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Stack Overflow Culture

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• vadimberman 9y ago
  I do hope that Stack Overflow will become usable again. In my opinion, the problem is mostly the answerers. I went all the way from a simple coder to management, and now I'm doing both, running my second startup. I talk to people of different walks of life, and I always do my homework. But on Stack Overflow, it's like I'm back to the early years of my career, a stupid newbie whose questions get randomly downvoted. I delete it, tweak the wording a little bit, and now it's suddenly accepted. I say something like, "a solution or a 3rd party library", an idiot downvotes me saying that "requests to recommend 3rd party libraries are offtopic". I change it to "a solution (3rd party library is OK)", and now it's suddenly fine. It's like the mafia of high-karma answerers decided to adopt Les Grossman as their role model. As a side effect, the good answerers are gone, and the really tricky questions are left unanswered, so I often answer them myself. Although, the way Stack Overflow is, my desire to contribute to the community is diminishing.
  • klez 9y ago
    It's nice that in a discussion that is in part about being nice you call someone that downvoted you an idiot. I usually don't downvote answer that ask for 3rd party libraries, just vote to close. Your example is a bit borderline and it's something I wouldn't close, but I can see how someone might think it warrants to be closed. Consider that the rule about external tools is meant to avoid a deluge of answers about libraries. They may be useful, but none of them is objectively right and can cause religious wars with people downvoting answers about libraries they don't like and massively upvoting their favorite library. If we can avoid this by being strict, I think it's a good thing. But hey, I'm just one of hundreds of thousands users, so it's not like my opinion is somehow more valuable than yours.
    • js8 9y ago
      > They may be useful, but none of them is objectively right and can cause religious wars with people downvoting answers about libraries they don't like and massively upvoting their favorite library. Like many, I find the answers to these "religious" (in fact, they are not, because done properly the answers are supported by arguments) questions to be the most useful content. In many ways, I can answer the most objective questions myself from the documentation or source code. But what I cannot do this with is distillation of expert knowledge that requires time, and the more distilled it is, the more subjective it is. Subjective doesn't mean unsupportable by facts (experience).
      • mlvljr 9y ago
        Exactly, the answers like "been using library X for three years but finally gave up due to Y" is the kind of personal advice-style answers that usually are the most helpful. PC mods crowd, you're missing that! :)
      • ufo 9y ago
        Letting more opinion based question in stack overflow sounds like a nice idea but in the end it doesnt work out because of the conflicting goals problem john skeet talked about. Answers that just recommend a 3rd party library optimize for solving the immediate problem an answerer is having asap but they don't work very well at creating a long lasting resource and they also give answerers a hard time. Opinion questions can get outdated very quickly and it is hard to tell if you come from a google search if the answers are still applicable. They also don't work well with the site format because you cant summarize the solution into one accepted answer. Instead, you get hundreds of tiny small disconnected answers, which cant really be edited to consolidate or keep them up to date, and no room for discussions (SO comments don't work well for long discussions)
        • acjohnson55 9y ago
          Except, it does work. I've found many closed opinion questions to be just the info I was looking for. Until they effectively stamped that behavior out, it was one of the best ways to get a request-for-recs in front of a massive audience of informed professionals. It was messy, but very useful.
  • pjc50 9y ago
    I have 30k rep on electronics.stackexchange, but I asked what I thought was a perfectly reasonable question on stackoverflow and it got instantly obliterated. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49302369/gdpr-encrypted-logging-in-c-sharp https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49302369/gdpr-encrypted-... IMO it doesn't scale indefinitely. There's a site culture to be maintained, and as the site gets larger the core moderator culture becomes a smaller and more isolated part of the site.
    • clan 9y ago
      The weird rule about opinionated answers! I get why your question is on hold. But I find it unfair. Some of the best questions and answers have been highly opinionated. And I have often been led to on hold questions by google. An opinionated SO site might be nice. In the old days we had newsgroups for this. But that audience has disappeared when everything moved to the web.
    • the8472 9y ago
      You basically asked how to architecture a security aspect of your software. And you asked for other people's experiences to boot, instead of a canonical solution. Additionally the preface about the GDPR is a distracting, non-technical detail, instead you should have described which security properties you want, your threat model is etc. with the GDPR as a footnote in case someone wants to know your underlying use-case, not the other way around. That's very much considered offtopic on SO. Maybe other sites on the SE network such as Information Security or Software Engineering might have taken it. But I don't use either of those, so I don't know if that would actually fit into their policies.
      • avinium 9y ago
        > You basically asked how to architecture a security aspect of your software. And you asked for other people's experiences to boot, instead of a canonical solution. That's exactly what I want to discuss on SO. Most SO questions/answers are things that could easily be googled/RTFM with 5 minutes worth of effort. Seasoned developers/architects don't need that, and to be frank, it's pretty low-hanging fruit and not super valuable. What is valuable are opinions, experiences, perspectives on trade-offs and engineering considerations. These are, of course, highly personal and subjective. But that's why it's so important - it's this kind of experience that people pay high salaries for, not answer to specific code one-liners. If SO isn't willing to provide that kind of discussion, they're going to very susceptible to someone who starts up a competing platform to do so.
