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Disclaimer: I code for Stack Overflow and before that I was a mod. Many of these comments lack a sense of proportions regarding Stack Overflow. We get 8,000 qu

by sklivvz1971 10y ago

Disclaimer: I code for Stack Overflow and before that I was a mod. Many of these comments lack a sense of proportions regarding Stack Overflow. We get 8,000 questions... per day. There are more than 30 million posts, 12 millions of which are questions. Yeah, we have to close a lot of them, and we keep the ones which we can answer. Lists are disallowed for a reason. Opinions are disallowed for a reason. We aim to build a library that will last for years longer than solving the problem for a single person. Another thing that people don't get is that Stack Overflow is basically a school. When programmers say their profession is a life-long learning exercise... they do it mainly on Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is not a community. Is the school of all developers. We can only ask them to be nice, but you can't expect everyone to be exactly how you expect. It just won't happen. While we do moderate rudeness, it can only be a post-hoc exercise where users help us identify such behavior. EDIT: I removed a paragraph that was very misleading and added a clearer one. Sorry about that.

jrumbut 10y ago
I guess what I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to the community than rudeness and vitriol. If I post a question that asks for an opinion or list, someone will swoop in and edit it or delete it. Why can't we do the same when someone embeds a little bit of professional problem solving with a lot of unprofessional personal attacks?
- hackuser 10y ago
  > I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to the community than rudeness and vitriol An excellent question, which leads us to the heart of the matter ...
  - jrumbut 10y ago
    I also wonder if there is any connection between the low value put on being polite and welcoming and the struggles to create bring more diversity to our community. StackOverflow is where professional development happens, and so there is some responsibility on them to make sure that development is healthy.
- sklivvz1971 10y ago
  Thanks for your comment, let me give you more context. > I guess what I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to the community than rudeness and vitriol. Lists were allowed, turned out to be an unmaintainable mess with our current format, which was sincerely hurting the community. The top voted content was bad content. This in turn primed and encouraged users to post even more bad content. Rudeness and offensive behavior against other users are not tolerated. No ifs and no buts. I might have given you the impression that we allow users to insult each other. We don't. http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-be-nice-policy-code-of-conduct-updated-with-your-feedback http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-b... However, unless we put a word filter on any possible bad word, there will always be rough comments. The only thing we can do is ask the users to flag such comments and remove them as appropriate. A user flagged the comment one hour ago and the comment has since been deleted. Read facebook. Read twitter. Stack overflow is not remotely like those places, yet it is one of the top 30 networks in the world by traffic. We heavily moderate rudeness, but we are not going to be able to moderate every opinion that someone is going to find remotely offensive before it offends anyone. What you are expecting is simply not realistic. > If I post a question that asks for an opinion or list, someone will swoop in and edit it or delete it. Why can't we do the same when someone embeds a little bit of professional problem solving with a lot of unprofessional personal attacks? As I said, we do delete such comments, as we did in this case.
  - jrumbut 10y ago
    For my own context, I've been a StackOverflow user since the more free-form days. I appreciate the focus on quality, it has created a culture of quality. I think a focus on kindness can similarly create a culture of kindness. I'm not looking for advanced sentiment detection algorithms or even new rules, just a few blog posts and some leadership.
jedberg 10y ago
> Lists are disallowed for a reason. Opinions are disallowed for a reason but then > Stack Overflow is not a community. Is the school of all developers. Maybe the school you went to is different, but the one I went to definitely was a place where we got lists of useful things and had professors and classmates who expressed their opinions, which we then discussed. If you want to be a school, then discussions of opinions is the number one thing you should be encouraging. But regardless of that, the problems go much deeper. As I commented before, when I try to answer a question, it gets pushed down so that an inaccurate answer can be upvoted and accepted, and when I ask a question I get marked as "duplicate" when it is in fact the exact opposite of the question it is supposedly a duplicate of. It's a lot easier to get some points for marking a question as a duplicate than it is to actually read the supposedly duplicate question to find out it isn't a duplicate but just happens to have some of the same words.
- Latty 10y ago
  The discussion doesn't generally go on in the margins of the textbook. If you want a discussion, great - yes, there is value in that, but it's a transient value. Use an IRC channel or the SO chats. As to your second point - you don't get points for voting to close a question or flagging one. Yes, sometimes people make mistakes voting, but generally a comment clarifying why they are wrong is enough, if that doesn't work, flag the issue.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Comparing Stack Overflow to the textbook is not very relevant: manuals etc are textbooks. Stackoverflow is a forum with very customized rules. Or if I'm generous: a reference.
    - sklivvz1971 10y ago
      Stack overflow is not a "forum". It was born as a mix of forums, blogs, wikipedia and reddit. See our original about page here: https://web.archive.org/web/20120131154217/http://stackoverflow.com/about https://web.archive.org/web/20120131154217/http://stackoverf...
reitanqild 10y ago
> Many of these comments lack a sense of proportions regarding Stack Overflow. We get 8,000 questions... per day. Then again you seem to enjoy it; your whole site seems like a big funnel to attract questions. If you feel you get too many homework or beginner questions I have mentioned here and elsewhere I think some ideas to reduce the workload while minimally impacting target users. To be blunt: IMO SO at the moment seems to be all about raking up user counts and question counts while lamenting the workload.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Correction: it is of course not all about raking up numbers, -lots of questions are answered. Still it feels weird to talk about the workload without adjusting the threshold for asking.
hackuser 10y ago
That may serve Stack Overflow's interests, but not the interests of many users. > So what if he calls a question stupid? This question should be closed. :) Such behavior isn't acceptable in any serious place, from the workplace to the classroom to any polite conversation to even on HN. The reasons are very well-known, even to children, and if you don't know them they are easy to find. > We can only ask them to be nice Another question that should be closed. There is plenty of research and implementations of solutions to this problem. Stack Overflow isn't helpless. Many users are unhappy; it might be worth doing something about it.
- sklivvz1971 10y ago
  I removed the first question as "unclear what you are asking". However the second one should be left open. We do read the research, but there are no clear answers there, yet. Edit: typo

jrumbut 10y ago

I guess what I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to the community than rudeness and vitriol. If I post a question that asks for an opinion or list, someone will swoop in and edit it or delete it. Why can't we do the same when someone embeds a little bit of professional problem solving with a lot of unprofessional personal attacks?

