999 karma · joined July 16, 2012
> I qualitatively analyzed the top 50 clones in that list and was able to identify the source (or at least a source) of the snippets in most of the cases.
[1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/375761/how-to-handl...
Answers are kinda the whole point after all; no shame in writing them...
...often, with slightly different terms used. So there's a very good chance a given search will find one of the duplicates rather than the original. This is an explicit goal: it helps searches; in fact, if you're not logged in and you land on an unanswered duplicate, Stack Overflow will redirect to the original.
As such, the core philosophy (and bulk of the code) behind it is still more or less the same, but how proposals actually behave has changed dramatically.
We've also made significant changes to the lifecycle of sites after they're created, which you can find discussed on Meta Stack Exchange:
- https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/260754/feedback-req...
- http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/283663/its-been-a-ye...
I stopped using Yelp the minute they made their mobile site unusable in a pinch while pulled over on the side of the road. It doesn't matter how good the content is if I don't have the time to jump through their hoops.
In 20 years, you'll be looking back fondly.
Which is still a pretty good trick, at least when it works.
But, I'd guess what you're probably after is something else entirely: a way to have an account, and post answers using that account, but not have those answers associated publicly with that account. This has been requested a few times over the years, but... It's a bit of a troublesome idea:
- Spam / trolling (the kind performed by humans, not bots) often depends on being able to stay just a little bit ahead of the folks who are trying to stop you. Anything that can buy you a few more minutes of activity before being blocked can upset that balance; sure, we could remove anonymity for moderators, but there's a psychological impact here: if you think you can get away with something, you're more likely to try.
- Reputation is tracked on a per-account basis, and most of the accounting there is public: again, this serves multiple purposes, both for the author themselves (they're encouraged to become "invested" in the site by contributing in exchange for privileges) and for the greater community (privileges aren't handed out capriciously, they're earned in ways that can be tracked).
- What about things like edits and comments? Presumably you'd want to be able to respond to comments on your answers, or make edits that correct problems - for "unregistered" answers, that's solved by giving you a temporary account that retains edit rights, comment rights, etc. (at least until you lose the cookie); if you posted anonymously under a normal account, would your edits and comments also be anonymous, or would you show up incongruously as yourself?
- We periodically publish a full set of data on posts, comments, edits, etc. that anyone can use; we'd have to decide whether or not to preserve anonymity in this data, and not just for authorship but also for edits, commentary, etc.
It's a big can of worms, which is why we've so far avoided opening it... But I do see the advantages as well.
Related:
- http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/198/should-there-be-...
- http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/177154/posting-anony...
Disclaimer: I work for Stack Overflow.
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 by the time it was named "Programmers", the decision was already made to refocus the site on something a bit more useful: a site not about programming but rather dedicated to sharing information relevant to the profession of software development. However, actually communicating that effectively turned out to be a headache and a half.
6 years later, we're looking at just renaming the site again so as to avoid this endlessly painful confusion: http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/8204/wha...
That's... A hard problem. On the one hand, it'd be nice if we could just lower the reputation needed to flag things as duplicates... on the other, there's a real risk of abuse there if folks who aren't yet familiar with how things work go around flagging things and annoying askers: there are a lot of new questions that are similar to existing questions, but have subtle differences that a cursory examination may not pick up.
An idea that's been tossed around for a few years is to enable folks to essentially post "this is a duplicate" answers that do nothing but link and summarize another answer... If they get upvoted / accepted, the question is a duplicate; if they get downvoted, it's not. There are some potential pitfalls there too, of course.
In the meantime, my best advice would be to summarize the answers you're linking to, and spend at least a sentence or two explaining how they relate to the question you're answering... Then include a link as your source. Not only does this avoid problems when the question isn't a duplicate, it doesn't make it look like you're just trying to ride the coattails of someone else (which tends to inspire negative reactions in people even when the answer is helpful).
More advice here: http://stackoverflow.com/help/referencing
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.
Reading further in your link, I find:
> Some 300 million children go to bed hungry every day. Of these only eight per cent are victims of famine or other emergency situations. More than 90 per cent are suffering long-term malnourishment and micronutrient deficiency.
The article appears to draw on a 2005 UNICEF report, which suggests this information may be somewhat out of date.
I'll probably keep calling them lag bolts too.
Which is fine; oil is tasty. I'm sure Just Mayo tastes fine.
The misleading marketing (trumpeting health benefits or - like our parent post - less animal cruelty) is fairly ridiculous though.
> it's fine to link to external sources, but the same basic "content should stand on it's own"-guidelines apply (so no link-only examples and the like)
- http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/117558?m=31845619#3...
Which is pretty standard advice on Stack Overflow; we spend an awful lot of time cleaning up broken links that were probably pretty useful at one time, but...
Disclaimer: I work for Stack Overflow and also really hate broken links.
Problem is that most people don't want to maintain these lists. The handful of exceptions stand out precisely because they have a few dedicated maintainers who've dutifully kept them relevant for years... Most of them, though, died from neglect and were eventually deleted out of mercy.
Source: I work for and use Stack Exchange.
IF this manages to accomplish a similar feat without the bulk, it's easily worth the price for those who do a lot of hair drying.
There's no good, universal solution here, short of never connecting to these blights in the first place.