  • jodrellblank 9y ago
    In my opinion, the problem is mostly the answerers And .. I downvoted you. I hope it will sting. People giving up free time to add value to your thing and you blame them for the site problems? Then the site design is really failing, if the problem is all the people being engaged with it. Whereas on stackoverflow when I downvote it’s for “this question shows no research effort” which is the downvote button tooltip, but a single downvote is felt as a personal attack on character. Stackoverflow is for programmers - people whose character traits are tainted to be nitpicky about small details - yet the bad experience angry posts call answers traffic cops and Martinets - exactly the kind of people who could help get your code past the compiler or browser or api or whatever. “Neutral” responses feel like negative ones (see: “what have you tried?”). As an answerer more than an asker, if I help someone understand then I feel good, if it seems someone asks from a sense of “help me” I’m endeared to the question and if they ask from a sense of “solve my business problem” I feel more abused (personally or site-being-abused) and resentful. No amount of Jon Skeet blog posting about the classic usenet popup “this reply will be sent to thousands of people who will have to spend time and money on it, are you sure?” seems to work on the modern web. If it were me reworking it, I’d get rid of the low quality question idea, let answered be the judge of that and google sort the wheat from chaff. Then get rid of downvotes and close votes and “neutral” comments. Leave only room for feedback buttons that in some way communicate “I tried to answer your question but couldn’t, Your question might be more answerable if ..” Forget being a repository of high quality questions and answers in the same way software has forgotten about big design up front and perfect quality goals and turned into “put an MVP on GitHub and let the issue tracker be the driving force”. The goal of “stop duplicates, everything that can be questioned and answered has been questioned and answered” forgets that there are 150,000 new humans every day, and thousands more existing people learning to code - a goal of turning everyone away with “that’s already finished nothing for you to do here” is .. daft. Questions and answers are, if nothing else, practise. A good way to learn is to try explaining it to someone else - SO churn has that room. But not on stack overflow, where following the site plan for downvotes and closevotes makes everyone feel shitty. I even doubt it is “high quality questions” that are supported but a combination of “this question feels like the asker is like me” combined with “and they’re asking about a thing I like and feel positively about rather than an edge case of the tool I feel bad about and wish the asker would politely overlook it like the rest of “us” all do”.
  • jodrellblank 9y ago
    It's like the mafia of high-karma answerers decided to adopt Les Grossman as their role model. It’s like the high karma answerers are exactly the subset of the site that you want seeing and answering your question because the site supports the idea that they are good at doing that, but they’re always reflected as some kind of tyrants appointed by an evil overlord. Broken site design somewhere that leads to that effect.
    • vadimberman 9y ago
      > It’s like the high karma answerers are exactly the subset of the site that you want seeing and answering your question because the site supports the idea that they are good at doing that, but they’re always reflected as some kind of tyrants appointed by an evil overlord. Are you 100% sure? Because from my experience, the most useful subset is between 100 and 2,000, those with experience but not arrogance. The top karma hoarders more often than not provide citations from official documentation and sabotage questions. I wish they were appointed by an evil overlord because the overlord is better than a swarm of annoying mosquitoes.
      • jodrellblank 9y ago
        what I mean is, their high karma score comes from the community voting up their contributions a lot. If they have high karma that's supposed to communicate that they will be good answerers, and of course you want good answerers, so you'd think that's whom you should want. it doesn't communicate that, they're not who you want - as you say in this comment. That's what I was commenting on. The disconnect between what that karma should say vs. what it does say
• clan 9y ago
  For me it has distilled into something much simpler: Enlightenment or Fix It. Those who seek enlightenment want to ask good questions and learn. They want to be educated and be a part of the community. You need to give some to get some. And then there are the fixers. The least effort they can put in getting their immediate problem solved. Long term value and learning something is not a priority. Unfortunately there are a number of "fixers" who answers too. They give short extremely to the point answers without much depth. Some because it is a quick way to handle ”easy" questions. And others simply hunting for points. As everybody else I have my own view on how to solve this. Raise the bar to ask a question. Spend more effort on actually build a well founded and good question before allowing answers. With the current system the churn is too high and there is too much focus on fixing rather than learning. How cool would it be if people started to ask "What questions do I need to ask to try fixing this problem?” With all its flaws SO is still one of the best resources out there. But I am afraid that it is considered "good enough" for anyone willing to make greater changes. Or it has reached a size with too much inertia to make such changes viable.
  • mulvya 9y ago
    > They give short extremely to the point answers without much depth. Typically, this is because these questions are a minor (cosmetic or trivial) variation* of an question asked many times already, and usually addressed in the docs. Search results aren't likely to put this question at the top of results, so the aim is to resolve the OP's need. *so technically not a duplicate.
    • clan 9y ago
      I do get your point. But would not prefer to have less of those? The information overload then becomes huge. And I would like some more filtrering. My approach today is to try to give quality answers when I can anyway. Even if the quality of the question is low. Sometimes I get surprised and the asker engages in a positive way. But mostly not. I spend most of my time on Unix SO and it has a very low voting activoty bit a very high rate of "fix my problem". So I try to be a good netizen but I feel more regulation is needed to fix the current status quo.
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• jpatokal 9y ago
  Meh. Stack Overflow is suffering from the same "problem" as Wikipedia: the quality & quantity of existing content is now so high that it's becoming really hard to contribute new content. However, while this is indeed a real problem for "askers" trying to get heard in all the noise, and there's diminishing returns for the "answerer" who has less fun questions to tackle, it's also completely irrelevant to the 99% of us whose questions have already been asked & answered, and those answers can be pulled up in seconds by your favorite search engine. Also, in case the blog author's name (Jon Skeet) didn't ring a bell, he's Stack Overflow's #1 contributor. If you've ever searched for anything related to C#, you've probably seen his answers, which have racked up over a million reputation points: https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
  • mooreds 9y ago
    This is really insightful. In some ways every community goes through the "wild west" -> settlers -> cities evolution. Happened with the internet at large, happens with most technologies that achieve mass adoption, and it appears to have happened with Wikipedia and Stackoverflow. (I read an interesting article about technology pioneers, settlers and other archetypes, but I couldn't find it.) Once most of the pioneering work is done, and the low hanging articles are written, a community needs to decide how to proceed. Who are you going to maximize value for? In the early days it makes sense to focus on what is the rarest resource (in SO's case, probably the answerers) but as a community matures, the focus can shift. Now it is frankly the anonymous viewer that it makes sense to optimize for, both from a monetary standpoint (jobs display being a primary monetization strategy) and a social good standpoint (far more anonymous viewers than either askers or answerers).
    • mooreds 9y ago
      Here's the article (someone else found it for me!): http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html http://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-tow...
