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Your two advanced questions are answered on SO:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6246719/what-is-a-higher-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27190934/implementation-f...

These are only two questions of many on these topics.

One thing I love about SO: that second question has only seen ~20 votes, but it still has a detailed and thoughtful response to a subtle question. I'm constantly impressed by how niche a topic can be and still get a really solid answer.

> I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.

I suspect that the part that you are "missing" has to do with the following belief:

> answers supplied by random internet people and "graded" by other, less-knowledgeable random internet people

You've inherently discounted the quality of content on the site, so it's no wonder you find nothing valuable there. The fact is that "crowd sourcing" actually can work, and "random internet people" are able to curate and raise visibility of quality content.

I think Stack Overflow is one of the best examples of this. Despite being inundated with terrible content, the system is able to consistently identify quality and float it to the top while mostly keeping the trash out of sight.

I have the same feeling. The official docs, experts' websites, code from relevant projects, and books are always better than getting a quick answer from SO. Sometimes when I've exhausted my available resources (often the case is that I don't have the necessary book), I'll click on an SO link... only to find that the question is closed because it's not a bite-sized chunk that fits the SO format.

I think this depends a lot on how good the "official" docs are. For some topics (like a depressing amount of Android stuff), the official resources are unclear, out of date, or fundamentally wrong. If the official API is just a list of functions and parameters, Stack Overflow is a great place to find out about hidden side effects and other issues.

For me, Stack Overflow helps to bridge the gap between crummy official documentation and how tools actually work.

I was thinking about that when I wrote my comment, but decided to only include my own experiences. I think you're right / what you say makes sense, though. Particularly for popular and fast moving projects (like everything web related), a lot of people are going to run into the same problems, and either the documentation is poor/doesn't exist, or they don't have the time to learn X the hard way.

I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.

You have bit of experience, Stack Overflow's usefulness applies mostly for novices. See the people who said they learned to program with SO in this thread, or otherwise find the material there useful. They're the target userbase, not you.

I suspect the audience is not limited on purpose. The work required to answer questions, and incentive system seems to select for questions that are already google-able but the person asking just doesn't have enough domain knowledge to productively google for that answer.

The only time I get a useful stack overflow google result is when I've jumped headfirst into an area outside my skillset and need to do a common operation but the toolset doesn't make obvious. The kind of questions where I'd be desperate enough to ask SO are either complicated and - at best - get "don't do it like that" answers. Or I'm looking to better understand the technical considerations going into a design decision, which is too opinion-based (or whatever SO calls it) to be asked.

> Stack Overflow's usefulness applies mostly for novices

I can understand this belief in that the most prominent content on the site is that which gets the most upvotes, and by statistical necessity the number of novices voting must be greater than the number of experts voting.

But when you get into the niche topics or tags, that's when the expertise really comes through. Try browsing the [scala] or [haskell] tags, they may not have a giant community, but the general level of both questions and answers hardly fits your generalization of "novice".

If we were just talking about the "hot questions" of the month (http://stackoverflow.com/?tab=month) I could understand why it would seem the site is mostly useful for novices, but there is definitely a place for expertise in the community as well.

It probably depends on the type of coding your doing, and your style of problem solving.

I've experienced a massive boost in productivity using StackOverflow to help resolve the sorts of issues that are too big to appear in the docs and too small to have a whole blog post. But perhaps it has something to do with the sort of software I work on that I happen to run into a lot of problems in that sweet spot.

What is wrong with getting answers from "random internet people". I've actually looked into some StackOverflow users and some of them are pretty accomplished software engineers in their own right.

I must be missing something, given the "reverence" SO seems to get.

I don't think you are.

Stack Overflow was an interesting idea, but I find it has a terrible signal/noise ratio today and one of the most unpleasant and unconstructive cultures of any tech discussion site, for basically the same reasons that many other comments here have already given.

The way they chose to co-opt search engines was also a brilliant move by the founders, but has also now become annoying to the point where I'd have the entire SO network removed from my search results pages by default if I could.

What would you prefer be returned instead? Places like Expertsexchange or Quora?

No, they are usually even worse. What I would prefer to see is whichever search results organically rise to the top excluding the huge but more-hype-than-substance sites by default. I often find there is real expert commentary via official docs, blog posts, archived mailing lists, presentations at conferences, and so on, sitting just underneath all those SO links that clog up the first results page.

This has pretty much always been true in my experience; if you're really determined to learn something in depth, you gotta go past page 1 of the search results and look for the folks who've spent years writing about some obscure topic and only get links from other people who are similarly dedicated.

And then hope their blog doesn't disappear from the 'Net before you finish digesting or need to refer back to that information. Buy their book if they have one.

The founding goal of Stack Overflow was literally "programmers seem to have stopped reading books"[1]. NOT "programmers shouldn't read books", or "book learnin' is inferior to superficial familiarity", but simply... "they appear to have stopped". There are probably a lot of reasons for the tendency folks seem to have of not investing effort into building a deep understanding of the things they're working with... But ultimately, it doesn't really matter: either you provide information in bit-sized chunks, or someone else will and you lose the ability to influence the quality of that information. Not the choice we'd like, but the choice we have.

Disclaimer: SO user since '08, employee since '11.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/04/16.html

It's always been true to some extent, but I think it's SO that changed relatively recently, not the rest of the web.

