Episode 2: Programming Stack Exchange Challenge

Programmers Stack Exchange
Programmers Stack Exchange

Last week I wrote a post about CSS naming conventions, while trying to start up my review of the Programmers Stack Exchange site. Writing the question got me all excited about the wonderful answers and insights I was about to gain. Unfortunately my question fell to the 2nd page of the site quite quickly, with a meager one upvote, and one (though well-written) unsatisfactory answer.

For a week I debated whether to skip Programmers and review a different site, but today this problem struck me as an opportunity! This is a great way to test the bounty system. So I decided to put 100 of my current 106 reputation up for a bounty, looking for any answer that can provide me with something more solid than the “personal-preference” argument.

While waiting and frantically F5-refreshing the question I have some time to write about the site. One fun side-effect from the reputation system already became clear though: I can’t upvote any answers on the site anymore, because the 100 rep bounty I gave up dropped me below the 15 rep threshold you need to pass to be able to upvote things.

Current Statistics

Just like last review, first we dig up the current facts for this site:

Fact Programmers.SE
Questions 17,311
Questions with no upvoted answers 225 (1.30%)
FAQ (questions with most links) 4,241
Top 3 questions 313 votes, 275 votes, 275 votes
Questions active last hour 10
All-time rep for top 3 users 37.4k, 34.7k, 31.1k
Meta questions 1,004

Bigger than Cooking SE, but still quite the “little brother” to Stack Overflow.

My Questions

Next up, my questions. Even though I often have questions that feel like a great fit for Programmers SE, once I’m halfway writing them I tend to delete them again. The reason is simple: even though the “good subjective” kind of questions are the bread and butter of Programmers SE, I’m probably too exact to ask a subjective question. However, the one question that got this post rolling is still worth noting:

My Answers

Like many people I have a certain mental threshold before I post anything on a public site like Stack Overflow. However, I was determined to overcome or ignore the threshold for the Stack Exchange Challenge. Nonetheless, at the time of writing this, I came up with zero answers.

Perhaps in the future I will answer a question or two (heck, I may even answer my own question), but until then, this section is shamefully empty…

Interesting questions

Now this is the good part of Programmers Stack Exchange. Although often subjective or even “whiny”, there are quite a few questions that are interesting or plain fun to read! Some questions i enjoyed:

Community Wiki

Some fun ones on this site:

Conclusion

This particular Stack Exchange is a fun site. It’s a fine line though between subjectivity and questions following the “good” Q&A format. This fine line will probably keep me from becoming a regular poster. However, I can highly recommend the level of interaction I’ve currently settled on: follow them on Twitter for the occasional fun-to-read question that pops by.

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