I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes
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@adynathos said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
But as I understand it, the sentiment here is that stack-overflow can be useful thanks to the rare kind people who answer the questions, and not the mods / internet-point-peddlers (or even despite their interference).
There's a little bit of an art to writing a very good question or a very good answer. The trick lies in writing things that admit correct answers (as opposed to just taking a grab bag of things to try) and that will be useful to others. It also almost always needs to give a bit of context; it's not that a very short Q or A can't be very good, but rather that it usually leaves some third party reader wondering βwhy would you do that?β Also, context can turn a subjective question into a much more objective one.
I would say that it is easy, except that the experience of many
peopleboomzilla alts here is that it isn't.Also, asking with a question that just uses popular tags attracts the repwhores. They're like a CADT pack of piranhas.
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Unrelated to content or users:
Is doing some kind of drive-by crypto mining on SO or what?
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@hungrier
Crypto-mining would be bombing your CPU, not your RAM. That's just your ordinary SPA brainworm.
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@dkf said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
repwhores. They
're like a CADTshould be introduced to a pack of piranhas
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An acquaintance of mine on another forum mentioned to me that he is switching jobs, and that he was contacted by the new employer based entirely on his profile and rating on SO. He also discuss a bit about how they have been improving how they handle certain things, contributor profiles among them.
I may need to reconsider things a bit.
My problems with Stack Overflow have never really been with the quality of answers, though in the past at least when I did go there, I've seen a tendency to answer questions directly, without considering if there were an XY Problem underneath it. More recently, I am see more effort to address those, fortunately.
Nor is my main issue with it the aggressive, and often pedantic and heavy-handed, moderation policies. While I do think that there is a problem there, a lot of that is simply the volume of questions involved. I do think that the policy has flaws, and some of them relate to my main problem with the site, but the ones which I hear complaints about most often are side issues to me.
As an aside, most of the common complaints about the moderation are cases where someone didn't know why they were modded down and were griping about it being unfair, which, while an understandable complaint and sometimes true, is something that is going to happen with any site that size - the mods don't have a lot of time to review each post, so they often have to resort to simple worst-case assumptions about the how appropriate, serious, and unique the questions are. I am seeing some effort to address this as well, but it may be a losing battle as the site grows ever larger and more heavily used.
The real problem with it is the same one many people have with the Unity 3D game engine: the culture of help vampirism, fence painting, and Frankensteining the site has fostered.
Simply put, it is really hard to make a site that caters to the needs of novices and non-experts, while also ensuring safe-guards that prevent con artists and grifters from abusing that ease of use and ease of access to information and tools.
I am not sure if it is even possible, especially at the scale that SO (or Unity, for that matter) operate, but my impression is that the moderation policy makes little or no effort to address the issue.
I may be wrong, however, as I have mostly avoided SO; my impressions come less from the site itself than from the people who have used it to build their own programs off of other people's work and knowledge, using the code offered but ignoring the information and advice, so that they end up repeating the same questions, and asking for more code, in an endless cycle.
Some people who start out like that do, eventually, break out of it as more of the material sinks in and they start to wipe the lemon juice from their eyes. But too many don't, and go on to build careers in the field based on their ability to get other, more skilled and knowledgeable people to do their work for them without compensation or credit.
It has become something of a crisis in the field right now, and had been building to one even before SO exacerbated it by lowering the barriers to entry. It isn't the fault of SO per se, and frankly I am at a loss as to how they could do things differently to lessen it, but at least in the past, I had the impression that the moderators - who do seem aware of the problem - had either stuck their heads in the grounds, or else thrown up their hands in despair. I hope that I am wrong in this, but that is how it has seemed to me so far.
I do see it as well-intentioned idea, and I do think that in the long run it will cause more good than harm, once things settle down and the industry adapts to address the issue (some efforts to do so, at least on the hiring end, are being worked out, but it is like watching WWI generals trying to figure out how to break the trench deadlock - most of the solutions are, shall we say, only marginally effective, and the sort of people who they are trying to catch with them easily find ways around them; perhaps they need to talk to the anti-malware people for advice, though given the problems they still have, maybe not). But it is hard not to be a bit bitter and skeptical about the site in light of how things are now.
It also has the converse problem, so prevalent and destructive for Wikipedia, of drawing in Subject Matter Experts while maintaining a neutral tone, and weeding out those who would manipulate the answers for their own personal ends. They do seem to be handling that better, though, in part simply because there are fewer people who are looking at it as a way to promote a cause or product, and more who will call them out for it for a given question (there are plenty on Wikipedia who will, but as the topics are often more subjective it is harder to make it stick, and there are far more topics than can be readily covered).
Lowered barriers to entry are, on the whole, a good thing IMAO, but SO, Unity, and Wikipedia all show that it is not an unalloyed blessing.
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@scholrlea said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
It also has the converse problem, so prevalent and destructive for Wikipedia, of drawing in Subject Matter Experts while maintaining a neutral tone, and weeding out those who would manipulate the answers for their own personal ends.
