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?
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.
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
Very rarely, but if it’s a specific enough question that I’ve actually researched before I usually get a good response.
Sometime between 2013 and 2018. Had to answer it myself. It got at least a couple dozen upvotes and a lot of people finding it useful and asking follow up questions.
It’s deleted now. To be fair it was probably really outdated. But my account seems to be completely gone now. Maybe it got hacked. I haven’t been there in a long time.
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 asked one. Answered my first one recently.
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 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
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
Last time I wrote a question - probably a couple of months ago. Last time I posted a question … aaaaages ago.
By the time I get sufficiently frustrated to contemplate asking a question, I find the clarity that comes from stopping and trying to clearly lay out a question usually results in my figuring it out just before I hit post.
A bunch of people that either failed to understand the value of the moderation system or are just crybabies about being expected to follow the rules answering here.
It is easy to use and not nearly as toxic as most of the internet will claim. Research your question, ask clearly, include the code you attempted for a minimal reproduction, and include debugging details. If you don’t do those things, you are the problem, not the people closing your questions.
I use it often per month.
It has been one or two years. I deleted my accounts since then and don’t look anything there anymore (if I can) considering things are quite outdated now.
I find I ask less questions now because I’m a better programmer and just visit the site less in general. I used to ask a lot. I actually don’t find that many duplicates though, usually when I have a question there isn’t already an answer… usually because when I have a question I’m doing something insane, I find I do that a lot lol.
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.
It must have been over 5 years ago. It turned me off. The culture there was so painful. People would refuse to answer a question just because they deemed the premise of your question unacceptable. Or even recommend you change your whole project’s language.
It was like that both in questions and in chat. I never tried again.
