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I agree with what you're saying, but I don't think it addresses the post. It's certainly true that Stack Overflow is the best place to get answers to programming questions and I won't dispute that. Here, though, is what I think the problem is. I think it mirrors the OP's problem.

Stack Overflow became and is the best place to get answers to programming problems because of the community it has been able to build. There are always competent people ready to provide an answer and they do it quickly. However, the problem is that the community is difficult to participate in. You need rep to do anything and you don't get rep until you do something. You also need to compete with a lot of other people in order to contribute usefully, which makes the barrier even higher. Ultimately, this undermines the community, which is what makes Stack Overflow good.

You can say that these effects can be ignored because answers are still given and you'd be right. But the difficulties do exist. I have enough rep on SO now to do most things (maybe not down-voting), but it was hard to get, so I can attest to what the OP was saying. I can only imagine it's harder now after the community has grown and rep inflation has kicked in.

Exactly. The OP's point is that it's hard to get over the initial rep hurdle so that you can participate.

This prompts the idea: is there some sort of way that new users could quickly and reliably gain a minimum amount of rep by doing a bit of maintenance on the site? Say, flagging spam or suggesting correction which must be approved by someone with lots of rep? If this is possible, why don't more people know about it.

The 'initial rep hurdle' is so low that any dimwit -- pardon my French -- can overcome it... As some others have pointed out, too easily actually, judging from the number of bad answers from people with a few K of rep.

I don't care to participate in SO often. I don't have high rep.

I _can_ provide insight.

every once in a while I find somewhere that I can provide some value or insight, whether via editing an answer with a url that's out of date, a comment expanding on the answer, etc... and it seems like I never can.

I don't care to jump through the hurdles to get to that point. I didn't come there to ask a question. I didn't come there to sift through questions to answer.

I came looking for something. I stumbled upon something where I could provide value and was shut down because I have better things to do with my time than to jump through hoops.

It's fine for the power users who want the world to see their rep, or the people trolling for questions regarding their pet projects. It sucks for the casual user.

So, yes, in theory the rep hurdle is quite low. I've just got better things to do with my time. -- Which I already wasted trying to help someone in the first place.

This has been my experience as well. Actually, it's worse. I actually managed to earn a bunch of points on SO by finding some questions that needed better questions...but it took a long time to get there for all the usual reasons of not wanting to jump through those hoops or spend lots of time trolling the site. Then I did something really stupid: I had an outstanding unanswered question about a really obscure subject, and I thought well, is someone answers this they deserve a bounty, so I added one. I didn't really care about rep, and my question was hard, so I put most of my points into it. It didn't occur to me that spending most of my rep would cause my account to degrade back into noob mode; I was thinking I had earned the privelegs of a normal user and they were mine to keep.

Worst of all, my question went unanswered, and the bounty was just claimed by the system.

I haven't earned back enough reputation to be a normal user again, although I have stumbled across many SO questions/answers that could use my insight. Since I can't use the site correctly, I just leave.

You do realize that they can't just grant anyone the right to edit questions or answers and that they don't have magical insight into your abilities? I don't know how you propose to solve the problem of automatically allowing those that have ability to bear responsibility, but I don't think there is any site that does it better than SO.

  It sucks for the casual user.

I'm a casual user (I have 1.5K rep and subscribed reasonably early, so we're talking about 10 decent answers per year) and I don't think so.

  Which I already wasted trying to help someone in the 
  first place.

Then SO is not for you, because SO only makes sense if its users want to help others, for whatever reason. I personally like trying to explain something clearly and concisely and I like solving the problems that are sometimes posed. I answer questions for my own good, but it is gratifying that someone else also profits.

A casual user should at the very least be able to flag an answer for review by a more senior user (and earn rep). For example, fixing broken links, or Facebook API changes that make old answers invalid.

I see your point, but I really don't think that 1.5k rep qualifies as casual in the context of the discussion.

I have answered 76 in two years and 4 months (and posed 5). Let's be generous and say that's 1 answer every week. Is that not 'casual use'?

