Is StackOverflow becoming less useful to anyone else?
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I haven't checked it recently, but stock MineCraft used to crash on start with Java 8 update 25.
? I never had that problem. OTOH IIRC Forge (IIRC) did, if you were using it.
Entertainingly, someone developed a fix, because the problem was Forge using something in a way that was deprecated, and they didn't it.
More annoyingly, MC throws a Java error when closing for me on 8u40, but that may or may not be due to the mods I use.
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The amount of policing they have in answer comments is starting to get a little annoying, especially the passive-aggressive "Hi, welcome to Frobinators.SE! Here, we expect you to supply frobination details for each widget you frobinate. This question is stupid and so are you. HTH. HAND. FYAD. DIAF."
I don't have an account over there, and every time I see one of those comments, my desire to create one gets smaller and smaller.
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Yeah they are pretty rude.
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I'm pretty damn sure that the vanilla launcher now ships with a bundled Java 8.
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Forge using something in a way that was deprecated
Sorta. IIRC they were (accidentally) relying on a bug. But yeah there was a fix pretty soon after that.
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Jeff
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<hr>Filed under: <img src="/uploads/default/19330/632018a0d1a2f206.png" width="165" height="42"> - No.
I did reply to several posts at once. What you think I'm waiting 30 mins between each post?
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I'm struggling to figure out what the actual purpose of SE is lately
Actually, it makes a lot more sense when you simply take the name of the site, and then add "for pedantic programmers" to it.
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Does it make any sense that a discussion website about cooking forbids the posting of recipes? Of course not, it's preposterous.
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Does it make any sense that a "cooking for pedantic programmers" website forbids the posting of recipes? Of course, they really just want to discuss the technical process of cooking or diagnosing a highly-specific-but-generalized problems in the cooking domain
Hope that clarifies things.
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Does it make any sense that a "cooking for pedantic programmers" website forbids the posting of recipes?
I get why.
SE, is more like the FAQ on your cooking device's manual. You don't post recipes there.
I think SE would benefit greatly from an ability to move a question into an article domain. (either as an article, or a request for article). That would make the site less caustic to new users, and returning users that forgot the details of the site. Plus it would increase exposure for SE.
It doesn't have to be as feature rich as code project. Hell the article could link to a code project.
But at least a springboard for people not understanding what content they really want.
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Oh FFS, these sites are even more useless than I remember them.
I peeked at the new questions on the cooking site, just to see if it was still "cooking for pedantic programmers", and of course at the top of the list was a mini-debate about whether or not the question could be improved in such a way for it to be acceptable on the site:
http://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/56519/low-or-slow-carb-stir-fry-sauces
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Oh FFS, these sites are even more useless than I remember them.
I peeked at the new questions on the cooking site, just to see if it was still "cooking for pedantic programmers", and of course at the top of the list was a mini-debate about whether or not the question could be improved in such a way for it to be acceptable on the site:
http://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/56519/low-or-slow-carb-stir-fry-sauces
indeed.Asking for recipe suggestions on a cooking site is considered off topic? Riiiiiiiiiight.
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SE, is more like the FAQ on your cooking device's manual for programmers.
FTFY.
On literally every other online community website, you can post a casual, friendly message with a question to a forum, and you get an answer from friendly people glad to help. On SE, you have to first navigate a level of pedantic dickweedery surpassed only by Wikipedia editors before you can engage the community... who, as it turns out, aren't actually experts (or probably even practitioners) in the topics, but are just programmers who seem to have a passion for "curating" information about topics other than programming, in a programming-like manner.
Hence, why these are just "X... for pedantic programmers."
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On SE, you have to first navigate a level of pedantic dickweedery surpassed only by Wikipedia editors before you can engage the community...
So we're only in the third place?
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I would argue the community here take it to an entirely new level: pedantic dickweeds about pedantic dickweedery.
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@thegoryone said:
Citrix problems? What brand is your HVAC
I think I recently read a funny story about how those could be related ...
