StackOverflow is a monster Q&A machine. If you have a programming question, StackOverflow is probably the best place to ask – you have a better chance to get an answer on SO than anywhere else.
The paradox is that SO is not interested in users getting answers to their questions. Usually Q&A sites want their questioners to be happy, but not SO. SO wants great questions and great answers. Hence the reputation system and an army of Nazi retards moderating everything they can see.
If a question is considered poor by the user with moderating privileges, it will be downvoted, closed and finally deleted. But that is not all – SO has an automatic ban system. Users providing questions & answers that received low marks can be banned by robots.
One of the first questions I answered on SO more that 2 years ago was:
Here is a task:
“3 brothers have to transfer 9 boxes from one place to another.
These boxes weigh 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14 kilos.
Every brother takes 3 boxes.
So, how to make a program that would count the most optimal way to take boxes?
The difference between one brother’s carrying boxes weight and other’s has to be as small as it can be.”
Can you just give me an idea or write a code with any programming language you want ( php or pascal if possible? ).
Thanks.
I thought the question was interesting and after spending some time found a solution based on checking all permutations of 9 weight numbers, it appeared to be blazingly fast. I posted an answer, and my answer was accepted by the questioner.
Sure that was not a great question. Also the question was not properly tagged – with ‘php’ and ‘pascal’. I guess ‘php’ tag was a mistake; the questioner got a whole army of moderating idiots attacking his question.
The question received 17 downvotes. The question got the comment `Smells like homework to me` and the comment got 14 upvotes; the presumption of innocence does not work on SO, and a guy with the editing privileges tagged the question as ‘homework’. Later on it was closed by the moderator called Bill the Lizard with the following resolution:
It’s difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.
Strange resolution, isn’t it? The question was answered…
The strange guy Bill the Lizard did not stop after closing the question. More than 1.5 year (!) after the question was answered he returned to it and deleted both the question and my answer (my answer probably because it contradicted his resolution).
If you think your post was not well accepted on SO, just think of the whole picture.
[Updated]
I was saying in this post “If you have a programming question, StackOverflow is probably the best place to ask”. It was when SO started some years ago; not now.
Today your chances to get a useful answer to your question on SO are close to zero. Instead you get a lot of comments arguing for example that your question does not fit SO or wrongly worded or else and nothing useful.
SO today is yet another trolls&noobs zoo.
The Programming Works 
Agree 100%. How did Joel allow his brilliant site to be taken over by the Q&A police? Far too many questions with sensible answers are tagged with that inane comment (“It’s difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.”) And always interesting to see people hiding behind pseudonyms (Bill the Lizard. WTF?)
Agreed million percent. I asked a question like the author and mentioned specifically “If I post the question in wrong forum please let me know. I will take off it immediately”. Then a GREAT COMPUTER GURU call Len#$@^&& comment and edit my question (Took off “If I post the question in wrong forum please let me know. I will take off it immediately”. saying fluff the question). Then he down voted me after that I tried to ask a different question. The system did not allow me to log in. Thank you very much Len$^$$@$$%&&&
Going to a single site for: [All-things-programming] is like going to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle for all of your programming needs.
Agree! I search and search and search…. search results are SO and SO and SO…. I read and sift and read and sift through the questions and BS answers described above… Pardon my French, but “Fuck” SO just let people answer the dang questions! Your F’n up the search results with all the BS, waisted “STFW” answers that you provide! LMAO (ok, finished.. thanks) 🙂
I TOO HAD A SIMILAR BAN PUT ON ME .IN ORDER TO REMOVE THE BAN CREATE ANOTHER ACCOUNT WITH 15 REPUTATION THEN SIMPLY VOTE UP ANSWERS AND QUESTIONS POSTED BY YOUR BANNED ACCOUNT .SIMPLE AS THAT
100% lol. People nubs just delete instantly. Especially Dill the Wizard, like ?! he’s just delete moderator because everything needs to be moderated and he’s like “let’s delete stuff” so like “let’s not let good answers on the site” lol.
How can you be sure that it was the same guy? Stackoverflow community is not like a small room like you expect so maybe you need to leave those childish habits of yours. Yes I mean grow up.
I Hate those people you ask a question..and they edit it next what you know is they down vote you 😦 for no reason at all .
How do you know that the one who edited the question is the same who downvoted?
There are several people reading your question, and you can’t be sure gave the downvote. Of course there is a possibility but you can’t be sure.
95% of the newbie users does not take the time to read the FAQ. I have read it and I also asked a lot of questions and I received none of the negative effects you have described here. I think that you are over reacting to a corner case. Of course you can have your opinion but don’t expect anyone to consider you a competent anyone if you call SO a “trolls&noobs zoo” en masse. The terminology you use suggests that you are one of those adolescent males who are perfectly described by ESR in his essay. I feel sorry for you.
I find it very Ironic that you make this troll post while stating that SO is the perfect place for your questions
He isn’t… If you don’t ask a question in iron clad terms, you will be downvoted. I had a question today which was basically “I don’t know how to set the Z-Order of elements in WPF” and I couldn’t remember the term Zorder so I worded it in a much vaguer sense than that.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25072831/moving-image-to-background
And because my question was vague, I got 3 downvotes from idiots who don’t know WPF and couldn’t comprehend why I would be having a problem. Few minutes later though, a smart person gave an answer that was absolutely obvious given the question. It’s just that I was learning the language.
Hello Bill ‘The Lizard’.
One of the many sad things about the internet is that it gives people like you carte blanche to troll on any site you like.
You are obviously a SO fan-boy but why comment on here trolling??? Who is adolescent again?
The article does not describe a “corner” case, it describes something that many people (myself included) go through with that horrible site. Every single time i follow a link from a search engine onto SO i am faced with the same BS about a question not firtting this criteria or that criteria and the ego games on that site…..whew!!!. You angling to be a mod on SO then????
@DardD : that’s funny : the question you asked was closed, then reopened and now have 12 upvotes… It appears that moderation process on SO is not that bad. 🙂
No, this post is a perfect explanation of SO. The only place on earth where you need a doctorate in English to post a question.
Then once you get your doctorate and post a highly specific, organized question with Headings, subheadings, and a nice bullet point summary clearly stating your question, you get downvoted for your question not being “clearly asked”
@nifty62, what a lame comment. Do you know SO doesn’t pay people for responding to such badly-formatted questions?
I don’t know about your case but community will generally format typos and formatting for you, and downvote if your question doesn’t fit SO criteria, which you can obviously find in the help section. Funny that you feel it’s okay to use a service while not agreeing the regulations which come with it.
you sir don’t have a life other than the internet? you don’t get laid don’t you?
I want to upvote this answer.
@dan hey dan the shitty man? Can you stop throwing potty all over the place…so we can just talk some sense?
It’s not a corner case. I’ve had two really bad experiences on SO in the past week. I read the FAQs (which are wooly at best in describing a ‘good’ question). I followed the rules to the best of my ability. I even said at the bottom of the question that I was a newbie on SO, I asked that if the question was not of good enough quality then please give me feedback so I can improve my questions in future. Instead it got a barrage of downvotes. Wow… great feedback. I come out thinking people on SO are wankers.
I feel sorry for you, though. You are really sad and pathetic, and you SO idiots should stop treating people like shit, it might just bite you in the ass some day, in a much more severe way that you being easily made and thrashed for your idiocy on a random message board. I really hope SO goes bankrupt at this point, because my god a pos site it has turned into.
Bullsh*te. I think 90% of people know to read the FAQs, and search for the answer prior to asking a question. As jw says ‘ you search on Google and your answers are allegedly addressed on SO’ — so you go, even though you hate that place, and 9x out of 10 you just end up seeing some other poor sucker get their balls handed to them for not doing something in the manner they dictate. These guys (and gals?) are just uptight, tech dweebs who have NO CLUE how to interact in a professional, let alone pleasant manner or social situation. They are the ones in the basements, with their headphones on – trying like H3ll to avoid actual, living humans. And For What Its Worth – sounds like FWIW is an SO troll and a Real SO Lover.
Today on CNN news …..
“95% of the newbie users does not take the time to read the FAQ. “
You read like an adolescent male also. Where did you pull 95% from? Corner case? Although I know what a “corner case” is, you misuse this phrase in the context of the read. And please show me your research on the 95%. For you stating, “I feel sorry for you”, really means that you are holding back your true feelings. By the way, “terminology” is an incorrect usage of the word in this context also. The correct word is, “noun”. You meet the very criteria for the definition of troll. I don’t feel sorry for you. I avoid people like you.
You seem very concerned with figures and grammar. How about spanking those who assert that it’s useless to use correct grammar or to capitalize where needed?
Just read the thread here, SO haters have gone bonkers – https://sergworks.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/why-stackoverflow-sucks/#comment-25645
Note: I’m talking about comments posted under a question/answer where the poster is politely asked to take grammar and capitalization into consideration. Key word: politely.
Hi Nephlim…. it does not matter if you read or don’t read the FAQ… in more important things in life people don’t read the small writing or FAQ… they just click yes and get on with their search for what they are looking for or need. I am sure you are an apple user which mean you clicked yes to things you did not read…
SO for you to excuse bad stake overflow behaviors because alot of the mods there feel like the answer is much less important than the appearance kinda makes you seem like you are trolling…
THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THEY WAY PEOPLE BEHAVE ON STACKOVERFLOW.
you say people are “adolescent males” which means that males with vaginas don’t use SO…
man… you are full or yourself… and search the interment to find this site so that you can spew nonsense…
But you know what… and maybe you can take this back to your High and mighty hive mind over at SO… people here will not ban you for not being perfect.
no you are wrong, I have questions for more than two years and it had answers and suddenly because amd asking currently new questions, some one check the question which is one year old and made down vote. I checked all the rules and when I say I didnt find tutorial that helps me create such graph doesnt mean that please give me a tutorial or I dont want to do my homework.
Even the guy who answered the question one year ago he is defending me and I dont even know him saying that he is not asking for tutorial and his question is not a spam and he did effort to ask that question.
At the end moderator asked me to change the world tutorial and I changed to information and now it is accepted.
You is a waste of space with a small brain taking a lot of pride on SO badges.
Why would i read the FAQ or Privacy Policy when they change more often than your diaper?
As a newbie posting my first question, I deeply perused every part of the FAQ about two times (because I was scared to post something due to the responses I’d seen to others’ posts). Sure enough, my questions received many of the “negative effects” described here, until I got a strong grasp of what is accepted on SO. The violent moderation of SO is indeed a very real thing. If you’ve genuinely asked a lot of questions and haven’t received ANY of the negative effects from them, then kudos to you, you’re very lucky. For the rest of us, however, SO is a great site to get programming information from. It’s a hellishly terrible site to ask for help that is specific to you in almost any way. (Also, I too picked up on that attitude in the article (i.e. the trolls&noobs zoo), and I personally think that that may be some exaggeration or anger from the writer. The article focuses on the question the writer answered, and its story, however, which clearly shows the harsh moderation on SO. Frankly, I don’t think the competence of the writer matters.)
There is no excuse for the way SOME of those people on StackOverflow treat others, noobies or not. There are a FEW nice people who have always realized that the others are ridiculously rude. FWIW, SO has a new “policy” of being nicer to people. Can you imagine? They had to do a complete overhaul of their MANNERS… so that people would continue to use their site. Someone woke up. I still won’t go there.
You’ll still receive many downvotes and sarcastic comments even though you read the stupid FAQ.
Agreed with you. I got expelled from the site, while asking proper questions and getting proper answers. I got down votes for spelling I guess, when English is not my language. Very annoying.
If you post in the language you are comfortable with, someone else can convert it for you
The annoying thing is people downvoting when you post brilliant questions.
Do not waste your brilliance on a Q&A site. It is equivocal to asking for validation from a stranger.
Bob Rioux (Bob R) I just went through a pissing contest with two morons at stack overflow. I have been scheduling leagues and sports for over 35 years. The first 15 years it was all done by hand. In the mid 1980’s a friend, who just happened to be a computer programmer, and I started to write a “league scheduling” software program. It took us 3 years to get this program to the point where I could schedule 248 teams in 17 divisions for 33 weeks in less than 2 hours. Prior to that it took me 8 – 10 days to create the schedules by hand. What was significant then and still today is no one else has figured out the permutation & combination issues to create proper, balanced round robin schedules providing equal distribution of; all teams, home & away status, and time slot placement. I was contacted about a year ago by Stackoverflow and asked if I would submit info about our schedules and how we create them. I said sure because I know it would help those that like to delve into calculating team pair matrix’s. The problem is most programmers and math enthusiasts are real good at what they do, but they lack the background of years of manually creating league schedules by hand. I spent many hours over a 6 month period putting together 4 presentations and published them over the past 3 months. In the past week I have been attacked by the NAZI police about putting my name Bob R on the bottom of two of the presentations. I feel like I’m being attacked by left wing socialists that have nothing better to do than have word fights with contibutors over a few words, or 4 letters (Bob R). Their demeanor was insulting. I wrote back and told them what I thought of their manor of treating contributors and said don’t worry, I’ll fix the problem by removing all 4 of my posts immediately. Which I did. They are nothing more than a pack of morons trying to micromanage insignificant words. They need to get a real job working for the government as left wing socialist democrats.
Bob R
UPDATE…..I don’t know if I am violating protocol, but I just received my 4 day suspension notice from ChrisF at stackoverflow. He said after 4 days he will reach out to try to resolve this matter… and that I can get my reputation restored. I sent him the following message:
ChrisF
There is no need for a timed 4 day suspension. Just make it permanent. You people must be crazy to do what you are doing. You’re like NAZI word police and I’ll have nothing more to do with Stackoverflow. I was contacted about a year ago by someone from your organization and asked if I would submit information about creating league schedules.
I spent many hours over several weeks writing 4 documents I thought would help others. Look where we are now. A pissing contest about absolutely nothing. I don’t have the time or desire to deal with your organization. After 35 years of experience creating all kinds of sports league schedules, and creating a one-of-a-kind league scheduling program, I have nothing more for you.
Bob R
PS I find it interesting you ended your note to me above with;
Regards,
ChrisF
Stack Overflow moderator
Lack of respect for real world knowledge and experience has reached insane proportions on SO. You did the right thing.
Do not waste your brilliance on a Q&A site.
Maybe you’re calling people crap like left wing socialist democrats is your problem and gets you banned. Sounds to me like you’re the angry right-winger?
RA: that’s stupid. political bias has nothing to do with the overall message. he put in diligent hours of his own personal time at their request to have then nitpick tiny things. I’d say wasting his personal time on professional level items for free deserves a bit of resentment.
Agreed million percent times infinite. Any suggestion for a better place to ask dev questions?
See https://sergworks.wordpress.com/2012/09/26/why-stackoverflow-sucks/#comment-24891
CodeProject http://www.codeproject.com/A
codeRanch, codeProject, dreamincode…..
Agreed, Ego speech police. I rarely find complete answers on stack overflow and the site is so full of EGO and condescension it is hard to find sincere solutions much less people that actually see the problem. One time I posted a newbie question clearly stating that fact and stating the info I knew and that I just needed a start to find the solution. Someone so called ‘SMART’ edited the question and took some info out then another person thumbs me down because that SAME info was not there!! I put the info back then in the comments lambasted the idiots that did it. I did get the answer/start I needed from someone else and I did solve the problem but there was a lot of hatred and total nonsense on that question. Browsing SO I see that I was not alone in my frustration as others have similar experiences. I rarely ever go there or ask a question there. If you can get past the GEEK EGO KNOW IT ALL WALL you MIGHT get an answer. Otherwise only go there if you are a perfect perfectionist or a sadist.
This site SO is everything I hate about the IT industry in general. Seems everyone there thinks they are the world’s best programmers and are in a mission to prove it.
Yep. I have managed to not get banned yet, but after several months I still only have 11 reputation – mostly because a**es go around searching to downvote something for anything they can find. I’ve been downvoted because my code “sucked”. When I asked “how does it suck when it works, it’s secure, it’s stable, and it works in all browsers correctly (I’m a web developer)?” and pretty much got told that it’s not the way this person (and others like him) would do it. I’ve tried to answer beginners questions (we were all beginners once), but I’ve given up because they normally get deleted within 6 hours of posting. One time I had a newbie trying to change the bullet style and have the list on a ul centering text instead of aligning with the bullet. He had tried to do it, had posted his code, and was stuck. It was an easy fix. Took me 2 minutes to type up his answer for him. It got deleted (the question). Apparently it was not worthy for the hallowed digital space that is SO – because, you know, only questions that are complicated enough as to be asked by at least professional developers can be asked. But, of course, if your question/answer is TOO detailed, you can get downvoted for that too. Basically, they allow mods to judge on subjective impressions on a continuum where either extreme is frowned upon. Since it’s subjective and there is no safe extreme, there is always a justifiable reason to downvote. On the other hand, if you’ve been there for years, even if your question/answer IS horrible, no one touches you. SO is nothing more than a developer’s clique now. Don’t get me wrong, I still use them, much the way I used snobby classmates in college. If your determination to show your superiority makes my work easier, by all means be a pompous a** and I’ll just benefit from your knowledge while laughing at your vanity.
“Took me 2 minutes to type up his answer for him. It got deleted (the question)”
Some idiots remove their own questions. I’ve witnessed it, having answered a few of them myself. Can’t blame mods for it, can you?
SO rewards moderation more than question or answers (gives more reputation per effort spent), thats the result.
I agree as well. SO has become full of people who want to beat each other up and the “Q&A police” have been removing every question that might attract those mean people. The only way around it is to thoroughly read the good question section, think on what wording your answer has, and make sure your answer is specific
Also, make sure you do your research. Why get your account banned/suspended for a question already asked? check other websites (w3schools, oracle, java2s, make your own list) and only post if you are 10000000000000000% stuck.
And maybe find a different Q&A site when your account is banned…
Agree; StackOverflow has become worthless as far as trying to get NEW answers…. if you’re looking for old issues then you’re likely to find the answer there.
But now they’re moderators are complete idiots
Very true. There are some insane people. There main task in life is diccourage others.
great example with my question here:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/352447/how-is-upvoting-popular-questions-fair
note who got 30 upvotes with an answer – you guessed it right – Bill the Lizard
I tried:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51115871/this-site-sucks
Hey Richard, I couldn’t agree with you more. I asked one question last time with careful thoughts and I think there’s some typo in my question(I wrote ‘two dimensional’ to two ‘dimentional’ and got two downvotes there and my question was closed, while a nice guy answered my question. I think other guys there were jerks.
Agree. SO sucks, but the concept is fine… Some of the other sites in the SE network are OK.
SO moderators ego trip philosophy could easily be resumed to:
“We have no idea of what you’re talking about and even if we knew it still wouldn’t be true!” So the bottom line is avoid wasting your time arguing with them. It’s not worth it. I found there were a lot of other ways to get accurate information, starting by adding a minus (-) sign in front of StackOverflow when doing Google search. This saves me a lot of time.
Good tip! Thanks
Yeah, there are some really good StackExchange sites.
Geeks immediately turn into Nazis when they see WRONG TAGS 🙂
For Delphi programmers, SO is a better knowledge base and has a better reactivity than the official Embarcadero forums. I use to spend a lot of time answering in it, and I’ve learned a lot from other’s questions and answers.
SO is not perfect, moderation can be to blame sometimes, but it is
I totally agree.
I did a similar observation earlier this year in the PS on this post: http://wiert.me/2012/06/26/repeating-characters-into-strings-in-c-and-delphi-via-net-best-way-to-repeat-a-character-in-c-stack-overflow
<>
I know that highly active sites need forms of moderation, but SO has gone way to far in this.
Crap, double pairs of less than and greater than will kill parts of a comment.
Here is what the quote should have been:
Oh BTW: I have reduced my StackOverflow presence. It looks like the success of StackOverflow made them instantiate many moderators. A lot of those moderators work under the mantra “we follow the rules strictly, and favour punishment over encouragement” (some even talk about “changing heritage“). That’s a real pity, as I see a lot of StackOverflow users get scared by the very active downvoting, question/answer closing and even deletion of material that is in essence valuable, if it were edited up a bit. Deleting content is always bad, as it increases the link rot that StackOverflow are trying to prevent in questions/answers as per their FAQ. Links are the foundation of the web.
Alas, devoting real attention to the quality of StackOverflow requires putting real energy in it, which for some of the moderators seems to be too much to ask.
I agree! I asked about 20 good questions and answered about 100 questions successfully with no problems and only ever had about 10 downvotes and no closed questions or deleted questions or answers, then I post one question that I thought was fine and was answered by many people who thought it was fine and ONE mod got me banned, blocked, and more. The list of rants goes on and on, but what you said pretty much sums it up…
Agreed with you. It seems stackoverflow is really meant for moderators and they are more focused to improve there site rather then helping people.
Yes, I always feel in posting on SO that I must be on my knees, in a supplicant posture, cap in hand, avoiding directly looking at the great and good, grateful for only mild admonishment. That said, if you are deemed worthy of constructive replies the quality is usually very good. Just remember to thank the commenter profusely!
“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”
― William Gibson
Indeed … Most arguments given to back up SO moderators reasons of being are highly debatable and unfounded. I mean come on, this is not moderation.
“Never argue
with an idiot, they’ll only drag you down to their level then beat you by experience”
– Mark Twain
Brian,
I feel the exact same way. I want to preface all of my questions with:
“Oh gracious lords of the internet, if you would be so kind as to humbly accept my apologies for polluting your site with my ignorance… ”
At least I would if my account weren’t suspended for 7 days.
lol – Please do this, it would be worth the suspension.
You know, the funny thing is that it is not even allowed to be thankful. I remember once seeing a “signpost” reading something like “Please do not include Thank You in your post”.
Correct – there are official guidelines against even saying “Hi”. Then Jeff Atwood wrote code to automatically remove any greetings from the beginning of questions. “Thanks” at the end are also removed.
Upvoting is the way of being thankful. It is annoying to have 12 “thank you” comments, it creates noise, are useless and eventually can hide important information contained in other comments.
I think the Nazi police do this in the hopes that it transfers to the bar. In other words – they can approach girls without saying hi, get their rocks off (probably in two minutes of business time) and can leave swiftly without saying thanks.
On-topic: I also notice that they willfully leave posts ON the site that contain relevant topics for advertisers (although they are so against questions like ‘what is the best tool for’), because they obviously want people to pay to have their ad posted above these posts and these are the posts that bring in the money traffic….
Saying that thank you posts are annoying is a very weird geek thing to say. Normal people don’t just put their humanity away.
Jeff Atwood might be very smart about technical stuff, but he’s a dork when it comes to social graces. Anyone who thinks people should be forced to have lunch together is just not very in tune with how people work.
That is correct, they do not allow thanking someone who has helped. Fricken Anti-Social Losers.
Similar issue exists in portions of wikipedia, and I suppose in any large-enough self-moderated communities.
I personally would like to see rules that moderators have to use their real names, and be validated (in some way or another) as being who they claim they are. Anonymous moderating persona always tend to behave “weirdly”, while moderators that use their real names and credentials don’t IME (or don’t anywhere near as much).
Facebook & other similar communities should be good indications that real names DON’T improve the quality. It’s also impossible to find impartial human moderators.
There are two ways to solve this problem and neither of them is without their own problems:
1) clearer rules (read: more rules), but this for example will make moderating more complex.
2) less rules (the example question & answer were deleted because of some rule), but this for example will lead to more questions bloat.
> but this for example will lead to more questions bloat.
Is question bloat really a problem? There is a voting system, and there are modern search engines. Good question will bubble up one way or another.
And “less good” questions may sometimes be a matter of perception (as in Serg’s or Jeroen’s examples).
I do not think that using real names can change the situation. I had experiance with ruth watters in physicsforums. He had real name but no competence in the basic calculus and you see in the proof http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=277816 his ignorance served as a ligitimate ground to attack participants. I have got to understand that his only purpose there was to be a good citizen: to promote American fascism/imperialism.
Bill of piece Lizard is of the same filthy kind. He bans you for for the false reasons. Twisting and looking for false reasons is a sign of being wrong.
About the problem you submited:
It is very interesting. I think it is a kind of integer linear programming problem.
Your solution is effective but it is brute force. It works fast for few boxes and brothers. Try to increase the numbers.
your question could be rewritten in the following way:
Y = [ sum (ai*Ai), sum (ai*Bi), sum(ai*Ci))], i = 1..9 where
ai is the weigh of the i box,
Ai = 1 if the first brother take the i box, 0 otherwise,
Bi = 1 if the second brother take the i box, 0 otherwise,
Ci = 1 if the third brother take the i box, 0 otherwise,
Y is a vector and it’s the target function.
The solution is Y0 = min(Y), varing the variables A, B, C ( they are vectors, A = [A1…A9] ).
Bill the Lizard can you solve this? 🙂
That f**cking retard wouldn’t know his foot from his hand, let alone do what you’ve asked.
Stackoverflow will turn into a HR sourcing portal, I think it was never something different. It’s better than other social forums where recruiters post a question and wait for a result. In general compare Stack Overflow to a ‘Rating Agency’… When I remember the specialist forums on linkedin on a specific SAP module, I found people there obviously in consulting positions at customers sites having no idea what they do, they asked for whole designs and not questions about exceptional situations only a few people run into once or twice in their life time … I would not waste my time neither on linkedin nor on Stackoverflow.
Amen on LinkedIn and I think I know which SAP consultants you’re talking about…. The ones every consulting agency loves, because they can charge for them and they quietly sit in their office trying not to notify anyone of their presence. Keep the meter running!
That moderator should have deleted both the question/answer for raising his action stats.
I believe they don’t really care if you actually want to help someone.
I was thinking of staying away of StackOverflow but sometimes they ask nice questions (only looking at delphi section), maybe I will stay away and return when I’ll be an old useless retard who thinks I know everything and have nothing else to do in my life (just like elders playing games in facebook) than being a Nazi moderator there. Sometimes I see a nice question, make an answer, try to post it and the question is gone
than = and
You can always ask your question on Experts Exchange or Yahoo Answers….. 😉
Sometimes the moderation, which is community moderation remember, can be a little over zealous. But plenty of time moderation is applied well. Have a little forgiveness.
I really wish a couple of the generic “shoot first don’t ask” style moderators kept the moderation to the topic experts at hand. Most topics have enough experts (with enough reputation) to handle the moderation.
No thanks. Don’t need your kind.
I think the opposite. Stack Overflow needs far more moderation to get rid of too many useless questions. In the beginning it was a great site, now it’s full of newbies asking questions they could solve themselves using the old RTFM or performing a simple search. But most became so lazy they ask and wait for someone else to find them the answer (see for example this today one: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12459128/how-can-i-read-and-write-data-from-an-xml-file-using-delphi).
Your questiond did look like the search for a homework solution indeed, the problem with “homeworks” is they are usually too localized to be of general interest (but too many questions on SO are as well). The “reason” to close it was wrong, there are better “reasons” available for such kind of questions.
Anyway the “homework” tag has been deprecated (http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/147100/the-homework-tag-is-now-officially-deprecated) 🙂
Kent,
Or maybe they should start a super-duper Stack Overflow, just for you and your illustrious peers. And you can go there!
It seems to me that it’s the other way around.
You don’t have to answer a question that’s been asked before. You can choose not to open it or post a reply that redirects to a previous question. The fact is stack overflow is full of rude people, I agree with the posted below that maybe you can create a super stack overflow where no duplicate or similar questions are ever asked and life is perfect.
So, if you created a second SSO (Super Stack Overflow) then we would have two places where if a question never asked before would get canned immediately once they realize you are not part of the inner circle. And, consequently, this thread would evolve into: Why Super Stack Overflow Sucks.
This is just wrong headed. “Too localized” would mean that people shouldn’t bother to look for specialized knowledge or situations that they can’t crack.
SO always had homework questions here and there, especially around exam seasons. What I find absent these days while looking through a wasteland of questions with negative scores, questions with positive scores and activity but dupe-hammered or closed for some other asinine reason, is a increasing lack of professionals asking questions. And it should be somewhat obvious why when the number of self-proclaimed sheriffs running around has reached whole new levels.
Contrary to what Kent Morwath says, I believe SO should allow “stupid questions” from “newbies”, sometimes people start learning to program on their own, having no clue as to where to start, they are forced to ask “stupid questions”.
Let’s not get into the documentation of Delphi after D7(and most likely other languages, some programming terms could be hard to grasp also), sure, they can google, but if one asks a simple question and it is answered, then any future question can be marked as “answered” and linked to the first similar question already answered.
Programming should be for everyone interested, anyone else ever wondered why the strange names i.e. “user100212312” exists? well, I’m pretty sure that a fair chunk of those people are developers that are hardcore in other languages but “newbies” in the one they ask, it’s a pity they hide their real names… but it is what it is.
Most of those “newbies” don’t try to search in SO as well (and Google would return SO links as well) and make questions they could answer themselves with a little effort. But they don’t, they just ask and wait for someone to solve their problems – hey, why use the brain? The fingers are easier! Many of them (and not newbies only) will also accept the “wrong” answer because it is “easier” than the “correct” one. This way more newbies will thing the “wrong” answer is the way to go. Very useful…
It’s a common pattern, some site starts with a good idea and early users feed it with good contents, then lazy people discover it and turn it into a mess of useless contents. It happened in newsgroups, it happened in forums, it happened in SO.
I asked SO to delete my account, and that’s another reason some user are identified by userXXXXXXXX names – your answer stays even when your account is gone.
“your answer stays even when your account is gone” – another interesting SO feature. Users can edit questions of others, but sometimes they cannot edit or delete their own question – because a moderating nazi considered editing as vandalizing, and a moderator locked the question.
You don’t help them by just closing/deleting/etc. the question, people will always have something new to learn, if one cannot accept that, it doesn’t mean that you deny others the right to learn just because they are at the beginning.
Please note that not everyone is savvy in searching for answers, be it on google, SO or other services and applications.
On SO’s about page it’s written:
“We don’t run Stack Overflow. You do. Stack Overflow is collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow programmers.[snip]”
I can’t help run SO if I’m not “helped” in integrating…
But StackOverflow is not a forum. It should be a repository of (good) questions and answers. If you fill it with a lot of “rubbish”, it becomes useless quickly. Also report StackOverflow rules fully, there also “Have you thoroughly searched for an answer before asking your question? “. Too many don’t. If they don’t know how to search, they will never become good developers. One of the basic skill is how to find information about your issues, and only if you can’t really find any – ask. Too many don’t, not the minimal effort, it’s just so easy asking someone else to search for you… and that’s wrong, very wrong.
Well, some google and go through a few pages and don’t find their answer or maybe their answer is slightly different and they just need a push in the right direction. Some even post a question and work hard on their own to solve it while waiting for an answer. The fact is the internet is not perfect, and honestly people that lack patience or have to read questions and downvote them or leave rude responses should accept the fact that the site will become garbage that is known for its pretentious users.
Kent Morwath, you are wrong! Yesterday I posted question related to OpenCV/C++ problem. It was related to code I found in a book written by University professor. And there was some error which rendered code non-compilable. In a book written by University professor, with PhD and great experience in a field on OpenCV. So, I sent him e-mail. I sent and email to publisher. I asked on OpenCV forum as well. I googled. Then, I asked on StackOverflow. Within 30 minutes I was downvoted 4 times. Then I snapped. I updated my question and I wrote what was on my mind in a harsh way. Something like “What do you want from me? Should I been smarter than the guy who wrote a book on this subject and holds PhD?. Should I been ashamed that I ask question?”. Also, I posted a link to a question that I just answered to some other poster just to show that I am not lazy. Then, one person helped me with problem. Then another. Then they even started to argue in between them what is right answer. Then (it lasted for several hours), I received response from OpenCV forum where it was treated like a normal question. They pointed to me that since recent versions of OpenCV there is a bug which prevents conversion of one type of vector into other type of vector. They hope it will be resolved soon. If the bug was older, probably it would show in google search. So the question was not superfluous, but actually required very good knowledge of OpenCV framework, especially the last updates. When I came back to Stack Overflow to say what I just found out, downvotes on my question disappeared, and after whole situation, my reputation even increased a little bit. So, what is a point? Stack Overflow become a place with too many “trigger happy” persons, who even without REALLY reading or UNDERSTANDING questions, downvote it. Just like it is a kind of a video game “Let’s shoot them”. And Kent, one more thing: I am 44 years old. Being there when Apple IIe was considered a great machine. Being there when Java and C# still didn’t exist. Being there when internet started. Being there when some of the Content Management Systems and Forums were created and even took active role into creating some of them. And after all of that, on some online community I have been bashed probably by some frustrated kids? Even if I asked obvious question, maybe it happen after coding for 10+ hours when tiredness takes it’s price. Is that a reason to receive numerous downvotes? But the thing I am sick and disgusted the most are people like you – you just assume that other people are lazy and that they want other people to solve their problems. To be honest I am GLAD that you deleted your account on SO, because with your attitude you don’t deserve to be there at first place.
I wa banned from asking because some jerky mod kept using lousy reasons to close my qustions. Then about a week ago, i got locked out, so i told them i want to get back in and the jerks said they dont have time for one “meaningless persons accout”! The bitches actually wrote that!
If you want a site that allows any Question just drop by the cesspools called Yahoo Answers. There’s a reason SO and the other SE sites are useful, because they don’t allow crap. Poor questions attract poor answers. There’s thousands of people who have been rubbed the wrong way when they got called out for their laziness, but there are millions who have benefited from the quality questions and quality answers which were promoted by the system.
Nope, I don’t agree.
I asked this question on SO:
http://www.coderanch.com/t/245074/java-programmer-SCJP/certification/Abstract-Classes-extending-concrete-classes
The response was getting banned from SO when my account was disabled.
And, I was not being lazy. I just didn’t find the response above before posting on SO.
But, the good side is I don’t bother w/ SO any longer because better sources exist.
And, BTW: SO stills sucks not because of what they are trying to do but because of the narcissists that control the site.
It is basically a pyramid scheme of egos.
The bottom feeders pumping up the egos of the ones above them.
I accept all that down voting on poor answers and questions but sometimes even a good question gets banned because it is overtly broad . How can a broad question be of poor quality? And what is more depressing is that you move forward towards an automatic ban which is handled by some guys who are just a human being like us and can do this thing just out of immaturity.
Really millions? Can you prove that? Why do people like you and Kent assume that people are being lazy because they post a question for which the answer might be obvious to you and Kent. Rude moderators only cement the stereotypical idea of geeks by most non-technical people (that’s probably 98% of the planet) as arrogant, self-appreciating nerds with no social skills (social skills= how to be polite and talk like a real human). In this day and age of rushed, unrealistic deadlines, newbies are trying to get to the point, i.e. the answer as soon as possible. What’s wrong with simply asking? That was a rhetorical question. The answer is there is nothing wrong to ask.
As for doing “research”, I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been looking for some information in a topic and I find tons of blogs and posts that appear to be helpful but are the SAME EXACT RESPONSE (word for word) that someone copied from somewhere else and then posted as “their” answer or opinion. I say “their” because not once do any of them ever say ” well here’s how Microsoft suggests doing this” in other words giving credit to the original source. Personally, I find them (a) laughable (b) annoying because they don’t even have the class to give credit. To make matters worse often there is another solution that is a better fit for what you want so you have wade through dozens of these posts to find what you are looking for. So in my opinion I don’t see anything wrong with someone asking for help, no matter how trivial the question. The folks at SO clearly do. Perhaps they weren’t listening to their teachers growing up “there’s no such thing as a dumb question”
Or just start Stuck Undertow for newbies. Since they have such derision for them. Hmmm — I bet at some point in the beginning of those ‘illustrious’ careers they needed help from someone too.
Very good point. When a newbie answers a question, another newbie of yesterday gets a chance to answer it. When she speaks up, the assumptions she had been making come to fore. Somebody then points out how the assumptions are wrong. This helps everybody including those who have not thought through the nuances. The question asked can sometimes spawn a dozen other questions, especially in the way a newbie puts it.
If SO moderators were running Apple, Steve Jobs’ iPad idea would have been voted down and they would have finally kicked him out. Reason, if he’s lucky to get it: PC already exists and there is a linux desktop. Nobody would want a tablet.
SO is doing a yeoman’s service by keeping all the geeky morons in one place.
You are right Darin, but you have a lot of IT professionals (usually guys) who need to prove themselves. Sometimes I wonder if all those guys ever did something useful or were employed, if they spend all their time policing others or chasing votes/reputation would they have time to do any proper work?
I agree.
In one instance I said “Thanks for the help!” and it was edited out by a moderator! Since when are manners a bad thing??
A good manner is to upvote those answers that were helpful to your problem. That includes searching for similar questions an upvoting similar answers that are (partially) helpful for your question. A “thanks for your help” also is not part of a question, you can leave it in a comment if you really dare so to express your manners but also keep in mind that it is borderline, the well known “Thank you in advance” for example is not good manners but an insult. Each community has it’s own set of manners and new users need some time to adopt. Most of this is outlined on meta pretty well.
But howto upvote when u no longer have access to the idiot site?
“Each community has it’s own set of manners and new users need some time to adopt.”
Well, gracefully a bunch of rules that even the SO moderators disrespect or don’t even take their time to put it in the context: https://www.google.com.br/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&ved=0CDIQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmeta.stackoverflow.com%2Fquestions%2F127529%2Fhow-should-we-fix-or-refute-the-charges-made-in-why-stackoverflow-sucks-and-par&ei=fyjXUbijGcXCigKjpYH4CQ&usg=AFQjCNF1mcXBaWVZY838F3a3j5mB4Q4G_g&bvm=bv.48705608,d.cGE
Sounds to me that if the newbies are lazy, lazier are the SO moderators.
