
I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining - bozho
http://techblog.bozho.net/i-stopped-contributing-to-stackoverflow-but-its-not-declining/
======
bryanlarsen
Stackoverflow works great for me, and I don't know why more people don't
appear to use it like I do.

1) When you've got a problem, Google it. 98% of the time the answer will be in
top 5 links to stackoverflow or documentation. You upvote the answer and
question.

2) 1.5% of the time, stackoverflow will have a related question, but either it
doesn't have an answer, or the answer has issues.

You figure it out yourself, so you post a comment or answer or just the crappy
workaround you used because you ran out of time to figure it out completely.

3) The remaining 0.5% of the time, you get nothing. You post a question, but
of course nobody answers because it's an esoteric, hard question. 24 hours
later you post an answer to your own question, or more likely a crappy
workaround.

And eventually somebody posts a great answer to your question. (Once this
happened to me >3 years after I posted it!) It's way too late for you, but it
will help the next person with the same problem.

You don't get a lot of karma quickly this way since you're posting esoteric
stuff, but you do tend to pick up some badges that are designed to reward this
sort of behaviour, like "Populist" and "Necromancer". You do pick up karma
slowly and steadily, though. What's satisfying is seeing an answer tick over
from zero to one ~12 months after you posted it, realising that you saved
somebody hours of frustration.

If you answer an easy question, you've saved somebody a few minutes. When you
answer a hard one, you've saved hours or days.

~~~
Chathamization
One issue I run into is finding a Stack Overflow question that exactly matches
the issue I've run into, find that it's been closed for being a duplicate,
click the link to the question it's supposed to be a duplicate of, and find
that the other question is completely unrelated. Not only can I not find the
answer from SO at this point, but if I find the answer on my own I can't even
help others.

Another issue I've run into is the minimum numbers of characters needed to
edit an answer. Once I found the answer that was chosen and upvoted had code
that didn't make any sense. It was something like an instance of a point
object "point1" and an instance "newpoint" and they wrote "point1 = newpoint;"
but actually meant "point1 = new point();". When I realized the problem I
tried to change it but wasn't able to because I wasn't changing the answer
enough (I think there's a minimum 6 character limit). I didn't want to make
random changes elsewhere just to make the minimum needed to fix it, so I let
it be.

I find Stack Overflow useful, but I don't try to participate in it anymore and
don't stay signed in.

~~~
corobo
The ones that really get my gripe are the ones that are flagged for being off
topic.. Off what topic? This is a place where technical questions are asked
and answered and this is a technical question that needs answering - Why is it
closed?

~~~
wheaties
I have flagged many questions for being off topic. You could say I'm part of
the "problem" but from my standpoint, someone will ask a question that can be
answered so many ways that the scope is too broad. Many times the person
asking doesn't know enough to understand just how broad the question they've
asked is. That's why I also leave a comment telling them _why_ I just voted to
close.

This is, unfortunately, an unsolvable problem. They're asking the question
precisely because they don't understand what they're asking enough to get a
meaningful answer.

~~~
lloeki
Maybe some questions are just not "too broad" but simply broad, and that one
may wish to have a number of possible solutions to a problem and pick the one
that fits one's case best ("one" being possibly someone else in the future
that has a not precisely similar but close enough problem that the set of
proposed solutions can help in finding the right path).

So maybe, just maybe a slightly broad question with a couple answers _may_ be
better that an theoretically ideal set of a thousand (question, answer) tuples
each trying to fit a very restricted case. Unfortunately some mods seem hell-
bent on promoting the latter, possibly in hope of writing bots that solve-by-
Google (see stacksort[0]).

[0]:
[https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/](https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/)

~~~
coryfklein
> Maybe some questions are just not "too broad" but simply broad, and that one
> may wish to have a number of possible solutions to a problem and pick the
> one that fits one's case best

I think there are two kinds of "broad":

1\. There are multiple ways to solve a specific problem with a specific
expected outcome. "How do I sort an array?", for example, is a broad question
in that it can be solved in many ways, but you can definitively say whether
any given solution is correct or not.

2\. The problem is not specific, and there is no clear way to determine
whether any given answer is actually a "solution". For example, a single
question with only the text, "How do you write a game?"

Most "broad" questions fall on some spectrum between these two, but the closer
a question is to the latter category, the less likely it is to generate any
sort of helpful feedback. The community does sometimes label the former as
"too broad", but 95% of the time the given close reasons are correct, and when
they are wrong the site provides documentation on how to get your question re-
opened.

It's hard to maintain a proper balance between moderating the inundation of
terrible questions and avoiding the false-negative closing of legitimate
questions.

~~~
sanderjd
I'd love to see the SO community's answers to "How do you write a game?".

~~~
coryfklein
I think this is an interesting and common response to the policies. As if the
"Too Broad" close policy is the only thing stopping volunteer contributors
from writing a 10 page thesis "How To Write A Video Game" for every questioner
that asks for it.

