I always find it interesting when I read praise being heaped onto StackOverflow and StackExchange. Let's see, they run a business, it's been successful, and most of the contributions are made by others. A fanboy even recently posted on Hacker News about how good it felt to get a signed letter from Joel Spolsky thanking him for his help. He should get a letter. He's put a lot of money in Joel's pocket. Let's not act silly, it was started as a business venture by Jeff and Joel, and if it hadn't worked, they'd have killed it right away, no matter how helpful it was.
Since my last blog post on stackoverflow, about out-of-hand closing of questions, I've come to another realization: I no longer use stackoverflow. Let me explain. I will search for a problem I'm having, and Google will regularly point me to stackoverflow. Almost without fail, if there's something helpful on stackoverflow, it has a date prior to 2011.
Why would that be? The last couple years there has been an attempt to close as many questions as possible. The questions that you are allowed to ask are all things that can be found in the documentation. For R, there's almost nothing that would be allowed on stackoverflow that you can't find by typing ?search-term. Even worse, a lot of the answers on stackoverflow are not good, because they're either noise written in an attempt to get points, or they're just wrong. There are exceptions, but answers usually only point you in the right direction, so you have to consult the documentation anyway.
The goal is to eliminate discussion. That means you have someone asking a specific question with a single, simple answer, and someone writes out that answer. The problem is that there are very few interesting programming questions that fit into such a format. "How can I debug a program in R?" is an example of a question that is considered inappropriate. It's very important, it's not easy for a new R programmer to figure out on her own, yet it's off-limits because it might result in someone stating an opinion. Something that can be posted is, "What is wrong with this call: x <- solve(y,z,linpack=TRUE)?" Snooze. It'll get four answers. Two will be general discussion, one will be an off-the-wall, totally wrong answer from someone looking for points, and one will be from someone summarizing ?solve. Yeah, not the world's biggest innovation.
These days I only visit the site to look at answers to questions that are at least a couple of years old. I don't have much reason to visit a website that is a substitute for looking things up in the documentation. Perhaps a new website, that allows for interesting questions, will appear. The strategy worked for Jeff and Joel, they made a lot of money before they decided to strictly enforce the "I'm too lazy to read the documentation" limitation on questions, hopefully someone else will take the idea and run with it.
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2 comments:
I'm the senior administrator -- a volunteer -- at a site you've probably heard of and are not supposed to mention around the Stack sites, because your comment is likely to get voted down to the seventh circle of hell, if not deleted completely.
I've read this post and your item from earlier this year ( http://lmf-ramblings.blogspot.com/2012/01/stackoverflow-needs-tweaking.html ), and with the utmost respect, tweaking the Stack sites isn't in the cards. How do I know? Mr Atwood quite famously got a lot of people to jump on the Stack bandwagon by billing his new site as the "Anti-EE". He had never used EE, and while he has probably wandered through the site over the last few months (EE did a complete rebuild that launched on January 31), he still hasn't. He just knew enough about it to build everything that EE isn't, and got enough people to put up enough money so that it can operate for free.
Free, of course, trumps a site where there's a paywall, and since the Stack sites have been hugely successful compared to EE, and since Mr Atwood and Mr Spolsky have the Google "spam website" folks on speed dial, Experts Exchange is sitting at about Quora's level. That means there's no incentive for Stack to do anything different -- at least until some VC wants a return on the investment. But that's another matter.
You're looking for discussions? That's what we do. Oh, we have our trolls -- the Google Monkeys and the Pasta Posters who are in it for their first t-shirt or two and then move on -- but there are a lot of us who have hung around Experts Exchange precisely because of what you're looking for: an intelligent (and even sometimes passionate, heated and even funny) discussion.
I cannot promise you that you'll get a solution to your R programming question; it's not EE's strongest suit. But I can promise you that if you're looking for a debate on the best way to approach a problem, you'll get a lot of programming folks who will be happy to share their opinions -- and unless someone is a little over the top in terms of the language they use in referring to someone or his/her parentage, we're loathe to delete them.
If you'd like the cook's tour, write to netminder at e-e.com, and I'll be happy to show you around.
You are spot on when you write that most questions are quickly closed. Btw this seems to be totally against what the SO found did want: they specifically stated that some level of redundancy is fine, especially for questions that are identical but with different wording... Because it helps getting more Google hits etc. The problem is the totally childish approach they took of "community moderation" which has nothing to do with a community but everything to do with totalitarianism. Moderation is done by a very few (tiny) number of individuals like "The Establishment" and "George Stocker" who are totally ruining the site. They're self approving each-other and you can't break through to bring some sanity in this whole mess they created. I've got several thousands K's on SO and I'm a top 5 user on one of their smaller site but I hate the entire stackexchange sites with a passion. Their attempt at recreating the Usenet hierarchy is pathetic and SO is just a very lame version of Usenet, for very average user. Usenet + killfiles was all you needed to get both great answers and opinionated discussions (which always has been a very good way to learn) but, sadly, the average programmer is to stupid to use killfiles. So we're stuck with something very stupid (SO) where a bunch of utter idiot like "The Establishment" are ruining the system.
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