You aren’t allowed to upvote until you get a certain amount of whatever their grading system is. I’m not there to get power, I’m trying to follow your rules and get help. And I’m not lazy, and I’m not a newbie by a long shot. But I’m not a ‘developer’, I’m a designer and sometimes I might have a problem, I am always trying new things, btw that’s the nature of our business. I research it, I work it, and then if I just can’t get a certain part, I look for help. What EVER forum I end up on, I search for a similar posts and answers first, before I waste everybody’s time, including my own (MOST important to me, by the way). What the hell else am I supposed to do, tap dance on a table? No, don’t have a help forum if you don’t want to help. I have never been more offended by a ‘help’ forum, I don’t usually get my knickers in a twist about crap like this but I’ve had it .
Yeah, that means SO is a community of abrasive social retards.
David Heffernan’s reply here (and he is a moderator of SO) has answered all questions about whether one should ask a question on SO. They want you to go elsewhere, like EE, Yahoo or Google answers. I.E., Don’t bother us with your questions. You better be an expert programmer, with a unique, thoughtful and well researched question.
I enjoy it when the OP fights back on some of the BS comments on an otherwise reasonable Q.
I check SO everyday but it will be a cold day before I will ask a Q there every again as I was made to feel like an idiot after my last question! End of my .02 cent rant.
Not really. My point was that nobody forces you to use SO. If you don’t like it, you aren’t compelled to use it. It’s a free world.
I’ve long moved on from my complaints here. It is a free world, but if we want to add value for our clients we need to use the best services possible ourselves. SO is the best service. The problem isn’t SO. The problem is the SO zealots, those people who are less concerned with helping people find answers and more concerned with making sure that others ask questions correctly. People are angry herein because they have been burned by zealots for asking otherwise perfectly valid questions the wrong way. I have long asked Stack Exchange to provide an exchange on how to use Stack Overflow. I was joking, but my sentiment is true. I have no problem with Stack Exchange or Stack Overflow, but asking questions therein is way to complicated a task and I have work to do. So yes, I do often go else where.
One of the main things that bugs me is that people are getting shy asking questions. Not only newbies (often people that just started and don’t even know how to properly search: we can teach them how to), but also experienced users (that ask questions immediately marked “too narrow”).
StackOverflow used to be a place with a positive vibe, where comments, edits and guidance would make their users become better users.
That vibe is fading very quickly.
StackOverflow is not “rent-a-coder” or “rent-a-consultant” – for free. Questions should be “relevant to more people than just you”. If you have a very specific issue while developing a commercial application, and you can’t solve it yourself, maybe SO is not the right place to look for a solution. I encountered people who when pointed at the relevant documentation to solve their issue with minimal effort, wanted ready to use code. Such people will never learn. They’ll just keep on exploiting others. If they go to another site, the better.
@Kent I totally agree what SO is not a rent-a-something.
But SO needs to be interesting for the experts too, not only for answering questions, but also asking questions that only a few might encounter (but when they do, are tough to solve). The combination of depth and breadth is the actual gold of SO. If it is only aimed breadth, than SO is just an advertising company and the people answerin g just repuation collectors.
Kent, who are you to judge what is the best way for people to learn?
Kent
Who cares if someone wants to use your precious code? So what? If you’re writing custom code for them on a continual basis then that’s your problem and maybe you do need to bill them. I “borrow” code all the time and have no problem with others borrowing mine. Why reinvent the wheel each time, in particular when perhaps it’s a standard routine or such?
We are NOT curing cancer, or abolishing hunger. We write code. Most of us are not doing anything new that someone, somewhere has not already done. There is no harm in providing help, even in the form of code to others. You’re not giving away state secrets or instructions for how to build a weapon of mass destruction.
“Lighten up, Francis” Sgt Hulka, 1981
You’ve completely lost sight of the people. It’s all about the PEOPLE. If you don’t want to help someone and make their day go a little bit better, what are/were you doing there? It sounds like it’s a place for some to bask in the fact that they know something someone else doesn’t.
Of course, Kent here would disagree if it’s a question that’s only relevant to him.
Reply should be relevant to more people than just you. If you have a very specific issue while replying and you can’t solve it yourself, maybe the internet is not the place for you.
The moderators of stack overflow are interested in several things. Not just whether 1 out of 4 billion humans who asks a question gets a helpful answer right away. Also, they care whether the other 4 billion people who might in future search for an answer can find it. This in the end is the reason for the close votes, the downvotes, and the deletion of the question that you felt you personally owned, and felt upset about seeing deleted.
Meanwhile, we have this problem online where the noise always threatens to drown the signal. Why don’t you also mention that EVERY answer you make on embarcadero’s forums is deleted after a while, to make way for new message? Or that every blog you ever comment on will eventually be deleted? If you want something to stay around forever, and you want to own it, host it yourself.
If SO didn’t have downvotes, closing, and deletion, it would no longer be a place where you could find answers before you even ask, to hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of programming questions, only almost every major programming language that there is.
I don’t agree with the hive-minds at SO about what is a question worth asking, worth keeping on the site, but the hive-minds are doing something important. They’re preventing an explosion of noise from taking over the site. There are a million ways of doing that, and maybe it’s better that they are doing it at all, rather than letting it just rot.
The deletion of ALL slightly subjective questions still has me upset. And the greatest questions ever asked on SO have ALL been deleted, and the one you mention isn’t one of them. There were thousands of great “subjective” questions that SO had great answers to, that the SO mods deleted. But I’m still not sour on SO. There is still a lot of good there.
Warren
Can you mail me a few links of the questions you really loved, but have been deleted? I might eventually blog a bit about that.
One of the most famous was the “Programming Jargon” question, others were “What books should every programmer read” and a few others. Here’s a blog post about the jargon one:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/new-programming-jargon.html
Warren
Here are a few pages with really popular SO questions that have been brutally deleted:
Popular Deleted SO/SU/Programmers Questions list
Legendary questions
Deleted questions on Meta.StackOverflow.com – examples of bugs swept under the rug, censorship etc.
At the same time, crap that comes from users with high reputation, and has no practical use, is kept up:
* http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/41288/the-stack-overflow-conspiracy-dont-tell-jeff-im-on-to-him
* http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/34903/stack-overflows-voting-system-is-not-entertaining-enough
* http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/21053/stack-overflow-needs-direct-to-brain-interface-for-post-human-users
Seems like Godwin’s law point was reached before the 1st comment.
@nicoco: You can tell when someone is angry because this Godwin’s law thing happens.
The first time I had a question closed and deleted I was similarly angry and upset. Moderators pointed out to me that I simply wasn’t aware of how they worked. I pointed out that regardless of how they work, the way it works sucks. There was no solution, I just had to decide that knowing this is what StackOverflow is (a hive mind system) I can leave it be, or participate inside their rules. So far, I continue to participate inside their rules. I guess Serge feels otherwise.
W
I don’t feel love or hate towards SO now, after being nearly 3 years on SO. I understand how SO and other crowd projects like Wikipedia work, it is kinda “The ends justify the means”. The Godwin’s law point was reached long before my post, I just added a little personal rant.
Thsi is the most proposterous and laughable argument against SO that i think I’ve ever read. I’ve posted my feelings here:
http://www.jameswiseman.com/blog/2012/11/01/a-response-to-why-stackoverflow-sucks/
No need to support the bad users of SO. I am using SO since 4 years. I must say that It sucks because the users with highest points always dis encourage new users with Bad words.
Yep, previously I have successfully posted questions that actually returned some small amount of + reputation. Now, with my latest question I get flamed and a repu of -3!
Give a few nerds some power and the following happens:
Power corrupts. And, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
hahahaha …… you are too good with that comment
Plato’s point was this: if you want to rule, then it will go wrong, because power will corrupt you. If you are a philosopher, you don’t care about power – all you care about is truth.
The thing is: The money is on SO. They did build a great knowledge base, an impressive interface and now they only thing that matters is that companies keep looking for skill workforce there. Big recruiters have HR who will just go and check the reputation; and they will be happy with the results; that will keep them there.
Why will they be happy with the results? because users with high rep are either 1) elite members that get over 100 upvotes per day and 2) debuggers – guys who fix a code and get accepted answer plus a few upvotes. Those are guys wih <50k rep
The debuggers are good material for companies, while this lizard guy is just part of the elite which cannot be contested :). That's the reality of power it's not just SO
Your example was a question that 'an expert' won't like. Because it is a 'do my homework for me' ; and I actually agree with those who downvote. Closing the question however is they key there.
What I see as the real machine behind SO demise is that all those moderators and expert downvote very, very quick (in a matter of seconds) making a question virtually unreachable because the system will show it last to any reader. That's why SO sucks; that downvoting can and I believe IS used abusively: anything that a few moderators think that threatens their comparative reputation will be eliminated.
I agree – downvote system is heavily abused. So should introduce a rule that for each downvote explanation must be provided altogether with username who downvoted. It’s much easier to dwonvote when you are anonymous.
That has been proposed and rejected – http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/29531/should-a-user-be-forced-to-add-a-comment-when-they-vote-to-close
Agreed! And I think stack overflow is overly commercialized and in many cases too well rewarded by search engines like Google. Countless times I’ve found the stackoverflow answer to a question be useless and/or incomplete, but it shows up first in Google.
The fundamental problem is that SO wants highly detailed answers from their community but offers no reward or remuneration in return, and they try to use gamification to turn it into some form of psychological gratification – which even programmers who are very intelligent are still susceptible to (who doesn’t have an ego after all?) Once people stop caring about their meaningless reputation, SO will stop doing so well.
That will never happen – gamification mechanics work because human psychology is highly predictable in certain aspects, and the few outliers don’t make any difference – StackOverflow has plenty of programmers to “choose” from.
I agree with Robert.
Sometimes I’d rather pay for a service in which I can ask everything I want no matter how stupid and newbie are the questions, and get the right guidance to continue learning fast without getting lost with a ton of documentations(whatever call me lazy), rules and exceptions, instead of a nazi site that’s based on EGO. Moderators earn only points and reputations, no money, so welcome to the brotherhood and ask the perfect question that can help the whole world, not only you, or else we are gonna punish you, you dumb. Today my “stupid” question got -20 points and was closed. If I had put my real name on it with my personal information I would have felt completely depressed and humiliating. So it’s not free, it could have been really expensive on my dignity if I was a real person there.
I miss the real world on the internet. The real world where you work, make money and pay for good services.
In that case, pay. Such services exist. But you chose to go on Stack Overflow, whose purpose is *not* to answer your question or help you. Stack Overflow is not a helpdesk. Stack Overflow is a repository of knowledge. And if I, as a 60k rep user deem your post bad, then I will edit it. And if I cannot edit it, I will close it, and then either the system or a bunch of users delete it if you don’t improve it to get it reopened.
If you don’t like this system, go to a different one where you pay to get service. My goal is not to help you and you alone, it’s to help the other 10k people who will see that question after you left the site and never came back.
And that’s why nobody who comes to SO as a newbie and asks questions stays to answer questions once they learn more, because of this stupid attitude of the people they encounter first. In case you don’t know it, the first impression counts. If you think you’re better than newbies because of your 60K reputation, why don’t you go work for one of those paysites and at least make some money, Boy Genius?
I gave up SO long ago and rather go to newsgroups. I get the same help there plus when I try to answer something and make a mistake, I don’t get downvoted or have people place a dunce hat on my head.
Your attitude shows exactly why SO is the most obnoxious place on the internet. A place for people with next to no social skills and huge egos hang out to compare the lengths of their digital phalluses. How’s your egotistical approach working out for you?
Why are you here if you’re so happy with your 60k rep? Why did you even reach for this post? Is the urge of bashing those who have different opinion is that much insatiable for you? It means the world to you? or something?
@mark
“Why are you here if you’re so happy with your 60k rep?”
Why would you use SO for purposes it is not designed for? Do you use racing cars to travel on bumpy roads? Answer for yourself.
said by someone with madara uchiha as a name
Few things that I’ve noticed:
1) Some people ask some kind of questions and they get up voted. Also, their questions don’t get closed, they seem to be appreciated. So maybe you need to ask a similar question, you do it because you know that it will not get closed, but you get down voted and closed. An example:
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/182514/should-i-learn-c-or-python
VS:
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/14744/i-dont-know-c-and-why-should-i-learn-it
2) Sometimes you really need to ask a question, which is in the “how should I do this?” form. However isn’t like all other banal “how should I do this?” questions. You searched a lot before asking it but you didn’t get the answer. As you post it some users start down voting it and it will get closed;
3) You see something like a question with two very similar answers, one with 40 up votes, the other with zero up votes, which is ridiculous;
4) The luck plays an important role, which it shouldn’t play. All the 3 points that I posted above are somehow related to luck.
@ramy1989 Me too. I also saw many times that very simple and general questions such as “how should I declare XXXXX in programming language XXXX” upvoted many times (and the answer lies in technical documentations easily to be read online) while high tech questions being downvoted ???
It’s because they can’t answer the hard question, so they try to make it go away before someone smarter than them comes along and does. These pathetic tools will go to great extend to protect their e-penis, and SO is a broken mess that needs to be replaced.
“Should I learn C or Python” is considered a “Gorilla vs. Shark” question. A silly analogy in my opinion, but it was made by SO creator Jeff Atwood, so there’s nothing you can do about the policy of rejecting comparison questions unless they’re so incredibly specific that you must do all the research on both alternatives before asking the question, and then can answering yourself. Only to realize that you’ve wasted half of your research time on the wrong choice.
Yes! That happened to me today. I read ‘how to post a question’. It said to do lots of work on the problem first (I did). I wrote a very detailed question. I told people I was a newbie so might need help rephrasing my question. All I got was downvotes… zero feedback or support. Another similar question got loads of upvotes and answers. Is it some kind of bigotry towards certain usernames? Or maybe that the SO guidelines are wooly and highly subjective so impossible to follow. Everyone has a different idea of what a ‘good’ question is. These people only allow black and white questions with an exact answer. Black and white questions are mostly pointless… they are easier to find answers for. Any question with any shade of grey gets shot down by SO users with small dicks.
Can you share a link to your question?
If SO is wanting to be forum with GREAT information, they can certainly fool the H out of me…
Every time I search for something in google, I get results from SO… NEVER have I gotten a result that was REMOTELY satisfying… NOT ONCE…
The forum sucks and should be taken off line
Yeah, I’m inclined to agree. I made the HORRIBLE mistake recently of accidentally posting a question more appropriate to cross validating than SO (fine line though since it involved both stats and programming, as most R questions will) and my question got downvoted then closed. But luckily someone actually helped me before it was closed. I don’t know why you would even bother downvoting me, I’ve only managed to scrape together 5 reputation anyway as a total newbie! It seemed mean spirited.
Today I have asked to be removed from SO.
A few days ago I asked this question in SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14541668/operations-between-different-enum-types-are-allowed-in-another-enum-declaration
(After my account deletion I’m “user1816693”)
As you can see, Eric Lippert make fun of my formulation saying that it is ambiguous and not a question at all: “Since you did not ask a question in your question, I’ll pretend that you asked some interesting questions and answer them: Eric Lippert”.
Eric Lippert is so intelligent that not only can answer any question, he even can find interesting questions when there’s no question at all. Eric Lippert fans are familiar with his ability: “its amazing how so many of your best answers begin “let me answer the question you didn’t ask but should have”… – Michael Edenfield”.
There are so many fools that don’t know how to ask questions, and it is so hard to imagine what this stupid newbies should ask: “Indeed, one of the hard parts about not knowing an answer is not knowing what question will elicit it. Eric Lippert”
Eric is so important in SO, that he is allowed to comment a personal issue that has nothing to do with my stupid question without question:
“A while back someone set up a Twitter feed to do just that; a robot crawled my various postings and tweeted each one. The Twitter account was “ericlippert” and had my photo attached to it, so it was reasonable for people to believe it was me doing that. The guy did not think to, you know, ask me first if that was OK, which it most certainly was not. Since that violated Twitter’s terms of service, I now own that feed. 🙂 Perhaps someone else has built such a robot; I don’t know. I am flattered by the attention; I’m surprised anyone else is interested in this stuff. – Eric Lippert”
Now we know that the account that echoes on Twitter Eric Lippert posts, was not created by Eric Lippert,-(he doesn’t believe to be interesting) but by a fanatical fan (perhaps Michael Edenfield?).
In short, I got more answers to my stupid question without question, and it was well received with several upvotes.
As you can see, the response of Eric Lippert is documented and explanatory, There is no doubt that Eric Lippert is an authority on C# and computing. But he ruled that the issue is a “known flaw” of the compiler, and another person determined that the issue is a “compiler bug”. I agreed with the latter, and marked his response as the answer. Then I received two anonymous downvotes, and Eric Lippert; Michael Edenfield, and others voted my question for close… and the question without question was closed.
I’m not saying that Eric Lippert is nazi retard, but he is a presumptuous and poorly educated geek.
Very good question, +1
I am pretty sure Eric Lippert is not the problem. The problem is that people like Eric Lippert attracts hundreds of suck-ups in SO. These people rally around the figureheads, and bully newcomers unless they form another layer of suck-ups. Surrounded by pyramids of suck-ups, there is no way for people like Eric Lippert to keep their perspectives.
user1816693, I edited your question title into a question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14541668/why-are-operations-between-different-enum-types-allowed-in-another-enum-declarat
😉
It’s now a question ¡¡¡¡wow!!!!
Thank you, zylstra 🙂
S.O. == a place to leave if you haven’t time to lose (and this, speaking politely, if not …)
+1
I agree that the moderators have become over zealous in the past year or so, to the point of scaring users away instead of encouraging them to stay, learn and do tribute. It’s getting out of hand. I had a question closed, reopened, upvoted, downvoted, and eventually answered by tbe chief architect of C# for Microsoft. It was insane.
However, a few points:
1. Part of the purpose of the site is to be a reliable archive and source for answers to programming questions. To that end, its important to keep the archive as clean of incorrect or misleading answers.
2. The question you mention is almost certainly homework. We’ll offer direction, but doing someone’s homework for them doesn’t help them learn.
3. The question is called the “bin packing problem.” It’s one of the first things taught in data structures courses at university. Your solution works great for small numbers of items, but for, say, 10,000 items, it becomes intractable as the number of possible combinations is a factorial. There’s a mathematical proof showing that this is an NP-complete problem. We use this to teach students to develop heuristics (algorithms that are sufficient, when the perfect solution of trying every combination is untenable). While you’re answer is technically correct for the question as asked, and shouldn’t have been deleted or down voted, it addresses one specific case and not the more general problem. I wouldn’t have down voted it, but I can see why others would be concerned.
You sound like a smart guy – just the kind of person we need contributing to these communities. Don’t let a few bad experiences dissuade you from participating.
I am a beginner and I was banned on StackOverflow as I was obviously asking stupid questions… a beginner asks. Can you suggest me an alternative? Where I can get answers to my questions and quick responses.
I have found coderanch.com (javaranch.com) a very friendly place.
Moreover, I realized the best thing to do is probably language or framework specific.
For example: if I have Grails/Groovy issues I goto grails.org or the ML.
HTH.
Thank you! 🙂
@Daniel While I was studying at university our professors usually encouraged us to ask. They had a habit of saying that no one question is stupid. I really don’t know what SO wants to accomplish with such a strict rules?
I see three big problems with the StackExchange sites. I see the same problem you see in the Android site. Some people seem to have nothing to do than make minor nit edits to questions, and they tag many questions as too localized, rather than letting the community decide if it’s interesting.
The other issue, I see with StackOverflow, is that there are simply too many questions. I ask a question, and it may get a comment or an answer within the first two hours, then it disappears into the ether.
The other issue is with the StackExchange network in general. Let’s say I have an issue with OpenSuSE Linux. Do I go to superuser.com or unix.stackexchange.com? Let’s say it’s with Ubuntu. I have a choice between the specialized knowledge but less traffic site of the ubuntu site, or I can go to the higher traffic superuser.com.
Do these people actually work? Or just sit by the computer waiting to hear a ping and then jump in and either give the thumbs up or thumbs down as to whether you get your head cut off…
They better hope all these pissed off users never reach enough points to vote up or down, because I’ll vote down every one of their rude and useless posts. If one of us gets up, we’ll all get up, it’ll be ANARCHY! 😀
Votes are limited – http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/28314/why-are-there-voting-limits
I’ve also found that when you have a rather difficult question, no one even looks at it until a bounty is attached. Experts of subject matters like the quick wins and are basically trolls looking for easy questions they’ve probably answered a 100 times already to gain reputation. points.
Agree 100%, one point I would add is that it is full of amateurs. 15 year olds, full of confidence inflated by point system and don’t have a clue about the real world. Also, SO is a good example of a democracy ruled by teenage idiots, too many hasty decisions and very little far sighted thought.
Yep – here’s an example of a teenage moderator who banned someone off the site. Later, a responsible moderator had to undo his ban.
Just had an answer deleted which had up votes, I guess it wasn’t a brilliant answer but it helped a few people. I will now be reluctant to answer.
Pingback: A Criticism of Stack Overflow | WHERELIONSROAM
It is Q&A by the Nerd Nazis.
I tried to ask a question this evening, first use of the system, followed their instructions for spacing to format the code, still got formatting errors. Attempted to edit to correct the format, and was told that I didn’t edit enough characters. Deleted and attempted to submit the question over again, and was told that my new question was a duplicate of my first deleted question.
Hey Rainman, what do I have to do to just post my damn question?
It is worthless system run by control freaks who make progress impossible. How did the people who run it avoid becoming TSA screeners?
Idiots.
What if they are TSA screeners on their off time? At one time airport screening security was handled by the airliner which can make better decisions since it’s their airline and one of the 9/11 phone calls does mention a gun or bomb which he wasn’t sure of.
I HATE THE DOUCHES ON STACKOVERFLOW I WISH WE COULD BOWCOT IT used to use dreamincode but when I google something those bastards are the first up
Use the “block example.com” feature on Google’s search.
My god, the community is absolutely crap. It is full of rude, egomaniacs who feels the need to control everything. Your legitimate question WILL be closed if they feel like the question is not up to their standards. The answers are 5% helpful answers and 95% rude comments. Oh, Have I mentioned how rude they are. Sure these people know plenty about programming, but I wonder how many people have been turned off from the site. If you are a new programmer, it is guaranteed that your post will be closed and downvoted to oblivion. They will find a reason to criticize the most irrelevant things in your post.
There is no sense of community at stack overflow.
Yep, when I Google something nowadays I use the minus (-) sign.
An example follows:
Java programming -stackoverflow
Try something like the above and soon you will never consider SO again while resolving all of your programming issues.
HTH.
Thanky you for this tip 🙂
Thanks, I like it, even better than just ignoring the link. Whoops, irrelevant post, don’t say thank you!
I have found I am much happier when I use the following construct (an example):
Programming best practices -stackoverflow
The minus (-) sign removes all references to SO in the Google search.
HTH.
Simply click the “Block stackoverflow.com” link once in one of Google’s search results for that site.
Truly no matter if someone doesn’t know after that its up to other visitors that they will help, so here it takes place.
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I agree, I hate SO. Stack Overflow. Two years ago I actually opened my own open source, supporter of the open Web Q&A forum. Mind checking it out?
http://technasium.userecho.com
I feel like often times people have good forum ideas and they’re too restricted. I never delete ANY post unless it outright states it needs help hacking someone. I close the thread and say that the only hack allowed is modifying systems and rooting phones, not what ruins privacy. I love the idea of Stack, but I feel like I captured an intelligent yer very friendly community.
As far as your site and this article, very cool!
why did you delete it ???
I thought it was an ok place until today… I was frustrated with my code so I posted it on there with the details of what I was trying to do… forgot to actually say “What is wrong with this code?” and before I got a chance to fix it it’d been downvoted 5 times and closed. And of course, then you have 20 minutes to vent about it before you can post again with that little line added in there -.- Of course what pissed me off the most were the 3 comments that all said “Where’s the question?? duuuur There’s no question! Wtf do I do with this, there’s no question?!” You’re not little kids! I think you can figure out that the question is “what am I doing wrong?” or at least comment something like “would you like to know what’s wrong with your code?” That’s what I would do! Anyway. Done venting now lol. SO is stupid, I just wish it wasn’t the most helpful place for good answers…
I Agreed, i am not allowed to ask Questions anymore because i made a mistake in one of the Answers i give. I have since Answered many more questions. But i am not allowed to ask questions. It’s some stupid rule i am kind of getting frustrated with SO.
SO is a site for code monkeys they will get angry if you ask why it works that way, and they set up robots to tell them what to do. Technocrat’s heaven, thinking men’s hell.
I think this article is influential in the philosophy of how Stack Overflow works: Help Vampires: A Spotter’s Guide, http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/.
These meta.stackoverflow.com questions may also be of interested:
1. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampire-problem
2. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/75544/its-ok-to-just-downvote-flag-help-vampires
3. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/119858/how-can-we-stop-help-vampires
Again, this begs the question: How can any of the meta links or FAQ ever help those that have been banned from SO?
Are these links provided as a consolation prize or sleep medicine?
At the end of the day for those of us that have been banned from SO the site still just sucks.
Folks that have posted legitimate questions have been thrown into the vampire pit and banned.
Are you saying that you cannot rejoin?
This answer on Meta StackOverflow about what happens when a user is question/answered ban might also be of interest: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/86998/163250.
So what is the point of all those nicely worded bullets and FAQ once someone is banned?
Who is served by such a ban?
And, yes I google: with this operator in the search dialogue: -stackoverflow.
I usually don’t ask questions on SO (mainly because I’m a habitual self-learner) however when I have my experiences have been negative. For instance, take this question I posted yesterday: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16869616/winsock-coalescing-send-calls
Since the subject matter is slightly exotic,and although I could’ve explained more compactly, I felt I should elaborate on context to ensure there were no misunderstandings and also given that [in my experience] users on SO are more interested in pushing their opinions rather than just answering the question I attempted to circumvent them by denying the possibility of more broader solutions (for valid reasons).
Ofcourse this backfired and what ensued was a pointless argument in the comments due to what was essentially miscommunication on either my side or theirs; eventually I had enough and it boiled down to a flame war (I’m far more overt in my flaming if it comes to it)
One person did provide an answer (which was precisely what I was after it turns out) and interestingly I assume he was a newbie to the site based on his reputation unlike the others. Ironically, maybe the newbies are the best to go for for answers on SO.
I guess the moderators deleted the original comment thread while I was writing this, however the later ones are still there in response to the other ‘answer’
I like to help people on SO. But I don’t score a lot of points because of the nazi moderators. I’ve had to work hard for the points I’ve earned. But then they’ll pick on something stupid like how I worded a method of doing something in Ruby as “old” as opposed to an “alternate” method when a new method had been developed. Geesh, it’s just symantics. A lot of DH’s on there, especially the ones with > 100k points.
SO is just like those web software projects that get very denormalized over time because a few Alpha types get control of the project and the management is over a barrel.
To keep the competition down after the Alphas run-off the better programmers the aim then becomes to hire the marginally competent programmer that stands no chance to reveal what they are doing with the project.
Your best bet is: coderanch.com.
Kid you need to grow up. Stop acting like angry boy when someone is trying to help. Yes someone may not think like you and may even disagree with your idea but try not to be nazi questioner okay?
Great article! And that sentence: “Geeks immediately turn into Nazis when they see WRONG TAGS” is golden! Last year 15 year old kid was a candidate for moderator. 15 year old kid!!! Ok, thats not so bad. But, what made me angry was when I took a look at his profile and found out he put programming languages he hates which I personally consider as quite immature and dissrespective. For me its equivalent to: “I hate: Germans, Jews, Japanese…”. Makes you wonder what kind of people sit in SO HQs when they call very immature kid to be a candidate for a moderator. I also saw cases when people were insulted because of their questions. I remember one of them very well: “You are miserable!”. I have a decent reputation, but I start to hate it more and more.
SO no longer irritates me since I began using -StackOverFlow in my Google searches.
So for the sake of sick curiosity what languages did the kid put on his hate list?
No, wait, don’t tell me: Java was at the top right?
I disagree – what is the likelihood of that question/answer combo helping future SO users? The main purpose of SO, in my opinion, is to build a comprehensive knowledge center that future programmers can reference when facing similar issues. Highly specific questions are unlikely to help future programmers.
I disagree with you on that. Finding an answer on highly specific question can save hours and sometimes a days.
This mindset is like only seeking cures that will cure millions of people, or only putting out fires that risk burning more than 20 people. It’s not about the question/answer database. The QA database is only a means to an end, and that end is HELPING PEOPLE. If you’re not helping people, there’s no point.
Disagree. Typically, general questions are easy to research. Specialized questions are much harder to research, and putting the information in an quick, easy-to-find place is far more helpful than say, copy-pasting documentation.
A simple answer to my simple question was considered cryptic, by one of those retarded moderators, do you find it cryptic $inc = $a>$b ? 1 : -1; for ($i = $a; $i!=$b; $i+=$inc){}, then he tagged my question as hardly understanable, fk. shit tards those peoples dont even know basic of programming, how do they allowed to moderate.
Later on i saw him in chat, he was happy that he flagged 1000 users.
You might like this one ;=)
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/147627/is-this-fair-question-has-tens-of-upvotes-yet-gets-closed-by-a-single-person
Ha, this question is now gone:
“This question was removed from Meta Stack Exchange for reasons of moderation.”
I contribute on SO in the C tag and there’s very little of what it’s reported here. While there are users that come and ask horrendously formulated questions, people still bear with them and provide answers. And while there are snide remarks, the people who make them are admonished by myself and other similarly-minded posters.
All a user needs to do not to get any down-votes or have their question closed is post a small, compilable example of what is available and how it should be extended and even if that’s not there, people will make an assumption and still attempt to provide a helpful answer. After all new users are a source of reputation for the casual contributor and it’s nice when you’ve clarified things for some poor bewildered soul that is dealing with pointers for the first time.
How is it possible to post anything when you get banned? Anyway, this thread must be working…
You must be one of the vampires on SO (oh yeah, “were”). I’ve seen this remark of yours quote a few times already. Here, I’ll answer it for you: You can’t do ANYTHING on SO if you’re banned. That’s why they call it banning.
Their recent fad is closing/deleting the so called list questions: when one asks for a list of things. I agree the polling questions that asks for the best/favorite/suggestion/recommendation/option things are bad and should be closed. But those questions where the aim is building a comphresensive list of something should stay. Most of these questions have lot of upvotes (2000+) and an even more marks as favortie, which means they are useful for the community. One example that’s fortunately kept: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list
But this one with 7000 favorites got locked/closed: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-available-programming-books
Seemingly someone among the moderators wrote a book and don’t like the free concurrence…
I once asked a question like: What optimization techniques GCC employ? I just wanted to learn how does the most popular compiler suite works at the lowest level. It’s perfectly valid question as I found no such list of this the web… It got closed as not constructive in 10 minutes, because I asked for a list, pfff… Then I rage-deleted the question…
Off-topic,etc don’t mean that the question is idiotic or worthless. It is just to say that it is not fit for SO. Yes I agree that great questions get closed but it’s about following rules.
It is similar to discussing POTTY while enjoying your meal. Discussing POTTY somewhere else is alright but DON’T DO IT ON TABLE YOU IDIOT!!!
The only solution to this is… make a parser for it and use that. Not worth to deal with idiots like David Heffernan. Infact due to growing disgust towards SO. I may opensource it!
Best of:
> an army of Nazi retards
In my experience, a perfect characterization!
> Yes, I always feel in posting on SO that I must be on my knees, in a supplicant posture, cap in hand, avoiding directly looking at the great and good; grateful for only mild admonishment.It is basically a pyramid scheme of egos. it is full of amateurs. 15 year olds, full of confidence inflated by point system and don’t have a clue about the real world. Also, SO is a good example of a democracy ruled by teenage idiots I HATE THE DOUCHES ON STACKOVERFLOW I WISH WE COULD BOWCOT IT used to use dreamincode but when I google something those bastards are the first up Yep, when I Google something nowadays I use the minus (-) sign.
An example follows: Java programming -stackoverflow Technocrat’s heaven, thinking men’s hell. Help Vampires: A Spotter’s Guide shit tards those peoples dont even know basic of programming, how do they allowed to moderate<
Hmmm…let’s see if this formats better:
Best of:
> an army of Nazi retards
In my experience, a perfect characterization!
> Yes, I always feel in posting on SO that I must be on my knees, in a supplicant posture, cap in hand, avoiding directly looking at the great and good; grateful for only mild admonishment.
>It is basically a pyramid scheme of egos.
> it is full of amateurs. 15 year olds, full of confidence inflated by point system and don’t have a clue about the real world. Also, SO is a good example of a democracy ruled by teenage idiots
> I HATE THE DOUCHES ON STACKOVERFLOW I WISH WE COULD BOWCOT IT used to use dreamincode but when I google something those bastards are the first up
> Yep, when I Google something nowadays I use the minus (-) sign.
An example follows: Java programming -stackoverflow
(Note: I’ve been doing that mentally in the past–now I know how to just get rid off all the SO junk. When searching, I consider SO results spam. I wonder whether if enough searches are done with -stackoverflow, if google will consider ‘deleting’ SO from it’s searches.
> Technocrat’s heaven, thinking men’s hell.
> Help Vampires: A Spotter’s Guide
tl;dr
> shit tards those peoples dont even know basic of programming, how do they allowed to moderate
Reading rules of site helps. Normally people act first, read later. When mods come, they get angry.
Stackoverflow is a total waste of time, when I browse this website I read about nonsense, it’s full of anti-professional and anti-academic answers that they are based on ignorance and pessimism of it’s members.
The bottom line is that I do not get an answer, so it’s worthless to me.
Solutions:
1. Start making mass complaints in google to bring down it’s pagerank, because the content is worthless also the website is pathetic not deserve to be at top all of the time.
2. When you do a google search add “-stackoverflow” to avoid visiting this website.
P.S. I was searching about the difference of printf() and cout, unfortunately browsing stackoverflow 10mins ago and some one answered by doing a speed benchmark!
Definitely imagine that which you stated. Your favourite
justification seemed to be at the internet the simplest thing
to take note of. I say to you, I certainly get annoyed
while other people think about issues that they just
don’t know about. You controlled to hit the nail upon the top and also outlined out the entire thing with no need side-effects , people could take a signal. Will probably be back to get more. Thanks
Or you just learn to ask a proper question….
Exactly, I just got banned today, even before that I hated how the whole system works at StackOverflow.
I searched Google “why stackoverflow sucks” just to see if others agree with me, 5 minutes ago and I found this.
I think that Serg is overreacting a bit. But the thing is that stack overflow is a great resource for many things. For me – checking out the most voted question with the PHP tag was a great way to see how other people approach certain problems, and to learn best practices or PHP functionalities I never knew about.
On the other side there are people who want free code and/or are lazy. Even now, checking the newest questions results in at least 1/4 of them being … spam.
And then there are moderators. I can’t argue that some of them aren’t assholes, I’m sure many are. And just because you met one asshole moderator who deleted your valid question / banned you because he woke up on the wrong side of the bed, that is not representative for the whole community. Neither for users or moderators.
I am a fairly active user, and although some of the restrictions to questions / answers piss me off, I just go with it. Stack overflow can help me in certain situations, and it can’t in others. But this doesn’t mean it sucks.
Shame on you. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22318891/how-to-show-item-name-with-quantity-to-sales-order-grid-in-magento-admin
“put on hold as unclear what you’re asking by Qantas 94 Heavy, Sim, Achrome, aS.K, Vlad Preda 2 hours ago”
The guy just wants a new column in adminhtml sales order grid, you should help him do a join with sales_flat_order_item table, and not close his question because you lack the means to understand it.
It’s hardly that, it’s rather Stack Overflow is not your personal code-writing service. If you think otherwise, shame on you for exploiting others.
Pingback: Collection of Great StackOverflow Answers | TechSlides
Just got banned myself from SO. I always dreamed about the fact that programmers were there to help each other out. And there are many of those willing to help IF you can find them through all the other drivel floating around on SO. I get the feeling that the hunt/chase for reputation has exceeded what SO has been designed for, Programmers helping Programmers. I answered a couple of questions just to be down voted so quickly that I eventually deleted my answer. I know for a fact that my answer was point on to what the question was asking, but the comments even range on the absurd, addressing issues outside the scope of the question. SO is still a nice system, but it is being ruined by the rep and badge hunters!!!
Stackoverflow Policw make learning on their siite impossible.
Another idiot. You shouldnt use stack overflow like chat service. Stop throwing POTTY all over the thread. lolz
I just requested that SO delete my profile yesterday. Got sick of being disparaged by Robert Harvey and Bunni and the like who just live to crush new users out of existence on SO. It’s sad that folks who really want some help can’t seem to get it without sucking the dicks of the mods on SO. They can go fuck themselves.
there are always two ways:
1. learn and improve yourself
2. give up and continue thowing POTTY
you chose the second.
sorry but Fuck SO ! they just don’t understand that there are people who are starting, beginners ! i tried to answer question but they are way high than my level (I’m honest here) but i still feel the need of asking questions !
please does anybody know a good forum where we can still ask questions and not be ashame of !
Then show your efforts. Noobs are so full of themselves and uneager to learn that they just can stand anyone telling them to show their research. Just learn to improve yourself and admit your failings. SO is the best thing ever happened to internet.
yeah…google is actually the best thing ever happened to internet
According to my profile on stack overflow, I have asked 0 questions. Yet I have been banned for asking too many low quality questions.
