
Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow - spatulon
http://michael.richter.name/blogs/why-i-no-longer-contribute-to-stackoverflow/
======
nathan_long
StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any
given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and
find a good answer quickly. And see some ads.

That's really it. Everything it does is geared toward that, and it does it
quite well.

I have lots of SO points. A lot of them have come from answering common, basic
questions. If you think points exist to prove merit, that's bad. But if you
think points exist to show "this person makes the kind of content that brings
programmers to our site and makes them happy", it's good. The latter is their
intent.

Does having easy answers available on SO make us dumber? I doubt it. People
have made the same argument about search engines, and you probably could have
said the same about encyclopedias.

~~~
VLM
"Does having easy answers available on SO make us dumber?"

Yes, in that the worlds largest helper only supports simple boring common
questions, as per the article. If you're trying to do stats in scala, and the
only help you can get is "hello world" in java, that's not good for Scala,
statistics, or much of anything else, making the world overall dumber.

By analogy, lets say reality TV shows completely push video documentaries off
the air. This is not so far fetched. The net result is likely to be dumber.

~~~
aaronem
By what mechanism do you imagine Stack Exchange-style sites starving out more
detailed and comprehensive treatments of individual subjects? The proposition
would seem to require the assumption that all programming can be reduced to
cookbook recipes.

~~~
VLM
Theoretical mechanism would look something like noob who could someday write
detailed comprehensive treatments of some Clojure topic tries to get started,
sees 99% of his available resources for help are java oriented, eh, better
stick with java in case I need help later on, and the possibility of noob
growing up to be clojure author of a detailed treatment has disappeared.

"The proposition would seem to require the assumption that all programming can
be reduced to cookbook recipes."

Its one of many effective ways to start learning a language, although not the
only way. To distort or screw something up, you don't necessarily have to mess
up 100% of the population, just a good chunk of them. You could try to argue
that few to no experts ever took their first steps as cookbook script kiddies,
but I don't think that would be successful.

~~~
testrun
This does not make sense whatsoever. You don't go to SO to get a feel for a
language. You go to SO to get quick answers for a problem you are having for a
language already chosen.

------
leephillips
He doesn't have a problem with Stack Overflow, really. He has some loathing
for his own practice of treating the site as a game and finding useless ways
to rack up meaningless points. He never explained why he bothered to collect
these points, but clearly one day he realized that this was pointless and
decided to blame the site rather than himself.

I go there now and then to answer questions. My latest answer[0], about a way
to get gnuplot to do a certain trick, took me a couple of hours to get right
and got me 25 whole points for being the accepted answer. I worked on this
because it seemed to be an interesting challenge, I was interested in figuring
out how to do it, and nobody else was answering. I sharpened my gnuplot skills
in figuring it out and helped someone. To do this for "points" is asinine
(unless a big score gets you something else, like a consulting contract - in
which case what's the complaint?).

[0][http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20294482/show-y-label-
in-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20294482/show-y-label-in-groups-
with-gnuplot)

~~~
jakub_g
Another +70 for now in 2 hours on HN, not bad, hmm I should link some answers
of mine here ;)

Coming back to the SO topic, I got my initial ~600 pts within just a few days
on "who's first", but it's not fun to do it long term. Then got ~400 pts for
Java trivia [1], now I usually just write my 2 cents when googling for
something and finding the best answer not satisfactory.

Sometimes I also self-answer myself for certain things I think could be useful
for others, or me-in-the-future e.g. [2]

[1] "What does the “+=” operator do in Java?" \- it's more than x = x + y;
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7456462/what-does-the-
ope...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7456462/what-does-the-operator-do-
in-java/7456548)

[2] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5924937/lucene-custom-
sco...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5924937/lucene-custom-scoring-for-
numeric-fields/5938998)

------
crntaylor
The author's main problem stems from his desire to use Stack Overflow as a
mechanism for gaining internet points - as is illustrated by his confession
that

    
    
      "I saw a simple Java question, hit Google, read briefly, then
       synthesized an original answer."
    

Why bother? Instead, I use Stack Overflow predominantly for three reasons --

1\. To ask interesting questions that I think will get a better answer there
than anywhere else (eg [0,1,2]).

2\. To help educate other programmers about languages that I like very much,
and would like to see in wider use. I endeavour not to just give a "how to do
X" answer, but instead explain what the different approaches are, and why some
approaches are better than others (eg [3,4,5])

3\. To stay in touch and build a reputation among the wider community of
Haskell programmers - _not_ by amassing internet points, but by asking
interesting questions and giving interesting, thoughtful answers.

If you just game Stack Overflow for imaginary internet points, it's no wonder
you don't find it very fulfilling.

[0] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9190352/abusing-the-
algeb...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9190352/abusing-the-algebra-of-
algebraic-data-types-why-does-this-work)

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10753073/whats-the-
theore...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10753073/whats-the-theoretical-
basis-for-existential-types)

[2] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19177125/sets-functors-
an...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19177125/sets-functors-and-eq-
confusion)

[3] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11684321/how-to-play-
with...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11684321/how-to-play-with-control-
monad-writer-in-haskell/11684566#11684566)

[4] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12968351/monad-
transforme...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12968351/monad-transformers-
vs-passing-parameters-to-functions/12969991#12969991)

[5] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20857165/move-or-copy-
in-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20857165/move-or-copy-in-haskell-
vs-c/20859731#20859731)

~~~
melling
How many good questions do you see that are "CLOSED AS NOT A REAL QUESTION"?
The site is fine for what it is, but there's definitely a market for building
a better StackOverFlow.

~~~
VLM
That annoys the heck out of me, because if it truly is not a real question,
then the "general masses" of answer authors would naturally agree. Instead
some deletionist authoritarian jerk needs to force his idea on everyone else,
because obviously no one else is worthy enough to make a judgment. Why feel
the need to force what they call the truth on everyone, if it is in fact the
truth? Or more likely they're full of it and just enjoy watching the world
burn. The worst part is the selection of judges is based basically on who
spends the most clock time googling for people too lazy to use google, it has
nothing to do with taste or skill or ability or experience. Random selection
would be more effective.

A site could be designed that isn't based on an anti-social, exclusionary,
classist, authoritarian philosophy. The tragedy is it wouldn't look too much
different than SO. So close, and yet so far...

~~~
greenyoda
" _Instead some deletionist authoritarian jerk needs to force his idea on
everyone else, because obviously no one else is worthy enough to make a
judgment._ "

I think they caught this disease from Wikipedia, where deletionist
authoritarian editors kill articles on real people because they're "not
notable enough" while allowing thousands of words to be written about minor
characters in TV series.

------
pygy_
The LuaJIT author, Mike Pall recently stopped contributing to SO [0] after
having an edit on one of his own posts about LuaJIT reverted by clueless mods
[1].

The reply was highly precise and technical, and the reasons given by the mods
to reject the edit are spurious, since they just couldn't understand it and
its implications.

I reached out to two of them (I couldn't find how to contact the third one),
but they didn't even reply to my mails.

[0] [http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/How-does-LuaJITs-
trace-...](http://www.freelists.org/post/luajit/How-does-LuaJITs-trace-
compiler-work,3)

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-
edits/3395606](http://stackoverflow.com/review/suggested-edits/3395606)

~~~
cruise02
It's generally accepted by the community at Stack Overflow that you don't edit
other people's answers except to make improvements to formatting and
punctuation. Changing the code should be left to the original author of the
post, as that changes the meaning of the answer. The people who rejected the
edit probably didn't notice that it was the same person who suggested the
edit.

Mike could have avoided that by just using the same account to edit his
original post. You can always edit your own work without it going through the
review process.

~~~
Shog9
FWIW, I've merged his accounts now.

Probably too late, but... If he ever decides to come back, he'll be able to
edit his own posts without review.

~~~
protomyth
Did you fix the edit also?

~~~
itsadok
Somebody else already had, a month ago.

