5 ms·

> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either. Great, so you've l

by Veedrac 10y ago

> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either. Great, so you've learnt something for next time. > Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place. Sorry, but no. "Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, people who write code because they love it." Stack Overflow's biggest problem is that frequent contributors are getting fed up with the torrent of newbie questions from people who haven't programmed for a month. Imagine joining Math Overflow because you're an enthusiast mathematician... only 19 of every 20 questions are about how to multiply two digit numbers. Imagine joining a DIY group after years of practice only to find that you spend most of your time building cubes out of playdough and sticks. Have you tried reading the new queue on Stack Overflow? What does this[1] even mean? (I'm actually kind'a shocked about how good it's looking right now; only about half of the questions are utterly irredeemable.) People from the outside don't see this. There are filters in place and people who care to make them work. So all you see is the hostility and none of the reason. But please believe me when I say that it's not just us being cronies. We really do care about the site, and we just don't want to lose it. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37779153/how-to-enable-disable-tridion-cme-ribbon-based-on-any-metadata-field-value-chang http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37779153/how-to-enable-di...

reitanqild 10y ago
Then maybe just maybe add a rule that you must lurk before asking questions? When the site clearly looks like as a place for noobs to get questions answered for free then maybe don't complain that you get just that.
- mhurron 10y ago
  If they would search for the answer to their question, they would get it right now instead of waiting for someone to come in and answer the same question yet again. If you are starting out with something new, someone has already had the same problem you are. Your question has already been asked and answered.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Not sure I understand your comment. My take is that would be a good thing if beginners learned to search first.
  - piva00 10y ago
    Most of the beginner's problem is: how should I phrase this question I have? Instead of searching for specific jargon they don't know about they'll come up with their own terms to try to explain their problem. This is another acquired skill, nowadays to be a good programmer you need to learn how to search for documentation and how to phrase it and to learn that you need to become a programmer and be in contact with the technical jargon. I don't know another way to overcome this except for experience, what is exactly what newbies don't have so I try not to bash them but educate in how they can find the stuff they want.
- an_ko 10y ago
  "Duration of membership" seems a much less relevant metric here than "quality of post".
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Yep, I only suggest there might be a correlation that could be taken advantage of if the main scaling problem is moderation.
- weaksauce 10y ago
  The about us statement clearly states that it's a place for developers to "Developers trust Stack Overflow to help solve coding problems..." and "...our products aim to enrich the lives of developers as they grow and mature in their careers." Pretty clear that it's for professional programmers and not beginners. I agree that it is a bit frustrating to google something and have the SO question marked as a duplicate of another unanswered question. There are many places to learn the basics of programming and SO is not that place.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    > Pretty clear that it's for professional programmers and not beginners. SO itself begs to differ: > Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, people who write code because they love it. So very clearly not only professionals. Also as lambda points out somewhere in this discussion you might be a seasoned pro in one language and a noob in another.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- edem 10y ago
  Again. Read the FAQ. It is there. The site has numerous points where they tell you to read it and the guidelines. Your lack of attention is a poor excuse.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    We're not talking about my lack off attention. I've already mostly stopped asking on SO a while and when I do I only do after I have either found the answer or exhausted all other relevant options that I know off (and prepared mentally to be told that it is not relevant because of what I think is <technicality>[0] or not a good question because it is primarily opinion based etc. IMO we are talking about every newbie that find SO every day and those who don't like dealing with them. [0]: ok, that last one was on networking stackexchange or something.
Joeri 10y ago
Meh, I'm an experienced dev and no questions that I might consider posing would get past the filters, either for being too vague, too specific, asking for off-site resources or asking for opinions. To be honest I don't even know what a good SO question is anymore, and i have 8000+ rep. You may believe the current rules and moderator brute squads work to keep the site clean, but from where i'm standing they work to make the site useless.
- michaelbuckbee 10y ago
