One issue I run into is finding a Stack Overflow question that exactly matches the issue I've run into, find that it's been closed for being a duplicate, click the link to the question it's supposed to be a duplicate of, and find that the other question is completely unrelated. Not only can I not find the answer from SO at this point, but if I find the answer on my own I can't even help others.

Another issue I've run into is the minimum numbers of characters needed to edit an answer. Once I found the answer that was chosen and upvoted had code that didn't make any sense. It was something like an instance of a point object "point1" and an instance "newpoint" and they wrote "point1 = newpoint;" but actually meant "point1 = new point();". When I realized the problem I tried to change it but wasn't able to because I wasn't changing the answer enough (I think there's a minimum 6 character limit). I didn't want to make random changes elsewhere just to make the minimum needed to fix it, so I let it be.

I find Stack Overflow useful, but I don't try to participate in it anymore and don't stay signed in.

The ones that really get my gripe are the ones that are flagged for being off topic.. Off what topic? This is a place where technical questions are asked and answered and this is a technical question that needs answering - Why is it closed?

> This is a place where technical questions are asked and answered

I think this is a great reflection of one of the largest problems that Stack Overflow has to solve, and that is user education. The definition of what is on topic for Stack Overflow is much more specific than just being "technical", but most users don't even know that.

This results in many new questions being closed. The community is constantly trying to reword these "closed" messages to be as friendly and helpful as possible, but to the newcomer it just feels like rejection.

In many ways, Stack Overflow has solved all it's "technology" problems, and now is left with a lot of psychology and communication problems. The site could definitely use a professional communications specialist.

(FWIW, for those curious, "on topic" is defined here: http://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic)

It may be true that most users don't know how narrowly the topic is defined, but it's also true that many users do know, and simply think it is defined far too narrowly. Sometimes, if you just can't seem to communicate some policy concept to your target audience, it's a problem with the policy, not the communication.

> Sometimes, if you just can't seem to communicate some policy concept to your target audience, it's a problem with the policy, not the communication.

I agree 100%. If you were to claim that the "on topic" policy for Stack Overflow is too narrow, I would respectfully disagree.

Yep, I think it's too narrow. I'm more than happy to agree to disagree! I'm curious though, since you're certain this is the correct policy, why do you think it has been so hard to communicate?

Probably because the general internet population is conditioned to a "one place fits all" approach. Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc all are places where any content of any kind is welcome.

I personally think the Stack Exchange network is effective because it creates communities that specialize rather than a single generalized community. But new arriving users have a preconceived conception that all content is welcome.

I think a lot of that could be alleviated by binding together the "Stack Exchange Network" into a more cohesive single site though. Kind of how each subreddit can have its own rules, culture, and community, but it's still very clearly part of Reddit TM.

It would be neat if there was a single entry point into the Stack Exchange Network where you could post a question, with a dropdown for selecting which "network" you think is most appropriate.

They do appear to slowly be increasing this sort of cross-syndication between network sites, but it definitely has room for improvement.

I have flagged many questions for being off topic. You could say I'm part of the "problem" but from my standpoint, someone will ask a question that can be answered so many ways that the scope is too broad. Many times the person asking doesn't know enough to understand just how broad the question they've asked is. That's why I also leave a comment telling them _why_ I just voted to close.

This is, unfortunately, an unsolvable problem. They're asking the question precisely because they don't understand what they're asking enough to get a meaningful answer.

> You could say I'm part of the "problem"

And I do! With lots of swearing! :)

The only time I'm on SO is from a Google search result. They should at least make the danged site noindex itself for that page if it's the question has been closed. You wouldn't believe the amount of times I've been searching for a solution and found a SO link and thought I had the answer coming my way only to see the thing was closed before anyone could answer the question.

In all honesty, I don't give a rats why a question was closed. It was either closed and is now useless or open and has answers.

The solution is to make the closed question not appear in Google search results. If the same question keeps appearing the solution is to let someone answer it.

> The solution is to make the closed question not appear in Google search results. If the same question keeps appearing the solution is to let someone answer it.

