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Comment by leoedin | Hacker News Reader

I was always under the impression that Stack Overflow was an information-dense bible of programming knowledge. Having recently started attempting to answer some questions on there, I quickly realised that it is in fact, in line with every Q&A website, filled to the brim with idiots with barely any understanding of programming whatsoever.

What they do fantastically well is quickly push the stupid questions out of the way and let the good ones float to the top (on the site and in search rankings).

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We found a fairly highly ranked "ticked" answer to a question yesterday (it was on keeping the heading rows of tables visible during scrolling) and immediately thought: (1) this answer seems stupid, (2) we can think of better solutions. Within thirty minutes we had two superior proof-of-concepts working and had found a decent off-the-shelf solution.

What Stack Overflow is great at is SEO (not sure if this is organic or deliberate or both). This at least tends to pull interested eyeballs in a kind-of similar direction. What happens then is anyone's guess.

1) Highly ranked answers are often horribly wrong. People asking common questions are, presumably, often being pulled to these answers and treating them as gospel.

2) Once an answer gets "ticked" (even when hopelessly wrong) there's very little that can happen to fix it.

3) Stack Overflow is (actively or passively) good at appearing in Google search results, but not at converging like threads; which thread appears in a search is far from stable, so two similar searches can take you to completely different threads.

4) The depth and quality of threads seems highly language-correlated. E.g. the PHP threads I've seen seem to mainly consist of someone posting bad code they've written and having it debugged by someone else. Javascript discussions are of a much higher quality. Obj-C discussions are another level or two beyond that. (Which says something... perhaps about the awfulness of PHP's error messages.)

re #2, that's not entirely true. There have been a good amount of times that another answer gets upvoted way higher than the accepted (ie. "ticked") answer because it's better. In those cases, even the original asker has chosen one, the community has chosen another ... so it's often worth scrolling to see the other answers that have been given.

That being said, I agree with everything else you've said :)

Yes it's true that better answers can rise above garbage, but it's an uphill battle.

In my experience, when I need information, I google with some keywords, and then land on a Stack Overflow page where my question has already been asked and answered. Thus I almost never see the questions and answers by the idiots.

Sometimes I ask questions, and usually receive good answers, but it may take a day or two.

It is both!

In search results it is an information-dense bible of programming knowledge.

If you click on the feed of newly asked questions, it is filled to the brim with idiots with barely any understanding of programming whatsoever.

The magic of their voting system and google's search algorithms converts the latter into the former.

> The magic of their voting system and google's search algorithms converts the latter into the former.

In addition to that, there's a lot of peer review going on. First posts, late answers, low quality posts, suggested edits, and so on are all reviewed by the community. Once you start reviewing, you'll quickly notice lots of shoddy content.

> you'll quickly notice lots of shoddy content

Some programming language and software product vendors encourage quantity rather than quality in questions posted to Stack Overflow because various popularity rankings use the number of Stack Overflow questions as one criteria when calculating rank.

I think the main factor is that SO is very aggressive in closing "bad" questions.

You are always going to have people of different skill levels, including those you call idiots. Now if it's a basic question it will likely get answered but if it's incoherent rambling then there isn't much the community can do. Except maybe teach people to ask better questions.

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