On 25 February 2018 at 12:48, Ingo Schwarze <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Martin, > > Martin Schroeder wrote on Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 08:00:34PM +0100: >> 2018-02-25 18:29 GMT+01:00 Ingo Schwarze <[email protected]>: > >>> And no, i'm not going to create an account on some >>> random site just for such a petty thing. > >> Stackoverflow is "some random website". :-) > > You can say that again, I'm dead serious. > > I have literally spent years working on documentation, and i shall > be giving my seventh presentation on that topic during an international > BSD conference at BSDCan in Ottawa, June 8 or 9 this year, so i > kind of know what i'm talking about. > > Stackoverflow is definitely not among the things you should consider > or look at when you want to understand how stuff works, when you > are trying to solve a problem, or when you want to help people to > use software more efficiently.
Unfortunately, StackOverflow is a very difficult-to-avoid site nowadays, unless you can easily live without using Google for your tech-related questions, either. However, I completely agree with the sentiment that the site is quite toxic, and I have 10k+ on StackOverflow and 30k+ on the whole StackExchange network, so I know a thing or two about it. The StackOverflow company routinely deletes your comments, questions and answers, often for very superficial reasons (including automatically based on metrics) and without any regard to the individual quality thereof, and effectively without you having any control over the explicitly human-generated textual data that you entrust them with. (Most folks don't even know this, until they're already hooked and their questions/comments/answers are gone and unfetchable.) Who likes their own well-articulated notes randomly deleted for superficial reasons behind their backs? Why not let you see what got deleted, so you can decide whether it's worth reposting in another venue? I recently got 10k on StackOverflow, which is the minimum reputation required to see not just any deleted stuff, but even your own deleted questions and answers; and the sheer volume of my own questions and answers that got deleted (some of which was done automatically based on rather arbitrary "metrics" without any human intervention) is simply mind boggling — `deleted:1` returns 36 results (questions and/or answers), which at 259 A + 105 Q in my profile, represents nearly 10% of my Qs and As! I've used the site for years, and knew some of my stuff was gone, but I was nonetheless totally surprised and shocked to see just how much of it was deleted and hidden from me until 10k! Effectively, every 10th answer or question just gets wiped out without a trace (until/unless you're a mod or have 10k+ rep), does that sound OK to you?! And since they keep the scoring and feature activation separate for each of their sites, some of my own Qs and As on the other StackExchange sites in the network are still unavailable to me even at this stage. (Meanwhile, various throwaway, bogus, incomplete and duplicate questions and spam answers from years ago still remain on their sites; and flagging any of these is basically a gamble and often results in absolutely no action.) So, I completely agree with Ingo that noone should be promoting StackOverflow and StackExchange et al, especially in the open-source communities, at least until the above model where withholding your own contributions from your own self is the modus operandi at StackExchange/StackOverflow company. Personally, even though I still participate in SO/SE, I 100% boycotted their new "documentation" effort, not contributing a single article to it, IIRC (LOL, I just checked, and they did shut it down — apparently, I must have been not the only one who didn't like the idea). Cheers, Constantine. http://cm.su/ > > Yours, > Ingo > >> Thanks. YMMD.
