In your opinion, what sucks about StackOverflow

Despite what SO states, the karma system does matter. And it's flawed, as the vast majority of karma that will ever be awarded, has already been awarded. Very simple questions have thousands of upvotes, as do the answers, and all of the basic, common questions have been covered extensively. The only path for a new, energetic, enthusiastic user to grow his/her karma score (and associated credibility) is via a massive grind. The likelihood of a new question or answer gaining hundreds of upvotes, is very slim.

I don't claim to have all of the answers, but a decay function seems quite obvious to me. For one thing, technology evolves. The jquery way of doing something shouldn't have 10x the upvotes as the ES6 way. Old answers should lose a percentage of their upvotes over time, if they remain relevant they will gain new upvotes, but if not, they will get surpassed by newer, more relevant responses.

Oh, and the new fonts.

I don't think it works anymore. I was very engaged in Stackverflow a few years ago (got ~55K reputation) but stopped using it (not sure why). Now, last week I opened a question in ServerFault (where I got ~100 reputation or so) and my "silly" question was just answered with "what are you asking? Please ask the question the right way".

I didn't even bother fixing my question. I deleted all my stack exchange accounts.

I just don’t value it enough to be reprimanded by an unknown internet person about how my question was worded. If I have a question I’m obviously not an expert in the matter, so I may not be able to word it perfectly the first time. Sometimes I need someone to ask a clarifying question to understand that I was looking at the situation from the wrong angle, but in SO you just get either ignored or just “that’s stupid”

That “what animal provides milk at the supermarket?” and “what animal goes moo?” are marked as duplicate questions because they have the same answer. They’re clearly not duplicates and have very different concerns.

The misuse of the site. The amount of people not following the rules and/or skipping tour is astonishing.

Open SO, choose any popular tag and just wait. In a hour you will see a dozen of "do homework for me", "what's wrong with my code" and "explain this very basic thing to me eli5". Not to mention things explained in introductory lessons of any decent tutorial or things answered by first search result.

Not to mention bad grammar and even worse formatting.

Minimal, reproducible example is just a dream.

Questions are silos.

StackOverflow users are constantly complaining about duplicate questions. The real problem is that the onus for better question asking is placed on the asker, who is only really motivated and prepared to express their confusion.

The whole reason most questions are asked is because the asker isn't familiar enough with the problem domain to find the answer. That also means they aren't familiar enough with the problem domain to find a duplicate/related question.

It's much easier for question answerers to find duplicate and related discussion. Instead of antagonizing the asker by closing their post as "pointless discussion that has already happened", answerers should be continuing discussion with the asker.

Every StackOverflow question (duplicate or not) provides two opportunities:

1. Answering the question.

2. Finding what information to better advertise so that confusion can be avoided in there future.

Not their fault but old answers really suck. A 2016 answer about Azure is useless. Even a 2016 answer about react.

Also it’s a trope that the select answer isn’t always the best so there is a meta conversation about what is the “really best” answer

The bureaucracy. I understand that they want some rules and processes, but their community is extremely hostile towards newcomers who don't do things correctly.

Not directly with StackOverflow but when I search for something, usually I meet with outdated results on google. For e.g. if I search for something on iOS/Android, I usually get results from 2011-13 which don't add any value because frameworks have been updated since then.

Stackoverflow is a very toxic community. It's not a welcoming place for beginners who are basically want to learn how to learn. An alternative was to use discuss forums (e.g. https://forums.fast.ai/).

I have spent time responding to questions on Stackoverflow, I think I spent 2-3 years providing answeers, and one time I answered a question that didn't follow a weird policy that I strongly don't agree with (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/311442/opinion-base...). I got banned, and my account has been deleted, the answers still there. My only regret was that I could have spent that energy and drive to contribute to open source projects on github. Now, I have less time, but I answer questions -when I have time- on reddit or forums.

The width of the code blocks in the answers is often too narrow and require horizontal scrolling

"Hot Network Questions" are a distraction and take up too much horizontal space.

StackOverflow is one of the most toxic community out there. Asking a question is a miserable experience. Answering a question? Same.

It really seems no one is there to help each other. It's mostly status quo or reputation. Moderators have too much work to do or have serious ego problems (most users call them "StackOverlords"). Or a mix between the two.

One thing I noticed is that other sites of the Stack Exchange Network are doing quite well. Probably they should split up SO, at least with one site for backend related questions and one for frontend, or even for specific frameworks/platforms. But this would also split the value of the site, so I don't think it's gonna happen.

Eventually someone will disrupt the whole network, just like they did with Experts-Exchange.

Their business model conflicts with what would serve users best. It once was a place where I would trust answers, now I have to search multiple times, scroll through many results to find relevant answers.

Having massive amounts of questions gets more surface area for ads but a lot of programming Q&A that is a few years out of date is mostly useless. API's change, things become deprecated or better solutions emerge.

They need to cull massive amounts of content for it to be more helpful but that would likely drop revenue.

As someone who didn’t study anywhere near as much math or cs in college as I’d have liked, and had to spend a lot of time asking questions on Stack.* sites, I’ve had an extremely positive experience.

The only even mildly negative experience I’ve had was once a high-level user pattern-matched one of my questions to a much simpler already-answered question and closed it along with a dismissive comment, but as soon as I commented highlighting the discrepancy he apologized and answered my question.

I practically don't use StackOverflow. It can be useful sometimes to find references to bugs, or something, but many of the solutions I've seen are sub-par, or the problems I have are mostly some issue in GitHub/GitLab that I'll comment in or open myself.

On the rare occasions I find a useful question, some asshole closes it because it was asked before. What makes them an asshole is that it's not the same question at all, or the question was not answered.

1. The licensing situation is a mess. Most people copy/paste and they don't realize what the license is (CC BY-SA).

2. Why aren't answers always sorted by the number of votes by default?

3. The "community edits" where people sometimes decrease the quality of an answer just to get points.

4. Some answers don't age well but they are perpetuated by their large vote count.

Impatience and hostility with new users.

1> You didn't ask the question in the right place, go and ask your question over in vaguely defined other place

2> You didn't ask the question in the right way, or are on the wrong platform, OS version, etc.

3> The tons and tons of ads.

It doesn't allow broad questions, only nuts and bolts questions. As in: is my approach to building this the best approach? I could really do with a site that lets me ask that kind of question.

The fact that anyone can post anything, so you could have a serious issue in your code and they give you an inefficient solution, which is then upvoted by users who don’t know better.

Not being able to ask the same question over time.

The best thing about reddit (imo) is being able to search for a question, and see how the solution the community came up with evolved over time.

Answers posted in the comments rather than in the answers section.

Questions closed as duplicate when there is some subtle but important difference.

Closed questions still appearing in the search results.

Mostly though just a general lack of good will, it's obnoxious.

The unfriendly attitude towards newcomers.

I am behind a corporate proxy, and I always(!) need to solve a captcha before I can use the search.

Nazi moderators closing valuable discussions just because they can.

Not being able to link to an answer.