
Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible - acconrad
http://goofygrin.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/why-stackoverflow-sucks-and-participating-there-is-impossible/
======
cletus
Let me add some perspective as a relatively highly ranked user (cletus) on SO.

I've seen this kind of post before and frankly it's annoying. The typical
template is "I tried to answer 2 questions and didn't get 1000 points so it
sucks" or some variation revolving around faster answerers or whatever.

Rather than being a problem, SO is a superb solution for the person asking the
question because they do get fast answers.

Compare this to forums or mailing lists which I _abhor_ as a means of asking
programming questions. You'll often get no replies or useless replies (eg a
bunch of people who don't understand the problem telling you that you
shouldn't be doing that or asking you why) or the right answer might be buried
on page 17 when the thread descended into an OT discussion on page 7.

There are certainly low-hanging fruit on SO (reputation wise) and people do
compete for those. In my case, I used SO to learn things because of the quick
feedback loop you got when you said something demonstrably wrong.

Now I barely go there because whether there's something to answer or not is
pretty random and I really don't have time for the waiting game anymore. Other
priorities now.

But to complain about a system where there are _too many people answering
questions_ is, to be perfectly blunt, ridiculous and narcissistic ("what about
me?" rather than what about the asker).

Also, the questions are, for me anyway, a lot less interesting. For a lot of
topics, they've now been covered. New questions are rarer and cover
increasingly edgier cases. So you're reliant on new languages, tools and
problems, which doesn't seem to come at the same pace the earlier questions
did, which were basically backfill.

Let me also say that there is an art to answering questions on SO. The OP
bemoans the quick answer getting the points while you write a thoughtful
answer. My response? To paraphrase Steve Jobs, "he's doing it wrong". SO
teaches you this.

If the question can be answered in one line, this is what you do. If more
comments will add to the value of the answer, explain deeper issues or perhaps
help in cases not necessarily directly relevant to the OP but possibly
relevant more generally, then you edit your answer as you go, adding as
necessary.

And if you think you can't write thoughtful answers on SO, you obviously
haven't looked at some of the great answers that are there.

~~~
lyudmil
I agree with what you're saying, but I don't think it addresses the post. It's
certainly true that Stack Overflow is the best place to get answers to
programming questions and I won't dispute that. Here, though, is what I think
the problem is. I think it mirrors the OP's problem.

Stack Overflow became and is the best place to get answers to programming
problems because of the community it has been able to build. There are always
competent people ready to provide an answer and they do it quickly. However,
the problem is that the community is difficult to participate in. You need rep
to do anything and you don't get rep until you do something. You also need to
compete with a lot of other people in order to contribute usefully, which
makes the barrier even higher. Ultimately, this undermines the community,
which is what makes Stack Overflow good.

You can say that these effects can be ignored because answers are still given
and you'd be right. But the difficulties do exist. I have enough rep on SO now
to do most things (maybe not down-voting), but it was hard to get, so I can
attest to what the OP was saying. I can only imagine it's harder now after the
community has grown and rep inflation has kicked in.

~~~
jessriedel
Exactly. The OP's point is that it's hard to get over the initial rep hurdle
so that you can participate.

This prompts the idea: is there some sort of way that new users could quickly
and reliably gain a minimum amount of rep by doing a bit of maintenance on the
site? Say, flagging spam or suggesting correction which must be approved by
someone with lots of rep? If this is possible, why don't more people know
about it.

~~~
Confusion
The 'initial rep hurdle' is so low that any dimwit -- pardon my French -- can
overcome it... As some others have pointed out, too easily actually, judging
from the number of bad answers from people with a few K of rep.

~~~
mendicant
I don't care to participate in SO often. I don't have high rep.

I _can_ provide insight.

every once in a while I find somewhere that I can provide some value or
insight, whether via editing an answer with a url that's out of date, a
comment expanding on the answer, etc... and it seems like I never can.

I don't care to jump through the hurdles to get to that point. I didn't come
there to ask a question. I didn't come there to sift through questions to
answer.

I came looking for something. I stumbled upon something where I could provide
value and was shut down because I have better things to do with my time than
to jump through hoops.

It's fine for the power users who want the world to see their rep, or the
people trolling for questions regarding their pet projects. It sucks for the
casual user.

So, yes, in theory the rep hurdle is quite low. I've just got better things to
do with my time. -- Which I already wasted trying to help someone in the first
place.

~~~
Confusion
You do realize that they can't just grant anyone the right to edit questions
or answers and that they don't have magical insight into your abilities? I
don't know how you propose to solve the problem of automatically allowing
those that have ability to bear responsibility, but I don't think there is any
site that does it better than SO.

    
    
      It sucks for the casual user.
    

I'm a casual user (I have 1.5K rep and subscribed reasonably early, so we're
talking about 10 decent answers per year) and I don't think so.

    
    
      Which I already wasted trying to help someone in the 
      first place.
    

Then SO is not for you, because SO only makes sense if its users want to help
others, for whatever reason. I personally like trying to explain something
clearly and concisely and I like solving the problems that are sometimes
posed. I answer questions for my own good, but it is gratifying that someone
else also profits.

~~~
danenania
I see your point, but I really don't think that 1.5k rep qualifies as casual
in the context of the discussion.

~~~
Confusion
I have answered 76 in two years and 4 months (and posed 5). Let's be generous
and say that's 1 answer every week. Is that not 'casual use'?

