I’ve had a registered account on Stack Overflow for six years. I have about ten years total experience in IT. I have followed a few tags on SO to answer questions in some very narrow areas I have particular knowledge which might be helpful to others. I have also asked a question on average every three months, for a total of twenty-five questions over the time I’ve been registered at SO.
When I ask a question, it’s after:
– Fully researching my question using search engines. This includes reading through listserv and bug tracker / issue resources and reading relevant blog articles. I have experience with customizing search engines (Apache Solr
), I know how they work. I’m not terrible at searching for technical information after all these years.
– Writing out my question on SO, and going through all of the relevant “Similar Pages” suggestions the editor offers to make sure I’m not duplicating my question (in addition to the Google search I did first).
– Stepping away from my question, and coming back to edit it before posting it so that I can make sure it is succinct, to the point, etc. I’m not a great writer – but I’ve also written technical documentation for a decade. During that time I’ve tried to improve my writing skills. I’m not terrible at it.
It’s been three years since a question I posted to SO wasn’t closed within the first ten minutes of posting it and downvoted for good measure (that’ll teach me to use the site like it’s intended!).
Every time I go to post a question on SO, I think “Do I have enough points to lose to ask a question?” (there’s a particular functionality I wanted enough points to be able to do on SO – creating custom tags for my personal open source projects).
Every time I go back to check on a question I post, I think “It’s probably already closed“, never “I hope someone gave me an answer for this difficult problem that’s stumped me and my colleagues for days“.
I spend more time editing my SO questions than I do on editing my blog articles on my personal website (hoping to avoid the SO mod mob eager to close questions as fast as possible).
My second to last question involved the behavior of a native browser API. It got closed as a “duplicate”, and the link provided to the “original question” was some completely unrelated JQuery function.
My last question (just now) asked about potential maintainability issues involved with a certain approach to CSS layout. I gave an example of a concrete maintainability issue that I could live with in one of the two scenarios, and asked for other concrete examples.
It was closed within a minute for being “primarily opinion based”.
I’ve finally decided to cancel my SO account, to add it to my hosts block list, and to block SO results from Google using an extension.
I get that moderators are barraged with low quality questions on SO, but if it’s been years since someone’s been able to ask a relevant question in spite of being very careful about it, the site is probably useless for most people (and slowly losing utility in a flaming dumpster fire).
I’ve shown questions to other developers that I’ve had closed and asked if they thought my question was wrong. At the time, I thought it was me and wanted to fix my problem. In every case the feedback was “That’s really stupid they closed your question, it’s a good one. I’d like to know the answer too. F#ck SO!“
Indeed. Stack Overflow is a toxic cesspool that is utterly useless outside of historical answers. That begs the question, what fills the void? It seems like Reddit, mostly. It’s not as well designed for the purpose, it lacks the nice tools specifically for a Q/A format, but at least bad questions just failing to show in the feed makes up for a goon squad incentivized to close questions for any reason they can, as fast as they can.
A DISCLAIMER: This post has gotten ~120k total views and +750 upvotes. That basically exceeds the number of people who’ve read everything I’ve ever written anywhere in my entire life. I’m out of my league. SO was incredible when it came out. Any other site trying to do tech Q&A would face the same issues they are. I’m not so much trying to dog SO as express my specific frustrations with the site, and hold out hope there is a fix for them (and maybe there’s not).
EDIT: I added a link to my SO profile and my last couple of questions that were closed in response to a request lower in this thread.
ADDITIONAL: A few people mentioned I’m being hysterical by blocking SO from search and hosts. Fair enough, it might be true. My reason for doing that is the same as the reason I force myself to do other things, like use regexes with capture groups for find-and-replace in my code editor: otherwise I won’t learn, I’ll keep doing it the hard way, and I’ll stay frustrated.
Leave A Comment