21 ms·

Strange and maddening rules

190 points by omnibrain 9y ago

Coincoin 9y ago
What I hate the most about StackOveflow is people continuously questioning the poster's motive instead of answering the question. That often means that if the answer doesn't involve glittering golden code seeping perfection, people won't bother and will just answer: "Don't do that."
- olavk 9y ago
  Can you link to an example of that? (Not disputing your experience, just want to learn.)
  - Pimpus 9y ago
    It took two seconds to find an example in my stackoverflow browser history: [0] > Question: Hide Show content-list with only CSS, no javascript used > Comment: Behavior is supposed to only exist in the realm of JavaScript. But my favorite example is the following, which I sacrificed a couple of minutes looking for because the exchange was so instructive: [1] > Question: How can I replace text with CSS? > Comment 1: To be honest it might be best to use javascript for this. > Comment 2: The question is how to do it with CSS. I am using a CMS that only allows me to change the CSS, which is why I arrived at this page while googling for the answer, and not a different one. That is why we answer the question that was asked instead of asking why the asker's situation isn't different. The thing people forget is that the question is not just about the person asking it, but about people coming across the question e.g. through Google who have to waste their time sifting through idiotic non-answers. For better or worse, SO tends to be ranked highly on Google for development-related queries and I've come to subconsciously ignore it because of its uselessness, in general. [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17731457/hide-show-content-list-with-only-css-no-javascript-used https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17731457/hide-show-conte... [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7896402/how-can-i-replace-text-with-css/14261898#14261898 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7896402/how-can-i-replac...
    - dspillett 9y ago
      > I am using a CMS that only allows me to change the CSS The problem there is not the person commenting/answering being self-righteous, but the original poster not providing sufficient context for the question. People on the other side of the Internet are no more clairvoyant than anyone else, so aren't likely to guess that such a restriction is in play and currently unavoidable. > That is why we answer the question that was asked instead of asking why the asker's situation isn't different. Speaking of self-righteousness: when I see that sort of tone from someone asking for help I tend to walk away and go find someone else to assist (or something else to do entirely).
    - BeetleB 9y ago
      After reading the exchange on SO, I agree: Questioning motives is the right thing to do. The problem isn't that people are questioning the motives. The problem is that we have to. The question is very reasonable within a certain context, and it is the responsibility of the person posing the question to point out that context. For me personally, it has happened a bunch of times that I Googled something, which led me to SO, where the answer was "Don't try to do it the way you're asking - the better way is X". I'm really glad I got those answers because I was educated about why what I was trying to do was bad and how to do it properly. The times where I really needed to do it the poor way are a small minority.
    - olavk 9y ago
      For the first question, there are 12 answers providing pure CSS solutions. One of them is marked as accepted by the OP, which indicates it solved their problem. Then there is a single comment (not an answer) which says "you are not supposed to do that", which have received a single upvote. You say "people won't bother", but in reality, 12 people have bothered and provided detailed solutions with code. What more could you want? I don't really see the major problem here. The second question has 23 answers, the top one having 186 upvotes. And then there is a single comment (not an answer), saying JS is more appropriate for this, and a reply from the OP explaining why it needs to be pure CSS. Comments are for asking questions, request clarifications and providing information which does not constitute a regular answer. This seems to work exactly as intended. Several answers make it clear that the CSS solution is more fragile and worse supported than a JS solution, so I think it is pretty relevant to ask the OP (absent any information either way) if they couldn't use JS instead. I really have a hard time seeing the problem here?
- egjerlow 9y ago
  To me, this is a feature, not a bug. In my experience, usually the questioning of motive is well-founded and the poster is really doing something that in a perfect programming world shouldn't be done. Then, if the poster is able to explain why they are forced to take this particular route, people will usually accept it and answer.
