It seems like a good place to put stuff that isn't a question.
[1] http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/303865/warlords-of-d...
One of my personal favorites lately has been bropages [2] - it's a crowdsourced set of usage examples for Unix command-line tools. Instead of wading through fifty pages of obtuse manpages or googling for usage, you just use "bro [command]" and you get some working examples.
$ howdoi turn dictionary into json python
>>> json.dumps(your_data, ensure_ascii=False)
Just allowing documentation right on SO is way better.
Any solution has to have the support of the long-term, high-rep community, but the long-term, high-rep community creates the problem - by sticking around so long, they accumulate influence even as their incentives changed. You can see why meta might have a lot of people who don't think there's a problem at all.
The senior-friendly design of SO ignores the fact that the graveyards are full of indispensible people. One huge change would simply be to age out the users who have been around the longest, or have the highest rep. The newest can (and should) be taught by the slightly-more-experienced who aren't yet jaded by the repetition.
Google: Take this link to Stack Overflow
* This discussion is closed, the moderator left the following message: 400 Bad Request. This is not the correct SO for this type of question.
Mention something that could be improved and you'll see what I mean.
Kudos to the team over at SO to continue to iterate the business.
I do wish they'd add an "out of date" button to flag questions/answers that are no longer relevant or just plain wrong. I think the amount of cruft they're going to deal with in the next 10 years is going to be HUGE.
I probably would have found much more use for it in my first year or so as a programmer, but at least from my own experience, once I had familiarity with my tools and libraries, the kind of problems that require digging on the internet aren't the kind easily put into bite-sized Q&A.
Maybe it's different for people who did start with SO available; perhaps they're saving their cognitive load by outsourcing various snippets of information to SO, and I only internalised them because SO wasn't available.
That said, it IS good for more open-ended historical or state-of-the-art type questions; "why did language X adopt this paradigm?" or "how do people producing commercial software go about supporting multiple graphics hardware today?" kind of questions. If I get lucky, there are a handful of people with a real depth of knowledge who can give a valuable overview and insight, but those are a long way from the typical SO question.
SO also lets me get by in frameworks and languages without having to know them all super deep. I find it much more useful to spend my cognitive load on algorithmic level or higher architectural level items instead of Spring configuration values or random iOS .plist keys.
True, but I think it would be helpful for two reasons:
a. Someone looking for an answer might not realize it is out of date.
b. It would help surface questions that do need updating. You statement presupposes someone actually finds the out of date info. A button would help SO bring all those items to a single location.
I occasionally get and click on a Google result for the photography stack exchange, but I've rarely clicked on any results for the other Exchange sites for my non-technical searches.
It's a bit sparse for existing Q&A, but so far people have been good about responding to my questions.
After many years of dealing with the hostility of SO, I feel that the effort to dig a bit in blogs, forums or mailing lists is less than the effort you have to do with dealing with SO's redirect loop: Off-topic question, Wrong stack overflow site, Duplicate question, Screw you because I got the reputation, etc.
That redirect loop usually ends up in an old question because some short sighted moderator couldn't tell the difference between the question 5 years in the past, than the question today.
I have a kind of love hate relationship with SO.
I love that I get answers. I hate that I spend so much time writing answers and then see SO make bank from my work.
I've probably spent over 1000 hours writing answers on SO. Most of that time is spent writing working samples for answers. In fact http://webglfundamentals.org was started because of answers I wrote on SO where it they seemed too long for SO.
But, now there's this feeling of conflict where for every answer I have on webglfundamentals.org I really just want to paste a link to the article there on SO when it's relevent. But, SO frowns on that. So, I have to basically give SO all my content and work for free [or ignore it]. I supposedly get some kind of benefit from their gamification rep which I can show on my resume or something but conversely it feels like a treadmill that I must keep running on or lose my rep. It's become an unpaid responsibility.
To be clear it's not just webglfundamentals.org. It's any tech blog post period. I feel like an SO gets more popular they just suck up all content. Why write anything tech on my blog when 99% of the people looking for an answer will go to SO first? So it's become a negative influence for me in a way. Because no one is going to look anywhere but SO I feel less compelled to write tech articles.
Sorry for the rant. Maybe there's a solution? Maybe I've just got a bad POV. Like I said I certainly appreciate the other answers. Random brainfart, maybe like Youtube they should pay contributors? Yea, that will never work but something just feels wrong to me at moment. Also it isn't about the money really. I can't really put my finger on it.
It's a particular concern given they are exploring a "Documentation" site designed for such long form answers and presumably there will be more answers on the main page of the form "see this example of this Documentation page" and it will be interesting to see if some of the Rep systems and moderation policies adjust with that. On the flipside the Documentation site as proposed still encourages people to (re)create content that could exist elsewhere for Rep points and maybe to the detriment of useful community sites or existing documentation sites. Some of that will be wait and see as they move forward into the project, of course.
Finally, in a slightly different direction, as a somewhat unsuccessful game designer in a past life, I spent a lot of time thinking about point systems and incentive systems, and it's hard not to evaluate Stack Overflow's Rep through some of those filters. From those respects, Stack Overflow Rep is not bad, but sometimes concerning, largely in part from a reactionary position on myself that the "gamification" of the world is largely a bad thing, incentivizing in people sometimes the worst OCD tendencies and disincentivizing thoughtfulness or creativity. Stack Overflow Rep is definitely OCD incentivizing.
I had interviewers ask me about my Stack Overflow Rep, and for one thing its not hard to find, and for second thing many of my points are actually elsewhere in the Exchange network, which can be fun to explain. But it's also easy for me to worry what in fact they are really asking about if they are interested in such an arbitrary metric, as well known and "extensive" as it may be... (Particularly in a world of employers that forbid social media participation entirely, which would include things like Stack Overflow.)
The organization of the company around developers as core users makes sense. Not sure if a name change is supposed to do much for the average developer in caring about their product offerings more or less.
I'm not sure whose is the better approach. I think the name change has a bigger impact on Alphabet (the shareholder shuffle, trying to get greater focus on "side projects" outside of the Google core search products) than it will on Stack Overflow. Certainly Stack Overflow doesn't seem to be doing it for outside shareholders, it seems like they are simply doing it to help coalesce their own corporate identity and how they talk about it amongst themselves. It might not directly impact the average developer in caring about their product offerings, but maybe it will help lead communications internally for them in making those product offerings better and selling those product offerings to themselves as important/core to their future. I certainly wish them luck in that case that the name change will indeed benefit their cultural stability and future.
Despite this trick, I don't remember finding any solution to my issues on this website.
Source: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/3863/how-does-...
You could even ask questions like 'Do you know a useful library for this problem' without having it closed.
EDIT: After reading the article more properly I see it's about company name, not website name. Still, not deleting my comment as it exemplifies the confusion the naming gave