  Do you think that maybe it is that all of the questions that can be succinctly summed up in a tidy Q+A fashion have been asked within the languages you work in? I was messing around with Elixir (which is newish in the scheme of thing) and it's very different than asking about Rails/Ruby.
- Veedrac 10y ago
  Note that asking for opinions is frequently handled through Programmers.SE. Also, "too specific" hasn't been a close reason for quite a while now (and probably never applied to you anyway).
- jrumbut 10y ago
  Right on, I think the goal of having this pristine collection of content is not really feasible given how fast things change. Most good answers become bad after at most 4 years, on new tech it might not last a month. It's good that there are rules, but what really matters is the community. People are on there are trying to get help following their passion or making their living. The stakes are often very high for the asker, making a rude response particularly painful.
- Steeeve 10y ago
  I'm a moderator of a small stackexchange site. When we got started, there were all kinds of "this isn't an appropriate question for our site" arguments. I warned people that if you were too strict about what questions could be asked, nobody would want to stay. The counter-argument was you had to push for high quality questions early on to have a high quality community. Nobody seemed able to know what a high quality question was, nor could come to an agreement on what topics specifically would be allowed. I left the community and became a mod a year later because stackexchange asked me to - given that I had a high reputation on the site and the site itself was in danger of dying out. The site still exists today IMO, in spite of the users who are quick to criticize other peoples questions instead of answer them - and really because the topic itself is something a lot of people are interested in without a lot of other communities to go to for support. Stackexchange's system encourages people to be bitchy and put down other people's questions. They are in the position they are because of SEO - and because google and yahoo's alternative solutions were short sighted. If the monetization model was really all that strong they would lose their market position very quickly.
catnaroek 10y ago
I don't disagree with the gist of your argument: the quality of Stack Overflow would greatly diminish if people (newbies or otherwise) were allowed to ask questions whose answers are in the manual. But there are better ways to correct undesired behavior. For starters: (0) Don't downvote newbies to oblivion. That's just being a bully. (IMO, downvotes should be reserved for bad answers.) (1) When contributing an answer, provide an option to flag the answer as “taken straight from the manual”. I'll call such answers “RTFM answers” for short. (2) When a user receives their first RTFM answer, just tell them in a gentle way that they're expected to do their research, and perhaps provide useful links, depending on the tags associated to their question. (3) Only if a user consistently asks questions with RTFM answers, punish their behavior in some way: reputation loss, decreased question visibility, etc. I've asked my fair share of dumb questions and even posted dumb answers, and the community has treated me relatively kindly. (I have ~7k reputation as of now.) I wish others could be treated the same way.
- Veedrac 10y ago
  For the most part, downvotes on poor questions don't cascade a ton. Questions that go lower generally deserve it. Of those questions about a day old with score <= 0, only ~30% are less than 0. Of those <= -1, only ~30% are < -1 and only ~10% are < -2. Your RTFM tag doesn't seem to add very much over a moderate count of downvotes. I believe the rest of what you've said applies when downvotes happen.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
lambda 10y ago
I'm a user with 150k rep on SO. I'm not a casual user. However, I have been discouraged from using the site in recent years due to too many disagreements over closing and downvoting questions when actually just getting a little bit more clarification from the person asking the question would have helped a lot more. I've answered over 1,000 questions, ranging from very simple beginner level to some things that took a good deal of research or debugging to answer. I've seen my fair share of poor questions. If a question is completely off topic, then sure, I click the "close" button immediately. However, if it's on topic, and about some identifiable issue, but not specific enough, too poorly worded, or doesn't include a code sample, or the like, then I post a comment requesting clarification, and listing how they can improve their question. In some cases, they actually work with me, improve the question, and then I or someone else can answer it. In some cases, they just ignore my comments or continue with requests to just give them the code or the like, in which at that point I find it worth a downvote or close vote. But a lot of the times, I've seen perfectly good questions that were just a little confusingly worded, however I was able to tease out what they were getting at, I've done some research to find the answer, and come back, only to find the questions closed. Now I have an answer for the question, but can't actually post it. If I vote to reopen, sometimes even after editing it to clarify or getting the OP to edit it, it will generally languish with one or two reopen votes. Sometimes I'll then post on meta to complain about this behavior; people being way to quick to close. This will frequently lead