Why Stack Overflow Sucks and Participating There is Impossible
Let me add some perspective as a relatively highly ranked user (cletus) on SO.<p>I've seen this kind of post before and frankly it's annoying. The typical template is "I tried to answer 2 questions and didn't get 1000 points so it sucks" or some variation revolving around faster answerers or whatever.<p>Rather than being a problem, SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answers.<p>Compare this to forums or mailing lists which I <i>abhor</i> as a means of asking programming questions. You'll often get no replies or useless replies (eg a bunch of people who don't understand the problem telling you that you shouldn't be doing that or asking you why) or the right answer might be buried on page 17 when the thread descended into an OT discussion on page 7.<p>There are certainly low-hanging fruit on SO (reputation wise) and people do compete for those. In my case, I used SO to learn things because of the quick feedback loop you got when you said something demonstrably wrong.<p>Now I barely go there because whether there's something to answer or not is pretty random and I really don't have time for the waiting game anymore. Other priorities now.<p>But to complain about a system where there are <i>too many people answering questions</i> is, to be perfectly blunt, ridiculous and narcissistic ("what about me?" rather than what about the asker).<p>Also, the questions are, for me anyway, a lot less interesting. For a lot of topics, they've now been covered. New questions are rarer and cover increasingly edgier cases. So you're reliant on new languages, tools and problems, which doesn't seem to come at the same pace the earlier questions did, which were basically backfill.<p>Let me also say that there is an art to answering questions on SO. The OP bemoans the quick answer getting the points while you write a thoughtful answer. My response? To paraphrase Steve Jobs, "he's doing it wrong". SO teaches you this.<p>If the question can be answered in one line, this is what you do. If more comments will add to the value of the answer, explain deeper issues or perhaps help in cases not necessarily directly relevant to the OP but possibly relevant more generally, then you edit your answer as you go, adding as necessary.<p>And if you think you can't write thoughtful answers on SO, you obviously haven't looked at some of the great answers that are there.