Over a sustained 2.5 year period, not really. I mean what percentile of activity/reputation do you think you'd be in for all members in that period? I'd guess well over 50... perhaps 75 or 80?

Programming is my full time job and I ask questions on SO somewhat regularly when I get stumped, and occasionally peruse for questions I can answer, but I don't make any efforts in particular to raise my rep for its own sake, and I just reached 100 rep after being a member for a year. I feel like I fit into the 'casual user' camp that he's referring to in the OP since I'm still pretty limited in my participation even though I FEEL like a somewhat invested member of the community. But I don't think these issues would really apply to you at your level of activity (and kudos to you for that, btw :) ).

The problem is that I want to help, but I can't. If they've added what other users have suggested, that anons or newbs can provide answers/edits that have to be approved by a more senior user that probably covers about 99% of the situations that I'm concerned with.

You're right that the system can't know my insight. But the community can. It is a community right?

I'm cool with going through some sort of approval process. If it means that it takes a few extra minutes for my changes to get in then so be it.

I think this is key. I answer questions to help other people. I also answer them to help improve my own ability to explain solutions to programming problems. Usually the problems are ones that I myself have dealt with before. I tend to answer questions pretty late, in a few relatively low-view tags, and I can tell from the view counts that maybe 10-50 people at most ever read any of my answers. But usually the asker of the question sees it and finds it useful enough to accept it.

This week, the ability for anonymous, 0 rep users to edit questions was added. They go into a queue where other users must approve or reject the proposed edit, but you can drive-by suggest those improvements now.

Agreed I have not really been participating for long but have managed to get myself upto a point where I can participate easily. It just requires some effort and some knowledge

Yes. Ask questions. Asking questions gets you rep (and quite quickly too, if your questions are voted up).

Valid, but asking questions is hard to do consistently. I've only ever asked questions if I've been unable to deal with a problem. Answering questions is something I can do on my own time because it's fun. Answering questions is what draws me to the Stack Overflow community.

The way I view it it's just a particularity of the way Stack Overflow has been set up. I think cletus is correct - rep cannot be your goal or you're bound to get frustrated as the OP found out.

Why not ask questions that you've solved yourself with much effort and googling? That would mean that that knowledge is captured on SO for easier access by others.

To be a bit brutal:

Peter Programmer knows Python very well and is a highly skilled programmer, but there is a rep hurdle Peter can't pass because there are already tons of eager Python programmers answering every question at least as good as Peter. This means SO doesn't need Peter or his contributions. At all.

If your contributions are unique and useful, you pass the rep hurdle easily.

Unique and useful to lots of people, you pass the rep hurdle easily. If it's only useful to a few people passing the rep hurdle will take a very long time.

Yeah, I answered several Android development questions, and at first got NO votes, despite having the best (and sometimes only) answer.

So I trolled the "new" queue for five minutes, found a C++ question, answered it, and POOF, I had some rep. It helps that I know C++ REALLY well.

Eventually those Android answers started getting upvotes, and now I have somewhere around 400 rep, which is enough to do what I need.

The badges bust me up. It's like a video game -- for programming questions! In any event, being able to comment and vote on answers was what I wanted.

As you have mentioned Python, let met tell you that the Python community on SO is awesome. People generally upvote all the good/correct answers to a question. This will not only appreciate their good work, but also make them answer more questions. In recent days, the percentage of questions on HTML/CSS, jQuery has increased greatly. The questions related to general purpose programming languages tend to be more unique than HTML/CSS.

I have the same feeling about HN. I've been regularly visiting HN for a year now, commenting when I have something insightful and voting articles and comments up if they're exceptional. Yet I still don't have enough karma to downvote. The feeling I get is- I'm a long-time member of the community, what do I need to do to be trusted with a simple downvote?

This isn't that bad since I can still be part of any discussion, but it makes feel unwelcome and a little frustrated when I see something that should be downvoted.

