Stackoverflow, was: [Pharo-dev] Could we keep Pharo-dev for Pharo-dev?

Serge wrote:
>Shall we move the discussion to pharo-users instead ?

Yep.

>I was not aware of that. Do you have recent examples about this behaviour ?

The last closed question was fine. Flagging it just gets clueless
moderator replies:
"declined - The question really needs to be fleshed out.
 Including the code for the rectangle morph would help a lot."

An earlier one was
Command pattern in smalltalk [closed] (you might not be able to see that
as it was deleted).

Of the 10 most popular smalltalk questions, at least 8 would be closed
using current moderation standards.

There is not 1 question from last year amongst the 50 most popular questions.
In the top 100 there are 2, and the most popular one is about Objective C.
The most popular question from last year gets 7 votes. That means there are
not enough smalltalkers on SO to be able to reopen questions.

The gaming system basically values popularity of answers,
not correctness. It reinforces majority choices.

Phil wrote:
>Traffic increases as a sign of traction/engagement and we want to silence things. Yeah sure.
>
>Put a tag in the title and filter on that.

Some channels are more effective than others.
Stackoverflow is not an effective channel.

Ignoring it is not smart.
Answer questions and point people to the
mailing lists.

Stephan

kilon alios writes:

> Yeah StackOverflow has serious issues with moderation but still that does
> not change the fact that is a popular site where tons of developers go
> there to find answers to their questions. I asked my own questions on SO
> about Pharo and so far I have not been disappointed.

The Prolog section does pretty well by having a small but significant
community that watch the Prolog tag like hawks. There are still
"drive-by moderation" incidents but by and large it isn't a huge
problem. There also is no general Prolog mailing list around which to
organize, so a substantial community is able to organize just around
Stack Overflow instead.

The big advantage of Stack Overflow is that googling your question finds
it there with an actual answer. Googling your question about Pharo often
lands you in the middle of a conversation on the mailing list,
replicated on some random site without enough context or useful
navigation, while the actual answers may be buried deep in some thread.
Or the question never got answered, but people went on to talk about
different things, but Google sees the question in the subject repeated
many times and assumes this is a useful page. Stack Overflow doesn't let
this kind of thing happen.

Things tend to move so quickly with Pharo that an answer on the mailing
list from 2011 is often practically useless today. That would be a
problem with old Pharo questions on Stack Overflow as well, except that
Stack Overflow doesn't make a point of drawing your attention to the age
of the answer. It's good and bad; good that things are moving quickly
and improving, bad in that a lot of that knowledge has a short
shelf-life. This phenomenon seems to be shared with Smalltalk, very few
books go into much detail about what's in the image, and the ones that
do are all greatly outdated because what's in the image changes fast.
Ruby and Javascript are also like this. Prolog is almost ideal for Stack
Overflow because everybody who shows up is asking the same questions
(taking the same classes at the same universities, probably), and the
system hasn't changed much in the last thirty years. Stack Overflow
is good at fossilizing knowledge, but not every system benefits from
that.

--
Daniel Lyons

Excerpts from Daniel Lyons's message of 2015-01-15 19:47:22 +0100:
> The Prolog section does pretty well by having a small but significant
> community that watch the Prolog tag like hawks.

something like rss2email could be used to forward stackoverflow questions to
the list, so that they'll be noticed by more people to be answered.

> The big advantage of Stack Overflow is that googling your question finds
> it there with an actual answer.

yes, when i search for a problem on google, stackoverflow search results are my
favourite choices to look at.

greetings, martin.

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