[http://stackoverflow.com/revisions/11318414/4](http://stackoverflow.com/revisions/11318414/4)

~~~
mark-r
So eventually the system was self correcting. Unfortunately that may be too
late to redeem the site in the eyes of the contributor.

------
jaydles
DON'T TRUST ME BLINDLY: I work for Stack Exchange, so I'm totally biased. On
the other hand, I left a lucrative career in finance for a lot less money here
because I believe in what we're doing, so there's that.

MOST IMPORTANTLY: I appreciate Michael's feedback, and he worries about a lot
of the same things I do. Moreover, we are incredibly grateful for all he's
done over the years - my honest belief is that his contributions (even when
they were just fish) helped a ton of people finish a project that may have
been what made them LOVE programming. And _those_ people _did_ take the time
to learn the fishing techniques underlying those fish, so they could do it
better next time.

ON REWARDS: _Points aren 't the point._ Let's be honest. We reward people for
helping others with points that essentially convey nothing other than the
ability to help in new ways (as you unlock new privileges). No one in their
right mind is spending time on the site with the empirical goal of getting
points.

The real reason people answer questions is that they _like helping people_.
The points are important, but only insofar as they give you actual feedback on
how many people appreciate your effort. The points aren't the reward; they're
just a way to measure the real reward people care about: knowing how much of a
difference you've made.

So when Michael worries about his points going up even after he's stopped
posting, that's the system _working_. It's not about ensuring the right person
is "winning" it's about showing how many people got help.

And he's still helping others today. I respect his decision to leave, but
truly think he should be proud of what he's done for the programming community
to date. In any case, we're grateful.

~~~
acjohnson55
I really think SO is a gamechanger and I agree with you mostly, but I do think
the points system is broken. SO offers all of these points and statistics that
catapult people to positions of visibility, bestow clout, and unlock abilities
on the site, and you're saying that they don't matter? They do. As a new user,
it's practically unachievable to enter the top 10%, because all those people
are _still_ gaining points at an incredible rate, even if they're not actively
contributing. It's a classic "rich get richer" dynamic. If the points really
aren't the reward, then maybe they shouldn't be displayed right next to the
user's username.

~~~
vitd
I disagree that it's practically unachievable to enter the top 10%. I did it
in my first year (2 years ago) without even knowing that they kept track of
that sort of thing. Answer a single question a day (correctly) and you'll get
there easily. You'll actually be in the top 3-5% if you do that.

------
adamb_
Did SO get everything right? No.

Is SO the best code Q/A resource available? Absolutely yes.

Remember what was used before SO? Pure shit. Open-ended help forums scattered
throughout the web that had little/no moderation and no indication of where
the solution could be found in the discussion, or if a solution was ever found
at all. SO's aligned everyone's incentives to post the solution & the site's
formatting makes it trivial and find the best solution provided.

I've personally experienced times where my questions/answers have been
affected by wikipedia-esque moderation, but at the end of the day I still
click on SO results first in Google & and I still visit from time-to-time to
see if I can help anyone out.

~~~
aaronem
This is an excellent point.

Is the Stack Exchange model perfect? No.

Does it reward what the article's author calls "obsessive twerps" more
strongly than it does anyone else? Arguably yes.

Can it be substantially improved upon? Almost certainly.

Is it nonetheless an enormous qualitative improvement on its predecessors?
_Good God, yes!_

The article's author brings up the old saw about giving a man a fish versus
teaching him to fish, and that's well and good. But sometimes you just need a
fish.

------
nathan_long
Why I still contribute to SO:

\- I've gotten a lot of help there

\- It's nice to help other people in return

\- Any answer I put there will be available via Google in 5 minutes, so I can
definitely reference it myself in the future. (I'll even ask and answer
questions I just figured out so that I can find them later.)

------
bryanlarsen
Unlike the OP who was playing the Stack Overflow game, I use SO like a typical
programmer: I type my question into Google which often returns results from
Stack Overflow. Sometimes I'll come across an unanswered question or one with
a better answer, so I'll submit an answer. If I can't figure something out
after a few hours of trying, I'll ask the question on SO.

Such questions and answers represent hours of effort on my part. That's fine
-- I needed to spend most of those hours for my work anyways, but crafting a
good answer does add a significant amount of time. They usually don't result
in many points: they're pretty obscure. But often it's the only place on the
interwebs where the question is answered.

But the answer that has earned me the most points is a stupid throwaway CSS
answer that's technically wrong:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1817792/css-previous-
sibl...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1817792/css-previous-sibling-
selector/8329572#8329572)

What does really annoy me are the badges. I've got a bunch of necromancer
badges, which I'm proud of. But the value of those badges is really degraded
by cheap silver and gold badges, such as yearling.

~~~
cruise02
I don't really see those Necro badges as devalued by other badges. I have 14
of them that I'm pretty proud of. I think each one of them represents a good
answer to a question most people had ignored or forgotten about. I'd much
rather have a Necro badge than 10 upvotes on a question that 10 other people
were racing to answer as soon as it was posted.

------
V-2
"In well over two years I have contributed nothing to StackOverflow: no
questions, no answers, nothing. (Well, that's not true. When my score went
over 10,000 I tried out the moderator powers for a couple of edits, just to
test them out.) Over one third of my reputation was "earned" from me doing
absolutely nothing for over two years."

So what? Apparently his answers were valuable enough and saved the time (and
nerves) of many programmers who faced similar obstacles as original posters...

It seems only right to me that a great answer, a canonical answer, like - say
- this one:
[http://stackoverflow.com/a/101561/168719](http://stackoverflow.com/a/101561/168719)
\- can be fuelling its author's reputation long after it was written. Because
it holds some universal value, unlike (say) a solution to a short-lived
problem with NetBeans 6.1.

"Indeed I went from the top 4% of contributors at my time of departure to the
top 3%"

OMG, I didn't realize this issue was so serious.

Now that's just horrible, somebody better stop this madness quick!

(I can't help but read his rant in Sheldon Cooper's voice ;) )

~~~
alecdbrooks
>"Indeed I went from the top 4% of contributors at my time of departure to the
top 3%"

>OMG, I didn't realize this issue was so serious.

It's actually a fairly big jump. If you look at a distribution of Stack
Exchange users[0], it follows a power law distribution, where many users have
few points and a handful have a lot[1]. Once you reach the 96th percentile, it
takes a fairly large jump in reputation to get to 97.

If I ran Stack Exchange, this might bother me because it suggests that many
high-reputation users are no longer contributing. (Otherwise, other
contributors would overtake the OP as they gain after-the-fact upvotes plus
upvotes from new answers.) An alternate possibility is that the OP wrote
answers that are unusually long-lived, garnering enough extra upvotes to make
up for his lack of posting.

(All of this is not to pick on you. I just thought this was an interesting
statistical point.)

Finally, it looks like percentile is calculated based on users with more than
200 or something similar. Otherwise, the OP would be in the 99.9th percentile
based on his rank and the total number of users.

[0]: [http://imgur.com/a/bfcSl](http://imgur.com/a/bfcSl)

Data:
[http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/15710...](http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/157109#resultSets)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law)

EDIT: Here's a better distribution of users' reputations:
[http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/90233/repu...](http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/90233/reputation-
frequency-distribution).

~~~
V-2
This "alternate possibility" is one that came to my mind when I thought about
this. Of course one could try to verify it.

And anyway - now, I understand that this is beside the point you are making
now; just returning to the context set by the article - let me stress that I
still fail to see how this is a problem.

It would be very simple to "fix" the scoring in this regard, all it takes is
to disable voting in questions older than 30 days, for example. But I'm
stumped on how SO would benefit from such a move.

Quite the opposite - this would be an obvious incentive for repeating oneself
(or others); reposting old explanations to keep on scoring points off the same
know-how. Plus time-wasting fights on what is and what is not a duplicate,
etc.

~~~
alecdbrooks
I agree, I don't think SO would benefit from disabling voting on old
questions. Don't you want to encourage people to write answers that are useful
long after the fact?

The only benefit would be preventing the kind of bullying the OP. It would
curtail systematic downvoting of past answers out of spite. But it's an
extreme response to what I understand to be a rare problem.

------
bryanlarsen
Please everybody, please post your "obscure" questions to Stack Overflow. Yes,
it's unlikely that you'll get a good answer in any sort of useful timeframe
for many of the reasons the OP lists.

Sometimes you do get a good answer quickly, saving you hours of frustrating
searching.

But most times you will have to spend hours figuring it out yourself or you'll
end up giving up. Answering your own question won't get you a lot of points
but it will probably get you a few over time. More importantly, because of
SO's high google rank, you've made your answer easy to find for the next few
people who have the same quesiton.

~~~
tetha
The core problem lies deeper than the reasons OP listed, though: Complex
problems require tradeoffs, and tradeoffs require discussion. Stack overflows
format is 100% incompatible with discussion. Thus, Stack overflow is largely
incompatible with complex problems.

That's simply not fixable.

