Why no Stack Overflow?

[billybobbonnet]

@michelfloyd, +1 on David Weldon answers, he has been a real help, very didactic and always spot on.

I have been active on SO last year during 3 months or so, and I remember you as being very helpful. All those you mentioned are definitely pillars of Meteor on SO (Kyll being a little too inclined to close questions). You guys are doing a great job and imho, SO situation is not as bad as it is pictured here. Meteor community has the same issues than everyone has on SO. But people are still finding answers there (including me).

Bottom line: there are many good SO answers about Meteor and most are the work of a few, and I wish to thank them along with you (and every one else helping).

If something has to be done in SO, I think it should be on “active” questions (less than 3 days). Meteor is changing and help is more needed on the up to date topics.

[vigorwebsolutions]

I think SO and MF (Meteor Forums) share many of the same pros and cons, and it seems to me that we may be in the first stages of the “trouble” that SO faces when a topic sticks around long enough. Namely, that the members of this community who are most active in helping out could become frustrated with seeing the same questions over and over, etc.

Say I have a problem with my app. It’s throwing an error, but when I google the error, I get a bunch of different answers from different sources. I even see some on SO, but the replies are from 2013, so I’m not even sure they would be relevant. Instead of sifting through the answers, I simply post a new question and hope that someone answers it. If the question gets flagged, then maybe I start sifting through the answers, or maybe I take to another community (MF?) and post there.

There’s no boilerplate for asking questions, so I pop in here (MF) and post my question, with the generic error I’m seeing. Someone helpful responds, asking to see my code, and I reply back with a block of unformatted code. Someone else replies, asking me to use this stuff, so I do. Now I’m a few hours into this bug fix, but at least real people are talking to me, and I’m not poring over google results trying to figure out which one actually fits my case.

Finally, someone helpful on MF gives me the mongodb syntax fix I need, and things are back to being great! But in all actuality, this exact question was asked just a few weeks ago on MF…

A real life example:

This was a good back and forth between a pretty new user and one of the super helpful people on MF: Help with routing

But, when I am creating an almost identical post, the post I linked to above doesn’t pop up:

I’m no expert on Discourse’s algorithm for topic/post suggestions, but I’m wondering if a boilerplate structure for help questions wouldn’t help users find the answers they need before asking another question?

Also, maybe taking some of the top SO questions/answers and compiling them into a FAQ or stickies here, with answers that are updated to reflect the most recent changes, best practices, etc.

I think SO is a very valuable source of information, and it’s interesting to read through questions with a number of useful, varied answers – this has been a great way for me, personally, to learn about the ways in which others think about code.

However, I think for many of the reasons mentioned above, SO can seem hostile, especially to users who are new to a platform. I think MF may be a good place to strike a balance between:

A) asking users to do a little bit of work when trying to solve a problem

and

B) making the best use of the knowledge and time of the community members

Just my two cents

[michelfloyd]

IMO the Q&A here in the forum as well as on TMC slack will naturally remain “interactive” (get your problem solved now even if the same problem was solved yesterday!). SO is optimized to be a perpetual reference site with high SEO, question and answer scoring, reputation, and curation (annoying as it may be sometimes).

Because the Meteor framework is evolving so fast however, SO answers to reference questions can easily get stale. Keeping those answers up-to-date is important.

Some concrete steps you can take:

• If you google a question and you find a helpful answer on SO, vote it up! That helps everyone who has the same question later. While you’re at it, vote up the question.
• If you find that an accepted answer is obsolete and there are no good current answers to that question then provide an up-to-date answer, including the version number for which your answer applies. As others hit this answer they will vote it up and eventually it can become the reference answer.
• Follow the Meteor keyword on SO via email and if you see a question you know the answer to and you have some spare time, answer it. It’s really just as easy to answer a question there as to post a rant here. Heck, I can often answer a simple question while I’m having my morning coffee (although my post-coffee answers usually don’t have as many typos
• Accept the fact that even though this forum has many of the world’s top Meteor experts, developing in Meteor requires a large set of skills that can benefit from a much larger community: MongoDB, reactJS, Angular, devOps, even HTML and CSS. You’re probably going to get better answers on those other topics on SO than here. For example if you want to really understand MongoDB aggregation then you’re going to want to have Blakes Seven answer your question. That guy is an aggregation god.

By the way, after I’d answered a couple hundred Meteor questions on SO Nick Coe from MDG was kind enough to give me a whole bag of Meteor swag at the Meteor DevShop in SF including two t-shirts. So there are benefits!!

[michelfloyd]

Thanks @billybobbonnet! I remember when you first started asking questions on SO. It was fun watching you gradually learn the framework and seeing your questions gradually become more challenging to answer You’re right that Kyll can come across as a bit brutal. He’s a CS student in France afaict. Very smart and skilled but can seem off-putting at times. I did go have a sidebar discussion with him about that once.

You’re right that recent questions tend to reflect the fast pace of change in the framework. It’s actually part of the challenge - it’s hard to be good at blaze, react and angular and angular2 all at once! Toss in ES2015 and Meteor 1.3 topics and there’s a lot to keep up with.

[looshi]

+1 for @dweldon , his answers always come up when I search, and are a great reference for a lot of Meteor topics.

[tomRedox]

Great and insightful responses @michelfloyd, many thanks for adding such thorough answers to the discussion. What shines through from your posts here is the human side of Stack Overflow and the genuine desire to help and educate that motivates the prolific question answerers. It’s also clear there is a community inside SO, it’s just not that visible to newcomers.

