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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

by 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 Opinion questions can get outdated very quickly and it is hard to tell if you come from a google search if the answers are still applicable.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.
    - shagie 9y ago
      It also took a significant amount of community curation to maintain the utility of that. As the communities that tried to maintain the posts have found that it didn't work well, those posts became worse and worse content that wasn't up to date and would have people adding a post for no other reason than to add a post (not even checking for if the answer was there before). The utility became less and less over time. It can be done with a small enough and dedicated community behind it (the C++ book list), but without that amount of attention and dedication its not that good anymore. There's also the number of questions. Stack Overflow back then got maybe a few hundred questions a day. You could glance over all of them in a tag in a page. Now it gets 8000 questions per day. Asking a recommendation question doesn't get your post there for a large community of experts. You're lucky if you've got a few minutes of visibility now. Look back at one of those https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 - "only" 14 answers to it... and look how many of them are saying the same thing. That's not useful. https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-java https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-ja... Try https://www.slant.co https://www.slant.co for the recommendations - its designed for that.
      - dcow 9y ago
        It's easy for you to say they're not useful. But it's harder to ignore the myriad up votes. Even objective technical questions suffer from the "same answer multiple times" problem you explain. IMO repeat answers act to provided consensus in a more finessed way beyond just added votes. I don't think it's inherently "not useful".
        9y ago
vadimberman 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 call them an idiot because they were nitpicking on a question that was asking for help well within the already Procrustean bed of regulations. I stand by my assessment: it's hardly a reason to refuse help citing bureaucratic regulations if you're a public servant, but that's somewhat expected. If, however, it's a fellow forum contributor, this is both unexpected and serves no purpose. Not sure who's right, of course, but as you see, the number of people complaining is greater by day. Note that many of them are familiar with the Internet since 1990s and are netizens of good standing; still, they manage to somehow "violate" these rules. As soon as there is a real competition to the "soup Nazi's shop", many people will jump ship without hesitation. It's also interesting that other Stack Exchange communities are not that strict.
- shagie 9y ago
  > It's also interesting that other Stack Exchange communities are not that strict. Its a matter of scale and the ratio of the amount of time people are willing to help to the incoming question rate. Lets say there are 500 people who are willing to spend the time to help a user craft a better question. They are willing to spend 60 minutes per day helping. Thats 30,000 minutes per day. There are 8,000 question/day. If we generously apply Sturgeon's law to this, thats 7,2000 questions in need of help. And now we're at 4.2 minutes per question for those 500 people. If you believe this is a smaller number based on https://stackoverflow.com/review/helper/stats https://stackoverflow.com/review/helper/stats and https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats then apply the appropriate scaling. You might want to work off of the values in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357198/mentorship-research-project-results-wrap-up https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357198/mentorship-r... > 63 mentors from the community volunteered to be our partners. Lets think about a smaller site now. Electrical Engineering gets 80 questions per day. DBA gets 40. Now you've got a point where each question with potential to it can have someone spend a significant amount of time making it into a good question for the site. The other half to that is the curation of the answers. Questions with discussions and polling are a nightmare to keep curated. Consider https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 or https://stackoverflow.com/q/406760 https://stackoverflow.com/q/406760 or https://stackoverflow.com/q/184618 https://stackoverflow.com/q/184618 and how many duplicate answers there are in there. Consider that if that was open, how often would a new user go to that post and create another poor answer to add their own opinion. Yes, each time a new answer is posted, there's activity on that the question that bumps it to the front page... but the front page scrolls too fast to do meaningful curation for all but the worst (and this also takes time out of the 1h for those 500 people). A smaller site can spend a lot more time per user to guide them to ask a good question and a lot more time per answer to make it something that is a good answer.
jcelerier 9y ago
> I usually don't downvote answer that ask for 3rd party libraries, just vote to close why ? why do you do this ? a lot of time there is an exact piece of code that does what OP asks for, what does it change if the piece of code is in a SO answer or in a github project ?
- shagie 9y ago
  The code is ideally a "this is the code that fixes the problem" and its done. Once there's an answer, you don't often get a dozen more answers with slightly different code. Library recommendations however - everyone has their favorite. Someone recommends Spring. Someone else recommends Play. Someone else recommends Stripes (and then has a dozen comments explaining the different between Stripes and Stripe). Someone else has Struts (and then gets a dozen comments about the version they're recommending being out of date and lead to the equifax breech). JSF, Jspx, JHipster, Grails, GWT, ... it goes on and on. And now that there are a score of answers, some new user sees the post, doesn't read everything and recommends a new version of Spring. Or points to a different site for Struts. The curation of such a question takes far more work than the question is worth. Look at how much effort the C++ community puts into maintaining the C++ book list. Spending that much effort on each recommendation question is far too much moderation time across the community. On the other hand... go to a site that is designed with exactly that goal in mind. https://www.slant.co/topics/40/~best-java-web-frameworks https://www.slant.co/topics/40/~best-java-web-frameworks does it much better than Stack Overflow can.
  - Can_Not 9y ago
    But there are times where I want to see everyone vouch for their frameworks in that exact manor in the stack overflow format by the stack overflow crowd.
    - shagie 9y ago
      That rule is in place because the stack overflow crowd doesn’t want to debate it and keeping it useful for anyone else is too much work.
gergles 9y ago
> so it's not like my opinion is somehow more valuable than yours. But you admit to trying to suppress his ability to express that opinion and see no problem in doing so?
- klez 9y ago
  Well, I'm not closing it out of spite (in fact, I'm not closing it at all, just voting to close, you need five votes to close a question). I'm closing it because there's a rule on SO that says that those kind of questions should be closed. The point being, SO is not for opinions, and not because I say so. The rules of the site say so. And I (and others) already explained why there are such rules. So why shouldn't I vote to close a question that is patently off-topic when the site rules say I should vote to close it? > But you admit to trying to suppress his ability to express that opinion and see no problem in doing so? Is this a trial? I find this phrase is a bit accusatory, but maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

