Ask HN: In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow
What are the worst things about StackOverflow for you? Despite what SO states, the karma system does matter. And it's flawed, as the vast majority of karma that will ever be awarded, has already been awarded. Very simple questions have thousands of upvotes, as do the answers, and all of the basic, common questions have been covered extensively. The only path for a new, energetic, enthusiastic user to grow his/her karma score (and associated credibility) is via a massive grind. The likelihood of a new question or answer gaining hundreds of upvotes, is very slim. I don't claim to have all of the answers, but a decay function seems quite obvious to me. For one thing, technology evolves. The jquery way of doing something shouldn't have 10x the upvotes as the ES6 way. Old answers should lose a percentage of their upvotes over time, if they remain relevant they will gain new upvotes, but if not, they will get surpassed by newer, more relevant responses. Oh, and the new fonts. > I don't claim to have all of the answers, but a decay function seems quite obvious to me. I don't have a super-informed opinion here, but a decay function sounds reasonable. I'd also suggest that the decay be uncoupled from the user's karma (i.e., the user keeps his/her karma, but the value of the votes decay over time to make way for changes in technology). I don't claim that this is a well thought out idea, but at first blush, it seems reasonable. Also, I just don't give a shit what my karma percentile is. Finally, FWIW, I find SO ~85% useful and ~15% problematic. And I feel like sometimes we fixate on the 15% without acknowledging the genuine utility of the 85%. The new fonts are just system fonts, which exist because they’re fast and good. Segoe UI, which Windows users now see by default at SO, is not a good font for reading blocks of text. Actually, it's not just "not good," it's terrible. I don't think it works anymore. I was very engaged in Stackverflow a few years ago (got ~55K reputation) but stopped using it (not sure why). Now, last week I opened a question in ServerFault (where I got ~100 reputation or so) and my "silly" question was just answered with "what are you asking? Please ask the question the right way". I didn't even bother fixing my question. I deleted all my stack exchange accounts. Is there some reason why people are so extremely rude on StackOverflow? I understand sometimes questions can be worded poorly or miss out important pieces of information, but moaning at people (often those new to the site) to do something the right-way seems like the wrong approach. Most people don't spend all day on StackOverflow and know the "correct" way to format a question. The "goal" of StackOverflow is not to best serve the individual who posts a question. Their goal is to best serve the individuals who find the answer to their question without needing to post. Once you look at it from that frame, it makes sense why they are harsh against poorly worded or duplicated questions. They aren't trying to aid any specific individual, just the collective. Right from the start the idea was not to have just a forum with questions and answers but a curated repository of knowledge. There would therefore be an active moderation. Duplicated questions would be closed, out of topic ones would be deleted, questions/answers could be edited,... This ended up in a culture of active and sometimes heavy-handed moderation that 's now part of the DNA of the site. They encourage it big you do the peer moderation you're told to check for that. I just don’t value it enough to be reprimanded by an unknown internet person about how my question was worded. If I have a question I’m obviously not an expert in the matter, so I may not be able to word it perfectly the first time. Sometimes I need someone to ask a clarifying question to understand that I was looking at the situation from the wrong angle, but in SO you just get either ignored or just “that’s stupid” That “what animal provides milk at the supermarket?” and “what animal goes moo?” are marked as duplicate questions because they have the same answer. They’re clearly not duplicates and have very different concerns. The misuse of the site. The amount of people not following the rules and/or skipping tour is astonishing. Open SO, choose any popular tag and just wait. In a hour you will see a dozen of "do homework for me", "what's wrong with my code" and "explain this very basic thing to me eli5". Not to mention things explained in introductory lessons of any decent tutorial or things answered by first search result. Not to mention bad grammar and even worse formatting. Minimal, reproducible example is just a dream. Questions are silos. StackOverflow users are constantly complaining about duplicate questions. The real problem is that the onus for better question asking is placed on the asker, who is only really motivated and prepared to express their confusion. The whole reason most questions are asked is because the asker isn't familiar enough with the problem domain to find the answer. That also means they aren't familiar enough with the problem domain to find a duplicate/related question. It's much easier for question answerers to find duplicate and related discussion. Instead of antagonizing the asker by closing their post as "pointless discussion that has already happened", answerers should be continuing discussion with the asker. Every StackOverflow question (duplicate or not) provides two opportunities: 1. Answering the question. 