[vjau]

answering questions that show little to no attempt to work things out for yourself.

For me this sums up what is SO.
Don’t bother us elites programmers with you stupid questions.
Why don’t you work things out yourself ?

[ffxsam]

In @lassombra’s defense though, I have seen some questions that just boggle my mind. Like people dumping out cryptic error messages with no code, asking “what’s wrong?” So while there’s definitely a way to pose a detailed and thought-out question, I don’t know if those people deserve to have their questions closed. But, 'tis the SO way and it is what it is, none of us will change that.

[vjau]

You know what ? I have been one of those people posting a “cryptic error message” without code.
I had a problem with a particuliar compiler that gave me a cryptic error message which i didn’t even understand.
The message didn’t seem to refer to a particuliar line of my code that i could identify, so what part of the code was i supposed to copy & paste ?
I posted a question explaining i didn’t understand what the error message was about.
Fast enough, one of the main maintainers of this compiler (with a 5 numbers reputation on SO) replied with a harsch answer in the style of “how are we supposed to answer without code ?”, and my stupid question was rapidly downvoted to oblivion… A few minutes later, my SO reputation was already starting to drown, and so i had to delete it in panic. The experience was VERY unfriendly, and at the time i thought i was not clever enough to have the right to ask a question on SO.
Later i transformed my question into a github issue (at least there, i have no karma to loose !), and there another maintainer took the time to answer why the compiler was not happy, and indeed the message was cryptic but there was a technical limitation preventing them to implement a better error reporting for this particuliar mistake.
So i still think the problem was not with me but with SO.

[tomRedox]

So i still think the problem was not with me but with SO.

I don’t think the problem is really with you or with SO, it’s with the high number of people who make absolutely no effort to solve their issues themselves, which ends up with people who answer questions on SO having itchy downvote trigger fingers.

I bet you didn’t just get the error and cut and paste it into SO? I bet you spent time trying to solve the issue first? It’s showing those ‘workings’, the steps you took to try and solve it, that stops SO questions getting down-voted to oblivion.

That might seem like it achieves nothing, it’s just making you type out stuff that didn’t work, but by listing out the steps that didn’t solve it you are saving the answerers from spending time going down those blind alleys too, and also making the question and answer more useful to future readers. Well… that’s the theory anyway

[michelfloyd]

It’s a whole different paradigm from chat or forums: I just saw a vague question with no code fly by on TMC and right away someone asked a follow-up question to probe what’s in the question. That works in real-time, but fails badly on SO because the person answering the question wants a question that is immediately answerable, not one that takes 10 follow-ups to figure out with each follow-up taking anywhere from minutes to days.

Let me make a slight analogy: a person with poor command of English approaches you on the street and says he’s lost. You try to help them and eventually you figure out how to communicate and where they are going and you point them in the right direction. That’s the real-time forum/slack version (analogy not valid in Manhattan).

Now over on StackOverflow avenue you’re walking along and you see a piece of paper stuck on a map of the city that says “I lost, pleaze help!” There’s no one around but you. What do you do?

[seanmavley]

The power users are too annoying and seem to enjoy closing questions more than answering them.

Won’t a day come the power users on this forum will ‘seem to enjoy closing questions more than answering’?
It is easier to criticize a community the size of SO. One day, should this forum grow that big, you’ll come back saying the same thing, ending your post on another new forum by:

"This [referring to that new communtiy] is much better [than meteor forums]

[pushplaybang]

I quite enjoy both and don’t really see the point in a conversation about which is better. I have gotten and given plenty of answers on SO, more than I have here, but I suppose I haven’t posted too much here.

I feel like SO is where I’ll get more specific nuts and bolts help, while the forum is a great place to interact with the community around meteor, discuss things relevant to the community, get news, and I do see there’s technical stuff here, but its not been my first thought when I consider the Meteor forum.

I’ll definitely continue to ask questions and answer them on SO, and try engage with forums more as well.

[antraxis]

Agreed that Stack community is quite strict in rules and every time you ask for help you need to think four times if that is a right question, but for me it worked, quite well. Here are my topics on Stack http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user:3836715+[meteor]

[korus90]

Speaking as a so-called “neckbeard” I find this extremely offensive. The suggestion that because I am of diminutive size with a beard covering what would normally be visible of my neck I automatically lack social graces is quite appalling. More appalling is that you got 2 likes.

Please take time to think about the derogatory slurs you use next time, and the implications and generalizations you are making.

Just found this and want to point out I feel you took it a bit too personally. You’re only here once man, don’t get so offended

[dweldon]

Thanks @michelfloyd for providing the statistics, and thanks to several of you for the kind words.

I sympathize with both sides of this debate with respect to SO’s narrow format. On one hand, fewer questions would come to a resolution if anything could be asked. On the other hand, it’s regrettable that new users often discover the policies via a community smack-down.

If I could offer only one piece of advice as it relates to this discussion, I’d recommend adding fewer tags to questions. If you cast a wide net, you’ll gain a larger quantity of eyeballs at the cost of quality of answers (and potential for non-meteor community snark).

[michelfloyd]

Thanks @dweldon! Good advice on limiting keywords. I think I’ll also raise a question on meta about how SO could provide a better experience for new users - at least better than “How dare you bother us you ignorant fool?”