~~~
Karunamon
Incompatible by fiat, not by any technical reason. There is no reason the
comment system couldn't be expanded into a more extended/threaded system to
allow precisely that.

That and the "not a good fit" close reason is the primary thing wrong with SE.

------
JimDabell
The site seems designed to enable lazy developers to scrape by without
learning how to do things properly. There are developers out there who, when
faced with a problem, don't bother debugging, don't bother looking at the
documentation, don't bother searching Google for the error message, but just
post a question on Stack Overflow and wait for somebody to solve their problem
for them.

I've seen questions where you can literally copy and paste the question into
Google, look at the first result to find an authoritative source, and copy
sample code to solve the problem. Yet that was apparently too difficult for
the person asking on Stack Overflow, and if anybody points out they should be
doing this, they get their comment removed.

I've answered a lot of questions where somebody is genuinely stuck on a
difficult problem and it's taken serious effort to figure out what's going on.
I've also answered questions where the answer is only a quick Google search
away. The former get a couple of votes up. The latter get hundreds of votes
up.

This is not a healthy addition to the software development community. This is
enabling developers with a vitally important gap in their skills to avoid
becoming competent.

~~~
caoilte
Stop answering the stupid questions.

------
andrewcooke
i left so a month ago, and while i agree with one point here (creeping
authoriarianism) i am completely opposed to "teach a man to fish".

for me, as a professional programmer, that site is useful because it has
direct, simple answers.

but it seems to have been taken over by students who are resentful that there
should be simple answers without some evidence of suffering (it really seems
to be that).

why should i have to explain "what i have already done" to a bunch of
schoolkids when all i want is for someone who has solved this issue before to
post the right answer so i can get on with life?

i'm an adult. i can make my own decisions about when i learn and when i want
an answer. i don't need someone else's priorities - from a completely
different context, apparently motivated by jealousy over grades - shoved down
my throat.

but anyway, while that bugged me, it was the dismissive mods that finally
drove me away (at 19k points).

(am i the only one that thinks that good questions - interesting ones - are no
longer getting quality answers because people that could have answered them
have left? and that they're no longer being asked as a consequence? the time
when i wrote answers like [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7076349/is-
there-a-good-w...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7076349/is-there-a-good-
way-to-do-this-type-of-mining/7237972#7237972) has long, long passed)

~~~
probablyfiction
Knowing what you have already tried is useful from a troubleshooting
perspective...not to mention that if I suggest something you've already tried,
it is wasted time on both our parts; mine for suggesting it and yours for
waiting for me to make the redundant suggestion.

Many times there are multiple potential causes for an issue. Ruling out what
has already been tried is what any competent troubleshooter is going to do.

~~~
mratzloff
Most of those "show your work" responses are designed purely to force the
asker to prove that they have tried to solve the problem himself before asking
Stack Overflow.

Showing your work can needlessly complicates the question, especially if it
requires a lot of explanation. It's also irritating because someone knows the
answer but is withholding it until you do what he wants.

I had that exact experience when I asked this question:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13240039/group-count-
with...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13240039/group-count-with-mongodb-
using-aggregation-framework)

~~~
twic
Right. The "show your work" stuff is about establishing a _proof of work_ for
effort expended on a question before anyone expends effort on an answer. It's
a way of keeping the system honest, so askers aren't purely freeloading off
answerers. _It 's a human blockchain!_

------
sergiotapia
Personally, I post each and every question I have to StackOverflow. When I
figure it out, I take some time to write out a detailed answer to my own
question.

Why?

Because:

a) I love contributing with the online developer community and sharing back
all that I've taken since I started freshman year of college.

b) Writing it out step by step solidifies the knowledge within me.

It's a win-win!

~~~
lostlogin
Please keep doing this. I'm a total newbie - my first app (a very specific
calculator for a small profession) is awaiting rejection from Apple. I'm yet
ready to ask questions on StackOverflow as I know perfectly well that
everything I could think of asking has been asked before. I spend hours
reading there and have always found my answer. Those who take the time to
answer are appreciated.

------
cjf4
This reminds me of an old talk radio adage: don't mistake callers for
listeners. The people who call into a radio show represent a fraction of the
audience, and are often the most extreme, polemic, loose hinged segment of
that audience. And most people don't call.

In the SO world, I'm definitely a "listener." I almost always wind up on the
site from Google, and it usually does a pretty good job. I don't think I've
ever navigated around the site itself, so the "game-ification" or whatever was
completely foreign.

I will say that there have been numerous times where there are pretty good
subjective or opinion based discussions (which language is better for x?) that
get "closed as non constructive." I can understand why they would want to
avoid flame wars, but almost always the discussions were, ironically, very
constructive, nor could I find the same type of discussion anywhere else.

~~~
collyw
I wish there were a site for subjective opinions. I often want to know what is
a better library for a specific task.

~~~
m_myers
That would be [http://slant.co](http://slant.co).

Disclosure: I am not affiliated with slant.co, but I am a Stack Overflow
moderator. I like slant.co a lot.

------
frobozz
IMHO, The banning of "what have you tried", and the removal of "too localized"
will lead to even more poor pedagogy.

The question to which the author links (2387218) is a perfect example of a
wholly unresearched question, where the only possible valid answers are
"RTFM/STFW" or "here's a fish".

This was the kind of thing that would have been deleted under "too localized"
as it offers no benefit for future seekers of enlightenment.

I suppose it may be flagged for deletion according to this criterion:

> Questions asking for code must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the
> problem being solved. Include attempted solutions, why they didn't work, and
> the expected results.

but that doesn't quite seem to fit. The question is not "give me teh codez",
but it does show that the asker has not attempted any solutions.

------
jordan0day
> There's an old cliché in English: give a man a fish, he eats for a day;
> teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. StackOverflow is filled to the
> brim with people giving fishes.

This hits the nail on the head, imo. While the SO system is (presumably) meant
to reward "karma" based on the __quality __of answers, more often than not it
seems that __quantity __is just as important. And it 's not hard to see why
this is the case -- there's an inherent risk in typing a well thought-out
(read: time consuming and potentially _long_ ) answer, when a simple one-liner
is probably all the questioner is really seeking.

On the other hand, maybe that's what StackOverflow is really for -- getting
things done, NOW. Even if that "getting things done" answer is just a band-
aid, and the questioner hasn't really learned anything.

In my experience, people who find themselves applying band-aid after band-aid
to their code (myself included) rarely connect the dots all the way back and
realize that all their subsequent problems were largely due to their initial
"fix".

~~~
CWuestefeld
_more often than not it seems that quantity is just as important. And it 's
not hard to see why this is the case -- there's an inherent risk in typing a
well thought-out (read: time consuming and potentially long) answer_

This is what turned me off from SO. The strategy to garner points (at least in
the topics I'm expert in) is to lurk waiting for quickly-answered questions.
Pounce on these, by entering a rough, approximate answer, so you can score the
credit. Then, if you're feeling charitable, go back and flesh it out properly
once you've got the karma in your pocket.

Time and again I've entered a correct and complete answer, to score nothing
because somebody beat me (and I'm a very fast typist, btw) with a quick one-
liner that provides little value - and in many cases, hasn't even been
completely correct. On more than one occasion, after reading the "winning"
answer, I've been left frustrated, thinking "come on, that sample you posted
won't even run, let alone do what you claim".

