What's your problem with the current state of SO?

It's full of people who can't be bothered to do even the most trivial investigation into their own damn bugs - the same trivial "I didn't configure it lol" and "I have no idea what I'm doing, nor interest in developing one, fix my thing for me plz" bugs that the site already has a dozen answers for. It stays that way because volunteer moderators don't want to wade through sewage all day. So it goes.

The topic-specific SE sites are often better; Emacs.SE, just off the top, is consistently of very high quality, with maintainers of several high-profile packages and Emacs itself regularly active there. But I abandoned any attempt to participate on SO proper years ago, and rarely even check there except on the off chance that some weird exception has an obvious cause that'll save me a source dive on a library or some similar large investment of time.

There are also many questions that I asked myself or googled and that I found shot down by overzealous SO moderators before someone could bring some element of response.

"Just google it"

>First google result

Fair, but that's the point of upvoting questions, no? As someone who uses SO through google searches 95% of the time, I mostly see high quality discussions.

The best discussions are usually marked off topic or 'no good fit" or "not of use for future readers"

And that's OK because discussions tend to lean in different direction, very often, and before you know it you are talking about something completely different. If you are sticking to the topic and have something really important to add, don't worry, moderators won't get in the way.

Yea - that's my biggest beef with SO currently, what I thought OP would say when I asked him.

On SO I pride(d) myself on asking good questions. That is formulating the question clearly and precisely was itself a kind of investigation. Often, the question never go finished, because the work of writing it up caused me to solve my original problem.

Probably SO should have weighted question upvotes at least as high as an answer upvote. Now it would take stronger medicine: e.g. pushing questions by people with low rep down the list.

I feel like you should still ask the question, and then answer yourself shortly afterwards. It'll help others in similar situations, and you might just get a better answer from someone else.

Same. I think I've asked one question ever on SO, and it got no answers - fair enough; I didn't have one, either.

What to do about it, I've no idea. I have the rep for most mod powers, but the Augean stables lack appeal. Beyond that, I wouldn't presume to venture a suggestion.

You could do a blog of your own to capture whatever it is you found out.

One problem is that the correct answers have to change over time and SO does not account for that except by having drive-by downvotes from dweebies who have no business even answering questions.

I used to answer questions on SO, but got so tired of arguing with idiots that I decided it wasn't worth my time anymore. It's too bad, too, because I strongly believe in "giving back" where I can and SO was a way to do that. No more. I still google for answers on there all the time, though.

so sorry to see you go.

> Expert Sex Change

You may want to edit...

Edit: Well; that explains why the service didn't take off

And I may not. That was the constant nickname back in the day, occasioned by the fact that their original domain was "expertsexchange.com". They later moved to one with a hyphen, but by then the damage was done.

(Edit to your edit: It did take off! It was the best we had for years. That best was just very, very bad.)

Remember joking with colleagues back then about sourceexchange.com and how that sounded out loud.

penisland was another famous site from the time with this property.

Edit: It was a site that sold pens; I think the alternative pronunciation of their domain name was unintentional.

Edit 2: I think I was wrong. Snopes says they did sell pens but they chose the name intentionally: http://www.snopes.com/business/names/domains.asp. Some other such names from that link: powergenitalia.com, molestationnursery.com, and whorepresents.com.

Did it ever actually sell pens? I always understood it to be a joke; if it's been anything else, I'd love to know more.

Snopes talks about penisland.net, which is still up now and clearly a joke - a rather disappointing effort, in fact, with a few rather broad double entendres and nothing further to offer.

I was curious about the (presumably) original .com, which is now squatted, and about which there seems no historical information easily to be found.

don't know about the website, but "Pen Island" is/was a small shop on Regents Street in London (not far from Picadilly Circus tube station) that sold high end fountain pens, mechanical pencils, etc. Don't know if it's still there, but it was list time i was in the UK (2007)

And http://www.bigbustycoons.com

Pen island? What was it supposed to be?

A joke - a "domain hack" avant la lettre.

penis land

Here's Peter Norvig explaining this stuff: https://youtu.be/yvDCzhbjYWs?t=24m37s

true . Other such nameswere therapistfinder -> The Rapist Finder Whorepresent -> Whore Present