2. Finding what information to better advertise so that confusion can be avoided in there future. > That also means they aren't familiar enough with the problem domain to find a duplicate/related question. It would be a valid point if only the answer wasn't so often the first result after pasting the title of their post into search engine. Often times this is when the asker is failing to articulate a similar question. Even in those cases, it's still just as easy to merge/reference the other question as it is to antagonize the asker. The point is that it's advantageous for everyone involved to help an asker ask a question instead of berating them for their inadequacy. After all, inadequacy is a key attribute of people with questions. Not their fault but old answers really suck. A 2016 answer about Azure is useless. Even a 2016 answer about react. Also it’s a trope that the select answer isn’t always the best so there is a meta conversation about what is the “really best” answer I disagree that old answers are useless. Frontend JavaScript frameworks are actually a good example. If you wanted to use ENYOjs, an amazing but seemingly defunct framework. You couldn’t go to the website because the whole thing was turned into a react fork and the original documentation was deleted. Besides stackoverflow you’re stuck and what if you have to maintain an old enyo project on roku or another web based platform? What if you are basing your project on some open source work from the past? Anyway there are many cases where old answers are useful and sometimes more useful then new answers. I do agree it’s extremely helpful when answers are continually updated with the times. But that doesn’t always happen but it’s nice. I agree, and it unnerves me because the solutions seem to be easy. Just allow users to tag an answer as outdated, or to add a "valid until YYYY" tag. This would provide a quick indication when skimming answers, without removing old ones. It could also allow to reopen an old question in case the accepted answer or all its answers are marked as outdated. > Just allow users to tag an answer as outdated StackOverflow is testing such a feature right now:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/407613/outdated-acc... The bureaucracy. I understand that they want some rules and processes, but their community is extremely hostile towards newcomers who don't do things correctly. Not directly with StackOverflow but when I search for something, usually I meet with outdated results on google. For e.g. if I search for something on iOS/Android, I usually get results from 2011-13 which don't add any value because frameworks have been updated since then. Stackoverflow is a very toxic community. It's not a welcoming place for beginners who are basically want to learn how to learn. An alternative was to use discuss forums (e.g. https://forums.fast.ai/). I have spent time responding to questions on Stackoverflow, I think I spent 2-3 years providing answeers, and one time I answered a question that didn't follow a weird policy that I strongly don't agree with (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/311442/opinion-base...). I got banned, and my account has been deleted, the answers still there. My only regret was that I could have spent that energy and drive to contribute to open source projects on github. Now, I have less time, but I answer questions -when I have time- on reddit or forums. The width of the code blocks in the answers is often too narrow and require horizontal scrolling "Hot Network Questions" are a distraction and take up too much horizontal space. > "Hot Network Questions" are a distraction and take up too much horizontal space. Well worth blocking these with an adblocker, if you don't already Don't even need to do that - just go to site settings and use the preference to block them - https://stackoverflow.com/users/preferences/current It requires being logged in but you don't have to worry about empty spaces. Didn't know this. Thanks! Done, but now there is some empty space instead. Probably fixable with some custom CSS... StackOverflow is one of the most toxic community out there. Asking a question is a miserable experience. Answering a question? Same. It really seems no one is there to help each other. It's mostly status quo or reputation. Moderators have too much work to do or have serious ego problems (most users call them "StackOverlords"). Or a mix between the two. One thing I noticed is that other sites of the Stack Exchange Network are doing quite well. Probably they should split up SO, at least with one site for backend related questions and one for frontend, or even for specific frameworks/platforms. But this would also split the value of the site, so I don't think it's gonna happen. Eventually someone will disrupt the whole network, just like they did with Experts-Exchange. That’s actually a really fantastic idea. Smash StackOverflow into hundreds of smaller StackExchange sites where people have a fighting chance of managing things. PHP.stackexchange, Wordpress.stackexchange (already exists interestingly enough) Python.stackexchange, Django.stackexchange, React.stackexchange, Java.stackexchange, JavaScript.stackexchange… some of these will still be very busy sites but at least they will be of more manageable size and better equipped to moderate outdated content. > Moderators have too much work to do or have serious ego problems As I mentioned in other comment, the amount of poor questions (e.g. of type "why my code not work"), with bad grammar and formatting on top, far outweighs the number of properly asked new questions. There are billions of us for whom English isn't our native language. A little more patience and empathy by the mods would go a long way. Sorry, I don't buy this argument at all. I'm not native speaker either and somehow have been able to write comprehensible sentences since elementary school. There is no excuse for not using punctuation, not capitalizing letters, not breaking statements into sentences. Here, an example [1] right from SO, raw copy-paste: >please can anyone point out what I have done wrong this is code for permutation which stores all possible permutation of the small vector "vec" and then display it And this isn't the worst I seen, but those get deleted quickly. But this one already tickles half of the points I've made. > I'm not native speaker either and somehow have been able to write comprehensible sentences since elementary school. Good education makes a difference. Not everyone is