Why Stack Overflow Sucks (2012)

In my experience, Stack Overflow is still one of the only places that I can ask questions and expect to receive useful information within the same day. I admit I don't answer questions as much as I used to, but there still seems to be plenty of people around to help. Also, as a general corpus of knowledge it really can't be beat - I often find useful answers to questions that were asked years ago.

I know it's currently in vogue to hate on it, but for me it continues to be a great source of information.

(Post is from 2012)

Article contains ad hominem and personal opinions. Author is/was personally offended by certain events and his blog provides a source of relief for his distress.

I would comment on every specific paragraph, but the "arguments" are simply absurd.

This kind of post truly deserves to not be read.

Have to agree with the post ... there are occasions when you read the question and understand it is a newbie who has no clue what technical term to use when s/he does his search and hence could not get a simple answer. Instead of guiding, it gets voted down real bad and sometimes the person is not able to ask more questions

This is kind of symptomatic of online communities in general as they grow, no? Similar concerns exist around community behavior here on HN. Over the past year we've seen declining overall behavior as flocks of new people participate, new moderation systems introduced in an attempt to stem the tide of low-quality comments and karma-whoring actions, and varying levels of transparency into these systems.

The HN moderators (and SO's) seem to do a pretty good job, all things considered, but this is no simple problem to solve.

IMHO, the deep integration of crypto-currencies into these communities and karma systems is key to better self-moderation. Let the almighty dollar speak!

Stack Overflow is an amazingly useful programming resource - but - like most things has problems.

From my viewpoint, the main problem is the drive for "karma". You may visit an interesting question and you will often find that partial solutions (or solutions to a re-phrasing of the question [thats as kindly as I can put it])have a high score while the true and, more importantly complete, answer (probably written a few days after the original question was posed) has zero points.

There are also those who answer a factual question with an opinion - I am sure that Dante would have added another level in hell for just that sin should he have lived in the modern age.

Points are not everything but there is a tendency for the scoring system to mislead the seeker after a solution unless they are aware that all factual answers have value.

yup. I also stopped participating there in 2012 or so. It's really quite a shame. I still find my way there from Google pretty frequently, but I don't bother asking or answering questions anymore

Something I start to notice that more and more questions are being closed as duplicate pointing to another question which only sounds similar but when you look deeper it is different.

I remember being ridiculed for having more questions than answers. It's skewed to the idea that answering and contributing your thought is of more important than the question generating such thought.

Regardless, Stackoverflow has fell off it's high place.