[jacquesm]

StackOverflow took the place of news/dejanews for me. It's a first place to stop whenever I have trouble with just about any piece of software or writing software, usually the answer is right there on the first place in a fairly easy to digest form. Along with wikipedia and the Khan academy it is a fantastic resource.

Amazing it is only 5 years old, it feels like it has been around forever, I recall coming across it for the first time while still in Canada and thinking 'this is neat'. I never contributed which is really a miss on my part but I try to keep the number of accounts that I have to an absolute minimum and stackoverflow is plenty useful as it is today. I really should do some community service there one of these days, it is only fair.

Hard to imagine that even google could not rescue usenet (or rather, dejanews) from the spam and the trolls.

[bluedino]

>> I never contributed which is really a miss on my part

I love StackOverflow. However, I think the worst part of Stack Overflow is how hard it is to contribute as a new member. You need to build up reputation points and they can be very hard to get. Questions get 'sniped', answers get deleted or buried, and very often when you help another new user out, they never return to the site to accept your answer. It's very frustrating to take the time to answer a question and not receive any feedback.

[eterm]

The best way "in" as a newcomer is to have some knowledge that no one else has. In my case my first good answer (although it took months to get any rep at all) was an obscure bit of paypal sandbox knowledge. I actually came across the knowledge first, and since the problem I had hadn't been solved via StackOverflow I searched SO for the same problem I had been having and updated the old question with my new found solution.

That has since earned me 50 rep. This along with a few other bits took me to the 200 threshold which then gives 100 rep across all stackexchange sites. (Enough to upvote/comment.)

But the fact that "newbies" can't contribute what in all honestly is largely going to be misinformation or "me too" answers is also part of the genius, it gives real answers breathing room and keeps spam out.

My question asking has been less successful. I've asked 2 questions, one of which had no response whatsoever, and the other had an answer which answered the question in the community's mind but because I had been slack with my terminology didn't answer the issue I was really having.

[_JamesA_]

Rep on SO is unpredictable.

For example I randomly answered a question outside of my primary domain because it was a relatively easy issue that I had encountered myself. I have since earned close to 2,000 rep from that simple answer alone and get 20-50 points a week from it despite it being over 2 years old.

On the other hand answers that I spent way too much time researching have hardly attracted any points at all.

[obituary_latte]

Same experience here. Quick, one or two line answers to simple, common questions seem to do the best.

Although, those questions that I've poured the most time into and really tried to answer thoroughly are my favorites. Especially if it's something I had to do a bunch of research and/or testing to confirm. The lack of feedback is supplanted by the quenching of the thirst to learn something new. In fact, this quenching is my favorite part of the SE sites.

[fusiongyro]

Definitely. Most of my rep is from Prolog answers. I can spend an hour on a lengthy, detailed answer, and the best I can hope for is <4 votes and (maybe) an acceptance. Average return on an answer is probably 20 rep. OTOH, if I squeak a Haskell answer in, average is more like 50-100 rep because there's simply a lot more eyes on Haskell answers. At the same time, this means while there's a good hour or two window between a Prolog question being asked, it's more like 2 minutes for a Haskell question. The community is just really good like that. So there's a limiting factor problem there. Competition for MySQL and Postgres answers is also really high so you have to be really fast with your answering, but all my "greatest hits" were in Postgres.

Question-askers benefit the most from this competitiveness, but without a niche it would be really hard to break in. For a little while it seemed like people were starting to treat S.O. activity as a test of your virtue or capabilities as a programmer. Today it seems absurd to judge someone for not having an account. It's just too hard to get started.

[zerr]

Interesting, you talk about the competition, breaking in, monitoring unanswered questions so you can answer first, etc... - What's the motivation behind it?

I guess it is not just contributing to the common knowledge, but maybe to show off your profile to potential employers or similar?

[fusiongyro]

For me, I just like being helpful. The rep is nice too. Stupid internet points are pretty motivational, but I also review edits, and you don't get any rep for that. I would be flattered if an employer had noticed me on there, but I don't think it's likely to happen. I've been active on SO for longer than I've been active here, but I have gotten many friendly recruitment emails from here and none from there.

Prolog is an extremely small niche. Most of the questions are pretty basic and from students. I don't like seeing students being told odd things about Prolog, with a dismissive air of "Prolog makes no sense, you just have to feed it this nonsense to make it go." So another part of my motivation is to keep this sad religion alive and inviting. Haskell has a much larger community of people working very hard to make it inviting.

The hiring angle probably works better for other niches. Every Java EE question is answered by BalusC. I imagine that pays dividends for his consulting: he's the most helpful guy in that area and I'd hire him in a second if I were in charge of that kind of thing.