~~~
sanderjd
Isn't this alleviated somewhat by marking duplicates? If nobody ever writes
any good answers on the original question, oh well! It's just annoying when
nobody _can_ write a good answer to a broad question.

But hey, it's their site, and I'm just some rando on the internet - they get
to make whatever policies they want.

~~~
coryfklein
My emphasis was less on the replication of effort, which duplicate tagging
definitely resolves, and more on the idea that broad open-ended questions
raise the bar for a well-qualified high-quality answer far above and beyond
that needed for a simple and concise question of limited scope.

Allowing such questions effectively lowers the percentage of questions that
get good answers, thereby training users NOT to expect an answer to a posted
question, and leading to decreased engagement.

On the other hand, by disallowing such questions, the questions that do get
asked are more likely to be answered, and this encourages repeat visits and
increased engagement.

~~~
sanderjd
Hey, by the way, in case you happen to come back and see this after the fact:
I've found your perspectives in this thread compelling, and while I'm not
completely convinced, I'll definitely be incorporating your arguments into my
thinking in the future.

Just thought I'd let you know you haven't been shouting into the wind!

------
ubertaco
SO is another area where I feel "out of sync" with the rest of the
"programming world", in that I've...

* ...never posted a question to SO (because I've never found it either necessary or helpful to do so),

* ...only ever "copy-pasted" from SO once (it was a CSS polyfill for iOS having broken "support" for vh/vw)

* ...only attempted to answer questions on SO twice, exclusively out of a feeling of "am I missing something?"

I've been programming for 16 years, and doing so professionally for 7 of
those. I've always seen StackOverflow as like a worse version of MDN or
something: obscure API-specific stuff that should be in documentation for
libXYZ or XYZService but for some reason isn't, with answers supplied by
random internet people and "graded" by other, less-knowledgeable random
internet people.

For more advanced stuff (like "what are higher-kinded types" or "how do monads
help simplify concurrency"), online articles, tutorials, or IRC channels have
always been a sufficient supplement to just trying stuff myself.

I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.

~~~
4ad
I don't think you are missing anything.

I also have never asked anything on SO, and never used SO as a reference. SO
only seems to work for factual simple answers that are found in the
documentation or manual pages.

For higher level discussion SO is not appropriate; mailing lists and IRC work
best for that.

I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random
stuff on SO works for them

~~~
ci5er
> I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random
> stuff on SO works for them

This is probably true.

I'm not a Windows developer and on a recent project I had to use their IDE
(which turns out to quite nice, if you are an IDE person) and a set of their
APIs. I read, but did not understand, some pretty fundamental/basic MS-
authored documentation. I found a few answers to questions related to other
people not understanding it either, and was on my way again.

To be fair to MS, it _was_ documented, completely and accurately. I just
wasn't accustomed to some of their calling conventions and was getting yelled
at by the linker.

EDIT: Outside of embedded systems, where there are a lot fewer moving parts
than on your typical MS OS box, it's been a while (20 years?) since I was
thrown at an environment where _everything_ changed from what I am accustomed
to. OS. Language. CPU architecture target. IDE. IDE configuration for project
build. Build process. SDKs. Calling convention. Oh, and the 2M line code-base
that I had just been introduced to (and where none of the MS Visual Studio
project files had been checked into version control - so I'm fumbling in the
dark there). Googling for the error message and landing on SO at least gets
you to the point that you know you have a configuration problem vs a calling
convention problem. That tells you where you need to start looking in the
documentation.

~~~
pjc50
One of the weird things about MS documentation is how _slow_ MSDN is. It's
often faster to find the answer through Google->Stackoverflow than it is
starting at the top and drilling down MSDN.

~~~
ci5er
Now that you mention it, I've noticed that. The pages seem to load quickly
enough, but take a while to appear. I might be some funky client-side JS
rendering "stuff". It reminds me of how a lot of material design web-
component/apps take forever to change after you "load" or "click" (for
example).

------
dx034
I would love to use stackoverflow actively, but wasn't very successful so far.

It's great to use as a passive user. It's a great encyclopedia. But all my
attempts to ask questions were unsuccessful.

I posted 3 questions where I did not receive any answers or clues at all. The
questions seem to have a lot of views, so I tried to answer them myself later
(in cases I found one). Which is ok, but makes it like an encyclopedia.

On two other occasions I needed help to figure out which way to attack a
problem (which systems to use). I wrote a detailed description of my data, use
case, restrictions, etc. Both questions were heavily downvoted as they're too
subjective and not specific enough. Apart from downvotes I received some
unhelpful spam so that I deleted the questions after a while. Luckily, I got
more helpful answers on Reddit.

I understand that SO wants to keep discussions on topic, but why can't I ask
questions about how to implement a problem, or which design to use best for a
given data set?

