Is Stackoverflow deserted?

Posted by SkyMarshal on Monday January 31, 2011 @05:24AM
from the self-post dept.

I don't use SO very much, but just went on it to post a question about a weird IE css filter:alpha edge case I can't find an answer to on Google.

Most of the front page questions have 0 votes and 0 comments. Is this normal, or just everyone away for the weekend? Should I still bother to post a very niche question?

http://stackoverflow.com/

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/uCfrW.png

( 6 comments | 7 points | on HN )

Re:Is Stackoverflow deserted? by robin_reala on Monday January 31, 2011 @05:48AM (#2161001)

The oldest question in your screenshot is 3 minutes old. I think you might be expecting a bit much for them to all have comments and answers!

In my experience, well worded questions do attract answers, even if those answers are a week down the line.

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Re:Is Stackoverflow deserted? by Jach on Monday January 31, 2011 @06:27AM (#2161079)

I was waiting a bit to make a snarky reply: the first comment on this thread was about 40 minutes after submission, does that mean HN is deserted?

More seriously though, people are sleeping. I don't know what SO's country-usage stats are, but I'd bet most of their active and knowledgeable members are from the States. Also from your screenshot alone you need someone familiar with windows server and C#, php and its relationship to apache and the filesystem, html5 AND its quirks with IE, regex and sed's flavor, more PHP and probably in the context of a framework, Python with templating and google app engine, something to do with HTML tidiness, and mutexes and multithreading in the context of C#. I'm frankly amazed when someone knows about the same thing I'm working on, only a bit better so that they are able to help me within a day of posting. A few times my questions have just been too narrow, and in that case I just shrug as it's usually not a show-stopper question for me.

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Re:Is Stackoverflow deserted? by dangrossman on Monday January 31, 2011 @06:34AM (#2161087)

SO's users aren't sleeping, the questions in the screenshot were less than 3 minutes old and some had multiple answers already. This submission should be flagged, it's not worthy of responses.

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Re:Is Stackoverflow deserted? by SkyMarshal on Monday January 31, 2011 @05:25AM (#2160954)

Clickables:

http://stackoverflow.com/

http://i.imgur.com/uCfrW.png

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Re:Is Stackoverflow deserted? by sad_hacker on Monday January 31, 2011 @06:05AM (#2161032)

All the posts are 30 seconds to 1 minute old, how fast you expect to get the answers? They are on front page so people can answer them.

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Re:Is Stackoverflow deserted? by mmacaulay on Monday January 31, 2011 @07:24AM (#2161184)

A little while ago they tweaked the way questions appear on the home page, might have something to do with it.

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/stack-overflow-homepag...

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