<story><title>Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow</title><url>http://michael.richter.name/blogs/why-i-no-longer-contribute-to-stackoverflow/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nathan_long</author><text>StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly. And see some ads.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s really it. Everything it does is geared toward that, and it does it quite well.&lt;p&gt;I have lots of SO points. A lot of them have come from answering common, basic questions. If you think points exist to prove merit, that&amp;#x27;s bad. But if you think points exist to show &amp;quot;this person makes the kind of content that brings programmers to our site and makes them happy&amp;quot;, it&amp;#x27;s good. The latter is their intent.&lt;p&gt;Does having easy answers available on SO make us dumber? I doubt it. People have made the same argument about search engines, and you probably could have said the same about encyclopedias.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tgflynn</author><text>&lt;i&gt;StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, and that is an incredibly valuable service.&lt;p&gt;I haven&amp;#x27;t participated in StackOverflow actively, neither asking nor answering questions, for various reasons, some perhaps related to some of the OP&amp;#x27;s complaints, but it has saved me many hours of searching through documentation and mailing lists just by being there.&lt;p&gt;I suspect the contribution to global programmer productivity is enormous.  It&amp;#x27;s true that it may tend to reduce the amount of very detailed knowledge about very narrow topics that people need to memorize but I think that externalizing this type of knowledge is the way to go.  As long as your mental models about the basic workings of the software you&amp;#x27;re using are essentially correct I don&amp;#x27;t think there&amp;#x27;s much harm in depending on external resources for specific details.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow</title><url>http://michael.richter.name/blogs/why-i-no-longer-contribute-to-stackoverflow/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nathan_long</author><text>StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly. And see some ads.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s really it. Everything it does is geared toward that, and it does it quite well.&lt;p&gt;I have lots of SO points. A lot of them have come from answering common, basic questions. If you think points exist to prove merit, that&amp;#x27;s bad. But if you think points exist to show &amp;quot;this person makes the kind of content that brings programmers to our site and makes them happy&amp;quot;, it&amp;#x27;s good. The latter is their intent.&lt;p&gt;Does having easy answers available on SO make us dumber? I doubt it. People have made the same argument about search engines, and you probably could have said the same about encyclopedias.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agon</author><text>I have to agree with your statement. I&amp;#x27;ve also used SO to ask esoteric questions about niches in technologies I work with every day. Most of the time those questions don&amp;#x27;t get answers quickly. However, after a period of time I can see they&amp;#x27;ve helped others by the views and awards that come in sometimes a year or more after posting. I view SO more as a way to display example use cases of strange behavior or puzzling functionality that I discover as I&amp;#x27;m working through issues. Especially for things that official documentation explains poorly or not at all.</text></comment>