~~~
danenania
Over a sustained 2.5 year period, not really. I mean what percentile of
activity/reputation do you think you'd be in for all members in that period?
I'd guess well over 50... perhaps 75 or 80?

Programming is my full time job and I ask questions on SO somewhat regularly
when I get stumped, and occasionally peruse for questions I can answer, but I
don't make any efforts in particular to raise my rep for its own sake, and I
just reached 100 rep after being a member for a year. I feel like I fit into
the 'casual user' camp that he's referring to in the OP since I'm still pretty
limited in my participation even though I FEEL like a somewhat invested member
of the community. But I don't think these issues would really apply to you at
your level of activity (and kudos to you for that, btw :) ).

------
dansingerman
The thing is StackOverflow really really works. If I search Google for a
programming query I nearly always find links to useful information on SO, if
not the precise answer.

(I've even found my own answers via Google when I have forgotten how to do
something)

That is SO's first and foremost use case. And I reiterate - it works extremely
well.

The community features are secondary to that (it's not Quora), and there are
thousands of users who will tell you that it is not 'impossible' to use.

~~~
Gobiner
I've found plenty of helpful information on StackOverflow via Google as well,
but I definitely would _not_ say that it "really really works."

I've asked two questions (C#/.NET so there's a large pool of potential
answerers) and neither question ever got the answer it deserved, even though
both got answers from genuine experts (Jon Skeet and Eric Lippert). I found
the answer to my first question on some MSDN blog after I asked on
StackOverflow, the second question is still unresolved.

~~~
dansingerman
Maybe my enthusiasm for the quality of StackOverflow results in Google is
because I remember the pre-SO days of scrolling through experts-exchange's
hideous site and fictional paywall for a low quality answer in a tiny font.

~~~
6ren
Me too; though I also thought that experts-exchange was a good idea at the
time, including its concept of an economic reward system (in fact, I got a
wonderfully helpful answer on that forum). Yet, it turned out to have
problems, which lead to SO with an even better, karma/game mechanics reward
system.

And now, some people experience problems with SO. This opens an opportunity
for something even better than SO. I wonder what that would be?

------
bryanlarsen
It sounds like this guy wants to participate in StackOverflow just to be there
rather than because he finds it a useful tool for his own work. I'm glad there
are hurdles for people who are just there to "get a good rep" rather than
there to support their real work.

A (hopefully) more common workflow would look something like this:

\- a developer googles a problem, the StackOverflow answer floats to the top,
and he notices this is a particularly good answer. \- this keeps happening,
and the developer gets impressed

then one of two things happens (or both):

\- he googles a question, and finds an old question without a great answer,
and adds an answer. Yes, old questions don't get as many upvotes on their
answers, but they do get upvoted, and at 10 points an upvote, it doesn't take
long to get to 50.

\- he googles a question and doesn't find an answer, so he posts a question

Neither of these require any rep, and you only have to do it once or twice
with a good question or answer to get to the magical 50 karma. And 50 karma is
the only milestone that matters on StackOverflow, in my opinion.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Heh, in the time it took to create this comment, this post went from 1 comment
to 15 comments, making mine less relevant, meaning I'll get fewer upvotes.

And as far as I'm concerned, gaming Hacker News to get karma is much more
useful than gaming Stack Overflow. 500 karma is required to downvote, and it
takes a long time to hit 500 karma.

Of course, now that I have the 500 I rarely downvote. I wish I would have
known that earlier. :)

In my opinion, PG should adopt the Stack Overflow downvoting rule (you lose
karma for downvoting), and lower the required threshold. It's hard to tell if
downvoting is being used more for good than evil, but it's definitely used to
express opinion more often than it should be.

------
alanh
To me, the #1 problem with Stack Overflow is the number of plain _bad answers_
that are given and often accepted. CSS question? Here’s someone’s un-
researched and invalid first guess, that doen’t work in practice. +10 karma
and accepted.

Hard question? Here’s some loser’s gut feeling of “can’t be done” in exchange
for +2 karma, and then a knowledgeable follow-up a day later from someone who
has actually been there, done that, and figured it out.

Example: Someone with 82k karma posts a non-answer rudely telling me I should
be using another technology altogether, a cheap and worthless move that earned
+2 karma: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4696128/bash-script-
deter...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4696128/bash-script-determine-if-
file-modified/4696145#4696145)

So often it’s apparent people are just throwing best-guess answers out there
for karma, and this is hugely unhelpful. There should be a large penalty for
stating incorrect guesses as fact.

It’s to the point where _I instantly mistrust any answer from someone with
over 10k reputation_ as I learned there is a good chance they are just
shooting from the hip for karma.

~~~
cruise02
You pointed out yourself in the comments to that answer that rsync was
helpful, but that you didn't like the rude tone. The answer you accepted also
agreed that you should use rsync until you edited the question to add more
details. Now it's cheap and worthless?