So the problem is, I cannot use it for too specific questions (often receive
no answer) but also not for too general ones (receive downvotes as being too
subjective). Everything in the middle is covered already.

Some communities in the network seem to handle that much better, GIS for
example has been a great help to me (as they allow open questions).

~~~
bryanlarsen
"But all my attempts to ask questions were unsuccessful."

Sure. But all the times you had questions that were answered on stackoverflow
even before you asked them on Google, you were successful.

And by answering your own questions on SO you're helping out the next guy.

Post your question hoping you'll get an answer, but recognizing that you
probably won't, and that you'll probably come back 24 hours later and post an
answer to your own question.

You will accumulate karma for these, slowly but steadily. But more
importantly, you're helping out those who follow.

~~~
dx034
Yes, answering questions is great, I totally agree with that. But I would love
if SO could allow more open questions as well. I'm not a huge fan of Reddit,
but it seems the only place where I can ask those questions (plus some IRC
channels perhaps).

------
johnslegers
I’m the author of the article "The Decline of Stack Overflow". I initially
published it in July 2015, when it got ±65,000 views in two days. I
republished it @ Hackernoon this weekend at their request, which resulted in
±125,000 additional page views, bringing the total page views of the article
since its publication in 2015 to ±245,000. The fact that this article went
viral TWICE (while none of my other articles even got to 5000 views)
illustrates how many people experience the same frustrations.

On SO, I currently have 11,914 rep, 9 gold badges, 66 silver badges and 73
bronze badges. I’ve posted 492 answers and 6 questions (that haven’t been
deleted). I’ve been programming since 1999 and I’ve worked as an IT
professional since 2006, and my experience ranges from PHP and JS to SAP and
PL/SQL. I also released my own open source frontend framework and several
other open source projects on Github. So I know how to program and understand
many of SO’s intricate workings!

Those rare times I’m stuck on a programming issue, I find it impossible to
find any useful answer on SO. My questions either get no answers at all or
downvoted and/or closed (for arbitrary reasons) by people who clearly lack the
experience to even remotely understand what I’m talking about.

During my time on SO, I’ve been bullied by 20+k users several times and even
got a temporary ban by one of them moderators for no other reason but pointing
out that another user was acting like “a little Hitler”… in a private
conversation with moderation.

Yes, other communities have similar problems, but never have I been a member
of a community where bullying and trolling was so common among the most
privileged segments of its membership.

Considering the popularity of my article, I’m considering writing a follow-up
and go in greater detail on my experiences with SO and how SO could be
improved.

However, I’m quite busy these days, so it may take a while before it actually
gets published… if it ever gets published.

Nevertheless, these are my 5 cents I’d like to add here…

~~~
jmcomets
> The fact that this article went viral TWICE (while none of my other articles
> even got to 5000 views) illustrates how many people experience the same
> frustrations.

I disagree. Many people simply view an article to understand the author's
opinion (my case). IMO the "new user" experience on StackOverflow really
depends on the topic addressed.

Maybe that's just programmer personality speaking, I wish someone would do a
study on the traits of programmers depending on their language / line of
work...

~~~
treehau5
Taking article views as acceptance for the article's viewpoints is quite the
fallacy. That headline alone will generate many thousands of views because
people are curious, not because they agree -- this is a problem with the
internet as a whole these days, so many people have news and topics filtered
and curated to their own beliefs, they are unaware that they are living in
their own "filter bubble" and thus we assume if I click on article a it means
I like article a, so news algorithm xyz will proceed to show me more like a.

I've read the article. It has some legitimate claims, I've even experienced
some of them, but I am not so thin-skinned as some people are about internet
points, and these issues aren't exclusive to StackOverflow. They are gripes
about internet behavior, and human behavior as a whole. It all has to be taken
into context, as many point out, the situation was much worse before Stack
Overflow.

In the article,

> Quora might seem like an obvious choice, but it shares many of the issues
> common at Stack Overflow,

Exactly. You can take Stackoverflow and substitute Quora, or reddit in some
cases and get the same exact situations described. It's a people problem.
Anything led by a curated community of imaginary points will naturally produce
elitist behavior. Heck you have this problem in real life (opposed to virtual
life) in Academia, a.k.a the "academic elite," what makes you think it is
going to be any different on the internet?

------
domador
I never even STARTED contributing to Stack Overflow, because of the high
barrier to entry for new users. Since now you essentially can't post a
question without answering several yourself, I didn't bother asking questions
about certain thorny technical issues. I tried a couple of times, ran into the
barrier, and gave up. Maybe some of these could have been the kind of thought-
provoking questions that the blog post's author would have enjoyed. Who knows
how many other would-be Stack Overflow users have had a similar experience.
Could Stack Overflow be cutting off its own long tail by having such
restrictive barriers to entry for casual, minor would-be contributors like
myself?