Can anybody make sense of this?
thats because they have accumulated too many questions into their database, I think soon it will be out of space they have no option but moderate, delete and ban.
Asking low quality questions can get you the ban but you can get the ban removed by improving the quality of the questions (those which have negative rating). If you keep asking trivial questions or without searching for answers on SO, you’ll be in trouble.
The right way to go about is to check the rules of the community and mould your question in the way expects – i.e show your efforts. Nobody is getting paid to answer so you have to show your efforts first.
walterbyrd is not even asking any question in SO…
are you a bot ??
Can anybody recommend a good alternative to stack overflow?
How about Reddit? There’s a general programming subreddit, as well as subreddits for every language you can think of, various types of programming such as web and mobile, etc.
Great thoughts.
I agree 1000% Stack Overflow sucks. The moderators are programmer Nazis. My two biggest pet peeves with the site:
(1) ” Here’s a link to a link that shows a link where you click on a link to a link that links to your problem”. [Yes, I embellished a little but the point hopefully has been driven home]
(2) “What do you mean it does not work, I tried it and it works.” [But never does the person provide you detailed, concrete explanation as to how they got it to work].
It is so disappargin to go on that site and be lectured to by nazi respondents.
Unresolved duplicates is a problem with multiple feature-requests pending. I don’t know about others, but when I say “It works for me”, it means that I copy/paste your code directly to the compiler/jsfiddle/whatever and pressed “Play”, and it performed just as OP expected it would.
not everyone’s compiler and system are the same
I haven’t read all the posts here. I don’t have time, forgive me please (I will gladly do it in the near future because the topic is interesting). I just want to leave my own brief opinion on StackOverflow. (And.. My English is not ideal, so my apologies).
I am very new to StackOverflow and my first impression is very bad. After my first post (the link is below) and behavior I experienced especially from one of the of veterans of SO I can’t recommend this site as a reliable source of information. If such things happen every day there so now when I see the assessment of some questions or answers, I can’t be sure if they are really good or bad. I realized some of the SO veterans (especially those who have pretty big reputation) can behave very irresponsibly and many posts are disqualified just because of their likings. And vice versa: they have many tools to create an artificial impression that some questions or answers are e.g. very good. I am very disappointed with the SO assessment system. Thus from now on StackOverflow is not on objective source of knowledge for me.
Below is the link to my first and I think the last post I placed there:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19409295/why-0-based-instead-of-1-based-indexing-isnt-it-a-backwardness-what-can-i-get?noredirect=1#comment28918265_19409295
Some of the comments here are really funny. Sure, SO has its faults, however it’s a great knowledge base.
As long as you don’t want someone else to write you a whole algorithm without you doing any work, you’ll find most info on how to create that algorithm yourself, and I’m (how others here say) 1000% sure that most of you have found plenty of useful questions/answers on there.
I don’t get it why you guys get so pissed off because some of your questions get down-voted or blocked, I hardly ever seen questions being blocked without a reason.
totally agreed. I’m an os programmer, and stack overflow banned me because i asked 2 stuffs in one question… I’m having a war with the moderators right now.
they are bunch of crazy ppls, format freaks who have xyz fobias, if questioner is posting something that itself explains he need to know and learn but moderator would expected him know everything, if he knows everything why would he be posting. It feels sometimes the forum is becoming closed discussion group for high nose peoples, any begienner lurking there would be hounded badly. I guess thats what happens when you create voting system, everyone ranging from poster, answerer and moderator wants to increase their count.
I feel your pain. I’ve seen questions about emulators that have been answered on the game section that haven’t been the same issue as me, so I’ve posted a question about an emulator cheat function for Pokemon Emerald. And I got downvoted and put off topic. I later seen a question on the game section about playing MineCraft in school, and they gave the guy a batch file. I asked a question about playing a game like AQW or another online game coded with java with the batch file.(My classmates won’t shut up about not being able to play, and looked at me like I was a god because I got MineCraft working with something nabbed from the internet). And it got downvoted and out off topic. So I’ve asked a question about Just Cause 2 if cars could get dirtier by driving offroad in the gaming section, and two hours later there was one guy answering with “Did you notice it?” (Of course not or I wouldn’t post you fucking retard) and it had four downvotes. This site is terrible, I don’t even know what I did. I wasn’t posting porn or asking how to pirate EA’s new DRM game or something.
SO is misunderstood by newcomers who just think it is a Q&A site where every single question is valid and needs to get an answer. I agree that all questions are strictly legit because when you wonder about something, you just do. The thing is that no one on SO wants to spend time answering questions that have been answered a thousand times before and you’d just find an explanation using an internet search engine. The site has a threshold and if your question does not pass it, just deal with it. Post it in a forum where there ARE people willing to answer. In my opinion this threshold on SO is definitely not too high. I agree that newcomers who post a “bad” question will not get a gentle response but this is well documented. You can’t just barge into a community and expect the spotlight to shine on you and everyone falling at your feet to answer whatever questions you may have. You wouldn’t come at a math experts meeting and ask why 2 + 2 equals 4.
Read the FAQ and you’ll make no mistakes. I like how SO wants to profile itself as a site with a certain level.
>You can’t just barge into a community and expect the spotlight to shine on you and everyone falling at
>your feet to answer whatever questions you may have.
That’s the whole POINT of Stack Overflow – to answer whatever questions people have!
>You wouldn’t come at a math experts meeting and ask why 2 + 2 equals 4.
I would go to a hospital and expect to be treated, even if I wasn’t in critical condition or I couldn’t exactly explain how intense my pain was or how often it occurred in a four hour period.
Stack Overflow isn’t some bunch of experts talking to themselves that gets interrupted by someone asking a question. It’s a gathering of people ostensibly for the very purpose of answering each other’s questions. To close questions then, is absurd in all but the most extreme cases.
http://ThepaidWork.com/?id=NpProg
I too said goodbye to stackoverflow. if the questions are allowed only from experts then i dont think its for me. If i ask a stupid question about HTML it may be because my expertise is in something else and i just want to fix something in HTML to get going. So If i am asked to go and do research for few days; then think i can find the answer by myself
SO can help, but the way it actually gains such a lead ahead of alternatives is too intransparent, makes me feel that it is somehow unfair in the end. I also think their site is a more unpolite place then the forums I visit, so I’ll stick to these. I’ll just talk with people the human way.
The unfair thing is actually to force good questions, because the question goes into the intelectual property of SO. One time I asked on SO, it was downvoted -4 immediately, since I probably hurt some python purists with a complicated problem. After improving my question to be 95% of my answer, I was actually too dumb to realize that now I shouldn’t post it to SO. Of course, it’s good to share your knowledge, but in this case you will just make SO confident in forcing people with problems to do work for SO and their rules. That’s not what I want the internet to become, it’s indeed like a dictate.
Agree, agree, and did I say agree?
Here’s the thing that irks me most about SO. A lot of people are beginners and don’t always know the best way to ask a question. Heck, they are probably just figuring out what to even begin to ask! They go on SO thinking they’ll get useful information. They post their code thinking “Golly, I’m being helpful by putting it all out there,” and then it turns out you have to be very specific and “self-contained.” If the people there who answer questions can’t copy and paste it into their compilers and run it within a minute, you’re apparently wasting everyone’s time. It’s too bad they don’t realize a lot of the people asking are beginners but do they care that they are beginners? I guess that’s the question to be asking. Sure they are volunteers but one has to wonder how much real volunteerism there is when they’re all bitching.
A lot of them complain about wasting time, yet they spend just as much time belittling the person asking or others answering questions without actually answering the question themselves. Is SO some sort of strange programmer version of high school? It’s one thing if a person says “Listen, you didn’t ask this in the best way, so clean up your question. Then we’ll help.” But to have person after person downvote you and gripe about how you asked a question? Some of the behavior is rather…feminine. Obviously by asking a question you are there for a purpose and by posting a mistake you are attempting to learn. No wonder so many people shy away from programming/IT! To think, I could be working with these people someday…
Fucking assholes.
“Some of the behavior is rather…feminine.”
I don’t agree with that. Stackoverflow is all about male dominance and ego-fighting. As a woman I even need to cover my gender on tech sites to avoid the potential abuse, so I don’t think anybody would dare to behave in a feminine way on Stackoverflow and sites like that. If you don’t like a behaviour it doesn’t mean that’s feminine. Feminine is not a negative attribute. I agree with you in everthing else you said. Stackexchange sites are built in a way that usually attracts narcissistic people without real knowledge.
That’s right. There is a saying: “There aren’t bad questions, there are bad answers only”. If somebody tells you that you ask bad questions, well… it’s nothing wrong with you, it’s definitely something wrong with him :-))
(I hope I wrote it good. English is not my speaking language 😉
My thoughts exactly. I haven’t dared to post a question on SO after seeing some of the absolute vile attitude some (not all, mind) of those folks seem to have. It seems that what should be a helpful environment for those who have questions about programming has instead devolved into a haphazard hive of self-entitlement and ego-stroking for those who seem incapable of remembering that when they were starting out, they, too, probably had questions such as this once upon a time. I can understand wanting folks to be capable of answering their own questions, but throwing folks into the fire because they dared to ask it is unjustifiable and just an exercise in being a jerk, IMO.
Hate that place, they really think a lot of themselves and are rude, treat their visitors like crap, especially if you are a newbie. I refuse to go there anymore for questions. Seriously, they don’t have better things to do with their time than delete a response that said “thank you for your help, it worked, but I found x worked, and y didn’t” — as being irrelevant? They can go eff themselves as far as I’m concerned. Stuck up bastids.
And I resent the ‘feminine’ reference. They’re just stuck up assholes.
You’re right kellmoony, they are stuck up assholes but they really do come off catty. For a place that seems to be mostly populated by men I wouldn’t expect that kind of behavior, and I’m a woman. It’s a huge ego trip for them, that’s for sure.
I read some of the previous comments regarding quality questions. Listen, if they want to have quality questions and eliminate waste from their database, why aren’t they developing a system that siphons people to what they need? Asking if people are beginners, intermediate, or advanced programmers and directing them to a set of questions or a section of the site would be more useful than downvoting people for not “researching their question enough”. People do their research on SO, can’t find what they are looking for because– lo and behold– questions are asked to be specific and self-contained! Can you generalize from that?? Then they have their suggestions for questions that are supposed matches to what you are asking. Even the seasoned posters there will point out the differences between linked questions and admit you can’t generalize because languages yield different results.
It’s better to ask an actual person who has to stand by what they say to you with full consequences than assholes on the internet. Anonymity does not grant the right to be rude. I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with online resources.
Totally agree. I have been helping out on SO for a while now, but I am getting more and more annoyed by the way things are going. Even if you give an answer that worked for you, you will get downvoted to such an extent that you loose more than what you gain. There is always someone that got out of the wrong side of the bed and decides that in his all knowing mind he will punish whom ever gives a “poorly” formatted question or answer. One is better of researching on your own than making use of SO.
Stackoverflow sucks. all they do is insult people who ask questions, and they spend more time telling you what you did wrong, rather than actually showing you the right way so you can actually learn something.
And why do they get to pipe in with meaningless comments like “That is a meaningless comment and not relevent and blah blah. Closed.” when anyone else can’t say “Thank you that worked for me, or didn’t, or this happened.” What I’d like to post “Stick it up your a$$es you unsociable IT dweebs.”
I agree. I just wanted to lament my experience with them. I posted the seemingly innocuous question: “Is there a C# library somewhere to read the gyroscope and/or accelerometer from an iPhone or iPad connected to a Windows7 PC via bluetooth? I mean, is this sort of thing even possible?”
Within seconds, the Nazis decided to down-vote me and tell me that they can’t offer suggestions to find off-site resources. It probably won’t get answered now. Where am I supposed to ask a question like that? Is it that unreasonable of a question?
Neith: That’s because they don’t make any money from offsite resources and provide a lame excuse why your question should be closed. I’m guilty of this fact, too, when I first started at SO, closing a couple of questions because they are “off-topic”. Then, I stopped and realised I have inadventently contributed to the narcissitic cesspool of Stackoverlords who think they are “top of the crop”. Ever since then I have lost count of the number of times I have upvoted answers of beginners, formatted their questions for them, where needed, so the Stackoverlord trolls won’t close it off and give them a fighting chance i.e. get their questions answered. But I’m always overwhelmed by the pack of wolves that follow the Stackoverlords that seemed to thrill at the prospect of killing off their prey- the innocent beginners.
Anyway, I’ve gotten sick of the f**cking SO retards and left a couple of days ago.
Correction: upvoted answers = upvoted questions
I TOTALLY AGREE!!!!!!!!!!!! little pieces of mod s* that dont take any time to answer anything just wring their hands over stupid s*. I posted simple questions, that would be easy to answer, i made it really easy to answer, and narrowly focused. sometimes it is the little things you need to know and not some elaborate BS. its like you cant even ask a simple question in good faith, only to get greeted by these mf aholes then what is the point of a site like that. they can all completely f* off. maybe somebody can invent a site where they dont have this sort of BS going on. IF YOU DONT WANT TO ANSWER THE QUESTION, FINE! IT IS OK! BUT DONT COME ONLINE TO F* WITH THE POSTER BECAUSE THEY ASKED ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Agree completely.
Actually it’s a QA site for programmers to turn to when they hit a wall. The question above isn’t written by a programmer because no attempt has been made to write code. A non starter that can be progressed by reading the most basic of tutorials online isn’t a wall, it’s laziness.
Gee, there are a million html and css and whatnot questions up there – but its just for programmers, I see. Since they’re so rude, maybe they should just put up in the header “We don’t answer html, css, javascript, etc. questions, so bugger off, non-programmers.”
Ross: “it’s a QA site for programmers to turn to when they hit a wall”
It used to be an open forum to discuss programming, ask questions, and get feedback. And while we’re at it Ross, since this site isn’t strictly a QA site, and since you seem to know there are most basic tutorials online, could you point me to the tutorial where I can find how to read the gyroscope and/or accelerometer from an iPhone or iPad connected to a Windows7 PC via bluetooth?
In fact, that wasn’t what I was asking on SO. I was simply wanting to know if that kind of thing is possible. Apparently asking questions offends people.
Remember kids, when Google fails you, DON’T ask someone else!
I’ve been using SO for two weeks, and boy, many of the legitimate comments here immediately resonate.
The site, apparently, encourages people to post a question and answer it yourself if you have gone through it the issue during your previous work/project, so you could keep it as a way of coming back to it if the problem arises again. In addition, it could help a lot of other folks who might run into a similar issue.
But no! The almighty moderators, who did not understand what the question was, had to take it upon themselves to put it on hold.
Another thing that really upsets me is that as soon as I attempt to search on a topic, SO results get on top of the first page. And the majority are not relevant or very narrowed to other problem. I am always looking for in depth “articles” or well written blogs — not a quick dirty answer, which SO claims is so against.
Yes, there are times a very specific problem should be answered in such fashion. But being a developer means that you need to read many chapters and articles to get your rolling. SO results are far from being comprehensive, yet they constantly beat other search results that could, very well, make the developers far more well rounded in the long term.
I just can’t stand SO.
The problem is the ‘reputation’ thing, people feel like they playing a game and winning (money or) something + let’s not forget the ego boost they get – ‘Yeep, I’m good .. if not the greatest’ … been there (to the G*eks * F*gs section) done that, but that was in the past
>t’s a QA site for programmers to turn to when they hit a wall”
Not true. I’ve gone there for years asking simple stuff like CSS menu problems that I just cannot figure out. I don’t GO there, I Google the problem and it often comes up. I’ve never been treated badly until recently. There are some nice people who DO help but there are some anti-social super geeks who do NOT know how to interact with other humans. They think they are superiour and guess the f*k what – they aren’t. I’d like to tell them that, but they can’t hack hearing the truth — they’d just delete and close the post. Thin skinned ass wipes.
I believe this isn’t a problem with SO but with all online forums general. For example, go to Wikipedia, and you will find an army of Nazi moderator retards just like on SO. These “moderators” spend enormous amount of time on these sites doing “work” and do not get paid. Why on earth would someone do this. Because the way they get “paid” is not with money but with power and the reason they keep doing it is because they enjoy telling other people to go fuck themselves and abusing their power. They get a kick out of downvoting questions, closing a thread, and people pleading to them wondering what’s wrong, and them telling these people that their question was not good enough. It’s not about the questions and answers, but rather the power balance and abuse between the moderator and the new user. This is sad, but it’s just human nature. These moderators probably do not have an outlet to get their power fix in real life so they go to these virtual worlds. I have long stopped asking questions on SO, or on any online forum for that matter.
Wow, where were all you guys when I needed you :P? I knew I wasn’t alone in my feelings about this and experience with these issues.
I wrote about this exact same thing the very same week as this post was originally published:
http://bryanhadaway.com/stack-exchange-helpful-vs-elitist-boys-club/
And also posted officially on Meta Stack Overflow (in my hopes of having a meaningful discussion about the issues):
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/149687/se-sites-in-general-helpful-and-polite-vs-rude-and-elitist-behavior
Could have used the support. But, all in all the idea of having a meaningful conversation that results in steps being taken towards improvement seems moot, because Stack sites, I think, really do operate exactly how they want them to and they need only say “If you don’t like it, don’t use it.” – Which is just a shame because ideally, they can be very useful.
Thanks
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make me look stupid or not make any sense. Every now and then, my not so clear questions or “lack of efforts” questions according to them get bombarded with downgrades and irritating sarcasms from mods.
Luckily for me, I can take a hit. But for some, downgrades and harsh criticisms are very discouraging to people (newbs) who are taking up an interest in coding. The worse is, you get downgraded and left with no response. You’re left to think “what did I do wrong?” “did i say it wrong?” “was i stupid to bring that question up”
I don’t buy that whole “I don’t have time to respond to unclear questions.” That’s pretty BS to me. The way I see it, if you have time to downgrade or post a rough comment to a question, you may as well spend that time to encourage the person to rephrase the question so that he/she can be helped.
Half of the time, SO is good for web dev/design/coding newbs like myself. I’ve had many people giving me valid criticisms and helpful answers. I could say as a newb, I do learn a lot from SO. The other half is really really bad! Being new in coding, I’m not always sure if i’m asking the questions with the right words. It could be a valid question (to my own sense) but my coding dictionary is still thin that might make me look stupid or not make any sense. Every now and then, my not so clear questions or “lack of efforts” questions according to them get bombarded with downgrades and irritating sarcasms from mods.
Luckily for me, I can take a hit. But for some, downgrades and harsh criticisms are very discouraging to people (newbs) who are taking up an interest in coding. The worse is, you get downgraded and left with no response. You’re left to think “what did I do wrong?” “did i say it wrong?” “was i stupid to bring that question up”
I don’t buy that whole “I don’t have time to respond to unclear questions.” That’s pretty BS to me. The way I see it, if you have time to downgrade or post a rough comment to a question, you may as well spend that time to encourage the person to rephrase the question so that he/she can be helped.
at 2014, you doubleposted from now on you are banned from this website
Well, I also had the joy of getting moderated by Bill The Lizard today. My crime was, linking to a solution on my own blog, which had the answer. I’m guess I’ll never contribute to the SO community again.
If it was a ‘link-only’ answer then it’s clearly a right move. Many a times we face broken links and this is why SO discourages copy-pasta of links. Post the relevant code/instructions (in addition to the link) in the answer.
I try to be the good helpful guy in SO, but sometimes the swarm of SONazis downvoting, criticizing and moderating everything is overwhelming. I can’t even make a bug report or a feature request at meta without being criticized. Yes, a bug report! I found a bug and I reported it. No one upvoted me (thankfully no one downvoted me either). Immediately a comment arose criticizing a phrase I used (just a phrase, in a sentence from the 10-20 sentences) in the bug report and in a matter of minutes, the comment got two upvotes.
Oh and the feature request, I had pretty much no support except two upvotes, against 12 downvotes and a flurry of critical comments and answers. All I did was to make a suggestion to improve the quality of the content posted by new users. (And by that, HELP the community have less shit to moderate. But no, they LOVE moderating all that shit, and they ain’t gonna let you stop them.) When I responded to the criticism, no one had anything to say.
I watch everyday, newbies being scared away when they innocently come to SO to learn. It’s a real shame. Sometimes I stumble upon questions from back in the 2000s and admire how welcoming the community was back then. I wish I had known SO then, but then I also don’t wish it because it might have molded me over the years into yet another SONazi.
It’s also funny how people are throwing downvotes around. It’s almost as though they are earning money by providing service (some occasional questions and answers) for the sole purpose of pushing the banknotes up someone’s butthole (downvoting). I stopped downvoting anything for many months once I realized it’s eating into my reputation score as well (not that I care about the number, but I don’t want to lose my privileges.. I’m aiming for 2000 for the non-reviewed edit privilege). Before that, whenever I downvote, I would leave a comment explaining what’s wrong. Now I just leave a comment, because I don’t get why I should be penalized for trying to improve the quality of something.
The concept of the site is great, and I admire how driven it is. It has helped me in many situations to find many answers to the programming problems I faced. However, I find that the community is heartless and unwelcoming. It’s very very sad, and it really reflects badly upon the broader community of programmers.
Yeah, I’ve given up on ever trying to understand Stack sites. I’ve only ever been polite and helpful and have mostly only received petty, rude, juvenile and mocking behavior in return.
I thoroughly enjoy constructive criticism, it helps us all to improve our communication and skills, but most people on these sites don’t understand the difference between constructive criticism and rude criticism.
And since they continue to be rude and falsely defend it as something else, there’s never any ownership of this behavior, hence never anything in way of a healthy discussion to help improve the situation.
What causes even more confusion, is that the message doesn’t really get to the bad apples (though, if it does, they only further prove our points by lashing out with name-calling, sarcasm and other attempts at belittling, ironically), but it gets to a lot of the very helpful and polite, mature experts who don’t cause this problem, only they sometimes take offense assuming the finger is being pointed at them.
What we end up with is a serious denial of the problem even existing. Because “good” experts inadvertently create a straw man argument defending what they stand for, not really registering that some of their peers really aren’t the most polite of people.
Like I said, this is all moot and a vicious cycle of never having a meaningful discussion (with both sides), trying to do so in Meta as many of you mentioned, just results in being attacked. Nothing is going to change, and it’s pretty much a waste of time to try and understand this anymore, I’m done discussing it, I’m even unsubscribing from this comment thread because I’m tired of even thinking about it, it’s trivial and pointless and a dead end.
Bottom line, the elitists like their club and they love being able to flex their intellect to show superiority over beginners and then there are enough experts that really are there to help with grace and politeness that want to share their knowledge with others, not impose it, that makes it just good enough to come back and use when we really need some help… but, very very sparingly.
About two hours into exploring SO and discovering that the time was wasted; I gladly deleted my account! I have better things to do, such as answer real life questions. I am holding a middle finger up to SO.
I agree with you. SO is not even an Open Source Community. My experience with SO is quite negative. It’s like you have to apologize every time you ask a question. I even had one moderator stalking my answers and being impartial. Not even trying to help other people counts, what counts is that you generate visits(mainly with your questions not your answers). The SO moderators have a very bossy, smart-ass, me-genius-you-dumb-fuck arrogant attitude (a bunch of social lepers with no life).
The sad thing is some enterprises are beginning to accept SO (and its shitty medals and points record) as a credible way to determine whether you are a good programmer or not. I hope some other alternatives come up soon.
“It’s like you have to apologize every time you ask a question. ”
Thank you, that’s how it feels.
Agreed. And here is recent evidence that supports the arguments
and point set forth by commenters and the author. http://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/19783/any-limitations-with-matlab-student-version-for-image-processing
I am not saying that SO in useless or fails as a general concept at all. It is a wonderful collaborative tool, but i think the requirements to be a moderator should be far more strict. For example in the CS site that i posted, proof of expertise – such as a M.S or PHD in CS EE Computer Engineering and or maybe Math – should be required before becoming a moderator. This could be an avenue for SO to begin to hook into the edu market and improve the accuracy of E-Learning.
I do agree!!! I have asked 4 questions. 2 of them (which I consider very vaild) where not anwsered and the comments were very hostile. I am a student, I tend to do research from that research questions and doubts arise. How the heck should I clarify them? Well, by asking… right? There should be someone with the answer and the knowledge. They should show that knowledge and help other people.
I agree. Some of the highest voted questions and answers don’t meet the policy. The measure of quality should be the votes – after all, that’s the measure of what questions and answers users have found useful. This question goes against their policy – http://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list, yet it’s the third highest voted question.
Which is why Stack has long considered removing it, since folks like you always point this question out as the reason why you should be able to ask your book recommendation questions.
You are simply jealous of the success that it has in helping people like me to tackle programming problems. Why don’t you have some constructive criticism instead of regarding the entirety stack overflow as being terrible? I am sick and tired of this crab in a barrel mentality you people seem to have. This is why we stagnate in productivity and innovation because you people are so obsessed with status recognition that you will hold back millions of people from learning something that can benefit not just themselves but the entire world at large.
We could give a rat’s ass about status recognition. Ours or anyone at Stack Overlord. However, your attitude gives a good indication you could do well there as a moderator, “answerer” or whatever your aspirations are there, if you aren’t already.
you are 100% right. similar story of mine. I won’t post it here as many would reply with tl;dr…
My experiences with SO is summed up by your post, which reminded me of this post on SO: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/133655/should-users-provide-op-legitimate-links-as-their-answer-if-it-helps-in-answer
Also, whenever I would use the SE network of sites, my IE browser (only one I can use for work) would automatically switch to “Compatibility Mode.” Mind you, this would only happen when using the SE network, nowhere else. I asked this question on SO, explaining what I just explained above, and got a comment from a moderator, “Don’t use compatibility mode.” Well, isn’t that the purpose of my question? To figure out why compatibility mode is being switched to automatically when on the SE network of sites?
Yes I too ran into Bill the Lizard and can see I am not alone in thinking he uses his delete finger far too often so add me to the list that named and shamed him
I did ask him to undo the delete but he’s too stupid to admit when he’s wrong
absolutely. People who ask stupic questions like “what is a stack?” and “what is C++” get hundreds of upvotes, but people like me who ask “real” question get negative votes for unjust reasons like “your question is not clear”. I told the moderators to justify their edits and deletions, and they suspended me”.
Stackoverflow is a good Q&A website, but the moderators are way to shitty.
of course the same thing happened to me. I asked a question regarding my college assignments task I didn’t ask them to do those assignments I just asked them how to dolike give me some idea how can I start it so I can figure it by myself and do the assignments by myself. but these mod nazis jumped into my question and said it’s too broad and make it narrow so they held the question. seriously. how come they judge my question? it doesn’t matter it’s broad or narrow if they know the answer then they can provide unless simply leave that’s how it should be. even if it’s board it’s not their issue it’s my question. they said then there are too many possible answers. this is really stupid if there are too many possible answers then they can simply answer it with what they know then I can pick the most right question and acknowledge them this is what I want.
but since it doesn’t fulfill their mentality they simply held my question. this is completely BS Y!A is much better actually. this happened twice I also got a couple of down votes. I would say stackoverflow is full of asshole. that stack is full of assholes and they overflow so the entire site rotten in the same place. I would never go there again.
*right answer and acknowledge them this is what I want…..
I would say that the main problem lies in the flagging system. -Any- five users with flagging privileges can close a question. There are probably thousands of these users, and once a question has been flagged by somebody, it only takes four more people to click on “close” so the question goes to the canner. Four is hardly a concensus, and since you get badges for doing review tasks, there is even a greater incentive for people to close questions.
I have no hard evidence, but I believe that the amount of questions closed is almost the same as the amount of questions flagged.
In addition to all of this, there is now an even worse tendence in SO: the points race.
Even though “unworthy” questions are quickly dismissed, burned and closed, interesting questions that require some brain usage for an answerer are ignored even quicker, as it takes much less time and effort to solve an obvious PHP question, and is much more likely to get upvotes. Since it’s now all about the reputation points, all those interesting questions get completely ignored.
SO used to be the place where every question was answered, but now it’s just a repository of burned “unworthy” questions, overanswered simple questions, and completely ignored interesting questions.
Shame…
There will always be somebody who’s not happy about something, we just have to learn to accept it.
I think SO has provided me with lots of answers to many questions over the years.
I don’t post questions and only post answers from time to time.
Yesterday I posted an answer that got down voted to a comment. The user who posted the question (with 50 points bounty) is thanking me, but can’t vote my “comment” and give me the bounty.
The moderator who transformed it to a comment posted this:
“This does not provide an answer to the question. To critique or request clarification from an author, leave a comment below their post”
SO has it’s down parts, but I think we can all leave with that.
Oh yes, you’re totally right. SO is full of retarded kids which have nothing better to do than tag and down-vote questions which are for some vague (yes, I am using the word) reason not good enough for their cause. There’s no real difference between good and bad questions, you only can get bad or good admin looking at it. And of course, if the admin decides to down-vote it, there’s legion of people stroking themselves and following.
When I initially commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox
and now each time a comment is added I get four emails with the same comment.
Is there any way you can remove me from that service?
Bless you!
I have the same problems like this..
Same findings here. My favourite author once wrote about church architecture that it wen all wrong about the time when christians turned into catholics. That’s what SO’s become, a church.
When I entered the site, after a while I started to fell like when I entered an online game for the first and the last time of my life. I thought playing with other people would be more fun than playing only with a computer, whatever smart programmed. In about ten seconds I got a load of hatred aimed at me, ‘nOOb piss of, here play the real men’ or something like that in about thousand different wordings. About the same stuff one get when trying to ‘infiltrate’ SO.
Yes, SO has changed when operators gradually become nazi robots. I has join SO 5 years ago and then after one year (last year) without take care it. Now when I want to contribute back for SO, but I can not recover the account because the openid has lost.
The first feeling when come back is too much aggressive mod comment and edit but very little useful answer because people answers nervously. Now as a new-commer, I can not vote or comment, and with 2 in 3 total question get vote down: one without reason, one just a mistake in sql syntax (has fixed). The 3rd answer have no response, make me can’t answer more. Now the only thing can do is giving the questions while i dont need 🙂
it is so s**t it is part of the INTERNET NOISE, it should be BANNED.
It is just an army of academic retards like you say, +1 to you sir!
I bloody hate it mentions so many words it constantly pollutes my google searches, and just about at one point it was almost useful. Sorry dude but you have to suck cock if you want to do well there and not everyone likes cock do they.
SO is full of idiots when it comes to Java and Python.
I keep a search on this only to filter out the stupid answers that my colleagues from india and china use it as a manual. The worst anti-patterns are to be found here
SO has actually been the source of quite a few negative experiences for me. Early on sometimes the responses made me want to give up programming so I wouldn’t have to deal with similar people. I’m glad though that it’s different camps and indicative of everyone. The thing to understand about engineering I think is that the hardest and most important thing is DEFINING THE PROBLEM. Engineers come to grasp this out of necessity as computers are amazing yet so dense that they need the problem to be defined in EXCRUCIATING detail. So much detail that engineers need an incredible grasp on the problem definition to the point of knowing the solution in order to execute good code. SO nowadays has a lot of people who want this problem definition defined to them. Often times a “fuzzy” or “bad” question, if it were able to be restated in a proper way wouldn’t need to be on SO because that level of definition and understanding of how to ask the questions allows you to google it. Instead of becoming of resource of programming insight SO is becoming a repository of patch-in’s for bad documentation.
So in short, SO mods are so badass, so very badass, that they now give out bad stinky ego farts all the time 🙂 (Sorry, another badly burnt user who could not resist)
agree 100%, i see post on SO when lot of people wanted to see a solution and the “nazis” close with out anwser…
A better model would be to allow users to vote with their wallets. If you think someone asked a good question (e.g., if you had a similar question and came looking for an answer), or if an answer provided you real value, you should put your money where your mouth is. Moderation then becomes less relevant. FTA:
“Imagine you’re a programmer. For us coding geeks, sites like Stack Overflow are a lifeline to getting work done. In fact, we’re reasonably convinced that when Stack Overflow goes down, all programming around the world just stops. (Well, at least that’s the excuse we use.) Yet, when we read an answer from someone who has fixed that (Javascript) problem we’ve spent hours debugging, we want to kiss that person’s feet with the appropriate Wayne’s World salute. It’s times like those when a thank you and a (worthless) upvote just don’t seem enough. That person saved us from hours of wasted effort and aggravation. That geek deserves more.”
http://valme.io/c/gettingstarted/faq/kqqqs/how-valme-works/
My favorite SO rape is when I ask a question, this is my question, this is the question I want answered.
And then others come along and edit the question and turn it into a question I didn’t need or want answered.
And then their question is closed for being off-topic or whatever.
Joel can have his playground, but it has certainly soured me on Joel or anything out of Fog Creek.
thank goodness I’m not the only one that can’t stand the moderation on SO. My favorite is no homework questions? You don’t need to do my homework thank you (uh oh, I’m being polite… )just maybe give me an answer that isn’t “study more” or “read the API.” If you can understand the API and you have a minimal understanding of your question why would you be asking it? Stack Overflow exemplifies why forum moderators have no place on this planet except in the ground.
(Sorry for my English):
I say: if StackOverflow’s current flawed grading system policy doesn’t change the number of its active participants will be still limited to people who are rather more cunning than really smart, creative and open-minded. For me SO in current condition is more like narrow-minded source of knowledge focusing more on ‘canonical answers’ where many people who could contribute really interesting thoughts and sometimes very innovative solutions of various problems are just afraid of taking the floor in order to avoid often unfair severe public humiliation.
If silly questions are being down voted and closed now – that’s for a reason. When SO started, there where no such questions. That’s not the current situation. There are already lots of questions and answers for most of these questions that the new users are coming up with. Most of these questions do not show any sort of effort. A simple google search would’ve shown numerous articles and SO answers regarding the same stuff. They don’t even bother to check the suggestions while typing the question… hence, IMHO they should be closed to keep so clean.
“Silly question” is a very vague notion. Silly questions for whom? After all complaints I saw here It seems that for SO’s veterans and moderators silly questions are often those which are just boring (sometimes aka too difficult to answer :).
What should be done with questions such as “I try program. Labbel1 = hello. Didn’t work.”
Personally, I am sure there are two cardinal rules to posting anywhere: 1. Always try to be helpful. 2. Never insult anyone. So (If we can agree to those stipulations) now what do we do? Would it be most helpful to all to delete the question? To point the user to some online tutorial? To make all questioners click a checkbox saying they have researched the best they can before asking their question? One does find questions such as in my example on SO from time to time.
What I am trying to say is that both you and Tilwin have valid points. There is no such thing as a silly question but there is such a thing as a lazy question, and we wouldn’t want the site overrun with lazy homework questions! After thinking about this, I feel if someone asks a lazy question it is by far the best to point them to an online tutorial rather than deleting the question or chiding them.
The problem with your question is that it could be asked in 100 different ways with 100 variations and all of them would still be useless for SO. That should be posted on an Algorithm StackExchange website, if any, because really the language doesn’t matter, it’s a logic problem that could appear on https://projecteuler.net/ and would be fun to solve. Other than that, it won’t help me resolving a real life programming issue.
It would help me. The very guts of programming is problem-solving. Right? I mean, that’s why programs are written, as a solution to a problem. In fact, programs are often referred to as solutions. So an exercise in any problem is going to help you with whatever practical problem you encounter. I recall my high school geometry teacher telling us that “you may never use all this stuff in real life, but math teaches you how to think.” He was right.
SO’s Bill The Llizard is an asshole. The biggest asshole in the whole SO site. He shuts down everything without even reading or thinking about it 1s.
I agree with most of the comments here. I had only made two posts on SO, and had no problems, but I did notice quite a bit of rudeness and putdowns. So I wasn’t surprised when the mods attacked my third post, and also my fourth post. It almost seems as if once the mods get hold of you, they won’t let go, kind of like an annoying cloud of mosquitos.
I think what happened in my case is I pissed off one of the biggest egos on there by pointing out a logical inconsistency in the comment he made to my question. Next thing I knew, the question was marked a duplicate. It wasn’t. The alternative question they pointed to did NOT answer my question. When I pointed that out in my edited code and with a comment, I was good and mad. I was also right, and even the mods could see that, so the duplicate question status went away. It just made them look stupid. But the whole experience sucked, even though I “won”. It took more time and energy to defend myself against these baseless and inane attacks than anything else, and my question remains unanswered. It’s probably deleted by now, I don’t know.
BTW, I looked at a few of the questions this egotistical jerk had answered and saw he makes a habit of putting people down. He told one poor guy his brain was not wired right. All this guy did was try to declare an inherited class incorrectly. They can sure dish it out but they sure can’t take it!
SO has the sh*ttiest moderators on the planet!
SO is definitely hit or miss. There are useful answers on there but what a P.I.T.A. to ask a question there. Seems most “vets” are more interested in “appearing” right about something, stroking their ego, or arguing over petty inconsequential bs rather than DOING WHAT THE SITE CLAIMS TO BE ABOUT — which is answering questions and providing tangible help to people with questions.
People there would seriously rather spend 2 hours correcting “there” and “they’re” instead of tackling the actual question. What a waste of efficiency.
The SO community only wants questions that they can answer (and add to their reputation points). Any question about modifying an algorithm that isn’t simple or easy to do, like depth-first-search, gets flagged for removal. Some guy told me that nobody wants to read the “crap code” I came up with. That crap code came from the “Introduction to Algorithms” book written by Cormen!
I laughed a lot after reading this article. It is very funny written, at the same time, It is true.