The system seems to work. The top-voted answer is the one you accepted.

~~~
alanh
I was being generous, as rsync could be a useful suggestion to other visitors
to the page, but it absolutely doesn’t answer the question that was asked. The
top-voted answer, to the contrary, was edited to be genuinely helpful and an
accurate answer, and deserves those upvotes. Also keep in mind that the page
is getting activity because it’s linked from this discussion, so some karma
changes have been triggered just now.

------
kylec
It's definitely true that there are a lot of people waiting for new questions
so they can pounce with a quick answer and get a few upvotes. However, there's
also a large backlog of unanswered questions as well
(<http://stackoverflow.com/unanswered>) that are very much in need of a
"thoughtful, correctly documented" answer. And while it's unfortunate that
legitimate brand-new users are unable to post comments, the reason behind the
rep threshold was to reduce spam on the site. Commenting requires 50
reputation, or about 5 upvotes on an answer/10 upvotes on a question (both of
which can be easily accomplished in an hour or two) - just high enough to
deter spam.

~~~
ck2
I simply do not understand this ego thing with "points".

A million points gets you what? An award for most wasted time?

I wish HN had an option to turn off points on an account, I can't even block
it with adblock because there's no element id.

There's more to life than meaningless "points".

~~~
Tycho
I think in the specific case of StackOverflow, having a lot of points is
something that indicates to potential employers that you are a
useful/knowledgable candidate. And it's not just a vague signifier - they can
actually go and look at your answers and see what you're about.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Yes, but quality matters almost as much as quantity. I'd rather hire somebody
who got 1000 karma through 10 questions/answers than somebody who got 2000
karma through 100.

Although quantity is important too -- even if it's not a definitive answer, a
partial answer is better than no answer to the questioner. It's just that when
I'm hiring, those definitive answers really indicate somebody who knows what
they're doing.

[edit: answering here because there are several good responses, who are all
right. The most important thing to do as a potential important employer is to
read a few answers rather than just blindingly accepting the karma. You can't
do that for everybody, but you can do it for your shortlist.]

~~~
fluidcruft
I'm not sure that high karma answers indicate anything other than that the
candidate is answering basic questions. Correct answers to obscure or deep
questions won't be trafficked as much and won't collect upboats. You should
look at something else, say the answer:question karma ratio, unless you're
looking for someone to answer the phones.

------
bherms
I don't really agree here.. While I do have my own gripes with Stack Overflow,
I don't think this is the biggest issue. It took me two days of casual
browsing/asking/answering to get a reputation of about 50 or so and another
few weeks to get into the hundreds. -- Keep in mind I'm not a super genius
expert or anything, I just asked a few questions and contributed a few answers
in areas I was knowledgeable about. It's not that hard.

The only major broken part (IMO) of SO is that the SE network is becoming so
disjointed and your rep doesn't transfer between sites.

~~~
kylec
If you have more than 200 rep on SE site A, you can associate that account
with your account on SE site B and get a 100 rep bonus on site B. This lets
users that are already familiar with the system comment and vote up on any
site without having to have gained rep first.

~~~
bherms
Oh cool.. I didn't realize that! I have about 250 now, but haven't ventured
out of SO in a while. Thanks for the tip!

------
randrews
I asked two questions, one about C and one about Objective C. I got answers to
both, relatively quickly. The answers worked.

But, in the C question, I provided some more information by adding a comment
instead of editing my post. Result? Comment deleted with a snotty note. In the
Objective C question, I called the language "Objective C" instead of
"Objective-C". Result? My question edited to fit someone else's idea of good
style: <http://stackoverflow.com/posts/2669817/revisions>

It's that last one that really gets me. Someone with more karma gets to put
words in my mouth? And my name gets left on the edited post? Wow. Done.

I get why they allow it, they want the site to be more searchable. And in a
way I'm glad, because I get a lot from reading answers to things other people
ask, but I will never again write anything there myself.

~~~
AgentConundrum
Clarity is a good thing, and uniformity and standards definitely help with
that. Looking at the revision page you linked, I don't see anything there
that's offensive. I may have made similar edits myself had I seen it (at
least, if it were a question in an area I'm familiar with).

Keep in mind that StackOverflow isn't just about answering your question; it's
about providing a large searchable knowledge-base so others with similar
questions can easily find ready-made answers.

Like it or not, collaborative editing of this kind is a cornerstone of the
site, and is explicitly addressed as part of the FAQ[1].

[1] <http://stackoverflow.com/faq#editing>

~~~
randrews
Clarity from changing "Objective C" to "Objective-C", whatever. The rest of
the changes didn't add clarity, they were totally stylistic.

People are not computers, and we're touchy about stuff we write. If you want
to add a tag to my question to make it more searchable, fine. If you want to
let me know I have a typo, or used the wrong word or something, whatever. Just
editing someone's question, especially for subjective writing style, comes
across as rude.

If it's not supposed to, or if the rest of that community doesn't mind, I'm
happy for them. But it's not for me, and it's not for a lot of other people
either. So, I agree with the OP.

~~~
rquirk
FWIW, I agree with you here. The other style changes were pointless (the "If
I'm.." to "For example, if I'm.." nonsense). You can always roll back a change
to your own question though. In the editor's defence, a lot of low-rep users
post really unreadable questions. Maybe he saw you had less than a few hundred
points and got a bit trigger happy.

~~~
randrews
I would roll it back, if I cared at all about the site. This all happened
about a year ago, I'm only pointing it out now because it's relevant to this
thread.

It's a really poorly-thought-out feature: new users who can't write coherently
get taught that they don't have to, because someone will come along and fix it
for them; new users who can write are more likely to be annoyed by other
people playing copyeditor on their posts. Guess which group sticks around?