This is a great idea. Have you considered discussing it on the Meta site?

The solution would definitely have to be more nuanced - sometimes "closed" questions have useful answers on them so you wouldn't want to remove those from Google. But removing "closed" questions that provide no value would probably be an improvement.

Well that's the other side of the problematic coin. The majority of my experience with SO is closed questions.

I generally consider myself a dumbass and not smart enough to figure out the rules to avoid getting topics closed, so I stick to reddit and HN (and it took years of lurking here before I started posting too!)

Maybe some questions are just not "too broad" but simply broad, and that one may wish to have a number of possible solutions to a problem and pick the one that fits one's case best ("one" being possibly someone else in the future that has a not precisely similar but close enough problem that the set of proposed solutions can help in finding the right path).

So maybe, just maybe a slightly broad question with a couple answers may be better that an theoretically ideal set of a thousand (question, answer) tuples each trying to fit a very restricted case. Unfortunately some mods seem hell-bent on promoting the latter, possibly in hope of writing bots that solve-by-Google (see stacksort[0]).

[0]: https://gkoberger.github.io/stacksort/

> Maybe some questions are just not "too broad" but simply broad, and that one may wish to have a number of possible solutions to a problem and pick the one that fits one's case best

I think there are two kinds of "broad":

1. There are multiple ways to solve a specific problem with a specific expected outcome. "How do I sort an array?", for example, is a broad question in that it can be solved in many ways, but you can definitively say whether any given solution is correct or not.

2. The problem is not specific, and there is no clear way to determine whether any given answer is actually a "solution". For example, a single question with only the text, "How do you write a game?"

Most "broad" questions fall on some spectrum between these two, but the closer a question is to the latter category, the less likely it is to generate any sort of helpful feedback. The community does sometimes label the former as "too broad", but 95% of the time the given close reasons are correct, and when they are wrong the site provides documentation on how to get your question re-opened.

It's hard to maintain a proper balance between moderating the inundation of terrible questions and avoiding the false-negative closing of legitimate questions.

I'd love to see the SO community's answers to "How do you write a game?".

I think this is an interesting and common response to the policies. As if the "Too Broad" close policy is the only thing stopping volunteer contributors from writing a 10 page thesis "How To Write A Video Game" for every questioner that asks for it.

Isn't this alleviated somewhat by marking duplicates? If nobody ever writes any good answers on the original question, oh well! It's just annoying when nobody can write a good answer to a broad question.

But hey, it's their site, and I'm just some rando on the internet - they get to make whatever policies they want.

My emphasis was less on the replication of effort, which duplicate tagging definitely resolves, and more on the idea that broad open-ended questions raise the bar for a well-qualified high-quality answer far above and beyond that needed for a simple and concise question of limited scope.

Allowing such questions effectively lowers the percentage of questions that get good answers, thereby training users NOT to expect an answer to a posted question, and leading to decreased engagement.

On the other hand, by disallowing such questions, the questions that do get asked are more likely to be answered, and this encourages repeat visits and increased engagement.

Hey, by the way, in case you happen to come back and see this after the fact: I've found your perspectives in this thread compelling, and while I'm not completely convinced, I'll definitely be incorporating your arguments into my thinking in the future.

Just thought I'd let you know you haven't been shouting into the wind!

My personal experience with such questions is that very often, the process of engaging in dialogue to determine what kind of answer(s) the asker actually wants is difficult and time-consuming. This typically complicated by askers who don't actually show up to the dialogue, leaving people who want to be helpful with no way to figure out what specific answers are helpful. There tends to be no adequate way to helpfully answer such questions, so people try to filter them out as poor uses of time.

The scenario you describe is somewhat different, in which the asker is well aware they have a broad question. Such people are advised to make clear that they know full well it is a broad question and are seeking broad comment on multiple viable approaches.

"How do I convert a JSON object to CSV?" is a common broad question I see all the time. There is no standard conversion because they are completely different data structures.

And yet, answers with demonstrations of the many ways to do so are extremely useful! Sometimes I think the side of this debate you land on is something of a personality test: do you seek order above all else or do you embrace and try to grapple with chaos?