  • zombieprocesses 9y ago
• weinzierl 9y ago
  > A while ago I started writing a similar post, but it got longer and longer without coming to any conclusion. I’m writing this one with a timebox of one hour, and then I’ll post whatever I’ve got. (I may then reformat it later.) While this is meta it pretty much sums up the situation regarding my feelings regarding Stack Overflow. I was an early user of Stack Overflow, not quite beta but almost. At one point I even received a snail mail letter from Jeff Atwood, thanking me for my contributions. I read most of the early discussions about policy and, being a veteran of various internet forums at that time, it seemed to me the most sensible, most reasonable approach you could take to running a question-answer site. I went to CodeKen in London in 2011 where I met Jon and a lot of other excellent folks that made Stack Overflow happen as a community back then. Today, I rarely consult Stack Overflow, and when I sometimes find a useful answer via DuckDuckGo it's almost certainly closed. I even joked that closing is a sign of quality at Stack Overflow. My last contribution is probably years ago. The strange thing is that there is no point I "left", nothing I could point at and say, that's when Stack Overflow took the wrong turn. I think we just drifted apart. And for the conclusion I guess for me it's mostly: "The way to hell is paved with good intentions".
  • alkonaut 9y ago
    Is this a sign of strength or weakness though? Like Wikipedia, any given topic on SO will approach “completeness”. I use stackoverflow at least as much now as in its prime - but these days just like a Wikipedia for code. I don’t consider it a flaw. I’m sure there are topics I don’t use (the latest ML framework or the js framework du jour) where the community is still growing the database. That I use it as a mostly completed reference work just means my field/tech is mature in terms of language/frameworks
    • freehunter 9y ago
      It's really hard to consider an answer to a moving target to be "complete". If the question was answered for Rails 3 but you're using Rails 5 and have the same exact question, chances are that answer isn't going to work for you. Now you have to chance that if you post the question again, is someone even paying attention? Is someone going to close your question as a duplicate? Is someone going to give you the wrong answer? Unless you're working with a dead technology, by the time the information is "complete", it's outdated. And I would consider much of the information on SO to be just that: outdated.
• jasode 9y ago
  I understand that Jon Skeet was just doing a quick "brain dump" of his thoughts on Stackoverflow triggered by Rob Conery's tweet but his comments about "low quality" questions don't seem to actually address what Rob was complaining about. (Because Rob wasn't the one asking the "low quality" questions.) I wish I could see the actual comments from others that irritated Rob but it seems like I can't find his SO profile. (Did Rob Conery delete his SO profile?[1]) Even if Jon Skeet's essay doesn't apply to RC, I think his assessment of "low quality" questions needs more dissection and it is missing a key psychology. He writes: >This is a low-quality question, in my view. (I’ll talk more about that later.) >[...] >– but I think it’s important to accept that there are such things as low-quality questions, Yes, Jon is correct that low-quality questions are a real problem but he's missing why they persist... the "askers" don't know enough to run their question through a self-diagnostic test to determine they are asking a low quality question. To beginners, it's a "high quality" question by one criteria: "I don't know the answer." If they knew the answer -- they wouldn't be asking it! <-- That is the psychology that's very difficult to solve. The SO experts want interesting and high quality questions to answer. If no questions were filtered out (closed), there would be too much crap to wade through and the site becomes a waste of their volunteer time. On the other hand, the beginners want their questions answered. Their questions being closed is a "toxic" environment and "unwelcoming." I've given a lot of thought about what the optimal Q&A website would look like and I've determined you always have an unresolved tension between naive beginners and experts. I would challenge anybody to come up with a Q&A system that filters questions in a way that the majority of askers who got their questions closed/deleted will agree that it was "fair". To get a usable site, you have to favor the answerers over the askers because the experts are the ones contributing the valuable content. [1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YFH2o5BLgYwJ:https://stackoverflow.com/users/1151/rob-conery+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YFH2o5...
  • codinghorror 9y ago
    > I wish I could see the actual comments from others that irritated Rob but it seems like I can't find his SO profile. (Did Rob Conery delete his SO profile?[1]) You and me both. Rob emailed me about this and I asked him the same thing. Criticism without actual examples is not actionable. Also one person’s pot-ah-to is often another person’s poh-tah-to if you know what I mean.
• deostroll 9y ago
  I happen to have a SO profile that tries to capture the essence of what Jon wrote. When I "do" respond to posts asking the "asker" to elaborate on that question with more details, I imagine the asker visiting my profile and, probably squishing my avatar with bare hands... If there are people out there that feel that way I am sorry...I am only trying to help. But that is the problem. There is frustration on the asker's part. Always. There is also frustration on the "answerers" part too. But this is a perennial problem. And its not going to go away soon. But at least the stuff Jon mentions in points...for both "askers" and "answerers"...they help. They are like commandments. Abide by them.
• bluedino 9y ago
  What drives me nuts are askers who either never choose a correct answer, or choose an incorrect answer (which also gets upvotes) so the first correct answer is buried 3-4 deep. So many times I have read the most-voted and accepted answer thinking, “this is completely wrong”
  • Rotareti 9y ago
    > What drives me nuts are askers who either never choose a correct answer, I sometimes do this when I'm not satisfied with the solutions that pop up in the first couple of days. From my experience the best (in-depth) answers often come from "necromancers". In such cases I want to leave some room for them. Your question will be there for a long time and it might attract people decades from now, I'm not in a hurry with this.
  • zbentley 9y ago
    Can't moderators select answers in some cases? I'm not sure of this, but recall hearing that it was possible in the case of valuable questions without an answer/with a blatantly wrong answer that sat around for a very long time.
• epx 9y ago
  In Portuguese version of SO, most of the questions are very basic programming and smell as course homework that the student is asking SO to answer. Whoever does this kind of question is not simply naive: he is lazy and gives the profession a bad name. No point in being helpful and forthcoming.
  • jochung 9y ago
    I'm somewhat surprised the term "help vampire" didn't appear in the original post. It's not just that some people ask for homework help. It's that some people's entire repertoire of problem solving skills well into adulthood only consists of asking others. Good questions ought to lead to better problem solving skills. Often they don't.