Couldn’t agree more with this post. A couple years ago it was so much better, now it’s junk. No one receives answers that are worth while, but they’ll receive 50 down votes in less than a 1 minute and have their account suspended even if they post all their code and precise issues. I understand if people just post “help me” and no code, no questions, and it’s a homework assignment, but come on, just down voting every single post and then trolling the person who asked. It all seems to come from their moderators and veteran people too. Guess a couple rep points got their ego trip going.
And here’s why it rocks: http://cauecmrego.blogspot.com.br/2014/05/why-stack-exchange-network-rocks.html
Don’t make yourself a fool posting that crap, please.
yeah… he’s been spamming all the blogs with that crap lol…
just ignore it, attention is all he wants.
I agree in parts. The worst part of SO is that you have to word question perfectly and give it a perfect structure code separate text separate blah blah every time even if the question has only 5 lines it makes sense when there is large numbers of line of code and looking through may get difficult .The Most annoying thing about SO is the highly privileged mods or troll looking for points edits and down votes by invoking any rules declared SO which in many cases without properly understanding the question .I have faced the all the things @serg said put up a question which could’t be answered by anyone and later it was flooding with negative votes not because the question was idiotic was speculative and expletives* . and in the end i received a question ban and next time i found a really interesting question answered it and user accepted and commented as exactly what he wanted and reverse scenario happened .What i find ironic is that some of the rules which are stated by SO are openly flouted as some question popular among SO users are exactly what SO emphasizes not to be its very irritating .Seriously to ask a question you have to get so much prepared like going for a war .The next thing is fake voting up for points seriously grow up guys.Then last when user asks for question most people like to help out what wrong in that if somebody suggests wrong answer if that person is notified then nothing is wrong about it but ,if the answer is exactly what user asked is it fair to compete by voting down your competion its not that i worry about loosing points eventually if you get negative votes for answers you might get banned for that also now they
Wait! Some of your past questions have not been well-received, and you’re in danger of being blocked from asking any more.
For help formulating a clear, useful question, see: How do I ask a good question?
Also, edit your previous questions to improve formatting and clarity.
Really what wrong did i do by asking a question that go question which was termed broad and another question that 2 negative votes
Don’t worry people, I’m also sick of Stack Exchange and will be launching an alternative I coded these months, before September. Just wait for it! You can also reply to this comment to suggest some features you wish to be there, there is always room for new features even though the software is done!
Yep, the same holds for almost all sites in the network, the problem is that SE does not want to build or support nice international communities, they just need volunteers to write a Q&A library useful for viewers OUTSIDE the network. See my rant here 😉
http://www.quora.com/Quora-vs-Stack-Exchange/Is-there-a-community-on-Stack-Exchange-Stack-Overflow-sites-like-there-is-on-Quora/answer/Sebastian-Schacher
I think it also applies to other sites in the SE network http://1in99.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/why-stack-exchange-sites-suck-and-what-im-doing-for-that/
Couldn’t agree more. Yes, I’m new to XCode 5.1.1/iOS7.1 SDK programming, and as such, seem to bump up agains seemingly trivial questions all the time. I have been programming in lots of other languages and platforms since circa 1980, back in the day when Grok meant something…
Usually I find my own answers after what seems like about 5 months of ratting around – and occasionally I made the mistake of seeking answers on SO. Well, 5 such questions got me banned – now I can’t ask any more. So that one’s out.
Turning as one does to the Apple Developer Forums – what do I find… you guessed it. Much the same breed of trolls. There is one person there goes by the name of Simpsonics, with 2,831 posts to his credit. Does this person need a life or what? If answers are less than helpful, don’t be surprised, because mostly you get the old “What? you want us to write your code for you??” type of response.
anyway .. rant rant… But I’m staying with XCode, and learning a lot because occasionally there are people on the Apple site who do give full answers, and are most helpful. I have learnt to just ignore the others. I have also started my own wordpress site, where I keep useful bits of code for things I have managed to fix myself, so I can come back to them later when I need them.
Absolutely agree.
I found SO a few years ago and thought it was great.
I asked a few questions without 100% understanding the rules, and I was quickly punished, and after a little while was banned, and so have to answer questions before I can ask any again.
I don’t mind contributing, but it is hard to compete with the best programmers in the world which is what it ends up as.
I just want some help once in a while when I can’t find the answer, and to be honest, if I don’t know it and can’t find the answer easily, then I bet the others with less knowledge who are also interested.
If there is a better place, please let me know.
Try http://www.questiondiscussion.com, it’s new with less strict moderators and is pretty cool. Not as huge as stackoverflow ofcourse, but sometimes a new perspective is better! I found it quite fresh and I am happy to share it here.
Thank you!
Tried contributing on SO for a day and immediately hated it. Ironically enough work isn’t this much work! I’ll still go there to grab snippets of code and to gloss over any interesting comments about why something works in practice and in theory, but I’d rather be writing code.
it has some warts but overall it’s quite useful. For question or answered ruined by Bill the Lizard, there are dozens more which were unscathed.
people still use Delphi?
It happened to me..
The strange thing is, some people answered the same question well.
But some people, degraded my question and made I sure that I was baned to ask any new questions.
Yup. Agreed 100%.
Nothing more than a bunch of conceited Nazi idiots.
I know this is an old post and all but that question is such a bad question to ask.
I will totally agree that the question you asked sounds like either:
– An interview question
– Or a homework question
– Or an exam question
Stackoverflow gets a lot of exam/homework/interview questions on its site and some are answered (rarely, or ages ago when the site first started); so much so that people can cheat at exams using SO now if they Google search with the question.
This why people will not answer such questions, it’s not about SO not wanting to help people but about your question being one of those questions which is seen as falling into those categories.
It should be noted that SO is about solving problems, not on-demand code writing. As an answerer I hate it when a person asks a question without any visible effort their side and just says “write this in a language” without adding “so I can peddle your work as my own”.
I am more than prepared to help, advise and discuss but I am not there to free-freelance your work for you, thank you very much.
Also you want to pass your course/homework/exam? Well do the work, I did so why should you be any different? I hate it when people want to cheat at their job, being something they are not.
It does not matter if you are innocent, the internet is not. We don’t know you in real life, how are we supposed to know you mean well?
As for coming back 1.5 years later: the site is always cleaned up and changes as the community does. If your question was deleted it was seen as cleaning up the database.
Also insulting answerers in your update doesn’t go a long way to getting their sympathy.
That is not entirely true.
When I posted question about Virtual 8086 Mode (for my OSDev Project) on SO, Bill the Lizard screamed, “modifying memory isn’t good practice!”, and downvoted my question. Then, another moderator came across my question and downvoted me again for “not being clear”. The moderator probably didn’t even understand the question.
Stackoverflow moderators are jobless fat people who only have limited knowledge in some high-level languages like VB.Net, C#, and Java.
It is true that homework/exam questions should be banned from stackoverflow, but whenever people ask “real” coding questions, like those in “C” and “C++”, those questions rarely get answered.
— The joke answers by stupid, jobless moderators (usually high-voted) that annoys me
me: …………. How can I implement this virtual 8086 mode handler in my OS (stdlibs are supported, libgcc library is used)… (I get -30 votes)
moderator: Smells like homework!! (gets 124 up-votes)
moderator: Your question is unclear.
moderator: Your question exposes privacy onto the internet.
I really think that the reputation policy and the up-down voting system is what messes up so personally. I really want those “features” removed from that so site, so that the moderators can’t damage SO any furthur.
95% of the newbie users does not take the time to read the FAQ. I have read it and I also asked a lot of questions and I received none of the negative effects you have described here. I think that you are over reacting to a corner case. Of course you can have your opinion but don’t expect anyone to consider you a competent anyone if you call SO a “trolls&noobs zoo” en masse. The terminology you use suggests that you are one of those adolescent males who are perfectly described by ESR in his essay. I feel sorry for you.
You’ll be back if you really ask questions there, and get insulted, but perhaps you are a SO troll.
i found a kind of narcissists in SO..,
The whole problem with Stack Overflow (SO) and its sister sites is, was, and always be its rating system.
The original intent of the rating system was to cull poor answers to posted questions. But then a “Points” system was initiated and the whole system was perverted into a social site where Type-A types compete for recognition. And you can’t have people asking questions that are “ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical” since such questions will skew the Points of the answerers.
I never post questions on SO. I will Google my question and then, if a SO hit comes up, I’ll read the “Q” & “As” and get the gist of the answer I was looking for.
Of course, I always do my homework first and use Google/SO as a last resort. As (also) a teacher myself, I am well aware of lazy students that turn to sites such as SO as a first resort. Did they not know that the teacher also has Internet access and knows all the sites and all the software sites and where “Usual Suspects” are? If I see plagiarism, I simply give the student a Zero for the HOMEWORK and a link to where their answer came from. I find their lack of effort disturbing. If they want to argue with me, I suggest they take it up with the Dean. The Dean is much less tolerant than I am on issues of cheating, usually giving the student a Zero for the COURSE and putting them on Academic Probation.
Curious…. is this mostly for students who just copy large portions of codes and try to “dress it up” to look like their original work? Would they be free to use language/script features though? For example, I was thinking about writing a function in Python to see if a list already contained a value, but then I noticed
if (match[i] not in list): does the trick, so I just used that instead.
It all comes down to what we learned in first grade: “There are no bad questions.” There’s a reason for that premise: implying that a person’s question is bad makes the person feel bad. The person is already in a humble spot by asking the question. If their question is shot down, then they feel stupid. The person is much less likely to ask another question and will probably go into a passive mode of behavior. It seems that the stack overflow forgot this. Doesn’t stack overflow want an engaged, active community?
Mr. Davis, I wholeheartedly agree with you both as a practitioner and as a teacher.
It depends upon what you mean by an ‘engaged’ community? If it’s about asking every kind of questions especially with not enough information, such as ‘My listview on Android hid today! What do I do?”.
I am not denying that legit questions are closed, etc. But most of the ‘stories’ people are mentioning is due to their own poor explanation of questions. SO is not a paid site and therefore you have to present your question nicely. An interrogation session in the comments of a question often means it was a bad question. But the same users will come here and rant. Don’t be a part of it.
FWIW, just shut the fuck up and go crawl back under your rock. It’s painfully obvious to anyone with half a brain that you are constantly defending that Stack-O-Crap for a reason.
@Max hey max, you wearing a maxi?
Heavy handed and arrogant mods are discouraging experts from starting or staying. They wonder why they can’t keep good experts – check out the policies and actions of moderators. Experts leave before they even cross the 500 point level…the “10k challenges” are missing the point.
You can’t be an expert at SO. The community dislikes complex questions that experts enjoy asking and will down-vote those questions if they can’t answer it. Wankers.
Well in their defense, the community is quite willing to help if you can share/let them know what you have tried irrespective of the question difficulty level. If you expect spoon feeding to your questions, you’re in the wrong place indeed.
The SO community definitely isn’t helpfuly. They flag down difficult questions about algorithms that they can’t answer and up-vote simple questions. Cs.stackexchange is for computer science researchers that expect research-level questions only.
Well, hopefully a lot of people will be reading your article, agree with you and avoid polluting SO with such useless questions from a community perspective. If there’s no bad questions indeed, there are bad places to ask some questions. You could ask your local butcher about Mechanic, don’t be surprised if he send you to the garage instead. The web is FULL of sites where you can ask whatever you want, however you want, just go to any of these places if you don’t want to follow SO rules…
Yeah…there have been lot of. Shitty policing going on SO. Those ppl have no ideas about the question nor ans, just poking their big nose in the matters that their retarted brains can’t understand
I am trying to learn different programming aspects on my own, and when i struggle with something i search and search, but the moment i get the idea to post my question on SO i quickly slap my face. Last week i gave it a shot in the hope that SO has gotten any better, but the moment i posted my question it was immediately closed, why ? No one knows. They tend to make you feel stupid, and that you do not deserve to ask any question. I mean even if the question seems really really stupid you do not make the asker feel stupid, it is the same as a good professor. If you ask him a question, he does not implicitly tell you that you are a moron, instead he guides you to find the correct answer that will satisfy you. With SO this not the case. I think most of the people that do such things on SO are people with problems or have been molested when they were little.
Because SO is a site made by Programmers, for Programmers. Answers for stupid questions can be googled or found in study books easily. I find answers for 95% of my questions without even asking them, cuz i can google right.
SO is moderated by users that only like easy questions about algorithms and will downvote the difficult ones. Cs.stackexchange is only for research-level questions. I’ve seen this all too many times to call it just coincidence.
Actually SO is a fantastic site BECAUSE it has great questions and great answers. I hate it when people ask to have their homework done, and I hate even more when I google for an actual question and get directed to something as specific as someone’s homework, because that would mostly be useless for my problem.
SO is great.
I know this may seem egocentric, but: I’ve asked multiple questions on SO. One was closed because it actually was a stupid question, but the other ones were upvoted and yielded good answers.
I feel like adding: The mods are actually terrible at times though. Sometimes I google something, only to reach a question that has been closed because it’s “too specific” – with thousands of views in a matter of weeks or months.
Mods are terrible in most communities though. Give people power and they abuse it. It’s pathetic.
The mods are horrendous at stackoverflow. I had asked a question about modifying mergesort using pseudocode and it got down-voted. Then I asked a question about selection sort using pseudocode and it got 4 up-votes! Mergesort is a more complex algorithm than selection sort. This has happened so many times that I’ve realized that stackoverflow users only like easy questions that they can answer (and increase their reputation) and will downvote hard questions. I was told to take my question about depth-first-search to cs.stackexchange.com, but when I ask questions there they tell me “it’s too basic and doesn’t contribue to anything to theoretical knowledge”. So basically, stackoverflow is for working developers and cs.stackexchange is for PhDs. Everyone else who is learning algorithms can go take a hike!
Agree! Stackoverflow.com is sh*t! I just started graduate school in computer science and have been learning basic algorithmic theory. I go to stackoverflow to ask questions and I keep getting downvoted because my questions are “about theory and not about implementation”. They send me to cs.stackexchange.com where I post my questions about the mergesort algorithm and they downvote my questions because “….this site is about concepts, algorithms, principles, etc. behind computer science, not about code or implementation….” What? So, where can a person ask a question about modifying an algorithm? Is stackexchange more Nazi or Fascist? I think more Nazi because they thoroughly and systematically terminate any honest, sincere attempts to learn.
I also agree…its the worse website on the Internet. I wish the Internet would gang up, moderate itself and ban it from the Internet. I get banned just for asking any question whatsoever.
“smells like homework”…and what if it is? No one is explicitly asking you to do the whole problem for them but if their book isn’t much help and their professor isn’t available, the next best thin is asking someone who know how to do it and can get you started. Claiming a question is homework and refusing to answer because they should “figure it out themselves” is a poor excuse not to answer the question if you can. In the business world,perhaps someone is stuck on something technical they don’t normally deal with and need a quick answer…so give it to them without the snark or a lecture on how it’s such a n00b question to ask, it’s not what they should be doing, or claiming the question isn’t valid.
even some of my questions on design paradigm and security got down votes and now i can’t post a question. i got badges the algorithm ignored that. I told them to jerk off!! good old forums dedicated to their technologies. Suck it SO!!
Can’t agree more! stackOverflow sucks sucks sucks!!!! It is just disgusting! They do not give you an answer to your question, but simply keep saying your question does not fit this website or it is vague, etc. I have had questions which did not receive a single answer there but was given effective solutions in other websites. I just hate stackOverflow. They’re the worst snobbish!
same basic thing happened to me 3 times
That question indeed smells like homework and (having taught programming) I am strictly against homework: http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/70155/133368. It’s good if that question tickled your interest in algorithms, but why post more than a nudge in the right direction?
Also, you getting worked up about the close reason seems silly. There used to be very few close reasons and if you wanted to vote for closing a question, you just had to pick one, even if it was a bad fit.
Just to provide some context: I have basically stopped answering years ago (http://stacksbi.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/sbi-is-leaving/) and have had a few rows on meta with the mods and with Jeff. (In fact, we in the C++ chatroom might have been the inventors of the term “meta police”.) I received emails from Jeff asking me to stop arguing on meta and some of the mods do not like me at all (mainly because I didn’t).
Very true. I once answered a question ‘why do we need delagates’ i provided a loose example of passing a method to a cache engine and got horribly attacked because the code wasnt perfect…. but it did answer the question. SO is useful for info on errors still that is it, unfortunately.
Very true. I once answered a question ‘why do we need delegates’ i provided a loose example of passing a method to a cache engine and got horribly attacked because the code wasnt perfect…. but it did answer the question. SO is useful for info on errors still that is it, unfortunately.
I don’t hate SO. I don’t think it sucks, but it does have a lot of problems.
But ultimately, the worst problem is that SO is a good search engine. But a terrible Q&A site. If your question has already been asked, SO will likely have a perfectly satisfactorily answer for you, that you can find quickly. Even if that particular answer isn’t good enough, there might be more answers on that question, or you could look at related questions.
If, however, your question hasn’t been asked before, or none of the answers on related questions were satisfactory, good luck. You’ll need it. Between overzealous moderators, micromanaging answers, and ruse comments, you’ll probably never get your answer.
Especially if your question is obviously related to other questions on the site – nobody sees nuance. Your question could describe in vivid detail why every one of the related questions don’t actually fit your use case, of that the answers are wrong, but you’ll still be marked as a duplicate.
If, however, it’s not obviously related to another question, it’ll probably be ignored. Unless, of course, it’s a question that could be answered through documentation, then you’ll be downvoted to hell.
SO. Good place to find answers, terrible place to ask questions.
Many reason SO sucks. But a simpler one is the outright lie. If you post an answer as anonymous with your name and email address you are then sent email for confirmation. Sounds legitimate you say? There is where the lie comes in. The verification email ask for you to create an SO account. Creating an SO account is not under the definition of email verification. Especially for a comment box that said “Anonymous”. SO just wants accounts for whatever google mess data collection mail address database garbage. SO, why not remove the facade of anonymous commenting, or at least do a verification and end it there. Another example of declining planetary intelligence
That is a taste of what it’s like when the US Goverment/corporation complex takes over the internet taxing it to death. Then every site will be like SO with the ban happy police unless you are miss goody two shoes.
And trying to get help will be like trying to get Google to respond and actually listen to what people want.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for this post! I’ve had all of the situations above and I’ve stopped using SO. Too bad. It’s hard to find a replacement.
100000000000000000% agreed !! SO really sucks there is no place for problems there,,,they just want good solutions rather and person to argue with…!! Any other sites ..???
SO is a nice resource for finding answers to questions, but there are way too many ego-centric policemen on the site. I cringe when I see “closed due to ‘not a real question'”. Since when is any question not a real question? Way too many people trying to one-up each other in their answers.
I saw a comment just today to an answer, “Downvoting. Quoting just the spec is a poor answer.” So someone asked a question, and someone had the “nerve” to answer it by quoting the exact spec/source of the answer, and the answer gets downvoted because it wasn’t “fluffy” or “English” enough? Get real…
It’s really a double-edged sword… There are a lot of smart guys (and gals) on SO, many of who you’d like to have on your team — until you met them in person and found out they interact on a real team with real people just like they do on SO. Then, you’d probably change your mind about wanting them on your team and would instead prefer a more junior guy who’s not such a self-centered turd.
Just my 2.5 cents (from an 18+ year professional developer who’s not a jerk!)
Their policies for closing questions need to be revised. They are stupid I think
*many of WHOM… 😉
Once I loved this site, it’s degrading now. Maybe due to their poor choice of moderators. Not doubting their techinical skills though.
I’ve gotten ans answer to every single question I’ve answered to be honest. There is loads of info on the site about how to ask, and if what you want fits that you get answered. I’m low rep, not moderating etc but I have received a friendly, helpful answer to everything.
For more vague questions, or situations where no code is written or research effort is made then other sites are the way to go. Sure there’s some dreadful moderation on there, sadly a common thing online, but once you read the help centre and FAQ you can get lots of advice.
It’s not perfect by a long shot, but I’ve gotten answers this week that saved my bacon in work.
Fuck yourself moron
I also used to like SO but it is getting worse and is sure to continue to degrade unless SO changes its culture of treating its contributors like scum who should feel honored to have the privilege to be part of community. The problem with SO is its army of Nazi moderators who seem to have nothing to look forward to in life except the joy of talking down to and arbitrarily punishing others who are trying to be helpful. What SO really needs is a way to up/down vote its moderators. The way it currently works, there is no way to keep moderator-induced misbehavior, idiocy, incompetency or other BS in check.
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so where can i do it please assist.
Totally Agree sometime a question is just a simple question , why the hell they force us to write more and more when all we have It’s just a simple question, we all programmers , short and simple is our motto , why unnecessary complex things?
SO shows perfectly how humans are crappy, they don’t help people for make them happy but for get some kind of reward
The reward is meaningless, but I would just like to get the minimum points to be able to have the “basic” toolset of functions available on the site.
I’ve spent the last week trying to build up my rep so I can participate in SO. I have gained about 70 rep points, but keep getting them taking away.
Incident 1: a guy asked a very well worded question in a different language. I answered him in English, spending 20-30 minutes to write a very detailed explanation that perfectly and thoroughly answered him. The mods don’t like non-English questions, but you know what? I don’t have enough rep to edit his question and put the English translation. So they came in and deleted it, and I lost my points. I could have put the translation in my answer, but that seemed to violate the “answering policy” rules.
Incident 2: Some guys comes on the site, I do research, I spend time writing a nice answer, I give him code. Then, his account gets deleted, and I lose the rep, even though the question and answer could have benefited future readers.
The barrier for entry is bullshit. I think I will go back to just reading the answers that come up in Google as I have for many years, and not bother participating, as it seems like a second job.
The observation about this being a second job is a good one. The people who spend all day there either have to be there for the love of it or because they have nowhere else to be. I think the second category is much larger than the first.
If one is imaginative, one will get voted down. Regurgitate stuff from textbooks and you are fine. This is definitely not a forum to learn new concepts.
> Yes I too ran into Bill the Lizard and can see I am not alone in thinking he uses his delete finger far too often so add me to the list that named and shamed him.
That is a very good example of very bad StackOverflow moderator.
I see lots of people here complaining about him.
Fuck Lizard Bill !
(PS: can a moderator be moderated?)
Haha, Bill the Lizard went after my contributions and I was looking for a way to ask him “what the fuck man?” Apparently being an ass is in his blood. Make him suffer people if you have time! 🙂
I agree completely with what has been said on this post. Good job man!
I have been struggling with this for a long time, when someone closes my question
for no particular reason. Or because they think it has to be closed.
Their closing policies need to be revised, and true there are lot of Q&A
Nazis there!!.
Great post, I hope this will somehow help stack overflow improve,
because it has good potential and it will be pitty if its quality
gets downgraded because of people like this.
I’ve used SO sparingly for about 6 years (20 questions, 400 answers, 8.5k rep [over 8k from answers]) and I honestly can’t say that I’ve ever had a real problem with how they do things.
If you ask a clear, specific question, then you’ll get answers. If you want to go helping people posting answers and you post a good answer, it’ll get upvoted (most of the time).
If you phone it in and just write some namby-pamby useless answer, you’ll get your balls busted.
I can only assume there’s a lot of people on here who have tried to just pad rep to get higher privileges (like 125 for downvoting, 200 for less ads) and posted stuff just to try and get numbers without caring about the quality of their posts. I’ve received (on average) a little over 2 up-votes worth of rep per answer I’ve given, because I’ve taken the time to make sure I’m giving a useful answer.
The place isn’t the Nazi police you’re all crying about, just use it as it’s meant to be used (a QA site) and don’t try to pad your rep just for the hell of it. You’ll be fine. If you really want to pad rep, just camp the newest questions for tags you know something about and post on them, you’ll get 200 rep in about an hour. Easy.
In short: you are one of those Nazis trying to convince us that Nazis don’t exist on NazisOverflow… just kidding 🙂
ITT: Noobs complaining because their shitty questions didn’t get answered.
You’re trolling, right? Shitty questions is all they can answers.
Where is the downvote button.
A few years ago, when linux had a chance of making headway on the desktop, there were people like you who would call the questioner all kinds of names. They would scare users away and have a good laugh about it. We know the resounding success linux had on the desktop, not! Keep it up.
When a replacement comes along and programmers find other ways to find the answers by cutting and pasting their exceptions in the latest fad language, SO and linux desktop can commiserate together.
If you want to see down votes, just try speaking out against these ridiculous moderating practices on meta.stackoverflow. Go on, try it!
My problem with SO is that I find most of their answers to be incorrect or incomplete unless the question is an easy one.
So do you have any replacement for this site?
I’d rather pay 100.00 a year and ask questions on http://www.experts-exchange.com/
Same problem. SO used to be great, now a bunch of Nazis who have nothing better to do than sit around deleting other peoples questions.
Here’s a perfect example of why SO sucks:
stackoverflow [dot] com /questions/2520727/why-cant-i-call-methods-within-a-class-that-explicitly-implements-an-interface
The first reply to the guy’s question criticizes the guy for saying “hello” and “thank you” in his question (and then goes on to end his answer with “thanks”). When the world has gotten to a place where we fault people for being polite in any context, we’re in a sad state.
PS: Fuck you, John Saunders. Thanks!!!
Please don’t end your comment with “thanks”, the Internet is not an appropriate place for this. Thanks.
I wish I could upvote your post 🙂
Well, SO was initially made to answer unexpected errors that arise during programming. That was it, then evolved to a much wider environment. Questions about “how?” and “why?” are discouraged there and questions about “what?” are most likely be answered. The site has somewhat a norm.
I find it funny how some are saying that some of those who ask a question on SO are lazy and their questions are due to lack of search and/or research. From my perspective, a noob, I always found the lazy aspect to be one of not asking questions versus the opposite. Interacting with strangers, asking questions, especially ones that admit ignorance isn’t easy for most people. Specifically speaking, asking a question on SO is really kind of annoying. I would rather just search and find the answer to my problem as quickly as possible. That seems more desirable than copying and pasting relevant code, then forming a cogent question in hopes of getting a correct answer maybe a few hours or days later. Thats all without the noob worry that my question wasn’t properly worded or too “vague”. The bulk of my contribution to SO has been in the form of questions searching for knowledge from others with more experience and know how. This is integral and, even the lifeblood, I might argue of the learning process in almost ANY arena. Thankfully, there are a lot of experts on the site who have gone above and beyond my question in the hopes of providing a more in depth understanding of said subject and thats what learning and asking questions is all about. Thats what good teachers and mentors do. Heres your solution and HERES why it works the way it does. There needs to be more of that, not less. It should be encouraged, not discouraged. In depth understanding eventually prevents more questions because thats the type of knowledge our brains eventually use and work with to solve future problems.
All of my questions on SO have been preceded by at least 30 google searches framed in different ways as to find a solution that pertains to my specific problem. Maybe I’m unique in that regard, but I doubt it. Especially amongst newbies. I don’t want to ask questions on SO but if I can’t find the answer I will. With that said, I’m considering other resources due to the plethora of reasons listed in the above posts.
Also, anyone who tells others not to “Thank” in any context is a moron. We are humans first. Conversing in text or audibly should always involve civility and proper manners as a respect for other humans. Ranking/Voting is not, and never will be a replacement for language and normal human interaction. This idea that thanking muddies things up is ridiculous and smacks of reasoning formed by socially inept idiots who don’t know how to say Hi to somebody walking down the street.
I totally agree. The best way to encourage learning is to be as polite and helpful as possible. I might add that the best way to discourage learning is to rudely imply the asker is somehow inferior, whether that inferiority consists of laziness or stupidity.
But in my book, ‘stupid’ doesn’t qualify as a way to put someone down. Some of us have been born more efficient brains for some things than others. Some of us have been born with blue eyes, others with brown.
One other thing. If SO doesn’t want to be a resource as described above, then somebody needs to take their place at the top of all search engine rankings in this context. Its annoying to look for in depth answers and responses to coding problems only to be confronted by a web application that discourages such. Yes, one can find other resources, but whether SO likes it or not, they are the resource that people, like me, who are searching for such conversations continually find in just about every search imaginable that involves a programming issue of some kind.
When getting heavily downvoted on SO when I started out I started putting a lot of effort into my questions. I’d usually write a small application to mimic my problem and post that and always be very careful that everything I said on the site was as per the FAQ guidelines. After 3 months and 5-6 seeminly successful questions in a row I had got up to 19 points and I was quite happy and excited. Then all of sudden I log in and I’ve been banned. You just have to laugh really. I’ve had such great help from people sometimes but the moderation is just some bizarre comedy!
Agree 100%. Total idiots. I usually get very good answer on StackOverflow, unless the mods interfere. They always have some moronic ideas that a question like mine already exit, although I usually spend at least whole hour looking for the answer on the web, and read at least 20 StackOverflow discussion, before I ask a question.
SO reminds me of what it’s like when getting *Help* from the government. They do the *blame* game making you go round and round.
I am learning to program, and often do a simple Google query for how to do something in Python or C. I cannot tell you how many times a crap ton of SO search results pop up, only to click on the link and see that some poor guy got berated for asking a question that he/she “should have just googled.” Well guess what SO your fing links are what show up when you google something like that. They pollute the internet. I hope your organization dies.
If it’s being backed by government funding then it’s not going to die. That is why we need a free market so the internet can have competition again.
Facebook and Twitter started by nerds back in the *Bush* era economy when people who had the money were more willing to invest. Now the investment is overseas and the rich have quietly pulled stock out of the US and it’s only China pumping up the US Dollar keeping us from having the worst economic crash ever.
China knows they depend on us to buy their cheap crap so if the US Dollar failed the shit would fly over to China too as their people are too poor to mass consume despite having over a billion people most of them are told what jobs they have to do and have to *register* to move or travel between states.
In the last 10 years they have allowed a limited enterprise and finding out it’s raising the living standards of China.
I left SO about 6 months ago. The only thing I miss now is the ability to up-vote the other poor sods I see trying to get something useful out of the site.
Odd thing, it seems a lot of my old posts are being deleted, I wonder with the mass exodus if they haven’t added a bot to remove the posts of those who left.
They should remove the voting system completely Most other forums do not have it I am not any more going to use it very unfair system for those people who need to ask question or help others. I do not like it any more. Cannot delete own account even if just standard user.
I see that about a million people before me agree with this. I had the same experience with SO but I kind of think that most people with a PhD in IT (and the big time answer posters there probably all fall into that category) are assholes. Strange, I never met one who, in the professional field, was friendly, helpful or even a sympathetic person. They all seem to be obsessed with showing to the world how clever they are and how dumb everybody else is.
I started with SO by asking a question and then tried to answer some questions. I thought my question was well defined according to their rules but I immediately got a downvote because it was “more appropriate for a forum”. My answer was also downvoted. So my reaction was “well that’s it then, I wont answer anymore”. Today I mostly browse SO when I have a problem but hardly ever bother with posting a question anymore. I just don’t feel like getting slapped in the face because some guy has a million points which gives him the power to do so.
This blog is awesome. Can you rename it to “Victim Mentality Anonymous”?
Never trust in a site that doesn’t let you delete your profile freely.
You can say that about a lot of sites now. The interent is becoming a giant bureaucracy type attitude where it’s impossible to get anything meaningful done.
I totally see the point everyone is making here. I never really post on there as I too, find it a little daunting. I feel like anything that is slightly wrong, will be down voted. So it’s a bit silly that they make us feel like we don’t want to contribute.
However, that aside, I work mostly by myself in terms of developing… if it wasn’t for SO, I just wouldn’t have been able to develop everything I have in a timely manner. I actually owe that site a lot in terms of professional development.
Wow. I’m sure there are pluses and minuses, but SO seems to becoming more research focused… from my perspective. Well I’m mostly interested in connecting technologies. Looking back and looking forward. SO is a great barometer of that calculus. I’ve read 1 post in this thread. My response… If you don’t have interesting questions to ask figure it out yourself.
David Heffernan is one of those lamer Nazi fucktards on SO who moderates Delphi questions.
Stack Overflow can drink my overflowing jizz. I asked three questions and got suspended with a threat of banhammering if I didn’t ask my questions in just the right way. Nah, I’m not kneeling down and kissing the emperor’s ring. Someone please make a programming site for noobs. I’ll even donate if you call it “stackoverflowsucks.com”
Would’ve been much better if you could post the question and their links? Will you?
I even agree with you. But SO was different when it was born. It really changed with the groth of users, and the real users who should be ban are those who does not give an answer to the question but just criticize the question with no sense bullshits. The only way to prevent this users is to create an area on SO and report all them.
Ken White is one of those Nazi moderators on SO.
I’f this was on SO I’d downvote it. Seems like sour grapes to me
Update from 2015.
It’s getting worse and worse. I can no longer stand the Nazis on that site. It’s just ridiculous. And sad.
all that depends 😛 but i tend to get good answers from SO, even in 2014/15, but agree that bill the fucking lizard and others might be more interrested in getting rep that anything else, but who can know and does complaining really help
no one even answered my question.. and in making question to hard and to many requirements just to post you Question.. :-(.. I Hope that they will improve there service…
I agree with OP. Downvoting without giving reason is like five me fucking a girl in party while she is not conscious and girl quizzes to find the father of the baby. Moment I ask question with grammatical mistake(Pardon, but english is not my native) they downvote. I mean WTF!!!! Atleast give a damn comment, saying what is wrong there!
Math stack exchange is just as bad. Some serious cunts on there.
SO takes the PISS, i posted a question, some guy said it was a duplicate…
had a look at the ‘duplicate’ was on a different programming language.
Hope these raging peado’s on SO and MSE get attacked by savage dogs….with aids.
Agree with you!
However I have to say that only Stack Overflow site has such bad downvoting practices. Many others I’m also visiting (like photography, electronics…) has much better climate.
Stack Overflow is not a forum. It is a question answer wiki. It was created under the false idea that past questions are likely to help future seekers and so should be curated. I am extremely frustrated, but I am going to stop myself before I say anything unkind.
I take this back. I was really frustrated. My problem is not with Stack Overflow itself. My problem is with the zealots who have been programming for 3 years and think they own the place because their rep is so high. To them I say, rep doesn’t mean you are good or smart. It’s an administration metric that allows for self governance.
I like SO for getting answers to things quickly (better format than a forum IMO) and have over 6k reputation there myself, but every time I see a valid question closed by Bill the Lizard (I see it a lot), I cover my face with my palm in disgust.
The phenomena was even more remarkable when the site meta-SO ( “Meta Stack Overflow is the part of the site where users discuss the workings and policies of Stack Overflow ” ) had its own independent reputation (rep) system.
You had these technically incompetent members having 10,000 (10k) rep on meta and 100 on SO treating with contempt the SO members (who are the actual SO contributors with) – reversely – 100 on meta and 10k on SO! These meta guys were a much better fit for political matters than programming… [now that’s changed: the rep shown on meta is the SO one, whatever the user meta Q&As are up or down voted].
All of this is of sensitive nature:
Of course the StackExchange folks do want and need as much as possible people to contribute to the sites. Not only Q&A, but also 1) flagging q&a 2) commenting 3) voting 4) deleting for high rep members 5) editing … well, all in all, they want you to spend as much time as possible on the sites.
(My account offers to review hundreds of posts – and I could indeed spend some hours doing that…)
And that works incredibly well! Look these guys spend a mega huge amount of time on the sites, doing all these administrative tasks! For free! (I guess moderators – about 20 members on SO – may get something, though)
What’s the secret to have people work for you, for free as in free beer?
Reputation. Or recognition if you prefer. Some members do actually want to help others, regardless the rep system, and want to share their own skills. But the majority of members, the ones spending days and night on the sites, is dead greedy for recognition.
Just watch the effects of reputation on questions, and even more on answers (and comments: not the vote [there’s only +votes with no impact on rep] but the answers to the comment).
A “-1” (down) vote on an answer is like the poster just got a nuclear bomb, within seconds he has to ask “why did I get down-voted?” (if it’s not obvious) ; the poor guy is like a dog having the tail between his legs. Like a trapped animal, he edits or deletes the answer quick. But, is a “-1” actually destroying the rep, bad? Nope. A “-1” just removes 2-rep, while a “+1” gives 10-rep on an answer. A psychologist would be interested in those members – probably still lacking recognition from their parents/teachers/… probably under-estimated in school / work / home …
Another interesting aspect is the yearly moderators election. A moderator is the highest level of recognition a member may get on SO (and all SE sites). Out of millions of members, only about 20 users are moderators. A yearly moderator election adds/replace a handle of them. About 30 members apply for “the job”, and everyone having a minimum of rep may vote for their favorite applicant. Competition is harsh.
Each competitor gives a small “speech”, and the site automatically adds to that a number of figures to show how that particular member is dedicated to the site: presence, rep, number of q&a, edited / flagged / deleted / closed etc… posts.
Giving recognition to people eager for recognition and letting them rule the site is maybe the problem. But how can SO manages to get people spend time on the site otherwise? What could be changed?
Firstly, is “rep” really reputation?
Obviously, rep requires some skills. But, does a user with 20k rep really deserve more reputation than a 5k one, provided that “20k” spends 10 times more time on the site, and gets on average +20 per answer, while “5k” gets +80 per answer, on average? Who is more skillful, reliable?
And what about the “jackpot” questions: these are ultra-simple questions to which the first to answer gets tons of votes/rep. Why’s that? Because most SO readers are rather beginners, and they upvote the questions they’re interested in, the questions they understand, the simple ones. Here again, the more dedicated users, the ones scanning meticulously the new questions get the more rep. Some users only answered a small number of questions, and may get +1000 rep per answer easily, spread over a few days [there’s a limit on the rep you get per day].
