Ask HN: Do you have any kind of “strategy” for StackOverflow questions? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you have any kind of “strategy” for StackOverflow questions?

4 pointsszatkus2 comments

I wanted to play a bit with SO. Seems like helping people could be a nice way to learn something new about tools I'm using as well as doing something good for the world.

Anyway there are a few problems. Sometimes when I write an answer, with a proper explanation, a solution and usually some links to docs, there suddenly appears a message that there is a new answer to the question. And usually it's as good as mine, so I don't even bother with sending it. It's a bit demotivating.

When I tried to browse questions without answers that were asked longer than 30 minutes ago there are usually just a bunch of badly formulated questions.

Do you have any tips how to effectievely browse StackOverflow?

View on HN

I no longer contribute, but when I did my most upvoted answers were the ones I wrote on old and very popular questions. So one strategy is to order questions by the number of votes, go through them and see if you have an alternative answer that is not yet posted on the question. Doing this you will not have to rush writing your answer. Your reputation will start increasing at a slower pace, but the increase will be more stable as there are lots of people that get referred to the most upvoted questions over and over again.

For new questions there are two strategies. First is to post a sketch of an answer first, and then edit and edit and edit to add more content to it. This way OP will see the core of it quickly and can upvote and nobody will "scoop" you on it. Second strategy is to write detailed and elaborate answer so that when your answer appears it will outshine the rivals by being the most comprehensive and most deep.

But frankly, nowadays, I feel like 95% of newly posted questions are duplicates and should be closed, yet aren't because even high rep users prefer to post a quick answer for some points, instead of going through the (as of yet unrewarded) effort to close the answer properly.

Also a lot depends on the tag.

Thanks.

Fun fact: I've just typed a random problem into Duck and selected the first result from StackOverflow. The top answer is at 238 right now. Then I checked it in archive.org at random points at time and it seems that reputation growth was slow, but almost linear. Amazing. And I was wondering why SO posts I stumbled upon had so many upvotes, when the fresh questions and answers rarely have more than just couple of upvotes :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com