I suppose that part of the blame lies with those seeking answers. The user
interaction is such that they'll allocate upvotes when they see something that
looks promising. Once they've actually tried it, and found that answer
wanting, there's little incentive to go take back the undeserved rewards.

~~~
aaronem
The green check mark is worth 25 points, one time, and an asker can reassign
it (and the points) if a later answer proves more worthwhile than one already
accepted. Every upvote is worth 10 points, and an answer can get upvoted for
as long as it exists.

If you're playing the game for points, the way to win it is to find questions
with lots of Google juice, and then answer them with every bit of correctness
and completeness you can possibly muster. This strategy requires patience and
discipline, which the "throw off a quick stupid answer as fast as possible"
strategy admittedly does not. Over time, though, it's bulletproof, and if
you're going to play the game for points in the first place, then I think this
is the best way to combine that and actually contributing something
worthwhile.

------
ars
His bullet #2 under "Creeping authoritarianism" is so incredibly correct! It's
exactly what happened to wikipedia, and why editors are leaving in droves.

With Stack Overflow it's simply not worth it to answer a difficult question,
the time to point ratio is just not there, and to make it worse it's all about
speed - how fast you can answer, because once the question goes off the home
page you will get basically no points. So a hard question is doubly bad - it
takes a long time, and by the time you are done you'll get no points.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Yep. Any community that gives censorship powers to an "elite" group runs into
this problem. I'd add to his points (which are good) by noting that when your
job description involves censoring, the obvious way to make it look like
you're doing your job is to censor lots of stuff.

This is just a gut feeling, but (at least for the stuff I tend to search for)
Google results leading to Stack Overflow are more likely than not to wind up
on a page that's been zapped by a "moderator".

If you're running a Q&A site, and people are Googling the Q's, it would
behoove you to have the A's. Or so it seems to me. Apparently SO management
has a different opinion.

~~~
sp332
The difference with SO was (supposed to be) that the only people who got those
privileges had high karma which was earned by being a good citizen of the
site.

------
robomartin
I haven't been to SO in months. I haven't contributed with a reply to a
question in probably two years. I haven't posted a question in about as long.
Same with ServerFault and other SE communities.

I've seen what's happening on SE before. It was called USENET back then. The
best way I can describe it is that marauding hordes of extremists aggressively
took over some groups mercilessly attacked anyone deviating from their vision
of the world. I remember comp.lang.c becoming particularly problematic.

OK, a little over the top. Well, yes and no. One of the most frustrating
things on SE and SF are the questions that are closed as off-topic when they
very much are on topic. I haven't been on either of those for a while. Back a
some time ago there seemed to be a war of sorts going on between the two
communities's moderators as they would close topics in each and send them off
to each other. For example, if I remember correctly, questions related to
XAMPP was a hot-button item that almost guaranteed your question would end-up
in digital limbo. In this sense, it very much started to feel like USENET when
the inmates took over the asylum.

When I got started with SE I felt a responsibility to give back as much as I
took. I remember devoting significant amounts of time to answering questions
with well-tested clear explanations. As you clash into the reality of what
these communities have become (both in terms of quality of content and quality
of the people who pull the strings) the motivation to contribute at that level
--or any level for that matter-- tends to go down.

Not sure what's in store for SE. It just isn't an important part of my daily
routine in any way these days. I suspect this might be the case for a lot of
professionals who have far better things to do with their time and skills than
to play such games for points and badges.

------
bryanlarsen
The OP complains that he got 5000 points for doing "nothing". On the contrary,
I think those are the most valuable points. If your answer is still useful to
somebody 2 years later, that's a great indicator on how useful your answers
were.

------
jere
>It's possible because I did what many of the people whose questions I
answered (and got points for) should have done for themselves: I saw a simple
Java question, hit Google, read briefly, then synthesized an original answer.

I had a very similar experience. I got the most points (3 times as many as any
other question I ever answered) from showing how to perform the most basic
task in ckEditor, I library I had not used before or since answering.

On the other hand, I would often spend _hours_ getting a demo to work to
demonstrate a concept that answered the person's unanswered question and
writing a detailed explanation... then nothing. No response. Out of spite, I
started deleting all my answers that were not accepted and had no upvotes.

~~~
sp332
Your answer probably _is_ the top response on Google.

~~~
jere
Yes, you are correct.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=ckeditor+textarea+value](https://www.google.com/search?q=ckeditor+textarea+value)

------
JoeAltmaier
I also find the quality of answers, and of questions(!) poor. A little
googling usually finds better information. And then there's the line-going-
dead issue that plagues most question/answer forums (fora?): after some back-
and-forth somebody suggests to try something, and the supplicant never
responds. Did that work, and they went on with their life? Did they give up?
Are they still trying to find an answer? Nobody will ever know.

~~~
cruise02
I think the huge influx of low quality, often unanswerable questions is the
biggest problem facing Stack Overflow. They make it much more difficult for
expert programmers to find the interesting questions that deserve an answer.
There are tools in place to remove these questions, but not enough people are
using them.

------
specialp
While it is true that simple answers get a lot of credit, it is also true that
most common questions have simple answers. Sure a bit of Googling may get you
the answer but sometimes it takes an experienced user to find a Google answer.
Just knowing the right thing to search for requires some skill. Dead obvious
questions that can be easily Googled or are repeats are flagged and often
removed.

Sure in an ideal world someone answering that very specific question that is
difficult to answer would get more credit but it is not perfect. That is also
why the bounty system exists because someone can have a specific hard to
answer question that would be very beneficial to them while not many others
would be helped and thus upvote. So that person can offer a bounty.

------
samspot
The main value I get from stack overflow is easy to find answers to easy
questions. I find it easier to find documentation of how to do X on stack
overflow than I do in the manuals for most of the tools I use.

Here is the workflow:

1\. Google 'question string'

2\. Click first stack overflow link

3\. Skip to the first answer without reading the question.

This, incredibly, works for about 80% of the things I need to look up day to
day. I often find that I either need a simple example, or just need my memory
jogged. In my opinion the entire internet is better because of the existence
of this one site.

I agree with all of the author's points, but I think stack overflow is
worthwhile _despite_ these problems. And trust me, I've gotten my own snarky,
low effort, infuriating, heavily upvoted, answers from Jon Skeet.

------
barrkel
I stopped contributing to SO because of this:

[http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/19659/search-
filters...](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/19659/search-filters-by-
minimum-rep-maximum-views-maximum-answers-etc)

Specifically, to keep SO interesting _to me_ , I wanted to have a custom
search that eliminated low-rep users from my view - questions from people who
are able to answer questions (e.g. able to Google) are much more interesting.

------
danso
I want to tell the OP to stop being such a buzz-kill, but the high-scoring
example he posts is quite comical
([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2387218/what-does-this-
li...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2387218/what-does-this-line-of-code-
do/2387232#2387232)).

It seems that most of the OP's angst are over the relatively simplistic points
system. In his Java ternary example, perhaps it could be counterbalanced with
the upvotes you receive _and_ the worthiness of the question (as marked by
stars and upvotes). But then the scoring system would become much less obvious
and then you'd have complaints about that.

Either way, even with the deluge of non-useful content...I'm amazed at
Google's ability to almost always get me to the most relevant discussion, even
with a bare amount of generalizing my search query...and in the cherry-picking
testing I've done, the Google search engine usually does a better job than
SO's own engine (though SO's related-questions sidebar is also quite good). I
wonder if some Googler's 20%-time idea was to closely study the SO API and
build an algorithm and quality flags specific to the SO domain, as a way to
keep devs loyal to the Google search platform?

~~~
nathan_long
I think "the worthiness of the question" is proxied by the upvotes on the
answer.

Imagine two good answers, one on an advanced question and one on a very basic
one. The basic answer gets way more upvotes. Is that unfair? It helped a lot
more people, apparently, which is the goal of the site. It more readily
demonstrates that the author creates content that helps a lot of people, which
is the goal of points.

As long as you don't imagine that more points means more knowledge, I don't
see the issue.

------
archwisp
I think most of you are missing the point of the article. He targets SO
specifically in this article but really, it can be applied to almost any
community on the Internet. He mentions Wikipedia specifically but I've seen
the same thing repeated over and over on forums, games, and even the IETF for
over a decade.

The question is: Is there a way to fix this?

~~~
jaimebuelta
I don't think so. As an Internet community grows, it loses focus and it
changes, which makes it different (not necessarily "bad", but a different one
that started). Also, the increase in number of members makes more difficult to
follow who the members are, which is one of the key points of making you feel
"part of the community" (plus the potential increase in trolls, even if signal
to noise ratio is still good) There are also stuff like repeated subjects,
etc...

I've been in enough communities to see the same pattern repeated. I'm not
really sure it can be fixed...

------
kyberias
Why would anyone care whether one Mr. Richter bothers to collect more points
in Stack Overflow anymore?

Despite ALL the criticism in the article, it is still possible that
StackOverflow is a very useful site.

------
acconrad
Overall I agree, but I think his analogy of feeding fish vs teaching is a bit
of a chicken and egg problem: oftentimes today if I'm googling a trivial
problem, Stack Overflow is the first result, and I'm actually glad that is the
case the majority of the time.