Occasionally, I see a “40k” answering a rather tricky question with a very poorly skilled answer. He doesn’t get rep, but that shows how the rep system works: the guy probably got his rep thanks to dedication and easy-answers. (to be fair, what I like on SO, is that the site is pretty open: one can check all q&a of a user, his comments etc… to get a more accurate profile that’s not only based on a (rep) number).
“rep” requires skills, but that’s not the most important factor. “rep” requires dedication, mainly.
So, how to behave on SO?
Maybe the rule number one is: get a minimum rep to use the site comfortably to your own interest, basically q&a, having useful features like deletion, view the +/- of a post, close/reopen, view deleted posts etc…
Then stop running for “rep”. “rep” is not reputation. Really.
That’s assuming you can do anything at all. Apparently there are several sub domains of stack exchange and even though I was able to ask a programming question and get an answer a few years ago, today apparently I can’t do anything. I can’t upvote, downvote, or answer anything. If a question needs a good answer it will have a tag like this:
“Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality answers, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site.”
However, if a question has already attracted good answers there would be absolutely no need for any new answers which defeats the whole point. If it isn’t properly answered you want MORE answers, not NO answers. If it is properly answered already there is no need to answer. It’s a stupid backwards system overall.
My profile says I never asked anything at all ever so I am guessing the system purges inactivity. In other words, if you don’t obsessively participate you won’t get to participate in the future. That’s right, I have exactly 1 point reputation because I haven’t logged in in a while.
Any system that overly restricts it’s users to that extent is going to push away anyone who might have an answer. I also don’t like the emphasis given to voting. The person asking the question should have priority in rating answers, not the people who view from the sides. People also shouldn’t be allowed to vote for moderators. Or anything really. It shouldn’t be a popularity contest. It should just be about questions and answers.
That all being said, I have no intention on even trying to use that forum ever again. All they want are people who spent several hours a day obsessing. It’s just a trap to generate ad revenue.
Stack Overflow is like “We only want SMART people who ask SMART questions on here, that will be answered by SMART people. If you’re STUPID and you ask STUPID questions on here, because you’re so STUPID, we’re going to down vote your questions, and after asking 3 questions with at least a couple down votes each, you will be BAN from asking questions for two weeks. It doesn’t even matter if the last two questions were asked last year, and you JUST asked the third question today, they will give you a 2 week ban. Basically, if you’re smart, and you already know everything, why the fuck would you even be asking questions on the website? But, Stack Overflow’s like, “Whatever. We only answer questions to people who already knows the answers to their own question, because that’s just how we do.” Fuck Stack Overflow. If there was any other websites out there with better attitude, then Stack Overflow basically will no longer be use. By anyone. Like literally.
I realize you are venting; vent away. But it isn’t a stupid / smart thing. I’ve been writing code for twelve years. I’m an expert level in several technologies. Yet I apparently ask stupid questions in those technologies. The problem is that you have people who are so caught up in the curation of these questions and answers. And you know they are monoculture zealots because if they weren’t, they would realize that tech is changing every few years. It doesn’t make any sense to curate software questions and answers.
What languages do you write in? I wish I truly understood one properly. I start to get it then there is like 4million things more to add and that is when I get confused. I started to learn JS again because of school and Java as well however, the school sucks because they ask us to read information about 5 to 6 years ago and half of what you read is irrelevant. Some of what they teach in this last class was actually something I enjoyed reading and learning but for the most part why some of the curriculum is so outdated. I get learning the history but come on we should have been learning PHP by now.
I write in C#. C# is pretty much the same as it has always been. They just add more features to the spec. They never take things away. Languages in general do not become outdated that quickly. Frameworks do. I like Visual Studio. There is a free, full featured community edition for learners like you (http://www.visualstudio.com/Free) and open source coders like me. Nothing helps me to learn a new framework like intellisense.
There is a site called dreamincode.net 🙂
I found this to be true these days I get angry because they don’t answer the question they just complain. Look some of us are not naturally gifted in the art of being a nerd but we trying to be. So what it is a school question give the person an idea please. Lastly, I just go to dreamincode.net they are pretty big as well and seem a lot nicer and more willing to help. I wish I was talented like that, I know they not suppose to answer the question if it is homework but he said help me get started not do it all for me man please.
Never had a problem personally. Maybe if I spent more time on SO I would, but in general I agree with a lot of the questions I see that get such responses. They didn’t look like “you didn’t match my requisite level of intelligence!” responses to me, they seemed more for questions that were too broad and give the impression that the person didn’t spend the time doing their homework/digging enough to really ask a specific question. I guess plenty of those types of questions get to run free too, so I would agree it’s inconsistent.
Personally I think there’s room sites with both kinds of approaches- and both can lead to a happier ‘questioner’. A site that allows more broad questions, or general ‘homework-y’ type questions or just generally doesn’t hold too many restrictions will get a broader range of questions and answers which can be great. But a highly curated site that tries to hold a high quality bar for questions and answers can lead to a better experience as well (answers that site resources, help the user get a more complete picture, questions where user includes steps they took to debug, logs etc).
Whether SO’s quality bar is at such a level I understand could be debatable, but my point is just that I think both approaches can be helpful; SO goes one way, and other sites can give you the other experience. Of course- you won’t get nearly as much attention for your question in most other places, but that suggests SO has been doing a pretty good job I guess.
I’m a developer and my software was recommended by users with a high reputation in several topics on SO,
Another competitor then started making fake accounts and spamming his software in these topics.
I’ve contacted SO and asked them to remove the spam comments.
They refused to remove the spam, and after i asked them again they simply removed the topics.
Very unfriendly support, disgusting people…they punished me for contacting them too much.
Greets from Austrtia
They have the attitude of *customer is always wrong*. That’s what a socialist nation is like. You think that is bad try having national health care where if you have any criticism it will take 5 years to change if they do it at all.
Anything ran in a bureaucracy has to have *group* think and something that could be an easy fix takes 5 years to get everyone to agree to make the funds happen going thru all the red tape.
Stack Exchange reminds me so much of a government controlled society where you have to be politically correct or you’re out.
Social nations don’t allow competition so if a company or group is bad they will always be bad until something extreme happens like a bunch of deaths to boot the group out.
At least in a private business you can choose not to go there and they will naturally fail going bankrupt while still possibly blaming the customers then a new business takes over that does it right.
Great post. I could not agree with you more.
I asked StackOverflow to delete my account today (which is idiotically difficult to do). As a beginner programmer it’s a horrible feeling to not get the help I need. When posting a question, after hours of googling and researcyng my problems, to what should be a community of helpful like-minded people, I expected helpful and polite responses.
In stead I recieve messages about how wrong the question is and that it has been asked before – accompanied of course by a storm of votes sending my score, which to some probably equals my value as a programmer, down to the bottom.
It makes me incredibly sad and angry at the same time. The only thing stackoverflow is good for is taking the spirit out of beginners, while maintaining the egos of the people at the top who know how to play the game – which is all it is. A stupid game.
To be fair, it’s better to have questions centralized in a way, meaning mark “duplicate” questions as such, adding a link to the first copy.
SO is a pretty high level programming site, and, TBH, many beginners questions simply do not make sense. Say you’re asking a math teacher “have a problem with this: 2 x +, x 2”, maybe that makes sense to you, but not for someone who is used to rigorous math. In that case you need a math teacher – not a Q&A site.
Therefore, do not take the down voting personally. Have a look at the link given and learn.
When you feel more comfortable programming wise, come again on a new account.
Disclaimer: see my post above about what I think about reputation and people spending 24/7 on the site, though.
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you’re pretty mad lel
I joined Experts-Exchange in 2000 and became a recognized Expert in Delphi Programming and a couple of other areas.
When they went to the paid model and started requiring people that contributed to their site get 3,000 points per month is when I decided to just let it go.
I began to use SO and quickly found out that the question NAZI’s there are even worse than having to answer 2 questions per month on EE.
I think I’ll just write a new site that is a combination of them both and see where we can go from there.
I’ll come back and post the URL…
Yeah, to top it all off, I just posted a question asking about bad word scoring on php. A guy named Mike down-voted and put the question on hold. This is in his profile “Currently a manager of a hotel in Costa Rica. I have been programming mostly as a hobby on and off for about 15 years”
Maybe that tells you how bad your question was? Seriously, do you think people are being paid to read badly formatted, tagged, worded questions?
@Suffian, You don’t know what the questions was, how dare you claim that it was badly formatted.
I’ve been a developer for over 20 years and to have someone put my question on hold without a reason, especially when he has never been a professional developer is just plain stupid.
I believe that the “reputation” should not be cumulative but should be attributed to certain topic areas. Then some manager of a hotel couldn’t do that to a questions about PHP programming.
@mrbaseball34 “put my question on hold without a reason”? How? No one can put your question on hold without a reason (it could be wrong reason however, but it is mandatory). And there are proper platforms to appeal such a case: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/ and http://meta.stackexchange.com/. Moderators may make mistake but it doesn’t get fixed by commenting on a troll blog such as this.
I agree, I stopped bothering on SO, just use it to find answers to similar questions I have but I shall never bother posting there… too many ‘trads moderating and just arbitrarily deciding my question isn’t a question – when it is, marking as duplicate – when it isn’t, or not believing there can be any valid reason for me to need to do what I’m asking… the ‘tards are ruining it, in the same way mods at wikipedia have.
Do you read rules before using a service or a product? Clearly not. SO has a help section which you must have read before launching the attack. And btw, duplicate question isn’t as bad as you think but again you haven’t checked it at meta stackexchange or meta stackoverflow.
I agree and the problem refers to the rewarding system. SO give points to idiots who can find mistakes in your questions, so a lot of people will just focus on being assholes rather than in posting useful answers.
Agreed with you 100%. SO is full of big headed retarded cunts who think they are it just because they have no life other than gaining reputation on SO. Whenever i post a question which i believe is important they downvote and even delete. We ask questions cause we don’t know. not because we know and we want to show that we are big.
Sites like you posted is part of why the government wants to take over the internet to stop trolling by creating their own disinformation agents but that will only make things worse as then there will be no chance for competition when everything is ran by the state top down without any accountability by *We the people*.
Since 9/11 the government has from not caring enough about cyber terrorists to being ultra paranoid and if they had their way they’d install an instant kill switch which I think is already there since Windows Vista time period but not being used yet until needed and I think it happened during the switch over to 64 bit architecture.
Remember when 32 bit was dumped? Kinda like going from rabbit ears to HD TV and you have to have a special encoder or you’re screwed where all the basic stations you are paying for today were free before. In fact ALL of TV before cable TV was invented was free. You just changed the channels. No special hook ups unless you wanted international stations.
The internet is now a hostile place compared even to 10 years ago. 10 years ago it was only unmoderated sites like 4 Chan that was hostile where people joke about the size of someone’s dick in an unrelated topic ruining it while NOT being funny at all and forums were largely ignored by trolls and trolls that did showed up were quickly called out.
In the 90s it was *punks* in their basement that would disrupt the internet just to *whop things up*
who have now grown up and gotten in which professional companies and governments who are now aware of computers and get paid to spread lies.
Now we have forums taken over by them in which they are *buddies* with the mods especially if the moderator in question agrees with the politics so ignores bullies who were once on sites like 4chan or Geocities that has poor moderation.
The government spying has gone way overboard and I do believe in what Snowden said they hire paid
I posted a question about alternate ways for electricity to work in Hogwarts and made some very clear points but they for some reason didn’t like my question and closed it without a second thought.
I am tempted to flame the mods but don’t want to be IP banned.
That’s how government trolls work and I believe it’s been going on since the Bush days only it was being done to Democrats and now it’s being turned around against all citizens regardless of *political party* unless you agree to bigger government and more control or otherwise you are a domestic *terrorist*.
It is sad how the internet went from a *super information highway* to a turnpike toll road. If they had their way the internet would be taxed to death though maybe that would be a good thing as then a second *free* web will be formed by users who have had it using open source technology.
The internet NEEDS serious competition started for the creative juice to flow once again.
“army of Nazi retards” so very true
Agreed with you..I have been blocked to ask question’s..After following the help center it is been stated that “Stack Exchange has automatic filters in place to ban questions from accounts that have contributed many low-quality questions in the past. These filters help keep the quality of our sites high.” If you refer to the link http://stackoverflow.com/tour says “Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It’s built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we’re working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming.” Why the fuck you don’t advertise on the welcome page that please get some 5-10 years of experience and later ask question or else we will block you. You call it open forums for study, and block people for asking wrong question. Were you stackoverflow born with computer and programming language…? Every one might not be good in English or asking question, Some might not be good in expressing there question. Stackoverflow please don’t keep so much pride or else please change stackoverflow to stackoverflow_only_for_geeks.com. You suck stackoverflow.
Wow. I can’t believe the number of butthurt people on this post. SO is a very popular and reputed site and so are the other related stacks. Almost all newbies to site have the above mentioned problems. But some of them prefer their passion over whining, and they stay, learn, get familiar with the system and become great contributors to the stack rather than whining about how their low quality posts were deleted by mods >.> and that hurt their tiny little precious hearts forever.
I’ve been with SO for six or seven years. It used to be a wonderful place to find help. It is not the application I have issues with for the most part. It is some of the people who are jerks have too much power. There are too many people on their with the answer-mill mentality. They have gamified answering questions and so get really nasty when something prevents them from getting their score, their fix, right away. I don’t usually talk to people say dumb things like “butthurt”. Your language betrays your maturity and intelligence.
I’m relatively new to SO and I did face the problems mentioned above. But now ive got familiar with the system and I’m loving it. L The usage of the word “butthurt” was not focused generally or to you. It was to describe some of the people in the comments section who took their valuable time to point out the “flaws” and “problems”. Also, is a question is deemed” stupid”, it is either because it is too easy that google has answers to it, or because it doesn’t make any sense. Please note, these are just the highly possible cases. (*You people will be happy to know that Bill the Lizard has stepped down from his position as a moderator and has become a regular user. Three new moderators have been appointed in his place*)
You barge in sounding like a total twat, “just saying” stuff, then try to take it all back in your follow-up. Doesn’t work that way. Read this initial post of yours again. You sounded like a total jerk.
@AdamP does P stands for Pyjama? Because you seem funny and I thought your name should be funny too.
Tons of people with tons of rep leave (are leaving) after spending years there. I’m one. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it might. Just don’t expect me to be on meta to say “told ya so.”
“Do stupid questions really exist?”. – Sometimes I ask myself this question, and I have come to the conclusion that it doesn’t.
If someone is ignorant a particular topic, shouldn’t they have the right to ask a question?.
The right to expand their knowledge?
From my experience, simply asking a question from a point of deep ignorance, gets you into trouble with some of the users in SO.
What ever happened to concept of learning?
Honestly, SO is a great site, just not for inexperienced programmer to still has to learn fundamentals in programming.
-In case you were wondering…Yes, I am a noob.
Every programmer is a noob within some space. Once you realize that, you gain traction in this community. No, there are no stupid questions. There are however, stupid ways of asking questions… apparently.
“There are however, stupid ways of asking questions… apparently.” – How exactly?
I don’t know. Ask SO.
The lack of a pager on these comments is why sergworks.wordpress.com sucks…
Or maybe an infinite scroll?
This Bill the Lizard cunt is probably an asocial retard who lives in his mother’s basement. I don’t use Stackoverflow for anything more than read good threads, but those are becoming rarer by the day with fool such as the aforementioned clown closing good threads based on their retarded “logic”. Also, this reputation scheme is retarded. Let the community moderate it wholly, you dumb cunt Jeff Atwood. And yes, Jeff Atwood is a pretentious retarded tool as well.
Shut up.
I’m glad I’m not the only one thinking Bill the Lizard is a retarded, totalitarian cunt.
I’ve always gotten … interesting vibes when reading things from Jeff Atwood.
You guys need to learn how to use Google. If you don’t like SO just don’t use it. Go to the crap old school style forums.
“-stackoverflow javascript” for example will remove any result from stackoverflow. Note (-) before the word you don’t desire.
But what if we have a question about a stack overflow exception?
I pat concur with you buddy.!
High school brats are there, when they can’t answer they Dislike your valid question, i have been through this even on asking valid questions.!
Hatred is increasing among common users against their stupid teenagers and some fools grownUp who think themselves as God of that language on which thread has started and after finding themselves in hot water of “Can’t answer the question” position , here you go, flag the question , moderator attention, and dislike first.!
I see many valid questions staying idle and have no response
Admitting ignorance is the beginning of actual knowledge.
I agree with this completely. It is something you have to experience to even believe.
I joined SO yesterday and asked a well thought out question which showed I had done some research before asking and in 9 hours got 2 sarcastic and snobby replies. I cancelled my membership.
Just another troll berating SO without posting a link to the question.
Troll: a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community.
Where is any of THAT in my post? Now this reply could be seen as starting an argument but actually, you started it so maybe that makes YOU the troll?
Berating: To rebuke or scold angrily and at length.
Please show me in my post where there was any anger and length to that end? Short, sweet, truthful. That’s what I posted.
I don’t think I needed to post a link to a question that had no direct relation to my post save to say that I had actually asked one and since I stated I cancelled my membership, doesn’t exist. But I will say that it had to do with batch files and I was very nicely helped with that question from someone who was glad I asked and who is now a new friend. Imagine that? Friendship from a question asked instead of pious uppity bullshit. Crazy, huh?
Thank you to Wikipedia and the free dictionary. I’m sure I will receive something for using these sources but I think they were fine for backing my replies to someone accusing me of and of using words he doesn’t know the meaning of himself.
If you claim something, post a link to support your argument or it is known as trolling.
Urbandictionary describes “troll” as:
One who purposely and deliberately (that purpose usually being self-amusement) starts an argument in a manner which attacks others on a forum without in any way listening to the arguments proposed by his or her peers. He will spark of such an argument via the use of ad hominem attacks (i.e. ‘you’re nothing but a fanboy’ is a popular phrase) with no substance or relevance to back them up as well as straw man arguments, which he uses to simply avoid addressing the essence of the issue.
Obvious troll is obvious
I just cancelled my membership even though I have been a contributor for almost 3 years. Lately I am noticing that the site is being taken over by a cadre of supercilious users that are treating many users with contempt closing questions that should not be closed and just plain being contrary to the very intent of the site.
The more time I spend on StackOverflow, the more I’m fed up with all those ignorant, arrogant little dictators and their arbitrary rules on what are good questions or anwers.
The consequence of their rigid policy seems to result in a consistent reduction of the overall quality of both questions and answers, which is a strong indicator for their gamification and moderation strategies being an utter failure.
A great article on the many problems with StackOverflow:
http://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/741.php
You guys couldn’t be more right about the anal-retentive nature of SO “moderators” and their Fascist mentality. Read my profile here (http://stackoverflow.com/users/463053/chuongpham?tab=profile) and the first comment by a poster to my question here (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26539445/the-setmobiledataenabled-method-is-no-longer-callable-as-of-android-l-and-later)
and you’ll know why I have just about had enough of SO cronies. For the latter URL, this guy (http://stackoverflow.com/users/115145/commonsware) didn’t even give me the chance to finish my question before downvoting it (plus a few others) and rate it as a rant. As it turns out, my question was one of the most viewed for a thorny topic that has plagued Android since the beginning: How to bloody turn off the mobile network function in an Android device.
The final insult to injury is when I received a private SO moderator message sent to me today containing unwarranted accusations. I have had enough.
The comment seems to have been removed so that means CW realised his mistake OR the moderators took an action. It’s a win-win situation so I don’t see how does this support the rant of this blog post.
Moderators are human beings and can make mistakes (since you have 2K rep, I believe you know that you can bring this accusation thing up at meta.stackoverflow.com [if you’re lucky and not guilty, you will be alright]) but if you’re going to slam SO while neglecting how much it helps the developer community, then you should suggest an alternative which is better than SO or at least as good.
Sounds like this troll (Sufian) is here defending the other trolls back at SO.
Or, a noob who just joined SO thinking it is the best thing since sliced bread, but will sing a different tune down the track once the s**t hits the fan, so to speak.
Even here I see Stackoverlord trolls. Geez!
“how much it [SO] helps the developer community”- Is this SO opinion or you’ve been preped to spout such rubbish.
All I see are tyrants running what is supposed to be a straightforward Q&A site. Help, you say? Yeah right, when school kids or lazy uni students want a quick answer, they look up SO. How is that going to help them in the real world- when copy and paste is not going to cut it?
CW (aka Mark Murphy) is a retarded bastard. Why don’t you look through his actions in SO- all the downvotes, the self-righteous-prick comments and answers, and replies that make no sense whatsoever- and all the while, this bastard is being rewarded for his “contribution” to SO. Eh?! SO has a handful of good responders; CW is not one of them! And notice the keyword “handful” I use so you know the “quality” of SO…
@CKD thanks for trolling. If you have an alternative to SO then please let everyone know. Till then go and hide in your basement.
@Kynan can you point out in my post where I justified what CW did or does? He might be right, might be wrong, I don’t want to comment on that. But seriously, grow up.
“How is that going to help them in the real world- when copy and paste is not going to cut it” true. This is why SO asks you to show your effort before you post question and this is why this blog post was created (Serg doesn’t agree with people showing their effort first). So basically you should be slamming Serg and not me.
@Sufian,I saw your profile get blocked once , because you’re suspected as cheating, and your reputation dropped. And now you sounds like a cunt.
@xpllrr if my account got blocked then why are you the one moaning?
the one who blocked you is moderator, well this is none of my bussiness [flyaway]
@xpllrr firstly, I’m not CW. I believe he’s either from America or Europe while I’m from Asia. Secondly, his comment was removed (by moderator or he did it himself).
When you get over these hallucinations then post something.
Maybe Serg should provide a troll-filter function here so we can filter out all the [SO] trolls, including this troll [Sufian] from the comments.
Sounds to me like this Sufian troll is here on behalf of SO. Or, this troll is down in his basement surrounding his life with SO.
One would have more chance of seeing low-flying porkers than claiming SO is a “good” site.
Judging by the number of comments posted here by this Sufian troll, you can clearly see that this troll is here to refute any negative emphasis on SO. Go figure!
@Sufian: Why don’t you crawl back in your hole? You have nothing useful to add here.
@Quan @Kalem please post an alternative to SO to make your post contain something meaningful.
@Sufian: “If you have an alternative to SO then please let everyone know”- No one is going to do your homework here, kid. If you’re smart enough to post comments here, then you should be able to search for sites online yourself that are heaps better than SO. If you don’t know how to, than I’m afraid you just have to stick with SO.
Yes auntie, I know I can do that but I’m not as disappointed or as frustrated as some of our troll friends here. If you can suggest an alternative to SO then it will also help future trolls as well.
“If you don’t know how to, than I’m afraid you just have to stick with SO”- You hit the nail right on the head there!
@Sufian: “post an alternative to SO to make your post contain something meaningful”- Maybe I should use the stupid SO action like “off-topic” and close this comment off. LOL! Kid, if you can’t search for sites better than SO, and like Catherine said, maybe you should stick with SO and never leave it!…
@Sufian,I saw your profile get blocked once , because you’re suspected as cheating, and your reputation dropped. And now you try to sound like a right man, you cunt.
@xpllrr if my account got blocked then why are you the one moaning?
I agree with the nazi moderators most of the time, because most of the questions in a site with thousands of visits per day are beyond StackOverflow purpose, and most of the answers are vague, undocumented, and barely educational.
Dont you ever ask yourself why SO is, usually, the site who pops up when you try to find a solution to a problem that you typed in google?,. and why usually you’ve got the right answer alongside a nice explanation, example, links and unicorns?
If they weren’t so Nazi, SO will be just another bunch of posts with so rare questions, focused in their explicit problem, that might solve your problem partially with the risk of mislead you to something totally different.
IMO, being nazi its OK. It makes people to think twice or more before type something.
Your kidding, right? They show up in Google searches because of a snowball effect. There’s millions of SO pages in the Google index and the content is added to by the hundreds of pages daily.
And the answers? 75% of the time it’s “Hey my bit of code is broken, please fix it.” which they oddly allow, because the fact is that it is not useful to nearly everybody who swings by on a Google search. Occasionally, you can glean something useful out of it, but if you tried to generalize it and create a different and better question, along with an answer, they’d shit a pickle and shut it down. Another 20% the question doesn’t have an answer or at least a good one. And the final 5% of the time, yes, you actually get a good answer out of it.
There is only one reason to ever post a question on SO: “Hey, my bit of code is broken, please fix it”. And add in a bit of BS like “I searched but couldn’t find anything” and they’ll just eat it up.
I completely agree with you. I have asked 2-3 questions and all of them have been downvoted. I deleted the questions myself. I have encountered this bill the lizard guy. He closed my question. Recently, I had a question related to using api, all they said was ‘use google’. I used google but, I didn’t find any good solution so, thats why I asked stackoverflow. So much hate !! I feel bullied.
Add Martijn Pieters to the list of Stackoverlord f**ktards who won’t give a newbie a chance to explore and use SO. This cunt thinks he’s the king of Python. Well, I’m the king of Anaconda. LOL!
lol
I can confirm this, Martijn Pieters is an asshole!
Oh God I’m glad there are others who acknowledged what that Martijn Pieters is, a real asshole. He is constantly pi**ing off half of SO users while he thinks is just “nitpicking”… I wonder when SO CEO will realize that these ego-maniacs mods are sinking the whole community, probably it will be too late.
Stackoverflow.com has too many Stackoverlords and their wolf packs that are ready at any moment to pounce on the unsuspecting newbie when he/she is trying to ask a question on the site.
For those who do not want to show search results from stackoverflow.com, in Google search options add this, minus the quotes: “-site:stackoverflow.com”.
“-site:stackoverflow.com”- Good tip
Hi, I agree 100% with all that is said by this blog. They did the same to me on more than one question, saying it was homework, when it was not. I am interested in many things from math, comp.sci, physics and statistics, and I find things in books and ask about how to solve them. They put a hold on my question, closed it, etc. I don’t understand, this place is supposed to be about Freedom to ask without fear of persecution!!! It has become a police state! I don’t understand how supposedly educated people on this board can behave in this way! It is very sad that sharing knowledge has become something to be scared of by the police state!
agree 100%. do you know any other forum for programming questions, specially related to PHP/JS ?
you can try “code project”..
Nice to see all this feedback. I agree 100%. I have asked a few questions myself in the past. Questions I thought, and still think were reasonable questions having to do with programming and how-to-do-that, and none were ever responded to with actual answers. I have actually found, on SO, really good questions and none of them ever received an answer. I agree it has become a troll site.
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Yep, making an account on this website is pointless.
If you have a question and stackoverflow doesn’t have the answer, ask it somewhere else.
SO is a bunch of ex-pseudo-programmers trying to act as moderators…..
Unfortunately in SO there are a lot of developer who thinks they are too good for the rest of the world, and they are ready to downvote any question which seems not interesting for them (or maybe question that they don’t understand). This is a problem to solve on SO if they do it is a very good place to post your questions.
Fully agree about SO nazis. Anyone who got on SO early in the piece and answered easy questions can get down-voting privileges. I have around 20 years experience in system administration, and found that DOS attacks via HTTP were not showing up as high load in top and ps, though they were slowing my server to a crawl. I answered the question by showing how I found the attacks in the logs, and how I wrote a python script to sift through the logs and block any that were not in a white list or already blocked. Question got down-voted and put on hold by Andrew Medico, Onik, Pang, lmgonzalves, Blakes Seven. All of these people were programmers from what I could tell. No explanation as to why it was off topic. I went to delete the question, then got a warning from SO that deleting answered questions may get me blocked as answered questions could be useful. Sheesh! Make up your mind!
Actually on reconsideration, moderation is important. Getting marked down stings, but I am pretty sure I got my points back once I deleted the question. Also, there are a lot of posts here which discredit this thread. No need to get too worked up about this and make it personal. That is just sour grapes.
Once I asked a question that was promptly marked as a duplicate by an editor and downvoted. I proofed it was not the same question and another editor removed the mark. So I asked why the question was still downvoted. Then the second editor downvoted my question as well. I cannot defend myself in any way, so I decided to downvote many of the second asshole’s posts 🙂
lmao XD
Great. But how do you know who downvoted you?
LOL! Yeah, let’s downvote all of those assholes posts! Make their reputation scores drop to 0, LOL! That’ll teach those fucktards to mark our questions as duplicates! 😀
Guess so…but derrick is idiot for not writing us name of those downvoters. He deleted questions like a loser, too. @derrick please don’t be a loser.
Retaliation is a sign of a weak mind. High ground please.
How do you know that the person who removed the duplicate mark from your question is the same person who downvoted you?
giusdisa is coward and cannot answer
Hey there! I’m building a better Q & A – here is the beta https://nerdspal.com website for professionals, teachers and students. I understand how useful information gets buried in these websites. Organization, simplicity and smartness are main points I’m considering. Help me make module building decisions.
You damn asshole. The link is not even working. You are just full of shit. “Better” rofl. You are just an dumb asshole
I getting 4 downvotes but no even one answer my questions…
and I forced to delete my own post in order to save my reputation…
Could you link to your question next time? I guess we could upvote you. 🙂
I’m not completely sure but I was downvoted just few seconds after I had complained that the downvote remained there. As the first asshole’s already downvoted me I’m pretty confidente it was the second. As a confirm that he was arrogant, all his questione was attacked by people like me and eventually he was forced to removed them 🙂
Are there any alternatives to SO? I really don’t like SO. It blocks legitimate questions.
Everyone ranting of ‘legitimate questions. No loser gives stack overflow link. You will fine a loser website one day.
I’m so beside myself that I think I might cry. Whatever will I do? Naaa, just kidding. I’m actually quite amused that the notion of my being able to count myself among a countless number of people who are *former* members of StackExchange, or StackOverflow (they make plungers for that), or whatever other StackOf**** they have to offer.
In my case I had done my homework and knew exactly what to expect before I joined. Just another gamified forum with a bad attitude that tries to pretend that it’s something other than just another forum with way too many moderators on the war path. You see, Google can be very handy sometimes, it’s how I found this site, while searching for the seemingly popular phrase “StackOverflow Sucks”.
In the relatively short time that I was there, which happens to be less than one day, I’m 99% certain that I was shadow-banned, or hell-banned, or whatever cutsie term they like to apply to it. Who do they think they are kidding? Anyone with half a brain can quickly tell what’s really going on.
What was my cardinal sin you may ask? I had the audacity to question their “voting” system and stated that I believed gamification systems were ineffective, at best. Aside from that I made a number of rather insightful posts, I mean questions, only to watch the down-votes come pouring in. WTF?
Hindsight being 20/20, I probably shouldn’t have wasted my time, but the place kept popping up in search results so my curiosity got the better of me. I asked myself, could it possibly be as bad as people described? In short… it’s worse.
Another troll hates stack overflow. Thou can show us those sucky questions?
If I’m a troll, what are you? Seriously, the same response has been posted to numerous complaints about StackOverflow, which makes the pattern very obvious. It’s nothing more than a poorly disguised attempt to get people to post links, thus giving you information. Get some new material champ!
Then I am anti-troll. LOL
Too afraid to post link? Must be real sucky question then.
You seem to want a link very badly. Ok, here’s a link. http://www.amishrakefight.org/gfy/
@Max moderators must have kicked your a$$ real hard. I’m sorry. Are you feeling numb?
@Phong an idiot calls me an idiot? Thou forgot who couldn’t convince stack overflow moderators that their question was not idiot. Now please continue trolling.
Almost forgot about this link. Thanks to @Max for refreshing my memory about http://www.amishrakefight.org/gfy/. I used to use it all the time on retards that don’t get a hint that if something is bad-it’s bad- no point defending or arguing about it. Just make you look like a fucking idiot if you do. Like this fucking idiot -> FWIW.
Hehehe…I almost forgot about that link. It’s a great link to give to idiots who insist on showing off their stupidity. Thanks @Max and Phong.
Stackoverflow still sucks! I can’t wait for the day when SO goes down the gurgler. Too many StackoverFUCK who just want to close off questions when they can’t answer them themselves. I made a point when hiring new programming talents for my company is to never hire an SO overlord or one of their trolling wolf packs. That way, I can flick off all the “garbage” and only hire the “creme de la creme” of programming talents.
Nice websites dont attract potty. Good luck finding a potty site for your shitty questions.
One more thing…share the name/link of that potty site with other shitty people like you.
Hello Ping Phong ball. Which website is accepting your shitty questions these days?
Looks like just about any question asked at Quack Overflow gets trolled by “moderators”.
We really need a replacement for this sadistic troll site!
Pingback: Another reason why StackExchange and network sites Suck
Stack Overflow is definitely the worst website out there, when I first joined I thought it was about programming and where people can ask about things they don’t know, later on I found out that it’s only for programmers who are on Snowden’s level can make it there, while all the others will get banned.
Most of the downvotes I personally got from people who don’t know the answer so they downvote the question and give a suggestion to use another way to solve it (like another module for example).
Don’t go there unless you have an amazing question and can be solved easily.
I agree. I asked a question once about some API’s for Windows device driver coding. A moderator said it was not a programming question and that I should explain more. Since the question was already to the point I explained a little more about the basics. The moderator must have been embarrassed so he/she banned me from ever asking a question again. I think these moderators are inexperienced developers that have a knack for knowing a little about a lot but not a lot about a little.
Remind me of the adage: “Jack of trades, master none!”.
Remind me of the adage: “Jack of all trades, master none!”.
Since moving off Stackoverflow, I’ve been looking for a solution to share my Android skills and have meaningful discussions with other Android developers- experienced or just starting out. So, after some soul-searching (LOL!, roll-eyes), I have decided to create my own technology blog- much like Serg’s blog here.
Initially, it will start off with the article about switching off the mobile network on Android 5 plus devices. This article is a good example of why Stackoverflow sucks as my question (see the hyperlink listed in the article, or see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26539445/the-setmobiledataenabled-method-is-no-longer-callable-as-of-android-l-and-later) was downvoted by a StackOverlord, followed by a flurry of downvotes by the lord’s adoring wolf pack. But upon seeing his foolery being displayed publicly, the Overlord decided to remove his comment about my question being a rant soon after. The second reason is that this article highlights the fact that many StackOverlords, who think they are expert at Android, can’t seem to solve a semi-hard problem: How to turn the mobile network on and off for Android 5 plus devices. Instead, the question was solved by myself and a few others who were genuinely interested in finding a solution-albeit a solution only for rooted devices-and share it with other Android developers.
Anyway, check out my blog at: http://chuonglepham.blogspot.com.au/ and let me know your insightful thoughts. I welcome all constructive criticisms- I find it a good way to learn from others.
@ChuongPham: Thanks for the published articles in your blogs. I particularly like the one about nine-patch drawable. Interesting read.
Your original question was a bit on the rant side. If you’re just skim reading you might miss the short question among all the other stuff. Your question probably should have been more “Is there a workaround to x?”
Wish I would have found this before posting on SO. What a bunch of douchebags over there.
I had a question about database files being used inside a desktop application and the response was “This is not a Teach Yourself Programming in 21 Hours” site.
This was accompanied by a down vote to close the question.
What a jerk!
So, does anyone know of any other forums where you can find real help for things related to programming? I’m fairly new to it, and I get stuck from time to time.
Try Experts Exchange.
I asked a question on SO once that was related to Windows device driver development API’s. But a moderator said it was not a programming question. He/she said to add more information. Since the question was a simple API call then all I could do was to explain what a device driver was. I guess the moderator was embarrassed because he/she banned me from asking questions forever … even though I had several hundred points.
Those who can do. Those who can’t moderate.
There are too many tossers over at SO who probably would piss in their pants if a nice girl so much as saying “Hi”. Another sad fact is that whilst they think they are expert on certain programming topics, they are not! I asked a couple of hard questions about programming and instead of getting answers, the tossers decided it was easier to close the questions as “off-topic”. Off topic, my proverbial arse! If you can’t answer them, just say so, or leave the questions alone so other “non-experts” can answer them. What are bunch of fucking retards!
Sucky questions are bound to be closed. Your questions must have lacked basic information or even the efforts to show that you actually tried. Remove suckness from your questions before ranting here.
I have seen plenty of questions about C that were not removed. It was clear in those questions that the poster had never even looked at a C book. But some good questions where removed just because the moderator was embarrassed that he/she did not know anything about the subject. I think that is what people are complaining about.
@Eddy there are two ways to ask the same question. One is to ask a question while showing your effort. The other (which most people here are complaining about) is to ask your question such as “my button gone invisible. Can anyone help me find it?”. This is a bad question and therefore it gets downvotes before eventually getting closed/deleted.
I do know and admit that sometimes good questions get closed but lets not pretend that SO is perfect, or any other website for that matter. BTW questions asked without showing efforts are closed because they are useless for others. And no one is getting paid to answer a question after interrogating the asker for details.
I agree and don’t even know anything about programming like manipulating floating point values or integers. Unless the question is abusive/snarky or is going on and on about unrelated problems JUST LEAVE THE DAMN TOPIC ALONE!!!
Overwhelmingly, we agree that SO has turned into a Nazi robot that deletes people for the hell of it because they got nothing better to do. In a society that shames people for not being perfect and who whats to be the guy that everyone else has to live up to? I dont. How about somebody wanting to collaborate and build an alternative to SO? Why else do we have this knowledge if not to use it?
Let me state a couple of examples:
Once I asked a question about the understanding of a File System Driver API function. The moderator discarded the question because it “was not a programming question”. It was clearly programming and I clearly asked the question to clear up an understanding of the API function. Since I was writing a File System Driver then that in itself shows I must have researched it first … otherwise I could not have even gotten far enough to ask the question.