[tiedemann]

My last two job offers came from people who had checked out my SO answers among other things.

[praptak]

> it's more like 2 minutes for a Haskell question

My experience: it is still possible to come in an hour and beat the quick answers, although I agree with the other comments about the rep being somewhat unpredictable.

[andrewcooke]

it's got harder for everyone. i'm over 10k and mine isn't going up quickly any more. there are fewer interesting questions (partly because many have been asked, but also because the sites have fragmented and the policing is more strict) and more competition answering.

i'm less sure, but i think answers are getting worse too. it feels like the smarter people have disappeared.

[mcv]

I don't get much rep for answers. I get it for asking the right questions. My rep still isn't fantastic (a few hundred), but it's good enough to give a bounty when I need it.

[tracker1]

If you are looking for something, and find older questions, try creating an updated answer for something, or even re-visiting your old answers. A lot of time an answer can change over time, new frameworks/tools etc... about half of my points come from the graveyard.

[nine_k]

Try giving more general, more in-depth answers. Such answers, if correct, get dug up by search and keep bringing upvotes months, or even years, after having been written.

[mcv]

I don't get much rep for answers because usually someone else has already given a better answer than I'm able to give. I'm just saying you don't actually have to know anything to get rep. You can get it for asking good questions too. (But first search to check if someone else has already asked the same thing.)

[joe_the_user]

I worked my reputation up to nearly 2000 at the start and then gradually fell off with considerable disgust.

Part of it is that it seems that within a year, the good questions were pretty much answered. It's notable that in the first year, especially the first six months, the site was carefully curated and had a friendly feel to it.

In the present SO, answering questions has become a matter of getting your low-quality answer to a low-quality question out extremely quickly or having some pretty obscure technical knowledge (even then, you're going to get karma only for obscure knowledge, not for a quality answer). And, yeah, I suppose you game things by creating a question similar to an existing high karma question (and this stuff also lowers average site quality too since the best answers kind of hide within ten similar questions).

Further, SO ironically turns out to be much useful when you Google than when you ask your own questions - questions beyond a given difficulty go wanting even if you give a high Karma reward. It seems the smart answers just skim for simplistic questions rather than spending time on any hard questions.

It seems like SO is now just kind of a low-quality-question fest because they've got a troove of good answers from their first year of existence.

I mean, one can claim hn has declined but any decline in hn is a thousand times less than the way StackOverflow has tanked as a site (but it's still great for googling all the good answers from yesteryear. When you're doing that, take note of the answer's dates, btw, I believe that it revealing).

[chx]

I disagree. I have 5K rep, I am not quite a newbie myself so I rarely ask. But just this month I have been under a lot of pressure with a site launch so I did put in a few questions. When I've asked a tricky MySQL question someone came in like ten minutes, produced a working answer, soon edited to add a fiddle. The dude is programming almost longer than I am alive! I asked a regexp question -- someone with over 50k answered that. Where else would you find free advice like that? SO is amazing.

[Kluny]

I made this site: www.rocketships.ca/fixmybug due to that very frustration. It doesn't in anyway replace SO, it's intended to help us help each other solve minor syntax errors and misunderstandings... the sort of thing that gets you banned from Stack Overflow. It's pretty quiet now though as I never got around to drumming up users.

[jgoldsmith]

Just a heads up for anyone tempted to run the code from the third question (bash script to play triforce through the system speaker), don't.

I know I'm an idiot for running random code, but I'll save you the suspense - it prints "rm -fr" but doesn't run it, and then prints a message berating you for running it, and insults the Q&A site.

[Kluny]

Baha, that's hilarious.

[smsm42]

Well, that's because a lot of people use SO as either "do my homework for me" or "I'm too lazy to RTFM, please read it for me" kind of site. But under the pile of this manure, real content is still there, real people with knowledge still answer real questions. But I admit it has become harder to contribute - even in areas that I have considerable knowledge, most questions aren't either interesting or worth the time, and those that are I'd be missing since I can't keep up with the inflow of low-value questions. I wonder if SO has any ideas how to fix it...

[joe_the_user]

But under the pile of this manure, real content is still there, real people with knowledge still answer real questions.

No, not really, not in a density that makes it worth it from anyone. I mean I looked hard at several points for question answerers as well as attempting to be one. You yourself admit the place broken by the end of your post.

The obvious thing is that good answers that involve effort on the part of the answerer generally don't get you anything like the appropriate Karma.

Even more, SO actually reduced the amount of Karma you could get by asking questions so there's nothing to distinguish good questions from crap questions.

