Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/251758/why-is-stack-overflow-so-negative-of-late?cb=1

by dublor • 12 years ago

8 5 12 years ago

meta.stackoverflow.com

collyw• 12 years ago

I saw this earlier and it is amusing that the entire thread acts as a perfect example about what is crap with Stack Overflow these days.

Loads of comments and replies, basically being in denial that there is any sort of problem, telling us why it is better this way, and why it shouldn't change. Not addressing (or even acknowledging) the problem any way.

If a question has a few hundred upvotes, and gets closed by one moderator because it is off topic/ not constructive in his opinion, then the site is failing (in this instance) at what it claims to be good at.

ollysb• 12 years ago

The whole idea of closing questions seems rather odd, if a question isn't useful then no-one is going to look at that page, no problem. I think the majority of people end up on stackoverflow pages from google anyway and google is more than capable of filtering the content accurately.

tshepang• 12 years ago

One cannot add an Answer to a Question that has already been closed, which is the idea I think. There are also many kinds of useful, and Stack Overflow moderators are not interested in all of them. Programmer jokes are useful in that they can funny, for example. And they were very popular.

ddebernardy• 12 years ago

StackOverflow has, for as long as a I've been using it, been a sewers of low quality questions.

What got me to stop using it on a regular basis (twice) was the unwillingness of the devs to provide tools to ignore the trash and the inability to ask any even remotely useful question on grounds that they're opinion-based.

zequel• 12 years ago

Could it be that too many people see it as a way to get answers from homework?

I feel programming is like voting, if people aren't motivated to do it, I don't want them in the profession (or at the polls).

That's why I hate the "Get out the vote" efforts as well as "Teach people to code" movements. I'd like to see more self-motivated people that are interested in coding (not a well-paying job). I think this is what's happened to the law profession, too many lawyers that didn't want to practice law, just people who wanted a big paycheck and a couple of letters at the end of the name.

I think a lot of these new users asking dumb questions are those types of people, they shouldn't be in the profession imo.

Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?

Related Stories