to enough people clicking through to reopen it, but also a torrent of complaints about how the question really is bad and how we shouldn't let this kind of stuff on the site because it's destroying the community. The thing is, bad questions don't destroy the community. If they're bad questions, they'll generally fall off the front page and get forgotten about. They don't really cause much in the way of problems; they're just a few extra bits. But this hostile behavior does destroy the community. It pushes beginners away, who may ask better questions later once they get a bit more of a handle on what they're doing. And it pushed people like me away; people who are there to help, and willing to do so even for beginners. I think that Stack Overflow is a very different thing than MathOverflow. Professional programmers sometimes run into thing that they need to do that they are complete beginners at; you may have years of experience writing Java, but then you wind up needing to integrate with and write a plugin for something written in Ruby, and you really have very little experience with it and so don't know where to look. Due to the huge numbers of different languages, APIs, platforms, and so on, rapid pace of change, and shortage of qualified people with the exact relevant experience, almost everyone is a beginner at something they are doing at some point in their career. Furthermore, some people just don't know how to ask good questions online. It's a skill that takes some time to learn. If you're asking a question to someone in person, they may already have more context about what you're doing, or will be able to more easily ask you questions to clarify and sit down with you to work through it, while asking good questions online can involve a certain amount of preparation in advance to narrow the issue down to a self contained, reproducible test case, to phrase the question appropriately, and so on. So while I agree that complete junk should be closed and delete, and people who just post "plz gimmeh teh codez" should be discouraged, I am really frustrated by the way people extend that to things that are just beginner questions, poorly worded questions from people who aren't good at asking questions online or aren't good at English, or the like.
jasonzemos 10y ago
This is exactly why the founders of SO, reddit, even HN itself implemented a solution with certain mathematical brilliance and you've just recreated the problem again. The absolute bottom line is that no question is too stupid -- they're only too stupid for you and your inured in-group of community insiders. If you don't want to see these questions, have the algorithms hide them from you; have people who have been programming for two months deal with the questions from people programming for one month. All you are doing here is injecting your own over-weighted bias into the algorithms and creating yet another tyranny of moderation for everyone that culminates with every single online community monotonically decreasing off peak from the point of its inception. Moderators should be more -- if not entirely -- concerned with tweaking algorithms rather than tweaking members and activity directly.
metafunctor 10y ago
I would imagine that if one was versed with the Tridion CME, whatever that is, the question would make some sense. Sure, there are typos, and the question could be worded better. But is it the kind of question that deserves the “fuck off” it got?
cooper12 10y ago
I feel a similar struggle on Wikipedia where I have to revert a ton of good-faith edits. The editors think they're improving the article, but it always falls afoul of being original research or trivia. I'd hate to discourage potential editors so I always explain why in human terms [0] in the edit summaries but to them it probably solidifies in their mind that Wikipedia is byzantine and bureaucratic. I'd much rather prefer to write content than edit war with newbies, but unfortunately every article has a half-life [1] if its not maintained. Just like for Stack Overflow, caring about the health and quality of the community is often mistaken for elitism and being territorial. (Or maybe it's a natural defense against eternal september?) [2] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WTF%3F_OMG!_TMD_TLA._ARG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WTF%3F_OMG!_TMD_TLA....! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_half-life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_half-life [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
jrcii 10y ago
I am often puzzled by Stack Overflow posts. Very often, the answer or leading link to a technical question I'm searching for is a Stack Overflow post and in the overwhelming majority of those cases the posts are marked as closed for being off-topic.
exolymph 10y ago
Nothing on the Stack Overflow page I came to from Google says anything about those cultural norms. This is what it says instead: "Stack Overflow is a community of 4.7 million programmers, just like you, helping each other." And then the actual answers are snotty people shooting down a newbie. Forgive me for not getting a great impression.
kaustubh 10y ago
One scenario you fail to address is, that programmers frequently switch between technology stacks. I am a fairly proficient programmer in C++, but a simpler question in javascript might trip me. If you'are a javscript ninja, it might look like a multiplication question to you, but I am sure there would be cases where you need help with something which you haven't been doing for years.