[smsm42]

I don't see it as black and white. I still use it and even answer things from time to time. But I recognize there's a problem.

[JeremyBanks]

The purpose of Stack Overflow is not to serve the people who ask the questions, that's just a happy side-effect. The purpose is to create a resource to serve future Googlers.

There are less broadly-interesting new questions in areas of established technology, but that's fine: there's less need for new questions in areas that the site already serves well. Stack Overflow is not having any trouble getting good questions about new technology as it becomes out.

[ryanSrich]

A quick and dirty way to get karma is by taking an already existing answer to a similar question and just tweak for the new question.

[lrobb]

StackOverflow solved a lot of usenet's problems, while creating an entirely new set of problems.

[ufmace]

That's the kind of annoying part about trying to answer questions. Anything requiring a relatively modest amount of knowledge gets answered in seconds. Try to type up something good and comprehensive with links to documentation and all, and there will probably be 4 other answers by the time you're done. And a lot of the moderately challenging or obscure things have been asked and answered already.

Meanwhile, if you actually manage to answer or document some tricky, obscure thing, then often it never gets enough traffic to earn much reputation. Mine is still pretty low, but my highest-rep answer is a one-liner, telling somebody that Mercurial can't track files outside of the repository root directory structure. Meanwhile, an actual challenging, obscure answer, like the one on running ASP.NET with C++ dlls (hint: avoid if at all possible) gets very little.

Asking good questions helps too, but I usually find it faster to look it up or figure it out myself than to format a decent question and wait for responses.

[woah]

Well this is a feature if you are looking at SO as a place to get answers. There are far more people looking for answers (by asking OR searching) to the basic simple questions.

So if you leave a good answer on something basic and simple, you have provided utility to far more people than if you are leaving a detailed answer to an obscure question.

This, incidentally, is what's lacking in the IRC channels of open source projects. In an IRC channel, questions that are not hard enough get ignored because they are not interesting to the experts in the channel.

So the IRC channel is good if you are hacking on the core, while SO is good if you are just trying to get something done, and the technology in question is a small part of your entire stack.

[Shog9]

Patience in online discussions is probably the most valuable (and definitely the most unexpected) thing I've gained from spending time on SO.

Coming from a more traditional forum, I originally expected questions that had a highly-upvoted or "marked" answer to essentially be over and done with - the majority of people will already have read the thread, so relatively few new votes will come in...

...But after five years, I've had ample opportunity to realize this is a flawed way to look at threads - questions - when the vast majority of readers come in via Google in the months and years following its asking.

Being quick on the draw can be fun, but being useful is what nets you the most attention long-term. Folks with real problems tend to keep reading until an answer actually solves them. And the race is not always to the swift...

[siegecraft]

This is why, despite using the site since the beginning, I don't have an account. The effort required to get enough rep to do anything useful on the site is simply not worth it, and it remains just as useful to me as an anonymous lurker. The few times I have actually tried to build rep have been an exercise in frustration.

[nine_k]

If you have no time or incentive to share your knowledge (which is totally OK), maybe staying anonymous is just the right strategy.

Still, to ask a question you have to have only 1 rep point. A really good question or two can get you 100-200 rep in just a few hours. Try it if when you have a good question at hand.

[cranefly]

If it's a c# question maybe. Not many votes in vb.

[nine_k]

One of very simple answers, one that I gave 2.5 years ago, just can't stop bringing an occasional upvote: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5762327/

This is definitely not rocket science, it's just 5-6 minutes honestly spent to research and write down the answer.

Usually longer and more thoughtful answers get a constant barrage of upvotes, though.

[hrasyid]

why would you "try to build rep"?

[siegecraft]

Just to be able to do the normal things you would expect to be able to do: vote down/up, flag things, edit a wiki. That's right, I couldn't even make it to 10 rep...

[pramodliv1]

StackOverflow is intensely competitive when it comes to answering new questions on your favorite tags.

So you could just post answers to problems you debugged on your own and then search SO for a similar question and add your answer. Over a period of time, you'd be surprised when your answers gain votes organically.

[joshdance]

Getting started as a new member is hard. Getting started as a new programmer is even harder. You have to ask questions carefully, and search for a previous answer like mad. It has taken my a year and I still feel like I am just barely a member.

[sampo]

I have mostly build my reputation (but it's only in three digits) by asking questions that were meaningful to my problems at hand. And sometimes answering my own questions later.

[dysoco]

I agree, the community is somewhat elitist, I got banned from asking about two years ago (Because of low reputation, I was much more "noob") and I'm still waiting...