• guilhas 9y ago
  To many "career stackoverflowers" I think. And no way to report moderators. The other day I had a problem, and fund a SO question related, solved the problem in a different way, and answered to the question, to help someone with same problem. A guy comes gives me -1 and makes a completely useless comment. PsExec requirements on local computer - Super User – https://superuser.com/questions/1158722/psexec-requirements-on-local-computer https://superuser.com/questions/1158722/psexec-requirements-... Edit: thanks to someone who upvoted my SO answer
  • alkonaut 9y ago
    Nothing ticks me off more than the drive by downvoters, ninja downvoting anything that could be considered an answer (or question) that violates some meta requirement. If a downvote cost 10 rep and also took a while to take effect (with any edits in the meantime canceling the downvote effect) I think the site would be a better place. Especially - when you see a question you should be able to extrapolate what the asker was trying to do. The idea of a “questions and answers” site is broken to begin with. No one has a question, what we have is a problem, and what the person with a problem needs is a solution not an “answer”. The best answer to a question (which might be initially best posted as a comment to get clarification if it’s not obvious) is this: “You are asking how to do X. In this situation I think it would be best to avoid doing X alltogether and to solve your problem which I assume is Y - you should probably try doing Z” This type of answer invariably gets two things 1. Thank you comment from the asker, for solving the problem 2. Downvotes from nitpicking drive-by moderators for not answering the question
    • Avamander 9y ago
      Attaching an username to every downvote could also fix the situation, makes it impossible to just be negative without any consequence, the very least it allows people who actually want an answer to ping the user(s) downvoting for a reason.
      • alkonaut 9y ago
        Agree. And a mandatory suggestion could also be required. “I think you should clarify in more detail why this is NOT a dupe of question xyz” “It’s not clear what you tried and what problems you encountered” A nitpick could give a time frame to address and fix, and the downvoter would have to review and accept reject the changes in order for the downvote to apply.
• ordinaryperson 9y ago
  The underlying problem to me is the fundamental flaws in crowd-sourcing and blacklisting as models to produce and manage content. Websites like StackOverflow, Yelp, Wikipedia start off by being fantastically useful by using crowd-sourcing to quickly generate a large volume of content that covers topics too wide for a small group of humans by themselves. But then crowd-sourcing becomes an albatross because an unpaid army of moderators have almost no oversight. They inconsistently apply (or don’t apply) standards, and blacklisting vitriol is a Sisyphean task. Valid questions get blitzed and jerks proliferate because it’s seemingly impossible to police them all in real time. I saw a stat that said only 7% of SO users ever ask a second question - that means 93% probably had a bad experience. While the problems are structural IMO they can do a few things. Downvoting should be temporarily disabled until Joel et al figure out a better model to surface important/good questions and answers; I personally now visit the forums of whatever framework or language I’m working in to seek advice because the downvoting on SO seems so inconsistently applied. Insults I can ignore but the DV makes it hard to have your issue seen.
  • alkonaut 9y ago
    Perhaps a multi-tier system where questions aren’t posted “at the top” for answering directly and moderated down, but instead a first step where the question is treated and discussed without possibility to answer. The community can suggest edits, and upvote it, but not close it. If it’s a duplicate the asker can get some time to explain why it isn’t, or retract it if it is. If it gets a thumbs up, it qualifies for the regular Q/A where people can answer - and expect a certain quality (and don’t risk spending 20 min writing an answer to a perfectly good question that was closed while the answer was written).
    • ordinaryperson 9y ago
      Makes sense to me. No open platform, as far as I can tell, has solved the problems of vitriol, but the down-voting is absurd (as attested by some of the experiences described in this comment thread) and can absolutely by addressed by changes like the one you propose or some other system.
• dsr12 9y ago
  Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16608029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16608029
• msl09 9y ago
  I think that the author have made a mistake in writing the goal of the answerer: > Answerer: maximize the value to the site of any given post, treating the site as a long-lasting resource That's rarely the case, usually the answerer wants answer the question as fast as possible to move on to the next question and accumulate karma. Honestly I can't really blame stackoverflow's karma system on that since I've seen that behavior everywhere even in person to person conversations. My point is, If you don't have time to think about my question, don't bother answering cause if you do, you will waste your time asking garbage questions ("are you sure you really need your operations to be async") or giving garbage answers ("stop using postgres and use mongodb") and then I'll have to waste my time replying to what you said to clarify why this is not a thing that can be "bargained around". Talking in person I have the advantage that my facial expressions convey my desire to murder, so my coworkers are used to only offer answers when they are super sure about it or when I directly ask them, in the internet I still have no idea on how to fix that.
  • mark-r 9y ago
    The goal of the answerer is likely to be highly individual. My own motivation is that I like helping people and solving puzzles. Probing the questioner to make sure they haven't discarded the easy solution needlessly is part of that. But I too have seen it taken to an extreme.
• SCdF 9y ago
  I was in the beta of SO. I almost never interact with it anymore. Asking a question on SO is a last resort to me, and I get a horrid sinking feeling in my gut when I feel forced to do so. The people[1] who are still active on it seem to be people who thrive on pedantry and whose goal is to find any potential flaw in your question and feel smart for pointing it out. You begin to realise no one is actually reading your question in good faith, so you start getting defensive: filling your questions with disclaimers about how your example code is just an example[2], how you know there are other ways you could do it but you're constrained toward this direction for various reasons[3], and so on and so forth, until you feel like you spend more time defensively shoring up your question from attacks than actually constructing the question in the first place[4] I still read SO, but as someone who was around before it existed I don't really feel like the quality of answers is any higher than the random forum posts of yore, it's just that they're all under the same URL now, and the same user interface. Which I suppose is something. [1] Not all people™, but definitely the general feeling tends this direction [2] classic situation: you simplify your code to Foo and Bar levels to show the problem cleanly, so people chastise you for having a complex data structure / worrying about performance / whatever for such simple code [3] e.g., "How do I achieve X" gets turned into people saying "Why would you want to achieve X, that's stupid" [4] This is not the same as researching the issue and trying as many things as you can think of, which is definitely helpful in any context of question asking
  • moberemk 9y ago
    I generally agree with all your points, but I also remember the forum posts and I find that SO has at least one big advantage over those: it's really quick to pick out a good answer compared to a long thread. Just the fact that a) answers are clearly demarcated vs comments and b) the author can select a "correct" answer makes them way more skimmable than, say, a phpBB thread where every post looks the same.
