Ready...Rant

Let's start this off with a rant. A StackOverflow rant. About human behavior, motivations, and going on tilt. I've been meaning to start posting to this blog for a couple months now, and even have a rack of long, technical write-ups already done, but haven't felt motivated to start boring people. But today I'm on tilt, which is a perfect time to launch a verbal barrage of BS on a fundamentally meaningless interchange on a site intended to help people like me. And maybe you.

I like StackOverflow. I use it almost every day, or one of its kindred StackExchange sites. Like Wikipedia, I learn something most of the time I go there, and have found answers to tricky technical problems reading other people's issues. A bunch of my friends work SO regularly, with reputations so high you wish they were bank balances. I think it's a good concept, and I wish them all success. And I enjoy Jeff Atwood's blog as well. So just to be clear, nothing in this rant should be interpreted as a problem with SO.

My issue with SO is that they don't know I'm not evil. I have very little reputation. So little that if it were my bank balance, I would be worried. And the way SO works, that means I'm not allowed to post comments, which means I'm not allowed to add on to a conversation unless I post an answer. Worse, it means I'm not able to add on a simple tweak to a good, already-accepted answer, even if that answer pointed me down the right path to the actual answer.

It's a bummer, but easily fixed: do more on SO. One of my friends with the huge reputation balance mentioned that the ability to comment comes at around 50 and that SO becomes a lot nicer at 100, so that has become my near-term goal. Mind you, not because I particularly want to help out the SO community, but because I want to be able to use SO more effectively for myself. Motivations.

Lately, things at my work have been a bit more relaxed, so I have put a little time into looking for questions to answer. And yesterday I thought I'd hit the jackpot: an unanswered question with a +150 bounty, on an attractive but somewhat esoteric Java technology I implemented for my company. I have direct experience suffering from the issues the OP was asking about, and remember the time it took me to get them nailed down (not to suck up, but the OP was making a good decision to spend 150 points to save those 6-8 hours). I have code in my version control system implementing those precise questions, and I remember the secret path through the online docs to get from nothing-works to wow-cool.

I wrote up my answer, structured to address the OP's direct questions. I linked to the correct API docs, differentiated between the two APIs you need to understand to drive the thing, and pointed out how to use the only standalone code example (from an earlier version of the API) to prototype the end solution. I saved my work offline, checked to make sure nobody else had answered the question while I was typing, and then submitted my answer. That's a good answer, I thought. Would have saved me a number of hours if I'd had that as a resource a year ago. Motivations.

This morning, I took a look at SO to see if any of my other answers had been accepted, and discovered that somebody had top-posted my answer on the bounty question. Same format, many of the same links, but wrong. @top-poster has clearly googled for the information but hasn't actually used either of APIs, and in fact referenced API-2 in a situation that requires API-1. But here's the thing: @top-poster formatted his (her?) answer better than I did, and garnered a vote. Erk. TILT.

Seriously? Somebody voted for that answer because it was formatted with bullet points? Somebody who doesn't understand the technology enough to know whether the answer is correct? Neither @top-poster nor whoever upvoted that answer have written the java, because if they had they would know you can't do that with API-2. It doesn't have those facilities.

Of course, this is where it gets ironic and funny. If I had the ability to post comments on SO, I would simply add a comment to @top-poster's answer saying: +1 Good answer, nicely written. I think you meant API-1 in your first bullet. Then @top-poster would edit his (her?) answer, collect the points, and anyone venturing into SO later would get a good answer to starting out with this difficult java technology.

But I don't have the ability to post comments, which is why I attempted to answer the bounty question. And because I want the bounty, I'm unwilling to improve @top-poster's answer, even if it means the OP accepts an incorrect answer. Instead, I edited my answer to use bullet points, copying @top-poster's answer. The OP will see two identical-looking answers, only one of which is actually usable. But since the OP hasn't used the technology yet, they will not be able to tell which is correct until they go spend the time digging through the docs and examples -- the thing they were trying to avoid by posting the bounty in the first place.

The end result of this is, fundamentally, a blog post. I understand why SO works the way it does, and appreciate the lack of spammers they seem to have achieved. I need to find some more questions to answer to achieve SO-nirvana, and the OP will have to do the homework they were trying to shortcut. Hopefully @top-poster will forgive me for copying formats. To the person who voted for a nice-looking but incorrect answer: thanks, you got me to start my blog. I owe you a beer.