by Veedrac 10y ago

reitanqild 10y ago

Then maybe just maybe add a rule that you must lurk before asking questions? When the site clearly looks like as a place for noobs to get questions answered for free then maybe don't complain that you get just that.

mhurron 10y ago
If they would search for the answer to their question, they would get it right now instead of waiting for someone to come in and answer the same question yet again. If you are starting out with something new, someone has already had the same problem you are. Your question has already been asked and answered.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Not sure I understand your comment. My take is that would be a good thing if beginners learned to search first.
- piva00 10y ago
  Most of the beginner's problem is: how should I phrase this question I have? Instead of searching for specific jargon they don't know about they'll come up with their own terms to try to explain their problem. This is another acquired skill, nowadays to be a good programmer you need to learn how to search for documentation and how to phrase it and to learn that you need to become a programmer and be in contact with the technical jargon. I don't know another way to overcome this except for experience, what is exactly what newbies don't have so I try not to bash them but educate in how they can find the stuff they want.
an_ko 10y ago
"Duration of membership" seems a much less relevant metric here than "quality of post".
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Yep, I only suggest there might be a correlation that could be taken advantage of if the main scaling problem is moderation.
weaksauce 10y ago
The about us statement clearly states that it's a place for developers to "Developers trust Stack Overflow to help solve coding problems..." and "...our products aim to enrich the lives of developers as they grow and mature in their careers." Pretty clear that it's for professional programmers and not beginners. I agree that it is a bit frustrating to google something and have the SO question marked as a duplicate of another unanswered question. There are many places to learn the basics of programming and SO is not that place.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  > Pretty clear that it's for professional programmers and not beginners. SO itself begs to differ: > Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, people who write code because they love it. So very clearly not only professionals. Also as lambda points out somewhere in this discussion you might be a seasoned pro in one language and a noob in another.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
edem 10y ago
Again. Read the FAQ. It is there. The site has numerous points where they tell you to read it and the guidelines. Your lack of attention is a poor excuse.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  We're not talking about my lack off attention. I've already mostly stopped asking on SO a while and when I do I only do after I have either found the answer or exhausted all other relevant options that I know off (and prepared mentally to be told that it is not relevant because of what I think is <technicality>[0] or not a good question because it is primarily opinion based etc. IMO we are talking about every newbie that find SO every day and those who don't like dealing with them. [0]: ok, that last one was on networking stackexchange or something.

Joeri 10y ago

Meh, I'm an experienced dev and no questions that I might consider posing would get past the filters, either for being too vague, too specific, asking for off-site resources or asking for opinions. To be honest I don't even know what a good SO question is anymore, and i have 8000+ rep. You may believe the current rules and moderator brute squads work to keep the site clean, but from where i'm standing they work to make the site useless.