Fortunately, many of the questions I've needed help with have already asked
and answered by others on S.O. But I've had to find help for my more exotic
questions elsewhere.

~~~
bhandziuk
I don't know if you were being hyperbolic but asking a question requires no
previous community engagement. There is no barrier to entry.

This is part of the issue with SO though in that so many people ask questions
without trying to figure things out for themselves or because it is their
first time asking a question on the internet they have a very hard time with
it. Veteran users are frustrated by new user's attitude and new user's
attitude is often that they are asking a question because they are hitting a
wall. They've stalled out on their task and are frustrated and the question
they end up posting shows this. It will lack context, enough information to
reproduce, be an XY problem or some issue like that. These questions are
either difficult or impossible to answer. Making them stop is a very hard
problem, unfortunately.

~~~
domador
No, I was not being hyperbolic. When I tried asking a question, the site told
me I had to answer a number of other people's questions first (or something
along those lines) before I could post my question. It happened on a couple of
separate occasions, and then I just stopped trying. Maybe they've removed this
restriction since then, but it was sure annoying (and discouraging).

------
Fuxy
I don't quite agree as someone with few points on StackOverflow the mods can
be quite hostile and inflexible when it comes to the rules.

For instance I found a browser bug in the code submitted on a stack overflow
answer [1] and I edited it and it got rejected because it wasn't in the spirit
of what the original author intended or something like that.

I also had no way of replying to the rejection motivating what my reasoning
was and maybe reinstating it luckily the original author got in touch and
fixed it himself later on.

At that point I wasn't even able to comment on the reply since I didn't have
enough points so I would ague the barrier to entry is quite high if all you
want to do is just fix a few mistakes you spot while using the site.

Also there are multiple communities like Ask Ubuntu, Server Fault each with
their own points which means I run into the same problem over and over again
even though I have proven myself on anther sister community.

[1]([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12131273/twitter-
bootstra...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12131273/twitter-bootstrap-
tabs-url-doesnt-change/36179228#36179228))

~~~
guard-of-terra
They actually give you 101 points on every new site if you're a proven user,
which lets you comment.

~~~
Fuxy
How many points do you need to be a proven user then?

~~~
tokenizerrr
200

------
p333347
There are three ways to use stackoverflow - ask, answer and lurk.

Asking is hard as the admins are quite intolerant of anything that doesn't
abide by the rules, in _their_ opinion. That said, small quick queries, those
that would get shot down when posted as questions, are best asked in chat
rooms and you will get a useful answer. The notification comes in handy when a
chat room question is answered after an extended period of time.

Answering is harder, as questions are usually highly problem specific (due to
the rules), mostly particular framework or domain related, and only those who
have faced similar issues can make meaningful posts. Often times the multi
hundred thousand rep kings can get away with non answers (some even get
accepted) in spite of a lesser rep king complaining about that in the
comments.

That leaves with lurking. Lurking has benefited me immensely. It seems every
problem you have is already answered in like 2010.

The programmers.stackexchange is much better as it allows opinion based,
discussion oriented posts although the admins seem to be getting intolerant
there lately, which is a bit odd.

~~~
acjohnson55
To be fair, asking on SO isn't all that difficult. It just requires a little
patience, to read and understand the guidelines, and to craft a high quality
question. Unfortunately, when someone's blocked on some tricky programming
task they've already been banging their head against for hours, it's probably
a time when patience is in short supply. But, that patience is often rewarded
with a solution.

I'm amused to see _programmers.stackexchange_ get a positive call out, because
it used to be the paragon of moderator intolerance. Perhaps that culture has
changed for the better.

~~~
dcosson
I agree, I actually really like that there's a high bar for asking. It makes
it more likely someone will be able to fully understand and give a good
answer. And I would say probably 50% of the questions I start typing on SO, I
actually figure out on my own by the time I've written it. I'll notice that
I've glossed over the details of one part so I'll stop to dig in further and
sure enough I had been making a bad assumption and fixing it leads to the
answer.

~~~
acjohnson55
> And I would say probably 50% of the questions I start typing on SO, I
> actually figure out on my own by the time I've written it.

The live search for related Q&As has been particularly useful for me for this.
Do I sometimes feel bad I did all that typing first? Sure. But that's vastly
outweighed by happiness at getting a solution.

------
kzisme
I've recently began using SO more actively (providing answers).

Most of the questions I've found and tried to answer were duplicates, but
since I didn't have enough reputation to mark it as duplicate. (or enough rep
to comment on a post to ask for more information on a poorly asked question)

It's fairly depressing to attempt to try to be active on a site like SO when
it's setup for failure in the beginning. It's irritating when users with 10k+
reputation can more easily gain reputation by commenting, editing, and
"moderating" new questions.

The other issue I have is that for new questions it's more about being first
to answer a question rather than what is actually correct.

