StackOverflow is one site where I never saw the appeal. I have stumbled upon it a few times through it being a top result during search, but the content seemed fairly flat, for lack of a better term.
I suppose if you have a very specific question, it gets the job done. However, in the more traditional forum model, I find the discussion that follows the answer to be far more valuable the answer itself. The StackOverflow implementation seems to discourage continuing the conversations once suitable answers are found.
It obviously works well for a lot of people, but I just don't get it. Voted do not use.
> I suppose if you have a very specific question, it gets the job done. However, in the more traditional forum model, I find the discussion that follows the answer to be far more valuable the answer itself.
In fact, the mission of SO is precisely that: compile as much knowledge as possible in the form of answers to very specific question. There are many forums out there to cover "enrichment", but until SO came around it was significantly more difficult to find answers to specific questions amid the chaff.
SO is good for getting answers to quick commonly asked questions. If I encounter an error, and can't solve it after a few minutes, I'll usually Google it. More often than not, SO is the first result, offering a quick fix for the problem. I'll agree that SO doesn't have the intellectual discussion-based community that HN has, but it's really good for answering quick questions which a lot of people run into.
If you're looking for high quality discussion, SO probably isn't your best bet. Although I have learned a _ton_ about a new topic by doing a search on a topic, and then ordering the questions by votes or favorites. For example, this is the most voted question for haskell, which has some decent discussion:
Most of the time I use StackOverflow as kind of a warm up to writing my own code. It's a good intermediary step between reading HN and actually getting something done.
I have found the signal-to-noise ration to be fairly low every time I look. It's great that there are so many beginners having their questions answered, but I have other things to do with my time.
I suppose if you have a very specific question, it gets the job done. However, in the more traditional forum model, I find the discussion that follows the answer to be far more valuable the answer itself. The StackOverflow implementation seems to discourage continuing the conversations once suitable answers are found.
It obviously works well for a lot of people, but I just don't get it. Voted do not use.