About this site
Welcome to overflow.tips!
Our goal is to improve the experience of Stack Overflow for the entire community of participants: both knowledge-seekers who ask questions, and knowledge-sharers who answer them.
This site is neither affiliated with nor supported by Stack Overflow (stackoverflow.com). The authors of this content are fully independent and offer advice that might be contrary to that of its staff.
We love Stack Overflow
Stack Overflow is unique in that it has amassed the largest publicly and freely available repository of information about programming and software engineering in one place, increasing in size daily. It’s an incredibly useful resource for programmers of all skill levels, who are also enabled and encouraged to contribute back to the community that they benefit from.
It’s a well-known fact that web search engines, such as Google, rank the content of Stack Overflow very highly, which supports its position as the most popular source of help available from a search. It’s essentially impossible to find a programmer who does not make use of the site on a regular basis.
Problems we want to address
Despite all of the ongoing community efforts in contributing and maintaining the site, Stack Overflow is not without its problems.
Like all web sites that accept user generated content, it can attract undesirable content from individuals who don’t have the community’s interests at heart. This includes the usual problems, such as spam or other trash content. Fortunately, there is a good amount of moderation that seeks to eliminate its impact, and we don’t feel the need to say anything further about that.
Another problem with user generated content, especially considering that the site attracts a lot of interest from people new to programming, is poor quality questions. Stack Overflow has a fairly well-defined set of rules about what sort of questions are not a good fit for the format of the site, but these rules often go ignored or misunderstood by those new to the site, leading to frustration. We feel this can be improved with education and coaching on asking good questions: the main reason for this site’s existence.
A derivative problem of poor quality questions is trolling and toxicity directed at those who have not yet learned how best to ask questions that fit within the site's guidelines. While moderation does keep this under control to some degree, it’s essentially impossible to eliminate all of the comments that you might perceive as unhelpful or negative. We also feel that the [downvote system for questions is problematic] and does not directly improve the quality of anything on the site. Our view is that this situation can also be improved with [coaching for people who answer questions]: another reason for this site.