michaelbuckbee 10y ago
Do you think that maybe it is that all of the questions that can be succinctly summed up in a tidy Q+A fashion have been asked within the languages you work in? I was messing around with Elixir (which is newish in the scheme of thing) and it's very different than asking about Rails/Ruby.
Veedrac 10y ago
Note that asking for opinions is frequently handled through Programmers.SE. Also, "too specific" hasn't been a close reason for quite a while now (and probably never applied to you anyway).
jrumbut 10y ago
Right on, I think the goal of having this pristine collection of content is not really feasible given how fast things change. Most good answers become bad after at most 4 years, on new tech it might not last a month. It's good that there are rules, but what really matters is the community. People are on there are trying to get help following their passion or making their living. The stakes are often very high for the asker, making a rude response particularly painful.
Steeeve 10y ago
I'm a moderator of a small stackexchange site. When we got started, there were all kinds of "this isn't an appropriate question for our site" arguments. I warned people that if you were too strict about what questions could be asked, nobody would want to stay. The counter-argument was you had to push for high quality questions early on to have a high quality community. Nobody seemed able to know what a high quality question was, nor could come to an agreement on what topics specifically would be allowed. I left the community and became a mod a year later because stackexchange asked me to - given that I had a high reputation on the site and the site itself was in danger of dying out. The site still exists today IMO, in spite of the users who are quick to criticize other peoples questions instead of answer them - and really because the topic itself is something a lot of people are interested in without a lot of other communities to go to for support. Stackexchange's system encourages people to be bitchy and put down other people's questions. They are in the position they are because of SEO - and because google and yahoo's alternative solutions were short sighted. If the monetization model was really all that strong they would lose their market position very quickly.

catnaroek 10y ago

I don't disagree with the gist of your argument: the quality of Stack Overflow would greatly diminish if people (newbies or otherwise) were allowed to ask questions whose answers are in the manual. But there are better ways to correct undesired behavior. For starters: (0) Don't downvote newbies to oblivion. That's just being a bully. (IMO, downvotes should be reserved for bad answers.) (1) When contributing an answer, provide an option to flag the answer as “taken straight from the manual”. I'll call such answers “RTFM answers” for short. (2) When a user receives their first RTFM answer, just tell them in a gentle way that they're expected to do their research, and perhaps provide useful links, depending on the tags associated to their question. (3) Only if a user consistently asks questions with RTFM answers, punish their behavior in some way: reputation loss, decreased question visibility, etc. I've asked my fair share of dumb questions and even posted dumb answers, and the community has treated me relatively kindly. (I have ~7k reputation as of now.) I wish others could be treated the same way.

Veedrac 10y ago
For the most part, downvotes on poor questions don't cascade a ton. Questions that go lower generally deserve it. Of those questions about a day old with score <= 0, only ~30% are less than 0. Of those <= -1, only ~30% are < -1 and only ~10% are < -2. Your RTFM tag doesn't seem to add very much over a moderate count of downvotes. I believe the rest of what you've said applies when downvotes happen.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

lambda 10y ago

I'm a user with 150k rep on SO. I'm not a casual user. However, I have been discouraged from using the site in recent years due to too many disagreements over closing and downvoting questions when actually just getting a little bit more clarification from the person asking the question would have helped a lot more. I've answered over 1,000 questions, ranging from very simple beginner level to some things that took a good deal of research or debugging to answer. I've seen my fair share of poor questions. If a question is completely off topic, then sure, I click the "close" button immediately. However, if it's on topic, and about some identifiable issue, but not specific enough, too poorly worded, or doesn't include a code sample, or the like, then I post a comment requesting clarification, and listing how they can improve their question. In some cases, they actually work with me, improve the question, and then I or someone else can answer it. In some cases, they just ignore my comments or continue with requests to just give them the code or the like, in which at that point I find it worth a downvote or close vote. But a lot of the times, I've seen perfectly good questions that were just a little confusingly worded, however I was able to tease out what they were getting at, I've done some research to find the answer, and come back, only to find the questions closed. Now I have an answer for the question, but can't actually post it. If I vote to reopen, sometimes even after editing it to clarify or getting the OP to edit it, it will generally languish with one or two reopen votes. Sometimes I'll then post on meta to complain about this behavior; people being way to quick to close. This will frequently lead to enough people clicking through to reopen it, but also a torrent of complaints about how the question really is bad and how we shouldn't let this kind of stuff on the site because it's destroying the community. The thing is, bad questions don't destroy the community. If they're bad questions, they'll generally fall off the front page and get forgotten about. They don't really cause much in the way of problems; they're just a few extra bits. But this hostile behavior does destroy the community. It pushes beginners away, who may ask better questions later once they get a bit more of a handle on what they're doing. And it pushed people like me away; people who are there to help, and willing to do so even for beginners. I think that Stack Overflow is a very different thing than MathOverflow. Professional programmers sometimes run into thing that they need to do that they are complete beginners at; you may have years of experience writing Java, but then you wind up needing to integrate with and write a plugin for something written in Ruby, and you really have very little experience with it and so don't know where to look. Due to the huge numbers of different languages, APIs, platforms, and so on, rapid pace of change, and shortage of qualified people with the exact relevant experience, almost everyone is a beginner at something they are doing at some point in their career. Furthermore, some people just don't know how to ask good questions online. It's a skill that takes some time to learn. If you're asking a question to someone in person, they may already have more context about what you're doing, or will be able to more easily ask you questions to clarify and sit down with you to work through it, while asking good questions online can involve a certain amount of preparation in advance to narrow the issue down to a self contained, reproducible test case, to phrase the question appropriately, and so on. So while I agree that complete junk should be closed and delete, and people who just post "plz gimmeh teh codez" should be discouraged, I am really frustrated by the way people extend that to things that are just beginner questions, poorly worded questions from people who aren't good at asking questions online or aren't good at English, or the like.

