Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

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> To novices, the long bureaucratic rigmarole associated with asking your first question on Stack Overflow can feel either completely unnecessary, or just plain weird.

I just think of SO as being "read-only." It might as well be Encyclopedia Brittannica for all I know.

I also think of the errors I read in SO as being part of that immutable encyclopedia. The only alternative is to spend time trying to correct an error which led me down this rabbit hole:

1. Realize that the site makes you jump through all kinds of hoops just to respond to a (wrong) answer or comment on a question.

2. Spend a total of 45 minutes researching and emailing two people who already are SO members. Sending them a link to the SO page that has a clearly wrong statement, and politely asking them to add a comment or whatever to make it clear that the statement is wrong.

Ironically, that wrong statement was about one of the old string-handling functions in the C standard library. So while the old usenet might have gotten a cranky response from a C Jedi who knows all the answers, it is prohibitively expensive to even provide the right answer on SO.

Luckily SO has enough correct information on it that treating it like an immutable datastore still has great benefit.

I think, given that SO has become an encylopedia, it needs editors in addition to moderators. My one contribution to stack overflow was a comment on a question about a strange TLS problem, where I explained what was happening, and mentioned it was worked around in the latest OpenSSL and linked to the diff where my workaround had been accepted. Then a few weeks or so later I got a message that I needed to fix my comment because something. I was motivated to fix the problem in openssl, and to respond back to help any other people who run into this, but I'm not motivated enough to fix my comment to follow community rules.

There are editors. Any user with something like 2000 rep can edit any question or answer. I do it all the time. There's even a queue of questions that have been flagged in need of editing.

If you have a high rep you get editor privileges on SO.

SO was great 8 or so years ago. Now it's mostly "you're doing it wrong" answers as the top shit I see when I search on google.

Wading through that nonsense takes longer than finding and implementing a helpful solution. Sad really.

Don't forget about the comments that read, basically, "why haven't you googled this, peon?" usually found in the first hit, often the first several hits, in Google.

What's better than SO?

SO is, if it ever gets around to listening to the recent outcry, and stops doubling down on the narrative they have going, which is something like, "Actually, the problem is you are a n00b, and we haven't communicated our godly ethos in a n00b-friendly way. So we'll solve the problem by explaining ourselves. And have we mentioned that only n00bs have this problem with us?"

I've had more luck with IRC in recent years. It's less crowded so it's more like the early years of SO. There's a billion channels so you can be as broad or specific as you want.

I'm in one channel where it'd be fine to say "I think I want a UI control that's sort of like ..., except more ... -- any suggestions?", and I'm in another channel where anything that isn't about compiler internals is strictly off-topic.

They're both useful channels, and have knowledgeable and helpful people, but both positions are much more extreme than are allowed on SO.

I find personal blogs covering the topic I'm looking for are typically much better.

I've had a similar experience. I've gotten a tremendous amount of help from StackOverflow, so I tried to contribute by answering questions.

It took so much effort that I gave up. I seemed to be caught in a catch-22 where I didn't have enough reputation points to answer.

So I treat it as basically "read-only" now.

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