I've had to cease relying on Stack Overflow altogether in researching "Dead Simple Python". Those badges seem to evoke a knee-jerk response by everyone else: "If this high-rep user says it, it must be so!" Yet I've lost count of the number of times the high-rep user gave an answer which was partially, or even entirely, incorrect! In each major tag, there seems to be an elite crowd of people who have tens of thousands of rep points. There's only one way in which reputation works against the "fastest gun" effect, and it's not a good way. The reputation system was supposed to be a check-and-balance on this, but it often only serves to amplify this phenomenon.
The first reason is well-known by the community, who refer to it as the "fastest gun in the west effect": the first answer often becomes the upvoted and accepted favorite, even if it's altogether wrong. I was sick of getting punished for it.Įven once there's a good question being asked, there isn't much hope for good answers. That's the second reason I stopped answering. Not only do they not want to play with the unpopular kids on the playground, but you'd better not either! The popular kids have downvote buttons, and they relish the opportunity to use them. "Answer everything worthy of an answer, whether the community likes it or not." That would be great if it worked, but unfortunately, one of the greatest crimes in the eyes of the core community is to answer a question they deem unworthy. "Just buck the system, then," one might think. At least in part, Stack Overflow's ubiquity is its downfall.
Segfaults and syntax errors were still worthy of discussion. This hasn't always been the case, of course, but that's largely because in Stack Overflow's early days, most questions hadn't been asked yet. Most of the remainder of the questions tend to be cerebrally domain-specific which, while not bad, are seldom reusable.ĮDIT: This doesn't count the "questions" that need to be flagged and closed for being spam, "giv me da codez!!1!", or entirely off-topic. Unfortunately, quite a number of "dupe-flagged" questions are false positives, but there are seldom second chances at Stack Overflow.Įven if a question manages to escape the dupe hammers, if it deals with anything that isn't puzzling to an expert, it's fairly likely to get dumped on, a la "how dare you ask why you can't cast a string to a double, you snivelling plebeian." Oh sure, the new community rules have reduced this sort of talk in the comments, or at least driven it to be more passive-aggressive in nature, but it hasn't prevented harassment downvoting. If anything even remotely similar has ever been asked, the question is quickly downvoted and closed as a "duplicate". That may sound absurd, when thousands of new questions are posted every single day, but most of them fall into one of three categories in the eyes of the core community: I stopped answering questions on Stack Overflow a couple of years ago for two reasons, the most pressing being that there weren't any questions to answer. It's become something few anticipated, and fewer want. But now, Stack Overflow has all but vanished from my workflow. I've been a member of Stack Overflow for years, once being an active reviewer, and in the top 5% of answerers for some popular tags. It's become an ubiquitous part of the programmer's workflow. And yet, I'll guess that most of us visit Stack Overflow on a daily basis. We commiserate with the countless hordes who have been shunned by the high-rep elites for.whatever reason. We joke about "Copying & Pasting from Stack Overflow".
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