StackOverflow and Hacker News both seem to actively discourage casual participation. I am the sort of person who doesn't like to speak unless I have something new to add, so I don't post comments or answer questions often.

However, I'm quite happy to use my time and energy to tend the garden and pull weeds, and plant something new when I happen to have a really great seed. HN and SO both tell me they don't want me there -- fine, their sites, their rules. But I do feel this encourages a high noise to signal ratio, eventually clogging the site and making it less useful.

500 days and 2 karma...here's one more. BTW, apparently 200 gets me- absolutely nothing.

What I find even more frustrating is getting enough karma to do things like downvoting, and then losing those abilities out of the blue because the requirements were moved up.

hackernews, what?

Perhaps my own experience is atypical but I'll elaborate anyway.

SO had been out of beta for a 4-5 months before I really started answering questions. I had dipped my toe in the water a couple of times prior with varying results: one particularly successful answer, several unsuccessful answers.

Granted, now is not a few months after launch. Questions tend to be more esoteric, there are more question snipers/campers and so on. But IMHO the same principles still apply: be quick and be concise. You can expand a concise answer with a longer answer but you can't usually ignore the concise answer.

Now some consider that a bad thing. Me? I think it trains people how to give good answers and not just for SO but in their work life in general: front load the information people ask for and then expand on it.

As for getting the initial rep: getting rep to vote to close and so on takes awhile but do you need that? The more annoying levels are when you can't comment or upvote. That you can get fairly quickly just by asking 1-2 questions if not answering them.

My own experience is that newbies who ask good questions or give good answers I (and others) will upvote them simply to get them past these points (to about 50 rep).

As for the barrier to entry and community aspects, there are issues here. In fact, I raised this very issue 1.5 years ago [1] and I still have mixed feelings about it.

Ultimately though, an abundance of answerers I don't consider to be a problem. With attrition, others will replace them. I'd only worry if no one is answering.

I don't see the value of SO is being in the community per se. Not in the same sense that the value in Quora (IMHO) is entirely in the community (which presents real long-term risks).

What SO did well, which obviously affected the community that grew around it (and Joel has spoken about this), is that it made bad behaviour hard, something people would actually complain about. Example: a common complaint is that SO makes discussion hard. Well, that's actually kinda the point. Discussions are 99% noise in the context of Q&A. SO allows good answers to float to the top with the voting mechanism.

Remember: rep isn't an end, it's a means to an end. It's also a way of solving problems that would otherwise require human intervention. For example, the minimum rep for editing answers. This isn't a de facto claim that a certain rep threshold means you know what you're talking about. It's simply a way of expressing the site's trust in you, as a contributor, rather than attesting to the accuracy of your technical knowledge.

Better that than Wikipedia-style revert wars that require constant mod attention.

SO is an excellent system for askers and answerers of programming questions. I'm simply unconvinced that this models translates well to other areas (as per the StackExchange model for other sites).

[1] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/1483/are-power-users...

Re: "But to complain about a system where there are too many people answering questions is, to be perfectly blunt, ridiculous and narcissistic"

I've never tried to participate in Stack Overflow as a hyper-active question answerer, but as a sometimes-user of the site who ends up there via Google often when performing coding question searches, the site still suffers from what has been dubbed "The Fastest Gun in the West" problem. I can usually find answers that are at least a useful starting point to solving my core problem on Stack Overflow but they are very often not the top ranked answer and are often way at the bottom sitting with a 0 rating due to having been posted "long" after the question went live (and by "long" after I usually mean like the next day). The top rated stuff is often superficial junk answers that just happened to be the best available when the question was still a hot one.

So I'd argue that even from a non-poster's view, the site is broken (because I have to dig through it more than I should have to) though still ultimately useful.

This happens sometimes, but I don't think it's endemic. I've seen people come in a day late, even in questions where an answer has been accepted, and get tons of votes. It just has to be obviously much better than the others and you have to hope the stars don't align against you (as with so many things in life). The "fastest gun" problem typically occurs when the best answer does not really stand out to people.

