Tried Stack Overflow, but got nothing. Normal?

[rx8pilot]

I have been a long time lurker on Stack Overflow looking for and getting snippets of understanding here and there. In general, I find that it takes longer to search through the enormous amount of muck (poor information and/or 'know-it-alls') than to use more structured sources of answers like books, documentation, and perhaps nicely packaged tutorials on the relevant topics. Periodically, I get some credible and useful information.

Today, I posted my first question trying to be very specific and described my troubleshooting efforts leading up to the post. It got a response about 2 minutes later claiming it was a duplicate and already answered in another thread. When I went to that thread, it was only slightly related and completely unhelpful - but my thread was now closed.

Is this normal Stack Exchange?

[SiliconWizard]

Yes.

[rx8pilot]

Yes.

I guess I am not alone.

When I tried to re-frame the question and post a new thread - I was greeted with the error.

Code: [Select]

'You can only post once every 90 minutes.'
I continued to search existing threads, and have come up empty handed. Nothing seems to even be close. 

[Nominal Animal]

I posted my first question trying to be very specific and described my troubleshooting efforts leading up to the post. It got a response about 2 minutes later claiming it was a duplicate and already answered in another thread. When I went to that thread, it was only slightly related and completely unhelpful - but my thread was now closed.

Is this normal Stack Exchange?

It is typical, unfortunately.  There are a lot of "reputation" gamers, who post answers and close questions as duplicates even when they're not (and often also close questions because they themselves do not understand the question, especially when the question is hard).  They do not really do it to help others, but to get more "reputation".  The entire site is based on the idea that "best answers get voted to the top", but popularity and quality do not correlate much (and causate even less).

[T3sl4co1l]

So you're going to post it here so we can possibly answer it, or any of us with SE accounts can downvote the guilty, right?

Tim

[rx8pilot]

There are a lot of "reputation" gamers, who post answers and close questions as duplicates even when they're not (and often also close questions because they themselves do not understand the question, especially when the question is hard).  They do not really do it to help others, but to get more "reputation".  The entire site is based on the idea that "best answers get voted to the top", but popularity and quality do not correlate much (and causate even less).

Struggling to understand such a motivation. Bizarre 

UPDATE:
The person that closed the thread is now responding via comments to the original thread. Since is it closed, he is the only one that can participate I am guessing.
Not sure why he simply does not open it back up for a public discussion.

So you're going to post it here so we can possibly answer it, or any of us with SE accounts can downvote the guilty, right?

Tim

lol, I will start a new thread. 

[Nominal Animal]

There are a lot of "reputation" gamers, who post answers and close questions as duplicates even when they're not (and often also close questions because they themselves do not understand the question, especially when the question is hard).  They do not really do it to help others, but to get more "reputation".  The entire site is based on the idea that "best answers get voted to the top", but popularity and quality do not correlate much (and causate even less).

Struggling to understand such a motivation. Bizarre 

It's a downside of gamification: people start treating the reputation points as their score, and the reason they participate is the dopamine release that occurs when you increase your score.

The person that closed the thread is now responding via comments to the original thread. Since is it closed, he is the only one that can participate I am guessing.
Not sure why he simply does not open it back up for a public discussion.

Members with high enough reputation score can see and comment on it.  Members with even higher can vote to reopen.  Members with even higher can insta-reopen, and so on.

[rx8pilot]

Members with high enough reputation score can see and comment on it.  Members with even higher can vote to reopen.  Members with even higher can insta-reopen, and so on.

Oooooh, now it is starting to make sense. It really creates a 'My points are bigger than your points' culture. There was a lecture I watched a while back and the guy introduced himself and immediately began putting his Stack Overflow credentials out there - presumably to qualify himself to teach the audience something.

[SiliconWizard]

I have never fully understood the Stack Overflow model. It's kind of an "elitist" board, but I've never really seen very interesting or at least helpful contributions. A large number of them seem to consist of stating that the question is redundant, idiotic, ill-formulated, etc. Others are just often very general answers, barely helpful.

You could say that they have very effective moderation in itself, but that's about it. It's almost like moderation just serves its own purpose there.

So, I personally don't get it. I guess it attracts people due to its "elitist" model (which would implicitly imply that the quality of posts must be very good), but in practice it doesn't seem to live up to its reputation. Don't know. Maybe people just feel "safe" there. Or maybe they like being called idiots. Who knows. 

[rstofer]

In my view, Stack Overflow is the least useful site on the Internet.  When I post a query to Google, I avoid all responses from SO.  Their replies are usually "Already answered" or something even less helpful and more insulting.  Of course the question was "already answered", there are no original questions.  Somebody has already discovered the answer and all I need is a link.

[SiliconWizard]

Yup. It almost looks like SO is some kind of S&M web board or something. A few elite people keep beating users, and the mass of users keep getting beaten up.
 