~~~
Dirlewanger
Seriously, this is what I want as well. I don't want to read a years-old forum
thread full of whitespace and content-less replies or, god forbid, EE, to
figure out the answer. I'm glad SO is filled to the brim with direct answers
to a myriad of questions. Saying it's ruining pedagogy is over-thinking the
site's purpose.

------
lemmsjid
I appreciate the author's opinions overall, so this is a nitpick of just one
of his core arguments. I think he is inverting the value of certain kinds of
questions. To me, Stack Overflow is valuable primarily for the simple answers
to simple questions, and secondarily for the complex answers to hard
questions.

As a software developer well into my second decade of professional experience,
I maintain a small number of technologies at what you might call an expert
level. These technologies shift in and out of focus depending on what my
current projects are.

When I complete a project and don't use the technology for more than a year or
so, I've found that I forget all of the nitty gritty stuff and remember all
the big conceptual stuff.

For example, I recently returned to Java after several years of disuse. All
the bit conceptual stuff that was really hard for me to pick up initially,
like polymorphic behavior, multithreading, etc., was still there. The easy but
nit-picky stuff was all gone. I'd forgotten when boxing happens and doesn't
happen, the behavior of equals in reference vs value types, even where I'm
supposed to put certain syntactic elements. Simple questions on StackOverflow
to the rescue!

As another example, I did a large project involving SVG in the early 2000's
and got to the point where I knew as much as there was to know about it. I
recently did a quick one-off project that utilized SVG, and I found that I'd
retained the big conceptual ideas, such as the behavior of the coordinate
system, the hierarchy of shapes, viewports, groups, etc., but I'd totally
forgotten a huge laundry list of practical nitty-gritty things about actually
making an SVG experience work.

In the Java example I was embarking on a large project, so I hit the books and
re-taught myself to fish again, because it was quite worth my time investment
to start from the fundamentals and work my way back up. In the SVG example, I
literally just wanted to do something in an afternoon, and I knew SVG could do
it, and I wasn't going to do any SVG work after that. Hitting the books and
teaching myself to fish in that scenario would have been a waste of time. So I
plowed through and was helped immensely by the simple-question simple-answer
Stack Overflow scenario.

Then there's a whole list of technologies that I really don't have the brain-
space to keep abreast of, but I still need to use. For example I am not an
expert at shell scripting, but on occasion I need to write one. Back to Stack
Overflow and the simple answers to simple questions.

Before Stack Overflow I wouldn't have been in the dark--as a long-time
Internet community member, I would have gone through the usual: find the right
community with the most helpful people, hope the community has a search engine
or is well indexed by Google, read through long lists of replies without a
voting system or assessment of quality, rinse-repeat. Stack Overflow speeds
that process up immensely.

~~~
collyw
I moved from Perl to Python around 3 years ago. And google searches went from
Perl Monks to SO. At first I found Stack Overflow nicer, with its clean modern
interface, but as time goes by, I see the moderators attitude getting worse an
worse.

Perl Monks encouraged discussion and deeper learning, even though a lot of it
came down to Perl Golf.

~~~
lemmsjid
Yeah, agreed, the other half of things that I didn't mention is that when I do
find a good stand-alone community around a technology, that tends to be my go-
to place. Especially for free ranging conceptual discussions.

What I see more of these days is a Google Group, or mailing list, or forum
with a lot of core users discussing things, planning the future, debating,
etc., and then a lot of reference back to Stack Overflow for particular
questions that get asked a lot.

And that's really the core purpose of Stack Overflow. When it comes to writing
documentation, the area that tends to have the most potential but the least
realization of said potential is the FAQ. FAQs provide another dimension to
documentation because they address the, "Well, given that I read this
documentation, I still don't get X" scenario. No matter how well written the
documentation is, there will be things that are not answerable, because
software is so multidimensional. Usually the way a FAQ works out is that the
person writing the documentation remembers a bunch of questions that were
asked and answers them in place. Hopefully people come in later and fill in
more answers based on questions that come in later. In the end it languishes.
People have tried to address this via forums, wikis, and mailing lists, but in
the end forums are a good place for narrative discussion, wikis are a good
place for writing documentation period, but both are poor for FAQ because of
their built in time decay, lack of voting, etc.

In that sense, Stack Overflow is a FAQ engine is appropriately geared toward
explaining particular answers to particular questions.

That said, Stack Overflow became more than that after its community exploded,
and I share in the annoyance when some of the more interesting free-ranging
questions get shut down because they're open ended. I am not wholly on the
side of FAQ-type lockdown.

------
insteadof
In four years you should have learnt that it's "Stack Overflow" with a space
and that you can only get moderator status when you have a diamond next to
your name.

Then again, there are plenty of 3-year+ users with 100k+ who still think
moderators are any other users who disagree with them and/or can only vote to
close a question.

When you don't want to see the effects of leaving joke questions around as
more and more users use that as a reason to increase the noise, then you don't
want to see why moderation and locking/deleting needs to take place.

~~~
cruise02
There are a set of tools that you gain access to when you hit 10k reputation,
which are often referred to as the "10k moderator tools." I think this is what
the author is talking about when he says he was close to moderator status.

~~~
insteadof
Reading the other comments here, a lot of people think mods are those with 2k.
Or at least those with edit privileges.

------
tcgv
_Remember how I have over 14,000 points as of this writing? (...) In well over
two years I have contributed nothing to StackOverflow: no questions, no
answers, nothing. (...) Any scoring system that allows this to happen is
simply broken in my opinion._

That's pretty much how our "real world" scoring system works if you think
about it. To make it simple, just replace the "internet points" by "money" and
your "stackoverflow account" by a "savings account" that pays interest and the
analogy is set ;)

------
erikpukinskis
My problem with Stack Overflow is that it basically feels like a ghost town
when I try to use it. The Ember people encourage users to use SO for help, and
shut down posts to the Ember discussion board that are too "helpy". But
whenever I've asked a question on SO, I've gotten literally zero responses. I
have no idea why. Does having a better reputation actually lead to you getting
more answers? I don't even know, so I don't bother trying. Many of the things
I try to do on SO I can't, because I don't have the right reputation. It
mostly feels like an impenetrable, confusing castle full of useful stuff that
I can only watch from outside.

Instead, I just blog solutions to various thorny problems I run into, so that
other people can find them on Google. And I try to use whatever domain-
specific message boards I can find. I just don't understand how to use SO to
get help so I don't bother.

And it's not that I don't want to contribute. I've answered some questions on
SO and I'd be happy to answer many more than the questions I ask. But my
(uninformed) sense is that I could answer questions til I'm blue in the face
and no one would ever answer mine. The ratio of unanswered questions to
answered ones is insane. It just doesn't feel like there's a community there
that I'm joining.

That said, I find it incredibly useful when there's already an SO solution
that comes up in Google that solves my problem.

------
PaulHoule
To me Stack Overflow is the new "Experts Exchange"

I love Java and I love the Java ecosystem. Stack Exchange serves the Java
ecosystem very poorly however.

A lot of the frustration people have with Java is that they try to learn it
from a task-oriented perspective, and that really gets you in trouble if you
work with Spring or Maven, particularly on a big team. If your first
experience is with a 40-module Maven project that is all SNAPSHOT releases, it
takes two hours to do a complete build, and there are just two people who
understand maven vs 23 developers who get their answers a problem at a time
from StackOverflow and who copy each others' bad solutions while adding more
problems, of course you hate Maven.

In the case of Maven the documentation sux and you need to read the source
code and not be afraid to write plug-ins, but Spring is not so mysterious if
you take your tablet to the gym and read the manual cover to cover a few
times.

There is no language that favors holistic thinking and punishes "task-
oriented" thinking more than Java. For instance, when most developers have to
deal with logging it's because things have gotten horribly tangled up with
slf4j and commons-logging. Once more, the situation is pretty simple if you
understand the big picture, but from a task oriented perspective you're just
stumbling in the dark.

------
georgemcbay
Somewhat tangential to the OP but as someone who is much more of a consumer
than a contributor, I've become increasingly less enamored with Stack Overflow
over the years just because of the vast increase in times I'll search for some
exact issue, find a link where the question exactly matched the problem I'm
having, see that it has an answer with like 10 upvotes, find the answer to be
wrong either because it is just straight up incorrect or because it is
"correct" but not answering the actual question as asked, and often I'll see a
comment to the answer from the original asker mentioning that the answer is
wrong, but then no follow-up discussion.