That's the main reason why there's such a focus on factually answerable questions and such a downer on βwhich tool could I use to do XYZ?β questions (that @DoctorJones was grumbling about upthread). Keeping relentlessly to things that can be definitely answered correctly reduces the amount of destructive axe-grinding and self-promotional blowhards.
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@hungrier Seriously, this is ridiculous
I left the f'in thing on over the weekend and haven't touched a single StackOverflow tab since.
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@doctorjones said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
Well, fuck me. If the purpose of SO isn't to help people, then what is it here for?
Masturbation.
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@polygeekery said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@doctorjones said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
Well, fuck me. If the purpose of SO isn't to help people, then what is it here for?
Masturbation.
Pedantic answers to stupid questions isn't my kink, but it takes all sorts
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@polygeekery said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@doctorjones said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
Well, fuck me. If the purpose of SO isn't to help people, then what is it here for?
Masturbation.
From what I've heard, the Internet has better resources to fill that need.
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@hungrier did you hear from "a friend"?
I'm just asking for a friend...
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I just came across a question that was closed as off-topic 7 years after it had been asked. Does that earn some extra dickweedery points?
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@dragnslcr
It's a natural outpouring of the StackOverflow Farr. Once every seven years, they have to get off by closing questions as off topic, it's just a natural survival instinct.
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@dragnslcr Bonus points if it received a useful answer at any time during the years it was open.
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@dragnslcr said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
I just came across a question that was closed as off-topic 7 years after it had been asked. Does that earn some extra dickweedery points?
Can't have difficult unanswered questions ruining the stats, duh.
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@hardwaregeek said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@dragnslcr Bonus points if it received a useful answer at any time during the years it was open.
Yeah, it was one of those "suggest a tool" questions, and it had a few responses with recommendations.
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@hardwaregeek said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@dragnslcr Bonus points if it received a useful answer at any time during the years it was open.
Extra bonus points for getting the whole thread deleted, especially if it had a useful answer.
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@hungrier I had restarted the browser after posting that screenshot. Now it's the next day and
Un fucking believable.
Edit: By the way, those aren't new tabs, in case you were wondering if I had opened 6 new SO tabs to try and get that screenshot.
The real question is why I still have those old SO tabs open.
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@doctorjones So why not use the software recommendation page? There's a whole site dedicated to asking about preferred tools and libraries. Granted, using 'loaded' words like 'favorite' would lead it to being closed for opinion reasons.
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@thebread I'm guessing the answer is something along the lines of "I'm not telepathic and I don't know that exists until someone tells me it does".
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@thebread said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@doctorjones So why not use the software recommendation page? There's a whole site dedicated to asking about preferred tools and libraries. Granted, using 'loaded' words like 'favorite' would lead it to being closed for opinion reasons.
For extra Internet pointz, here's the link:
Apparently there's also one for hardware:
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@blakeyrat Understandable, the mods used to do things like "Hey, this might be better at site:x, we'll migrate it for you" but they're all about those mod badges now so they just churn through and delete without explaining
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@thebread I visit SO many times when I'm bored at work (waiting for a database import or update or what-not), and I've never heard of either of those sites. If they want people to use then, maybe they should advertise them in some way.
In any case, the people who run SO are garbage. If there's a way to do something rude or impersonal, they'll do it. Added bonus if they get to delete data entered by a user with fewer Fantasy Internetpointzzz than they have.
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@blakeyrat I completely agree. The other non-SO pages will advertise other sites, but the big one doesn't, and has the hot network questions kind of hidden away. The main site has definitely become not as friendly as it used to be.
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@thebread said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
The other non-SO pages will advertise other sites, but the big one doesn't
It does for me, in the sidebar beneath the general ads and in-network job ads. It's possible that's because I've got some epeenpointzzz.
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@dkf said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@thebread said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
The other non-SO pages will advertise other sites, but the big one doesn't
It does for me, in the sidebar beneath the general ads and in-network job ads. It's possible that's because I've got some epeenpointzzz.
I see it, too, and I got no pointzzzz at all.
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@blakeyrat said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@thebread I'm guessing the answer is something along the lines of "I'm not telepathic and I don't know that exists until someone tells me it does".
Funnily enough, not one person mentioned that on SO. It probably slipped their minds because they were do busy being pedantic dickweeds.
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@hardwaregeek said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@dkf said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@thebread said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
The other non-SO pages will advertise other sites, but the big one doesn't
It does for me, in the sidebar beneath the general ads and in-network job ads. It's possible that's because I've got some epeenpointzzz.
I see it, too, and I got no pointzzzz at all.
OTOH, to support @blakeyrat's statement, I'm pretty sure I've never heard of those specific SE sites; I would have had no idea that I could ask such a question there.
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@doctorjones said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@blakeyrat said in I fucking hate StackOverflow sometimes:
@thebread I'm guessing the answer is something along the lines of "I'm not telepathic and I don't know that exists until someone tells me it does".
Funnily enough, not one person mentioned that on SO. It probably slipped their minds because they were do busy being pedantic dickweeds.
Of course, they moderate SO. I help mod SFF and the ry flows freely through me whenever I log into that site.
Though SFF will sometimes show others that there are other sites they can use: like suggesting a question about crab people would be better on the world building site