<p>Over the last ~9 years I’ve spent way too much time answering questions on stack overflow.<br />
I don’t know why. I want to say it’s because I like helping people.<br />
It’s certainly not for “internet points”. In fact I despise the<br />
gamification on Stack Overflow so much I tried to hide it from myself.<br />
Here is what my view of Stack Overflow looks like </p>
<p>Notice all the points are missing. I feel an unhealthy influence of points on<br />
all sites that have them so I turn them off. I’m convinced someday some<br />
scientific research will show they are detrimental to well being and will push<br />
to ban them or at least shame them out of existence.<br />
In any case, yea, I spent way to much time answering questions on Stack<br />
Overflow. At the time I wrote this I had answered 27% of all the WebGL tagged<br />
questions on the site. Including other topics in total over 1900 answers. I also<br />
edited the tags of hundreds of wrongly tagged questions.<br />
Many of my answers took hours to write. It could be figuring out a working<br />
solution or it could be debugging someone’s code. I generally tried to post<br />
working code in as many answers as appropriate since in my opinion, working<br />
code is almost always better than just an explanation.<br />
As a recent example, someone was trying to glue together two libraries and was<br />
running into issues. I got their minimal repo runnable, tracked down the issue,<br />
posted a working solution, and filed a bug report on one of the libraries. The<br />
entire process took about 2.5 hours.<br />
I’ve also pointed out before that I wrote webglfundamentals.org<br />
and webgl2fundamentals.org in response to questions<br />
on stack overflow. WebGL is a verbose API. People ask questions and there is no simple<br />
answer. You could just give them some code that happens to work but they likely need<br />
16 chapters of tutorials to understand that code. That’s way too much for stack overflow.<br />
So, 9 years ago I started writing articles to explain WebGL. I tried to go out of<br />
my way not have them be self promoting. The don’t say “WebGL articles by GREGG TAVARES”<br />
In fact, except for the copyright license hidden in the code comments IIRC my name is no where on the website.<br />
I’d even be happy to remove my name from the license though I’m not quite sure what legal<br />
implications there are. Can I just make something up like “copyright webglfundamentals.org”?<br />
I have no idea.<br />
I even moved them from my github account to an organization. The hope was I<br />
could find more people to contribute if there was an org so you can participate<br />
in the org and not in my personal site. The sites are under “gfxfundametnals”<br />
not “greggman”. Unfortunately no one has stepped up to write anything though<br />
several volunteers have translated the articles into Chinese, Japanese, Russian,<br />
Korean, and other languages.<br />
In any case, once I’d written the articles I would point people to them on Stack Overflow<br />
when it seemed appropriate. If someone is clearly new to WebGL based on the issues they<br />
are having I might leave an answer that answers their specific question and then also leave<br />
a link to the effect of </p>
<p>You might find these articles useful. </p>
<p>If someone else had already written a good answer I might just add the same as a comment<br />
under the question.<br />
Similarly if one of the articles addressed their particular issue I might link directly<br />
to it. Of course if I was answering I’d always leave a full answer, not just a link.<br />
I’ve been doing this for the least 9 years. It’s clearly and unambiguously<br />
helpful to the user that asked the question and well as users reading later.<br />
An example of this came up recently. Some asked a question about how to use mat4 attributes.<br />
Someone else left an okay answer that answered the question, though it didn’t give a good<br />
example. But, given the answer was good enough, I added a comment. “You might find<br />
this article useful…”<br />
because the article has a better example.<br />
There were 2 other parts to the comment. </p>
<p>The answer stated something incorrect. They claimed drawing different shapes with instancing is impossible. My comment<br />
pointed out it was not impossible and specified how to do it. </p>
<p>That brought up another point which is if you want to draw multiple different models in<br />
a single draw call, I’d written an example to do that in a stack overflow answer and so I linked to it. </p>
<p>The next day I went to check if there was a new comment, in particular to see if the answerer<br />
had addressed their incorrect “it’s impossible” blurb. They had, they’d removed that part of the<br />
answer. But, further my comment had been deleted!?!?! </p>
<p>The comment was triple useful. It was useful because it explained how something was possible. It was useful<br />
because it linked to a better working example the questioner needed. And, it was useful because it linked<br />
to a more flexible solution.<br />
I didn’t know this at the time but there is no record of deleted comments. I’d thought maybe I was dreaming.<br />
That 2.5 hours I spent on some other answer happened between 4am and 6am. I meant to go to sleep but got<br />
sucked into debugging. When I was finished I checked for more questions, saw this one, and added the comment<br />
but maybe I was too tired and forgot to press “submit”?<br />
So I left the comment again, this time under the question itself since the answer had removed the<br />
part about something being impossible. This time I took a screenshot just so I’d know my memory wasn’t bad. </p>
<p>I checked back later in the day to find the comment deleted. This prompted me to ask on meta, the<br />
stack overflow about stack overflow, what to do about on topic comments being over zealously deleted.<br />
This is when I found out a bunch of things I didn’t know </p>
<p>Comments can be deleted by any moderator with for any reason. They don’t like you? They can delete<br />
all your comments. They hate LGBT people and believe you’re LGBT? They can delete your comments. This is<br />
one reason why there is no visible comment history. </p>
<p>Comments are apparently meant to be ephemeral.<br />
Several people claimed comments have absolutely zero value. Therefore their deletion is irrelevant. </p>
<p>I found both of these claims rather ludicrous. Comments have a voting system. Some comments get hundreds of<br />
vote. Why would anyone design a voting system for something that has zero value?<br />
Links to other stack overflow questions and answers in comments are scanned and used to show related<br />
links on the right side bar. If comments have zero value why would anyone make a system to scan them<br />
and display their info?<br />
But further, I found that, according to various members, the links I’d been leaving are considered spam!!!!<br />
According to these people, the links are nothing but self serving self promotion. More than worthless<br />
they considered them actively bad and I was a bad person for spamming the site with them.<br />
Here I was spending a few hundred hours writing these articles for<br />
users of stack overflow to reference when they needed more than would fit in an answer but apparently<br />
trying to tell them about these articles was against the rules.<br />
Some claimed, though it was frowned on, it was slightly less shitty spam if I spelled out I wrote the<br />
articles when linking to them. There was no guarantee they wouldn’t still be deleted, only that<br />
it was marginally less shitty if I declared my supposed conflict of interest.<br />
To put it another way, if someone else posted the links it would be more okay because there is no<br />
conflict of interest. I don’t buy that though. They’re basically saying the exact same comment<br />
by person A is ok but by person B is not. That’s effing stupid. Either the comment is useful<br />
to people reading it or it’s not. Who posted it is irrelevant.<br />
Well, this is straw that broke the camel’s back. </p>
<p>Spending all the time answering people’s questions and writing these article to help them<br />
was nothing but a burden anyway so I guess I should be thankful Stack Overflow corrected<br />
my delusion that I was being helpful and made it clear I was just a self serving spammer.<br />
It’s probably for the best anyway. I’ll find some more productive way to use my time.<br />
To be clear, a bit has flipped in my head. My joy or compulsion or whatever it<br />
was that made me want to participate on Stack Overflow is gone or curred. Time to move on. </p>
<p> Note: Changes to the Full-Text RSS free service</p>
