On the contrary, as a C# developer I find tons of useful information there especially in advanced issues. And the discussion is also useful because they present solutions from different angles. Perhaps SO is better suited for those on the Desktop frontier rather than mobile or web development.
Weird. In the past two years or so, I've answered almost every one of my own answers after an additional day or two of work. Generally, when I think I've exhausted all leads on solving a problem I'll distill everything down into the smallest reproducible setup, do a detailed write-up, and list all what I've done. At best I might get a token up-vote from someone who pities me, but I never get any real attention. There are easier picking out there, after all.
I used to be pretty active on SO and Programmers.SE as a young buck, and back when SO was still pretty new and shiny. Nowadays it just feels like a race to the bottom as someone trying to answer a question. The winning strategy is to post a shitty, incomplete answer and get the upvotes and while that is happening, update to a better, clearer answer, oftentimes poaching content from the guy or gal who took the time to do a detailed, "good" answer. I get the notion of consolidating the answers into that one perfect answer, but working on a good answer and having it poached by the highest voted answer will leave a bad taste in most folks' mouths.
In the case of Programmers.SE, there was a shift in the site topic and, in my opinion, some rather overzealous moderators along with the handful of folks who just seem to sit on the site and close-vote any and everything that does not perfectly align. Always be wary of those that seek power over their fellow man...
StackOverflow and the surrounding sites are a good force overall, don't get me wrong, but as someone who tried to be active and use the site, it leaves a lot to be desired. I'm not interested in answering "How do I do X in jQuery" and I'm not interested in having someone plagiarize me.
SO should be modified to provide both a correct answer and a low latency answer, they aren't necessarily the same thing, nor should award points in a winner-take-all manner. The person who puts in a day should get rewarded, the person who edits for grammar and clarity should get rewarded. In effect, it is a group of people solving a problem where only one gets a payout. That is what is broken.
The easy, popular questions have been answered.
You're left formulating and answering long-tail questions. These understandably get less traffic and so less upvotes. People don't go around browsing SO and upvoting high quality answers. They solve their own problems and upvote/edit/comment along the way. And that's fine.
This leaves me wondering how you might a site like SO that incentivizes participation and quality answers, but disincentivizes poaching and incomplete first answers.
Could you build an incentive strategy and reputation system around collaborative answers?
One option is to either not show scores for some time after answers are posted (at least to other viewers - maybe the asker could still see answer scores?), and/or to randomize the order in which answers are shown for some period of time. That would at least make it less likely that people read just the first answer, up-vote it, and move on. Each person would see a different "first" answer, at least for some time period. Maybe after an hour or 24 hours, then they become ranked by votes? Just a thought - I haven't actually tried it.
What if incomplete first answers could be "merged" with better, more complete, answers, with the better answer getting the karma from the incomplete one?
Well, it's gamified for a reason. Sure, I'll hang out on IRC and help folks, respond to questions on YouTube video tutorials I've posted, etc. I'm certainly altruistic to a point, but throw a number in front of me and it becomes a competition. Combine that with the fact that folks get to "win" against me by posting a shit answer and stealing my work, and I'm just not gonna play that kind of game. I'm not gonna learn anything posting intro to Java answers, now am I?
> That's true, if you care about the points, badges, etc.
Jeff Atwood has discussed this subject fairly extensively, and it does matter to a lot of people, which helps make SO more successful than it would otherwise be.
The moderators feel any question that can have discussion should be closed. They just want one right answer, anything with multiple is bad by their definitions.
So if you are getting discussion, you are actually just experiencing the common case of getting your needs addressed before the terrible moderation kicks in and closes good content.
This is also incorrect. There can be multiple answers, there just should not be dozens, or hundreds. The dozen case is where you start to see that the question isn't a question, but a discussion.
But sometimes that is also exactly what a programmer looking for information needs.
It happens quite often that I look up something that I already have (or could write) correct working code for. It's when I notice that there's more than one way to write that code, and I want to do it the "right" way the first time, so the decision doesn't come back later and bite me, when I go out looking for what is considered "best practices" in such a situation.
Usually there's more than a few "correct" answers to what is considered the best practice, and the choice depends on the context of your problem. That is when the discussion is invaluable, without it I cannot determine which of the choices apply to my problem.
But of course it's your fair right to say "well okay, but SO is not intended for that".
The moderators feel any question that can have discussion should be closed. They just want one right answer, anything with multiple is bad by their definitions.
That's not very smart. Sometimes, even a technical problem's context can be complicated enough to merit several different "good" answers, depending on other factors.
Maybe someone should formulate a law -- over time, any site's moderation starts to suck. There are factors involved with this, such as depletion of low-hanging fruit, popularity drawing more attention from spammers, and increasing workload of moderators.
That's surprising and disappointing - a lot of my value derived from these postings is from the discussions and the alternate answers / differing viewpoints.
Also confusing from the point of view of the site operators - aren't they missing a lot of site interaction and pageviews and additional free content, etc. ?
It's especially frustrating with questions about browser quirks or incompatibility, as these change from year to year. More than a few times I've searched Google for some obscure JavaScript thing and gotten a stale Stack Overflow answer with completely misleading info.
Perhaps for C# that is the case, but there are a lot of good questions for other desktop languages that are being deleted or removed because they're 'duplicate questions', even though the so-called 'duplicates' were asking completely different things.
I hate to be contrarian, but I have not experienced much of the negatives people are complaining about here. StackOverflow has been a fantastic resource in my programming career.
SO started out with a big C# community because the people that built it were C# developers. And perhaps the C# community didn't really have a very good place to go to before.