The Big Box Hot Box
The average big-box hardware store is like a small city. They have every piece of hardware or tool imaginable (except, of course, the one you’re looking for). You’ll find no less that 15 aisles of power tools stocked with everything from battery operated screwdrivers to arc welders. To store all...
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Oh look, some people on SE have at least some sense of humor.
Checkboxes - Is better to check exceptions or to uncheck exceptions?
I have a grid of ~20 checkboxes which users can utilize to select features. Typically, user might have ~15 features selected ~5 unselected for a co configuration. Deselection of features which a u...
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But the community around them apparently doesn't:
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I do resent that fact that people can vote you down without a reason, or close it off without a specific reason on why it was closed off.
Even then, the reason for downvoting/closing would probably require voting. So it continued, until the animator had a fatal heart attack.
To answer your question, I can't say I've noticed much of a change in usefulness. It's one of the best places for getting answers to my questions, but I think there's more options available to me than there were a few years ago.
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I peeked at the new questions on the cooking site, just to see if it was still "cooking for pedantic programmers", and of course at the top of the list was a mini-debate about whether or not the question could be improved in such a way for it to be acceptable on the site:
If you look at some of the related questions, which have actual answers, they're people asking about how to replicate some particular sauce or other restaurant recipe. They are horrible people. That's my first impression (seasoned [hah!] by your links and commentary, admittedly).
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So we're only in the third place?
Yes, and it's not even close. We're mainly pedantic dickweeds here for entertainment. Those guys are dead serious about it.
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I think that the problems @groaner, @mott555, Blakey, and others are having with the site are partly because they are only engaging with it from the question side -- asking questions alone is a very inefficient way to gain rep. (Although I agree with @groaner that the tone of some of the remarks about obtaining more details isn't quite right -- it's usually better to frame those as questions, although some people still don't get the hint...)
The amount of policing they have in answer comments is starting to get a little annoying, especially the passive-aggressive "Hi, welcome to Frobinators.SE! Here, we expect you to supply frobination details for each widget you frobinate. This question is stupid and so are you. HTH. HAND. FYAD. DIAF."
Is there something wrong with "Hi, welcome to Frobinators.SE! What is the model number of the widget you are frobinating?" or something of that ilk, instead?I got tons of downvotes, but instead of helping me make better questions, the community was more satisfied with blowing the questions away with downvotes until I deleted them. There's a bunch of communication on meta that the focus should be to make the question better if at all possible, but that's just not followed.
Some people, sadly, expect you to respond to downvotes alone, without commenting about what precisely is wrong with your question.Sometimes I like to go to SO and answer questions. But I have only so much time and patience. So if I have to scroll through more than 10-15 questions that are either poor or that I can't answer or that were already answered, I loose patience and give up.
SO has the ability to show you only unanswered questions, filter by tags, etal...why would you ever go through the frontpage or w/e you're doing to try to find questions to answer?Since we had that last discussion about how it wasn't useful to me because I made a new login for each job I had (speaking of Nazis: SO basically puts new users in a concentration camp), I started posting questions using the same login. I've posted 3. None have been answered. Two were completely ignored, one was answered by a guy who obviously had not read the question and/or lived in the Twilight Zone where WebAPI 2 worked completely differently.
Have they seen any voting activity at all?
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SO has the ability to show you only unanswered questions, filter by tags, etal...why would you ever go through the frontpage or w/e you're doing to try to find questions to answer?
I do go through tags. But it's still finicky. I always have to manually skip through a bunch of items that, with better options, the system could filter for me.
What I'd like is a real filtering system, where I could tell it something like: "Show me an active feed of all non-negative rated questions with tags 'a', 'b' or 'c', but without tags 'd' and 'e', that hadn't received an answer after an hour of posting, sorted from newest". Perhaps even set it up to drop me some kind of ping when a new one appears (maybe through their app on the mobile?)
Or something.
But I get the feeling, whatever they do, the overhead of just going through question after question after question and reading it, mentally parsing it, thinking about it and deciding I can't answer will always wear me down eventually. The best SO can hope is to get an answer out of me before that happens.
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Should I vote him up? I feel like I want to vote him up.
