Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "Is Stack OverFlow Evil? | Prime Reacts" video.

  1. Stackoverflow does have members that wanted to be local Sheriff as a child and now they are expressing themselves by going through all new questions and playing "you didn't follow the law" game. RTFM the documentation given to new users would help but I don't agree with following rules to letter if the question itself is sensible.
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  2. I do write answers to Stackoverflow and I expect the new users to RTFM. However, I rarely downvote bad questions unless it's spam or something else obviously malicious, I simply ignore them. If I downvote a question, I always write situation specific explanation for it to help the human being asking a bad question to understand the problem. Linking to generic "wrong type of question" page is just bad in my books unless the content is obviously malicious. And even in that case, the correct action is to flag the question for admins, not to downvote it. That said, if you cannot bother to read the documentation provided to you before you ask the first question, do not expect other people to bother to interact with you either. The instructions clearly explain that you should tell what you've already done and how it has failed. The intent of the site is not to do stuff for you – you have to demonstrate your work first and then ask other to help with the mistake you fail to see. If you don't want to bother to read or work, do not expect free support. I participate to StackOverflow because I believe in teaching things to other people and it makes me better communicator in general. I feel that I can explain things better to my collegues once I have learned to teach other people on StackOverflow. My reputation is around 15k which should give some idea how much I've used it. And I think StackOverflow does have too strict rules about what kind of questions are acceptable. I've been downvoted for real questions as being too opinion based. Most programming tasks are some kind of compromise and it would be valueable to explain what each developer would choose and why. Even if the why is opinion, not a perfect statistical fact.
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  3. 16:35 When you've been waiting for 3 days, now you have surely read the documentation you were provided in the first place, right? Right?
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  4. I think gamification is good for figuring out which accounts are real users and which accounts are bots or spammers. The "reputation" (which I consider karma in reality) on StackOverflow gets you more admin tools once you demonstrate enough sensible behavior. For example, with my current reputation I could go around the site and modify the descriptions of all the tags and mess things out seriously bad. So I understand why those actions are not available to any random spammer. But I think it's a really good idea to give more admin-like powers to users of the site as long as they demonstrate behavior that aligns with the sites objectives. Other than the ability to do actions that are not allowed for newly created users or users with bad karma (e.g. spammers or bots) I don't really care about how much reputation I have. If some future employer were ever interested in that kind of statistics, sure, it would be nice to be able to show that I have this much reputation on StackOverflow. I still feel that the reputation is thanks to sensible behavior, not because I've gamed the system. Gamification results in some users primarily answering only easy questions that get lots of traffic via Google. I don't like that but I understand that it's good for the site because Google gives more value to StackOverflow pages if lots of users looking for simple answers click the StackOverflow page in the results. So even though I don't personally think those answers are worth a lot, I understand why even that kind of gamification benefits the whole site.
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