Another time I answered a question. For the answer I made it simple and to the point such that the asker would not have to read a lot of detail to get his answer. But one of the users wanted to give his answer so he downvoted me. I challenged him and he removed the downvote. But this does show the attitude of some of the moderators and even users.
I do know that there are some users who wrongly flag and vote for questions to get closed down. But what most people here are complaining is mainly due to incomplete questions.
Like your question may or may not have the code or algorithm written. In case you didn’t include, it seems more like spoon-feeding which is not the trait we know at SO.
How do you know that the downvoter was the same person who had posted the answer?
Who’s to say they don’t use robots in an AI fashion that hunts keywords that match filters and these topics trigger something which can be anything from a word the robot doesn’t understand to the format/words that surround the word that is banned.
I want to personally thank the founders of SO for referring to developers who need help from time to time as “help vampires”. Thanks guys, thank you for shaming an already shame-based world where people are afraid to ask questions and remain ignorant as a result. What hubris!
Hey everyone, I found the help vampire.
What is wrong with having the work or answers given to you sometimes? That is one of the best ways to learn and apply…. I mean that is what parents, friends, teachers, and textbooks do… show or tell how things are done. It’s also why teachers in college and high school will sometimes do part of a homework assignment in class(depending on the subject of course, but certainly including programming). I don’t understand why people use the “Google it yourself”, when it should be an honor that someone respects your knowledge enough to ask. And I have yet to come across a question on SO that was too vague or off topic for me to understand what is being asked… I mean seriously, if the questions were really so vague and off topic, there wouldn’t be any answers in the first place. And many of those questions “that don’t help millions” have saved my bacon. I for one, am one of the ever shrinking number of people that is not self centered, lust(for many things) driven at the cost of others well being, or thinking I am better than everyone else. Cause last time I checked we are all humans each with skills, hobbies, and professions that many many other people have too, so we should all be helping each other out. I can’t say the same about a lot of the mods on SO.
I can completely understand why many people don’t like SO, I for one like it and dislike it for one reason. When i started out coding I found it quite hard to get help from any forum around, after many years of self teaching and practice I now feel confident enough to help people out so other coders don’t have to go through what I went through. I think the rep system is stupid. Higher the rep the better you are??? I for one don’t downvote someone if they ask a “stupid” question, I comment asking could you please explain more, or ask for more detail on a specific part. But another problem with SO is SO, because SO is so big and many people come along and use it, many coders come to SO thinking they can ask any question and get an answer easily. So try to understand some people are trying to make SO better, but as we are on the internet, the bad people always win 😦
Yes, this. I was a big contributor to a few SE sites, not SO. There were always things I didn’t like, but the not liked stuff began to outweigh the liked stuff. Hence, I don’t participate anymore.
Old post but I wanna say this
The reason your question was marked as “homework” is because you’re not asking a simple programming problem. You’re asking for help on a linear programming problem and how that solution can be coded. Even if it’s not actual homework, you have to realize that that’s the general format of questions asked by people who are looking for help with homework, thus the generalized tag name. While “homework” questions are still fine to ask, the problem with yours is that you’re just asking other people to solve the problem for you, and you’re providing little to no input from your side.
One of the most basic and surefire ways to get good responses is to provide background information. If you show that you’ve made an effort to try to understand how to solve your problem, and indicate what exactly it is you have issues with, then people will be more willing to help you. Otherwise, it comes off as if you just don’t want to do any work and you just want an easy answer to your issue.
The reason for “Bill the Lizard”‘s resolution was that what you’re asking for was way too broad. Do you not know how to optimize the problem? If so, then your main problem isn’t coding-related; its linear programming-related, and you should probably look for help from more relevant outlets. Do you know how to solve the problem, but not how to code it? Then show what parts of it you have trouble with. Moreover, why are you asking? Are you just curious on the process? Do you need it to make some bigger project? Is it actually something like homework?
There’s a reason why there’s a dedicated “how to ask a good question” page on StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask).
You’re everything that’s wrong with SO: self-entitled idiots who need to pass judgment, but more than often either misinterpret the question or don’t understand it at all. Case in point: He didn’t ASK the question, but ANSWERED it!
You lecturing him about his supposed lack of understanding the rules is absolutely ridiculous. His point was that even questions that violate those assinine and absolutely arbitrary rules can have some value. Also, he clearly showed the ego trips some mods are on which is quite obvious if the question was deleted after 1.5 years of nobody caring about it!
For you kind information, the question was deleted because it was saying “can you write this code for me?”. There are so many questions on SO which don’t get closed or even downvoted, because they show some effort put into them.
Learn to spell English before you lecture me on anything you moron. ANY question implies that people want to see a solution… who gives a shit if someone can’t write it if someone’s willing to answer it. Get off your fucking high horse you low life piece of shit!
Asking a question is NOT the same as asking for code. You have to be an idiot to disagree with it. Read the rules of the community before posting shit!
Again: Nobody gives a shit if someone is willing to answer it. Besides, you can’t learn without looking at code. The rules are bullshit and so’s your laughable display of fanboyism
Well as stated before, SO is not a rent a coder, therefore asking for code is off-topic and gets closed all the time.
If the SO rules, and the site itself is crap, why does Google in their Android courses on Udacity refer to SO? Please educate yourself.
This is probably not the best example of why StackOverflow (and related sites) sucks but they certainly do suck. I have a fairly high reputation on nearly all of them yet any time I try to do something to actually improve the site (very, very, rarely), like editing comments, I get rejected. The fact is, the whole place is run by a minority of assholes with inflated heads that want to retain power (not a rare thing in Internet communities). If they don’t do the edit themselves, then no one else should. Whatever, I’m done with that crap. Why do free work for these people? It’s not a community, it’s yet another monarchy of morons.
How do you edit comments of others? LOL
This post is still relevant. They need to super moderator to moderate these moron moderators. I have seen lot of good questions downvoted and closed, even though OP accepted an answer.
OP accepting the answer doesn’t matter here. The question was poor, i.e it was of the form ‘do you haz the codz?’.
Only according to your ignorant opinion. Neither the asker, nor the author of this article or the many other people here comminting in favor of the latter agree with your trollish point of view
Because a claim without proof is a lie. If the proof is funny, everyone should shit on it. Agreed? Oh I totally forgot that you got your ass kicked on SO. Might take a week or two for the pain to go away. LOL
LOL You’re too fucking stupid. A claim without proof is merely unproven…not a lie…nowhere near one. But what kind of reasoning can one expect from a retard like you…
When you don’t want to provide an evidence, your accusation becomes a mere lie because you don’t have it. So a retarded pre-teen, that is you, understands the point now?
So I’m a retarded pre-teen? Alright, you can’t prove it which makes it a lie according to your logic. How does it feel being exposed as a dumbass by your own lack of logic?
So now you’ve understood that proof is required for a claim to be valid. Well done, you’ve learnt something.
Even if it as “have the code” it would be useful for others that may need help learning.
SO moderators who can’t answer hard questions tried to cover their stupidity by closing the questions as off topic. WTF?! This is the only place on the planet that fucking morons think they are superior to people with real intelligence. Elsewhere, these morons are made to suffer, and their stupidity forever recorded on the Internet. Intelligent people should stop contributing at SO- there are too many fucking retards roaming the place; too many fucking retards defending each other. Even here, there are too many fucking retards defending the other retards back at SO! Start your own technology blog and forget SO. Not worth your fucking time! Enough said.
Well put but due to the economy those days are over. Back when the economy was better blogs were popping up like poppy seeds.
I don’t see a lot of mods closing on SO; it’s usually the community voters with enough rep to close vote. But, certainly, on some sites, there’s mods that unilaterally close questions all the time and you get the distinct impression that he has little understanding of the topic.
I have been active for 4 years on stack overflow. Now the site is overrun by gangs who wants users to stand inside the circle they draw for them. It not just end at SO many other popular stackexchange sites have similar experince.
I’d love to gut the admin of stackoverflow. My questions/responses always gets down voted and I make sure they are informative if I have the same issue as someone else so users reading won’t get frustraded doing the same thing.
When I Google questions the more interesting ones that require thoughts/opinions get closed once the topic is flowing while nasty questions remain unlocked or the usual questions.
What do you know. I got banned and in fandoms they close the more unusual questions that require critical thinking skills not the OMFG answers..
There are some really shady people that truly need to be knifed or beat up as that is all they understand.
I am astonished for the long list of links of those down voted questions. Do you post like this on SO as well?
Why should he provide links? So you can shit on him some more? Get a life you worthless waste of skin. Seriously…trolling people on January 2nd? You truly have no life. You’re probably some basement dwelling 40 year old virgin with inch thick glasses that needs to defend SO, because he has no social life otherwise.
Only according to your ignorant opinion. Neither the asker, nor the author of this article or the many other people here comminting in favor of the latter agree with your trollish point of view
LOL. Since you can’t deny that it was “can I haz the codez?” question, you start to rebuke me? LOL. You sound like someone who has their ass kicked on SO. LOL. Good day, sir.
Oh look, the virgin troll is back. You truly have no life, pestering people on here for half a year now and showcasing your massive boner for that piece of shit website…
So the idiot who got their ass kicked is not back on SO? Surely not. Because the butts are still red. LOL
The fuck are you idiot talking about. & months of stalking this comment section shows what a weak ass character you are. No friends. No family. No sex lol…
Seems like you won’t stop with your crap till your butts turn blue. LOL
Nope, that was a valid question. Whether such a butthurt apologist like you agrees with it or not
How was it a valid question? It was breaking the basic rules of the site. Hey why am I seeing you buttocks turning red? LOL.
Stop coming on to me you weird ass sexually repressed fucktard. Get a dog or a hooker!
“Stop coming on to me you weird ass sexually repressed fucktard. Get a dog or a hooker!”
My ass is normal, it’s yours that looks weird. With those wacks you took from mods on SO. Of course. LOL
The autism is strong in this one…
YES. THIS is exactly what’s happening. A lot of my questions get downvoted for no reason at all (probably by users who understand literally nothing about coding, or who think a downvote is a better answer than clearing the concept), and a lot of questions get flagged as offtopic even they’re proper coding questions.
And before long, when you’re about to ask a question SO says “Wait! Some of your past questions have not been well-received, and you’re in danger of being blocked from asking any more.”
How good is SO if the users who have volunteered to answer the questions, don’t understand a simple, tagged, example/sample based question on a Programming Q&A website? And instead of clarifying or answering, can actually downvote a question flagging a user from asking further questions?
Them users should leave and hangout on SuperUser or Meta instead.
Took me a good deal of reconsideration to prevent myself from closing my account there.
PS:
What’s the point of a SO account if your Q/As are rejected/ignored?
You could always pretend it’s a wiki with ridiculous, lazy, half-wit editors.
I have found Stackoverflow to be pretty good as long as I restrict myself to asking questions and not trying to answer them. However, I would like to vent about Math.stackexchange, which is one of their most popular sites and is horribly broken,
I asked the most popular question on there 4 years ago. It has a score of 941 and there are several questions marked as duplicates. The next most popular question has a score in the 600s.
http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/71874/can-i-use-my-powers-for-good
A couple of months ago, some parvenu mods in their infinite wisdom decided that the most popular question on their site wasn’t a good fit, and so started closing it. Various reasons were given, mostly “seeking personal advice”, although it is rather clear that the question isn’t seeking personal advice, but some personal information is given as background.
In fact, the question is introduced with the words “Here is my question”. I am not sure how it could be clearer. Quote:
“Here is my question: what careers which make a positive contribution to society might be open to academic mathematicians who want to change careers?”
The question kept being reopened. So now it has been closed (on 25 December) and locked (on 28 December) by one Jyrki Lahtonen, which prevents me from editing it, even if I wanted to.
The thing that particularly riles me about this is that the locking happened in the middle of the holidays, when Stackexchange has its “Winter Bash”, in which users can collect “hats” with which to decorate their profiles. Hats are awarded for various feats, and probably locking a question is one of them.
I suspect that Jyrki Lahtonen locked the most popular question on his site *because he wanted a hat*.
This is why Stackexchange’s gamification is so broken. It’s not about the questions. It’s not about the answers. It’s about rep. It’s about hats. It might as well be Cookie Clicker.
Maybe this isn’t so bad on Stackoverflow, but the math site has an additional problem, which is that the most popular questions on there are the easy ones, and upvotes can be collected easily by those who are the first to answer a trivial question. So the people who end up collecting very high rep don’t even really have to know any mathematics at all!
Of course, I don’t need to mention that nobody has touched, locked or closed the numerous questions that are duplicates of my question. No doubt those don’t need to be taken down, because they aren’t as popular and wouldn’t give the mods the rush of power they no doubt get from disregarding the opinions of many of their users.
I for one am done with it!
I am planning to post a job on StackOverflow before this February
Can you please suggest me that who may apply to these jobs?,
Have to agree, some of the moderators there have overinflated egos and think they are GOD. Some of the responses from them are incredibly condescending and arrogant. One of them is Andrew Thompson. And if you don’t acknowledge his arrogant comments, he has to answer it back himself!
I couldn’t believe the pettiness of this response here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14700758/how-to-change-background-color-for-nimbus-look-and-feel-using-java
Honestly, the poor guy who asked the question probably is not well-versed in English. And Andrew completely misunderstood the reason the user posted his code there but instead, suggested he was an idiot for doing so.
I think its about time we comment back on mass and complain to SO or better yet, start another forum.
It’s a basic knowledge that you write “Java” not “java” and class names with correct case. Unless you’re paying for SO, you don’t really have a reason to complain for people asking you to post your questions in a correct way.
If a reader can’t discern what “java” vs “Java” means he should not be in this business. I’m sure Andrew Thompson has never worked on complex projects with a diversity of people. I have written code for Cicso, DELL and AMI at the lowest, most complex level and have worked with lots of engineers from India since 1995 … I suspect Andrew would go nuts if he worked at one of those companies (assuming he could be hired).
@Eddy let me quote what he said first. ” Please add upper case letters where appropriate (Swing, Java, I, class names, start of sentences) to make your question easier to read”.
Tell me why using correct case will not make it “easier to read”?
And also tell me is it stupidity to set code standards (which includes writing “Java” instead of “java”) within a company? Google does it and I’m sure every medium to large companies do it as well.
It’s petty which is especially obvious with his douchy second comment that served no purpose at all other than to stroke his ego. Besides, that’s what the edit function is there for. If he feels the need to pretty up the article, he can do so without bitching about it
It petty that you don’t know that “please” shows politeness. It’s a good thing to point out in a comment, unless the user is super-dumb it will help them to not make such mistakes which take away the interest of the potential answerers.
Look up what “petty” means, you strawman argument abusing idiot… You can ignore his condescending bullshit all you want. That doesn’t make his comment any less dickish than yours
LOL. I guess I’m talking to an idiot who just doesn’t understand politeness.
You sir are a low life idiot. Please stay away from SO, we don’t need shit floating around. Thanks.
LOL You’re a self-righteous hypocrite, shitting on others and then acting like you’re the one with manners here. Newsflash: harrassing people on here for months just because they have differing opinions, taunting them for having been banned or reprimanded is petty, juvenile bullshit that only reflects on your immature personality, so don’t lecture me about politeness you moron! I will abuse SO as much as I like. Nothing you can do about…
Are you gonna teach us how to be polite while you can’t even digest polite comments like “please use capitalisation for better readability”?
Of course I cant do anything about you posting trash on SO, but without a doubt the mods will love to turn you buttocks red. LOL
You are absolutely right!
If you expect SO to be a place where people answer other people’s questions, you will be frustrated.
I observe SO as a project that tries to be the Wikipedia of Q&A. They try to maximize the quality of recorded Q&A.
Plus, there is always a fraction of ugly, egoistic, ignorant, narcistic, etc. people in any social network. Just like in real life. That is no reason to quit real life either. Just deal with it.
Total respect to you.
My first question on StackOverflow was about web design. After 1 hour I saw ‘answer’ that wasn’t connected to the topic. In other words he/she said “Are you sure you wanna learn X language to develop this app? Noob”.
I prefer use google for searching for the things I want to know more. Not some bullshit website with arrogant and stupid answers.
Down votes are anonymous so you can’t even look at the person’s history. I think they are often given because some people (probably newbees) just want to make noise. That is discouraging to anyone that asks a question. I have seen the stupidest questions, and sometimes “how do I write this code”, that actually got up votes (go figure).
One more here. Haven’t been there for a week, and I found out they blocked my account because they don;t know the answer to my question 🙂 It is silly, when you ask something simple they bash you because the answer exists somewhere on the web, but when you ask something complicated they downvote you, when they don;t know what to say 🙂
Once I asked a question about programming a device driver … the moderator did not know what a device driver was so he blocked my account.
Is there any replacement for stack exchange out there? I have also had unhappy experience with it today.
I used to belong to Experts Exchange. My company paid $10 per month but it was very good and no one criticized me. I think you can get points by answering questions and that gives you the right to ask more.
Great post. I already have trouble asking for help on matters. I’m just a shy person and generally have a lot of social anxiety and fear of being attacked if I talk to someone. StackOverflow creates this worst case scenario. It’s virtually impossible to ask a question and get a useful answer. It seems like most members of the community will see your question and give you a useless half answer, or just downvote you and insult you for asking a question beneath their standards and having the gall not to know the answer already.
I will say this for StackOverflow — it is great for archival purposes for really arcane environment problems. Like Weblogic throws some bizarre exception when trying to run otherwise good code, or something like that.
Just don’t EVER ask a programming question there.
I found some of the most basic questions getting up votes, but if you ask a complex question you get down votes. One question I saw was as stupid as “how do I program this”? I wanted to be nice so I gave a simple but relevant answer then some guy gave me a down vote to my answer. He gave his own answer which was overly complex for a simple problem (he made an easy thing hard).
Agree with you. Sometimes seems very harsh to newbies and even feels like uncomfort, unkind. All of them are professionals but me.
I have been at stackoverflow for a while. I have not posted many questions, mainly answers. The point is, the noise/ration there is beyond belief. Many users see their questions down voted simply because they do not take the time to write a proper question. Let´s it be honest, writing something good, either a question or an answer *takes time*. A proper question can take between 10 and 40 minutes, a good answer between 15 – 2 hours. As long people realize that, it is easier.
The main gripes about stack overflow I have is often people feeling entitled to have a free service, and the gamification – i.e. people not giving you points, even when you give nice answers. I do give points to any people helping me, either when asking questions, or when googling for things I need.
I’m fine with the gamification of answering, I just don’t like the gamification of questions. It discourages any complex questions as people will only upvote questions that they understand or are interested in. In the Meta, it’s even worse because people only upvote questions where they agree with the idea that’s being implied by the question, and then downvote questions that imply ideas that they don’t agree with. For example, any posts in the Meta that complain about the gamification system of the website get downvoted immediately.
A sample of such a complex question is needed to make your argument valid.
Regarding your statements about Meta:
That’s how Meta is supposed to work. It’s also the reason that votes on Meta do not affect any reputation whatsoever.
Your example simply is not true. There are plenty of Meta questions about the gamification of the site that are upvoted. Search Meta for “gamification” and see for yourself.
@Arjan Except on Meta Stack Exchange, the network wide meta site, where rules that affect the whole network (all sites) are made. Imagine being utterly annoyed with your State government (minor SE site you use), then your federal government makes even crazier rules that don’t even pretend to consider the minor sites. That’s Meta SE. And if you go there and bitch about it, with only 101 rep starting, you’ll get blasted with downvotes hitting you with -25 points at a time. Which, of course, eventually loses you the privileges to comment and vote. So disagreeing too much eventually loses you the right to disagree in the first place. Therefore, you have to “gamify”. Find some opinion that’s popular, then post an answer in the right place. Great, Stack Exchange is teaching me I have to be dishonest to get anywhere in life.
Most frustratingly, they agree with me, but won’t fix it. http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/273127/212646
I agree completely. Time was I could ask a question on StackOverflow and get an answer in 30 minutes.. not anymore.. hell nobody answers and if they do it’s some retarded response.. crazy
Superuser is even worse. I’ve asked five questions. Nothing. Not even a vote or a comment. I asked why on meta, and the responses there might as well have been asdf.
I asked my first two questions last week because i couldn’t find a solution on SO…. My question was solved within 20 minutes and there wasn’t any problem. I will continue asking when needed.
All Stack Exchange sites, not just Stack Overflow, will eventually mod themselves into irrelevance. Maybe at that point, they’ll listen to the people complaining in the Stack Exchange Meta. I’ve always therozied that volunteer moderators are the worst, because if they’re not there for money, they’re there to stroke their ego. Yes they could deny it all day but why else would they be there? It makes them feel good to close every question for the stupidest shit even if they’re destroying the website and they know it. Meanwhile, professional moderators do it only for the money, not to stroke their ego, and in my experience are far more reasonable because of that.
*theorized
I think this might be true for some, but if you were in on one of the newer sites that was fun (before it got ruined), then modding was like a community duty. Stack Exchange has no problem getting great sites started, but it’s missing something to keep them great. They all go to shit eventually, leaving people like me that helped pioneer it feeling like what we built is lost or soon to be. I’m burned about it because I cared about the site being a fun place to learn, but now it’s so regimented and filled with obstinate, pedantic turds. The saddest part is a large chunk of the pioneers like me have been swayed to being these turds, but newbies, most of which don’t even hang around long.
So, when it was fun, I wanted to be an elected moderator so I could help do what I can to keep the place the way we built it. But that’s not really how it works in the first place. Site rules are ultimately democratic. They make these rules on the meta sites and eventually they bloat up and trying to overturn them is damn near impossible. And then the crazy starts to snowball, and then they start closing questions for stupid reasons and so forth. So the problem is people in general. Apparently, humanity tends toward hysteria when left without a true authority (should we be concerned about the state of Western Civilization). Basically, you might be right that they need paid moderators that can lay or take down rules hard line and without vote. They have paid community managers, but I’m still wondering what purpose they actually serve except to repeat incessantly that all feature requests are denied.
Well… I’m not totally agree with you.
Indeed, the posting policy there is really strict.
But in my case, it helps me to learn english pretty well.
I think SO policy is to prefer WIKI like questions/answers.
If some one desires to be updated with latest technologies then he must be go to see this website and be up to date daily.
Web sites come and go. Stackoverflow will be just another casualty down the track as I see more and more intelligent people leaving the site and closing their accounts.
You mean people who’re too intelligent that they questions which even they can’t explain properly? Pfft.
salty.
Stock Overflow.. is terrible .. you can see many trolls in the internet fixing yoour gramer,,,
add pagination on it
🙂 You are wrong, man. StackOverflow is not a place to make other people do your homework. Your question should EASILY/DIRECTLY make other people feel your question is advantageous to them. It’s related to Search Engine Optimization. If you want people to answer your question no matter they’d benefit from it, hire a tutor. Or ask in Quora, where nobody told you what to do.
I agree.. I used the website to try to learn python. I could not figure out how to make the text Into code. I thought ‘ oh well, What does it matter, you can still read it ‘ The moderators had a field day. It’s annoying because they shut down questions which apparently cannot get a quality answer when there is already a quality answer left by a normal human.
SO is not “learning language XYZ for dummies”. It’s a Q&A site where you come after you’ve done your research and Googled for answers. If you can’t find it on the internet (which I’m sure you’d have found out if you put some effort. If not, feel free to write what the question was about, exactly) then you come and ask at SO and show what you want to do and what you’ve tried. Since it’s not LivePerson or a similar website, you’d be wasting time of the community by asking ambiguous questions.
Stackoverflow is where you are directed if you have a question on Google Scripts. If you are new to scripts, you are going to have questions that aren’t easily googleable by someone who doesn’t know what he/she is doing. I’ve spent weeks trying to find answers on my own. When I posted the same question on SO, the ignorant people like yourself come look at it, then move on or post a question in the meta section about how my question is too similar to other questions. It’s not a waste of time to the community because it provides another search result that could possibly reduce the chance the question could get asked again in the future. It’s also very likely a different scenario of the previous question, so it may need a different answer. Either way, it would take you 5 minutes to answer many of the questions that someone new is asking, but you won’t because you’re too good for that.
I don’t need to explain myself to you or anyone on that site. If I’ve tried to figure out my question, I’ll say that and maybe give some examples, but I’m not going to justify my posting of the question. I’ve taken the time to post a question, so try to help if you have the ability to. If you’re too big of a jerk to provide some intelligent input on it, then go spend some time on your own programs because that’s clearly all you care about anyway.
Just because it’s not “learning language XYZ for dummies” doesn’t mean you have to treat people wanting to learn like garbage. In my experience, SO teaches me what not to become once I learn a language. SO could make it easier to learn a language, but it won’t because it’s too hard for many of the users to get over their ego. Judging by your post, you are clearly one of the cancers on the site because you clearly feel above everyone who doesn’t know programming already.
SO works perfectly fine as a site where you can offload tedious work to the idiots like you hunting for virtual credit and that’s exactly what I abuse it for and you idiots fall for it all the time… I take pride in not accepting any of the answers I get. I rather rephrase the ones I get to sound superior and take the credit myself and there’s nothing you can do about it LOL
@Kai_LeRai there’s a lot of ignorance in your comment. Nobody answers idiotic questions that you ask so how would anyone ask you to accept the answer that was never posted? LOL.
Funny… that is applicable to every single of your comments. Coincidence? I think not… My comment, however, is perfect in every conceivable and it’s a well known fact that perfection always looks like ignorance from below…
“My comment, however, is perfect in every conceivable”
Yes this is the know-it-all attitude of yours which is the real problem. Arrogance is not much appreciated at SO, and that is exactly why you found your butts red that day.
Yeah a loser’s gonna tell me how SO works. LOL. Read the rules you moron!
What a suck up you are. You must be a moderator there, you have the social skills.
@kell yes I do try to contribute to SO by answering questions, as well as approving edits and delete votes, etc. But this can be done by even a sucker like yourself, in case you have enough rep.
So you admit being one of those idiots that’s just playing the system to gain useless virtual badges. Needless to say, I revert all changes made by idiots like you, because they usually don’t add anything to my flawless description in the first place. Try to scrounge credits somewhere else or upgrade to Pokemon Go…
Leaving my personal opinions and experiences aside, the fact alone that this simple post has such a huge response impact shows you that SO has a problem.
Wow, so many comments on this! 😯
It’s pretty telling that the most vocal proponent of SO here is so damn rude. I’ve never used the site to ask a question, and certainly won’t now…
There’s never really an excuse for making people feel worthless, especially when they’re reaching out for help.
@siwel
Funny thing is that this BIll the Lizard guy seems to agree with you. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/323582/6178459
TBH I think that this “most vocal proponent of SO here” is nothing but an ordinary big mouthed troll.
I agree. I liked stackoverflow few years ago because it helped me to learn. Recently I am lerning Android so I asked some quesions on SO, but my question constantly downvoted and marked as duplicated or unclear by a guy. Hey, I really want to learn and asked the question seriously, it took me 15min to searcing answer in SO, modifing my queation and typing the code! But it just marked duplicate by the same guy everytime! Those guy reading SO everyday of course know the detail of every question, but as a new user, we can only check a few Q&A, and may be checking some with the title to see if my question has been asked.
To stackoverflow, you guy may be right that there is rule in the SO, but be aware that at the end there may be leaving the same group of people in SO, no new user anymore, so the community will be declining.
Sometime the question may be really duplicated, However as a learner of a new programming language, sometimes I even do not know my question is related to another question in SO! Just like when you learn new things, you do not know the detail of it. It really get me down when I asked the question seriously, and really want to learn something, but then get a down vote and the question marked as duplicated.
Stackoverflow is where you are recommended to go if you have a question regarding Google Scripts. If you try to ask a question though, you get a bunch of views and that’s it. From the response I’ve gotten and the type of questions posted in the meta section, Stackoverflow just seems to be a bunch of pompous assholes who whine about how people are posting too similar of a question to someone else’s question or the question isn’t formatted right. They complain about how someone could’ve googled the question and gotten an answer. Just because something is easily googleable for one person doesn’t mean it’s easily googleable for another person. I don’t know much of anything about programming. How do I search on how to do a process if I don’t know what the process is called? You can’t ask on Stackoverflow though because you aren’t a fellow pompous asshole. If you’re experienced at programming and can provide some intelligent assistance to people when asked, then provide your input. I had one person who felt it was more important to correct my punctuation than to provide an answer. This ignorant jackass didn’t even know the correct punctuation to use because he turned my correct word into a form of the word that doesn’t even exist.
Stackoverflow could be a great resource, but it is useless from what I’ve seen. People on Reddit are more helpful because there doesn’t seem to be this believe that they are Gods and you should bow to them like the Stackoverflow people seem to think.
To sum it up: SO is a site for egotistical wannabe “experts” who can’t seem to comprehend a thinking-man question and would imnediately close such question off for fear of exposing their stupidity to the poster and other intelligent people.
Easy questions get upvoted continuously; whilst hard questions are bumped because the morons can’t answer them. Leave these fucking hard questions alone and let real intelligent people answer them, fucking retards!
If I were you, I would start a technical blog and try to help others or new programmers. Why do it for free for SO when you can do it for free for yourself with your own blog?!
SO is shit! Period.
“SO is shit! Period.” – Agree.
Stackoverflow is overrun by fucking morons who can’t see past the tip of their fingers, let alone anyone else’s.
Don’t bother asking any question at SO, you’ll just cause yourself some anxiety. SO is a the only site where people are made to feel worthless, particularly when they are starting out to learn a new programming language. If SO experts are so smart, why the f**k are you patrolling SO like a troll? Why don’t you become a Formula 1 driver and earn millions instead of wasting your life on SO for peanuts? The answer is simple: they are just as worthless as the people they criticise with their condescending manner!
Websites come and go. SO will eventually mod itself into irrelevance! I for one won’t miss it.
Good lord you are one butt-hurt self-absorbed moron. Stack overflow is a huge success because it works. It does not indulge in poorly written questions that don’t serve to help other people. It is a community. By writing good questions and good answers, you grow a wealthy resource that will stand the test of time. Asking questions that have come before, are written badly or are too broad are not fit for SO – “period”. If you seriously think that people do not answer tough questions on SO… and good lord how much you pat yourself on the back. It’s hilarious. What a joke! You have no idea how annoying and frequent it is that stupid questions are written on SO. It is obviously people like you that contribute to them, then go and whine about it on your “personal blog”. You need to get over yourself.
If SO were to indulge in all the poorly written questions and answers, it would quickly become an unwieldy mess and I have NO DOUBT it will lose its place as king of programming Q&A. The reason it remains so is exactly the same reason you post your ironic diatribe on your fancy blog.
So why are you here ?? What’s you excuse ? Do you find it fun be-littling others too? What a butt-hurt self-abdorbed you are ‘Simon rather don’t speak ‘
@Ruck well sir, it is you and other SO-haters who are butt-hurt. Because the SO community used your butts as sandbags. LOL
It seems you’re happy with your 10k rep.
Programming nub here. Was googling “c# style guide”. The third result was a closed SO question phrased like this:
“I like style guide used by google for c++, published here . Is there any similar style guide available for c# also? I’m looking for more of good practices along with simple things like naming just like in google style guide for c++.”
Closed because
“This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.”
I mean wth!? I’m a newbie, I’m looking for a style guide. Because SO people can’t help giving “opinionated answers” and “spam” the question got closed? Luckily the most upvoted answer got the info I was looking for – while being neither spam nor opinionated. I mean that’s what the upvoting system is for, isn’t it?
Apparently I was following C++ best practice by avoiding using “using namespace std”. Every decent C++ programmer knows this is purely evil, and should only be use in short example code snippet. When I post my C++ on SO and ask how could I do achieve the same thing with java. I immediately get 5 downvote. No problem, I don’t care as long as I get the answer from an aero-space engineer. But then, this old guy Elliot Frischer or Fischer (I don’t remember) came in and post a comment that mock the “std::” of C++. I view his profile, he’s a java programmer who’s about 40-50 years old, and has been spending his entire life being a “senior programmer” for various company. Most of his job does not last longer than a year or two. After marking his comment as not constructive, old man Elliot deleted his comment and downvote my question. This person seriously has a problem with his inner self. Maybe, the reputation system is just for people who are so frustrate with their real life and questionable competency that they have to go online and vent all of that on random questioners on the net. I pity that kind of people.
“After marking his comment as not constructive, old man Elliot deleted his comment and downvote my question.”
You seem to not know how SO works. When you flagged the comment, it went to moderation queue, where the MODS decided if it was worth deletion.
like I care shithead, fuck off one-man-army.
@mark that’s the problem, son, you don’t care and you don’t understand. Try to grow up and then join SO.
Not everyone is as brainwashed as you, Fucktard Without Inner Wisdom. What’s worse? The smell while licking the assholes of those SO idiots or the after taste? You probably are into both…
@Kai_LeRai so you found out the downvoters by doing that licking trick? No thanks, I’d rather not follow your trademark and disgraceful way.
Oh look, it’s the Aspi with the OCD again…
SO is layered and layered with arseholes who have just graduated from elementary school. Nitpicking, condescending, egotistical, trolling, brain-dead fuckers who can only answer the easiest of questions and voted on them like their lives depend on it!
Forget about asking complex questions or you’ll be surrounded with arseholes on their “shining steeds” sweeping questions left, right and centre after ridiculing the unsuspecting posters with asinine gesturing for asking questions that the fuckers don’t even know how to answer!
If you want alternatives, there are many. One of which is CodeRanch- less arseholes there [for now] and more tolerance than SO!
SO- like Wikipedia- will eventually mod itself into oblivion. Good riddance to both!
stackoverflow is seriously unfriendly with people marking a question as ‘unclear’ etc.
Quite often ,as in my case, narrowing down the question and making it more granular loses the very essence of the question.
Honestly hate the people at SO , don’t they realize that people come for help after they have spent hours days or even weeks for solutions !
Don’t bother with SO; go to CodeRanch.
SO is plagued with too many dumb areholes; you will just waste your time there!
Thanks for the suggestion. Never heard of CodeRanch before, but I’ll definitely give it a shot.
CodeRanch is the place to go!
I can’t stand the assholes at SO- too many assholes with too much vanity and not a lot of intelligence!
Yeah, I love codeRanch much 🙂
One time i read this and agreed and made a spam question on SO. I got a ban and within the first minutes it got 14 downvotes and a few comments. It got deleted shortly after.
This was the title:
한국한국한국한국한국한국한국한국한국한국한국한국한국한국한국
Yes, i actually did that.
Strange, I thought I’ll be the only one thinking exactly what you describe here.
Simply: If there is a person “with influence—>reputation or badges” on SO that think your question or answer sucks, it will suck.
For the real world replace “reputation or badges” with “money and weapons”.
Thanks, that a nice post!
its simple , I ask a question , I dont get an answer , I get flamed , I get mad .
fuck this shit site , consist of MFkers who replaced their keyboards with a type writer so they can go on a warpath with innocent users everyday of their lives .
stackoverflowed with morons
I’ve contributed a lot to Stack Exchange. Only a little to SO, but tons to a few others. On SO, everyone is a dick. It’s like they all have to prove they’re so smart and you’re so dumb. Just today, I asked a question about some HTML tags and why they are not deprecated, because other related tags with CSS can take the function. First, I get shit for answers, that are rude too. Then I get dick responses when I comment about it. All the while, I get downvotes and these answers get upvotes. Seriously, it’s not a useful place at all. Unless you have a specific problem in your code and have it narrowed down to 50 lines or less, there’s no reason to ever go there.
The sad thing is all SE communities tend this way. They start out fun and easy going. Everybody is excited to talk about the topic and learn new things. Then people start bringing in rules. Rules for this, that, and everything. And then if you break the rules, even as a newbie, you get downvoted. And these rules are damn near impossible to overturn. I couldn’t even convince a certain community that we should tell askers to see a doctor under certain situations (seeing things, hallucinating) because that is “advice” and there is a no advice policy. You gotta be fucking kidding me!?
I participated heavily on one particular SE site from 2013 to 2015. In that time it went from fun to kind of stupid. I have nearly 10K rep (most acquired in the first half of my time there) and now I’m getting answers deleted because some under 3K rep twat whose been there 5 months convinces a mod that my answer violates a meta policy via some tenuous reading of it. That was the last straw. I’ve answered since, but only when I’m bored.
It’s frustrating because some of them were so good and fun, and the ones that are good won’t be for long.
Agree 100%, stackoverflow and the whole site is a total piece of shit, it was bad before, now it is utterly useless piece of shit trash that deserves to burn in hell. Fuck stack overflow and the fucking asshole morons who made this piece of shit trash.
Honestly, I don’t know why SO moderators are so fucking rude!
First, they micro-managed your questions, then they insult you. Shit, I’m only there to ask questions and hopefully get some useful answers. I’m not there to be someone else’s “punching bag”.
Perhaps you could offer to teach them some manners. Judging by your post you are perfectly qualified to do so.
@davidheffernan: And judging by your dimwitted comment, you should stay permanently at that cesspool called SO. The outside world rejects all morons, including you, asshole! Go on, teach me some manners with your retarded command of English!
