
Unfortunately, StackOverflow is difficult-to-avoid nowadays… - cnst
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=151960881910649&w=2
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smsm42
Looks like the case of snobbery outbreak right there. I mean, you can have
issues with depth and precision and other stuff on SO answers - in any huge
project, there are good things and there are bad things, and in fact there are
tons of bad things you can pick out if the project is large enough. But
ignoring the fact that lots of developers successfully use it to exchange
information and enrich their knowledge and claiming it's just "some random
site" is just ignoring the reality. And claiming "no one should be promoting
SO in open source community at all" because it's imperfect just begs the
question - ok, what should one be promoting instead? What is the perfect site
which is as good an information source as SO and yet has none of its
downsides? If this is not specified - in the same place - it just sounds as
empty snobbery. SO is a practical tool, it's imperfect, it has obvious and
known flaws - but dismissing it wholesale out of hand is only appropriate if
one has better tool that solves the same problem, and better. So far I haven't
seen any suggestions for that.

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icc97
When a site is as big as SO you can never fit all the people all of the time.

1\. It's community run

2\. they make their money through legitimate means of job ads which fits
perfectly

3\. the ads they do have are to community voted places eg Sheldon Brown from
cycling SE

4\. It's about as transparent as you can get

5\. The people with the most points almost always really know their shit

6\. It's one of the few places on the Internet you can make yourself
marketable by being helpful. I can prove my knowledge to potential companies
through my answers

Or let's just all go back to Experts Exchange.

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netzone
It all depends on how you use it. If something I make produces an error, or
unexpected output, the first thing I do after the usual "stop and think" phase
is google it. More often than not, that search will give me at least half a
page of Stackoverflow pages - many of them completely irrelevant to my
specific problem of course - but looking at the code can jog something in my
mind that I wouldn't have thought of myself. It helps to look at somewhat
related code. At least in my opinion.

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commandlinefan
I've lost count of how many times I've googled a question, had the first hit
be SO, and the top answer to the question be "Have you ever heard of Google,
n00b"? (Thread locked).

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coldacid
I've lost track of the number of times that I've gone to a question that
actually deals with what I'm looking for just to find that it's locked and
marked duplicate of a completely different question. Complete pain in the ass.

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chopin
Although I've encountered this as well, in most cases I got a useful answer
for my problem.

I often ddg problems related to Ubuntu. I had many encounters where someone
had the same problem than me on askubuntu, but the answers where unhelpful,
sometimes only the question was posted with no answer at all. Or the original
poster stated he solved his problem, without posting the solution. In most
cases, on SO I found relief.

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Flimm
I was curious, and I did a search for "deleted:1 user:me" to see if any of my
posts had been deleted, and six had, almost all of them I had deleted myself.
For context I have posted around 200 posts on Stack Overflow.

Being able to see deleted posts is indeed an eye-opener, and I also wish more
people had this ability, but for a different reason. It makes you aware of the
amount of very low quality posts that get posted to Stack Overflow, not to
mention spam.

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smsm42
Yes, I see candidates for deletion in review queue, and most of it is either
garbage or "I have this complex problem, please solve it for me after I give
you the most vague description of it". Like the one I just saw recently where
somebody has a huge pile of legacy Perl code and has trouble figuring it out
(and that's all, no specific Perl question). I can feel their pain, but what
can be done here except giving the poor soul a hug? So this kind of questions
gets closed. And probably the person asking it is very frustrated, but really,
what can one do here?

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vgy7ujm
What about hiring an actual Perl programmer?

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smsm42
I've been a Perl programmer once, and I assure you given a pile of legacy Perl
code, written in a good old style with good old "everything accesses
everything", no comments and clever use of tricky Perl constructs, most people
would be inclined to yell for help. It's not specifically Perl's fault, but a
constellation of Perl being at the top of its popularity when thinking about
who will support it 20 years later didn't exactly enter the mindset of most
programmers.

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jpalomaki
Main issues for me: 1)too eager closing of questions for whatever reason
2)number of answers for given question growing over time and best answers not
getting the best position.

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deadliftpro
I concur. Main issue I have faced is people down voting questions even when
the question is perfectly valid and reasonably well explained(imo). It
sometimes looks to me that when a question is about 'under the cover' stuff
and not superficial 'how do i get this done/i did this but got this output',
it would be down voted.

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Caveman_Coder
I had this happen when I was obtaining my degree a couple of years ago. I
forget the issue exactly, but I had this homework problem that I was able to
solve using Python docs but what was happening underneath wasn't really
"clicking" in my brain. So I posted the problem I solved, my solution, along
with my actual question about the underlying issue. I got a lot of "did you
check the documentation?" and "is this for HW?"...sadly my question was closed
and I never got an answer.

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lnanek2
What I find hilarious is when I post a very detailed technical android answer
and then someone comes along and edits it to be incorrect. I wish there was a
way to make your posts only viewable or deletable. The people who go around
editing do a terrible job...

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geezerjay
That's a sweeping geneealization. More often than noy, those nifty, pristine
posts with corrext syntax and grammar are the work of editors who clean them
up.