In the earlier days of SO, it used to be that a search engine might return an SO link or two but they had a decent chance of being relevant. At that time, SO was smaller, the questions being asked were more common and general, and thus the answers were mostly correct and widely applicable.

Today, unfortunately, my usual experience is that there might be as many as 4-5 SO questions turning up on the first results page for a programming-related search, yet none of them is actually relevant. Some will probably already be closed with some hostile and quite possibly incorrect status. Some are effectively keyword stuffing and not actually relevant to what I was looking for, but don't get penalised as such by the search engines because SO as a whole is so well established. Particularly irritating, it's no longer rare to find that a question shows up that is relevant but either it has no answer or it has nothing but wrong or misleading answers (which may well have been voted up or accepted anyway).

It's not providing information in bite-sized chunks that's the problem, it's providing irrelevant, incorrect or out-of-date information, or attracting attention but then providing no information at all.

Funny you mentioned "keyword stuffing"... Came across a related sub-thread on reddit earlier today [1], where a bunch of folks were trash-talking one of the top answerers in the [java] tags for his efforts in marking duplicates and removing irrelevant tags.

There is an insane amount of hostility directed toward anyone trying to minimize the noise Stack Overflow generates, I'm afraid. Folks feel entitled to spam the whole site - indeed, the whole Internet - with their questions, and take umbrage at anyone who might stand in their way.

So a lot of folks are left feeling that their choice is between trying to help and getting blasted with vitriol, or just walking away and letting entropy win. I find it hard to blame those who opt for the latter route.

We do try to combat this to a degree by deleting unanswered or poorly-received questions after some nominal period of time; of course, given search engines' fascination with boosting the rank of recent content, this can only help so much - there are several thousand new questions a day in the most popular (and thus crowded) tags, where you can imagine the inherent motivation on the part of each author is to optimize for views rather than specificity or clarity.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/54f62f/the_dec...

So a lot of folks are left feeling that their choice is between trying to help and getting blasted with vitriol, or just walking away and letting entropy win. I find it hard to blame those who opt for the latter route.

As do I. In fact, I empathise with them, because I've been a high profile contributor to discussion/support forums at various points in the past. I've seen firsthand how the culture in each forum makes a huge difference to how motivated you are to continue helping out there.

Unfortunately, while that might explain my original observations about the poor signal/noise ratio and problems with effectively spamming search engines that SO has today, it doesn't make those observations any less accurate.

The only way I see this improving now is if those running the SO network intervene directly, first by encouraging a more constructive approach and being clear with high-ranking contributors on what that involves, and then if necessary by starting to reduce the privileges of those who don't play along regardless of their score in the game and ultimately, if necessary, kicking the bad apples off the system entirely.

I don't think you are missing anything.

I also have never asked anything on SO, and never used SO as a reference. SO only seems to work for factual simple answers that are found in the documentation or manual pages.

For higher level discussion SO is not appropriate; mailing lists and IRC work best for that.

I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random stuff on SO works for them

> I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random stuff on SO works for them

This is probably true.

I'm not a Windows developer and on a recent project I had to use their IDE (which turns out to quite nice, if you are an IDE person) and a set of their APIs. I read, but did not understand, some pretty fundamental/basic MS-authored documentation. I found a few answers to questions related to other people not understanding it either, and was on my way again.

To be fair to MS, it was documented, completely and accurately. I just wasn't accustomed to some of their calling conventions and was getting yelled at by the linker.

EDIT: Outside of embedded systems, where there are a lot fewer moving parts than on your typical MS OS box, it's been a while (20 years?) since I was thrown at an environment where everything changed from what I am accustomed to. OS. Language. CPU architecture target. IDE. IDE configuration for project build. Build process. SDKs. Calling convention. Oh, and the 2M line code-base that I had just been introduced to (and where none of the MS Visual Studio project files had been checked into version control - so I'm fumbling in the dark there). Googling for the error message and landing on SO at least gets you to the point that you know you have a configuration problem vs a calling convention problem. That tells you where you need to start looking in the documentation.

One of the weird things about MS documentation is how slow MSDN is. It's often faster to find the answer through Google->Stackoverflow than it is starting at the top and drilling down MSDN.

Now that you mention it, I've noticed that. The pages seem to load quickly enough, but take a while to appear. I might be some funky client-side JS rendering "stuff". It reminds me of how a lot of material design web-component/apps take forever to change after you "load" or "click" (for example).

I think there is definitely something to what you're saying. Reading API documentation is in itself a skill - when you're starting out, a lot of times you don't even know the right question to ask that would be covered in API documentation.

Instead, you ask the wrong question on SO and end up getting the right answer because you have other humans that are able to interpret it.

As you get better, you begin to understand what the right question is and how to use the actual reference material provided to you.

> I suspect most people don't like reading reference material so asking random stuff on SO works for them

That's a dismissive way of framing it. There's nothing anti-intellectual or lazy about using the tool that will most efficiently retrieve the information you're looking for. If I'm faced with a non-esoteric problem that I don't immediately know the solution for, I'd much rather spend 5 seconds Googling it and being brought to a highly relevant Stack Overflow answer that addresses my specific problem than having to find my way through a poorly-searchable manual.