------
noarchy
"Rep grinds" (see how MMO-speak has influenced us?) on non-gaming web sites
may be becoming the norm. You grind out some rep, and get privileges based on
that rep. One can argue that this serves as an effective barrier to keep out
would-be posters of bad content and discussion, but as we can see it also
screws with "legit" posters. Determined individuals will figure out how to
work the game to their advantage, both for good and bad.

~~~
ddkrone
What game and what advantage? It's a Q/A site. The only way you are going to
game the system is if you ask clearly delineated questions and provide
thoughtful and clear answers.

~~~
kstenerud
A few techniques:

Form a cabal of vote sharers, who always vote for each other's posts. Post a
bunch of semi-plausible content once a day and you'll have tons of karma in no
time.

Post quick responses that have little insight. You'll always get votes for
being first.

Post LOTS of trivial questions. More people will upvote than will downvote on
the whole.

~~~
ddkrone
All the things you mentioned requires a lot of effort. In fact it's more
effort than just actually providing one or two good answers and questions a
day. Also, I have never seen any of the popular answers get answers that are
not really close to the mark. Even the unpopular ones always get good answers
that float to the top. Organizing a cabal of voters and then monitoring new
questions within your area of expertise just so you can post semi-plausible
answers to move up the ranks is borderline psychotic and I have yet to
encounter these people on SO.

------
PaulHoule
Personally I haven't gotten involved in SO precisely because of this. I don't
feel the prize is worth the amount of effort that I'd put into playing the
game.

However, plenty of people do feel that it's worth it, and certainly the
barrier to entry keeps out (some of) the griefers that inevitably show up in
online communities.

~~~
RuadhanMc
The prize is the satisfaction you get from helping other people with a great
answer. The reputation is window dressing. If you think of rep as the end
goal, then of course it is not worth your time. If you enjoy answering
people's questions, then it probably is worth your time.

~~~
PaulHoule
There are a lot of social things to do on the web, and probably I should be
doing less of them and more real work

For me, participating on SO is like the Weather Channel. I've got another
other things I could be doing rather than waiting for "Weather on the 8s" to
come around.

------
Khao
I've never seen stackoverflow as a race to get the most rep possible.
Reputation is just a "bonus", not a prerequisite to participate in the
website. I like stackoverflow the way it is

~~~
SandB0x
During the development of Stack Overflow, Joel and Jeff talked about the
answers staying up-to-date in a wiki-like fashion. I think what the author
means is that in order to participate in this - i.e. edit and improve an
existing answer - you have to have a certain amount of rep.

It's quite likely that a user Googling for their particular issue might find
an incomplete or out-of-date answer on Stack Overflow. When they finally solve
it they are unable to improve the existing entry, which is unfortunate as for
many "long tail" problems they are best placed to contribute.

~~~
kylec
This used to be true, but there's a feature currently in testing that will
allow _anyone_ (even someone coming from Google) to propose an edit to a post.
This edit proposal can be approved either by a moderator or several users with
sufficient rep. Hopefully this will make Stack Overflow more wiki-like and
help solve the problem with answers getting out of date.

~~~
rhizome
This sounds similar to how Discogs has implemented quality ratings (via votes)
for arbitrarily edited content, in between full editorial control and open
wiki.

------
kaffeinecoma
I totally disagree with this blog posting, but here's a situation that I feel
SO could do better.

I wish there were a feature whereby as a question-asker, you could say "I've
dutifully read all the provided responses, and none of them answers my
question. Marking this as 'unsolved'".

And then the "unsolved" questions would not count against your percentage in
"accept rate". When new answers come in, you'd need to go back and re-evaluate
whether or not the new responses answer your question or not.

The original idea of publishing askers' accept ratio is to encourage people to
"give credit where credit is due". But it also has the unfortunate side effect
of encouraging people to accept sub-par answers at times.

Apart from that I love the site, and hope Jeff makes a bundle (or at least a
happy existence) from it.

------
praptak
_"So if you’re knowledgeable enough to provide a counterpoint to someone
else’s poor answer, you have to post it as a new answer… and then you get down
voted (lose rep!) for adding a new answer versus just commenting on the
original, flawed answer."_

Never happened to me. Sometimes I even noticed that the author had deleted the
original wrong answer and left a positive comment on mine.

~~~
alxp
Yep, also if you just have 1 reputation getting downvoted doesn't cost you
anything, you stay at 1. So it doesn't hurt in the least even if this did
occur, which I haven't seen myself, either. I often see that SO users will be
helpful to new users who seem to be trying to be helpful.

------
lukasb
"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

------
olalonde
That's why I try to avoid StackOverflow as much as possible when I can ask my
question on a smaller StackExchange site such as <http://askubuntu.com> or
<http://programmers.stackexchange.com>. The quality of answers on smaller SE
sites is usually 10x higher.

------
sajidnizami
Rep whoring? Q&A sites are there to help out not to give you points and stroke
your ego.

I think if SO is hindering you into getting a good rep, probably you don't
have enough domain knowledge.

PS: I've been there since the beginning and I still got 114 rep. I love the
place because it has gotten me solutions at times without even asking.

~~~
sad_hacker
I agree. I enjoy that you get answered so quickly and if you are rep whore,
you can just ask good questions, they get up-voted and you get points. But I
really don't see any point, it's a serious Q&A site.