I think this may be in large part a negative side effect of the "gamification"
because this rarely happened back when usenet posts (searched via deja or
google groups) or dedicated forums for topics would be my source for finding
programming answers in subjects I was unfamiliar with (new API, new language,
etc). In those places if I found a question that matched mine well, and it was
answered, there was a very high percentage chance the answer was correct and
not just someone guessing or answering half-assedly and too quickly to get in
on the karma train.

These wrongly-answered answers seem to dissuade others from answering
(question too old, already sort of answered, nobody will see my correct answer
and upvote it), so this wrongly answered question just lingers seemingly
forever. If the moderators spent half the time pruning out these wrong answers
that they do closing topics that are borderline off-topic, the site would be a
far better resource for me.

------
Shog9
Growing up, a good portion of my summer (and spring, and fall...) was spent
helping out in my family's rather large garden.

Most of this involved rather tedious, repetitive labor. So to stave off
boredom, we made up games to go along with it. "Fastest to finish hoeing a row
of corn", "Most peas shelled in a minute", etc.

It helped. We got a lot more done, faster, and with less complaining because
of it.

But... The games weren't really the goal, and no one ever thought otherwise:
the point was the creation and preparation of food for the next year. If you
"won" by chopping down all the corn or throwing out the unshelled peas, no one
would think highly of you for doing so.

Too many people look at games - or especially "gamification" \- as a silver
bullet that will turn the efforts of lazy and unproductive players into
gold... This is exceedingly naive. Any game played in bad faith will have
disappointing results, whether the mechanics of that game involves throwing a
ball around or answering programming questions.

Is that a good reason not to play? Hell no! Games are fun, and with the right
players and attitude can be exceedingly rewarding. But you do need to keep
some perspective, to remember at all times _why_ you're playing.

------
V-2
Any idea where they went wrong? Any suggested alternative?

Some trivial Java question gets one more points than a brilliant solution for
some obscure problem - okay. Isn't that the nature of all things? Is this
StackOverflow's fault?

He recommends:

"Engage with other users of the tools you use in the form of user groups,
mailing lists, web forums, etc."

Don't "mailing lists, web forums" suffer from the same bias? Even if there is
no formalized reward system (points) there?

------
adrianonantua
While OP makes some valid points (i.e. community receptivity), this is
something that caught my attention:

    
    
        > StackOverflow is filled to the brim with people giving fishes.
    

Perhaps. But those get only a few points. Joel Spolsky wrote about not only
answering a specific domain question, but rather writing a comprehensive
answer about some topic in a away that it becomes the default answer everyone
reverts to when the question comes up again
([http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/reputation-not-
rep/](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/reputation-not-rep/))

I tried that. Guess what happened:

[http://stackoverflow.com/a/7745635/570191](http://stackoverflow.com/a/7745635/570191)

Not saying my answer is awesome, but I just tried to be comprehensive on a
very recurring SQL topic and the community responded very positively to it.

I get it, SO feels like a game. But I use it to hone my skills and learn new
things. When I want to learn, I don't ask on SO: I stick to a tag and keep
trying to answer something on it. Learned a lot that way.

Just my 2c.

~~~
caoilte
I only answer questions that aren't googlable. Edge cases in hedge libraries
basically. I give comprehensive and detailed answers that reflect the hours of
research I had to do. They get upvoted a few points every now and then.

I once answered a Java frameworks question with an opinion. It has gathered
nearly a thousand points over the last few years.

The game is broken. Bad answers to stupid questions get all of the points and
I raise an eyebrow every time a CV lands on my desk enumerating the candidates
SO points.

But it's still a well optimised site that beat experts exchange, so it doesn't
matter too much.

------
robbrown451
"Over one third of my reputation was "earned" from me doing absolutely nothing
for over two years. Indeed I went from the top 4% of contributors at my time
of departure to the top 3%, despite, you know, me not doing anything."

I don't see the problem here. He's not getting points for doing nothing. He's
getting points for something he did in the past. Sort of like royalties.

------
colemorrison
Okay, so I literally can't imagine programming nowadays without Stack
Overflow. Sure, google synthesized answers may be a cheap way to score points
(actually I'd never thought to do that), but people that do that are still
saving me time. And even though some answers do skip the art of "teaching a
man to fish" there are still TONS that do "teach a man to fish."

------
dinkumthinkum
I feel the same way and in a similar position as the OP.

I don't think #1 and #2 are really a big deal. #3 is the real issue. The
problem is SO still follows slavishly an ideology proposed by one of its
founders, I think it was not really Joel's views so much if you followed the
podcast discussions. This ideology has persisted in the mega meta bureaucracy
that is SO now.

Of course, it is always funny that their presumable goal was to be the
destination for technical for answers but yet any question you might google
and find answers on StackOverflow, the answers will, with a probability of
nearly 1.0 that it will be locked, closed, and marked some kind of horrible
thing that should haver appeared on the site. Good job, I guess. If SO was
meant to fix the wretchedness of forums .., what fixes SO? I don't know. But
with the fury that it attacked the other forms of communication I just expect
more than endless "philosophizing" about "what makes a good question" and all
this meta ideological nonsense. Maybe it's just me.

------
nickthemagicman
Stack overflow is awesome. I asked a question about message pack and the
author of the software responded.

Ignoring the gamification of S.O. the community that surrounds it and the
sheer amount of knowledge it holds makes it an incredible resource never seen
before in the history of programming.

Sometimes it seems like human beings could live in a golden palace and be
upset that the gold is the wrong color.

------
Someone
_" Indeed I went from the top 4% of contributors at my time of departure to
the top 3%"_

That seems to indicate that stack overflow had considerable growth in the
number of contributors, relatively few of which acquired large scores (for
example, if there were no 'effortless scoring', they would need 33% growth of
users who all have lower scores in order to make the former top 4% become the
new top 3%)

That might be an indication that there are fewer users who play the "I want
points" game. It would require access to quite a bit more data (who joined
when, what do the distributions of scores look like, etc) to prove that,
though.

If it turns out that there still are lots of users chasing high scores, I
think it might be worthwhile for Stack Overflow to play with different scoring
functions. For example, h-index is popular in scientific papers. One could do
a SO h-index (has X answers that got at least X upvotes). Maybe, to encourage
diversity, one could add "... With X different tags" to the requirement.

------
InclinedPlane
I have basically the exact same experience with SO as the author. I was in the
beta group, I currently have moderator permission levels, and I hardly ever
use the site.

It's great finding specific answers to highly specific questions that a large
number of devs can help with. It's terrible at keeping many of the most
experienced devs interested in answering questions. And it's not great as a
general learning resource either. The site just stalls out at a low to
moderate level of sophistication in terms of the level of knowledge that can
be found there, for all of the reasons the author described.

Edit: after some reflection, here is a stronger critique of SO:

SO leverages a huge amount of effort from developers for very little real
benefit. Some of the site has value but a lot of it boils down to moderately
experienced devs spoon feeding answers to beginning devs, which I think could
be more detrimental than helpful. By doing so such beginning devs avoid the
hurdle of having to RTFM, which stunts their growth. They avoid having to
level up their skillset and they know that they can just return to SO when
they have their next problem, so they are discouraged from acquiring the
skills to solve their own problems, they will stall out at a beginning skill
level forever. Meanwhile, as many people have pointed out the true point of
crisis in skill/project development lies not at the beginning but after the
initial hump, after years of work. And here devs are not well served by SO
because they need more than just an answer to a specific question, they need
guidance, they need mentoring, they need encouragement. SO's nearly
pathalogical lack of community makes it a very poor place to seek out
assistance during that phase of personal development.

In short: SO may be helping the wrong people and discouraging folks who are
more in need of assistance and for whom being helped would have a vastly
greater positive benefit on the industry as a whole.

~~~
testrun
<i>... so they are discouraged from acquiring the skills to solve their own
problems...</i>

Nobody is discouraging anything from anybody. SO is mainly a resource for
programming problems.

For the life of me I can not understand this expectation that SO is a tutoring
site. It is not. As a developer resource it is invaluable, and free.