by klez 9y ago

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.
  - shagie 9y ago
    It also took a significant amount of community curation to maintain the utility of that. As the communities that tried to maintain the posts have found that it didn't work well, those posts became worse and worse content that wasn't up to date and would have people adding a post for no other reason than to add a post (not even checking for if the answer was there before). The utility became less and less over time. It can be done with a small enough and dedicated community behind it (the C++ book list), but without that amount of attention and dedication its not that good anymore. There's also the number of questions. Stack Overflow back then got maybe a few hundred questions a day. You could glance over all of them in a tag in a page. Now it gets 8000 questions per day. Asking a recommendation question doesn't get your post there for a large community of experts. You're lucky if you've got a few minutes of visibility now. Look back at one of those https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 https://stackoverflow.com/q/22697 - "only" 14 answers to it... and look how many of them are saying the same thing. That's not useful. https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-java https://www.slant.co/topics/259/~best-mock-frameworks-for-ja... Try https://www.slant.co https://www.slant.co for the recommendations - its designed for that.
    - dcow 9y ago
      It's easy for you to say they're not useful. But it's harder to ignore the myriad up votes. Even objective technical questions suffer from the "same answer multiple times" problem you explain. IMO repeat answers act to provided consensus in a more finessed way beyond just added votes. I don't think it's inherently "not useful".
      - 9y ago

vadimberman 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 call them an idiot because they were nitpicking on a question that was asking for help well within the already Procrustean bed of regulations. I stand by my assessment: it's hardly a reason to refuse help citing bureaucratic regulations if you're a public servant, but that's somewhat expected. If, however, it's a fellow forum contributor, this is both unexpected and serves no purpose. Not sure who's right, of course, but as you see, the number of people complaining is greater by day. Note that many of them are familiar with the Internet since 1990s and are netizens of good standing; still, they manage to somehow "violate" these rules. As soon as there is a real competition to the "soup Nazi's shop", many people will jump ship without hesitation. It's also interesting that other Stack Exchange communities are not that strict.

