Stackoverflow is "some random website" | Hacker News Reader

Stackoverflow is "some random website"

marc.info

41 pointstype022 comments

Having 10K+ rep as well on StackOverflow, I thought this way for a time but more earlier on in my use of it. In looking back at the things that were deleted from my account or times I was down voted or things that were edited that I felt were just wrong, those were the ones where I was in a bad mood or not exactly nice or being silly or aloof in my comments etc. This is a similar experience in Hacker News except they don't delete your stuff, they just let it be clobbered unless you get banned. I can't say what is better overall but I would have to say they are both appropriate for their use case as I honestly love them both. IMO, the internet is a better place because of StackOverflow (and Hacker News).

This seems like out-of-context message board drama, with an editorialized title. Why is an openbsd-misc opinion about Stack Overflow at the top of the front page? Are people voting this up because they think it's important that Martin Schroeder called SO "some random website"? Who cares?

Kids these days don't know how to stir trouble by cross posting, so we get this instead.

I've been using the Ask Ubuntu stackexchange since it came out (Top .3% of users there) and have spent countless hours reviewing. In my experience the deletion is one of the best features.

The mail is making an assumption that every thing that is being deleted is valuable, and the fact is that there's a ton of noise, and there's a lot of time being saved _for everyone else_ by deleting crap.

- Most comments don't add anything useful, if a comment is actually useful then it's better to edit and add it to the answer or question, or to remind the poster to do so.

- By the time SE is automatically deleting something it's clearly been abandoned by the community long before.

- I don't need 50 answers explaining what `/etc/hostname` is for or 15 comments with your opinion on systemd.

The problem with SO is simple:

- many of the questions would actually work better on a forum that was explicitly somewhat transient, rather than somewhere that tries to keep the best answers ""forever""

- there is no such forum

- Jeff Atwood wrote Discourse more-or-less as an attempt to build the right kind of forum software for that purpose. But there is still no such forum, or at least not one that SO questions can be moved to.

Why do you think that forum is better than SO? I think that SO does its job pretty well: good questions (or answers) are visible, especially via Google while bad or non-interesting questions are vanished forever. Forum is about discussions. Most of programming questions are not about discussions, but rather simple question-answer style. And discussions are not welcome in SO anyway.

> discussions are not welcome in SO anyway

Yes, so rather than deleting the question unanswered on a few people's subjective opinion that the question is a "discussion", move it to the forum?

(e.g. I ran into this problem https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49302369/gdpr-encrypted-... ; would you say that's a discussion? It got closed until I cheated by mentioning it on HN, resulting in helpful HN readers re-opening it)

Most of the time I read forums, it's because I want to get an overview over the latest discussion on a topic (most recently BBQ grills). Whenever I'm redirected to forums via a search engine, it's mostly "this has been asked before, use the search", rants, and other low quality content.

The incentives in the SO community lead to pretty good quality overall, compared to forums. Answers are regularly updated, even years afterwards. I've never seen that in forums.

It's not really SO's goal to be a perfect and immutable repository and publisher of your personal content. If 90% of your content is finding a permanent home on SO, the optimistic, generous interpretation is that you're producing excellent, useful stuff. The converse one is that they're not deleting enough.

This just sounds like some random people ranting. Most people seem to like SO (it certainly helps me).

Have some random juxtaposition to go with the random WWW site.

* https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=151958046704287

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/413978

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/327361

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/430344

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/299580

* https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/434844

I never knew about deleted content. Is there any place you could buy a stack overflow account with 10k+ reputation?

Why would you want to buy such a thing?

You never know when these accounts come in handy. I'll just buy it up.

Probably if you really want but most of the deleted answers are deleted for a good reason. The only ones I'm glad I can see are the ones that link to a website with a good answer and are deleted because the answer must be on Stackoverflow! Can't have those other websites collecting precious pageranks can we?

Anyway 10k is really not a lot. I only ever answer questions if I have a problem, find the same unanswered question on SO and subsequently solve it, and I have 30k rep.

Also this guy makes it sound like they delete your answers without telling you, which isn't the case at all. SO definitely has problems with rule nazis but it is still the best QA site out there and this guy is an idiot.

I've had my jimmies rustled by what felt like over-zealous deletion of my content on SO. A strict moderator culture seems to have developed there. It may well make sense, to prevent the site bloating up with low-quality content, but it was pretty annoying at the time.

I don't think it's about low quality content. That is the intent of the rules, but the overzealous application is because a) the people that spend most of the time enforcing rules obviously love enforcing rules, and are probably the kind of people you don't want doing it, and b) they tend to zip through the review queue and don't really consider questions fully. Especially with the "too broad" or "not clear what you're asking", often it is just that the reviewer doesn't understand the question because it isn't something they are knowledgeable about.

Despite its flaws it's still the best option.

Wow SO Documentation was, in fact, shut down: https://stackoverflow.com/documentation. I remember reading about it Hacker News not so long ago.

Is there any good alternative though?

slack groups

Depending on the project there are bugtrackers, archived IRCs/mailinglists, wiki (discussion) pages, forums or blogs and blog comments. And there you even have the chance to get information from contributors to the project in question. Other ideas?

That other website you need to be logged in to see the answers. Was it experts exchange? The design stinks.

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