Such a question is best addressed in a personalized way, starting from what capabilities the asker has and what they are trying to accomplish. Offering multiple viable technical solutions to a person who asks such a question is quite likely to leave them confused and adrift as most of the answers are not comprehended.

So, you're absolutely correct. Demonstrations of the many ways to do so are extremely useful to many people! It is, however, highly likely that few - if any - will be useful to the person asking the question.

You're very right - this is a personality test. Do you try to jump directly to trying to answer an apparently-simple question, or do you cautiously consider if the simple question hides complex depths (deeply nested structures, arrays of variable length, etc.) that make a simple and straightforward answer difficult?

The thing is: many times the question is harder than the answer. If only we could phrase the question right, then the answer is actually the easy part.

This has been a big part of my experience.

I think the last 3 times I've gone to SO to write a question I spend an hour finding the right code samples, explaining what the problem is and why I need to solve it. Why I've chosen this route and after all that has been put down on the page I see what the real issue is and solve it before its even submitted.

It's almost become another tool to use, "How would I structure this problem if I needed help from the community?" It forces you to think through the problem into the route cause, almost like debugging your thoughts and removing the bloat

Leaving a comment is more than enough. Question/answers that are ridiculous and "don't contribute" tend to disappear into the bowels of the internet anyway. There's no reason to force it away when it will disappear naturally.

Yes, sir, you're definitely part of the problem. No other way to put it :)

I don't necessarily agree with the logic, but SO's "topic" is software development. Many questions that are technical but not regarding software are closed for being off topic. Some/many are migrated to sibling stackexchange sites. Some questions are closed because they require opinion-based answers ("What's the best ...?", e.g.).

What's kind of interesting is a lot of the target SO questions are implicitly opinion-based. For any "How do you do X" there might be multiple ways to do it so the question is actually "what's the best way to do X" which is up for anyone to interpret "best". And this tends to work out nicely, you'll often see multiple answers where the top upvoted one is not the selected one, or some answers build off of other ones and describe why they think it needed updating. This kind of nuance and seeing multiple, competing answers is often pretty helpful while you're learning.

Plus some of the best, most interesting questions on there are "community wikis" which often tell you they should have been flagged as opinion based but are preserved for historical significance.

Because of that I really don't see the point in being so dogmatic about closing opinion based questions. Even something like "emacs or vim" I can imaging being a useful question, with a highly upvoted, thought provoking answer arguing each side.

The historical significance thing is particularly annoying. It's an explicit statement of "We want this type of content, but the system of rules that we created and can change any time we like does not allow this type of content, and what do you mean, 'that seems like something we should do something about'?"

"how to do X" has an objective answer: "here's how". Whether it is "the best" is subjective. That is why multiple answers are allowed on Stack Overflow (instead of a single article as on Wikipedia modulo different languages).

The accepted tick on the answer says that "here's how" might have worked for the question author.

The most upvoted/popular answer works as a rule (there are exceptions). Popularity contest is not the best way to get the truth on a technical subject but it works more often than not (you can read the answer in the chronological order if you like).

> Some questions are closed because they require opinion-based answers ("What's the best ...?", e.g.).

The problem with this is that there are opinions and preferences and biases (and so on) hiding all throughout even the most (seemingly) objective questions and answers. The SO folks think they're making a more meaningful distinction here than they actually are.

Not to mention "what's the best <X> library" can frequently be answered in an objective fashion, if the answers give a breakdown of why.

Things like "lib A requires excessive boilerplate compared to lib B, see example", or "lib A can't be installed under the following platforms", etc. What should be voted down on those types of questions isn't the question, but poor answers.

It's really frustrating, because getting the opinion of experts who have tried a bunch of alternatives, and know the pros and cons that matter, is exactly why I go to SO frequently.

What's stopping them setting up an opinions.stackoverflow then if they've already got sibling sites? Somewhere to contain all of the opinion-based questions.

They do have some. For example the Software Recommendations Stack Exchange:

http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com

Exactly. Double frustration if it was the first return from google.

