Re:Done Answering Questions Stack Overflow
by arp242 on Wednesday February 17, 2021 @08:44AM
(#26166180)
Yeah, the UI/communication could improve here. Stack Overflow suffers from a lot of mismatched expectations.
Some of my most successful answers have been to old questions by the way: I try to solve a problem, the Stack Overflow question doesn't contain a solution I like, I figure it out, and I post it as an answer.
> They want it to form a general resource, with Stack Overflow being less of a bulletin board and more of a reference guide. The problem is that their UI doesn't telegraph this very well (I blame the way they leave the original asker's name and avatar visible on the question), and neither do their marketing materials. They're kinda trying to have it both ways, baiting people with the chance to get their own question getting answered and then switching to editing their question into something more generally useful than something just for them.
Easy to look at an old question and think "There's no point posting another answer here, the asker is long gone." If we thought about it more like a wiki page and less like Yahoo Answers that wouldn't be the case.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26163113