Comment by Shog9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shog9 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com