I also dislike providing answers to new questions, and the OP is a brand new
user asking a question and never marks an answer as correct...

I wish it was easier and less frustrating to be active, but I suppose I'll
keep trying.

~~~
Bartweiss
One of my least favorite SO patterns is seeing a top answer with ~150 points
that's simply wrong, and then a second or third answer with ~20 points that's
actually correct.

For high-profile questions this gets sorted out eventually, but it sometimes
persists indefinitely for niche questions, and it's really unfortunate. I know
"first mover advantage" is hard to solve (cf. Reddit), but it's a really big
deal for SO.

~~~
kzisme
It's frustrating as well when the question that was asked gets answered by me,
and I receive a slew of down-votes since I answered it first.

The next few answers are essentially copy/paste of my answers or other answers
on the question...but I'm still negatively impacted by the down-votes since I
only have ~39 rep and wow has getting started been a pain.

~~~
Bartweiss
A weird observation: starting with SO is particularly punishing if you come to
it as an established programmer.

The karma restrictions don't chafe much if you're a novice who mostly asks
questions, and occasionally answers a simple topic they recognize. If you're
experienced, you want to give more complex answers, and perhaps comment on
other answers that you think are suboptimal. Doing that, you feel the new
users restrictions (and the sting of uninformed downvotes) constantly.

50 karma is big, because the option to comment on other people's posts is core
to giving relevant answers ("Did you want it to do X, or Y?") and using the
site properly.

Honestly, I'd just ask a few questions (if your domain is uncommon enough that
they won't be duplicates) and let that karma carry you until the site becomes
usable.

~~~
r00fus
Huh. Maybe the site has changed in the past 5 years, but when I started - I
gave answers on stuff I knew (basic JS, advanced SQL) and asked questions
about stuff I didn't know (Obj-C, advanced JS/jQuery, Ruby).

~~~
Bartweiss
This is still viable, but it's gotten a bit trickier because "closed as
duplicate" has slowly become a more common outcome. So it's possible to have
the stuff you know well be largely covered, and you lose gained karma if the
post with your answer gets deleted.

------
Lapsa
top 2% here

i can understand the reasoning but i left SO when they broke it into pieces
with StackExchange network

i actually enjoyed stuff like code golfs, joke questions (minus endless flow
of repetitive xkcd references)

have always been interested in THAT programming part where problem meets
consciousness meets technology. spent a lot of time puzzling around questions
on design, patterns - more ethereal side of programming

nowadays stuff like that gets quickly eliminated

and more technical questions often gets spammed with shallow bullshit i've
already checked couple of times

~~~
raesene6
interestingly I thought that breaking things up helped a lot and that they
could do better by continuing that trend..

For me a big part of the problem of SO (as opposed to other SE sites) is that
it's too big for the mods to really have much option other than applying
blanket rules without exception.

On the smaller sites there seems to be more scope for a more flexible approach
to moderation as the question/answer flow is more manageable.

Also I think it lets more people get engaged by feeling to be a key part of a
smaller community where on SO their contribution would be very unlikely to be
noticed as the site is soo big..

~~~
r00fus
The only problem with the break-up is that it results in the moderations of
"not appropriate for this forum" when e.g. you ask about effects of say SSD
cloud storaage on your app performance and you're asking on stackoverflow
instead of serverfault or soemthing.

And the moderation is not helpful in migrating your question to the other
forum either.

One analogy might be if the US were split into 50 states with their own,
strict, immigration policies.

------
coryfklein
It's easy to nitpick and find fault with Stack Overflow, but it is hard to
argue with the results. The site has done something amazing: it has harnessed
the wild democracy that is the internet and produced something of great and
lasting value to a lot of people.

It didn't do that by being a wild-west open-to-anything community. If that's
what you want, go to Reddit. But you'll be hard pressed to find quality
content that goes beyond "16 Animal Memes That Speed Up Your PHP And Improve
Your Sex Life". It's the structure that allows Stack Overflow to succeed.

Cut the string from the kite and it doesn't fly up to the clouds, it comes
streaking down to the ground.

------
pavlik_enemy
For me the biggest problem with SO is that it's hard to get answers to
advanced questions in some areas. Not a lot of people could answer the
question in the first place, because it's about some obscure and rarely
encountered problem, and these experts are constantly spammed with basic
questions from inexperienced programmers. Though it depends on the area you're
interested in - I've got almost no answers to advanced Rails-related questions
and got pretty good responses to Scala-related stuff I'm interested in (but
maybe it's because Scala questions were about more basic stuff)