  - alien_at_work 9y ago
    No, this is unacceptable. Ideally you should first answer the question, then explain why it shouldn't be done. If you don't have enough time, then drop the second part. And the reason is not about the OP, the OP is irrelevant in such a site. SO is a collection of programming knowledge. So the problem is that an experienced software engineer comes along years later, forced into doing something they already know is bad but have no choice for some reason (normally some silly job constrained that they simply cannot change), google search to see if anyone has done it and guess what comes up? The exact question on SO but with these useless answers. And since it has been "answered" no one else bothers any more. And I can't come in an clarify why I need it, it's not my question. If I ask again, my question will probably flagged as a duplicate. If I could change only one thing on SO, it would be that anyone who answers "don't do that", in any form, without answering the question is banned from the site and their response removed.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - recursive 9y ago
      The majority of people arriving via that search years later probably don't already know, and are less equipped than the experienced engineer to tell the difference.
  - psyc 9y ago
    This is horrible, and reminds me of the programmer mentality in general. I come as a human asking a question, and instead of answering like a normal person, they grill me until I've proven something to them.
- stinos 9y ago
  In all honesty, quite often the people are right. I've seen so many questions where the poster comes in and already 'solved' part of the problem by making false assumptions (note: this can be by accident, it's normal for novices and even more advanced programmers to have a lack of diagnostic insight) and then asks 'I want to do this, how do I do this?' which is at that point simply the wrong question. Practical analogy to one particular style of questions: I have a lamp and a switch, and I don't see any light when I toggle the switch and I go to SO to ask how to replace the lamp. SO people could of course come up with a perfectly valid and acceptable answer and leave it as-is. But SO people might know better and realize such answer might not fix the actual problem, which could be a myriad of other things (no power, no wires, switch broken, I'm blind, ....).
  - alien_at_work 9y ago
    It's highly presumptious to assume you know better than the person asking. You might, but you might not. The fact that SO serves as a collection of programming knowledge, you do not know better than everyone who will ever search for that question even if you do actually know better than the OP who actually asked the first time. It would be fine to help with all these other possibilites but part of your answer should... actually answer the question that was asked, as it was asked and not doing so should result in a servere punishement.
    - stinos 9y ago
      It's highly presumptious to assume you know better than the person asking For me, questioning someone's question, asking more info, pointing out he/she might be doing the wrong thing, ... does not in any way involve me assuming knowing things better than the questioner or anyone. (e.g. for all I know, the asker is way more intelligent and wise and knowing than I am, but just temporarily confused - happens to me sometimes so can happen to others) Those two are orthogonal for me, it's just my nature to always question stuff. Including myself. And this certainly helps in finding solutions. And doesn't lead to me thinking I'm better. Perhaps different sometimes, yes. your answer should... actually answer the question that was asked, as it was asked and not doing so should result in a servere punishement. To stick with the enalogy: while the answer 'buy lamp, take ladder, unscrew old, screw in new' might perfectly answer the question, it is in my view completely useless if it doesn't solve the problem. So I'd leave a comment asking for more info. And if someone else would already have given that answer I'll probably leave a comment saying it's rather incomplete. Because it's imo the only way to actually help the OP. Why on earth should one get punished for that? Isn't it the right thing to do?
- dspillett 9y ago
  (I don't post answers on SO at all, but I do on some of the sibling sites (DBA.SE, SF, SU), so my experience might not be exactly the same, but...) > questioning the poster's motive The motive can be important. Where there are multiple explanations and/or solutions this can filter out some that are not going to be relevant or practical for their current situation. Also where what they are asking seems impossible/impractical/misguided/other it can help in providing a better solution (i.e. trying to give them what they ultimately want even if it isn't what they are specifically asking for) or give context that might quieten your gut "don't do that" reaction. The poster's motive is one of the most important bits of information: Where were you? What did you do? Why? What were you intending to happen? What happened instead? > "Don't do that." Sometimes "don't do that" or "you can't do that" is the only suitable answer though (such as where what they are trying to do is impossible, or just wildly impractical, or will open up a security nightmare, or there is a built-in method so they'd be reinventing a wheel, or one of many other reasons) with the important caveat that you don't answer with just "don't do that". Better is "don't do that because <good explanation>" or "you can't do that because <good explanation>". Even better still, if what is being asked it actually possible even if it is strongly recommended against: "You shouldn't do that because <explanation> but if you chose to ignore this recommendation you could try <method>".
