What went wrong on Stackoverflow? [closed]

Question

During 4 years on Stackoverflow I've noticed that over time I got far less answers to questions and instead more and more comments like "this shouldn't be here" or no answers at all. Now being compliant with the regulations has become far more important than helping people with their problems.

There's a huge class of problems that is known to be unsolvable by a simple code snippet so suggesting a library is the only possible answer. There are thousands of questions like this on SO. In such a case what is the difference in asking for a 'solution' or asking for a library?

Many questions like this have been closed even though they get lots of upvotes - which means this is something people want ask and get answer for.

An example is question from today: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21028484/how-to-upload-file-to-string?noredirect=1

Answer 1

For what it's worth, I don't happen to think there's anything inherently philosophically wrong with a site allowing requests where the right response will be a library recommendation.

But on SO, they became problematic as the site grew.

They worked well, and helped a lot of people in the early days of SO, and similar questions work fine on some other, smaller sites.

And, to be fair, some of them aren't that opinionated - you're looking for any library that does X, and there are only 2 out there.

But some of them are VERY opinionated. There are tons of libraries that meet the criteria. Worse, a lot of people have highly vested interests in which one is the top answer. The problem today is that they became unmanageable as the site grew. They do often attract spam and cause other problems, and over time, the community felt like they distracted more people who had to deal with spam or sort through tons of "which is better" to find the kinds of questions they were looking for.

At some point, they failed the key question we want communities to ask:

Does allowing these net help more people in the long run than making them off topic will?

In younger communities, I encourage allowing them until they see an actual problem, but on SO, they seemed to be creating enough distraction per person helped that the net effect was negative.

Answer 2

I think we've covered this ground quite a lot but let me reiterate:

Stack Overflow is not the site for tool/resource requests. I believe it states in the close reason some of the reasons why this is off-topic:

Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.

Spam answers and opinionated answers are not the type of answers we want here. Recommendation questions almost always end up with spam and opinionated answers. Therfore, we close these questions as to not attract bad answers. This is to make sure that we still provide high-quality questions and answers to the community.

Answer 3

One of the reasons for the shift is that these question are almost always fully-answerable via google. When there are libraries out there for a job, there are web pages that describe them, web pages that decry them, and web pages that ... oh, you can think of another verb that starts with 'd'. So it can't be that people need to ask on stackoverflow.com to discover the existence of these resources.

That leaves the evaluation of the resources. Here we have a gigantic bubbling cauldron of subjectivity and debate. One man's fish is another man's poisson, especially in distributed systems. We're not really helping anyone to provide an, ahem, forum for everyone and their pet goldfish to post an opinion on the 'best' library for parsing phishing email responses, or even the library best suited to a particular message.

Add it all up, and the sum is 'off topic'.

Answer 4

Stack Overflow has become unfriendly. If I ask "what do you think would be the easiest way to do this?", of course it's a matter of opinion - what is easy for you might not be easy for me - but so what?

It got closed and I was advised to edit my post. Did so, but it wasn't re-opened. Don't know if it was re-reviewed.

If they don't want that kind of questions here, why not give a link "Please go and post it there"? Instead of just closing it and letting you dangling?

Another time, one of my posts was closed because it was unclear. Well, I do my best to answer if people ask me for more info. They ask specific questions, they don't just say it's unclear.

Anyway, of course it was unclear, I was asking for advice. If it had all been crystal clear in my mind, I wouldn't have posted this question, would I?

I usually try this and that, loads of this and that, and search for a long time, before posting a question. Posting was a kind of last-resort action, something I did before calling it a day. Then I closed the computer, thinking that at least I had done something : I would come back tomorrow, find some useful info, and take it on from there.

This is no longer the case. It's depressing. Because it's frustrating to spend hours on a problem and to get nowhere. Because I'm not a good programmer, I'll never be a good programmer, and now I'm thinking that maybe I should give up programming altogether. If I can' even ask for help when I'm stuck...

Oh yes, "younger communities". Such as what? And what am I supposed to do to find out how old a community is? So now I want to ask "Do you know any friendly alternatives to SO?", and this is certainly opinion-based!