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Why is this? Is it something to do with the Flex community, as compared with, say, the C# community?

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  • There ya go! But I do think its because the Flex community is much smaller than the C# community. So there are less people who appreciate questions dealing with flex. I think this carries for any technology that is not overly mainstream yet.
    – Zoidberg
    Sep 7, 2010 at 15:07
  • i wonder if there are stats available in the SO api (yes i will go an look) to see the frequency of any tag being voted up as that could then be collated against the take up of that tags technology in the industry (not sure how one would do that) this way we could have a definitive answer. Anyway you are currently bucking the trend.
    – PurplePilot
    Sep 7, 2010 at 15:12
  • kinda made me laugh! But, its also a real question. Without upvotes for 'good questions', its very difficult for a new flex person to gain reputation points, as pretty much all you're left with is answering questions, which, again, for a new flex user, is going to be awkward.
    – reidLinden
    Sep 7, 2010 at 15:15
  • In particular, for when a user wants to get to a spot where they are able to offer a bounty
    – reidLinden
    Sep 7, 2010 at 15:21
  • @reidLinden - Perhaps this is a question for meta.stackoverflow.com, but not here.
    – Greg
    Sep 7, 2010 at 15:25
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    I understand, but at the same time, I disagree....It was posted to the 'flex' tag, and is only really relevant there, in that context. I recognized that it wasn't really a programming question, so I tagged it as a wiki. Its just that moving it to 'meta' takes away the point of the question, which was to identify to the readers of the Flex tag, that we may be under-utilizing the SO system, to our ultimate detriment.
    – reidLinden
    Sep 7, 2010 at 16:05

2 Answers 2

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That is one possibility. I think it's more likely that Flex questions don't resonate with the SO community the same way other questions do. I notice that the questions that get voted up most are ones that work the audience for nudges of recognition — they hit on pain points for large groups of people. As a corollary to this, the answers that get voted up the most tend to work the same audience in the same way, only this time they get voted up because they hit on ideas or topics that resonate with the largest segment of the readership here. For example, if someone has a Javascript question, it's usually worth a couple of up votes to suggest that the OP try jQuery. Human nature being what it is and all ...

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  • Perhaps my own personal usage is just different. SO sees so much traffic, that, for me, just looking at questions, without tags is practically useless. So, I have my 'interesting' tags established to look at the particular subsets of SO that I'm interested in...To that end, I wouldn't expect any of my 'flex' tagged questions to even be looked at by a c++ developer, but, at the same time, I WOULD expect it to be seen by the community of flex devs. It's to these individuals I was asking the (arguably rhetorical) question.
    – reidLinden
    Sep 7, 2010 at 16:08
  • I bookmarked the Flex category and go right to it. I almost never look at anything else.
    – Reboog711
    Sep 7, 2010 at 16:14
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Is there a Stack Overflow protocol for why you would upvote something?

I rarely upvote questions. Not sure why, I never thought of it before. Very few questions impress me as being well written or having some overall relevance to the world of Flex Development.

A lot of questions seem poorly written. I'm am sick of being told "I can't provide a runnable code sample to demonstrate the problem." or "I can't provide a code sample due to NDA." or other similar excuses.

I do notice, perhaps unrelated, that I personally seem to get a lot of "answer" points without a lot of "upvotes". I think I even got a badges for that ( Tenacious and Unsung Hero ).

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  • Its a good question. For myself, I upvote questions that 'are' well written, or, for ones that I'm especially keen to see answered, or otherwise have an interest in.
    – reidLinden
    Sep 7, 2010 at 16:37
  • It would be interesting to compare the ratios of upvotes to questions asked/answered for various tags to see where flex lines up. Maybe Flextras is right regarding quality of questions/answers. I tend to be a little more free with upvotes, but lately I haven't seen many upvotes from others and anecdotally the quality of questions seems to have dropped too.
    – Wade Mueller
    Sep 7, 2010 at 17:31

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