- fuzzy2 9y ago
  This may seem off-putting at times, but I believe it is absolutely necessary. When colleagues come to me with questions (which they do a lot), I always ask about the background. And sometimes, I arrive at different conclusions that solve the actual problem with ease. If you expect a quality answer that actually solves the problem, explain everything. Provide clarification when asked to do so. Also, don't assume hostility and be friendly yourself.
Clubber 9y ago
I'm happy to see Spolsky blogging again. Everyone should read his old stuff; most of it is spot on. I was young in my career when I found his blog; right around the dot bomb. His posts are very thoughtful and insigntful. They should be required reading for any programming manager, team lead, or developer. Joel, if you are reading this, it's difficult to find your archives on your new site.
- daveslash 9y ago
  Agreed. Good greats for anybody; excellent for people newer to software development (including managers, leads, and other non-programmers). On his website https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ scroll down to "Reading Lists"; he has a link to his archives, as well as top reading lists by topic.
jasode 9y ago
>, with this in mind, to read Jon Skeet’s checklist for writing the perfect question.[...] Sadly, not everybody finds his checklist. Maybe they found it and they don’t care. They’re having an urgent problem with code; they heard that Stack Overflow could help them; and they don’t have time to read some nerd’s complicated protocol for requesting help. As to the Jon Skeet checklist[1] that Spolsky linked, is there any reason why those questions can't be part of the UI when posting a question? The data entry for those fields can even be optional instead of mandatory. The incentive for filling them out is to boost the likelihood of the question getting visibility and getting answered. An analogy is "SEO" Search Engine Optimization and "pagerank". If you want your question to bubble up to the top of the answerers' queue, boost the "effort score" by answering those Jon Skeet questions. Any drawbacks for this? [1] https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2012/11/24/stack-overflow-question-checklist/ https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2012/11/24/stack-overflow-quest...
- mistermann 9y ago
  This seems like an absolute no brainer great idea to me. I've often wondered why moderators don't do the same on subreddits....how often when you're doing a search do you see results with useless titles like "Need help!" or "What should I do here!!??".
fergie 9y ago
SO has never quite cracked the "be nice" rule. You can still get some pretty nasty feedback on your questions, and I completely understand why some beginners would be put off. Its also worth noting that the top result for a software question in Google often takes you to a SO question that is "closed as off-topic" or "marked as duplicate". I have a lot of sympathy with Joel's view that you should mercilessly enforce standards, but some of the "SO approved" moderation and feedback is not just rude, its actually wrong and unhelpful in the wider scheme of things.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- olavk 9y ago
  If the question is "marked as duplicate" then there is always a link to the duplicate, where the question is hopefully answered. I think it is a good thing that the same question has answers in a single place. But of course there is a grey zone when it is not exactly the same question. As for off-topic questions, this is annoying, but I also think it is necessary for any useful site to maintain a focus. For example, StackOverflow does not allow requests for software recommendations even though this a frequent kind of question. But it is not a good fit for the format of the site since you often cannot say a recommendation is the "correct" one.
  - oldcynic 9y ago
    It often seems that the duplicate is different enough that they should remain separate. Or just as frustrating the duplicate relates to a previous release where the same question begs a different answer.
    - olavk 9y ago
      Can you provide a few links? I can vote to re-open if appropriate.
  - GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
    In my own experience ~7/10 times the duplicate question is something entirely different and I have to spend longer searching because of someone's ignorant pedantry.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
SO has long been the butt of jokes about over-moderation. Any arbitrary SO link found in the wild is 90% likely to be closed for some reason or another, even though it probably solves the problemn you ended up on that page to solve. It's hard to read from this blog post, but if fixing this is one of the forthcoming changes I think it's a good move.
- olavk 9y ago
  Can you link to a few examples? (I sometimes moderate on SO, so would like to learn from previous mistakes.)