------
pointernil
While I find Stackoverflow and most other Stackexchange sites VERY often
helpful and interesting, I thinks as well that it is the child of the "SEO
triumphs it all" times.

Additionally it is geared towards STATIC knowledge. Chosen "best" answers
(CURRENTLY!) and the fact that most of the time no one is actually updating
their votes according to the CURRENT state of the art or current established
best practices actually can even drive info seeking users towards out dated
answers...

Still, most of the time I think it works just fine for the folks just in need
for quick "how do I convert x into y in language z" answers.

To tackle the non-static, more dynamic and actually fleeting aspects of
"voting for the best" aspects I am working on and experimenting with Sustinion

[http://www.sustinion.com/opinions/tagged/usa+](http://www.sustinion.com/opinions/tagged/usa+)

------
cruise02
Under "poor pedagogy" the author explains the "give a man a fish" problem on
Stack Overflow, then goes on to explain that giving fish is how he gained most
of his reputation. How about being part of the solution instead of part of the
problem? No one is stopping you from teaching people how to fish.

~~~
tokenrove
The system is such that there's no incentive to teach people how to fish.
First, the best way for people to learn is not by completely solving the
problem for them, but that's what people want in an answer. Second, by the
time you've written out a pedagogical response, other people have swept in
with quick, just-give-me-the-fish answers, and the question asker has moved
on.

~~~
cruise02
I don't really need incentive from the site to teach people how to fish. I
just like doing it. More often than not, I learn something myself.

------
Bahamut
I don't really post on StackOverflow - people have tended on the rude side a
little more than should be the norm there from my experience. I use IRC
heavily though for my programming help needs. SO is nice for its searchability
though, and how many solutions to problems are posted there. It has its
utility.

------
jhawk28
Most of this is just a symptom of Stack Overflow being too successful. It was
good when it was just a few thousand good/nice people. Now that it has
critical mass, you have to deal with the rest of the people. I doubt that the
problems are going to be solved by having good people leave.

------
FrankenPC
"The people asking are learning nothing useful beyond the shortest of the
short terms"

Not for me. It's my go to place to find syntax equivalent examples for
languages I don't typically use. If Google has a universal translator for
code, I'd probably use that instead.

------
thehme
I find it interesting that there aren't more comments on this post; wondering
is some Hacker News SO contributes disagree with Richter. I usually find
myself kindda needing to comb through lots of SO answers to find something
that actually explains a solution to a problem. I think that SO is a site you
go to to when you don't have much time to actually learn what need to know.
However, I should add that I have gotten good link by contributors that have
helped me learn more about the topic of my question. Perhaps this is that we
should be doing - sharing validated material that explains the topic one is
trying to understand.

------
nwp90
Ha. I have never _started_ contributing to Stack Overflow, because it won't
let me. It appears that you can't provide answers without first asking
questions. When I have questions, I use Google or IRC. Every now and then
Google throws up SO questions I can answer (or improve answers to, or point
out FAIL in the answers to) on the way to my finding an answer to the original
question, and I log in to SO and try to contribute...

So my attitude to SO is pretty much "meh". I'll take useful answers (and
sometimes there are really good ones), but if they don't want me to
contribute, stuff 'em.

~~~
DCoder
> _It appears that you can 't provide answers without first asking questions._

That's not true. You can write _answers_ right away, but you need to acquire
some rep before you can write _comments_ .

------
yalogin
Over the last year or so I saw that the community has become too pedantic. I
have tried to start some (what I thought were) valid system related
discussions by asking open ended questions. They were closed as too open.
Having seen some very open ended questions on stackoverflow show up on HN and
other places I was really disappointed with it. The users close questions
without giving any reason why or how to ask the question properly. I don't ask
questions on there frequently and but the quality of my questions has remained
the same but the way the community approached it was really different.

------
datphp
It's funny to see a guy who spent time on Google to research and answer
trivial questions for points call people with more points than him "no-
lifers".

Then there's the part about giving fishes instead of teaching how to fish.
Duh. That's what the site is about. It's a resource for fishermen. It's a nice
place to get samples of fishes you haven't heard of. You're free to just eat
them, or study them further.

SO is amazing as a super cheat-sheet. It's not a tutorial, a school or a a
forum. It's not Reddit or Farmville. Please stop.

------
ams6110
I've occasionally found, via google search, a good answer on SO for a question
I had. But it's rare. I don't ever think to go there to search directly, and I
don't participate in answering questions there.

I find it's much more effective to simply read the documentation of the
language/function/feature I'm having trouble with, than it is to try to
formulate the precise phrasing of the question that will lead me to the answer
I need in my circumstance.

~~~
acjohnson55
...unless the subject of your inquiry is something like Angular, where the
documentation is severely lagging the info available in their own Disqus
comments and SO.

------
yomritoyj
I agree with the OP's point that it is mostly the easy questions which get
many answers on Stack Exchange. But I don't see that as a negative. Those
working in dense communities can get a lot more done because they have the
option to quickly ask a knowledgeable neighbour's opinion. Assured of this
support everyone gains by specializing more. The Stack Exchange sites bring
the same benefits to more isolated workers.

------
nettletea
I have a few moans about SO, but I also find it very useful. I bear no flair.

The one thing that niggles me most on the web in general, is continuous
reinvention. If you must paraphrase someone else's work then do. However most
of the time a simple link would suffice. The same for repeat/similar
questions. And it's always good to reference your sources.

~~~
daphneokeefe
A disappointing percentage of links go dead, thereby making the answer
useless. This problem increases over time.

~~~
nettletea
That's certainly a good point, but it seems wasteful to copy, just in case.
Surely though multiple links would decrease that chance.

What I was really getting at was wholesale monotonous rewrites. A lot of the
web in my mind could be DRYed up. But perhaps redundancy isn't the issue I
think it is.

I do feel I do a lot of toing and froing with searches. More than in the past,
but possibly that's just because there is so much more information to filter.
I'd have thought that healthy linking would help search engines.

------
triplesec
You guys collectively here seem to have nailed it on the points v useful
information issue. However, I do like his analysis of the community problems
in collaborative sites like SO and Wikipedia as becoming run by an anal-twerp
cabal. This is a real social information problem and deserves more thought
.thank you to OP for that analysis.

------
mathattack
The OP decries the lack of deep learning. I don't think that was ever the
intent. Neither was community. The intent was crowdsourcing a body of
knowledge. For this they succeeded. I've also switched to being a provider to
user but that's because I don't expect community there.

------
xwowsersx
His whole analogy of teaching man a fish vs giving a him a fish ignores the
cases where you are not a domain expert in something, aren't looking to be,
and don't need to be and you just need some quick help from people who do this
stuff day in and day out. But I agree wrt to e/t else.

------
TacticalCoder
I think the biggest problem is not "creeping authoritarianism" or the low
quality of quite some questions / answers.

The biggest problem in my opinion are voting rings getting more sophisticated
and getting undetected for longer and longer period of time, with users from
the rings getting more and more rep before action is taken and basically
filling the site with spammy questions/answers (and even probably links to
malware). This has the potential to become really nasty soon: at one point you
can imagine several users from a voting ring upvoting themselves to 10K rep
and starting to slowly vandalize many questions while going undetected for
long period of time.

Which means SO is polluted with fake questions / answers. Google results are
polluted with fake questions / answers. And high-rep users (the one with
enough point to directly edit questions / answers) are wasting time fixing
what looks like poor questions or commenting on these, not realizing they're
fake questions/answers made by people participating in a voting ring.

Here's a recent example:

[http://stackoverflow.com/users/3143873/leonte-
george](http://stackoverflow.com/users/3143873/leonte-george)

User has 364 rep as I write this and it's obviously a voting ring made of a
few users. If you have a few minutes just open that account and all the
questions he answered: they're all from the same two or three same users,
sometimes answering twice the same question and obviously getting upvotes and
accepted answers from people in his voting ring.

But that's not the issue... The issue is that this is not stopped fast enough:
because the mods are too busy wasting time on less important issues concerning
users who are perfectly legit.

Despite my 3.8K rep and flagging to moderator attention, nothing is done to
stop these _fastly_.

So on one end you have creeping authoritarianism focusing on not so important
issues (like say, the "closing question" police which is super-fast to act
when it comes to closing or mark as duplicate legit questions), while on the
other end there are real abusers, totally gaming the system, reaching enough
rep to create havoc and basically doing vandalism by filling the site with
fake questions (and fake answers).