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While downvoting a question doesn't require a comment (but it bugs you to leave one), voting to Close a question (which requires 3000 rep) makes you choose a reason as to why you're voting to close it.
It looks like this:
Note that "off-topic because..." opens up a new menu that is different for each site. StackOverflow's looks like this:
Unfortunately, the "belongs on another site" one only lists 5 sites... the site's Meta site plus the four sites that the admins think are closest to the one you're on. For StackOverflow, this is SuperUser, Tex, DBA, and Stats.
Yes, they think Tex and Stats are more related to StackOverflow than Programmers or Server Fault.
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I think that the problems @groaner, @mott555, Blakey, and others are having with the site are partly because they are only engaging with it from the question side -- asking questions alone is a very inefficient way to gain rep.
I don't want rep. I don't want to be "part of a community". I just want to ask a question and get an answer.
I thought (perhaps foolishly) that was the purpose of the site.
Is there something wrong with "Hi, welcome to Frobinators.SE! What is the model number of the widget you are frobinating?" or something of that ilk, instead?
I personally think all of those "polite-but-also-rude" copy and paste blurbs are awful. They're like the [citation needed] tags on Wiki, it basically translates to, "you're wrong and I hate you but I'm too lazy to help you out".
Have they seen any voting activity at all?
I have no idea if they have, or even where to look.
While downvoting a question doesn't require a comment (but it bugs you to leave one), voting to Close a question (which requires 3000 rep) makes you choose a reason as to why you're voting to close it.
Remember, the having 3000 rep qualification is either: "spam hundreds of quick answers", or "be an early adopter and do basically nothing at all".
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I have no idea if they have, or even where to look.
Go to your SO profile, and click on the "Reputation" tab
Remember, the having 3000 rep qualification is either: "spam hundreds of quick answers", or "be an early adopter and do basically nothing at all".
Close votes are a fairly advanced function -- more in line with early-stage moderation than fundamental site functionality!
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Go to your SO profile, and click on the "Reputation" tab
Yeah I don't give enough of a shit to visit a webpage and sign on. I don't care about internetpointzzz and I definitely have no idea why people think I (or anybody) would.
You know what I think of that useless site: it's useless. Take it or leave it.
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Asking for recipe suggestions on a cooking site is considered off topic?
It's off topic because you will be inundated with subjective answers.
But, considering everything in life is about technique and subjective opinion on technique....
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You've explained in two sentences why I no longer post on programmers.se.
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I don't want rep. I don't want to be "part of a community". I just want to ask a question and get an answer.
I thought (perhaps foolishly) that was the purpose of the site.
My single interaction with SO was to attempt to ask a question, only to be told I didn't have enough rep to ask a question in that category. I don't want to build rep; I want to solve my problem. If I had gotten help, I might have stuck around to help others, but FU, SO. I haven't even logged on since.
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The basic idea is you can ask things like "What did I do wrong while cooking" but not things like "What should I make for dinner tonight". Recipe requests are considered more like "what should I make", while restaurant mimicry is more like "what did I do wrong".
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I'm really curious now, because SO doesn't have categories. Like, don't get me wrong, SO is fucking awful for getting answers, but... there aren't categories. There's tags, did you need to create a new tag?
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It's been at least a couple of years, so I don't remember the details. It was probably a question about Verilog or SystemVerilog, so I posted (or tried to) in the most appropriate place I could find for that. I'm pretty certain I didn't try to create anything new.
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"What did I do wrong while cooking"
Which can be highly subjective.
Go look up, tough meat.
You'll be told that you need to tenderize, next person will call them crazy. Then you're told you cooked too long, or didn't cook long enough. Then someone will go into marinating, etc.
Hint: For us it was because we didn't cook long enough. Who knew that meat cooks to tough first, then becomes tender.
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I actually use SE/SO/whatever pretty often, but not from a "community" standpoint. The only SE site I've tried to use that way was the Android one, and that got really frustrating very quickly.
For answers though, it's a great resource, and gets indexed very well by search engines. Just don't try to actually interact with the site (@blakeyrat's comment about concentration-camping new users is dead on)
Just as an example, this is my usual usage...
