will be able to get a job regardless. If I was hiring
someone who was pushing their super-high Stackoverflow score I would be
suspicious why they spent so much time gaming a dumb score on a website
instead of building cool stuff.

~~~
teh_klev
No-one has ever suggested that SO rep alone should be used solely to judge
someone's skills when hiring. Then neither would the contents of your github
or bitbucket repo (after all how do you prove that the code in the repo is
yours?).

SO rep is just another small nugget of information that _may_ be useful to
potential employers, and if said employer is using the SO careers site, your
Careers profile is linked to your SO profile page.

I mention in my "other activities" section of my CV that I participate in the
site, but I certainly don't make a big deal about it, and especially the rep
part.

------
smoyer
For me the reason it's difficult to participate in is completely different. I
originally signed up with my own OpenId server run on a static IP address from
my basement rack. When we switched ISP's, we went with a normal account and
moved most of our servers to Linode. I didn't bother moving the OpenID server
(I'd forgotten about it) but about 7 months later, I lost the cookie for SO
and that ended my ability to log in.

I have to contradict the article's assertion that karma's were dropped by the
rebalancing ... I've been amazed at how my better answers have continued to
receive up-votes and I think my reputation is about 1000 points higher than it
was when I last participated.

------
recursive
As apparently the lone voice of dissent, I like to say that I find the
StackOverflow moderation to be helpful and increase the quality of the site. I
suppose it's not a coincidence but I don't find it difficult to participate at
all.

------
jgh
Lots of people don't accept answers that are correct, even if we've had
subsequent discussion and elaboration of the answer :( I have a few open
answers telling people exactly how to do things, and they've thanked me for my
answer (and in one case I won a bounty) but my answer is STILL not accepted.

------
taybin
I like the posts that are just a stack trace of an NPE in a homework
assignment.

~~~
monksy
Don't forget the stack traces of an exception in either Spring or Hibernate.