That's the only way visit SO. It's double frustration all the time.

The duplicate thread thing is the most common annoyance I have with it. Feels like the people moderating are not fully understanding what they're reading/not reading the whole thing.

That's certainly possible in many cases. But it's so terribly common for duplicates to show up on SO that many folks have itchy trigger fingers. :/

> and find that the other question is completely unrelated.

Did you take advantage of this opportunity to comment or flag the answer for moderation? If a question has been inappropriately marked as duplicate, that's something that the community should be aware of, and SO has methods for doing so.

> Not only can I not find the answer from SO at this point, but if I find the answer on my own I can't even help others.

If you want to helps others; post an answer, a comment (if it is a minor correction to an existing answer).

If you can't post an answer or if the question is not the exact duplicate; ask a new question:

- describe your specific problem

- link to the duplicate (the back link is created automatically but you can also add a comment under the duplicate question explicitly if you'd like)

- describe how it is different, how exactly existing answers have failed for you (what behaviour did you expect; what did you get instead, step by step)

If you follow https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve then your question will be better than most questions already (and even if it might be closed as a duplicate; it would attract additional attention—if the question is the exact duplicate you could also create a bounty: it is unlikely to help with difficult questions but it would also attract some attention).

Just add code highlighting if your edit falls short. It's like 20 bytes.

<!-- language: lang-js -->

> I didn't want to make random changes elsewhere just to make the minimum needed to fix it, so I let it be.

Instead of just adding "I fixed a small code bug but SO has a minimum edit length, so here it is" to the end of the answer?

s/newpoint/new point()/g may not be obvious to the next person.

It really depends on what language you are asking about. Stackoverflow has subcommunities.

Some niche frameworks have great helpful communities

While the general Javascript community there hates questions that aren't formatted a very particular way

I taught myself to code using SO in just the last two years. I reference it almost daily. I've shipped production software in this time span using the information. I can't believe such a high quality source of information exists on the internet, it is a phenomenal public resource. Difficult to contribute to? Sure. Prickly moderators, who close questions I've found very useful? Definitely. Is it dying? I have no idea, I hope not. The creators of the site deserve some kind of medal, in addition to whatever valuation the company has. Really an incredible resource.

I wonder if these days SO could move to a revenue model of just asking software companies for money. The entire community certainly owes them a debt for how much they've streamlined working with unfamiliar tools.

"We make all of your programmers 50% more efficient, kick us a little cash to keep us running smoothly."

As others have said, the first objective of stackoverflow was to destroy expertexchange, which it has succeeded admirably at. Finding answers through search engines is now far easier.

I've posted very rarely on the software stackexchange, but I've been very active on the electronics stackexchange to the extent that I'm in the top 2% and rank #28. It has very aggressive moderation of 'bad' questions, and I sometimes wish there was somewhere chattier and less fussy we could gently steer the less well formed questions to. It does feel bad when someone asks a question and gets the door slammed in their face. But on the other hand there are a lot of repetitive 'bad' questions from people who've not yet understood what a resistor is.

Remember it's been gamified, so we might as well treat it as a game. Consider the motivation of the question-answerers.

(I also opportunistically karma-snipe the "hot network questions", so I have 1.4k rep on math.stackexchange from only two answers)

Top 2% here - I have used Stackoverflow this way for years. It has saved me hundreds of hours of searching over the years and still does. One thing I'd add is I try to leave a thank you comment in addition to an upvote when I find an answer to a hard question. Getting comments years later thanking you for a quick answer you jotted down at some point is so satisfying.

Ironically, leaving a "thank you" will typically get deletions/nags from the self-appointed comment police.

As much as I like (and heavily use) SO, it has a real problem with making people feel like shit when asking, answering and commenting.

There are people who are exemplary in their politeness and helpfulness like the top-contributor, John Skeet. There are also quite "mean" people like Hans Passant (also super-high score). I wish more people would use the really fantastic users like Skeet as an example of how to behave.