It’s not about SO, but please, give me your five minutes and read it, because I’m sure that the problem is much deeper and it bases not on service or rules, but on psychology. I should write a long article about it someday. It’s the same with every big social open website – including bulletin boards. I’m from Wikipedia (not English, I don’t know it that much) and Wikimedia Commons. I was there for 11 years. I don’t need to be anonymous, so I’m Krzysiu (ex Herr Kriss) there, never banned, admin and ex-admin of few projects, co-creator of one (szl.wikipedia). When I started you could post crap there and it was fixed by others in a moment. Now lack of categories is the reason to delete article. I generally left these projects – I tried to fight, beg people, teach (my lesson in Polish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J28LwsEP_E) how to threat users, but nah. Let me point of a few reasons applying to most projects (exclamations after numbers=greatest effects):
1!) aggressive admins/mods which scared off the rest. Other mods are passive as they are afraid to get into long and difficult fight.
2) thinking about end user fades away with time. People want to have pretty website and they prefer to delete something than fix.
3) so-called “ramp”. “If that post was kept, then why this, just a bit worse, have to be deleted”. Here is the loosening of rules. Making it more strict – “if we deleted post with misleading categories, why not delete one with good, but not THAT good. And then if we deleted one with not that good categories, why not…”
4!) lack of need of new users by old services. There’s need, but they don’t see it anymore. How many people will leave because such acting of mods/admins? A small count, nobody notices when you have e.g. 100 000 of them. The numbers which could show the case would be the count of newbies who stays for a long time. Not just newbies, not users.
5!) some time people gets sick of explaining the same thing to everybody (i.e. explaining some rules). They forget they don’t explain it to the same person, but to newbies, which still are here or there. They just give link or some weird stuff like “Banned per ABC1.5”. I’m not explaining these people. I think that if they don’t want to explain it again and again they could ignore it.
I don’t know what is the truth behind the situation you are describing. All my work on Wiki(m|p)edia made that I don’t give a crap about it. Why? Because mods shouldn’t act like that, no matter what was the reason. They shouldn’t assume such things, as well.Of course everybody would deny it, but it’s obviously mocking. They did bad, even if your acting would be bad. That’s why I don’t need to care about cause, as results are nonetheless wrong.
Actullay YOU SUCK. AND THAT IS THE BOTTOM LINE CAUSE I SAID SO. And stackoverflow is the new programming champion.
I find SO so smarmy as to be worthless. You look up a solution for a problem you’re working on, find a question that fits on SO, and instead of seeing some potentially useful answers, typically all you see are petty critiques of the question. If it is actually answered it’s typically in a very condescending “what a stupid question!”/ “You don’t know THAT?”/eye rolling way.
It’s fucking obnoxious.
It gives me the impression that the answerers are more interested in signalling how smart they are than in actually trying to be helpful.
I now ignore all SO hits that come up when I’m googling for some help on a problem because the site is worthless.
I would say there are still good people who answer the question, they just need better website to do what they like to do for fun.
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You wrote:
“SO today is yet another trolls&noobs zoo.”
But your story proves that you like this way. Question was obviously a homework there is no doubt of it.
This question doesn’t represent any value, unless other lazy student is searching for it, so IMO it should be trashed (students should learn stuff, not copy them from internet), so it should be down-voted so google will not give high value of it. It sis verry enoying when you are searching for something and you get on first place answers with low value.
Now your answer. It was solving the problem and newbie accepted it since someone did his homework, not because that it was proper solution. This is worst possible solution: by brutal force. Complexity of this solution is “o(n!)” = “o(n^n)” so a lot, for 9 boxes it works but for 20 it will fail (probably program will not end before end of universe). So I also fully support down votes on your answer, but only if there was a comment why your answer was wrong.
Proper solution should have complexity “o(n^2)” maybe it is possible to achieve “o(n log n)”.
IMO you are not happy not because something was wrong, some valuable information was deleted, but that your effort was not appreciated by community and you were not recognized as a genius.
I can get you people and you would discuss for many years if it is homework question or not. So your judgement is yours not should be a rule. I was searching for something online to help understand something in the uni. It is not asked by professors but I was curious and I was treated as if am school student who is asking for homework although am a phd student who is curious about something not in my field.
The only thing I don’t like about it is how prideful the answerers can be. One question I asked on the Software Engineering Stack Exchange was why you shouldn’t declare everything as public or everything as private, and instead of answering the question they mocked it. I know the answer seems obvious to them and they’re probably annoyed that I’m asking such a basic question, but I’m a beginner and I know that they had the same questions as me when they started. Later, they closed the question as “unclear what you’re asking”, even though it was obvious what I was asking.
And, Stack Exchange is not useful for anything. Because of the mods, and the stupid system that buries your question if it doesn’t get answers immediately. If you have a question about Linux, go to the Linux forums that are away from stack exchange. If you have a question about a specific programming language, go to the forum of that language. Stay away from Stack Exchange. Most likely the forum users will be more knowledgeable. Stack Exchange users care about upvotes and rep, not learning more about the subject they’re answering about.
I feel the same, some idiots just downvote your question for no reason at all, they simply cannot understand what you mean.
SOF is no doubt a good place to seek good answer. But man, I have no idea what kind of drug the web guys use and what they are smoking when the design this site. If you enter a post title the “wrong way, it will block your post. If you don’t put a tag, it will block your post, but if you put a tag not to their liking, it will tell you you don’t have enough “reputation” to create a new tag word and block your post. WTF is this? A police state? And when you try to make a comment to an answered question, in the middle of your writing you want to start a new paragraph by pressing the return key, the post is submitted before your even finished.WTF is wrong with the people at SOF? And I thought people who work there are smart.
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I just read this and I think i can agree…unfortunatley. I’m really new at programming and I have to do some minor work It’s not something that I like to do but I have still really high respect for everyone who can code really well but I don’t have drive to become one of them. I haven’t done much code before but I had to do this work. So I started and it went quite well until I got completly stuck. Tried to look answers in google and asking couple of friends but nothing that I could understand. FInaly asked in SO best of my abilities, posted a code and everything and I waited an hour. During this time my post got many downvotes and people saying to me that I have bad attitude toward programming and I could never be a coder (not even trying to) because of my question. I had really high stress because of this work and this wasn’t something I wanted to hear I said that if you don’t want to give me answer can anybody at least tell me what I should try to do. In the end I deleted my post and got badge to my profile “peer pressure: deleted post with more than -3 votes”
Yeah really nice addition to my night
sorry you had this bad experience, it sort of fits in with what I posted here myself about the site. The ‘elite’ experts are sometimes somewhat bullying, and there is no one to tell them that they are doing it. They can also bully ‘lesser’ experts (like me).
I found the same as Pallero essentially, the community was quite unhelpful, even more active and popular members were plain rude. Their terms for posting are interpreted too broadly, what I considered to by a concise, answerable question was slammed because I didn’t provide the value of a string variable.
StackExchange does not foster communities, just elitism.
I might be that you were overlooking the value of that string and stuck there with the problem.
Sometimes we get stuck in a problem and look at the area where there’s no possible error while overlooking/downplaying the actual problem elsewhere.
I strongly and completely disagree with this post and the attidude of it.
SO is largely a community of professional programmers. Everybody can use SO and learn from it, everybody can ask questions but it prevalentely remains a Q&A community made of pros.
You can present every type of programming related question to SO, even on topics no one gives a shit about and then get a bunch of pretty competent answers(here is an example of a very stupid question I asked and never got a downvote or a negative comment http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12179532/thesaurus-for-programming-keywords/41032190#41032190)
When one approaches SO it must be aware that the community is not there to do homeworks or answer logical questions about distributing wheight between three brothers.
That question you answered was something for rentacoder.com, freelancer.com or or other bounty programmer sites.
If the guy asked something about his effort to code a specific solution to the problem and some code he got suck on, the community will have flown in flocks to help. But the guy asked “can you do my homework?” and you replied. And let’s be honest here, you replied only to gain points in the gamification scheme you are spitting on and despising in this post.
So the kind of question that reads like “can you program this form me?” is not accepted on SO, and I very much appreciate the work of the thousand moderators that put effort into tagging, edit, deleting, bashing, banning users and questions that BOLDLY SHOW a lack of effort from the OP not only in tackling the problem presented, but in respecting the site shared and accepted guidelines.
You completely misunderstood the community and you are whining like a 6 yrs old.
It’s definitely become too officious at SO. People jump to downvote questions asked by inexperienced users, maybe if they struggled to get all the info down, or conversely put too much info down.
I’ve seen decent attempts at questions made by IT professionals, who seem not to happen to be SQL Server specialists; and then they get a load of downvotes because the regulars say they have made basic errors that they have previously told people not to make. Totally forgetting that the guy is probably being asked to work on some project an ex-employee knocked together 10 years ago, he may have only just become aware of SO and not happened to peruse the entire back question catalog.
There are now too many answerers, and not enough new questions to answer. In many of the questions the actual problem is not visible, leading to frustration amonst answerers. In some subject virtually every conceivable ‘how do I…’ has been asked, leading to downving of anyone who re-asks (or re-answers probably).
This is not a problem of SO, this is the great big point SO (and stack Exchange) has *addressed* in the internet.
I am so happy you raised this, this is my definition for Overflow guys, they remind me of nerds in school where they are used to be bullied and finally they found the place that they can take revenge.
Asking about something related to coding but still related to a framework that the person who should answer should know that frame work so knowing coding is not enough to answer my question and then people who comments asked for clarification. By clarifying, it showed them that it has to do more with the tool than pure coding and because they know nothing about the tool I started to get down votes and starting from that point my many years old questions are also getting down votes. For one week I got 2 down votes for all my questions, as if two friends had a deal searching for people like me who deserve the down vote.
I remember I wanted to raise my disagree in Meta stack Exchange and I was saying that it is disrespect to down vote without even willing to answer the question. You either have a point to down vote or leave the question be and ignore it. Some one was disagreeing and asked why I shouldn’t down vote without saying the reason. I replied it is like a person is talking to you and you are suddenly leaving him without saying a reason. In order for me to have a better question you should do effort as well by commenting why my question is not good. After saying that I got -7 down votes.
Everyone who had no problem of down votes is already more than good in coding and it is his field although coding now is involving many fields that you have to code a bit in order to have the output you are seeking while it is not your field. The problem is that informatics people disagree with that saying not everyone who doesn’t know how coding is, shouldn’t code. This is the main problem that making them act as nerds in school instead of taking the responsibility that they have with this knowledge.
So I would say SO has a responsibility that they are not good enough for it, they are just coding fans who are still in the show off era in school like nerds and they are free with their choice how they want this website to look like or be in the future. But I will get my answer with account 2 or 3 as this is my “HOMEWORK” as you are judging it. I will not care for their system because they didn’t care for the human being willing to find helpful people.
Fuck You SO ! ! !
StackOverflow does not care what your problems are. It is not a somewhere for solving trouble of programmers. It is just collecting “professional questions” and “professional answers” to make SO looks more valuable.
Real trouble of users will always be “downvote” or deleted. But if you don’t want to write a function or don’t want to spend time on reading a book for a question, you can find good answers in StackOverflow which almost copied from others’ blog or github.
Absolutely agree with you. My latest experience on stack overflow is that I’m blocked from even posting a question in most of the topics, because of my low reputation. And my reputation dropped because of bloodfirsty idiots moderators who blocked, put on hold, deleted my topics, regardles of me trying my best to post a god damn question. Hate that place
Nice to see the system is working as intended!
This is what happens not only in SO but also other StackExchange sites. People with moderator privileges think that they own the site and can do anything on it.
It cannot be denied that the answers you get at SE are quality answers and may be better than answers from anywhere else. But the way moderators behave make users frustrated, some may develop the feeling that everything they ask is shit!
@J P Roy – Yes, it can be denied that the so-called “answers” which remain on the site possess any quality. The ones that aren’t deleted are the ones by those who have reputation. The whole place is corrupted and wrong. Sometimes the correct answer is “check this link and follow the instructions”. Period. It isn’t necessary to go copy/paste the Internet into StackExchange and yet those bozos with the reputation do that at least an hour a day, pretending to makeup those “answers”. The name for this is plagiarism.
What we need to do is to plan an “in real life” StackOverflow party and offer all kinds of free food and gifts as if it were hosted by the owner. And then we go in there with baseball bats and beat the living sh*t out of them. They’re a sorry excuse for human beings.
no, just get a competitive platform up and running. Make it where people can go get their questions answered without political correctness snowflakes.
+1
What happened to SO… I thought the goal was to help, not more obscene politics.
The same thing that happened with the internet. At first it was new and full of smart nice people. Then it got dumbed down so much, a monkey could get on and throw virtual poo at everyone.
I agree, fully to your last sentence. It is rather frustrating asking a question as a beginner / hobby-programmer in SO. I have several accounts for SO, I don’t care about up- or downvotes at all, cause how much does a vote of a troll tell about you as a person? Correct, nothing at all. People will take more effort in trying to explain why this question isn’t worth being there than actually trying to answering the question, which drags me into thinking that many are only here for trolling and hating, more than for anything productive. The arrogance of these people is horrendous. Whenever a question isn’t too specific/complicated, I try to simply ask it in one of the other good forums I know, there is especially one good other forum where the rules say you have to treat each other friendly, and there must be at least enough time for manners, saying “Hello” at the beginning of a question, and saying “Thank you” when you got helped. And guess what? There are awesome experts there too, because they enjoy helping AND a friendly environment to do so. I fully agree, and I enjoy answering questions so much more in forums like these, because I am still a person, not a robot. The great looking down on others in SO of some people simply makes me believe that programming is all they have in life, so they want to rule like a big boss in a forum, which is very sad to begin with. In my opinion the way you treat other humans tells a lot about how satisfied and happy you are in life, and who is totally hateful in their own lifes will emit exactly that hate. Which is why my feelings for many of these people answering are not respect, but pity.
You are such a bloody idiot. the question was closed because 1. Showed no sign of asker trying 2. No testable code to work with 3. Too broad….. It violates the rules on 3 areas. If I break 3 of your rules in your home I bet you will ask me to stop and if I do it some more you will kick me out.
SO has only gotten worse. It used to be Q+A police that were an issue now it’s full of know-it-alls that vote to close your question if it reflects any kind of confusion. Soon any and all questions will be closed simply because a question means a person is obviously intellectually inferior and doesn’t deserve an answer to his question. Now I have contributed a lot of useful answers to very difficult problems. Some of my best answers barely have more than two votes. Yet, if I answer a Python qst or anything else thats trendy I could easily get over 10 votes. I feel stupid for contributing my knowledge and code samples to this site. I’m done with SO. It’s like a person you do a lot for but get little in return and a person you help but isn’t there when you need them.
You are absolutely right about Stack overflow. The site is garbage! Many times i see (simple) questions that can be easily found in google and are being upvoted. But when i posted a question about a specific type of SSD its being downvoted for no reason at all.
Although i did get my answer there i would recommend everyone to avoid that site and go to forums instead
I was on SO for 6 weeks and contributed quite a bit. When I challenged two men (with a friendly question in the comment section) that were high in the ranks, I was banned from the site immediately. They refused to tell me why they suspended me, except to say that I was “rude.” When I asked for specifics, they didn’t give any until I phoned the main office and asked to speak to someone, asking what the policy was. A community mgr got back to me to say that I was suspended without a warning because I was “actively damaging the site.” But no explanation as to whether or not that ruling was subjective, which it must be. They based it on one comment. The moderator was using his power to bully me out of the site. It’s a little boy’s club. The comments here about downvoting are true -they’re sometimes done out of retaliation. And you CAN tell who is downvoting you if there is a pattern and if they all of a sudden lose two points after you see that their reputation decreased by two points and they are online. Most of the time, the downvoting is fair but not for every user and there are plenty of downvotes that are done out of retaliation. It’s a haven for bullies. It just depends on your personality type, are you going to be seen as a threat or not, but you cannot challenge people at the top and expect to not get hated. I like the format for their site -the questions easily seen on the homepage. I don’t like the lack of professionalism or the lack of knowldege, which was more common than what they’d like to portray.
My questions have never been downvoted OR flagged OR ridiculed. Do you know why? Because I actually do my part of the job. I always make sure I do enough research before I ask a question, and when I do decide fo post one, I make sure it is LEGIBLE and communicates well. I contribute to, if not maintain, the overall quality of the site. Asking questions that involve no discussion or learning experience dumbs down the whole community. SO is a Q&A site with its culture similar to that of discussion forums; its members want to assist those who are willing to learn, share, and improve. It is certainly not a place for those morons who give no shit about their task and expect someone else to do their stuff for them, for free, without even trying. You’d think they’d at least put some effort into their questions if they really wanted an answer… no no no, those spoiled brats just spew some unreadable question and expect US to take the time and effort to decipher his post. You may not like SO, but I see nothing wrong with its culture. At all.
Hi,
I heard lots of good things and reviews about this website and you guys are saying that why this website is sucks. I don’t understand why people saying that kind of things without even using once. Earlier, i have used one website where i had been great experienced and before using people had said so many negative things about that website but after using i found best website i have ever used.(http://www.hifreelancer.com). So, guys grown up, and say only that things whichever you had going through from.
Thank you
Actually not for newbie! Simply wanna say!!
I think if they need to control of garbage Up/Down voting! If a new user asked then it should be considered as max 2-5 down votes!
I have got a good conception from them! And had wrote an aritcle after reading a post on stackov..
This is the url :(Difference between decimal, float and double in programming) https://devsael.blogspot.com/2017/04/difference-between-decimal-float-and.html
You can check it out!
Agree 100%, that community has some really really selfish moderators how are targeting new users for any reason!
Stackechange is the most unfriendly and stupid community I ever saw. They are not here to help other people but to downvote and show how they are full of science, and how many reputations points they have. Talking with them is like to talk with a stubborn deaf, plus they don’t know politeness and respect. They are not searching to increase they knowledge, they are seeking for impose their views, think they are specialized in everything and increase their points to get privilege. Never seen such an hostile site where your question is locked if it looks like another question, even if your question is different, they don’t care, other users are just garbage for them. A good reply that is not 100% proved according to their double standards get downvoted, even when it’s interesting.
Totally agree, well said!
It’s weird how the author and most commentators are SELECTIVELY concerned with the (often stupid) behaviour of the SO moderators, while completely ignore the fact that most downvoted/closed questions come from people who ask questions which they may google out, or not putting enough effort into wording and formatting and just puking out their questions and automatically expecting that the experienced developers would lose their time for free trying to decipher what Their Lordships want to know and are lazy to find out themselves.
“I have a program which does not work. What shall I do?” without specifying what the program exactly is supposed to do, what exactly is the error etc. Not speaking about just clearly copying their homework assignment.
Or they just copy and paste **all** their code there, without making it “Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable”.
…Minimal – Use as little code as possible that still produces the same problem
…Complete – Provide all parts needed to reproduce the problem
…Verifiable – Test the code you’re about to provide to make sure it reproduces the problem
Sorry for that but most of you sound exactly like one of those Rejected Geniuses whose questions I describe above…
However it’s true that in Stack Overflow they sometimes close a question which **is** interesting, which bothers me a lot. So I also agree with the critique, only I don’t think it is to be applied to most of the cases.
You know it’s really funny when you get “Minimal, Complete, and Verifiable example” and that is exactly what you provide (to the best of your ability). I un-deleated my question just for this as a clear example of why you see so many complaints about this sight… http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43906308/jscrollpane-set-vertical-size-to-not-resize-when-maximize-window/43925781#43925781
I created that test code and spent hours forming what I thought was the perfect question…. nope! I dumb it down even further to remove one of the errors here – http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43915822/jscrollpane-sethorizontalscrollbarpolicy-as-needed-without-resizing-content/43916564?noredirect=1#comment74870099_43916564. The answerer reproduces the error (in the question I gave too much info about), so I let him know it in the comments so he could go back and give the actual answer I was looking for. Then I get followed by that moderator who has no interest what so ever in answering my question (obviously), and instead just tries to micromanage me into something I was already going to do (“mark him as the answer”) once I was done verifying the issue was not in the answer, but with the compiler.
Getting a question answered is like pulling teeth. You have to prep for surgery and baby people to get it. and 90% of the time, your question is marked down to close (unless you fight them on it, which sends your question into oblivion).
Well, Sam Parson, your code is apparently NOT Minimal – a lot could have been removed to achieve the same. And it is YOU who should have tried removing line by line until you either get the REALLY Minimal example, or maybe find the error on your own.
but otherwise the question looks good. Maybe I am wrong – I have not tried it in a compiler – and you REALLY could not delete anything… Still your initial post was very rude (in the meaning described here https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/309018/2886891).
My initial post was very rude?… Whatever you say. I’ll let the logic of others decide the truth on this. Hearing it from me will mean nothing to you.
@Sam the guy had over 200K rep but he ain’t a mod. Moderators have a diamond symbol in their usernames.
Like this is a moderator -> http://stackoverflow.com/users/1849664/undo
I got into it with SO mods today. Been a user for 4 years, over the last few months I have noticed a steady decline in being a real Q&A sight (and quite frankly got fed up). I mean… “this isn’t supposed to be a learning environment”… really? What kind of site is this if you can’t come ask questions to get answers (aka learn something!!!). Seriously… you can read this comment (if it wasn’t already deleted) here – https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/262791/the-rudeness-on-stack-overflow-is-too-damn-high/349065?noredirect=1#comment472363_349065
I just find it really funny they deleted my suggestion/comments (with threats of punishment for “abusing the system by asking questions”). Luckily, I took a screen shot (as I knew where this was going) – http://i.imgur.com/dDRqPim.png
Pretty pathetic. I’ve been forwarding their behavior to all my programming colleagues (and they acknowledge as well how bad they have gotten). It’s really too bad SO is a monopoly right now. We are in dire need of a competitive platform.
What’s sad is these sites spam the search results and Google is suppose to stop it. Google only cares about goofing off on their phones then doing any real work.
BTW: I’m not making it up. https://theamericangenius.com/business-news/ex-googlers-share-what-sucks-about-working-at-google/
Though I wish I were.
My question is this, I would like to know why i do not have a choice of removing “Google” off the Pc, I mean removing it, not blocking it, clean of .Gone for good, I hate the stupid little jumped up browser and all it stands for what`s behind it, and the people who run it.
I see this browser as a threat to World war 3, A threat to fine young minds,A threat to Catholic values,
This browser spreads Sickness of the Mind.
Simple choice that`s thing here, like when you go to a supermarket, I like this product and this one ,but I don`t Like that one Called “Google”
I have no Mind for it, if that make`s sense, just wondering if any of you Technical Heads out there know a quick solution to this that would be great.
The Greatest Man In The World got Hung on a Cross for his way of thinking, So if you think you` nailed this problem Let us Know,
We are the people ! Hail Hail.
SO sadly is full of really really selfish and inflated moderates as they stick there nose in every derails in your questions ans they need it to fit exactly to there standards!, So bad admins!
This page looks like a parking lot for all the unappreciated geniuses which StackOverflow is not worth of. Haha 🙂 what a loss for the world that you all left StackOverflow! 🙂
I gave up on Stack Exchange rather quickly. If the site happens to be among those on the first page of Google results when I’m searching for something I won’t purposefully not go there or anything, but I gave up on adding anything to the site regardless of whether I have an answer, a better answer, or THE answer, for pretty well exactly the reasons you state . . . namely,〝 SO is not interested in users getting answers to their questions 〞and 〝 [an] army of Nazi retards moderating everything they can see 〞. The two things actual go together : SO is more interested in moderating everything they can see than they are in users getting answers to their questions.
What did it for me was one time when I saw that the chosen answer was actually wrong. I didn’t have “the answer” per se but I laid out where, why, and how the chosen answer was incorrect, then I “worked the problem”, meaning I laid out what we know, what we can eliminate, and so on, to help come up with the full complete answer. My post was deleted.
To be clear : they kept the wrong answer, which helps no one, because it was “an answer”, and deleted my answer, which will help anyone interested in actually deducing the full, complete answer, because I didn’t actually advance “an answer” in my post.
So by their logic, had I posted “the answer is polly wolly golly oink oink zap” it would have value, because I’m providing what I believe to be the answer even if it’s wrong, but if I observe the scientific method while experimenting on my own system for several hours, then post my results (eg. “so we can eliminate a, b, and c, because of d, meaning the answer must be e or f” or wtv) which DEFINITELY will help point to the solution, SO consider that post to have no value, and delete it.
That’s when I walked away . . . when I realized their mods, and maybe (probably in fact) the admin as well, are collectively retarded, fer fcuk’s sake.
@Mike Mounier if correct answers get deleted on SO or SE then why do you check what people have to say there? LOL
Unless you’re using abusive language or such, answers don’t get deleted by the community. They can get down voted by trolls or sadists or because it doesn’t fit the SO standards (e.g. link-only answers are bad. Either quote the relevant portion in addition to the link or post the link as comment not answer).
Give us a screenshot of your deleted answer (go to your profile and open from there) and a link to the question, otherwise it’s a lie.
@FWIW Oh fuck off already! Nobody gives a shit about what you think is a lie or not and nobody has to prove anything to you fanboy retard-troll…
Why would I care what someone from a mental hospital’s cell is saying. LOL and why do we need a proof that you’re caged in a cell? You’re just a troll asking for proof just to waste our time.
The fact that you’ve been pestering this page for two years, leaving countless snarky replies proves that
a) you DO care and
b) you’re most likely the one sitting in a mental hospital with your inability to control your autistic fanboy-OCD
Hey I see your butts turning red. Was it the stackoverflow mod who kicked your soft arse or was that hospital security while you’re trying to escape from the cage? LOL.
Is your record broken or why do you always use the same lame comeback? You even lack the creativity to insult someone properly. No wonder you’re bending over for the SO powers to make you their bitch…
Besides, by not addressing my points, you basically proved just to be a troll, troll…
@WIWF “You even lack the creativity to insult someone properly” probably because, unlike you, I’m not a veteran at trolling.
“Besides, by not addressing my points, you basically proved just to be a troll, troll…”
Yeah if you can’t provide evidence to your allegations that makes me a troll. Whatever, you mentally challenged dude. Maybe one day you will have your body work the opposite, like a normal human being i.e speak from your mouth and fart from your ass.
You’ve been attacking people daring to criticize your favorite shithole for the last two years. That’s all the proof that’s needed to expose you as a troll, troll. Besides, you didn’t even deny it the first time I called you out, you poor excuse for a basement dweller…
If a mentally challenged person like you can slate SO/SE without evidence then why can’t someone ignore your sucky questions?
FYI, my favourite shithole is the area below your nose. I mean, what else is the use of such a big mouth?
@FWIW such a big mouth can be used to eat big food 😀
I think it’s gotten even worse. But some languages are much worse than others when it comes to being the Q&A police. HTML, CSS & even Javascript are much more lenient and tolerant of beginners. In fact I’ve actually got a famous question gold medal for one of those.
Literally one of my first questions, didn’t put any thought into it, but it’s worth over 90% of my reputation points.
PHP, or Java (Not Javascript. Don’t ever confuse them. lol). is so bad though. Even if I try to give good examples, proofread, keep it to the point, I’ve never had an upvote and I’ve asked a lot more questions about it.
Server fault is worse though. I used the wrong terminology once and even though they knew how, they refused and made childish insults, Yet when I complained and said as much, even the moderators started harassing me and down voting my comments. Seriously was unreal how bad it was. Felt like I was back in highschool, but worse because there was nothing I could do about it.
Sadly when it comes to needing help with programming questions it’s the top of the search results for a lot of common programming questions. Frustratingly so, because often the questions are old and so are the solutions, if the top answer isn’t maintained, often far better solutions are hard to spot because they can have no upvotes at all.
Very true – I was about to join, as I have questions about Python. However, my employer and several others that I work with advised not to join – and directed me to the python.org and related sites – where all my questions have been quickly and efficiently answered.
Having read SO (and other SE sites, such as Physics, Academia etc), I see that there seems to be a trend of tacit approval of bullying and that the sites seem to be overwhelmed by questions seeking to have homework completed and self-congratulating ‘in-clubs’ or core members.
After reading over the sites, I am very glad to have been given the advice to avoid joining (and avoid using) anything on Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange.
I’ve noticed this as well. I replied to the main post above and you can read the rest of this there. Here’s an applicable excerpt:
The sad thing is all SE communities tend this way. They start out fun and easy going. Everybody is excited to talk about the topic and learn new things. Then people start bringing in rules. Rules for this, that, and everything. And then if you break the rules, even as a newbie, you get downvoted. And these rules are damn near impossible to overturn. I couldn’t even convince a certain community that we should tell askers to see a doctor under certain situations (seeing things, hallucinating) because that is “advice” and there is a no advice policy. You gotta be fucking kidding me!?
A colleague of mine (a Professor) described SO (and several SE sites) as being examples of ‘little emperor’ syndrome. The sites start out fun and easy-going (as you stated), but then a small core of like-minded, usually high-ranked members effectively ‘take charge’ – these are not necessarily moderators. They have a tendency to treat the site as their own and have very little tolerance for differences.
My learning process in Python and data visualisation has been successful without using any SO threads. I did try using SO (as a guest), reading the questions, answers and comments – most of what I saw was either homework questions or comments from established members critiquing the other members about how they write the question – neither are helpful at all. It took far too long to find the buried gold nuggets of information. Whereas in other (non SO/SE) websites, the information was available in a much shorter time.
I looked over the Physics site on SE as well, as an experimental physicist, I found very little to suggest that this just as important approach to physics is welcomed or accepted. I could be wrong there, but the first impression is that it is a theoretical physics site, run by a core group of physicists (presumably) – certainly did not get a welcoming vibe – but have found several viable alternatives.
join it and post a question it is funny when they shut down your question
my question got shut down
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44973736/what-is-pla-h-in-c
but I laughed instead
When I discovered SO many years ago, I hated it immediately. The sign up process was convoluted and tricky that I never did learn it. And I’ve noticed over the years it being very helpful AND also infuriating. I’ve been having a Drupal install issue for 2 days and I finally found *THE* question by someone having my PRECISE issue (in a sea of the same issue with variations). It managed to get one comment/question before it was closes as “too broad”.
Moderator kiamlaluno, you’re a BITCH!! I’ll bet you have a mod account at wikipedia, too.
I totally agree with your post sir, to me SO is like Alcatraz where users are like jailers ruled by robots with none sensed stupid and retarded behavior and also guarded by a bunch of zealous full of shit morons (Please excuse my language), the 1225 upvotes of this blocked post in SO itself tells it better: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758/why-is-stack-overflow-so-negative-of-late
I totally agree all the people with high rep just post answers from google and down vote saying it is duplicate whereas in reality the so called possible duplicate of question ‘X’ is not the same question and has a different answer most of the time they are so fucking illiterate that after telling them not to give googled answers (I wrote especially on the question itself ) They just copy pasted from wikipedia I mean really If I could google the answers WHAT ON EARTH IS THE USE OF STACK OVERFLOW
I am actually talking about stack exchange as a whole
yeah right
I am for a government ban on this shit website and its derivatives. They are the definition of Internet pollution.
Now I have been working with several of of stack exchange
Latex
Mathematics
Stack overflow
Stack overflow people are the worst. All of them are setting their own rules and ways, if you said that then wrong if you mentioned this then wrong. They dont care about the question to be better, they only care that this field should involve certain people and not everyone.
A message to Stack over flow people, Just answer the question if you care to help or try harder finding a better job. It is the case there are many of you and yet people need you so be of a good help or act as an asshole else where.
Check other stack exchange websites and learn how they are forcing the questions to be better.
reminds me of my question
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44973736/what-is-pla-h-in-c
which gets downvoted for not clear lel
Absolutely agree – their 1984 Orwellian attitude makes the site useless except perhaps for loyal devoted followers who strive to ask “satisfactory” answers. The geeks who dreamed this up probably thought it was a great and groundbreaking step in Q&A forums,
So far as I’m concerned I am the best judge of whether a question I ask is a good question because it is me who is encountering the challenge that led to me ask the question. Their approach is naive and juvenile and a poor design that attempts to reduce spam/clutter but at the expense of overall utility.
What use is a Q&A forum that actually prevents you from asking questions?
Draconian and sadly all too typical of modern self aggrandizing web companies.
Brought up the issue here – could use some backup https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/352225/does-stack-overflow-track-the-effect-of-moderator-policing
Hey!
I hate those nazi moderators too. I haven’t had any problem with them on SO yet, however this story remembers me when I decided to post a job offer on the facebook group of my school, and one of those retard nazi moderator refused to publish my post, sending me an email of 1000 km to explain me how my 10 lines post was not “corresponding to the chart of the group”…
Those maniac psychos are everywhere, and judge your content production with their own fucked up standards. StackOverflow could do something about it, like stopping to reward their unhealthy comportment with reputation. It doesn’t make any sense that someone who didn’t produce any helpful content could be reward by removing “Hello!” from a post.
However, I’ll still use StackOverlow, I like getting reputation when I help people, it makes me feel great, while those trolls are happy with their fake reputation… Not a good developer ? Become moderator x’)
Just kidding, one of those nazi moderators got me for the first time… because I insulted IE. Lost 100 reputation points lol. At least that’s still a funny story x)
This moderator was definitely humorless. My post had 3 upvote! >_<
I’m such a troll, I couldn’t resist.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/352391/is-it-really-a-good-thing-that-some-moderators-are-humorless
Pingback: love/ hate letter to stackexchange summer 2017 | Turing Machine
It is a fact that most of the world’s media is owned by right wing moguls. Their purpose is to spread the virus of capitalism and increase the planet’s differentials between rich and those in need. Left Insider offers left wing news from reputable news sites such as Left Futures, Red Pepper, Novara, The Canary, Buzz Feed, Left Foot Forward etc. Everyone has the right to maximise our own qualities and we all have the obligation to assist others maximise theirs.
You went far, very far.
Thank you for this post. Although it is now 5 years old, nothing has changed about its truth. There still are, however, some islands on SO where you can get decent answers (or where the elitists, as I call them, at least leave the post being “tumbleweed”). I experienced this around Java, Scala and Big Data topics. However what you describe is 100% true about, for example, .net or C++-related topics. Yesterday I posted about a strange problem I had about an object coming from a dependency property being propagated down into another user control via databinding not getting there. It was downvoted, and got a “close vote” for being “off topic”. Hello, I posted a WPF question with the tags WPF and C#, why is this off-topic? And this is not the only time I got this sort of response when asking about something .net related.
I am going back to the roots – I try to get as much information out of the official documentation and related blogs as I can and fiddle my own solutions. Yes, these tend to be dirty and ugly hacks at first. But I also consequently optimize these hacks, and I reckon, optimized hacks come close to the “real” solution, and if not, at least I build myself a library of useful functions that is spot-on without pulling in a whole Internet of dependencies. If I really have a question I can’t avoid, I post this in the official forums or mailing lists of these projects or libraries. In that respect, the people at the MSDN forums are also much nicer than the .net people at SO.
Here is what I posted at the bottom of my post that got downvoted (I’ll leave it here in case it gets deleted over at SO, what I really think)
Somehow I have the impression that we are progressing backwards in programming, at least in the .net universe. I feel as if a new age of programming has started which tries to get back to the glorious days of the 1980s and 1990s when we had our home computers, some books about BASIC from the school library and maybe some official documentation in printed form if we could afford it. And then we were on our own. We had to hack our way towards our goal, trying to figure out things the hard way and very often do ugly workarounds since no-one could tell us. Today, we have the Internet as a vast source of information, and communities like StackOverflow could be a great place to get a quick hint when we are stuck. But seemingly, some people still think they are born pro, and feel the urge to put obstacles in the way of people which do not have as much expertise. I know this very well, a lot of guys starting the venture into the world of programming or IT have such an “elitist period” in their lives, at the moment when they have more knowledge than the rest of the people around them. At least, this brings back the fun into programming – exploring previously-uncharted lands (or lands where maps exist for but they are so complicated that no-one can use them) and cherishing the moments, when you even do a dirty and ugly hack but finally get it working.
I love how people who were banned on SO rant about it elsewhere. Here at SO we don’t need people like you here, please, never come back.
I have never been a member – my decision is based on observation and from feedback (from friends)
There you go, thanks SO Mod… So inclusive. My experience is I have genuinely tried to contribute and offer answers and suggestions but have always been knocked down. Not great for one’s confidence or sense of worth… I fully appreciate that it is good to try and keep spam down but imho the system seems very rigid and inflexible.
This is funny. Since this was posted in 2017 the sheer numbers of voices re-echoing the sentiment against the problem that this person has let slip here provides such broad objectivity to the situation. And most of us here are not banned on SO. We just cannot use the system anymore for its primary established purpose It no longer serves that purpose in any primary sense. Due to the up / down voting, heavy handed and forced closing and deleting issues that come with no direction or explanation it really cannot be used to get any help. I personally cannot even ask for a clarification of something that wasn’t worded clearly without a “jealous serial down voter” chasing all of my posts and down voting them all. The system sometimes rectifies this, but sometimes it does not, and an invisible guy who has gamed the SO points system for years because he has had nothing much to do in the industry for all that time has so many points to spare that he can do this and get away with it and no one cares even when they take notice. If I keep posting he can knock my reputation down to zero while only losing 1/50th of his gaming points. For him this isn’t about help, or right, or wrong, nor about new ideas, alternatives or brainstorming. For him it is about him wanting to seem to be at the top sound-byte-wise. So if someone dares to comment on something, there is no analysis of the new content whatsoever. Yes I know that you will always _claim_ that is the reason. But there have been enough incidents of this for all of us to know what the real reason is. You are using your power to silence or brow beat a smarter, or more thoughtful person than yourself.
A new trend is going around on SO now. It won’t be long before it’s in the tour and all over meta and the help pages. The final rule there for all questions is the following:
“Please answer your question before you ask it.”
You have a bit of code you’re struggling with. It’s doing something predictable, but you don’t know what to do about it because you need a slightly different thing to happen. Due to your ignorance of the language, you don’t realize that there’s a different method for exactly what you are trying to do. That’s great! You’ve never heard of it before and it fits a need that you had and likely others did as well.