[Shog9]

Contact the team: http://stackoverflow.com/contact

We'll get you sorted out.

[brandall10]

Wholeheartedly agree about the "feels like it has been around forever", which to me is the mark of a product which has changed the game. I simply can't recall what life was like before it. Conservatively speaking, I'm probably a good 2-3x as productive as I was pre SO.

[drbawb]

The only Q&A I can recall before StackOverflow was finding answers on a message board _or_ finding the answers hidden behind a pay-wall. (e.g: ExpertsExchange, which I believe has been around since the 90s.)

StackOverflow was definitely a game-changer.

[ccozan]

the EE answers were never really behind a paywall, simply they were so hidden at the bottom of the page that a normal user did had the idea to scroll fully. After all, they needed to present the information to the google bot.

[Shog9]

Did you ever try passing one of those links to a colleague? They were doing some referrer-checking at one point - if you weren't coming from Google, you didn't get the answer.

[JTon]

Oh really, I had no idea they were doing this. Any idea why?

[sp332]

They did that for a while, but Google implemented a policy that what gets shown to the Googlebot has to be the same as what a user would actually see. EE got delisted from Google for violating that policy, and ever since then, they have the answer way at the bottom of the page no matter what.

[rmc]

Why did they do that? To make the site less useful unless you'd paid up. i.e. "to encourage you to pay".

[Hovertruck]

Because Google wouldn't list them unless clicking the link revealed the answer, I believe.

[sergiotapia]

I used to visit DreamInCode.net for my question/answer needs.

[siegecraft]

Yes, usually the answer is right there on the first page and it says "Closed as not relevant" (but fortunately it's usually been answered with a helpful answer anyway).

[jacquesm]

That's a good point. I never really got the 'not relevant' bit. After all, if a question was worth asking it was worth answering (there is no such thing as a stupid question or an irrelevant one, there are stupid answers though. The closest thing to an irrelevant question (or a stupid one) is a question that wasn't asked...).

SO would not suffer unduly from letting these not relevant questions be asked and answered anyway. Relevant Questions are like beauty, they are in the eye of the beholder.

[Permit]

>there is no such thing as a stupid question or an irrelevant one

I think that's where they disagree with you. Stack Overflow aims to keep discussions as minimal as possible and is not the place to weigh the pros and cons of programming language X against that of programming language Y. If you want more information, they cover their take on the issue in great depth on their podcasts (which are great to listen to, regardless).

I like what they've done. By closing all bad questions and a few good questions the site contains only good questions. The obvious downside is that the occasional interesting question is removed, but I think the trade-offs are worth it. And judging by the popularity of the site, I think most everyone else does too, even if they're not consciously aware of it.

[6cxs2hd6]

I once had a question moved from StackOverflow to Programmers. I agreed with the rationale: The question fit Programmers.

But then it got closed on Programmers. O_o

Fortunately that's been the exception not the rule, for me.

[fusiongyro]

SO would suffer, because the kind of question you're talking about is intrinsically debatable. Those questions aren't bad or wrong, but they are inappropriate for the medium of SO, which is about technical questions with concrete answers. SO is not the be-all, end-all of knowledge, but it is pretty close to perfect for technical questions with right answers, and I think it would suffer greatly if it developed an HN or reddit-like clubhouse atmosphere.

[dionidium]

"SO would suffer, because the kind of question you're talking about is intrinsically debatable."

That's certainly a claim and it's a claim that the SO folks also make, but I still haven't seen a single piece of evidence that it's true.

[fusiongyro]

If it isn't obvious to you I doubt anybody will be able to "prove" it to your satisfaction. Besides, you can't create rules around impossible conditions like "close any question which will lead to endless debate" so instead you create rules around easily detected conditions like "close any question that isn't concrete."

I don't greatly love SO (though I like it more than I used to) but there are lots of alternatives that lack SO's irksome limitations (slant.co comes to mind). By now it is obvious that whether you like SO's formula or not, it clearly works.

[nine_k]

A "not relevant" question is usually not a "bad" question, but just a question that can't have a good, definitive answer. SO are trying to be a site hosting such answers, not discussions.

So opinion-based questions are explicitly unwelcome on SO. They can collect lots of worthy information in comments, so such questions are usually closed but not deleted.

SO even tried to channel the discussions by developing discourse.org so that interested parties can get a them a discussion forum and continue there :)

[jsmeaton]

It was Jeff Atwood (and friends), not SE, that developed discourse. One of the reasons he headed in that direction was because of the discussions that weren't appropriate for SE sites - but it wasn't SE trying to fill the discussion need.