For example, glancing at my top five answers, one of them was posted the day after the others in the question and got four times as many votes as the next top answer. I remember that at the time I wrote my answer, a very low-quality answer from somebody who didn't know Ruby very well was accepted, but now mine is accepted and the other guy graciously deleted his.

And that one's still getting votes. People come across those old questions and vote the good answers up years later. So the site can correct itself as long as people are willing to do that.

Unless something has changed, you need a minimum level of reputation to upvote. If you are not a member of the site (I have a vague memory of starting with only 10 rep - I have no idea now) you have no mechanism to actually do as you suggest until after you've posted or asked a question that has gotten at least one vote.

I just created an account there after years of lurking and absorbing knowledge from other's questions and answers, but I only have 1 rep.

Oddly enough, I created the account specifically to upvote the answer that solved my problem of which another member had asked about, but I am unable to do so until I submit a problem of my own that has not already been answered.

Yeah, that's still true — people who haven't participated in the site cannot upvote. I'm not sure if there was a larger point that I'm missing. Things still get upvoted quite a bit even with the rep requirement (and you could make a reasonable argument that the rep requirement means the votes you get are marginally better indicators of quality).

I presume that when you find questions in this state you're upvoting the "good but slow" answers? The original asker may have accepted the fast answer and moved on, but if you're landing on the question now, it's definitely not too late to improve the content you found.

I regularly upvote older questions and answers that I find interesting or helpful. It's also fun to have my own old answers upvoted or commented on, which prompts me to go back and reread them.

Do you take the trouble to upvote those answers that are helpful to you? I think that, given some time, the best answers of all questions will slowly bubble up, but that only happens if folks like you and me upvote the answers that are actually good

Generally, no, I don't upvote the answers, because I have no idea what open id provider I used to make my old stack overflow account, which brings me to the other broken thing about Stack Overflow... Open ID. Nice in theory, hellish in practice.

You need rep to upvote and downvote.

Yes, 15 to upvote, 125 to downvote. Asking a few serious questions is bound to earn you the three upvotes (you get rep for your questions being upvoted) required to be able to upvote. Honestly, I don't understand the fuss. You really only need to use the site as a consumer to gain enough rep to participate.

I've generally stopped answering questions on SO, unless they're explicitly related to the Delphi compiler and RTL and nobody else has answered them - and I find these with a combination of Google search alert and RSS feed on SO tags, which are delayed, rather than by visiting the site.

Something that would have kept me there is something along the lines of this:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/19659/search-filters...

If I could filter questions by minimum rep, I could look for questions that aren't by complete noobs - and the noobs are getting into the 2-5k rep range now owing to repeated asking of simple questions. It would be more stimulating to answer questions that stump expert users; as it is, I fear that the site is driving away these people post haste.

A more explicit version of my motivation for asking is in the original version:

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/posts/19659/revisions

... but it was downvoted as people seemed to be misreading me.

The reputation might be a sort inverse filter: thousands of people participate in the programming jokes questions whereas even perfect answers to questions like "Under conditions X, Y, Z how can my foo do bar?" are unlikely to get much love.

It's those hard questions I love StackOverflow for (and there's no rush of people sniping them).

"SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answers."

You want an even faster answer?

Ask on IRC.

As far as programming questions go, freenode is usually the best place to go (with a minority or apps and projects off on some other irc networks, sometimes).

That said, HN, forums, mailing lists, usenet, and SO are usually better for preserving answers for others to learn from once the question has already been asked by someone else.

The quality and depth of the answers can sometimes be better in these other media that are more well suited to longer, uninterrupted, essay-like answers.

On the other hand, that's not always the case, since on IRC there is a much higher level of interaction and you also have the ability to interrupt the speaker and ask for clarification on any point, with immediate feedback.

As a very rough analogy, I generally find IRC to be more like having a real-time spoken conversation with a teacher (or teachers). Whereas those other media are something more akin to correspondence via letters and email.