"Game-ification" strategies in social networks like SO tends to attract uncharitable, persnickety rule-zealots and this seems to have been re-enforced over the years.

Honestly, I am in the camp in favor of deleting "thank you" comments. I view the whole platform as a fantastic way to curate high-quality content for the whole web community. I don't come to Stack Overflow to socialize or make friends, I come because I'm trying to get my widget to work and I just want to find the solution to my problem.

While expressing thanks is definitely an admirable human quality and should be lauded, it frankly does not provide value to the other people viewing the page. Part of the problem, I think, is because "comments" on Stack Overflow have a different meaning and context than 99% of the web. They don't exist for some sort of "social" experience, but as a means of coordinating improvement to the content.

Maybe SO could do better to communicate that difference. Educating new users is one of the biggest challenges in the face of the eternal September that SO receives.

Regardless of their intended purpose according to the SO FAQ, the comments in Stackoverflow are often the most interesting part of a question or answer. They do more than coordinate improvement to the attached question/answer. The comments often provide valuable context, point to other resources, and can offer some opinion.

I agree that a comment consisting of nothing more than "thank you" isn't particularly helpful, but a "thank you" + some twist or application tip is interesting and valuable. Sadly, some SO-cops just see the words "thank you", ignore the rest of comment and then immediately recite the rules and/or delete the comment.

As for SO communicating the difference, I think they already do. Their problem is that people like me _deliberately_ ignore "the rules" and post whatever we think is appropriate-- the mods just can't keep up.

> some SO-cops just see the words "thank you", ignore the rest of comment and then immediately recite the rules and/or delete the comment

If that happens, then the mod is out of line. But what can SO do to prevent that behaviour? If you have ideas I'm sure the community on Meta would be more than happy to entertain suggestions, that's how the platform evolves and grows.

The "comment police" bit is an interesting observation - much of the really petty hostility seems to come from mid-tier power users instead of mods and high-level contributors. I think the article here undervalues how unpleasant it is for a new programmer to get even a single response of "Seriously? Marking for deletion."

Those comments might get removed later, but saying "trolls are everywhere" is too pat when the people abusing new users are very visibly established, popular members of the community. Getting attacked by a random throwaway account is a very different feeling than getting attacked by someone up near the top of the totem pole.

SO mod on comments:

"You should expect comments to get deleted.

If they are oh-so-important, they should get rolled into the post they are commenting on. At which point they are obsolete."

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/255140/592746

So, your problem, clearly, is that you think your "thank you" is "oh so important." If your ego wasn't so big, you'd get that.

Just pointing out that one of the things the parent says gives him joy on stack-overflow is actually "not allowed".

I don't have "a problem".

I use stackoverflow quite productively, appreciate its utility, and help folks out with answers when I can. I've gotten acclimated to the rudeness but I wish it were a nicer place.... more skeet less passant.

I was sarcastically criticizing the SO mod's comment, not actually claiming you have a problem.

[Edited for snarkiness.]

oops, sorry!

I have a question about nodejs from 2011 that still gets comments and upvotes regularly.

One of my favorite parts I think is the fact that the correct answer changed over time, so I continued to update the question.

At first the answer to "how to read a file one line at a time" was to use a module, later, a better module came along, eventually nodejs finally added native support for file reading.

I had an "annual update" going for a while since the correct answer changed to often.

Eventually someone came along and completely rewrote my question. Wiped all the history, evolution, etc... And boiled it down to "use native"

I was saddened a little, but understood.

I find a number of stack overflow rules/guidelines to be odd. For example: 'do not say "thanks" or "hello" people reading your question do not have time for that's [sic]

It's definitely a community which has been usurped by the aspie side of programming

That said, I still get thanks on it and it makes me smile when I do

Concur. I remember the days prior to Stackoverflow (where the average search for a programming question landed me on expertsexchange).

They were not good days.

Agreed. This related to the misconception that "little or no activity on an open source project means that it's dead." That statement is frequently true, but not always.

If most of the common questions have been answered, then there will obviously be a correlated decline in the number of questions posted and subsequently answers posted. Esoteric questions aren't abundant, especially over a constant time frame.