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    Anytime a question that has interesting or thoughtful replies is closed, it does a disservice to the community and content of the site. It's something moderators don't seem to agree with the users about. Here are a few of many, many examples: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2847655/find-threads-running-for-a-particular-process-in-linux https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2847655/find-threads-run... https://web.archive.org/web/20150404191857/http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5574241/using-sun-misc-unsafe-in-real-world https://web.archive.org/web/20150404191857/http://stackoverf... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5574241/why-does-sun-misc-unsafe-exist-and-how-can-it-be-used-in-the-real-world https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5574241/why-does-sun-mis... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/961942/what-is-the-worst-programming-language-you-ever-worked-with https://stackoverflow.com/questions/961942/what-is-the-worst... I'm sure mods can explain why those don't fit on the site but closing them makes people not want to use SO and develop a negative opinion of the moderation team.
    - recursive 9y ago
      If posts don't fit on the site, it seems fair for moderators to close them. (It's called putting "on hold" now) Most of the questions that are put on hold are not put on hold by moderators, but just ordinary users. Your 4 links go to a total of 3 distinct questions. By my estimation, 2 of those are just general open-ended discussion questions without specific correct technical answers. If users form a negative opinion of the site or moderation team for closing those, they probably never had a chance to like SO in the first place.
jancsika 9y ago
> To novices, the long bureaucratic rigmarole associated with asking your first question on Stack Overflow can feel either completely unnecessary, or just plain weird. I just think of SO as being "read-only." It might as well be Encyclopedia Brittannica for all I know. I also think of the errors I read in SO as being part of that immutable encyclopedia. The only alternative is to spend time trying to correct an error which led me down this rabbit hole: 1. Realize that the site makes you jump through all kinds of hoops just to respond to a (wrong) answer or comment on a question. 2. Spend a total of 45 minutes researching and emailing two people who already are SO members. Sending them a link to the SO page that has a clearly wrong statement, and politely asking them to add a comment or whatever to make it clear that the statement is wrong. Ironically, that wrong statement was about one of the old string-handling functions in the C standard library. So while the old usenet might have gotten a cranky response from a C Jedi who knows all the answers, it is prohibitively expensive to even provide the right answer on SO. Luckily SO has enough correct information on it that treating it like an immutable datastore still has great benefit.
- justherefortart 9y ago
  SO was great 8 or so years ago. Now it's mostly "you're doing it wrong" answers as the top shit I see when I search on google. Wading through that nonsense takes longer than finding and implementing a helpful solution. Sad really.
  - maw 9y ago
    Don't forget about the comments that read, basically, "why haven't you googled this, peon?" usually found in the first hit, often the first several hits, in Google.
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    What's better than SO?
    - psyc 9y ago
      SO is, if it ever gets around to listening to the recent outcry, and stops doubling down on the narrative they have going, which is something like, "Actually, the problem is you are a n00b, and we haven't communicated our godly ethos in a n00b-friendly way. So we'll solve the problem by explaining ourselves. And have we mentioned that only n00bs have this problem with us?"
douglaswlance 9y ago
Open source StackOverflow, Joel. Let us fix it!
nlawalker 9y ago
I find that a lot of askers on SO are really in need of a consultation with a tutor or technical mentor, not a singular answer. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but to me, really poor SO questions often look like opportunities - what if the asker was open to a 30 minute chat with someone knowledgeable that could totally illuminate things and set them on the right path, but there's just no forum for accomplishing that (or they don't know about it)? Is there any site/service out there that facilitates this? Paid, unpaid, whatever, I'm just curious if anyone in the HN community has done something like this, on either side (as either the tutor, or the tutored).
- stinos 9y ago
  Very good point. Best thing you can do on SO is starting a chat with the user I think, or sometimes you can give a 'teach a man how to fish'-style answer where you don't just give a code-only answer (i.e. how), or maybe don't even give a complete direct answer at all, but explain the bigger picture (i.e. why). Problem with the latter approach is that if the OP doesn't leave any comment you don't really know if it helped at all, whereas chat is more direct. But if you do get a 'well now I learned something' type of comment there's a good chance it actually helped the OP becoming more knowledgeable.