- Need an answer to something (In this case enable SSL on websockets in Jetty)
- Google it
- 1st result is SO question
- Get answer from SO question/comments/answers
- Problem solved.
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Cooking != programming
You can't apply the same pedantic rules to programming that you can to cooking, period.
Filed Under: art.stackexchange.com YOUR PAINTING SUCKS NO IT'S AWESOME NO IT SUCKS
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Yeah, subjective is WAY less of a problem once you get out of SO proper. Most of the SE sites are comfortable with subjectivity so long as there's some way to have answers be objectively wrong. For example, you can't make meat less tough by bombing it from a jet plane, but some may prefer it tenderized vs braised. However, "What should I cook" can have literally any answer you want, and none of them are more right than any others, so it's just not a good fit.
I posted (or tried to) in the most appropriate place I could find for that
There's only one place to post. I think it must have been a tagging issue: at the bottom of the form you're required to tag the question with what category it applies to, and when you ask about something obscure, there's often not a tag that applies, but you have to tag it with SOMETHING. Which is fucked up, because now new users can't ask about obscure things ever because they can't create the tag, so they have to break the rules and mis-tag the question and get yelled at.
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Some people, sadly, expect you to respond to downvotes alone, without commenting about what precisely is wrong with your question.
It doesn't help that having
"-1" in your comment, is considered "community inappropriate" and therefore banned (comment won't save).I usually lead with that to indicate that I'm beginning a comment on why I downvoted.
Now I have to say
"I downvoted because..."
But that's the kind of shit that pisses me off. Arbitrary zero tolerance policing of comments.
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you can't make meat less tough by bombing it from a jet plane
That may not be entirely true
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It doesn't help that having
"-1" in your comment, is considered "community inappropriate" and therefore banned (comment won't save).I usually lead with that to indicate that I'm beginning a comment on why I downvoted.
Now I have to say
"I downvoted because..."
But that's the kind of shit that pisses me off. Arbitrary zero tolerance policing of comments.
+1
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For your exact example, see questiosn like:
How to make the best of tough meat while camping?
The problem is my buddies like to buy cheap steaks to take camping (usually from the 5 for $5 bin), then they hand them to me like I could work some miracle other than adding cracked pepper and try...
It sounds super subjective, but it's totally acceptable in cooking.se.
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There's only one place to post. I think it must have been a tagging issue
Whatever. I wanted to ask a question on a Q&A site, but wasn't allowed to. They lost any future contributions I might have made to their "community."
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Yeah, that's shitty for sure.
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Recipe requests are considered more like "what should I make", while restaurant mimicry is more like "what did I do wrong".
I mean...I get that, but the guy (linked by @apapadimoulis) was asking about something a lot more specific than "what should I make," while a bit less specific than a particular restaurant recipe. And the guys hinting that the question could be made acceptable without even saying why just come off as passive aggressive dicks.
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a lot more specific than "what should I make,"
Eh, not really. "I want a sauce! What sauce should I make?" isn't much more specific than "I want to have lunch, what should I make?" As for the hinting, maybe I'm just more familiar with the community, but they're not coming off that way at all to me. They're saying "We don't take this type of question but we do take this one, so if you want this related question answered we'd be glad to help" to me.
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Eh, not really. "I want a sauce! What sauce should I make?"
But that's not what he said. He said low / slow carb stir fry sauce. That's waaaaay more specific than
"I want to have lunch, what should I make?"
As for the hinting, maybe I'm just more familiar with the community, but they're not coming off that way at all to me.
Hmm...going back and re-reading, it was my memory that was passive aggressive. I still think they're wrong about how specific this question was, but then I can understand that sometimes Godzilla is green, so take that for what it is.
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Yeah, subjective is WAY less of a problem once you get out of SO proper. Most of the SE sites are comfortable with subjectivity so long as there's some way to have answers be objectively wrong. For example, you can't make meat less tough by bombing it from a jet plane, but some may prefer it tenderized vs braised. However, "What should I cook" can have literally any answer you want, and none of them are more right than any others, so it's just not a good fit.