~~~
coldnebo
Yeah, unfortunately looking for advanced Rails answers means sifting through
lots of silt: answers that were correct for version X but no longer, answers
that avoid the question by doing something else, cargo cult solutions.

~~~
Annatar
That's a good indicator of the quality of the software.

A piece of software is only as good as its documentation and compatibility to
itself.

------
eugenekolo2
I don't think you're looking at it from the right angle. SO is a great
resource that's amassed a lot of simple questions. My personally favourite use
of it is to find boiler plate code, or to get answers to simple questions in
languages I'm not an expert in, but unfortunately get forced to use for
whatever reason. The same is true for sysadmining tasks. I'm wearing far too
many hats to remember how to change hostname on 4 different operating systems
- it's far easier to just google and click the SO link than to read manuals
every time I have a simple task.

Additionally, your answer regarding:

> On the other hand, even the simplest questions are not closed just because
> they are simple. One of my favourite examples is the question whether you
> need a null check before calling an instanceof. My answer is number 2, with
> a sarcastic comment that this could be tested in an IDE for a minute. And a
> very good comment points out that it takes less than that to get the answer
> on Stackoverflow.

Is particularly bad. "Test in an IDE" is not a valid response when the
question pertains to a JVM implementation. Your Sun JVM may be different than
my Apache JVM, different than JoeShmoe JVM. A better answer might be to refer
to lines in the official JVM specification, and note if there's an ambiguity,
and that most implementations follow X, but not necessarily...

------
gotofritz
I still use SO every day, and also have enough rep to be an editor, and I
don't think it's in decline. But I have also stopped answering to questions.
Mostly because the race to be the first to answer easy questions to get rep
stopped being fun very early on, and there are only a few interesting
questions among all the "do my homework for me" and barely comprehensible
questions.

As for editing, editors come in all shape and form, and let's be honest,
developers can often be opinionated so and so's who can spend hours debating
tabs vs. spaces. I think the moderating reflects what we are as a community,
I'm afraid. For example, I always reject any edit that only changes the format
of the code because I find it a complete waste of time. I am sure there are
other mods who would do the opposite, and actually go and reformat code in as
many questions as they can find. Who's to say one approach is right and the
other wrong? There aren't actually any guidelines in the modding pages.

It does get annoying sometimes; for example, I was refused the tag vanilla-js
because of reasons by someone who didn't even seem to be a js developer. Had a
few heated discussions, in the end the mods won. But hey, you know what? Who
cares, the site is still useful

What are the realistic alternatives? Quora?

------
0xmohit

      Stackoverflow is a little more boring for contributors now than
      it was before (which is why I gradually stopped answering),
      simply because most of the general questions have already been
      answered.
    

This sums it up. I'd not find it fun to answer the same questions over and
over. Doesn't imply that no-one should answer those; just that it leads one to
wonder the value being added.

------
dukoid
BTW: Do competition sites have an army of downvoters to bury leaked questions
(it's kind of frustrating when one spends time answering one of the rare more
interesting questions and it gets downvoted into oblivion because of a
duplicate that wasn't answered properly and then also disappears...)

------
erikb
I agree, most normal questions are answered on Stackoverflow already. There is
a lot of opportunity in the edge cases though. And it's true that these are
the answers that take experts and time. Maybe SO should advertise more
experienced people to share their knowledge as well.

------
br3w5
Hold on what the hell - I just skimmed through the 'decline of...' article
referenced by the above article to look for the one of the reason for those
2013 stats being that there are users that can find the answers to the
questions they need without asking and without answering. I am within the 8%
that have answered more than 5 questions but I don't have time to actively
contribute but do use it everyday and am voting on questions and answers
everyday. If there are more like me then how is it in decline?

That the referenced article doesn't cover this then undermines the other
arguments about its attitude to users (arguments I largely disagree with).

------
0xmohit

      you can’t easily ask a question without having it downvoted,
      marked as duplicate, or commented on in a negative way
    

I wouldn't really agree. If the question is clear and even if it is a FAQ,
then you'd not receive answers but also upvotes (for posting a FAQ) especially
in popular tags such as python, regex, java.

That said, there are several other problems with SO:

\- too many poor quality questions

\- too many poor quality _accepted_ and _highly upvoted_ answers

\- activity in a limited number of _tags_

\- the _reputation_ (apparently virtual bitcoins) cause the overall answer
quality to decline (search for "Fastest gun in the west problem" on meta SE)

------
scraft
I have 851 reputation (top 39% of all users), I have answered 15 questions,
about 50% haven't received any points, a few have received a minimal amount,
and two or three have received a bunch of points.

My answers are generally to quite niche topics, I have never gone out of my