------
pgroves
While I actually can empathize with the author on wanting to help out, he's
really making stackoverflow sound awesome - knowledgeable people are falling
all over themselves to answer your question, and don't worry about being a
freeloader, they already have too much free labor going into the answers.

------
david_shaw
Please stop saying that StackOverflow is 'broke.' The word you're looking for
is _broken._ StackOverflow's overflowing stack of cash is doing quite well,
actually.

Other than that admittedly nitpicky detail, the article is accurate and
provides insight on a problem that I, too, have experienced. However, I don't
think that StackOverflow is _broken_ , I just think it's overcrowded. And for
a question-and-answer style website, isn't that a good thing?

------
alexsherrick
A lot of people are dogging acconrad, but I have to agree with him. I was
having a problem with rails, and I found the answer on stackoverflow. The
right answer had no upvotes, so I figured I would upvote it; this way the
original "asker" would know it is the right answer. However, it said I didn't
have enough rep to upvote... I'm sure he'll figure it out but this would save
him from checking the other "solutions".

~~~
smackfu
The weird thing is how it doesn't tell you that you can't upvote until you try
to do it.

~~~
cruise02
It tells you in the FAQ. <http://stackoverflow.com/faq#reputation>

~~~
smackfu
I meant that it is surprising that they don't hide the controls that you can't
use.

------
jwtanner
Is Stack Overflow a game in which the goal is to get the most reputation and
badges?

Or are you using it as a tool to discover solutions to programming problems?

Or Both?

~~~
CrLf
Any community where you get "points" of any kind becomes a game, which
eventually becomes more important than the community itself.

------
topcat31
I completely disagree with both the premise and conclusion of this blog post.

I'm a complete coding noob (<http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001>) and along the
way to learning programming have relied on StackOverflow for about 10
questions.

For every single one I have received complete, thorough, helpful and patient
answers. In short, I could not be happier with SO. As a beginner it's been a
phenomenal resource both for searching and for answering specific issues.

The post makes the point that newbies can't answer questions - and for me this
is one of the reasons the quality of the site is so high. If you let anyone
answer then you don't know how good quality the response is. As a beginner how
am I to know if a given answer is correct?

Of course, any community site still has problems like this and SO is not
immune to it but IMHO this is one of the ways they keep the quality bar higher
than any other Q&A platform out there.

------
adnam
"but you quickly realize that every question that’s not some vague, poorly
worded, open ended impossibility has already got 10 answers"

Exactly :) Stackoverflow has built-in breaks to control growth. Maybe HN could
benefit from this ;)

------
petercooper
I agree 100%. I was in SO early (the beta) and still encountered this. Not
only that, but a quick/early bad answer would tend to do better long-term than
a later but correct answer.

Given this (and I'm no stranger to accumulating high levels of
karma/followers/whatever by natural participation on sites) I only use Stack
Overflow as a user now and rarely answer anything. It works great for that and
I can sift through the answers and pick the one that works best while ignoring
the score. It's clearly not for me in terms of participating fully but I can
live with that.

------
RuadhanMc
I would encourage anyone who is interested about the thinking behind Stack
Overflow, reputation, money, question and answer sites, badges, commenting,
wiki, etc, to go back and listen to the early Stack Overflow podcasts. You
will get an hour by hour insight into their thinking behind certain features
of the site and will see that there are some very good reasons (and to be
honest, some not) for some things being the way they are.

<http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/podcasts/>

------
spinlock
Or you could just ask questions. I don't write too many answers on Stack
Overflow either but I usually do get a good answer to my programming/Ubuntu
issues.

I would actually argue that Stack Overflow works great. This article is an
excellent example of how their badge system creates a strong desire in their
user-base to contribute answers to and participate in the site. Maybe I'm just
weird because I could care less about karma and just want to get my questions
answered (by the karma obsessed trolling the new questions list :).

------
markstahler
Is rep important enough to warrant a blog post complaining you cant get
enough?