Of course, you don't get upvotes or points for answering questions on IRC. But the system works very well anyway. And, honestly, who really cares about these silly tokens anyway?

I've asked a question in freenode channels then idled for the better part of a day, or even a few days, with little traffic and no answers. SO is faster, often much faster.

It really just depends on what you're asking about. My opinion is that IRC is a better medium for common languages with popular open-source implementations like PHP, Python, or C and SO is usually a better medium for languages with popular closed-source implementations, like C# (though freenode's ##c# is sometimes helpful) or ActionScript/Flash. More enterprise people are on SO than IRC, I guess.

It could have just been the case that more experts for the particular area you're interested in were on SO at the time you asked that question. Had you asked a different question on a different topic, perhaps there would have been more experts ready to answer it on IRC than on SO.

Having spent a long time on IRC, I can attest to seeing many people's questions getting answered there constantly, and usually (on the active channels, at least) very quickly (ie. often within seconds or a minute or two). Fifteen minutes is usually considered a long time to wait in an active channel for an answer to a question that isn't really obscure.

Of course the likelihood of an answer decreases with the obscurity of the question, the lack of popularity/appropriateness of whatever it is you're asking about, and depends on when and how you ask the question. The same goes for any other medium of communication.

I'm happy that you've had a positive experience on SO, and sorry that you haven't had much luck with IRC. But that doesn't mean that your experience is a typical one.

I'll take it as encouraging that I've reached the level of expertise where my questions are more quickly answered on SO--I will grant that "where do I find an Ubuntu driver for my video card" will almost certainly be answered more quickly on #ubuntu than on Serverfault or Superuser.

"I'll take it as encouraging that I've reached the level of expertise where my questions are more quickly answered on SO"

This attitude of yours says more about your lack of experience with and appreciation of IRC than it does about its relative merits in respect to SO.

That's not an attitude. That's an appropriate response to assertions you made about the obscurity of questions and unpopularity of platforms that will receive no response on IRC. I realize it was not a humble response, but it was not an attitude.

As to inexperience, I'll admit I've only been on Efnet's #help since 1997-ish and Freenode since around 2005, but that's still much longer than I've been on SO.

>I'll take it as encouraging that I've reached the level of expertise where my questions are more quickly answered on SO

You have no idea how devs actually function then.

Almost every open source project that is active and of a certain size has an IRC dev channel where they hash stuff out.

I've worked at more than one company where dev and ops idled in private IRC channels as well.

My questions are not of the sort "Why hasn't my patch been committed?" I consider this a difference in type of expertise more than a difference in level of expertise.

> Ask on IRC.

Nearly every time I asked a programming question on IRC I've had bad experiences with arrogant users who think you're wasting their time with your noobness. Now of course I don't believe that everyone on IRC is like that, but it's really the last place I'd recommend for newbies.

I used to agree with you, the "old" IRC nets are full of rude, mean and cruel people. But FreeNode is an excellent place for programming. I have the most experience in the python, haskell and freebsd channels and the people there are excellent, responsive and friendly. The C/C++ and Java channels attract slightly more grumpy people, but even those are generally quite helpful if you try and act with a modicum of sense (if you are on HN you probably exceed the requirements by far).

EDIT: Incidentally, freenode is also the home of the unofficial HN IRC channel (#startups).

You've been unlucky. Yes, sometimes there are people on IRC who are unhelpful to and/or arrogant towards newbies. And some channels are worse in this respect than others. Fortunately, however, that is the exception rather than the rule.

Some channels, like #help (or most other channels with the word "help" in them, like #linuxhelp) are especially patient with newbies.

That said, it certainly does help to know and follow IRC netiquette , and know how to ask questions[1].

[1] - http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

I'm in a non-US timezone, so all I get in most (software-related) IRC channels is crickets chirping. SO is like a searchable log of an IRC channel for when my question was asked and answered 4 days ago.

It's true that freenode is relatively quiet when most people in US time zones are asleep. But even then, it's rarely completely dead. In the larger channels, it's quite likely that someone will be awake and answer your questions even then.