[nine_k]

Yes: it was owners' efforty, not a community effort.

[lukev]

Google obviously didn't even try; Even I could write a bayesian filter to eliminate 90% of the spam that shows up in their web interface, but apparently they didn't bother.

[annnnd]

Interesting. I have an opposite view - for me it was easier to find answers before SO. One good example is when you need to get a library recommendation (which is quite a useful thing for a programmer). "SO is Q&A site and doesn't do library recommendations" (literal quote from someone who has closed such a question). The problem is that most of the programmers nowadays hang on SO, so other sites (where such questions would be allowed) have much less audience than they did pre-SO. Sure, I can disguise the question and hope that I will get library recommendations nevertheless, but that's an (ugly) hack.

There are countless other examples where well-researched, popular and in some way contributing questions were shot down because they are unfit for SO.

And as others have pointed out, most karma comes from answers to popular questions, which rewards generic questions which probably have tons of similar answers across the Internet. Domain specific answers however are less awarding.

I cope with that in my way. I ask the questions and treat fairly all who answer / comment, but I hold myself back when I see a question I know the answer to. Why would I answer and help SO? I really hope some alternative arises so I can share my knowledge there, but until then I will just try to survive with SO. And what "if all did that"? Well, I guess the alternative would come much sooner. I wouldn't be unhappy about it, far from it.

[roel_v]

"SO is Q&A site and doesn't do library recommendations" (literal quote from someone who has closed such a question)"

Yeah SO is going the way of Wikipedia wrt rule nazi, trigger happy editors, it's very frustrating. Especially since many of those 'editors' have gotten much of their brownie points from farming them through answering 'soft' questions with popular answers, asking beginner-level but popular questions etc. When you look at the profiles of those voting for closing in cases like the one you cite, you very often see that their domain knowledge is very limited.

I've been sort of active on the site since the very beginning which has led me to have a few thousand points there. To my big frustration, a large part of them come from two answers: one in which I recommended the K&R for learning C, and another how to use the @ operator in PHP to suppress warning messages. I'm a bit disheartened every time I get yet another vote for those answers.

Anyway, what I was going to say was that I get the impression that when I ask or answer a question from that account (with several thousand points and active for 5 years), I'm treated differently than people on new accounts with few points, even when their question is worded exactly the same way I'd do it. It feels like bullying by low-quality users who through grinding stumbled upon editing powers. It certainly (mostly) stopped me from contributing a year or 2 ago; not even so much for the morality of it, but more the overall idea that a site run by the distinctly mediocre (even if there are a few very high quality contributors) just doesn't give me great confidence in the quality of what is on there.

Of course this is a widely documented phenomenon with any UGC (hey there's a buzzword we haven't heard since 2009!) site after it hits a certain critical mass, we just have to look at the very site we're reading now...

[annnnd]

Nice to know I am not the only one - I have a similar answer that brings me enough points I can see my reputation safely (and undeservedly) rising.

However my biggest problem with SO is actually that it is narrow in scope, but due to its success other (broader reaching) sites don't have enough users. I still hope they will change their policies to allow broader (still well-researched) questions, but I am not holding my breath.

[lifeformed]

> Amazing it is only 5 years old, it feels like it has been around forever

Indeed, it seems like every programming question I input on Google gives me a (helpful) StackOverflow post. It and Wikipedia are probably my top two most common results on Google.

[mcv]

Yeah, usenet used to be the place where you could get any question answered (though often accompanied by a flamewar). I think I may have actually stopped using usenet around the time I started using Stackoverflow.

(Really only 5 years? Unbelievable.)

[mathattack]

I find it to be an enormous productivity help too. Almost always it's the best hit from Google on any programming problem that I have.

The one thing I've noticed is I've switched from being a contributor to a consumer of information. I'm not sure if it's selfishness, or just that the easy questions have all been answered. I wonder if this is part of any larger trend.

[edraferi]

Perhaps there's a way to measure the maturity of software by looking at the age and upvote distributions for its posts on StackOverflow. The common questions get answered well and stick around for quite a while, usually helped along by edits. New projects with "easy questions" yet to be asked should have a decent new question velocity without any mega-answers.

[Kiro]

I'm surprised you compare Khan Academy with Wikipedia and SO. What's so good about it and what do you use it for?

[polaris9000]

It (StackOverflow) is still one of the places for me to get valuable information as well. I find Hackernews to be valuable in terms of news articles but StackOverflow in terms of finding out information that I need then and there (When troubleshooting servers, etc).

Why didn't usenet take off on the Internet? I was wondering the same thing.