    • SCdF 9y ago
      I definitely see that side of those, though I think they both have pros and cons. Especially in the JS space[1], there are lots of historic answers upvoted on SO that are now wrong and you have to scroll around (or find a slightly rephrasing of the same question that occurred more recently) to find a good answer. Unfortunately the longer a question is around both the more answers it has and the more likely the answers are to be wrong. On forums / mailing lists the question would just be reasked. On SO it is supposedly a wiki so new versions of the same question gets closed. [1] Because it has evolved a lot, Rust has similar issues, as I'm sure lots of languages do
• jancsika 9y ago
  > The goal of Stack Overflow is to create a repository of high-quality questions, and high-quality answers to those questions. That's confirmed by Jon Skeet's responses to Rob Conery's tweet. Skeet keeps focusing on downsides of what he calls "'bad' questions." To be precise I'd say SO is about generating high-quality answers that people can actually find. One way that SO does this is by trying to incentivize high-quality questions. Another way SO achieves this is by having questions that use the same or similar words to the ones most people use to construct a search engine query. Yet another way is by having any question at all that induces or references a high-quality answer that shares keywords with common search queries. Of those two additional categories, a large number of SO questions can be and are low-quality questions. A significant number of my routes into SO high-quality answers come from what I'd consider low-quality questions. Sometimes the high-quality answers are inline. Sometimes I arrive at them through a mod message about duplicates or another hyperlink. Especially when someone is first learning a topic, they need those low quality routes more than ever. After all, they don't yet know how to ask high-quality questions! At least in my experience, those routes from low quality questions to high-quality answers are the one thing that makes SO unique. Those routes are essentially the skeleton bones of the scary, sometimes humiliating process of asking a noob question. (And now I learn it's also the exhausting and soul crushing experience of experts submitting their high-quality answers.) So on the one hand, it'd be great if SO had figured out that when herding problem solvers it's a good idea to minimize their propensity for being obtuse and condescending. On the other, it's a testament to the hacker spirit that SO instead caches the results of all that humiliation and sniping so that others don't have to go through it to find their answers. That's actually a big step for the subculture that came up with the error message, "You don't exist. Go away."
  • mark-r 9y ago
    It's not just noob questions that get roasted though. Last week I had a C++ Windows API problem where something was working when compiled in 32 bit mode and not working in 64 bits. I have over 100K points so I know what I'm doing - I knew it had to be condensed into a toy example that could be examined carefully, or I'd get the same treatment any noob would get. The problem was I couldn't get the toy example to work in 32 bits either. Finally a coworker found a hint somewhere on the web (not StackOverflow) that pointed to a problem with the manifest in the 64-bit version (and both versions of my toy example). I couldn't craft a good question because I didn't know the answer yet!
• cletus 9y ago
  So I was an early contributor to SO. At one point the top users was Jon Skeet, Marc Gravelli then me [1]. I pretty much came to this conclusion 6-7 years ago (the one in the tweet Jon is responding to). Two things were already happening then: 1. The low hanging fruit (of questions and answers) was gone. Questions were by necessity becoming more specialized. These attracted less attention (and votes). This is a common problem on online forums. Back when HN had public vote totals I'd often see someone put together a thoughtful comment and get a single upvote. Someone else would correct a typo or say the year in question was 1995 not 1996 and then 11. 2. And this is the one I had and have a real problem with: the toxic moderators took over. Those who can, answer. Those who can't, question. Those who can't do either, moderate. So many useful questions I saw getting closed as "not constructive". Useful things like "what are the benefits of A vs B?" The de facto standard became if it didn't have an objective, definitive answer a cadre of mods had decided it didn't belong on SO. Thing is, you can provide a really useful answer to the question of "should I use Python or Ruby?" with some relative pros and cons without saying one or the other. The argument against those questions was they might be fine questions but they didn't belong on SO (eg maybe on the programmers Stack Exchange). While that might be true for some questions (particularly those career related) I found that ever shifting standard was actually detrimental to the site. Basically it seemed like the threshold for moderating content on SO was too low. Answerers provide the most value (IMHO). Good questions matter too. The problem seems to lie in moderators who think they provide as much value as answerers and what they do is super-important. It's useful, no argument, but it's just not on the same level. Some of my answers have been edited 30+ times over the years for, in many cases, no good reason. Someone decides something should be capitalized. Someone else disagrees. Some of these have actually changed the meaning of the answer and I've had to go and correct the answer. Don't get me wrong: SO is a fantastic resource. It just has its own Wikipedia editor problem. [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus https://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus
• matte_black 9y ago
  Do you think there might be a demand for a bropages equivalent of stack overflow? Answers to questions with little to no explanation, just straight to the point?
• gor-d 9y ago
  stockoverflow inherently enables and supports the absolute worst elements of the tech industry. the correct answer for a novice just starting is not the same as the correct answer for a total expert, the novice wont even know what you are talking about. It panders to those that think there is a right and wrong way to do things and that they know the right what and the correct way to educate someone is with a public humiliation. The whole site is totally un-inclsive, its great for like the 50-100 people who prefer elitism over education, and also already know what they are talking about. IMHO they should split the site and create a new one for professional programmers, that does exactly what SO says it wants to do now, but be very clear its not for hobbists. then vet first questions to ensure they understand the rules etc. before interacting. But honestly i think this vision that some have of it being a perfect data store of problems and solutions has an over simplistic idea about how the world works.
  • gor-d 9y ago
    also blocking opinion questions and open-ended ones is silly, just have a tag for it and let people filter them out. i have learned a lot for the discursive and open-ended questions, meh its just trying to apply to many rules.. huge communities are not going to be that aligned
• gor-d 9y ago
  the questions are THE MOST VALUABLE PART of stack overflow. I think the issue is that the answerers refuse to accept this -> they are worthless without a question first :D
• sampo 9y ago
  If one operates outside of the mainstream, then SO still works like in the "good old days". Mainstream and the main volume of action is about the relatively basic questions about the popular programming languages and platforms. But if one asks or answers questions about, for example, more advanced features of git, more advanced algorithms, numerical mathematics, GIS, anything that is not interesting to "the masses", then you still get genuine helpful answers, but you might have to wait hours or days, and there will not be a large number of answers.
  • bhaak 9y ago
    I once answered a question that was 4 years old. Although still relevant as I ran into the same problem as the OP but as nobody else answered I had to come up with an answer myself.
• nickjj 9y ago
  I think SO does more harm than good now. A lot of answers are just people parroting documentation without any additional information. Back in the day you would search for a problem and find a nice juicy blog post written by someone who has experienced and solved your problem. They would also add a ton of ancillary context around the problem which makes it interesting to read and a "better" answer than just a dry code snippet. You can still find those blog posts today but since SO is so popular, you often get multiple SO results engulfing the front page of search results.