[aix]

As a reasonably high-ranking and long-tenured contributor, I can't say I have any evidence of reputation gaming.  It's not even clear how voting to close a question could help someone game the system to their advantage.

That said, I do see a fair amount of questions getting closed as duplicates where they aren't really.  Those instances generally come across as a person or, more commonly, multiple people (since closure generally requires multiple votes) misinterpreting some nuance in a question and marking it as a duplicate of another, similar question.  When I see that, I re-open the question.

There is a staggering number of duplicates getting posted all the time, and it's not surprising to me that some false positive get caught up in the flood of closures.

(It is also true that the average quality of a question as posted is shockingly poor, though that's a separate problem; I am in no way implying that this applies to your case.)

[magic]

I'm not even entirely sure what the problem is with dupes and dumb question. If somebody else answers them... volenti non fit iniuria

It's not even clear how voting to close a question could help someone game the system to their advantage.

I don't know either, maybe to limit inflation

[Nominal Animal]

As a reasonably high-ranking and long-tenured contributor, I can't say I have any evidence of reputation gaming.

I stopped contributing a year ago because "high-ranking and long-tenured contributors" typically refuse to acknowledge or correct their errors, and instead either delete their answer, or let it stand, whichever yields them the most reputation points.  The quality of the information does not matter to them; their reputation rank overrides any such considerations.  This is the reputation game.

It gets more egregious the higher-ranking member that makes the error.  With some notable exceptions, of course, like Jonathan Leffler, chux, R.., and others.

Simply put, too many higher-ranking contributors are more worried about their reputation score than the correctness and usefulness of their answers.
Which I hate, because being wrong is understandable, but knowingly letting misinformation stand, leading others astray, is evil.

It's not even clear how voting to close a question could help someone game the system to their advantage.

You have severely misunderstood the argument here.  It is not that some people game the system; it is about gamification of advice and help.

By using "reputation" as a score, contributors will pursue higher scores, regardless of the quality of the answers.  This happens because of the human dopamine system; we're biologically wired to react that way to positive reinforcement -- even if it is just a number on the screen.  The exact same thing happens on social media, with "likes" and so on.

These score-seeking contributors are especially keen to close questions they cannot answer, because a secondary tactic is to stop others from gaining "score" when they themselves cannot.  They do not do so consciously, it is more like emotional bias to treat hard questions as "because I cannot answer that, the question must be stupid, so it should be closed".

[Berni]

Stack overflow seams pretty useful to me tho.

Tho i don't use the site directly, like search trough it, post questions or answer them. I just open up Stack Overflow pages when they show up in google results and they are offten pretty good. The questions i usually resort to it are along the lines of "How to best/easily do X in language Y?" and among the top 3 answers is usually a short snippet of code that does what i need, so i just copy paste it, tweak it a bit and done. Gets the job done much faster than reading trough the piles of Python documentation arranged as looong pages where you have to scroll trough forever to find the thing you need, only to have it explained in a very generalized way so you still have no idea how exactly to use it. Another thing i like it for is the question "Is X faster than Y?" where the official documentation often won't tell you that but you might find a SO post where someone tested both methods and benchmarked them, while sometimes also explaining the reason why X is so much faster.

Another website for quickly grabbing snippets of code is the Roseta Code site: http://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code It has commonly used code snippets written in pretty much any reasonably common language(plus sometimes very obscure ones).

What i don't use the site for is more specific questions of like "I downloaded github project X and it keeps throwing error Y when compiling" or "Im using MCU X and peripheral Y is locking up when in do Z". People probably don't feel like putting in a lot of effort to answering these narrow questions that are actually sometimes really difficult to answer properly.

What sort of questions do you look to be answered by stack overflow?

[tggzzz]

Stack overflow is at best and by design useful for "which button do I press to cause the floggle to snurf" questions.

The answers are usually of the form "my fluggle snarfed when I pressed Z at the full moon", spelling differences intended, and note the absence of cause and effect.

There is very little understanding of principles visible; instead monkey-see-monkey-do responses are preferred.

There is very little discussion of subtle points, for the same reasons.

If I was interviewing people for a job and somebody touted their stack exchange credentials in their CV, it is highly unlikely that I would bother to interview them.

[aix]

I personally don't much care about my reputation score.  To me, it's merely a proxy for the amount of time I spent on the site genuinely trying to help people (on and off, as I have time, over the course of nearly a decade or so).

As far as the quality of questions and answers goes, it's highly variable.  However, the better-quality stuff is often great, and upvotes are a great way to discover such stuff.  So much so that I often scan the top-voted questions across the Stack Exchange network, and read those that catch my eye.  It's amazing what you learn.

Each to their own I suppose.

