4 ms·

Funny you mentioned "keyword stuffing"... Came across a related sub-thread on reddit earlier today [1], where a bunch of folks were trash-talking one of the top

by Shog9 10y ago

Funny you mentioned "keyword stuffing"... Came across a related sub-thread on reddit earlier today [1], where a bunch of folks were trash-talking one of the top answerers in the [java] tags for his efforts in marking duplicates and removing irrelevant tags. There is an insane amount of hostility directed toward anyone trying to minimize the noise Stack Overflow generates, I'm afraid. Folks feel entitled to spam the whole site - indeed, the whole Internet - with their questions, and take umbrage at anyone who might stand in their way. So a lot of folks are left feeling that their choice is between trying to help and getting blasted with vitriol, or just walking away and letting entropy win. I find it hard to blame those who opt for the latter route. We do try to combat this to a degree by deleting unanswered or poorly-received questions after some nominal period of time; of course, given search engines' fascination with boosting the rank of recent content, this can only help so much - there are several thousand new questions a day in the most popular (and thus crowded) tags, where you can imagine the inherent motivation on the part of each author is to optimize for views rather than specificity or clarity. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/54f62f/the_decline_of_stack_overflow/d81fzkz https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/54f62f/the_dec...

Silhouette 10y ago
So a lot of folks are left feeling that their choice is between trying to help and getting blasted with vitriol, or just walking away and letting entropy win. I find it hard to blame those who opt for the latter route. As do I. In fact, I empathise with them, because I've been a high profile contributor to discussion/support forums at various points in the past. I've seen firsthand how the culture in each forum makes a huge difference to how motivated you are to continue helping out there. Unfortunately, while that might explain my original observations about the poor signal/noise ratio and problems with effectively spamming search engines that SO has today, it doesn't make those observations any less accurate. The only way I see this improving now is if those running the SO network intervene directly, first by encouraging a more constructive approach and being clear with high-ranking contributors on what that involves, and then if necessary by starting to reduce the privileges of those who don't play along regardless of their score in the game and ultimately, if necessary, kicking the bad apples off the system entirely.

by Shog9 10y ago

Silhouette 10y ago

So a lot of folks are left feeling that their choice is between trying to help and getting blasted with vitriol, or just walking away and letting entropy win. I find it hard to blame those who opt for the latter route. As do I. In fact, I empathise with them, because I've been a high profile contributor to discussion/support forums at various points in the past. I've seen firsthand how the culture in each forum makes a huge difference to how motivated you are to continue helping out there. Unfortunately, while that might explain my original observations about the poor signal/noise ratio and problems with effectively spamming search engines that SO has today, it doesn't make those observations any less accurate. The only way I see this improving now is if those running the SO network intervene directly, first by encouraging a more constructive approach and being clear with high-ranking contributors on what that involves, and then if necessary by starting to reduce the privileges of those who don't play along regardless of their score in the game and ultimately, if necessary, kicking the bad apples off the system entirely.