so lucky. Really? They didn't receive "good education", so makes it somehow OK to write like preschooler? They would need to receive education deliberately worsening their learning skill for it to be understandable. Capitalization of first letter in sentence isn't difficult concept to grasp, neither is using periods at the end. Your ignorance is not surprising. I am from India where our education system is multi-lingual. As a developing country many of our schools (and even colleges) are poorly funded. Many students in these small and underfunded schools (especially in rural and urban poor areas) are taught in their local language. And while English and another non-native language (or another foreign language like French in some of the better schools) are also taught in these non-english medium schools, the focus is often only on basic reading and writing skills. This is partly why some indians struggle with the language. Those who can speak it fluently often have the advantage of a better education (and more importantly educated parents who emphasised on reading books and speaking fluently, and a social network conversant in the english language). I've seen many a good student struggling in college and workplaces because of the language barrier. Again, how does this excuse not capitalizing letters and not using any punctuation at all? Stop fighting a straw-man and answer this question already. Their business model conflicts with what would serve users best. It once was a place where I would trust answers, now I have to search multiple times, scroll through many results to find relevant answers. Having massive amounts of questions gets more surface area for ads but a lot of programming Q&A that is a few years out of date is mostly useless. API's change, things become deprecated or better solutions emerge. They need to cull massive amounts of content for it to be more helpful but that would likely drop revenue. I wasn't able to find a detailed breakdown of their revenue, though https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2020/07/28/stack-ove... indicates that Teams is responsible for 1/3 of it. Is it the ads you object to? The ad revenue model requires a lot of SEO friendly pages to be in search indexes. I don't mind ads or that model in general. A lot of the answers on pages are outdated but they have no incentive to cleanup old content if its going to affect their bottom line because they will have less indexed pages. This means I get much more noise when trying to find something so I go elsewhere. But won't that be self correcting if people bounce away from old (less useful) content? That would negatively affect SEO, I'd think. As someone who didn’t study anywhere near as much math or cs in college as I’d have liked, and had to spend a lot of time asking questions on Stack.* sites, I’ve had an extremely positive experience. The only even mildly negative experience I’ve had was once a high-level user pattern-matched one of my questions to a much simpler already-answered question and closed it along with a dismissive comment, but as soon as I commented highlighting the discrepancy he apologized and answered my question. I practically don't use StackOverflow. It can be useful sometimes to find references to bugs, or something, but many of the solutions I've seen are sub-par, or the problems I have are mostly some issue in GitHub/GitLab that I'll comment in or open myself. On the rare occasions I find a useful question, some asshole closes it because it was asked before. What makes them an asshole is that it's not the same question at all, or the question was not answered. 1. The licensing situation is a mess. Most people copy/paste and they don't realize what the license is (CC BY-SA). 2. Why aren't answers always sorted by the number of votes by default? 3. The "community edits" where people sometimes decrease the quality of an answer just to get points. 4. Some answers don't age well but they are perpetuated by their large vote count. Impatience and hostility with new users. 1> You didn't ask the question in the right place, go and ask your question over in vaguely defined other place 2> You didn't ask the question in the right way, or are on the wrong platform, OS version, etc. 3> The tons and tons of ads. It doesn't allow broad questions, only nuts and bolts questions. As in: is my approach to building this the best approach? I could really do with a site that lets me ask that kind of question. For many broad questions, when you google them one of the top results is an old Stack Exchange post that wouldn't be allowed today. It's a shame, because these answers are usually more thorough, objective, and helpful than anything else that comes up in the search. Yes, a fair comparison and contrast to help choose between two libraries or frameworks is extremely helpful, but those are pretty much not allowed. The fact that anyone can post anything, so you could have a serious issue in your code and they give you an inefficient solution, which is then upvoted by users who don’t know better. Not being able to ask the same question over time. The best thing about reddit (imo) is being able to search for a question, and see how the solution the community came up with evolved over time. Answers posted in the comments rather than in the answers section. Questions closed as duplicate when there is some subtle but important difference. Closed questions still appearing in the search results. Mostly though just a general lack of good will, it's obnoxious. The unfriendly attitude towards newcomers. I am behind a corporate proxy, and I always(!) need to solve a captcha before I can use the search. Nazi moderators closing valuable discussions just because they can. Not being able to link to an answer. What do you mean? It is possible to link to answers, e.g.: https://stackoverflow.com/a/67723416/3398271 I just noticed the share links below the answers. Honestly have been blinded to that link for quite some time, expecting it to be above the answer body sort of like github issues are.