When Stackoverflow went in beta I was really excited. Joel & Jeff had been discussing it for a couple of months already in their pod-cast and I was kind of curious to finally see it in action. I already had an OpenId which I had never actually used so Stackoverflow gave me a chance to finally test it out. I signed in…
It’s a couple of months later now and I’m currently not sure what to think of Stackoverflow. I liked the idea of a community of programmers coming together to discuss programming and anything related in a forum/wiki style environment. But what can I say, programmers will always be programmers.
By participating on Stackoverflow you gain reputation points and badges. The old style forum set ups had a similar thing where you basically gained status by the number of posts you had contributed to the forum. Often forums would also give you a title, or rank, based on this number or contributions. E.g. if Bill Gates would sign up at some Windows discussion forum he would gain the status of “rookie” because he had made zero contributions. These forums would always assume that if you hadn’t posted anything yet you knew nothing about the subject, so “rookie” in this context would mean that Bill was a “beginner” or a complete “noob” when it comes to Windows.
Stackoverflow’s reputation scheme works a bit different. Your reputation is based on what others think of you. Your questions and answers can be up or down voted by the other participants of Stackoverflow. Badges are assigned according to what type of actions you perform. E.g., if you write a lot of comments (which are like annotations to questions and answers) you might receive at some point the Commentator badge.
However, besides all the fun, Stackoverflow is starting to bug me.
As I said earlier, programmers will always be programmers. I’m not sure if the reputation scheme aggravates the typical programmer behavior (you know, that of the anal attitude and the obsession with the specific definition of things) but it seems to happen within Stackoverflow with an irritating presence.
To give you an example. I gained reputation points (or votes) for an answer that basically told the person asking the question to use Google. Now, even though its a valid answer because people should use Google before asking questions like that. To “up vote” an answer like that is kinda, well…, sad. It’s like kicking someone who is already down.
As I understand it, Stackoverflow was created as a community for programmers to share all things programming and related. However, there seems to be a certain self righteousness on Stackoverflow where certain individuals seem to think that its up to them to decide whether a question is a valid question or not. I really don’t understand why people need to go around and close other peoples questions just because it doesn’t fit with their opinion of what type of questions can and can’t be asked. If my question was totally unrelated to anything programming, e.g. about shepherding or something, I could understand, but just because someone doesn’t share a certain interest (in my case O’Reilly programming books) doesn’t mean they should be closing questions. E.g. asking a question about Programmer Jokes seems to be just fine. I guess, it doesn’t really matter if your question is pointless as long as it has a gimmick or an element of fun to it.
The typical programmer behavior comes to surface in the type of contributors who go around “editing” other peoples questions and answers for, guess what…, typos! It’s “Apache”, not “apache”! Oh dear…
Well. I’m not sure what Stackoverflow will do for me in the new year. I’ll probalby phase myself out at some point as happend in the past when I used be very active on a certain forum where I haven’t been activally contributing for over a year now.
I guess time will tell…
In the meantime, have a good one and the best wishes for 2009!