shagie 9y ago
> It's also interesting that other Stack Exchange communities are not that strict. Its a matter of scale and the ratio of the amount of time people are willing to help to the incoming question rate. Lets say there are 500 people who are willing to spend the time to help a user craft a better question. They are willing to spend 60 minutes per day helping. Thats 30,000 minutes per day. There are 8,000 question/day. If we generously apply Sturgeon's law to this, thats 7,2000 questions in need of help. And now we're at 4.2 minutes per question for those 500 people. If you believe this is a smaller number based on https://stackoverflow.com/review/helper/stats https://stackoverflow.com/review/helper/stats and https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats then apply the appropriate scaling. You might want to work off of the values in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357198/mentorship-research-project-results-wrap-up https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357198/mentorship-r... > 63 mentors from the community volunteered to be our partners. Lets think about a smaller site now. Electrical Engineering gets 80 questions per day. DBA gets 40. Now you've got a point where each question with potential to it can have someone spend a significant amount of time making it into a good question for the site. The other half to that is the curation of the answers. Questions with discussions and polling are a nightmare to keep curated. Consider https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 https://stackoverflow.com/q/1711 or https://stackoverflow.com/q/406760 https://stackoverflow.com/q/406760 or https://stackoverflow.com/q/184618 https://stackoverflow.com/q/184618 and how many duplicate answers there are in there. Consider that if that was open, how often would a new user go to that post and create another poor answer to add their own opinion. Yes, each time a new answer is posted, there's activity on that the question that bumps it to the front page... but the front page scrolls too fast to do meaningful curation for all but the worst (and this also takes time out of the 1h for those 500 people). A smaller site can spend a lot more time per user to guide them to ask a good question and a lot more time per answer to make it something that is a good answer.

jcelerier 9y ago

> I usually don't downvote answer that ask for 3rd party libraries, just vote to close why ? why do you do this ? a lot of time there is an exact piece of code that does what OP asks for, what does it change if the piece of code is in a SO answer or in a github project ?

shagie 9y ago
The code is ideally a "this is the code that fixes the problem" and its done. Once there's an answer, you don't often get a dozen more answers with slightly different code. Library recommendations however - everyone has their favorite. Someone recommends Spring. Someone else recommends Play. Someone else recommends Stripes (and then has a dozen comments explaining the different between Stripes and Stripe). Someone else has Struts (and then gets a dozen comments about the version they're recommending being out of date and lead to the equifax breech). JSF, Jspx, JHipster, Grails, GWT, ... it goes on and on. And now that there are a score of answers, some new user sees the post, doesn't read everything and recommends a new version of Spring. Or points to a different site for Struts. The curation of such a question takes far more work than the question is worth. Look at how much effort the C++ community puts into maintaining the C++ book list. Spending that much effort on each recommendation question is far too much moderation time across the community. On the other hand... go to a site that is designed with exactly that goal in mind. https://www.slant.co/topics/40/~best-java-web-frameworks https://www.slant.co/topics/40/~best-java-web-frameworks does it much better than Stack Overflow can.
- Can_Not 9y ago
  But there are times where I want to see everyone vouch for their frameworks in that exact manor in the stack overflow format by the stack overflow crowd.
  - shagie 9y ago
    That rule is in place because the stack overflow crowd doesn’t want to debate it and keeping it useful for anyone else is too much work.

gergles 9y ago

> so it's not like my opinion is somehow more valuable than yours. But you admit to trying to suppress his ability to express that opinion and see no problem in doing so?

klez 9y ago
Well, I'm not closing it out of spite (in fact, I'm not closing it at all, just voting to close, you need five votes to close a question). I'm closing it because there's a rule on SO that says that those kind of questions should be closed. The point being, SO is not for opinions, and not because I say so. The rules of the site say so. And I (and others) already explained why there are such rules. So why shouldn't I vote to close a question that is patently off-topic when the site rules say I should vote to close it? > But you admit to trying to suppress his ability to express that opinion and see no problem in doing so? Is this a trial? I find this phrase is a bit accusatory, but maybe I'm just reading too much into it.