But you're right about the searchability of SO. That is one of the strengths having a good, searchable archive of questions and answers. Forums, some mailing lists, and Usenet also share that strength, to some extent.

On the other hand, some IRC logs have been published, and google search results do sometimes happen upon such public logs.

You can also keep your own long-term logs, just by turning on logging in your IRC client, and leaving your client idling in the channels that interest you.

I mostly use SO when an answer shows up in Google. I've only answers a very small number of questions.

Occasionally I see an answer there that is mostly right, but has one or two things that are not quite right. My first impulse is to add a comment--except I am not allowed to add comments.

I think the problem with the OPs line of argument is that the goal is to begin commenting right away. When I give a good answer to a question that already has some answers I'll eventually get up votes. It takes time for new people to come looking for the same answer and vote up my answer, but it happens. A few of my answers are now voted higher than the accepted answer.

It takes time not effort, but I think that's the point.

Do I understand correctly that as a relatively high-ranked you don't think it sucks, you just don't go there much any more because you don't think the questions are interesting?

You criticize the OP for not liking the incentive system, but then openly admit that you don't visit the SO site much anymore because you have other priorities and don't want to play the waiting game. You're nearly saying the same thing in different ways, but you're still criticizing him.

Next, you criticize him for being narcissistic but forget to detail that the SO site is built around reputation, which is an INCENTIVE system for encouraging/discouraging participation, and thus actually encourages narcissism. After all, most people on that site are essentially working for a form of virtual currency to their personal brand. How much more narcissistic can you get? It's all about yourself, with an illusion that you're there to help others. Whenever reputation systems are in play, it's likely impossible to leave narcissism completely out of it. It would have to be anonymous, but even then, some people are still narcissistic privately.

Then, you go on to mention that the questions are less interesting to yourself (how is that not more about yourself than the posters on the site?)... I mean, the hypocrisy is thick here.

Sure, the OP is being critical of SO, but he brings up some good points. He's not really whining about not getting 1000 points after 2 posts. It's evident that he's used the site for a reasonable amount of time and then made some observations that he just can't deal with anymore.

You're obviously smart, perhaps more than most. Perhaps a more constructive reply to the OP of the article makes more sense than simply tearing him down? He makes good points, from his perspective.

I personally see the degradation of SO due to these problems. Less experienced developers can only earn reputation by knowing more than they do, because they are unable to ask repeat questions on simpler topics. Newbies still continue to do it, and thus the site is flooded with repeat questions, and more experienced users get annoyed and condescending. There is no warm culture there, and it's purely self-administrating, other than by some reputation filters. Contrast this to HN where PG and others help to continually curate the community personally and not just with software implementations.

Writing a thoughtful response takes time, and when 7-10 other people are writing thoughtful responses, don't you think that's a bit discouraging? Especially when you think the subject matter is less interesting as you have progressed?

If SO wants to grow a good community, they're going to have to make some serious changes.

As a regular SO user these were my thoughts exactly. It takes time to built reputation, just like the real world. Well thought out response, I find it upsetting someone is so quick to draw conclusions about a community which as far as I can tell is thriving. When I started SO I got the right answer and a whole lot more quicker than walking over and asking my officemate.

The situation you're describing is probably great for the askers of questions, but it's certainly not good for those of us wanting to contribute answers.

edit: That's not necessarily a bad thing, and I don't think that "StackOverflow sucks," but it does means that it sucks for new users trying to become useful contributors.

If there are already enough people who are contributing, what is the problem then? Why do you want to contribute to something if it not useless?

Excellent reply. SO far surpasses any other programming forum when it comes to getting answers for a specific problem, and that matters so much more than how easy it is for a user to get artificial karma.

* [On forums] You'll often get no replies or useless replies (eg a bunch of people who don't understand the problem telling you that you shouldn't be doing that or asking you why) *

Actually, I have made similar experience also on SO when a question becomes a bit more special. I hate it to justify why I want to do it this way. But I was told that it's just the way it is on SO.