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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 i

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.
  - GordonS 9y ago
    I think this is a great idea - it should also encourage downvoters to leave a comment explaining why. This has long been considered good etiquette on SO, so it should be encouraged somehow, or maybe even mandatory.
- codinghorror 9y ago
  Downvotes do cost 1 rep already. They have for almost a decade now.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    Yes. It's clearly not enough. Perhap if downvotes with comments cost one, and downvotes without explanation cost more? And downvotes should be both signed (by user) AND motivated. Then the community could rate the downvote as well. A poor downvote should be worse for your rep than a poor question.
    - shagie 9y ago
      While you are suggesting something stronger (1 rep for with a comment and 1+N rep for without a comment), give https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/276440 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/276440 a read. The short version of it is it has problems with the design and you'll get even more junk in comments along with disparaging remarks. Down votes are not a problem. They're a form of moderation of content. They are a signal to other readers that this material has an issue. They are a suggestion that the question shouldn't even be read because. They increase the perception of "this is an attack on the person and not a review of the content."
      - alkonaut 9y ago
        I agree it’s a form of moderation and has long term value, there are issues with how voting is applied (quickly and without feedback), leading to questions being buried or closed instead of improved. As an example: I read a poor question where I can decode what the problem they are having is, but it’s not obvious from the question, so it should be improved. Since I know a good solution to this problem, I don’t downvote or close-vote because I don’t want to bury or close the question while I answer. Instead I suggest how to improve the question in a comment, and start writing my answer. When my answer is finished after 10 minutes, the question is -4 and has multiple close votes even though the author has already improved the question, and my answer was accepted. The question isn’t even an hour old, it’s now a perfectly acceptable question with an accepted answer - but it’s now closed and has score -4 with votes applied to a question that looked nothing like it does now. So the biggest issues are - too easy to downvote with no moderation effort - too easy to end up with improved questions still closed - Fundamental improvements doesn’t reset score (why should asker be encouraged to write a new Q instead of changing old?) In short the problem is that everything happens at once, and the system is designed around questions being final when in reality the first 24h sees significant change. So I’d suggest some simple fixes: - close votes and downvotes removed (by moderation queue confirmation) if a question is sufficiently rewritten in the first (say) hour. It should simply count as a new one. - downvotes registered but not shown during the first (say) hour. Herd mentality seems to make the threshold for downvoting lower. - clicking downvote should at least have an optional comment or a selection among issues (like the close votes already have). That the material has an issue is content moderation but it isn’t feedback. I agree with Jon’s goal that the site should aim to make better askers - not just a better Q/A site. It should even be an explicit goal.
jodrellblank 9y ago
If I googled for “what do I need to make psexec to work” and found your answer “just use a completely different tool” I’d be annoyed by it. “How do I fix my car?” “I find driving a different model works for me” - “good for you, but that doesn’t answer my question” You say it’s a “completely useless comment”, you want to offer anything that might help, they want to keep stackoverflow focused on specific answers and not being like any other discussion forum where any comment is valid. They’re at odds. But the site design is that you should post your own question “what alternatives to psexec exist” and then get closed because recommendations for tools are off topic. The site doesn’t want tool recommendations, they are often commercial and they go out of date quickly. You posted a tool recommendation and it went badly, you’re driven away, apparently that’s the site working as intended. A useless comment that annoyed you and you won’t do it again. For better or worse. curating content requires rejecting most of it, but everyone wants to pretend that it doesn’t, and it can be exclusive and also open and welcoming and that seems contradictory to me. YouTube comments are trash. Sites with comment regulation are hurtful because nobody wants to feel judged as “not good enough” by another group. If anyone can fix that..
- Avamander 9y ago
  > “How do I fix my cat?” “I find driving a different model works for me” - “good for you, but that doesn’t answer my question” Having that as a solution is always better than nothing.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    It gets asymptotically close, however.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  “This tool is trivial to get working and is a drop in replacement for the tool you are struggling with” seems like a completely valid answer. The point is that the site IS a problem/solution site, under the (imho mistaken) label of Q/A site. The answers should be solutions to the askers problem, not answers to the askers question. Decoding the problem from the question is often the hard part. If this answer wasn’t valid (the asker had to use the tool mentioned) then the solution is invalid of course. But this is in my experience much less common than the opposite - that there is a problem buried in the question that can be solved without answering the question. It leads to a few “take the bus” answers to “my car has problem X” - but I think that’s acceptable. The asker can clarify that the problem wasn’t getting from A to B but was to fix the car. All this should usually take place in comments for initial clarification of course