hackuser 10y ago
> I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to the community than rudeness and vitriol An excellent question, which leads us to the heart of the matter ...
- jrumbut 10y ago
  I also wonder if there is any connection between the low value put on being polite and welcoming and the struggles to create bring more diversity to our community. StackOverflow is where professional development happens, and so there is some responsibility on them to make sure that development is healthy.
sklivvz1971 10y ago
Thanks for your comment, let me give you more context. > I guess what I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to the community than rudeness and vitriol. Lists were allowed, turned out to be an unmaintainable mess with our current format, which was sincerely hurting the community. The top voted content was bad content. This in turn primed and encouraged users to post even more bad content. Rudeness and offensive behavior against other users are not tolerated. No ifs and no buts. I might have given you the impression that we allow users to insult each other. We don't. http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-be-nice-policy-code-of-conduct-updated-with-your-feedback http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-b... However, unless we put a word filter on any possible bad word, there will always be rough comments. The only thing we can do is ask the users to flag such comments and remove them as appropriate. A user flagged the comment one hour ago and the comment has since been deleted. Read facebook. Read twitter. Stack overflow is not remotely like those places, yet it is one of the top 30 networks in the world by traffic. We heavily moderate rudeness, but we are not going to be able to moderate every opinion that someone is going to find remotely offensive before it offends anyone. What you are expecting is simply not realistic. > If I post a question that asks for an opinion or list, someone will swoop in and edit it or delete it. Why can't we do the same when someone embeds a little bit of professional problem solving with a lot of unprofessional personal attacks? As I said, we do delete such comments, as we did in this case.
- jrumbut 10y ago
  For my own context, I've been a StackOverflow user since the more free-form days. I appreciate the focus on quality, it has created a culture of quality. I think a focus on kindness can similarly create a culture of kindness. I'm not looking for advanced sentiment detection algorithms or even new rules, just a few blog posts and some leadership.

jedberg 10y ago

> Lists are disallowed for a reason. Opinions are disallowed for a reason but then > Stack Overflow is not a community. Is the school of all developers. Maybe the school you went to is different, but the one I went to definitely was a place where we got lists of useful things and had professors and classmates who expressed their opinions, which we then discussed. If you want to be a school, then discussions of opinions is the number one thing you should be encouraging. But regardless of that, the problems go much deeper. As I commented before, when I try to answer a question, it gets pushed down so that an inaccurate answer can be upvoted and accepted, and when I ask a question I get marked as "duplicate" when it is in fact the exact opposite of the question it is supposedly a duplicate of. It's a lot easier to get some points for marking a question as a duplicate than it is to actually read the supposedly duplicate question to find out it isn't a duplicate but just happens to have some of the same words.

Latty 10y ago
The discussion doesn't generally go on in the margins of the textbook. If you want a discussion, great - yes, there is value in that, but it's a transient value. Use an IRC channel or the SO chats. As to your second point - you don't get points for voting to close a question or flagging one. Yes, sometimes people make mistakes voting, but generally a comment clarifying why they are wrong is enough, if that doesn't work, flag the issue.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Comparing Stack Overflow to the textbook is not very relevant: manuals etc are textbooks. Stackoverflow is a forum with very customized rules. Or if I'm generous: a reference.
  - sklivvz1971 10y ago
    Stack overflow is not a "forum". It was born as a mix of forums, blogs, wikipedia and reddit. See our original about page here: https://web.archive.org/web/20120131154217/http://stackoverflow.com/about https://web.archive.org/web/20120131154217/http://stackoverf...

reitanqild 10y ago

> Many of these comments lack a sense of proportions regarding Stack Overflow. We get 8,000 questions... per day. Then again you seem to enjoy it; your whole site seems like a big funnel to attract questions. If you feel you get too many homework or beginner questions I have mentioned here and elsewhere I think some ideas to reduce the workload while minimally impacting target users. To be blunt: IMO SO at the moment seems to be all about raking up user counts and question counts while lamenting the workload.

reitanqild 10y ago
Correction: it is of course not all about raking up numbers, -lots of questions are answered. Still it feels weird to talk about the workload without adjusting the threshold for asking.

hackuser 10y ago

That may serve Stack Overflow's interests, but not the interests of many users. > So what if he calls a question stupid? This question should be closed. :) Such behavior isn't acceptable in any serious place, from the workplace to the classroom to any polite conversation to even on HN. The reasons are very well-known, even to children, and if you don't know them they are easy to find. > We can only ask them to be nice Another question that should be closed. There is plenty of research and implementations of solutions to this problem. Stack Overflow isn't helpless. Many users are unhappy; it might be worth doing something about it.

sklivvz1971 10y ago
I removed the first question as "unclear what you are asking". However the second one should be left open. We do read the research, but there are no clear answers there, yet. Edit: typo