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About Me
- Robert Elwell
- I am a web developer from Austin, Texas. I am a Zend Certified Engineer, with certifications in PHP5 and the Zend Framework. I work at Vertive, publisher of Offers.com. Feel free to learn more about me at Robert Elwell's Personal Website. You can also follow me on Twitter.
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10 comments:
"they're just going to go to Google."
Joel wrote that he considered Google to be the main UI to stack overflow from the day one.
"They could revise their tagging system to associate reputation with tags"
They already do. However, to get such a badge, you need 400 upvotes for answers in any given tag, which means that without a great deal of dedication to one subject, you won't get one any time soon.
I think that there is already a dwindling happening. There seems to be a surplus of questions asked by lazy people, and a lack of interesting questions.
They need a way for other users to tag questions and answers; and other users to check on the tags tagged by other users. Vote on tags or tag tags.
Nice article. Not to mention the fact that most of the times an answer posted by someone with a higher score gets picked by the OP even though an answer posted by a newbie might be equally good.
Is there anywhere better to get answers than S/O? Not that I know of... Questioners will often be able to answer other questions when they visit to post theirs, therefore it will do just fine for the foreseeable future.
> People aren't going to go to Stack Overflow anymore; they're just going to go to Google.
That was always the goal -- from day one.
As I said in podcast #72
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/10/podcast-72/
"The goal isn’t to be on Stack Overflow, but to generally do things that make you a better programmer. While that certainly includes the fractional time slices of questions and answers that programmers so generously contribute, it also means doing your job, and writing code! To the extent that Stack Overflow itself becomes the goal, we are failing you."
"Of course, that doesn't alleviate the fact that questions are rarely tagged completely."
Any user with sufficient reputation (a regular, contributing user) can retag questions that are incompletely tagged. And should.
StackOverflow remains useful as a way to hone one's own expertise. There's nothing like a cascade of goofy, inane questions about how to do things that nobody should do in the first place, or why weird behavior is exhibited by horribly broken code, to get you to dig deep into a programming environment you think you've already mastered.
Bottom line is - there is just way too much noise to sift through now on SO. Even with the tags.
I think SO is great to be honest, it's the only place on the internet that I know of that you can get answers from people who understand what you're talking about.
Places like ExpertsExchange, Yahoo! Answers and good old newsgroups just don't cut it these days and this is an area where SO thrives as it capitlises on the advantages of all those platforms - but without all the guff to go with it.
I don't see the SO platform as some sort of achievement/level up system anymore, I just see it as a nice place to go to either
a) Read up on interesting topics
b) Help someone with a problem
It's a nice safe haven for programmers and that can't be a bad thing!
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