So you expect a good reception for such a question, right? Nope. You must answer your question before you ask it. You clearly didn’t do enough research, otherwise you would have found this other method that does this slightly different thing that you needed. So, you deserve all the down votes. Meanwhile, your only consolation is that a comment is given that informs you of this method that solves the problem. Well, at least you got an answer. But what of the actual answer that came in, the one that basically says “deal with it; that’s how that method works.”? That gets up votes. Now, you being a person who hopes to help the next guy, turn that comment from the one helpful person into a real answer.
So you expect a good reception for such an answer, right? An answer that actually solves the problem in the question? Nope. That’s not how it works. You should have answered your question before you asked it. You deserve those down votes too. How dare you break protocol and even come here in the first place. Please fuck off and never return.
Okay, you’ve been doing SE a while, you know the gist. You’d like some appropriate feedback, so you hit the meta site. “May I have some feedback, please?” you say. Sure, but let us first introduce you to the meta effect. As soon as you come here looking for feedback or help on a “bad” question, the deepest crevasses of Satan’s anus spread open to loose those most worthless turds the world could know: meta trolls. These depraved cretins roam meta only to find more questions that need more down votes. “Thank you for alerting us to your presence. Have some more down votes. And in case you missed the previous message, fuck off.”
Wow, what a reception! You get a single comment that alerts you to the new holy rule: please answer your question before you ask it. You reply, “lol. It’s really gotten bad here since I started years ago.” The next morning, comment mysteriously missing. Well, it wasn’t really rude or obscene or anything, and this is meta, so maybe there was a glitch. So you repost it. Again, comment mysteriously missing.
Okay, you’ve been here a while, let’s do the right thing and double meta this bitch. That’s right. Post a new meta question about a different meta question. You ask “What are the guidelines for deleting comments on this meta?” because out of millions of questions, that doesn’t actually exist yet. Instead of answering the question, they make it about you, and how you’re rude and offensive for suggesting the site’s not as good as it once was. No, the irony should not be lost on you that twice a question was not actually answered, yet the answer space was used and those posts receive up votes.
Ah, what are we to do at this point. Right now, to feel that literary completeness, I’m quite tempted to self-answer that second meta post with a real answer and see what happens. I have a sneaky suspicion that the first event foreshadows the second. I don’t think I could make this up, yet at the same time, I can truly appreciate the twilight zone, poetical happenings here.
So will I be back? Probably. I’m a see-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-is kind of guy.
If you’d like to read the nitty gritty:
Original question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/45779385/1934286
First meta question about the OP: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/355382/1934286
Second meta question about deleting comments on meta: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/355556/1934286
I had to stop at 200, sorry: https://imgur.com/a/SklJD
Yeah, the community leaves a bit to be desired, but overall I couldn’t do my actual job without SO, I found many solutions to problems I encountered there.
However, this meta post is just fucked up beyond belief: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/261593/
It actually DISCOURAGES YOU to have the nerve to add another question to the site, and this comment recieved 550 upvotes as of yet. WTF?
Yes, some questions already have been answered over and over again (like “how to do an UPDATE based on a SELECT”) or “I get a NullReferenceException”. Or sometimes it’s just a whole lot of code (and I mean A WHOLE FUCKING LOT OF CODE) and the question is something like “i get tis error and dont know wyh!!!!”, but it’s not too big of a hassle to simply flag those and move on, that shouldn’t result in such a post!
About flags… I flagged this answer as “very low quality”: “you needs to upload a pdf file.so you need a IOutils tool help upload a pdf file. pdf file maybe parse IO file.and need pdf template.” and it was declined because “a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it”.
Wow, if this isn’t “very low quality” I really don’t know what is, lol.
Yea was banned about 5 years ago for an android question . Didn’t give a shit then don’t give a shit now .Its basically a closed door community and because of their policies the project bad reputation and will be replaced by something better .Moderators are monkeys and the creators of the site Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky are so arrogant in their approach to the community .that they can effectively be labelled as the leaders of dis-community. two words to describe those two are “fucking twats”
I joined SO the first day; quit on the second day.
This just about sums up SO credibility! Site is overran by f*cking retards!…
I tried to find out about why I can’t switch off the mobile network on my S7 running Android 7.0. Found one of SO’s articles (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26539445/the-setmobiledataenabled-method-is-no-longer-callable-as-of-android-l-and-later) that talks about being rooted in order to do this after Android 5. However, the person posting the question and provide his own excellent answer has left SO due to conflict with the dumbshit SO moderators. Luckily, I found his full blog explaining the root cause of the mobile network issue and how to get around it. The blog is located at https://chuonglepham.wordpress.com/2017/10/07/android-setmobiledataenabled-method/. Interesting read! I don’t blame the author for quitting SO. I, myself, quit after three days because of too many braindead idiots roaming the place.
The most annoying thing about SO is chat not the main itself, if you say something stupid after a moment of emotion, it stays there forever, not just as a stupid side of your personna, but more as a weapon or evidence to use against you even 10 years after! that is horrendous!
I can’t agree more! I cringe every time a search lands on that horrific site. Sure, maybe 1 out of 10 times I find an actual answer, but usually it’s just a bunch of fucktards blathering on about how stupid or incomprehensible the original question is, and how super smart they are (yet not so smart as to understand a perfectly simple question).
Stack Overflow has overthought itself. Make Programmers seem like Empathy-Free *** who’ve disappeared up their own **** There’s more to life than Programming or anything that you excel at. Qualities like Humility, Compassion for others in difficulty. Or just being helpful to someone from time to time. I got banned and I have no idea why. I’m not unintelligent in any way but they like to make you feel like you are. Superiority Complex because I have basic insecurities is what it probably is!!!!
I discovered that it heavily depends on which main topic you ask on. When you ask in fields like .net, here especially C#, the probability of getting downvoted, your questions being called “off-topic” or you even banned (this can be an automatic process as well, when you get too many downvotes or posts flagged as “off-topic”) is much, MUCH higher than when you ask about e.g., Scala, F# or Data Science related topics. I believe it’s because of mentality differences. Some languages and platforms are more often used in scientific / researchy fields and the guys in these fields tend to be more rational and less elitist when it comes to answering questions.
I can even relate a bit to this elitism in certain fields. Being interested in computers didn’t make you popular in younger years – back at school the “cool guys” were the “bad guys” and the ones doing sports and stuff, if you were interested in computing, you were treated as if you had leper. Being at a specialist school for math and science didn’t help very much either. These “nerds” then felt superior in their field, and with the advent of the computer and when it was not possible any more to get away from it, they suddenly became important and superior to their bullies. And I think the elitism emerged from that. I often read and hear, they are “fed up telling all those noobs the same easy and basic things again where it is all in the docs”. Great, when the docs cover a whole lot more and the information you need is buried in some small sub-clause, or when they are written in a way that not everyone understands it properly…
We can’t change the people and how they think, we have to cope with it. And until now, I think not posting at SO any more is the wrong thing because then the elitists have won and the overall quality and diversity of questions declines. There are a lot of people not posting anything but just using answers from SO after a quick hit on google, but this depends on people actually posting them, even though they are downvoted like hell and closed for being “off-topic”. I even find questions with a large minus score very helpful myself.
My tactic now is: If I find a question with a minus score and I don’t see a reason for it being downvoted, I give it an upvote. Maybe more people reading this should do this. And I keep posting, not caring what votes I’ll get, until I get banned some time (however, my questions now end with asking the downvoters to explain why, so I can improve things I might actually be doing wrong – nobody is perfect). And after being banned, I return with a different mail address.
I am not at all an expert programmer. Not even close. But I like coding and learning how excites me. I also find online communication to be fraught with confusion and snap reactions. I don’t think that’s a new or radical insight. It seems to me that the arguments made here against SO amount to misunderstandings about the way SO works, and even a demand (without much foresight) that it should operate the way complainants want it to instead.
In my experience, many new users actively refuse to follow SO’s community guidelines. Demanding whatever one wants, however one wants, with complete disregard for the site’s format or intent, while expecting and insisting on an answer or free work, strikes me as short-sighted and infantile behavior. It floods the site with “gimme” requests that are useless to the community and saturates the site with voices that seem to have no intention of effort, growth, or contribution. There are plenty of other sites geared toward plenty of other types of requests, but that is not what SO is for. On the other hand, I’ve watched new users respond to cold, snippy, snarky, and bitter replies with a genuine interest in learning something new. Rather than wallowing in hurt feelings, they brush off the jabbing egotism and try to see how they can adjust their approach. I find this kind of modesty to be an effective way of confronting arrogant attitudes and authentically participating with and even improving the community. With this approach, regulars who are bitter or arrogant seem to fade away or relax their grips and those who appreciate a true interest step forward to offer (really incredible) amounts of time and energy.
Many participants on SO become frustrated and annoyed with continual entitlement and apparent laziness (especially but not exclusively from new users). Calling that simply “arrogance” appears to me as a childish tantrum. Such complaints sound to me like disguised hurt feelings and insecurities. Someone might know more than you. And someone might think you’re being selfishly grabby, unmotivated, and destructive to the community. Maybe they’re wrong. Maybe not. If you’re new, it might help to try and understand the existing community rather than to demand that it immediately accommodate you or to rage against it. Granted, this is not always easy. Sometimes this means reading (extensively) and doing your own research before asking a question. Sometimes I’ve had to build a hard-earned foundation before even realizing what I need to ask. I imagine I’m a neuroscientist and a new student bursts into a lecture asking me to write their undergraduate essay about the brain. I might be annoyed or impatient. I might not have much time to spend getting them up to speed. I might suggest they read up on it themselves first. If I’m really patient and helpful, I might recommend some resources to explore.
I try to understand that online regulars don’t like babysitting. Arguably, as teachers, they should be able to handle, guide, and reframe counter-productive requests, and some admittedly do not. Egos run wild, it’s true. I can add to the screaming mess, or I can participate in a (potentially, ideally) valuable give-and-take experience.
My advice, if you are really interested in learning: have some humility, listen to advice, make an effort of your own, try to ignore apparent rudeness and arrogance, and take the higher road even if you think moderators are being jerks. Scream at your computer if you want to. (Sometimes I do.) Those ideas have served me best. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about coding from many different online resources, including SO.
I’d also like to add that calling people “nazis”, “retards”, or “psychos” only throws gas on the fire. I don’t see much difference between that behavior and the way bitter moderators hastily down-vote, flag, berate, or ban a newbie. SO is not perfect. Nothing is. Pound your fists against it, throw the baby out with the bathwater, direct your energies elsewhere, or choose to thoughtfully participate and contribute to make it better.
Yeah I agree. Those lowlife “fascist” idiot censors take joy in preventing people from getting answers.
We need an alternative site which isn’t moderated (like that). Is there one out there already?
Quora isn’t much better since it needs registration etc.
Overmoderated, the sense of superiority, cherrypicking trolls, nitpickiness, minority rule, autocracy, it is more in real life than in there, so let’s forget about all these, but since when someone can’t delete a **chat message** in a social media? we are talking about chat here, people blow bubbles everywhere in chatrooms, I haven’t seen anywhere in internet when a chat comment is permapinned !
Slashdot has survived over 25 years with nothing more than a common ban system. They are doing pretty well these days. Stackoverflow, youtube, and the other systems seem to do much, much, worse. Seriously, Google? You can’t do better than this? What the actual fuck. Like they can’t figure out something that was pioneered by Slashdot and Kuro5hin 20+ years ago and literally the code was handed to them to free… OK…
package com.forum.jerk;
public class StackOverFlow implements EveryKindOfAsshole {
public Asshole postQuestion(Question q) throws DownVoteErectionException{
return new SOModerator();
}
}
@leowilliams: Very funny, man! LOL.
Todays forums compared with those in 90’s are nothing more than place for brainless flies who only seek reputation and some cookies. Those who agree getting cookies and reputation out from forums, come to me, I will give you cookies and rep, especially for those on SO.
agree,,I have a SO account which is 300+ was ban too, I checked my question and I did not know what wrong about it?
ABSOLUTELY AGREE WITH YOU. THEY GAVE POWER TO ARMY OF NAZI IMBECILES.
ONCE YOU GIVE POWER TO HUMANS, THEY WILL 100% ABUSE IT, GODDAMNED HUMAN NATURE. I gave up asking questions, since every single time I ask ANY question, it is mark as deleted or downvoted. Shame.
Probably because you refuse to follow the guidelines.
Can we just stop with the dimwitted, heavily-propaganda, incorrect-use of the word “Nazi’! All you guys are doing is just spreading more brainwashed-indoctrinated false information.
If anything, the international Jewish Zionist international bankers-fuckwits are more control freaks and destroyer of nations than the German Nazi (Nationational Socialism). I won’t be surprised if they created some false pretexts to invade Syria next, then Iran, North Korea and finally Cuba – because these are the only countries left on Earth without international banking – and doing quite well for themselves. Look at what happened to Germany when it tried to get rid of Jewish international bankers during WW1 and WW2, it got destroyed by other dimwitted, braindead Christian nations (Britain, France, USA, Netherlands, Russia, etc). The only true Christian nation at the time was Germany.
For starter, search online for “Europa The Last Battle” series. It’s a multiple-part documentary to give you more insight into what really happened to Germany.
Remember, history is written by winners to suit their agenda; and their agenda are full of lies (a.k.a propaganda), mysticism and misdirection.
Educate yourself and be free from the rest of the fuckwits!!
These imbecil moderators delete posts even when you attach an image, a screenshot for example. Why the heck do they have “Insert image” button anyways?
Stupidly created an account on SO to ask a question. Within seconds it got swarmed by “moderators” and voted down.fixed the question and it went dead with no answer. Repeated those steps a second time on a separate question and promptly deleted my account.
I agree with you completely. I don’t usually ask questions in SO, but rather use it to find the solutions by referring to the existing questions. Today I received two down votes for a question I asked without even a comment. I asked this questions, as I was looking for a place to start developing this specific framework and it is a tough job given the tight deadline. Instead of receiving answers, what I got was two down votes. It is very discouraging, because I’m already in a tough spot.
Maybe it is better to let highly reputed ‘supermen’ keep SO only for themselves and have their joy. SO is developed focusing on assisting each other in tech domain. This is not that.
100% agree and SO is the last place I go for answers. SO is EGO driven and the reality is that even ‘wrong’,’mis-worded’, ‘off topic’, ect… QA can be helpful to the right person searching for an answer. So is a scoring GAME – the person with the most votes wins. What you will also see is that legit questions get down voted by many who want their questions and opinions to win. SO is a farce.
I think that the community has became a kind of a “cult”.
On meta stackoverflow, there has been recently an interesting question Are questions really getting worse? (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/362967/2886891) :
>I have noted that recently fewer and fewer questions are getting positive score and I think this is a tendency that has been going on for a while.
>…
The question statistically documents that it is a visible trend that the community is less and less upvoting for the questions. I have stated my opinion there – well, I did use a slighly expressive language, but I was not *very *rude. The moderators did not even let my opinion to stay here and they have deleted it:
>Deleted for a complete lack of constructive argument. Please reference our behaviour guidelines and refrain from offensive hyperbole.
This is not true – although my answer *did* contain “offensive hyperbole”, it did *not* lack constructive argument, I supported it with several examples of questions and described the behaviour of the “reviewers”.
I obtained several supportive comments, like
>just because his response is over the top doesn’t mean it’s incorrect. Just because an experienced programmer has the razor sharp skill to detect a “bad” question does NOT mean that the level and angle of the question DOESN’T speak to a newb programmer and contains the exact context for which they are searching. From choice of vocabulary to complexity of example, there are in fact differences between questions that are called DUPES which is a major gripe of mine. New programmers suffer most from this jaded standpoint. – Mindsect Team (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/4897352/mindsect-team)
>I think you nailed it. Well said – Marilee (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/2955598/marilee)
However, some community members were very loud at not even trying to understand what I have written and started talking about something completely different, where **I fully agree with them**(!) and I am not questioning it, like e.g.
>Your desire to have a site flooded with crap, in which people wade through it in a futile attempt to find some good content, rather than a highly curated site with a high signal to noise ratio, is explicitly the *opposite* of what the site was *explicitly* designed for. SO was *created* because the sites that existed before it were flooded with crap, and that just *didn’t work*. It was *designed* to be a site that was heavily curated with lots of quality filters, so that the content would be a useful long term repository of knowledge. – Servy (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/users/1159478/servy)
I copy here my answer so the opinion stays at least somewhere:
>The community becomes less and less tolerant towards the “basic” or “stupid” questions. In the *good old times* of Stack Overflow, basic questions like What is reflection and why is it useful? (https://stackoverflow.com/q/37628/2886891) (score 1516 as of 06.02.2018) or What is dependency injection? (https://stackoverflow.com/q/130794/2886891) (score 2420 as of 06.02.2018) were highly voted up and produced good answers. Nowadays such questions would be marked within minutes as *Too wide and unclear what you are asking*.
>Also the community was more willing to answer questions which look similar. And this was good – what is clearly “the same question” for the experienced ones, it’s something totally different for the beginners, as they cannot see the similarity. And often the lazy so called “reviewers” mark as *already answered* just purely on the basis of the keyword occurrence, and not based on the actual meaning. I cannot understand how can a single question be voted for closing within 10 minutes – it is simply not enough time to *really read* them and *understand*.
>Once a question has several downvotes or even close votes, the way back up is virtually impossible. As someone already noted in meta, it’s much easier to close a question than to re-open it. And a question with several a negative score does not attract the user to even read it.
>I am not happy about the direction Stack Overflow is going to. The Stack Overflow Race Purity Nazis are overpopulated.
>Maybe in the old times the SO users were just excited that there *is* a site like this, were enjoying it and let others enjoying it too. Now every idiot who has just reached the reputation limit for closing joins the Review Gestapo and starts raging.
FTFY https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/363102/1934286
I can’t believe MSO just straight up deletes things. It’s *meta*, not main. Pretty much anything should stand. Let’s see if that let it stand this time, since I removed the bits of snark at the end.
I came here out of frustration about SE, which nazis around just like SO, because I googled “stackexchange is shit”.
Avoiding SE like the plague.
Are you son of a bitch calling me a nazi?
Just deleted my nearly 10 year old account with StackOverflow, and will likely delete any other stack accounts. Many moderators seem to be incentivized to be condescending and overzealous to delete perfectly valid, on topic questions. I’ve had enough of it. I realized that every time I even thought of visiting the stack sites it was giving me anxiety. I don’t have time for that, the waste of time it has become, nor the rudeness of arrogant moderators.
I agree. nerds should be banished. it allows thom to be anti social in a social nehhitg
This is completely true! no long time ago i maked a question about a pretty complex math problem and they considered my question bad because there wasn’t “enough information to resolve”, even when i putted the source of the problem! there is an alternative for SE?
@jason if you’v posted a request with this grammar “maked,putted,..”, I’m sure you wouldn’t find anywhere on earth to receive and publish your bad grammar in the long run.
@previousone: You’re the typical dumbass moderator that are found in abundance at SO – correcting user’s grammar with petty critiques. Who give a sh*t about English grammar as long as you understood the question asked by the poster! Are we writing an English thesis, asshole?!
lol I looked up “Stack Overflow sucks”, because It wastes a LOT of my time (professional developer). Here’s the formula:
1. Ask question.
2. Four immediate comments questioning your question, waxing philosophical. argument breaks out in comments.
3. Convoluted answers with wildly ranging, overly complex code.
4. Question is edited to the point where several answers and comments no longer match original question.
5. Said answers and comments are down-voted zealously.
6. OP posts that they figured it out, then runs away from the stupidity, and gets down-voted for not answering his own question, even though it’s been changed.
7. Closed as off topic.
I’m just going to block SO from my networks, and figure out how to exclude it from my search results. I’m legitimately amazed at some of these mods I see who chill there ALL DAY LONG with track records of just closing EVERYTHING. and btw I’ve read the meta, read the FAQ, read the rules (because I thought hey, maybe I’m doing something wrong, or we all are). I downvote the meta and the FAQ for being unclear, ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably understood in its current form.
To exclude SO from Google search results, add the following
“-site:stackoverflow.com”, minus the quotes.
However, you would be better off blocking everything to do with SO permanently within your router’s configuration. That’s the way I have done with my router.
Regardlesd of the fact that SO is now a place for nerds with life and personality problem the key point is that it is now a waste of time, there are more arguments, polemics and wrong moderation than useful things, so even if one pities the nonsensical nerds the problem is that one wastes time there. Curious to see how is users base will be in 5 years
SO is dead. Noobs and retards own now. They dont like good questions and will downvote a lot. They will upvote hugely on textual questions… cuz they are easy to asnwer. XD
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stop bill the lizard
answered a question with a very simple answer suggesting a newly acquired formula in excel (new to 365) and promptly got downvoted as it was too simplistic..ffs…if the answer is smple why try and over complicate it.
Got a ban for my trouble and tbh feel like its a badge of honour hahaha
100% spot on.I won’t be using that site again.
Absolutely agree. I have a grand reputation of 1 (maybe I should be proud of that). I just when back to SO to try and comment on someone else’s answer: I had discovered a bug in their answer and wanted to warn others but no can do. I don’t have the “reputation” and I can’t give another “answer” because i wouldn’t be “answering” the question. WTF? Not the first time either…. These guys should think of getting jobs with FB and twitter doing something useful with a bit of fake news takedown 🙂 rather than getting off on being a bunch of schmucks.
There is the edit feature on every post, available for everybody regardless of rep. Hell, even non-logged in users can edit. If you’re under 2000 rep, you can make a *suggested* edit, which will be reviewed by higher rep users before being approved and made public.
Better to ask in reddit. SO is full of retards and fortnite kids.
I’m developer for more than 10 years and I use SO for 6 mouths.
What you describe is exactly what I think about this website : a bunch of trolls who think they have power by voting minus on a simple question like yours.
I posted only a few questions and almot each times, I got no answer and finally found the solution by myself and my threat finish with many -, lol !
The last example is here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54370092/func-with-parameter-in-objc-protocol where I spent many hours to explain what I simply want to know : the good syntax to call a method (solution is funcName(_ : type) instead of funcName(paramName: type (really simple)). But without any explanation, I got many minus and the only guy who participated finally deleted all his questions (which were always the same so my answers too) so it became unreadable. I was wondering if I delete the thread but I let it finally because it is a school case.
I don’t know SO for a long time but I can say : it will be my last participation because IT IS A LACK OF TIME and if you don’t want to spend some time to chat for nothing, go on another websites of FB help pages. They are nicer and better than thise Black Mirror notation nazi website.
Right now it sounds like WordPress is the preferred blogging platform available right now.
(from what I’ve read) Is that what you’re using
on your blog?
here’s a fantastic example. I got into rubik’s cubes, and looked everywhere to understand what the “VIP” card I got with my nice, new (and somewhat pricey) cube was for. results were poor, and the official site has the information hidden away.
Then I find this.
https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/78862/what-is-th-gan-356-x-vip-card-for
The icing on the cake is that the Stack Police were pretty much ignored, there was one answer, it was accepted, and the Stack Police angrily shook their fists, impotently downvoting like it means something.
Synopsis: I had a question, could not find the answer.
Somebody asked on Stack the same, having experienced the same.
Stack Police didn’t bother to even try to answer, became hostile immediately
Somebody answered both mine, and poster’s, question.
Stack response? To prefer to NOT answer because of rigid and poorly constructed guidelines.
Like everyone is saying, what kind of Q and A site is hostile toward asking questions, and getting answers? I’m grateful I got my answer, and sad I had to go there and see idiotic lunacy in action.
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Yep, I agree. StackOverflow is GARBAGE! The point system is retarded as it doesn’t allow people to comment unless they have enough points. Then, you get penalized for responding in the only way possible making it a ridiculous policy and a complete garbage. The Admins then change your answer making it look like you said something you did not say. This is trash.
Im deleting my account and my answers as i do not promote this trash.
SO sucks because of oeople like you, explained here:
https://techblog.bozho.net/i-stopped-contributing-to-stackoverflow-but-its-not-declining/
Yes, Stack Overflow has a specific format; open ended questions are not part of the format since there could be multiple valid answers. Stack Overflow is for when you have tried something, but it doesn’t behave as you expect, so you post what you have tried along with expected/actual results.
I particularly want to find straight answers, not long discussions about the best way to try something.
For more open ended questions you could use https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/
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Wow! I’m glad to have found that my thought/opinion about Stackoverflow isn’t just me..
I Googled “stack exchange bunch of arrogant pricks” and your site with this page specifically was the #4 Search result..lol (nice SEO by the way)
I’m very skilled when it comes to Computers. Especially Hardware, Graphic Design,Web Design,Photo/Video Editing (Deep.. Not just MSPaint,Cropping,Or Filters..lol
Programming, However, I am a COMPLETE beginner. I’ve never made a program,app, etc
The only programming type stuff I have experience with is HTML and CSS. But that’s it.
But anyway.. It seems like most, if not all the stuff I Google search for ends up being websites in the “Stack” Family which sucks.
I guess I need to stick with Programming BOOKS.. 😛
A similar thing happened to me. Years ago I was getting good answers there. Then about 2-3 years ago I asked two questions, about a day apart. One was help for my daughter in her programming class – it was in a language that I couldn’t help her in. Another was a book recommendation for myself. I got several good answers to both. Then someone marked both questions as “bad”, which gave me a reputation below zero, which basically means that I’m banned.
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Same happened to Quora (if for slightly different reasons) . Started off okay. then went down the tubes.
Trolls
Questioners too lazy to do any research of their own
Same questions repeated over and over
Moderation merging questions that are NOT the same
Gosh. It’s like the internet is ran by the global elites!!!! Weird huh?
Wow. Years later, and this thread is still absolutely relevant. SO is garbage. They should drop the Q&A format and adopt the Wiki format. They do not want questions, they want wiki entries. Hell, just finding anything helpful on SO is next to impossible anymore. Most responses are debates around question viability and format, heavily layered with snotty sarcasm.
Don’t waste your time on Stackoverflow sites.
They are filthy GARBAGE!
Enough said.
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For those who are still using SO, or about to use SO:
D.O N.O.T U.S.E S.T.A.C.K.O.V.E.R.F.L.O.W!
CodeRanch is the place to go; or use forums: Oracle forums for Java and other Oracle products, Microsoft forums for .Net and and other Microsoft products, etc.
SO will be dead in the future because trolls have a short lifespan!
Two things my lecturer said in university many decades ago still ring true today:
1. The best lecturers are ones that don’t have a PhD degree. PhD lecturers can’t pass on their knowledge to others because they don’t know how to explain it in simple layman’s terms for beginners, or someone who does not have their level of knowledge or expertise, but want to learn.
2. There’s no such thing as a “stupid” question; only stupid people who can’t or won’t answer them, so they find a convenient excuse to not do anything to help beginners. Sounds familiar? Remember, everyone starts out as a “beginner”.
Well said.
Those two things said by your lecturer are found in abundant in SO. That’s why that site is so toxic for new beginners.
Heh, they banned me for a week because I upvoted Q&A from girls too much. What a weird reason, isn’t it?
What can I say!
SO is a formula straight out from the perverted Talmud!
Every fucking sick cunts are on that site! Abusing, condescending, rude, petty, anything but helping others. SO is filthy to the core – much like the Talmud!
If you want genuine help or technical assistance with any programming topic, jump straight to https://coderanch.com/. People there are more tolerant; virtually no dumbshits roaming the place! Can’t say the same for SO!
Interesting discussion you have here. I can basically confirm everything said. My account rarely active and I am far from being a newbie nowadays, more looking for quite non-standard answers once in a while.
And even then SO threats you like shit. About 3 of 4 answers not getting answered, only receiving dumb and evasive comments, which indicate that the writers didn’t spend much time reading the question, and were only looking for a quick opportunity to say something.
And after a short time the question is downvoted and closed and eventually hidden. With bullshit explanation like “too vague”, “too specific”, “promotes use of specific libraries”, “opinion-based”, you name it. And I am like facepalming, the aspects mentioned in the question are the key to understand it in first place… and sorry, too vague it is only when you stop reading after three lines. And the StackOverlords just don’t get it. Too stupid or too arrogant, or both, I don’t know.
Anyway, SO is burned ground. A place only for n00b questions being answered by mediocre programmers which are addicted to collecting points on low-hanging fruits. Everyone else is considered enemy. I am done with it.
I feel your frustration, brother!
I’m in the same boat: I asked a few complex, thinking-man questions and the fuckwit moderators decided to close them all after some unrelated, heated, asinine comments that have no bearing on my questions at hand.
I had enough of SO after two days and closed my account permanently.
Won’t be coming back to SO again; and blocking all their related sites in my router’s settings.
What is built through 5 years, made flat by trolls in less than one year, one year was enough for these blame shifters in the most frequented and wellknown IT community on the whole WWW to wreck what giants built in years, congrats, at least i can still hear sound voices trying to redeem the damage, about trolls they all left already because there is nothing yet to enjoy in this miserable void they are walking on.
I totally agree….I had a simple question that asks which is better between 2 approaches in calling a method. The method in the 2 approaches differ only in the method signature and how you call it (extension method or class initialization – I provided the 2 methods without detailed implementation as it is not related to question). I got down-voted and the comment I got was “Hey we need to see the whole code”!!! I reported the comment and asked to delete my account.
So in short words, no matter what you do or what your write and how you organize your question, you still wont get an answer but you will get some ego replies.
If you desire to improve your familiarity only keep visiting this website and
be updated with the most up-to-date information posted here.
Yea, I made an account 5 years ago when I started learning programming. 5 years later and I’ve never logged in again because it so full of bullshit there. If you want to learn anything, just stay away from SO because you will learn nothing from anyone there and just get frustrated.
Yes, StackOverflow SUCKS! just deleted my account
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Sorry but the internet sucks in general now. Google made changes in 2014 and the UN bought out the rest of the web after a certain President sold it off in a very unamerican move and not to mention an illegal one too.
This election 2020 will determine if the internet will remain trapped in a bubble or be free and if it does be free a lot of sites will at first vanish that are being given Democratic props and Soros money as they won’t be able to stay afloat without artificial/inside help.
The internet is going to get REALLY weird for the next year or so.
Wow, it feels so great to have people who I can relate to on my grievances against that HORRIBLE site, and its obnoxious and condescending users (not to mention the SITE itself, which condones and incentivizes that type of behavior). It’s like it has a very severe peer-review process for questions, which however is not fair and those SO idiots are just after punch bags on whom they can take out their unhappiness and frustration with their own miserable lives.
But, I will not say the fault lies entirely on the site alone, many mathers have this arrogant obnoxious Trump-like personality and attitude (“my presidency was the best presidency of all time, I am the least racist president in the history of mankind, my scores at Harvard were so great and tremendous that the dean told me they had never seen such good greats before, they said I actually got 110 out 100 in all my exams, and they said they had never seen this before”). So, yes, many mathers think they are god-like creatures with super perfect brains, and if they don’t understand something you posted, you’re wrong and they are entitled to downvote you and claim your work is garbage because it hasn’t been peer-reviewed in a pro journal, not just uploaded to arXiv. It’s a very obnoxious website crammed with users that delete their profiles (very common to see userXXXX in many of the posts.) People get tired of the BS and leave, but there are always the cockroach blood types that never do, always simping for that HORRIBLE site.
Stackoverflow is FUBAR:
Fuck Up Beyond Any Recognition!
Used to be good when it first came out. Now the whole site and its closed affiliated network are ran by trolls and worth less than shit!
I just deleted my profile to dump the web site. I could be wrong, but what really grieves me is that the “moderators” come across as having some sort of superiority complex.
In military combat (Vietnam), I passed quite a few Quonset Huts full of body bags and body parts. I assure you that gives you 100% focus on what is really important … plus sleeping on an army cot sitting about 100 yards from a runway at DaNang (DMZ) carrying bombers enroute to Hanoi. I also rode on board several Huey’s flying at tree top level in Nha Trang where Agent Orange was spread.
A good military man will always be concerned with their troops, the troops who have your back.
A good teacher will always be concerned with their students .. after all the teacher’s mission is to teach, not bully.
I just found this site after becoming the victim of a serial down voter on Stack Overflow. I have been a developer for just over 40 years, and have some great answers and comments with appreciation over there. However the serial down voting started just 6 months or so ago when I responded to a question with a better and easier work-around to a question that already had a response from a person with over 10,000 rep. The person’s answer was not accepted, probably because he said that “there was no solution or work-around other than a questionably invasive modification of a version of Azure Devops Server 2019. Actually there was a work around simply by modifying a vNext build template.
Ever since then, whenever I post a comment or question, within about 10 to 20 minutes it receives a down vote with no comments, suggestions or rationale. Recently, I have taken to monitoring it and deleting the comment or question if it is not a question that has already received an answer. (Which you can be banned for doing.)
As a result, as long as this guy exists, I cannot really use that system. It would be great if someone would tell me where to go for a replacement. Please.
Try asking a question on Spiceworks.com. I have moved there and the community is far better than SO.
Thanks, Alex! I will check that out!
https://coderanch.com/ is good, too!
Thanks, Martin!!
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I totally agree. Firstly, people are very toxic and unfriendly here. Always post sarcastic comments which makes new users feel uncomfortable. The second reason I don’t like it is the moderator teams and how they deal with issues. For example. I was suspended because of rule violations. Later, I created a new account without knowing it was illegal. And the silly moderator team, without knowing the cause and effect, just suspended me for 30 days!!! The worse is later, when I created one more account (without knowing about the letter they sent me), they banned me for 365 days!!! I was furious, and immediately deleted my account. Stupid site, I will never use that again.
You’re not the only one.
I’m not defending StackOverfool, but it likes to be a Q&A central for everything programming. But, like, what were these abusive moderators and high rep people smoking when they just keep causing problems to new people who have just joined StackOverfool? They think that they own the entire site and act like overzealous tyrants who are time and space hogs to people who just joined and needed help regarding something in their code. They hide in their dark rooms beyond their “shiny back-lit RGB” keyboards and mouses, play some loud heavy metal songs in full volume from their speakers to keep their neighbors awake from when they log in until at least 6 AM, and attack every newcomer with rude remarks and their “Sorry, your on-topic question has been closed because your question is off-topic” or “Sorry, your programming question has been closed because it’s not related to programming” or suspend these people like they’re a waste of their time as soon as they ask a question like they got anything else to do in their lives, and when they get reprimanded by those users as to why did they do this, they either act like they’re innocent and lie to these users to justify their actions so they could continue their “career” like nothing happened or cry to other moderators and their friends like a bunch of children whose ice-cream fell off by another child accidentally pushing them instead of apologizing to all of the new people and moderators and even the entire community in general and never repeating their never-ending terrible mistakes.
In my opinion, StackOverfool should not only have a complete rebuild, but… I don’t know… these moderators and high reps should also start apologizing to everyone and correct their mistakes so newcomers could ask their questions again.
If I said something wrong or offensive, correct me.
“If I said something wrong or offensive, correct me.”
No, you are absolutely correct in there. In fact, I just got suspended again, this time not on stackoverfool, but on another site in Stack Exchange. And the stupid moderator team suspended me because I said something rude. Oh, sorry, maybe I should say they suspended me because “they think” that I said something rude. And when I reply to them and explain it, they did nothing!!! And tell me that there’s no need to go back and forth in the chat and will no longer reply to me any more. Yeah, always chicken out like a bunch of cowards. Later, I wrote a reply to criticize them, I said something like “You are always abusing your powers!”, and I found the Questionnaire they filled out when they are participating in the moderator election. (Participants have to fill out the questionnaire when they are nominated), and told them that what they said in the questionnaire is the opposite of what they’re doing now. And they didn’t reply me!!! I think they didn’t even “look” at it.
A bunch of morons. Ha, “moderator team”, they are just the “dictator team”.
Then these coward dictator morons can’t take criticism.
“Yeah, always chicken out like a bunch of cowards.”
Haha! +1!
Yes, It’s a bunch of shitty nazists.
The dishonesty on the social topic sites has reached shameful levels. I just nuked all my accounts except the technical ones. I still have SO, WordPress, etc. I deleted Skeptics (where I was a moderator for a year and had nearly 20k rep), Politics at 5k rep, etc. It’s embarrassing and disgraceful. They’ve become just another cesspit echo chamber. Any mention of non-left side politics is a makes you a racist or whatever stupid thing they come up with, even on Politics SE where the question is literally about right side politics. Answers that actually describe and educate get lost under a valley of “well, these crazy right side politicians actually believe [insert dishonest misinformation]”. It’s bad enough a few dishonest posters keep writing such answers, but they get tons of upvotes and the honest answers are lucky to break zero score.
I knew Skeptics was a shithole when I ran for moderator in 2020, but I ran on a platform of cleaning up the political crap, and making the stuff that we would keep honest. Some were on board, but apparently not that much, since the other mod elected at the same time was one of the biggest offenders! I tried for a year, then stopped caring, after seeing that there was not nearly enough support among the users to overpower the desire for “status quo” among the other mods. So then I started just kind of floating around the different sites. *Ulgh*. You literally can’t say anything not-politically-left, even if just descriptively, without it being “controversial”, or worse, accusations of all kinds of crazy, while some the most egregious left-side stuff goes utterly unchallenged. And by that, I mean plenty of people comment about the problems with such posts, but those get deleted every night while you sleep. They are already flagging some kinds descriptive comments as “offensive” to get them deleted. You use the same logic on their crap and it stay, prominent and upvoted.
No one is honest anymore.