• ajnin 9y ago
  I think SO has 2 problems : 1) it want to be a repository of canonical knowledge, a giant FAQ and wiki of everything. The problem is, that it does not fit the way the site actually works: people will write imperfect questions, precisely because they don't know the answer, and ask the opinions of their peers about things. But they are not domain experts writing documentation so they often get down-voted or their questions closed. 2) There is a karma system in which more karma gets you more power. Inevitably such system attracts people in search of fame or power, and this kind of people get off by telling others that they are smarter than them, or that they know this little site rule better and consequently censor their question. As regular users become fed up with the state of things and leave the site, the position of high-karma users become more entrenched. Then, those users obtain total control over the meta board to veto all fix proposals, make up even more draconian rules, and entrench their position even more. Problem 1) causes inadequate meta rules, and 2) zealous enforcement of these rules. Some combination of 1) and 2) prevent the site owners from changing the rules.
  • jxramos 9y ago
    good incentives analysis, pretty interesting, I'll have to meditate on this one.
• bjourne 9y ago
  Anyone who complains about stackoverflow should visit their sister site about math: https://math.stackexchange.com/ https://math.stackexchange.com/ Because the difference is night and day. No pedantry (no pedantry on a math site! Impossible!), no assumption that askers are throwing their homework on them. In fact, my experience with mathematicians have had me question whether I choose the right career or if I should have become a mathematician. They all seem damn chill in comparison to most of us developers. Anyway, the idea behind that site appears to be to help people learn math. Not to build the world's most polished question repository. I very much prefer the former approach.
  • 11235813213455 9y ago
    totally, but in general the quality of questions there is higher than stack overflow
  • mlvljr 9y ago
    This, indeed ^
  • maxxxxx 9y ago
    I wonder if this has to do with the people who are entering a field. I suspect that people who post on a math forum really want to do math, have an interest in it and don't want to just get a job that pays the bills. In software you have more and more people who got into programming because it's a good job but don't really care for it. This may diminish the quality of forums because a lot of people just want somebody to solve their problem so they can move on without doing any work. I see that also in a lot of new hires who don't seem to care about actually learning programming but just want to do the bare minimum.
    • nyxxie 9y ago
      I think there's also a level of cultural gatekeeping in play as well. Programming (and many of its sub-focuses) are considered a fashionable career path, and there are many people who want the reputation that being a programmer/hacker/etc conveys more than they actually want to do the work to learn. The Security Stack Exchange is full of a similar sort of people. Almost all of the new questions at any given time are either tech support "I think I have a virus!!" or low-effort handholding questions "how do I use kali linux to hack server". I think folks who spend a lot of time on these sorts of websites have adjusted to be more jaded towards questions that look similar. I've learned to ignore it and be thankful that (in general), questions that I ask on stack exchange tend to receive helpful answers.
• PaulHoule 9y ago
  What this post does not talk about is a different customer: the person who is searching for programming advice. SO is useful, but it is often awful. For instance, most Python examples on SO were written for Python 2, thus you need to add parenthesis if you want to cut and paste them into the Python 3 REPLs. Many coders will accept the excuse that having to manually insert parenthesis "keeps you own the ball" or "helps you learn", etc. No, it's the kind of machine stupidity that we have to dispense with to achieve artificial intelligence. Often I get five or six competing answers. Sometimes the best one is at the top. Sometimes the one at the top has a comment that says the author of the post and the original poster both agree it is wrong and that you should ignore it and scroll down to the one below. Meanwhile, the Q&A format means that I may have to scroll through a large amount of incorrect source code before finally finding the two or three lines I really need. Those small things add up because I am juggling a number of balls in the air as I work, and I just don't need any cognitive trash. If you program in Python, Java, Ruby, Rust, Javascript, etc. you may find that your biggest head scratchers have do with integration with and the choice of third-party libraries -- discussion of which is severely curtailed on SO. I am fascinated with the discussion about "People asking insufficiently detailed questions" because that is one of the great unresolved problems of Hacker News -- "Ask HN:" is choked with many cries for help which can only be replied to with "We need to know more about this to give you a real answer" that frequently don't get answered.
• bhauer 9y ago
  Meta: Can we please not link to AMP versions of pages on HN? Yes, it's easy enough to remove the amp/ suffix from the URL [1], but linking to AMP version directly is even more annoying than linking to mobile versions directly. [1] https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2018/03/17/stack-overflow-culture/ https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2018/03/17/stack-overflow-cultu...
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• jordanpg 9y ago
  I've always thought that one of the reasons SO was so successful is that they were an early adopter of easy to use markdown for code snippets, with a fairly snappy, simple UI. Compare this with the alternatives around the same time, like Google Groups/Discussions or phpBB, which are still painful to look at to this day, IMHO. Is there anyone who wince when have to scroll through nested threads, and unformatted raw text in code to understand something?
• lkrubner 9y ago
  What's become common for me, when I ask a question, is to have it marked redundant. The response is: "Your question is a repeat of this earlier question." So then I try to point out that I already read that earlier question, and I tried the solution suggested in that earlier solution, but it didn't work for me. All of which I explained in my original post, but the moderators don't seem to read all of what I've written, or they'd already know that. I think they just scan the opening sentences, and if it seems to them to be similar to something else, then my question gets marked redundant. But when I clarify the situation, no one sees my clarification, because once my question is marked redundant, people stop reading it.
  • jxramos 9y ago
    I remember first getting a question marked duplicate and me plugging in differentiating factors. After time I've come to not view duplicate answer as a pejorative thing but rather as a good catchall structure to bring a locus of related content close together to effectively play the role of "here's an alternate way of asking the same question". This basically expands the keywords and tags that could successfully land a questioner to the answer they seek. After all people oftentimes think of things differently, and to have multiple slightly different means of asking the same question lumped together in some coherent scope, that's a good thing.