[Nominal Animal]

However, the better-quality stuff is often great, and upvotes are a great way to discover such stuff.

Given that only one third of my answers at stackoverflow have more than two upvotes, and one fifth has zero, by that logic my answers are utter shit, not worth reading.

According to the people that I've helped (I get about one email per week about various StackOverflow/LinuxQuestions stuff I've discussed, even though I haven't answered any questions or comments in a year), like this or this or this, I do not believe so.  I don't claim they are great; I only claim that their score does not match their usefulness.

My highest voted answer starts with "Why does everyone insist on reinventing the wheel again and again?", and isn't the accepted answer .
(It's about using POSIX.1 nftw() to walk directory trees, instead of opendir()/readdir()/closedir(), as the latter is hard to implement in a robust way, correctly handling e.g. files that are added, deleted, renamed, or moved during the walk.  If you care more about BSD than POSIX compatibility, use fts() instead; me, I like POSIX.)

It would be much better if instead of "reputation" it was called "popularity", because that is what it reflects: popularity, not quality or reputation.

I've only ever asked one question at the StackExchange network, related to perfect binary search trees; otherwise I've just trawled for unpopular but interesting questions, and answering those.  So, perhaps the set of questions and answers I've dealt with is particularly skewed.  It is definitely true that the "atmosphere" differs a lot on different StackExchange sites, like math.stackexchange.com vs stackoverflow.com.

[Bud]

In terms of quality of answers i do not see how SO differs from any other forums.

[tggzzz]

In terms of quality of answers i do not see how SO differs from any other forums.

There is very little understanding of principles visible; instead monkey-see-monkey-do responses are preferred.

There is very little discussion of subtle and/or complex points - such discussions are actively discouraged by making it very difficult (if not impossible) to include multiple levels of context. Instead they favour simple linear statements, as found in most (un)social media venues.

Others have noted that some people chop other people's discussions that they misunderstand or find boring.

Is that sufficient difference?

[Siwastaja]

Stack overflow is at best and by design useful for "which button do I press to cause the floggle to snurf" questions.

The answers are usually of the form "my fluggle snarfed when I pressed Z at the full moon", spelling differences intended, and note the absence of cause and effect.

There is very little understanding of principles visible; instead monkey-see-monkey-do responses are preferred.

Exactly, and the "stack overflow coding" (well described earlier in this thread) works the same. I resort to "SO programming" paradigm when I have a problem that
1) is small
2) I hate
3) I have to get done quickly
4) Exactness, quality and maintainability are of no interest whatsoever

Surprisingly often, copypasting together 100 lines of code from Stack Overflow seemingly does the job I hate and I can go on to something I like to do properly.

But indeed, if I needed to hire a programmer, I would look very carefully if someone is marketing their stack overflow reputation.

[tggzzz]

Exactly, and the "stack overflow coding" (well described earlier in this thread) works the same. I resort to "SO programming" paradigm when I have a problem that
1) is small
2) I hate
3) I have to get done quickly
4) Exactness, quality and maintainability are of no interest whatsoever

Surprisingly often, copypasting together 100 lines of code from Stack Overflow seemingly does the job I hate and I can go on to something I like to do properly.

That sums it up, except I can't remember the last time I used it for programming.

Occasionally I've used it for linux box configuration. Even then I usually get the feeling there's too many necessary preconditions the poster didn't include, probably because they didn't realise they existed.

[blacksheeplogic]

These score-seeking contributors are especially keen to close questions they cannot answer, because a secondary tactic is to stop others from gaining "score" when they themselves cannot.

I've thought about answering or adding to existing answers but the community feels hostile and dismissive to harder questions. My assumption is that there's a lot of weekend code warriors on the site with a high opinion of their ability who actually don't understand the complexity of the question being asked.

However, having said that, the site does seem useful to the same weekend code warriors and novices as although a the questions are simple in nature and the answers are obtainable in the documentation/IDE it's maybe not written in novice friendly terms with novice friendly code examples.

[rstofer]

Somebody said "There are no stupid questions!" - obviously, they were wrong.  To be fair to SO, some of the questions are easily answered by a simple Google search.  Since all of human knowledge is on Google and their question is unlikely to be cutting edge, there is a Google reply out there.  All the user has to do is look.

What happens is that SO comes up fairly high on the Google replies and the unsuspecting user clicks there and somehow decides to post a question.  Probably not a cutting edge question so the universe crashes in on them.  If it was a cutting edge question, I don't know why they would be searching SO.

In the end, I see no purpose for SE or SO (for me).  I can get more appropriate responses almost anywhere else.

[RomDump]

Is this normal Stack Exchange?

Pretty Much.

My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow: Arthur S., Arthur T., and the Soup Nazi
Staging: What Stack Overflow Can Learn from Git and Garbage Collection