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.
- GordonS 9y ago
  I think this is a great idea - it should also encourage downvoters to leave a comment explaining why. This has long been considered good etiquette on SO, so it should be encouraged somehow, or maybe even mandatory.
codinghorror 9y ago
Downvotes do cost 1 rep already. They have for almost a decade now.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  Yes. It's clearly not enough. Perhap if downvotes with comments cost one, and downvotes without explanation cost more? And downvotes should be both signed (by user) AND motivated. Then the community could rate the downvote as well. A poor downvote should be worse for your rep than a poor question.
  - shagie 9y ago
    While you are suggesting something stronger (1 rep for with a comment and 1+N rep for without a comment), give https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/276440 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/276440 a read. The short version of it is it has problems with the design and you'll get even more junk in comments along with disparaging remarks. Down votes are not a problem. They're a form of moderation of content. They are a signal to other readers that this material has an issue. They are a suggestion that the question shouldn't even be read because. They increase the perception of "this is an attack on the person and not a review of the content."
    - alkonaut 9y ago
      I agree it’s a form of moderation and has long term value, there are issues with how voting is applied (quickly and without feedback), leading to questions being buried or closed instead of improved. As an example: I read a poor question where I can decode what the problem they are having is, but it’s not obvious from the question, so it should be improved. Since I know a good solution to this problem, I don’t downvote or close-vote because I don’t want to bury or close the question while I answer. Instead I suggest how to improve the question in a comment, and start writing my answer. When my answer is finished after 10 minutes, the question is -4 and has multiple close votes even though the author has already improved the question, and my answer was accepted. The question isn’t even an hour old, it’s now a perfectly acceptable question with an accepted answer - but it’s now closed and has score -4 with votes applied to a question that looked nothing like it does now. So the biggest issues are - too easy to downvote with no moderation effort - too easy to end up with improved questions still closed - Fundamental improvements doesn’t reset score (why should asker be encouraged to write a new Q instead of changing old?) In short the problem is that everything happens at once, and the system is designed around questions being final when in reality the first 24h sees significant change. So I’d suggest some simple fixes: - close votes and downvotes removed (by moderation queue confirmation) if a question is sufficiently rewritten in the first (say) hour. It should simply count as a new one. - downvotes registered but not shown during the first (say) hour. Herd mentality seems to make the threshold for downvoting lower. - clicking downvote should at least have an optional comment or a selection among issues (like the close votes already have). That the material has an issue is content moderation but it isn’t feedback. I agree with Jon’s goal that the site should aim to make better askers - not just a better Q/A site. It should even be an explicit goal.

jodrellblank 9y ago

If I googled for “what do I need to make psexec to work” and found your answer “just use a completely different tool” I’d be annoyed by it. “How do I fix my car?” “I find driving a different model works for me” - “good for you, but that doesn’t answer my question” You say it’s a “completely useless comment”, you want to offer anything that might help, they want to keep stackoverflow focused on specific answers and not being like any other discussion forum where any comment is valid. They’re at odds. But the site design is that you should post your own question “what alternatives to psexec exist” and then get closed because recommendations for tools are off topic. The site doesn’t want tool recommendations, they are often commercial and they go out of date quickly. You posted a tool recommendation and it went badly, you’re driven away, apparently that’s the site working as intended. A useless comment that annoyed you and you won’t do it again. For better or worse. curating content requires rejecting most of it, but everyone wants to pretend that it doesn’t, and it can be exclusive and also open and welcoming and that seems contradictory to me. YouTube comments are trash. Sites with comment regulation are hurtful because nobody wants to feel judged as “not good enough” by another group. If anyone can fix that..

Avamander 9y ago
> “How do I fix my cat?” “I find driving a different model works for me” - “good for you, but that doesn’t answer my question” Having that as a solution is always better than nothing.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  It gets asymptotically close, however.
alkonaut 9y ago
“This tool is trivial to get working and is a drop in replacement for the tool you are struggling with” seems like a completely valid answer. The point is that the site IS a problem/solution site, under the (imho mistaken) label of Q/A site. The answers should be solutions to the askers problem, not answers to the askers question. Decoding the problem from the question is often the hard part. If this answer wasn’t valid (the asker had to use the tool mentioned) then the solution is invalid of course. But this is in my experience much less common than the opposite - that there is a problem buried in the question that can be solved without answering the question. It leads to a few “take the bus” answers to “my car has problem X” - but I think that’s acceptable. The asker can clarify that the problem wasn’t getting from A to B but was to fix the car. All this should usually take place in comments for initial clarification of course