Yeah -- there's a "Good subjective, bad subjective" thing floating around that's used for that.
There's only one place to post. I think it must have been a tagging issue: at the bottom of the form you're required to tag the question with what category it applies to, and when you ask about something obscure, there's often not a tag that applies, but you have to tag it with SOMETHING. Which is fucked up, because now new users can't ask about obscure things ever because they can't create the tag, so they have to break the rules and mis-tag the question and get yelled at.
Re: tags -- the best solution to "there isn't a specific tag that addresses what I want" is to step back and use a more generic tag that still applies to your question -- for instance, asking a very obscure question about C++ compiler minutiae and simply tagging itc++. I don't know of any reason someone'd yell at you for doing that; they might tack some tags on, but that by itself is pretty harmless.It doesn't help that having "-1" in your comment, is considered "community inappropriate" and therefore banned (comment won't save).
I usually lead with that to indicate that I'm beginning a comment on why I downvoted.
Now I have to say
"I downvoted because..."
Simply drop the prefix and spit out the reason for the downvote...But that's the kind of shit that pisses me off. Arbitrary zero tolerance policing of comments.
This does get annoying at times, yes -- even though comments are in some ways intended to be transient, that's not something SO conveys well to its users.Whatever. I wanted to ask a question on a Q&A site, but wasn't allowed to. They lost any future contributions I might have made to their "community."
Ehh...did it simply say you didn't have enough rep to use theg++tag?And the guys hinting that the question could be made acceptable without even saying why just come off as passive aggressive dicks.
Yeah, that is passive-aggressive if you ask me -- if you think there's something that can be done with the question, spit it out.
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Yeah, I'd honestly have come down on "low-carb makes it specific enough", but others don't see it that way, it's a judgement call. Things like "I want a recipe for gluten-free cookies" can often be edited into "How do I adapt a recipe to be gluten-free" which is answerable, so that's one route ("How do I make a sauce low carb"); another would be turning it into "How can I make a low-carb sauce more flavorful", which is answerable. "What recipe will I like" is fundamentally un-answerable, though, which is probably why they came down on the side of unanswerable.
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It's off topic because you will be inundated with subjective answers.
And? What's wrong with that? It's a fucking cooking site not a site specialising in cost-based SQL optimisation.
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"What recipe will I like" is fundamentally un-answerable, though, which is probably why they came down on the side of unanswerable.
And while they can't imagine what the guy will like, you could still get good answers, some of which might be actual recipes, some of which might be ideas about particular ingredients / substitutes or techniques. And even if the OP didn't like one or another, it still might be useful to other people who come by later, especially via google.
But if they want to make their site less useful and interesting, I suppose that I'm not going to try
toand stop them.
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Yeah, that is passive-aggressive if you ask me -- if you think there's something that can be done with the question, spit it out.
This is the big problem with the site.
Instead of encouraging cultural developments by leading by example, the leadership of SE have basically instilled a set of rules that impart a sense of superiority dickweedery to its userbase. Then realizing that people were mindlessly dictating the rules when they weren't followed, the leadership begged users to be more proactive (showing how to make the question better, editing the question when you can, and so on), but the superiority complex had already been established.
So, now they are just modifying their UI to censor certain word arrangements and playing a game of cat and mouse, making them look even more like dicks.
The big problem is that whoever is in charge of SE/SO can't lead worth shit.
He can't inspire people. He can't encourage people, and so he uses rules and filtering as a whack-a-mole stick, then blogs and blogs endlessly in a whiny rant about how the SE/SO culture is toxic and how people are being irresponsible.
Then the same thing happens here with a post about a question, and instead of coaxing the community to stay on topic, or redirecting, the leadership calls the community toxic and storms off like a spoiled child.
This is why all the productive members of SO have basically walked off, leaving the question-nazis to bitch at questions rather than actually answering them or attempting to be courteous in their explanation.
They'd rather bash their users over the head with an ever expanding rulebook, than to create an environment that leads by example.
Meh....
