It just occured to me, that I haven’t asked anything on SO for a while now. It might even be years, the last I asked for help.
Most of the problems I come across were already faced by someone else.
Do you guys feel the same?
When the number one result in Google is a site answering my exact question with “did you try googling it first?” I have no incentive to interact with that site.
i got that once, except it was my exact question with no response at all, then i noticed it was me that posted the question 4 years earlier.
i used to use stack overflow a lot back in 2007/08 but i cant remember the last time i actually got an answer.
I’ve stopped using most corporate message boards and forums since AI hysteria highlighted their greed and self-aggrandizement.
All of them act like they are indispensable and provide value, when their only value is the network effect, and their “products” are entirely user generated and moderated. It’s only a matter of time until they enshittify and rug pull.
“Have you tried formatting your PC and completely reinstalling Windows? That often fixes icon misalignment on the desktop. Please upvote if this helps you!” - every “volunteer Microsoft Support Forum” representative ever.
They all have that same irritatingly obsequious and simultaneously infantile dunning-Kruger customer support agent vibe when responding. Never posted there myself, but all the responses feel like they’re written in that tone.
Ha I once googled some question, found a great answer in some random forum and was like about to write a reply saying what a great answer it was when I realised it was me, like 10 years ago.
Never. IIRC, I also couldn’t upvote good solutions because I had never posted or something, though I may be mis-remembering.
This was my experience as well. They seemed to angle the system away from the casual user, which I didn’t have time to sit around and answer questions to get enough fake internet points to interact more.
Yeah, it sucks. In the cases where it was really helpful, I couldn’t upvote the answer that helped me solve my issue (usually with some more poorly-documented library or something).
You can however always accept the answer, which is similar and pretty helpful
I’m not the one asking anything in this case, just findingnothers’ questions and answers
fake internet points
Your take is a valid one, but not very fair.
Points are a reputation system. People who are contribute and provide quality get increased trust and power.
It’s not “fake”. It’s a designed system of points with meaning.
A casual surfer not being able to vote is by design. Which has a cost of missing out on valid votes, but the benefit of evading trolls and misuse.
Some of my saltiness comes from the fact that I tried to answer questions a few times, but told I wasn’t worthy enough to participate in the conversation, and so I was confused by the system. Also, I saw people answering with lots of points, but their answers were trash and I couldn’t impact that response/point gathering, and just made me think it was just another gamified system, and engineers love to game a system. :)
If that were really true then they would give users with 100k rep some benefit of the doubt when it comes to questions… but nope. Still get closed as “too vague” by people who haven’t even heard of the thing you’re asking about.
At least that’s a testament to neutrality - in a shitty way.
I’ve never asked a question there. Typically if there’s no quick answer to my question already available, I’ll just dig through documentation.
Funny story: when SO first started, started answering questions in domains I had experience in. The gamification was fun. After a year, questions got repetitive, so stopped.
A few years later. Googling a tech question. Top answer. Checked. Looks good.
Scroll down. It’s my own answer from way back when.
First time I felt old.
Never. Don’t have the patience to gather enough points to ask a question.
Oh, and,
Asking, answering, and editing require no reputation.
Most of the responses on that site are toxic, so I tend to avoid it.
So which one are you using ?
By responses you mean to include comments and moderation, not just answers?
It’s sometimes there, but - from the [limited] use I have - I would certainly not qualify them as “most”.
Never. For the most part i haven’t had a question that hasn’t already asked or that couldn’t be answered from reading the docs or some other source. For the cases i get stuck i ask the question to a more focused group
I find SO too pissy to interact with. If I find something useful there, I’ll copy it, but otherwise I ignore it.
What do you mean by pissy? What do you find so pissy?
I would answer your question, but it’s too much like a previous question, that someone else hasn’t answered yet.
I asked and answered a small handful of questions in the mid 20-teens but not really much since. I still wind up finding good answers there on a semi regular basis, though.
I just looked in my profile and my last question was in 2017. I received a holier than thou “what you’re trying to do is wrong” type of response and finally solved it with the help of a coworker who actually cared.
Last time I asked was in 2019. I’ve asked 30+ questions total, only about half of those are ever answered. I’ve found that, the more experienced I get, the less my questions get answered on SO. Usually because my questions are well thought out, explained incredibly well, and the problem isn’t that I don’t understand something. It’s that my problem is one of a kind. E.g. no one else on the planet is having it. So of course I’m not going to get help for it.
yeah… that’s what I realized too.
If you ask basic questions - “google it yourself” … closed!
If you ask anything specific (like in your case) - it’s just crickets
I haven’t asked that much on SO. Often I can find the answer myself. In other cases my question is so niche I don’t know how to formulate it into a good SO question.
One of my questions got closed for being duplicate because it was tangentially related to a different question. I got the answer, but it left me a sour taste.
Did you get the answer from the duplicate? If so I don’t see what the problem is, they’re building a knowledge repository so all dupes must be closed
Only from the comment saying it was a duplicate. The question wasn’t even the same and the answer was barely touching my question.
Rip
I forgot that last time was in 2023, although the previous one was in 2016. SO had a lot of moderation drama and point-grinders that (imo) led to community becoming more toxic, to the point where it’s not too pleasant for me to participate in.
To be fair, they still have some good answers, and sometimes they can provide a useful answer, but edge-case rare obscure problems that seemed to be the very reason for SO are rarely answered now, as I see it
Never, end up there a lot when googling though.
You should already know that. It’s such a simple thing. — first answer on StackOverflow
Usually iterations of:
“Closed and locked due to duplicate of: (question asked 9 years ago about Visual Studio 2011 and Visual Basic, when you’re using VS code '22 and C#)”
“This seems like an XY problem, what are you really trying to accomplish?”, after a one thousand word post describing in detail exactly what you are trying to accomplish and the many different reasons why you can’t just use #GENERIC_EVERYDAY_METHOD.
Either that or the quick and dirty method that I want for a one off data conversion that uses standard libraries is heavily down voted and lost while the elaborate, all-cases-considered, 7-third-party-library-using answer becomes the top result.
This is not my experience at all.
It seems we search for and look at different kinds of questions.
The problem with stack overflow is that you need to know enough about the domain you’re working in to describe it accurately enough to search and find that previous great answer.
If you have no clue, and then naively ask the no-clue kinds of questions, because you have no clue, then you get beaten over the head about not searching for the existing answer that you don’t know how to search for.
I think I’ve asked only two or three questions there, ever, and those were on topics obscure enough that the answers ended up coming from me.
There was a time when I answered other people pretty regularly, but that was more than a few years ago. I stopped mainly because I’m not very comfortable giving them free labour so they can be the gatekeepers of community knowledge.
I wonder if anyone is working on a fediverse Q&A platform.
