4 ms·

The premise that you need to "earn points and privileges" is the part I disagree with, though. I want a Q&A site where I can ask a question and get an answer w

The premise that you need to "earn points and privileges" is the part I disagree with, though. I want a Q&A site where I can ask a question and get an answer without having to waste months doing pointless stuff to get some imaginary Internet Pointzzz attached to my name.

bhandziuk 10y ago
Posting on Meta is available once you have 5 rep. You start with 1 so getting to 5 means you get one upvote on one question/answer, or you make two accepted edits. Asking a question can be done with 1 rep (i.e. a brand new user) and you can answer questions anonymously. The only thing which requires any rep is commenting at the barrier is 50 points. http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges These barriers seem really low. If you think you need to do months of work to participate that's just false. On the other hand if participation to you means access to more of the moderation tools, site diagnostics (view votes of various sorts), etc. you do need to put your time in.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  Yeah; but the problem for me is I only ask difficult questions (easy ones I won't need a Q&A site for), and those are impossible to get answered unless you place a "bounty" on them. And you can't place a "bounty" until you earn the imaginary points. I mean, the real problem, that aside, is I disagree with the entire concept of gamification. The entire premise makes for terrible communities full of rules-lawyering assholes who are only there to earn useless points. Wikipedia's turned into that. StackOverflow's turned into that. It's a bad idea, it didn't work, we should give it up.
  - bhandziuk 10y ago
    Where else can you go to have a difficult question answered? But what's the alternative? Gamification encourages many people to participate, free sites with ads mean more people participate too because paying sucks (though the ads on SE are very non-intrusive I find), allowing the (vocal) community to drive the direction of the site encourages a certain type of participation (because a site which heads in a direction the community doesn't support dies). All of these things generally lead to more questions being answered. What would the ideal site be? If the ideal site is not perfect out of the box then how to you improve it without a meta-like structure? How do you support quality content which allows people to be satisfied with the sites content while having moderation that satisfies appropriate participation? Hacker News has moderators, so does Reddit, people complain about them all the time (more so on Reddit). What can we do to be better here? Not to say you have the answers but these are difficult questions and I think SO gets it more right than the rest.
    - blakeyrat 10y ago
      I'm telling you what I want. I never said it currently exists. > Gamification encourages many people to participate, Yes, then it also encourages them to be dicks to new users and post nothing but rude and condescending copy-and-paste snippets and vote to close or delete literally anything you post. > allowing the (vocal) community to drive the direction of the site encourages a certain type of participation (because a site which heads in a direction the community doesn't support dies). Yes, but if the community is full of dicks, that only steers the community to cater to dicks. Non-dicks don't get involved in the process because they all left the site the first time they tried to participate and some dick discouraged them. > What can we do to be better here? Who is "we" and where is "here"? One thing you can do, if you're representing an organization, make that clear before posting. > Not to say you have the answers but these are difficult questions and I think SO gets it more right than the rest. Possibly, but that's a pretty low bar. --- You're right that I don't really have any better suggestions, but StackOverflow makes a lot of assumptions I vehemently disagree with: * That people who have the most imaginary internet pointzzz are the best qualified people to moderate content (especially when those pointzzz are assigned by an easily-gamed computer.) Similarly, that these people are also best-qualified to represent the "silent majority" of read-only users who use the site when considering site changes * That the best way to determine which questions get answers has anything at all to do with the person who posted it * That features of a site should be "gated" by imaginary internet pointzzz, especially extremely basic features like writing a comment on your own question. --- EDIT: also you ask "where else can you go to get a difficult question answered?" Well, since StackOverflow has a track record of exactly 0% at that for me, as far as I'm concerned: anywhere else.

bhandziuk 10y ago

Posting on Meta is available once you have 5 rep. You start with 1 so getting to 5 means you get one upvote on one question/answer, or you make two accepted edits. Asking a question can be done with 1 rep (i.e. a brand new user) and you can answer questions anonymously. The only thing which requires any rep is commenting at the barrier is 50 points. http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges http://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges These barriers seem really low. If you think you need to do months of work to participate that's just false. On the other hand if participation to you means access to more of the moderation tools, site diagnostics (view votes of various sorts), etc. you do need to put your time in.

blakeyrat 10y ago
Yeah; but the problem for me is I only ask difficult questions (easy ones I won't need a Q&A site for), and those are impossible to get answered unless you place a "bounty" on them. And you can't place a "bounty" until you earn the imaginary points. I mean, the real problem, that aside, is I disagree with the entire concept of gamification. The entire premise makes for terrible communities full of rules-lawyering assholes who are only there to earn useless points. Wikipedia's turned into that. StackOverflow's turned into that. It's a bad idea, it didn't work, we should give it up.
- bhandziuk 10y ago
  Where else can you go to have a difficult question answered? But what's the alternative? Gamification encourages many people to participate, free sites with ads mean more people participate too because paying sucks (though the ads on SE are very non-intrusive I find), allowing the (vocal) community to drive the direction of the site encourages a certain type of participation (because a site which heads in a direction the community doesn't support dies). All of these things generally lead to more questions being answered. What would the ideal site be? If the ideal site is not perfect out of the box then how to you improve it without a meta-like structure? How do you support quality content which allows people to be satisfied with the sites content while having moderation that satisfies appropriate participation? Hacker News has moderators, so does Reddit, people complain about them all the time (more so on Reddit). What can we do to be better here? Not to say you have the answers but these are difficult questions and I think SO gets it more right than the rest.
  - blakeyrat 10y ago
    I'm telling you what I want. I never said it currently exists. > Gamification encourages many people to participate, Yes, then it also encourages them to be dicks to new users and post nothing but rude and condescending copy-and-paste snippets and vote to close or delete literally anything you post. > allowing the (vocal) community to drive the direction of the site encourages a certain type of participation (because a site which heads in a direction the community doesn't support dies). Yes, but if the community is full of dicks, that only steers the community to cater to dicks. Non-dicks don't get involved in the process because they all left the site the first time they tried to participate and some dick discouraged them. > What can we do to be better here? Who is "we" and where is "here"? One thing you can do, if you're representing an organization, make that clear before posting. > Not to say you have the answers but these are difficult questions and I think SO gets it more right than the rest. Possibly, but that's a pretty low bar. --- You're right that I don't really have any better suggestions, but StackOverflow makes a lot of assumptions I vehemently disagree with: * That people who have the most imaginary internet pointzzz are the best qualified people to moderate content (especially when those pointzzz are assigned by an easily-gamed computer.) Similarly, that these people are also best-qualified to represent the "silent majority" of read-only users who use the site when considering site changes * That the best way to determine which questions get answers has anything at all to do with the person who posted it * That features of a site should be "gated" by imaginary internet pointzzz, especially extremely basic features like writing a comment on your own question. --- EDIT: also you ask "where else can you go to get a difficult question answered?" Well, since StackOverflow has a track record of exactly 0% at that for me, as far as I'm concerned: anywhere else.