Why I don't like SO and affiliates

cluelessPHP

I am going to state blankly I don't like Stack overflow and it's affiliates, why? Now I posted this question on the meta section not so long ago

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So I just "found" Mars, as a complete armature with a 50 mm scope what should my next target be? Keep in mind I just started using a telescope

-8 votes, now fair enough that's the meta section and before sneakyimp(yes you're rather honest) says anything, my complaint is at time you can post a perfectly legitimate question just to be berated by ten year veterans, for the most part I see things as Boolean it's true or false, never the less I think the stack overflow lot have become so obsessed with the minutiae of a question and focus on the grammatical structure so much they really forget it's just some armature sitting behind a keyboard trying their best

/endrant

dalecosp

I kind of understand. Their insistence that they are the One True Source (and therefore there should only be One True Answer per One True Subject) is a bit of hoity-toityness I could do without and stands in stark contrast to this forum.

But they've got a lot of power right now, job listings, and free CV-type stuff, so they're probably not going away anytime soon.

I really think Tim Perdue, God rest his soul, would've been a better leader then Joel Spolsky for a programming community. But one cannot choose when he will leave unvoluntarily ....

sneakyimp

I agree that SO sucks in that way. I asked what I thought was a reasonable question and it got voted down with no explanation. A sincere question, asked out of a genuine thirst for knowledge getting voted down seems counterproductive to me. I really like this forum here because one can ask genuine questions and get genuine answers and potent insights from friendly peers with pretty extensive experience. That said, our scope is somewhat limited. I'm about to embark on some Python stuff and don't feel like I can ask it here.

SO's "power," as dalecosp put it, comes from their tremendous search engine ranking I think. Pose almost any programming question to google and you'll see numerous SO links right at the top of the answers. I do think SO is rather smartly constructed in that respect. Their goal/algorithm/process is to find THE answer to a question and to push that forward as THE answer. If you vote the others down and cut them away, what you get is a leaner forum, where the "best" answer is clearly indicated. The problem with that is that the "best" answer might not actually be the best answer. And the little blurb you see there with its green check-mark might not be represent the best way for any one individual to come to grips with the subject at hand. It reminds me of college where I was a pretty poor student. I find it hard to learn from most static documentation. I do a lot better when I can ask questions. I recently posed a question about git and saw someone else's topic asking the same question -- its answer did nothing to answer my question. Needless to say, I voted the question and the answer down. :evilgrin:

cluelessPHP

I was talking to some guys in my class as it seems most of them dislike SO as well, the conclusion we came to was it's all about their ego in as much as to say "look at me look how great I am", they seem to avoid going SO as well

sneakyimp

I posted a question on SO and it got voted down as being "off topic" and I was encouraged to post it on ServerFault (connected to SO somehow). The "answers" that were given were to some abstruse document with no further commentary. I do think the links they provided will be helpful once I get my head around what they are telling me. I wonder in this case if there might be some culture clash. Sysadmins and software devs have slightly different cultures. A sysadmin typically has too many machines and not enough time and they shoot for the quickest solution to keep the system running.
https://xkcd.com/705/

Weedpacket

sneakyimp wrote:
ServerFault (connected to SO somehow)

The Stack Exchange group includes Server Fault. If I remember my history correctly (I probably don't), Server Fault was the first and it was just called Stack Exchange. When it became 90% crap, the crap was split off into its own site - Stack Overflow - to keep Stack Exchange itself useful. It was renamed to Server Fault when all the other spinoffs started being created under the SE banner.