way to answer questions, I typically post an answer when I have invested a
good chunk of time to find the solution to something and then see a question
about the same issue. I sometimes see questions I could answer (or improve
existing answers), but do not provide an answer as I find it hard to justify
the time, I feel that if I wanted to rack up points on stackoverflow it
wouldn't be that hard to post several answers a day.

My reputation has gone up pretty much steadily, for the last three years, with
an average of about 3 or 4 posts per year. I am a pretty light user, and being
in the top 39%, if anything, surprises me as I could easily imagine being in
the top 80%.

I find stackoverflow very useful, I work in games development which is quite a
broad subject, in an ideal world I'd have very in depth knowledge about
hundreds of topics, but in reality stackoverflow allows me to get quick
answers to a huge amount of questions/problems, which in turn gives me more
time to devote on area which I feel are most important. I haven't noticed
stackoverflow going down hill in the time I have used it.

------
yesbabyyes
This is my experience as well. I'm in the top percentile and I almost never
answer any more. The points keep coming though, for a handful of popular
questions/answers.

Answering is way less rewarding than a few years ago, but SO is working fine.
From the opposite point of view, I have asked one question on SO to which I
never received an answer, probably because it's not possible (it had to do
with Flash streaming).

------
brudgers
I believe one of the features of StackOverflow's design is that people quit
the site when they become burned out answering
repetitive/uninteresting/homework/etc questions. Because the alternative is
that they hang around the site and entertain themselves by treating people
badly...despite the design, I believe that the way in which 'homework'
questions are used as an excuse for unhelpful behavior illustrates the general
problem that concerned Spolsky [1] when designing the site.

[1] and perhaps Atwood to a lesser degree based on their difference of opinion
regarding 'how do I move the turtle in Logo'.
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-
th...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-
in-logo)

------
geordee
I stopped getting answers in SO. These days I see that the answer could be
there in SO, Github, Gists, blogs and Google is the first place I go to. A few
years back, I could go to SO for practically anything to do with coding. And I
was doing Ruby and Rails.

------
ravenstine
I rarely have the sort of experiences on SO that some seem to have. From my
witnessing the kind of frustration friends have had with SO, and from
experiencing my own occasional mistakes, I think some people are just poor at
stating an actual question, but can describe their problem in detail, which is
fine except often just talking about a problem without conveying the direction
one is looking to go towards isn't helpful to others. Some people also just
get offended really easily. Perhaps it comes from a past of spending time on
very Machiavellian BBSes, but my skin is rather thick and I've only once run
into a complete jerk on the Stack Exchange system, though not on Stack
Overflow.

It's easy to complain about any system, but what do we really have that's
better than Stack Exchange? Quora? Yahoo Answers? lol Maybe Experts Exchange,
but the userbase hasn't been nearly as large as SE in years. I personally like
the fact that SO/SE is so strict because, for all the power of the internet,
there is _mostly_ incorrect information on it. I'd much rather some people get
dissatisfied with it, and that some of my questions get closed or downvoted
easily, than have to wade through a ton of duplicate questions with answers
that appear to be written by 12 year olds.

The only thing that I wish SO would implement is mandatory explanations for
downvotes. Upvotes help a question get attention so there really isn't a big
need for an explanation, but a negative score from a few voters early on can
prevent a perfectly valid question from ever being taken seriously. This has
happened to me on a couple occasions where I knew that the question was valid
and the body properly formatted, but someone just didn't like the question for
whatever reason. It's a good thing that a bounty can fix this, but I shouldn't
have to spend 100+ of my points just because one or two people didn't like
that I was asking a question that supposedly every programmer should know and
I'm an idiot for asking it.

I have no clue what people are talking about when it comes to a "signal to
noise" ratio; Stack Exchange is one of the least noisy sites I've ever seen.

------
kazinator
Stackoverflow is a waste dump of crap questions that need to be put on old
(and permanently deleted).

This is not the case with some other SE sites, which run a "tigher ship". For
instance, the moderation review queues on the Electronics SE site are kept
small; everything gets processed.

The moderation queue on SO is huge. Currently, 8.8K questions with close votes
need review. Hundreds of low-quality posts. In Electronics SE: 6 close votes
need review at the moment, 3 First Posts and 1 re-open. That's it.

I clicked on Review in SO just now to start reviewing close votes. The very
first question that comes up is from 6 years ago.

------
fail2fail2ban
I want to contribute but there's some reputation barrier. About 1/4 of the
time, the best answer isn't chosen but I don't have the ability to help vote
up the best answer.

------
therealbobsmoot
Biggest problem on SO is the constant need by the moderators to mark a
question as 'not a question', when it's actually a really question and gets a
lot of good answers.