• catchmeifyoucan 9y ago
  I agree with the author. SO culture definitely exists. His final points are great. However, I think that the author didn't explore the idea of rewards on StackOverflow and how they might influence the quality of an answer too deeply. For example, things like most upvoted answer and best liked questions are things that definitely fall under my radar when answering questions. In an ideal world, it shouldn't matter whether my answer is the best, or the "selected" answer, but it does. Of course, that might not be the case for everyone.It's like this good feeling; like you've achieved something and you're getting validation of your knowledge.I know that when I used to answer questions, some people would comment saying, "Don't just post a link to the answer, explain it". It helped make me a better answerer. There are also times when I tend to ignore questions that are downvoted. TLDR; I think the rewards system plays a significant role in determining the outcome of the quality of answers and questions on SO.
• coleifer 9y ago
  I regularly check so for questions about the libraries I've written and try to provide good answers that will hopefully get indexed and be discoverable. It's both a short-term desire to help and in the long-term reduce time for other people struggling with something. Very often I can just include a few lines of sample code and provide a link to the docs. Occasionally a bug or deficiency is revealed and I can make my library better. Despite these benefits, there are clearly some ridiculous questions... and incorrect answers given by others. The tension between high and low quality can make for some frustrating experiences. But it's still worth the small amount of time it takes me, I believe, to try and help.
• twic 9y ago
  > On Stack Overflow, the most common disconnect is between these two goals: I wonder if you could serve both these goals. What if the basic Q&A machinery was used to explicitly help solve asker's problems, but there was a mechanism to elevate a question and its answers into the site's library of long-term knowledge? The site could then do standard SEO-fu to only include the latter questions in search results, emphasise them more in search, etc. The mechanism could be something like the current close vote mechanism - if four users with sufficient rep vote to elevate, it gets elevated, plus mods can do it directly, de-elevate, etc. You could end up with lots of "low-quality" questions and answers whose turnover is still helping people in concrete ways, but also build up a repository of knowledge.
• truedatt 9y ago
  The half dozen times that I've corrected blatantly incorrect answers my posts have been deleted for some inane pedantic reason or another - while leaving the wrong answer intact. I'm done with StackOverflow. It's not worth the hassle. The answer quality has decreased exponentially over the years to the point when googling for the solution to a problem I will click on only non-SO links.
• always_good 9y ago
  Honestly, a lot of people's opinions on HN just seem like people getting more experienced with programming and not needing SO like they used to. How many times is "I rarely even go there anymore" going to be part of someone's criticism? I barely go there, too. You should see the questions I used to ask though. I was a beginner. Also, each time I learn a new language, I'm back on SO. Lately it's been Rust. I'm googling questions like how to concat strings and convert a byte array to base10 all over again. I have no doubt that SO has problems. But I wonder how much of the piling on I see in comments is just people who aren't serviced by it as much as they used to be, and then backsplaining it with "because it sucks." Also, a lot of the criticism I read here is extremely petty. People who got way too absorbed by SO and then blamed SO for their own kinda toxic behavior.
  • dcow 9y ago
    Have you tried to ask a more finessed question on SO lately? It's neigh impossible. Someone (likely with less experience than you in the domain you're asking about) will fail to fully process your question and flag it as not relevant to the site, too broad, primarily opinion based, etc. because they didn't quite understand it or didn't take the time to, etc. It takes hours of arguing (worse: in public--where people don't want to be wrong) with people to make any progress and by that point people who could have helped answer your question skipped it because it's been sitting at -2 and flagged. And so SO has regressed to the mean. You're not wrong that SO is probably more useful in a DAU/MAU sense to a new programmer askers than seasoned askers. But what you're mistaking for "backsplaining" is experienced users saying it's hard to get meaningful help anymore because they have to fight the mob on the more rare occasions that they do ask a question. That is something SO can correct, but hasn't done a good job with, IMHO. The primary goal of SO should be to provide utility to its users. But many of us feel like it's only providing utility to well behaved newbs.
    • always_good 9y ago
      As you gain experience, your questions are naturally going to have an increasingly niche market. By the time I'm asking something on SO, it's pretty damn esoteric and it's going to take some thought on the part of the answerer. I've never dealt with negative ratings nor does that sound like something I'd complain about. I've also never had to "fight the mob" -- that doesn't sound like nontoxic behavior to me, btw. What I've done is set a bounty on my question and hope someone with the experience can answer it. If so, awesome. If not, well, I'll have to find a free answer another way. I don't see how that's a community's fault unless I entitle myself to the time and expertise of others. It seems pretty natural to me that SO is going to have diminishing returns as your questions have finer and finer points on them. That's how it works in the real world, too.
• hysan 9y ago
  I've been writing my own blog post about my experience as an "answerer" on StackOverflow for the past year (first time I've spent significant time on the website). This puts to words a lot of the problem feelings I had that I couldn't quite explain. What I find interesting is his point on diagnostics: > In my case, I have often have a sub-goal of “try to help improve the diagnostic skill of software engineers so that they’re in a better position to solve their own problems.” There was a recent discussion on Meta that went over whether or not basic debugging was a required skill. [1] My reading of the general consensus was that StackOverflow isn't a place for such users. Anyone who cannot debug or do basic diagnostics before posting doesn't appear welcome. However, there have been efforts of trying implement mentoring to help do exactly what Jon Skeet is doing. [2] This all leaves me wondering what the true purpose of StackOverflow is now. One last problem that I didn't see mentioned that I think is compounding the issue of "askers" looking for quick answers is the trend for larger open source projects to tell users to submit all questions to StackOverflow instead of on the issue tracker. So projects with significant churn and poor documentation end up flooding StackOverflow with extremely low quality questions. StackOverflow was never meant to be used this way. [3][4] However, they haven't done anything to curb this behavior and it's starting to become the norm. I feel that this issue will make the "improve the diagnostic skill" approach to answering impossible in the future. [1] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/364282/can-we-support-users-who-do-not-understand-how-to-debug-their-code https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/364282/can-we-suppo... [2] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/mentoring https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/mentoring [3] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3966/is-it-okay-to-use-stack-overflow-as-the-support-forum-for-a-product-or-project https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3966/is-it-okay-to-... [4] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19852/use-stack-overflow-as-the-official-support-site-of-an-open-source-project https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19852/use-stack-ove...