jasonzemos 10y ago

This is exactly why the founders of SO, reddit, even HN itself implemented a solution with certain mathematical brilliance and you've just recreated the problem again. The absolute bottom line is that no question is too stupid -- they're only too stupid for you and your inured in-group of community insiders. If you don't want to see these questions, have the algorithms hide them from you; have people who have been programming for two months deal with the questions from people programming for one month. All you are doing here is injecting your own over-weighted bias into the algorithms and creating yet another tyranny of moderation for everyone that culminates with every single online community monotonically decreasing off peak from the point of its inception. Moderators should be more -- if not entirely -- concerned with tweaking algorithms rather than tweaking members and activity directly.

metafunctor 10y ago

I would imagine that if one was versed with the Tridion CME, whatever that is, the question would make some sense. Sure, there are typos, and the question could be worded better. But is it the kind of question that deserves the “fuck off” it got?

cooper12 10y ago

I feel a similar struggle on Wikipedia where I have to revert a ton of good-faith edits. The editors think they're improving the article, but it always falls afoul of being original research or trivia. I'd hate to discourage potential editors so I always explain why in human terms [0] in the edit summaries but to them it probably solidifies in their mind that Wikipedia is byzantine and bureaucratic. I'd much rather prefer to write content than edit war with newbies, but unfortunately every article has a half-life [1] if its not maintained. Just like for Stack Overflow, caring about the health and quality of the community is often mistaken for elitism and being territorial. (Or maybe it's a natural defense against eternal september?) [2] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WTF%3F_OMG!_TMD_TLA._ARG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WTF%3F_OMG!_TMD_TLA....! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_half-life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_half-life [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

jrcii 10y ago

I am often puzzled by Stack Overflow posts. Very often, the answer or leading link to a technical question I'm searching for is a Stack Overflow post and in the overwhelming majority of those cases the posts are marked as closed for being off-topic.

exolymph 10y ago

Nothing on the Stack Overflow page I came to from Google says anything about those cultural norms. This is what it says instead: "Stack Overflow is a community of 4.7 million programmers, just like you, helping each other." And then the actual answers are snotty people shooting down a newbie. Forgive me for not getting a great impression.

kaustubh 10y ago

One scenario you fail to address is, that programmers frequently switch between technology stacks. I am a fairly proficient programmer in C++, but a simpler question in javascript might trip me. If you'are a javscript ninja, it might look like a multiplication question to you, but I am sure there would be cases where you need help with something which you haven't been doing for years.