Things I hate about Stackoverflow
October 9, 2011
Stackoverflow (and other stack exchange sites) is amazing, no doubt about it, there are tons of great answers, I love it how people share their knowledge and it is a huge inspiration to expand my own knowledge. In my spare time I love to read the most voted questions and their answers of some interesting topic or tag.
However there are three main things that are quite annoying:
- Quit that job and get somewhere to do real work comments. You can see too many of these suggestions, especially on questions that are asking for some real help. By real help I mean something that cannot be easily googled, something that others that gone trough that could share with the world. People that want to improve the software they are working on or the environment they are working in deserve encouragement not suggestion to find a new job.
- Rushed answers that are just there to get some points. I don’t even need to reference this, it is in almost any question. Recipe is easy: write down few words that can’t hurt anybody but still don’t give anything to the question and if you’re lucky enough you’ll get +1 or even +2 for it.
- Momentum. For example in this question where I also shared my thoughts, IMHO an unappropriated answer has been voted up and selected. It is incomplete, very shallow, does not really answer the question and basically is just a random thought (how did it actually help the OP, I have no idea). Again this was one of the first answers, so it got the first votes up and from there it stayed in the top and probably by not-knowing what to select OP just selected the highest voted answer.
However I can see these troubles only only on StackOverflow, probably because it grew so huge. On smaller Stack Exchange sites there is no such problems, the communities there are really helpful and usually they not only drop the link, but also expand it with valuable comments.
MikeOnGIS 
Definitely an excellent resource, I’ve been helped many times. But their attitude is so SNOTTY. I don’t like snotty people in general, I sure don’t like them working with me, because ultimately, those snotty, ego-driven ones are not helping. They just like to DESTROY. lol What they seem to fail to understand is, if one is looking for a solution to some problem, they don’t GO to SO. They Google it, and often, SO is one of the links. So you might try the others first, or you might try SO and see if the problem has already been answered — usually it is different from your question, so you might ask your own question. Many times nice, helpful people actually answer it. Many times no one answers it. No problem, I can understand that. But lately — many times — the responses are jerky. Snotty. Sort of ‘in your face’. They pissed me off one too many times and I will never go back there. It may take me a bit longer to get my answers when I have them — but I don’t care – they can kiss my ass. And I’m pretty close to finally getting “rights” to do this or that, but personally I’d be embarrassed to be affiliated with them.