Timeline for answer to Stack Overflow fails to promote well-researched, well-written, but difficult questions by Greg Burghardt
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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23 events
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| Aug 12, 2020 at 20:21 | comment | added | user400654 | or... d), it's not actually a really gnarly problem... just a failure to debug/break down the problem. | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 19:15 | comment | added | StackOverthrow | And when you do come across one of those really gnarly problems, nine times out of ten it will be a) incorrectly marked as unclear until the right person comes along who knows exactly what you're talking about; b) incorrectly marked as a duplicate of something only vaguely related; or c) correctly marked as a duplicate of a Q&A you couldn't possibly have found because you didn't know the right terminology until you read it. | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 15:17 | comment | added | Mark Carpenter Jr | This is a concept I failed to grasp on SOF, thanks for this. | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 13:54 | comment | added | J... | @stackoverblown I'm sure that would go over well. Sounds like a volunteer/minimum-wage loophole exploitation racket to me. | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 12:19 | comment | added | stackoverblown | Can we convert every 500 fake internet points into a Big Mac at McDonald so that it is no longer "fake"? Stack Exchange should put some of the advertising dollars that they earn with thousands of free workers to good use. Since McDonald is worldwide, it should work. :) | |
| Aug 12, 2020 at 9:07 | comment | added | Ian Kemp - SO dead by AI greed | I strongly disagree with this answer's unsubstantiated claim that the asker's question requires heavy-duty debugging. | |
| Aug 11, 2020 at 20:56 | comment | added | Julia | IMHO: if you only answer questions for the rep, you're in for a bad time. | |
| Aug 11, 2020 at 20:00 | comment | added | R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE | Regarding larger bounties, this! I've almost never lost rep on a bounty. The bounty promotes the question enough to get it new upvotes and (this is an unwanted effect but works to your advantage) bumps it whenever someone posts a low-quality answer hoping you'll award them the bounty, causing more people to see it again. | |
| Aug 11, 2020 at 19:56 | comment | added | J... | @GregBurghardt Regardless, SO is not a good platform for collaborative pair-programming, or anything of the sort, so well-constructed or not, deep esoteric problems rooted in tangled production code are probably not a good fit at all on SO. | |
| Aug 11, 2020 at 19:49 | comment | added | Greg Burghardt | @J... It's not so much the OP needs to learn how to debug, it's that the problem is so deeply rooted that even experienced developers cannot see how to debug the problem. The "good honest debug session" you are talking about is best done as a pair programming session, or screen-sharing. The OP needs another set of eyes, but maybe a Q&A post on the Web is not the best tool in this case. Sometimes you've tried everything else (including the good, honest debug session) and you are just plain stuck. Basically a large bounty on a question is the "Hail Marry" of programming. | |
| Aug 11, 2020 at 19:36 | comment | added | J... |
It requires some heavy duty debugging This, I feel, is a major feature of low-engagement questions, whether they are well written and presented or not. Most nasty programming problems usually end up just needing a good honest debug session. Answering these questions is difficult because a useful answer is more about teaching OP how to debug rather than the actual problem itself, which drives the question into tutorial territory requiring a long-form answer only loosely related to the question. These could probably all be closed as dupe if we had a good how-to-debug canonical.
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| Aug 11, 2020 at 14:11 | comment | added | user400654 | Personally I find bountied questions to more often than not be the worst questions around. They're often poorly researched or poorly debugged. Everyone seems to think their own problem is somehow more important or more complex because they can't figure it out, and reinforce that idea by the fact that their post isn't getting attention. | |
| Aug 11, 2020 at 8:24 | comment | added | amalloy | Even to someone who doesn't care about fake Internet points, a bounty is still attractive. Expert answerers are on Stack Overflow for interesting questions, and a bounty indicates a problem that is at least not so trivial as to be solved by random passers-by. My Stack Overflow "homepage" is a custom tag search on some low-traffic tags I frequent, so I rarely see any bounties; when I do, they're usually worth checking out. | |
| Aug 11, 2020 at 7:14 | comment | added | Matthieu M. | I think it's important to realize that reputation is a popularity contest. I have poured my soul in some of my answers: diving into the specifications, demonstrating the effects with code, tying it with the OP's particular issue... but the question was so gnarly to begin with that nobody bothered reading it and therefore I received maybe 10 or 15 points, 25 at most. On the other hand, I've written one-liners to easy questions that scored over a 1000 upvotes: easy questions are relatable, everybody can judge whether the answer matches... | |
| Aug 11, 2020 at 6:18 | comment | added | endolith | "There is so much information on SO that I tend to answer my own questions 99% of the time." Sometimes more literally: "Wow this person from 5 years ago had exactly the same question that I have, I wonder wh... oh." | |
| Aug 10, 2020 at 14:38 | history | edited | TylerH | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 29, 2020 at 15:11 | comment | added | Scratte | I usually assume my answer will go without any internet points at all. Especially when answering old Questions. But I don't answer them for the points anymore. I answer them because I want to know the answer, and once I know it, I might as well post it. | |
| Apr 29, 2020 at 14:40 | comment | added | NoDataDumpNoContribution | "Now the payoff in fake Internet points is worth them investing some time in the problem." I 100% believe this statement is true and still I fail to understand it really. Thanks for this wonderful answer. | |
| Apr 29, 2020 at 9:13 | comment | added | Gimby | "I'm not a particularly good programmer. I'm just good at googling." - ...you meet the criteria to be a good programmer right there. | |
| Apr 28, 2020 at 17:49 | history | edited | Peter Mortensen | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Active reading. [<http://stackoverflow.com/legal/trademark-guidance> (the last section) <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/google#Verb_2> <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Google-fu> <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/upvote>].
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| Apr 28, 2020 at 0:40 | history | edited | Greg Burghardt | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 28, 2020 at 0:04 | comment | added | Snow | Yeah, once a question is more than a day or two old (and hasn't been answered, which means it's not low-hanging fruit), large bounties are pretty much the only thing I expect to draw experts' attention. It's pretty unlikely anyone's going to bother otherwise. | |
| Apr 27, 2020 at 23:55 | history | answered | Greg Burghardt | CC BY-SA 4.0 |