~~~
ravenstine
How were these questions stated? Whenever I have seen this happen, it's
because the user was behaving like they were posting on a vBulletin help
forum.

For example, the title might be "question about rails" and the body might say
something like "Uploads don't work. Here's my controller code."

There are two problems here. First, no actual question is being asked. There
may be an implicit question, but that's not what SO is about as it isn't
terribly helpful to those searching for answers. Second, the user may be
missing so much fundamental knowledge about the subject that a sufficient
answer would require more work than is worth anyone's time, and would contain
more information than is in the scope of a single specific question. SO is
meant for answers to precise problems, and isn't a tutorial site. Sure, some
people may post good answers, but the question may be too nebulous if it
exists at all.

I really don't see that kind of thing happen often enough to be a big deal,
but that's the only sort of case I have seen get the treatment that you
describe. As I have said before, I would rather have some of my questions be
rejected on some basis than have SO be a complete garbage dump. In contrast to
other sites in general, SO/SE is very clean.

~~~
r00fus
Maybe better moderation responses would help - ie, recommendations, links to
guidelines, etc. Have those improved recently?

------
Annatar
Stack overflow, like a lot of the forums out there, suffers from the same
pathology:

it is very easy to stumble upon an answer which answers the question, and is
correct in a very wide context, but is actually bad advice (low quality
correct answer, which without experience is bad practice).

And now comes the catch-22: if I do not have enough experience to recognize
the correct-correct answer, the answer presented will actually propagate some
solution, implementation, or practice, which is bad in the long term.

EXAMPLES

Example 1: new user asking a system administration / configuration management
question

"how do I change DNS settings on my system?"

"oh, just edit /etc/resolv.conf by hand."

(When the correct-correct answer would be "learn how to create an OS package
which delivers the correct /etc/resolv.conf, or create an OS package which
configures the system to be a DHCP client, and then keep that under revision
control.")

Example 2: a developer asking how to link properly

"I compiled abc and linked with def only to find that abc cannot find the def
shared library. How do I fix this?"

"Use ldconfig or set LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/shared/library." (When the
correct-correct answer would be "when compiling abc, set
-R'$ORIGIN:$ORIGIN/../lib:/path/to/lib' or
-R'$ORIGIN:$ORIGIN/../lib64:/path/to/lib64', depending on whether you're
compiling 32- or 64-bit, and always use the compiler's front end to link as
well.")

~~~
ap22213
Plus, for specialized topics, a good portion (10-15%?) of the top-voted
answers are just wrong or misleading.

About once every few weeks in reviewing one of my team's code, I see something
strange. I ask them about it, and they say they did it that way because of SO.
Then, I have to explain why it's not a good idea to do in our code. Then, I
have to spend a couple hours showing them why, because clearly 'everything on
the Internet is correct.'

Overall though, SO has saved me a TON of time over the years. But, lately I
have been more often reading user mailing lists or looking at the source code.

~~~
Annatar
Stack overflow can save a lot of time, but only if perused by someone with
experience who is just looking for their next clue, and will know how to turn
a low quality but correct answer into a clean solution. In such a case, stack
overflow can be very useful, but then the same goes for any random Linux
forum.

------
Insanity
I don't think SO is declining either. I myself don't contribute that much
anymore either, but I used to. Mostly because of reasons stated in this
article.

There are some valid points though for both contributing and not contributing
to SO. The fact that you need to be 'really fast' to answer questions does
indeed hold mostly for the simple answers. And actually there I found that
it's best to write a short, concise answer to the question and post that -
more chance of being first - and then alter your question to add additional
information that was not crucial, but still nice to have.

Anyway, SO is still a good resource for problems that are not that esoteric.
With esoteric questions, the odds of someone finding your question and being
able to answer it in reasonable time is smaller, and you're probably better of
either looking through the docs yourself or, if possible, looking at the open-
source code.

That it's hostile to newbies could be true. But it can also be hostile to
people who have been using the site for quite some time. That is,
unfortunately, part of the internet these days. Trolls are hard to avoid on
websites with a big community.

------
bandrami
SO is problematic when combined with the current trend towards CADT release
models. The "non-duplicate" question you get pointed to was seven releases
ago, and the solution in the answer has been deprecated. Doesn't matter,
though: still marked as "duplicate".

------
shardinator
Hi Bozho, thanks so much for your help over the years. SO might be in decline,
but it's one of those few products that makes you realise that better product
design can change things for the better.

------
edoceo
Why has SO entered the hiring market? Are they losing focus? I use SO profile
as part of my hiring process but does the world really need another job-board?

------
kefka
I work in emergent technology and R&D.

My questions don't have a SO question, let alone an answer. I get that in
general programming, SO is great. Or if you need to know how to generate a
N-dimensional array and initialize it for floats -- sure.

But what about: How can the Hololens be used in an Academic sports setting as
training hardware? I'm brainstorming rapidly, then digging in what the
Hololens can do (by experimentation, no less), and then investigating the API
for what's exposed.

The API is the easy part, as it the simple programming.

~~~
rubidium
The closer you are to actual research, the less helpful anything in print or
online will be in answering your question.

SO is for questions that have known solutions or quickly knowable solutions.

Sounds like you're actually looking for a collaboration tool.

------
gjolund
SO mods are some of the most toxic people I have encountered on the internet.

------
ommunist
I cannot even start to contribute to Stackoverflow, because it is way too
complicated ladder to become helpful.

