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Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

I have given up on participating on SO because more often than not I am told I don't have enough reputation to do something (I don't know if it's commenting or giving an answer or giving an upvote but there are some questions for which answers are wrong or need some updates and I can't participate. So I just don't by default. I think I can't upvote on some stack and I find this weird).

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I'm with you. I've never had an active account on StackOverflow. I created an account once or twice after coming across a question where the "accepted" answer was incorrect, or where it was badly missing something about the big-picture, and I was appalled to find that they don't let new accounts answer questions -- you have to comment or upvote (or something?) before you gain the right to answer a question.

Fuck that. I'm not going to waste my time farming karma for the privilege of answer questions for complete strangers that I happen to know the answer to. The moderation on stackoverflow is a complete mess -- it reminds me of the powertripping that you see on Wikipedia, but maybe even worse because there's far less room for interpretation when most of the questions are technical in nature.

This has been my exact experience. So to me it's always been a read only site.

Adding my voice to the quorum, same here.

The threshold is very low.

https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges

You need 15 points to up vote which means you need to have received 2 up-votes yourself on either a question or answer or have edited 7 questions/answers and had those approved. It's quite easy to hit those numbers. Once you have 1000 points (I think) on any site and you join a new site you get 100 points by default which means you always have those base privileges wherever you are.

The threshold is very low.

Well, not low enough for me. After a few attempts to answer some questions early on, I gave up. Read only for me. I don't even remember what the problem was.

Why making contributing difficult and consuming easy? I guess it worked for them. Counterintuitive, but nice jackpot.

As far as I can remember it's always been this way: very low barrier to entry. All you have to do is make an account to ask and answer questions.

I don't know why you had a hard time posting. Maybe you're thinking of commenting?

The counter is ExpertsExchange: very difficult to do both.

No idea, but I was just trying to answer some questions. I remember vaguely that I needed some points to help and I needed to help to get the points, so... I shrugged and let it be.

If a question is very popular, a lot of people think it's like a normal forum and post “me too” answers. (Or, at least, they used to, before everyone knew Stack Overflow.) So there's a mechanism to “protect” questions so you need at least 10 rep (on that site – the “you contributed lots on another site so probably aren't a spammer” bonus doesn't count) before you can answer.

Very few questions are protected.

The first post on SO for most accounts tend to be from Newbs. The people see the question and think Read The Fucking Manual and downvote. Then you have zero karma and you can't do anything else.

The problem is that the Newb doesn't even know where to start in the manual.

As helpful as you no doubt would be, until you interact with SO in some way you're indistinguishable from a misleading moron.

That wasn't a problem in any of the other forums I've contributed to. Go figure!

Because contributing has no value unless your contribution is actually good, and often there's a lot of crap that's negative value because it's wrong or off-topic or spam.

Having a barrier greatly helps overall quality.

So downvote the contributions, then -- but you can't do that if they can't be made in the first place! Read-only site for me too.

Then again, same stupid "earn points before you can post" system here on HN too.

Having a barrier helps manageability of the site, so from a business' perspective it's been good, indeed.

Don't forget that a site being able to be managed & stay in business is also good for users.

It wasn't good for the users whose questions I wasn't allowed to answer, but you have a point.

If you want, I'll give you some points by making a bounty on some old question and giving it to you. You have to answer it though.

Thank you, but this was never something that I wanted to do for my own interest.

I just saw someone with an unsolved problem and found out that I'd had to go through loops to help, so I gave up.

Actually it seems that owners became rich and it's now a popular site without my help, so I guess it can still survive without me :)

I'm someone with 15+ facebook accounts and who knows how many stackoverflow accounts. I don't really care. And if I try to comment and don't have the 15 points then I just leave.

Do you just forget your passwords? Why would you make so many SO accounts?

Why would they -- SX, that is -- need so many different sites?

Are you suggesting you use a different account per SX site?

No, I don't, but I'm suggesting that the UI could well be (or especially, earlier have been?) confusing enough for a lot of people not to realise they could use the same one on them all.

Just, say, google some programming question, get directed to SO, create an ID and post your question. Some time later, google an OS -- or maths, literature, whatever -- question, get directed to a different SX site, and repeat the process before (or wholly without) realising they're parts of the same whole.

Possibly do the same a few more times, and hey presto, you have umpteen SX IDs.

Seems utterly plausible to me. Not you?

> No, I don't, but I'm suggesting that the UI could well be (or especially, earlier have been?) confusing enough for a lot of people not to realise they could use the same one on them all.

There was a time when SO used their own openId server/backend.

It was confusing because you had one openId stackexchange account to sign-in into something but still had to create an account on each stack and you could login from any stack but not with your email but with the openId account... for which you used your email to login... so the URL jumping around was confusing. Add one forced logging out when cookies expire or something and it was frustrating just to log in because you could be logged in into SO but not into SU for instance (despite using the same login but with a different identity).

I could log in with another openId providers but the details are fuzzy.

I can't downvote your comment here on HN, presumably because I don't have enough reputation. And HN doesn't even tell me.

I think you need 100 points in order to downvote. HN generally prefers to upvote good content rather than to downvote bad content.

you need >500 points

I've got close to 600 ... yet only see the downvote option on very new posts

It's a mitigation to the "bury brigade" problem digg used to have. I think a relatively low hurdle is a good balance.

You can comment without any problem. Downvoting is not the main usage of HN, like answering questions is on SO (or commenting, it's a wonder that they still allow any kind of activity for people without karma, too bad the only allowed activity is making questions, that will be incorrectly marked and downvoted most of the time).

For me, I just don't use it often enough to log back in. It's largely been supplanted by browsing issue trackers and reading the source.

At the same time, google search results are massively less useful now and if I don't get a hit, I'm going to reach out to the source.

To that extent, I think SO has the same problem as Google - it will regress to the mean.

This is also because google search results will be flooded with SO mirrors that rerender content but with more ads.

I like logging in and bookmark answers I might need later.

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