Declining question/answer activity shows that the website is healthy. I've opened S/O a few times over the past year with the intention to answer questions, only to find duplicate/off-topic/low-effort/etc. questions.

Stackoverflow can be thought of a big cache for programming problems. A hit is a +1 on question/answer and walk away with the answer. A miss is when you have to find the answer someplace else (or figure it out yourself), then you make the cache bigger.

I've earned "Necromancer" about a dozen times and I don't think it's a coincidence that they're some of the answers I'm most pleased with. I don't even bother answering old questions unless I think there's a clear gap in the existing answers that I can help fill.

Do you normally answer older questions that have already been answered, or newer questions with a few sub-optimal answers?

I find that most older questions have pretty useful answers so I can't really improve upon them.

P.S. for SO devs, how about an "Advanced Necromancer" gold badge? 1 year and 10 points rather than 60 days and 5 points for the current silver?

Could we get away with calling it "Lich King", ya think?

Stackoverflow is a good language resource for me -- if I don't know the language I'm working in as well yet, it's invaluable. For non-beginner questions I don't find your percentages to be accurate, apologies. In the latter case SO (and hell sometimes even googling the problem) are unhelpful, and whatever is on SO that is related isn't applicable enough to be helpful. In these cases sometimes I find myself asking SO questions, but more often than not after about ten minutes of searching I go offline in my quest and find a senior+ engineer who has a free moment to ask.

It beats having to use the man pages 100% of the time, which is how I had to do it before the web had accessible technical content.

All the "works for me" answers like yours and the articles are just another example of what's wrong with SO.

I was tempted to qualify this more, but honestly, if you can't see why "works for me" is one of the worst kinds of answers you can give in tech, then i doubt i can convince you.

A common theme for new users I've noticed is questions regarding a code snippet. The question claims the code doesn't work - that it throws or produces an incorrect result. However, the code is completely correct.

How else can you respond, other than saying "the code seems to be correct, and there's not enough to reproduce the problem here. can you provide more information?"

That is honestly a completely different kind of answer, that imo is perfectly fine. Although, it should come as a comment first, not an answer, but deserves promotion to answer if no further info is given.

The difference between your phrasing, and a blunt "works for me" is that you actually bother to inquire further and don't desire to just shut things down so you can move on to the next question and make more points.

Of course there are "works for me" answers. There are so many different setups out there. Just between chrome and IE for example. "This works for me on most browsers, but I don't know what the answer is for IE" is perfectly valid.

Sorry, I fail to see that. Works for me works great for me ninety percent of the time.

When a person says, "I'm having a problem" and the response is, "Well I'm not having any problem, buh-bye!" it in effect says "I don't care that you have a problem."

Often the real problem for novices is that they don't know enough to ask the right question; good questions require that you already be pretty close to the answer. So the real process of helping somebody with technology often begins by turning a bad question into a good question.

So basically, I think "works for me" is disrespectful. Mostly I see it used defensively; the goal is to make the querent go away again. If somebody doesn't want to help, fine, I respect that. But in that case, they should not put themselves into a position where they are answering questions from novices.

>When a person says, "I'm having a problem" and the response is, "Well I'm not having any problem, buh-bye!" it in effect says "I don't care that you have a problem."

What a bizarre interpretation. When someone says, "It works for me," they're saying "I tried your example because I want to help, but was unable to reproduce your problem. Maybe there's some information you didn't provide that can explain the difference between what I'm seeing and what you're seeing? Please add more information so I can understand what's different and help you."

That may be what you're thinking. But it's often not how it comes across, especially when it's the totality of the reply. If you want to say the rest of that, I'd suggest you actually try saying the rest of that.

Ninety percent of the time it works every time!

(Jokes on HN fail about 90% of the time, which is a shame because yours is subtle and has been missed)

Exactly what I do. Exactly what happens to me. I am a serious Necromancer.

Exactly. And that's good enough. The question whether contributors "are welcome" is less relevant now than it was 5 years ago. But I think they still are.