Man, money is too hard to get. I wish this damned CEO wasn't getting a 600k
salary + bonuses. Blog post upcoming.

~~~
tdoggette
He's not complaining that he can't get enough rep, he's complaining that he
can't contribute without it.

------
reason
You are concerning yourself with increasing a meaningless stored value on a
website on the internet that, chances are, you'll move on from in a relatively
short period of time. Take a second to think about that. That applies to here
and all other social-voting websites. It's an unnecessary worry. Focus on
things that matter.

------
RobertKohr
Who cares?

If I hit a wall while working on a problem, I toss into the gladiator pit
known as Stack Overflow, and after it has been mawed to pieces by a bunch of
brilliant people, I stop by and get my answer and can continue whatever I was
doing. Usually this all happens in the time it takes for me to get some coffee
and maybe take a short walk.

It is a beacon of hope and joy to someone who has wasted too much time in the
past trying to find the answers to hard problems.

So they are at each-others' throats trying to out answer other users so they
can increment up a point counter. Gamefication is a great motivator, and I am
happy that I don't have to use the typical motivators of begging, pleading, or
-ugh- paying for quality technical support.

Emotional reactions to the competitiveness is the success of a very well
designed game that has the outcome of great answers to problems that are
typically hard to find.

------
vannevar
I think the poster makes a good point. In the early days of SO, as in any QA
site, there were a surplus of questions and a dearth of answers. It would've
been suicidal to obstruct people from providing answers, so the bar was set
low there. Comments on the other hand are less valuable early on, so there was
no reason to encourage them.

Fast forward to today, and now there are a critical mass of people willing---
even eager---to answer questions, so that every new question has a surplus of
answers, many of them wrong. SO might well improve their signal/noise ratio by
reversing their policy and requiring higher karma for answers than they do for
commenting. As the poster points out, a newb is unlikely to come up with an
answer not already posted, but nonetheless might have some unique experience
or insight on that answer that could be helpful.

------
jswinghammer
I went through a short period where I really cared about what my profile
looked like there. I don't know why I ever felt that way. I think my top voted
answer is telling someone what I thought important concepts in C to
communicate to students are. I don't think that says anything about me
positive or negative to be honest.

If you look around the top contributors to the python tag you'll realize there
is a lot of room for people to submit good, thoughtful answers. If you take
the time to write something good then it will get voted up and if that's what
you want you'll be all set.

It seems like no worse of a way to spend your time than anything save perhaps
reading a good technical book and let's face it there aren't very many of
those.

------
marcusEting
The other bad thing about SO is that when a question has some answers, even if
they are not really right, nobody really pays attention to the question
anymore.

So it feels like questions that move down in the queue with a few proposed
answers are basically dead.

------
nlawalker
Headline is misleading - the real complaint isn't that participating is
impossible, it's that reputation is hard to earn. In SO's nascent days, you
could earn rep simply by showing up and answering questions. Now that it's
popular, if you want to gain rep, you have to muscle your way in using methods
like the author describes.

I find it amusing that SO's creators chose the term "reputation" for their
participation points, as opposed to "karma" or something else, because in this
aspect it's pretty similar to real-life reputation. When supply is high, it's
hard to gain reputation without gaming the system. That's not SO, that's life.

------
rexreed
Am I the only person that doesn't get this whole Stack / Quora thing? Why does
anyone care about points?

Don't get me wrong - I love the fact that there's a place I can go to ask a
question and get it answered by knowledgeable people. But what does that have
to do with points? If people want to help each other, then great. If not, then
don't.

Newsgroups used to fill this role quite well without points, but came with all
sorts of negatives (as detailed above). The benefit of the Stack / Quora stuff
is that you don't have to wade through irrelevant stuff to find what you need.
but points?

~~~
ddkrone
The voting is a crude proxy for correctness. I say crude because sometimes the
first few answers get way too many votes for simply being the first but over
time the correct answers float to the top.

------
quinndupont
The information on Stack Overflow is fantastic, but I just don't want to be a
leach. And contributing something useful _is_ challenging. Maybe I just don't
have anything wonderful enough to say.

------
acconrad
I'd like to point out that while I definitely did not write this post, I did
feel it easy to relate, because it seems hard at this point to gain reputation
without gaming the system a bit. But there are so many ways to get
involved...I think the best seems to be being knowledgeable in a very specific
area of expertise - answering C# questions is really tough, but if you know
Heroku, there are so many more questions there without answers that you can
really gobble up quite a bit of reputation by knowing something niche.

~~~
phwd
All the while one does not / is not able to answer questions, he can learn
from the answers that have already been submitted, no reputation gained but
knowledge (I have heard people compiling e-books on the best posts from
Stackoverflow). I call that a step forward.

------
mcantor
This post appears to be written from the perspective that the goal of Stack
Overflow is to gain points, when I believe the goal of Stack Overflow is to
answer questions.

------
angdis
Stack-overflow is amazingly effective, especially when one considers the
alternatives like those countless forgettable websites heavily laden with
front-and-center ads, and the ones that have nag screens that block responses
to answers until you "sign up", and the ones with clueless dilettantes
fumbling in the dark.

My only concern is that I think the exchange community might get
fractured/diluted if there are too many separate stack exchange sites.

------
kstenerud
I've never liked karma systems.

On the surface it seems to make sense: People who are helpful/insightful get
lots of karma. In practice, it fails on two fronts:

First, karma systems in and of themselves work based on popularity, under the
mistaken idea that popularity = correctness/insightfulness/suitability. Quite
often, the most insightful or thought provoking ideas are unpopular (or
speaking the truth is unpopular). What you get is a system that automatically
filters out the ideas that the majority are unconfortable with, and so you end
up with an echo chamber which doesn't admit new ideas.

Second, the policies formed around the karma system grow biased AGAINST new
users over time, which leads to community stagnation:

The initial couple of years are great. The early adopters are all eager to
participate in meaningful ways, and build a thriving, vibrant community.

Then the gamers join in. They learn how to game the system to gain points.
They do this just to show that they can. Closely related, the karma whores
move in. Their sole goal is to gain points for self-worth. The community is
meaningless; points are everything.

As the gamer's techniques become more widly known, the spammers move in,
automating the techniques to promote their spam, and the cat-and-mouse game
begins, usually at the expense of making things more difficult for the users.
These measures are almost always done with consideration of the already
established user base, using them to determine what a "normal, real" user is
like.

Once you hit this point, it starts to become prohibitively expensive for a new
user to join in, thanks to the biased notion of a "normal user". Stack
Overflow is a prime example of this, where you have to jump through all sorts
of crazy hoops just to be able to even comment or _gasp_ edit your own
question because upon re-reading, you decide it's not as clear as it could be.

And so you complain. But people don't like complainers, so they all jump on
you and say "It's not so bad! I went through the red tape and so should you!"
and "If you don't like the red tape, there's no place for you here!"

There's a word for this: Bureaucracy.

As a service provider, you should be doing everything in your power to make
things MORE accessible to new users, not LESS accessible. You should be
ENCOURAGING participation, not throwing hurdles in their way. New users are
fickle. Their first experience on your site will largely shape their
perception of it forever. Start them off with a bad experience and they'll
refuse to participate. Rampant bureaucracy is a sign of severe failure in the
system.

------
jws
The right question is as important as the right answer.

The easiest entry is to ask a good question. The next time you run into a
poorly documented problem, do some research, and eventually work out an
answer, reformulate it as the question you wish Stack Overflow contained and
ask it. You can always comment on things in your own question so you can guide
the answers if they are going wrong.

• Two question up votes and you can vote things up.

• Five and you can comment anywhere

