Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow
What are the worst things about StackOverflow for you?
I don't claim to have all of the answers, but a decay function seems quite obvious to me. For one thing, technology evolves. The jquery way of doing something shouldn't have 10x the upvotes as the ES6 way. Old answers should lose a percentage of their upvotes over time, if they remain relevant they will gain new upvotes, but if not, they will get surpassed by newer, more relevant responses.
Oh, and the new fonts.
I don't have a super-informed opinion here, but a decay function sounds reasonable. I'd also suggest that the decay be uncoupled from the user's karma (i.e., the user keeps his/her karma, but the value of the votes decay over time to make way for changes in technology). I don't claim that this is a well thought out idea, but at first blush, it seems reasonable. Also, I just don't give a shit what my karma percentile is.
Finally, FWIW, I find SO ~85% useful and ~15% problematic. And I feel like sometimes we fixate on the 15% without acknowledging the genuine utility of the 85%.
I didn't even bother fixing my question. I deleted all my stack exchange accounts.
I understand sometimes questions can be worded poorly or miss out important pieces of information, but moaning at people (often those new to the site) to do something the right-way seems like the wrong approach. Most people don't spend all day on StackOverflow and know the "correct" way to format a question.
Once you look at it from that frame, it makes sense why they are harsh against poorly worded or duplicated questions. They aren't trying to aid any specific individual, just the collective.
This ended up in a culture of active and sometimes heavy-handed moderation that 's now part of the DNA of the site.
Open SO, choose any popular tag and just wait. In a hour you will see a dozen of "do homework for me", "what's wrong with my code" and "explain this very basic thing to me eli5". Not to mention things explained in introductory lessons of any decent tutorial or things answered by first search result.
Not to mention bad grammar and even worse formatting.
Minimal, reproducible example is just a dream.
StackOverflow users are constantly complaining about duplicate questions. The real problem is that the onus for better question asking is placed on the asker, who is only really motivated and prepared to express their confusion.
The whole reason most questions are asked is because the asker isn't familiar enough with the problem domain to find the answer. That also means they aren't familiar enough with the problem domain to find a duplicate/related question.
It's much easier for question answerers to find duplicate and related discussion. Instead of antagonizing the asker by closing their post as "pointless discussion that has already happened", answerers should be continuing discussion with the asker.
Every StackOverflow question (duplicate or not) provides two opportunities:
1. Answering the question.
2. Finding what information to better advertise so that confusion can be avoided in there future.
It would be a valid point if only the answer wasn't so often the first result after pasting the title of their post into search engine.
Even in those cases, it's still just as easy to merge/reference the other question as it is to antagonize the asker.
The point is that it's advantageous for everyone involved to help an asker ask a question instead of berating them for their inadequacy. After all, inadequacy is a key attribute of people with questions.
Also it’s a trope that the select answer isn’t always the best so there is a meta conversation about what is the “really best” answer
Frontend JavaScript frameworks are actually a good example. If you wanted to use ENYOjs, an amazing but seemingly defunct framework. You couldn’t go to the website because the whole thing was turned into a react fork and the original documentation was deleted. Besides stackoverflow you’re stuck and what if you have to maintain an old enyo project on roku or another web based platform? What if you are basing your project on some open source work from the past? Anyway there are many cases where old answers are useful and sometimes more useful then new answers.
I do agree it’s extremely helpful when answers are continually updated with the times. But that doesn’t always happen but it’s nice.
StackOverflow is testing such a feature right now: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/407613/outdated-acc...
I have spent time responding to questions on Stackoverflow, I think I spent 2-3 years providing answeers, and one time I answered a question that didn't follow a weird policy that I strongly don't agree with (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/311442/opinion-base...). I got banned, and my account has been deleted, the answers still there. My only regret was that I could have spent that energy and drive to contribute to open source projects on github. Now, I have less time, but I answer questions -when I have time- on reddit or forums.
"Hot Network Questions" are a distraction and take up too much horizontal space.
Well worth blocking these with an adblocker, if you don't already
It requires being logged in but you don't have to worry about empty spaces.
It really seems no one is there to help each other. It's mostly status quo or reputation. Moderators have too much work to do or have serious ego problems (most users call them "StackOverlords"). Or a mix between the two.
One thing I noticed is that other sites of the Stack Exchange Network are doing quite well. Probably they should split up SO, at least with one site for backend related questions and one for frontend, or even for specific frameworks/platforms. But this would also split the value of the site, so I don't think it's gonna happen.
Eventually someone will disrupt the whole network, just like they did with Experts-Exchange.
As I mentioned in other comment, the amount of poor questions (e.g. of type "why my code not work"), with bad grammar and formatting on top, far outweighs the number of properly asked new questions.
Here, an example [1] right from SO, raw copy-paste:
>please can anyone point out what I have done wrong this is code for permutation which stores all possible permutation of the small vector "vec" and then display it
And this isn't the worst I seen, but those get deleted quickly. But this one already tickles half of the points I've made.
Good education makes a difference. Not everyone is so lucky.
Having massive amounts of questions gets more surface area for ads but a lot of programming Q&A that is a few years out of date is mostly useless. API's change, things become deprecated or better solutions emerge.
They need to cull massive amounts of content for it to be more helpful but that would likely drop revenue.
Is it the ads you object to?
A lot of the answers on pages are outdated but they have no incentive to cleanup old content if its going to affect their bottom line because they will have less indexed pages.
This means I get much more noise when trying to find something so I go elsewhere.
The only even mildly negative experience I’ve had was once a high-level user pattern-matched one of my questions to a much simpler already-answered question and closed it along with a dismissive comment, but as soon as I commented highlighting the discrepancy he apologized and answered my question.
On the rare occasions I find a useful question, some asshole closes it because it was asked before. What makes them an asshole is that it's not the same question at all, or the question was not answered.
2. Why aren't answers always sorted by the number of votes by default?
3. The "community edits" where people sometimes decrease the quality of an answer just to get points.
4. Some answers don't age well but they are perpetuated by their large vote count.
2> You didn't ask the question in the right way, or are on the wrong platform, OS version, etc.
3> The tons and tons of ads.
It's a shame, because these answers are usually more thorough, objective, and helpful than anything else that comes up in the search.
The best thing about reddit (imo) is being able to search for a question, and see how the solution the community came up with evolved over time.
Questions closed as duplicate when there is some subtle but important difference.
Closed questions still appearing in the search results.
Mostly though just a general lack of good will, it's obnoxious.
Honestly have been blinded to that link for quite some time, expecting it to be above the answer body sort of like github issues are.