• duxup 9y ago
  As a n00b just learning programming Stack Overflow is both super helpful, and not so much. My biggest issue is the votes for best answer are based on what is most technically correct. Their code is correct... but their helpfulness isn't necessary helpful for someone who might not know WHY the code in the answer is a good answer. I'm searching for answers because often I really don't know that code, and then someone posts a blob of code with little to no answer and everyone who already knows the answer votes it up.... They're not wrong, just not necessarily helpful. Granted I don't expect anyone to bust into a full blown class to explain it, but often it's not explained all that well for someone who might be looking.
• bluedino 9y ago
  Stack Overflow has a few issues, but have you ever tried using other Q&A sites like those from Apple, Microsoft, or HP? They're terrible. Ten times worse. Someone came up with the idea that the top answer should be listed again in the list of other answers, it's so confusing. Not to mention nobody comes along to purge all the useless answers. Many of the 'answers' are really just comments, more questions, 'me too', etc.
• itwy 9y ago
  To a certain extent, I actually appreciate their strict question asking rules. People complained and sometimes moderators closed some of my questions which made me learn how to formulate my questions better. However, I go out of my way to punish users who want to look smart and post comments (not answers) so they cannot be downvoted by going to their profiles and randomly downvote some of their questions/answers.
• didymospl 9y ago
  I don't really understand these complaints about being downvoted on Stack Overflow. The vast majority of downvoted questions are either off-topic or too vague. SO has clear guidelines on the questions' topics https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic Even its name implies what types of questions you may ask there, yet apparently some (highly respected - like Rob) people still want it to be a general programming forum. Personally, I think the most of downvotes on stackoverflow are quite objective and therefore better justified than here where they are generally used to express a personal judgement about a comment.
• kidsil 9y ago
  I would like to take this opportunity to point out that the Stack Exchange ecosystem is alive and well, with some super nice and helpful communities like DIY or English
• nicoburns 9y ago
  I have 10k+ rep on stackoverflow. IMO a lot of the 'low-quality' questions are some of the most valuable. Often the question contains not a clear description of the problem (which the asker doesn't have), but a seemingly nondescriptive error message, which happens to be commonly causes by maybe 1, 2 or 3 different things. The brilliant thing about stackoverflow is that it can capture someone else's hard won (e.g. throughba detailed debugging session) knowledge about the issue. I agree with the moderation being overzealous, although with the caveat that this is difficult problem solely due to the size of thw community.
• deviationblue 9y ago
  Most times I posted on stack overflow, my question got downvoted and/or there were snide comments (sometimes). But I got the answer I needed, and my work got done. I don't really care about anything else- why would culture matter for me when I get the results I want? Also, the problem with a lot of beginner questions is that there are often a lot of similar such questions out there already. I don't blame others, or hold it against them, for getting miffed about the umpteenth such question. But really, they should just ignore it, and/or post the duplicate post(s).
• mycentstoo 9y ago
  One thing I've learned to do is pre-empt typical moderator responses and answers. For example, I will find things that they might consider to be duplicates and then I will differentiate my post from each. I also outline every solution I've tried. I've had that hit 17 or so and the post was almost comically large. Moderators are great but when they're bad, they're predictably bad. Use that against them and pre-empt the normal responses they might have. Since I've done this, I've never had a post closed or otherwise reprimanded.
• el_cid 9y ago
  My main gripe with it - are the closed questions. I think half the time I end up on SO - the questions is unanswered and closed. Delete the thread at least, why waste time of people searching for an answer to get frustrated by your over-zealous mods. Damn I hate when that happens. There were instances where the closed-unanswered question was the only place in the entire www where this was asked... :/
• outsidetheparty 9y ago
  I wonder if a lot of this problem would go away if SO questions could be officially split into a "I'm a novice / learning developer" site and a "I mostly know what I'm doing" site. This is impossible, of course, not least because of the Dunning-Kruger effect... but those two categories of people have very different needs, and most of the friction I see on the site seem to be a result of them being lumped together. (As many people have pointed out, the problem's a lot worse in tags that tend to have a lot of beginners -- HTML, CSS, jQuery, regex...) I get where the rudeness, pedantry, and rules-lawyering is coming from. It's frustrating to wade through a dozen daily iterations of "how do I vertically center this div," "why doesn't my async code work when I try to treat it like synchronous code", or "why didn't this jQuery event handler bind to the DOM element that didn't exist when I tried to bind it," or "here's a screenshot and a vague complaint that something doesn't work right, fix plz". And when you've been through a bunch of those you end up primed to assume the worst of every question. Those are all perfectly reasonable questions to the person asking them. (well except for the last one maybe.) But to the people treating the site as an Encyclopedic Repository of Coding Knowledge, they're just repetitive noise. Possibly I'm outing myself as part of the problem, here. (I do try to keep a level head, or at least keep my mouth shut while I mark as duplicate.) But I think the rules-lawyering is a necessary defense against the site turning into Yahoo Answers or Quora or Experts-exchange. (Remember them? They've added the hyphen since last time I looked. Good call.) It could be done more politely than it often is, but it does need to be done somehow. Which is why I wonder if it were possible to reframe those "beginner" questions as mentoring, rather than walling off or shutting out the noobs; and to make marking a question as a duplicate feel less adversarial and more "your answers are over here!" then it all might be a little less angry-making on both sides. (Not that I know how. The Documentation beta seemed a good attempt; I was disappointed that it didn't work out.)
• eastern 9y ago
  Like so much on the internet, SO is not what one would ideally want, but is definitely the least bad way of asking for and getting answers. And maybe it's something about software people. Other parts of the Stackexchange network that I use, like photography, English language and travel, are quite pleasant.
• martin1b 9y ago
  I've been with SO since the very early days when Joel and Jeff were very involved. In the first few years, I visited daily because it was like a community of developers working together to help each other in a professional yet cheerful fashion. Now that Joel and Jeff aren't as involved (if at all), its like the focus of the site has changed. As many have said, moderators appear too stringent. So much to the point of removing value from the site. Removing value removes users. I now rarely visit SO because it doesn't feel like a group of developers wanting to help it's community. Asking a question has almost become a provocation of hostility from either moderators or 'answerers'. There are many controls to limit the asker. Perhaps controls should be put in place to limit negative answerer sentiment or moderator dominance or SO could lose it's place in the developer community.