Stackoverflow Sucks
It might surprise you but my favorite blogger is without a doubt, Jeff Atwood, the creator of Stackoverflow.com
Sorry Jeff, you’ve created a monster. Its not all bad, and I will admit its a great technical achievement, but I can’t help being left with the feeling that my overall user experience was a bitter one.
I registered on stackoverflow and asked some programming related questions. Only I didn’t know that Stackoverflow is full of Nazi users who moderate all questions, almost in minutes my questions were getting shutdown as not programming related or not a real question.
Questions like:
“Where is HTTPd.conf located?”
My Logic: This question is programming related because I as a programmer also need to set configuration values for my application to run correctly.
Stackoverflow Nazi Logic: This question is NOT programming related, because configuration is the job of a server adminstrator.
This really annoyed me.
Stackoverflow also has a reward system and rating system, so it gives more abilities to people who “live” on stackoverflow, at the expense of casual users. Members actually get given rank for shutting down questions. You can be sure, some of these users are so obsessed with their rating, they go crawling looking for questions to shutdown to gain rank.
Questions also get voted up quickly before a selection of answers are provided. So this encourages up voting trends. In other words lazy pattern scanners quickly scan and just lazily agree to the last persons up vote.
The terms of use actually encourage users to ask questions that can be concisely answered, rather than opening discussions, unfortunately life is just not that easy, sometimes there really are more than 1 acceptable answer to a question, in this case, you might find your question getting shutdown – because – its “not a real question”.
Jeff, full respect for what you’ve done, unfortunately you have no control over the types of people who use your site, but you should have anticipated how the “Karma” system you’ve implemented will leave people with a bitter taste in their mouths.
An Example:
Stack Overflow SUCKS, it is a real waste of time, I waster two months there only to make their decadent and retarded business to grow. I was suspended by a stupid moderator (Joshua Heyer AKA Shog9) for no real reason, only his inflated ego. All my contributions blocked and part to make that stupid service bigger.
Everybody STAY AWAY FROM THE STACK-EXCHANGE NETWORK.
Alex
December 4, 2011 at 12:21 am
100% agreed!
steve88
January 28, 2012 at 2:19 am
The problem with SO is that there are nazis like Shog9 and George Stocker who are ruining the system. It hasn’t changed. Somehow some users, as soon as they can do harm, start to do so. On SO it’s when they reach enough mod points. Thankfully not all SO users are like this but there are enough retards to give SO a very, very bad rep.
AnonymousDude
February 15, 2012 at 2:33 pm
I agree with you, things haven’t changed. What I have learnt to do is fluff up questions to confuse the Nazi’s.
For example, the other day I was trying to test a VPN. My friend was not able to browse the web when in China.
I asked the question on server fault. Now server fault is the ideal place to discuss technologies like OpenVPN. OpenVPN is pretty technical, my question was too technical to be asked on SuperUser, definitely not a question for SO either, but I knew the people over at ServerFault would be able to help.
I had one small problem though. This experiment of mine was in a private capacity, and that would mean any Nazi would shut it down as “Off topic”.
So I fluffed up the question. Instead of mentioning “My friend” from China, I said “All of Our consultants in China”. I also added some fluff stating we were in the test phase and we are just reviewing OpenVPN as a possible solution.
This is how you combat these Nazis. Learn to ask the questions in such a way they can’t turn around and tell you “It’s offtopic!” or “It’s not programming related”.
I know it’s not ideal, but in the 2 years of using Stack Exchange Sites – the culture has only improved slightly. There are still an army of Toffee Nosed Nazis hovering around every time you ask a question. And sometimes you need an answer and don’t want to get caught up in the semantics of what you’re asking only to end up in a discussion with a Nazi.
MichaelL
February 15, 2012 at 2:41 pm