~~~
allwein
Or you can just answer your own question, which is completely acceptable
behavior in SO.

------
eliben
SO is optimized for _askers_ , not for _answerers_ and intentionally so! The
whole goal of the website is to make asking questions simple, finding related
questions (reasonably) simple, and getting good answers quickly. As you can
see from profiles of some users, some people exchanged their books for SO (why
look it up - just ask). True, the rep game is a tough one, but so is life, so
get over it.

------
tmachinecharmer
In this article you say that you are <strike>a pretty and smart</strike> "a
pretty smart guy". Then you are definitely welcome at SO.

NOT participating in SO is neither a solution to your problem nor a decision
that a pretty smart guy would take.

Give it a shot buddy! and I am sure you will NOT write an article about how
awesome SO is because you won't find the words to describe SO awesomeness.

------
rhizome
"Impossible" seems exaggerated. Somehow, in an article decrying rep-whoring,
the OP decided that title-whoring was OK.

------
ben1040
I thought the same thing when I joined SO a few months ago, and agreed with a
lot of what was written in the blog post.

But, then I decided to give SO another chance just now. I posted two answers
and in ten minutes got enough upvotes to get me out of the 15-rep new-user
jail.

So consider my mind changed and I don't see what the big problem is, now.

------
d0mine
> Edit: closing comments since I’m tired of moderating (and I didn’t delete
> any but the obvious spam). Thanks for letting me vent.

It is ironic to hear it from a guy who complains that he can't comment without
enough reputation points on a site visited by millions.

------
messel
I believe SO is designed so that new users ask questions. Then after getting a
few rep points from questions they can contribute back with answers or
comments (my preferred input).

------
cfontes
I Disagree badly... It's a wonderful environment for developers. I personnaly
love it and I only have 101 points. that doesn't keep me from doing a thing
there.

Really bad, bad article.

------
jodrellblank
Do programming language designers look for repetetive questions on SO and
improve their languages so those questions wont come up in future?

------
nopal
Maybe not from his perspective, but from the perspective of those asking
questions and looking for answers, it works pretty well.

------
ForumRatt
I frequent the sister site Super User, I had no problem in getting rep points,
so far I am at over 8K in less than 8 months. No these are not forums and you
will be berated for not following the proper order of things. If you can't
compete stay off the site, its not for everybody like a forum is.

------
flipside
Any Q&A site that discourages potentially useful answers is doing it wrong.

As it happens, I've come up with an algorithm that would solve the most common
problems with Q&A sites (included the ones cited in this article) and am in
the process of building a prototype.

------
basha
Why not to try a new site for programmers <http://tagmask.com>. It provides
the ability to filter out content according your preferences and looks really
good. Have you checked it out?

------
AgentConundrum
What a terrible article. I'm sorry for the rant, but this really pissed me
off.

Admittedly, I don't participate in StackOverflow that much right now - I sort
of go through an ebb and flow where I get really gung ho about answering
questions, then it sort of wears off for a while - but this guy sounds a lot
like he wants to game the system, and is only in it for the points.

I'm not trying to put words in Jeff/Joel's mouth, but I think the "answer
before you comment" system is constructed the way it is so that noise can be
reduced. By that, I mean that the system wants you to actually contribute
something to the site to get used to how it works before you can "join the
discussion". Comments aren't downvotable, presumably because they don't want
to silence dissenting opinions in a discussion, and the average comment
doesn't get upvoted at all. If anyone could just walk in off the street and
leave a comment, you would end up with a bunch of "YouTube comments" being
left by random passersby.

For a newbie, your only way to contribute to a question is to write an answer.
Answering has a different social contract than does commenting. When you
answer a question, you are expected to provide, well, an answer! If your
answer is incorrect, then it will be downvoted to distinguish good information
from misinformation. Downvoting is a way of saying "this content is harmful",
and this is a perfectly valid response to a bad answer, but not a valid
response to a bad opinion (i.e. a comment you disagree with).

If the OP provided _answers_ on StackOverflow and was downvoted, then his
answer most likely was simply wrong. I haven't seen many, if any, correct
answers with negative scores on StackOverflow. The system tends to be fairly
self-correcting in that respect. If someone is downvoted wrongly, there is
more often than not another user who will upvote the answer back to zero. If
the OP is simply lamenting that he isn't receiving upvotes (in contrast to the
idea that he's being downvoted, which is a separate concept), then maybe his
answer simply isn't as good as he thinks it is, and the "flawed answer" he
wants to comment on simply isn't that flawed.

