I know how to mitigate "The Fall of Stack Overflow"
meta.stackoverflow.com
The site should be made newbie-friendly Or, rather, question-friendly. I realize that such a blunt suggestion is likely to be met with immediate backlash, from all sides. But please hear me out. Pl...
  • snowe@programming.devM
    5·
    2 years ago

    It just takes a while to get the site, which unfortunately doesn’t work if you jump right in without lurking.

    I don’t really think that’s the problem here. It’s pretty clear that people answering most questions just want to be contrarian. Here’s a question I asked earlier this year (not on SO, but I’ve had the same exact problem on SO years ago) where I detailed literally everything I tried and instead of reading the post, the answerer literally said:

    To be candid, this is much to lengthy and broad to follow. When you get the wait cursor (the spinning beachball of death), it means that the system is waiting for something before it can move on. It could be from either RAM or your disk or another application. Before you start taking drastic steps, boot into Safe Mode and see if the problem persists.

    If they had literally read even a quarter of the way through the post they would have seen that I had already done what they suggested. It’s clear the problem is with the platform. Not the people asking the questions.

    In fact if you look back at most of my questions you’ll find a majority of them not answered. Not because I didn’t provide enough information, but because SO rewards tagging and closing questions rather than answering the actually difficult questions. And because of that it’s just better to have a billion questions that get closed than answer a single question that might take more than a few minutes, even if that question comes with an example project to show the problem at hand

      • snowe@programming.devM
        4·
        2 years ago

        I’m curious as to what reward you believe that people are getting from closing questions?

        there’s a bunch of badges for things that can only be accomplished by flagging.

        You also get the nice ‘feeling’ of clearing your queue. The faster you do that the better you feel. It’s literally all rewards for putting as little effort in to get as much ‘reward’ as possible.

          • snowe@programming.devM
            1·
            2 years ago

            With over 1000 rep on Stack Overflow, you should have access to the First Posts and Late Answers review queues where you can get an idea of well, give it a try to see what’s in there. There’s a fair bit of people trying to sneak links into new answers to old questions (Late Answers) that having another set of eyes on would help catch before they get too far. Likewise, there’s a lot of posts to First Posts where someone could help a new user and take the time to help them make their question better… or if it isn’t a good fit for the Q&A format of Stack Overflow flag it for closure.

            Those queues were the ones I’m talking about. SO rewards clearing your queue of 40 per day for each queue (maybe that’s different if you have more rep).

            Without the gamification of the badges, the participation in community moderation and curation of the material would likely be even less active.

            I very much doubt that. Forums for helping others existed for decades before SO and even now a lot of stuff has moved to discord, Reddit, Zulip, and slack and they still have moderation and most people actually get answers to their questions.