The "proof" that there's a real issues is that several high-rep users spent
time fixing (intentional?) typos and grammar errors in these questions,
thinking they were real but, mostly, that several people are going to open the
profile I just mentioned and not realize it is part of a voting ring.

Now that I post this on HN _maybe_ that HN mods are going to act... Sadly
while at the same time explaining that HN is not the place to point out SO
issues, that this should be taken to meta (where I'd be downvoted or closed as
duplicate etc.).

As a side note I don't understand how a new user can ask six questions, have
five of them answered by a single user and all upvoted and accepted without
that kind of behavior directly triggering an alarm requiring moderator
attention.

So: add the ability to directly flag a user (or a question if it's simpler) as
part of a voting ring, add an algo that finds probable voting ring behavior
and call immediate moderator attention when such rings are discovered. Also
prevent questions which are made by user which have too low of a rep from
appearing in Google immediately.

And, no, I'm not taking this to meta: I don't like the "tone" there ; )

~~~
insteadof
A typical day's queue of flags on Stack Overflow is around 1000. If your flag
isn't tended to the minute it's raised, it's going to be because of the 900 or
so others already there taking up time from having to verify the flag reason
is correct in the first place.

~~~
TacticalCoder
I know but that is kinda my point...

There are countless things way less important that are raised and people's
time is wasted on less important issues, like people fighting as to who in the
"close police" is going to close first, say, anything looking remotely like a
duplicate.

While all that energy could be used instead to detect things like voting rings
where people already have hundreds of rep and are polluting both SO and Google
with fake questions, fake answers, fake edits, etc.

If nothing is done and if voting rings flags get queued at position 1000 in
the queue, then it's just a matter of time before voting rings reach 10 K rep
and are able to create a real mess.

------
vfclists
SO must change their rules to make those who downvote or vote to close to give
their reasons, and they should give the OP enough time to amend the question
or explain themselves if the question is not clear enough.

~~~
cruise02
You already do have to give a reason for closing a question. That reason is
displayed when a question is closed. You have plenty of time to edit your
question to make it clear before it's deleted. Once you edit it, it can be
reopened.

------
hippich
From my experience, every answer I came up already fall in two categories: 1)
Already answered on SO 2) Will not get answered on SO

So.... Most of current contributors just fight for points really.

------
gwu78
The author says he hates Java and C++. I say: "Vote with your feet." Good for
him to move away from contributing to SO.

------
flueedo
I got curious about something: What are then the OP's favorite languages since
he hates Java and C++?

~~~
tokenrove
He seems to be into Prolog, Lisp, Haskell, et cetera. The usual languages that
cause one to hate Java and C++.

------
j_s
I use Stack Overflow because I won't have to re-implement my solutions from
scratch at the next job.

------
unlimit
I learned a lot from answering questions, I became an expert IMO on regex just
by trying to answer some of the questions. My work does not expose me to a lot
of interesting stuff, but reading SO does. And yes, I like my internet points.
:-)

Also, I hate the new black bar at the top. It is the reason I don't visit the
site that often now. It hurts my eyes. :-(

------
lampe3
if the Author like he says is so good at c++ why didn't he pick the harder
questions and does theme ?

If the Author is an expert then answer/discuss questions on your level and
most of the issues will be gone...

------
wehadfun
Richter and everyone else go back on stack overflow and answer questions. It
is helpful for us all.

You may not get the recognition you deserve but believe me you don't give
others the recognition they deserve either.

------
lien
I have recently deleted my SO account. Hallellujah! I've gone as far as
putting in -site:stackoverflow.com when I need to google something because
most of the answers are just white noise.

------
daphneokeefe
The site appears to be overwhelmed. Server error 500

------
mattsfrey
As the years roll by I appreciate more and more the fact I learned how to
program back when there was just IRC and if you asked a trivial question all
you got was 'RTFM'

------
SteveDeFacto
Did he ever think that stackoverflow is about building a library of questions
and answers so it is easier for people to find answers on Google?!

------
dredmorbius
_If you 're going for points (and that's the entire raison d'être for
gamification!)_

That's the faulty premise. Or rather: it strikes at the weakness of
gamification.

Yes, there is a very strong tendency for reward and effort to be grossly
mismatched in user-ranked and filtered sites. Guess what: there's a copious
amount of similar mismatch in real life. Jobs which are painfully difficult
offer little reward, other times a casually tossed off effort may gain endless
plaudits.

On HN, I think my top-voted comment remains a sarcastically flip jibe at PHP
(a couple of submissions have out-scored it). On reddit, something of a
throwaway about terminals vs. glass TTYs (at least it's technical). On the
other hand, I scored my first reddit gold, which is to say, someone was
sufficiently moved by what I'd written to actually pay something, for a longer
and more detailed post, but one which my research of the topic made pretty
easy to write.

But that's not why I participate.

My principle objective is to learn, explore, examine, have my own ideas
challenged, and generally expand my capabilities and understanding. And used
correctly, HN, reddit, and StackExchange _all_ accomplish this pretty well.

The rating systems are there less for the person being rated and more for the
benefit of others -- they're a first-level indication of how well trusted and
respected someone is ... or how long and obsessively they've been using the
service.

A recent HN post (also appearing on reddit) was "We Have to Talk About TED". I
wrote my own riff on that: "We Have to Talk About 'We Have to Talk About TED'"
([http://redd.it/1te3hz](http://redd.it/1te3hz)) (and yes, as the woman in the
back says, its TEDtles all the way down ...).

The key problem:

 _There 's a fundamental problem with democratic voting processes and voting
systems (such as reddit's own post and moderation processes[2] -- which are,
in their defense, better than most) in assessing who's qualified to make a
judgement -- and then, of course, in determining who's qualified to assess
who's qualified._

There's been a strong focus in the online world for the past decade or more
over user-moderated discussion. Slashdot was arguably one of the first such
sites, many others have come along, most have gone. I think a fundamental
misunderstanding is that the most democratic moderation systems are the best.
I don't believe this is the case. Rather, _any_ distributed moderation system
_shares the load of content filtering_. Which is a good thing. But
distributing that load _to those unable to draw meaningful distinctions
between "good" and "entertaining"_ is _not_ useful.

This is most crucial where you're not measuring, say, marketplace potential
(where popularity is in fact by and large the metric you're looking for) as
opposed to, say, technical correctness. In which _tests of suitability_ are
more significant.

And that's the point of StackExchange: it's not a platform with the goal of
scoring people the most points, it's a platform on which _if you go there with
a question, you 'll find a good, and hopefully the best, applicable answer._
And to that end, I've actually found the site extremely useful.

So: HN, StackExchange, reddit, Facebook, Google+, and other similar sites tend
to fall down a bit of a rathole. Clay Shirky's noted that the problem isn't
information overload, it's filter failure, but there are also two modes of
filter failure: one is filters which are overwhelmed in the classification
task and can't keep up. But another is filters _which select the wrong stuff._

Which isn't a particularly easy problem to solve. StackExchange actually takes
a decent cut at it (as do other services such as Yahoo Answers, though with
varying degrees of success) by having the submitter select the best answer.
Within the ranking system, this might carry some benefits, and in particular,
submitting a lot of wrong, or simply unselected answers, might carry a
penalty. Another way to switch up the voting system would be to assign more
points for answers to harder, less-answered, or unanswered questions. Or to
provide a means of judging between solutions: what's faster, simpler, more
comprehensive, more robust, etc.

Which gets down to determining what quality and fitness are. In which case I'd
recommend taking another look at Pirsig's _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance_. Though you need not agree entirely with what he has to say.

------
goggles99
Nothing is perfect, Stack Overflow is a great resource online. Of course it
has a few quirks and problems, but why try to bring it down by publicly
quitting it and seemingly trying to bring others with you. Quietly leave.
Making a noise like this leads me to believe the problem is more with you than
SO.

Arguments could be made against contributing to... Helping the homeless, Open
source, Hacker News discussions, ? ETC

------
dobbsbob
Everytime I google a question and get a stack overflow result, it is always an
unanswered and locked question for silly neckbeard pedantic reasons.

~~~
cruise02
Stop Googling for "what's your favorite programmer t-shirt" and that won't
happen as often.