If the flawed answer is indeed flawed, then there is no harm in adding a new
answer. Simply write your own detailed answer and include evidence explicitly
proving that the current top voted answer is incorrect. When you post an
answer, the site will kick the question back to the front page of the site, so
you should get the opportunity for your "correct" answer to get exposure, and
if it's any good, it should get upvotes.

What I take the most issue with in this article, however, is the OP's lament
that any question he wants to answer is already answered. _That's the whole
point of the site!_ If the question is already answered, then the system is
working. The site doesn't exist for answerers to get points; it exists for
askers to get answers to their questions. If a question gets a lot of
responses, that is a Good Thing.

Now, OP used to have a valid point about having a lot of "in progress" answers
being posted. This was the so-called "Fastest Gun in the West" problem, and
was solved by modifying the site to display same-scored answers in a
randomized order. At this point, an "in progress" answer which doesn't yet
provide enough value shouldn't have any upvotes, and therefore a new answer
would have the same opportunity to be viewed as that answer. If you get your
answer into a steady-state first, then you will get upvotes and you will get
views. If someone else does, and gets upvoted, then at least the asker will
get a proper answer to their question. If you're complaining about other
people giving "minimum viable answers" which nonetheless help the asker, then
you're probably just "rep whoring".

For my part, I tend to answer questions in the same way. I'll quickly add an
answer which provides a technically correct answer that at least gives the
asker enough to finish the answer on their own (for example, "This can be
accomplished using the some_function function" is enough of a hint that it's
useful - the asker can look up the some_function documentation and learn for
themselves). Once that answer is in place, I'll go back and edit the answer to
include links to the documentation (I'll usually save at this point), then add
a thorough explanation of how the answer works and how to use it.

I've been commended by askers and other users for my in-depth answers to
questions, and I've even beaten the "horde of already submitted answers" due
to my quality. O a few occasions, I've come to a question that already had 5+
answers with "minimal correct answers", some of which have upvotes, and have
written an answer with a lot of detail which ended up either the highest
voted, or accepted by the asker (or both).

Basically what I'm saying is that if you're only trying to be a "rep whore"
then yes, the system is against you, but that's a Good Thing. If you're in it
to actually help people, then taking the time to write a detailed, quality
answer is the best way to go, and it'll often net you points to boot.

~~~
alanh
AgentConundrum, I just recognized your name from an incorrect answer you
provided on StackOverflow that nevertheless was accepted
([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4435906/print-when-
textar...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4435906/print-when-textarea-has-
overflow/4435958#4435958)). You made assumptions and then adopted your self-
confessed strategy of “quickly add[ing] an answer which …gives the asker
enough to finish the answer on their own,” but failed to understand the
problem inherent in the question. _You_ seem to be “rep whoring” and part of
the problem on Stack Overflow. How dare you just write a wall of text to
dismiss as “terrible” someone’s critique of SO.

~~~
RuadhanMc
Well then why don't you provide the correct answer with the right assumptions?

~~~
alanh
I did, you should have checked. I even made a public test-case to illustrate
why naïve solutions don’t work:
<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/105727/web/print_textarea.html> _Edited to avoid
sarcasm_

~~~
mcantor
I downvoted you for being sarcastic, and because I was discouraged by the tone
you used in this SO comment:

    
    
      Gordon, you downvoted my answer and left a misleading comment because you
      assumed that a user wouldn't edit the textarea? For shame. Your solution is
      not "pure CSS" but rather uses PHP to duplicate a textarea and then
      hopes that the user doesn't its content before printing.
    

Please chill out, dude. There is absolutely no reason for a discussion
involving Javascript and print stylesheets to require usage of the term " _For
shame_."

To phrase it differently: Try to avoid being the guy from this Xkcd.
<http://xkcd.com/386/>

~~~
alanh
Fair enough. Sometimes I do feel like that guy.

~~~
mcantor
It's OK. We're all that guy sometimes. All we can do is watch out for it and
adjust accordingly.

------
devin
"The point system is all wrong!"

Epic fail at life.

------
ddkrone
There is nothing sucky about the stackexchange sites. They are designed to be
useful and growing repositories of frequent question and answers. The whole
rep/voting thing is just a gaming layer on top to make the process of
participation a little more fun but if you just focus on the gaming aspect and
take it way too seriously like this guy then you miss out completely.

~~~
bherms
While it may seem like just a gaming aspect, there are a lot of benefits as
you gain more reputation on the site. Unlike many "points systems", SE
actually allows you to become essentially a moderator of the site as you gain
reputation. Once you've hit a certain mark you can edit, close, delete, etc. I
think it's brilliant.

~~~
ddkrone
The old forums had the same system so there is nothing new or brilliant going
on here, the stackexchange sites just measure things in terms of
reputation/votes and the old forums did something similar with posts/replies.
The only innovation I see is the automation of how promotion happens in terms
of votes/rep.

~~~
jbri
In other words ... the autopromotion happens to people who provide quality
contributions rather than those who add to the noise?

And you don't see how that's significantly better?

------
infocaptor
No matter what others say, but SO is awesome. I have got nearly instant
responses. Only once I had to pay someone on freelancer to solve my jquery
issue. It is like having SO community helping me in my development.

I know it is tempting to gain reputation points by answering simple questions.

Simple questions will have tons of responses. Instead try to pick the tough
ones and answer them.

------
lhnn
Why <noun> sucks, and <false hyperbole>