  - kqr 9y ago
    > Problem with the latter approach is that if the OP doesn't leave any comment you don't really know if it helped at all I have thought before that somehow responding to people's answers should be mandatory to get them, but I have yet to figure out a good scheme for this.
- jamessb 9y ago
  I think hackhands is what you are describing: https://hackhands.com/how-it-works/ https://hackhands.com/how-it-works/
  - arbie 9y ago
    This looks amazing! Any experience with getting help on an enterprise codebase?
ILikeConemowk 9y ago
The absolute best quote in the OP: These questions feel like showing up on a medical website and saying something like “I think my kidney has been hurting. How can I remove it?”
- slantyyz 9y ago
  >> These questions feel like showing up on a medical website and saying something like “I think my kidney has been hurting. How can I remove it?” While I laughed at this example for a few seconds, I also think this is a question that needs to be answered. While we'd like to think that everyone who uses the Internet has a basic level of intelligence and a grasp of common sense, this is often not true. Having a real expert answering this question properly (in simple, non-patronizing language) could prevent someone who may not be thinking rationally/logically from doing something incredibly stupid.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
peterwwillis 9y ago
I notice a lot of people talking about moderation on SO. It reminds me of the moderation on HN. It's all focused on one of two things: being "nice", or being "interesting". Which is really bizarre. It's not reasonable to expect people to act in an artificial way. People are emotional, and usually not all that smart or interesting. We're monkeys with hats. Just because you can train a monkey to paint a picture does not mean it won't fling poo at you. SO wants to keep some beginner questions, but also keep the really complicated questions, and you have to do some homework, but really most questions are okay, and you shouldn't ask a question again, and you have to be nice, ... These are so many subjective rules that serve to make everything "look" a certain way. It's almost like playing a game. Ah, you didn't say please and thank you! You lose five points. In a world where not everyone agrees with you or behaves the way you want, I wonder what the goal of this particular game is? I guess what I'm driving at is how thinking you can just make up a list of rules of how humans should behave and expect it to go okay, is maybe not the best idea. It's like expecting that you can write some shell scripts that tell a computer how to work, and it will always work that way. Bad news: computers don't always follow simple rules, and neither do humans. Moderators are the equivalent of health checks that go around restarting things that died. That may be fine for your massively scaled enterprise application, but humans have something computer programs don't have: feelings. Which brings up a completely unrelated question: In the future, when computers have emotions, will server automation be considered equivalent to chicken farms? Yes, we're killing all these living creatures after they have a meager existence in cramped spaces, but have you tasted this amazing chicken cordon bleu? (Inb4 flagged for "incendiary topic: animal rights")
Quarrelsome 9y ago
This is why I quit stackoverflow. I'm a top 2% but there became a point where people seemed to care more about the correctness of the information repository than they did about helping people. It changed from a community vibe into a library and then mods started to stamp on some very good questions that people asked and closed them as duplicates (linking to a slightly different question) or as "too open-ended" or "off-topic". They gave those mods carte-blanche to enforce their way of viewing the site, of data and people and then meta.overflow adopted a hostile culture to shame people who questioned this world-view. I really like that site but ended up hating it. My 2% rep is also a lie. I got so much from simple answers and so little from much more complicated ones.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  > care more about the correctness of the information repository than they did about helping people Not whether you meant "useful" or "rule-abiding" when you say "correct". Optimizing for the future reader rather than the current asker is explicitly part of SO design.
  - Quarrelsome 9y ago
    and they haven't succeeded. Try finding something for Angular 5 without getting bogged down in previous Angular stuff or seeing questions about tech choices that are ridiculously out of date because they stopped allowing people to post those questions in roughly 2010.
    - mycomments2017 9y ago
      there's a place for freenode/gitter/matrix.org's '#programming' room and there's a place for 'correctness of the information repository' that SO provides
      - Quarrelsome 9y ago
        you think there is no value in an open question with upsie/downsie on SO? On freenode the answers are very much dependent on the time the question is asked.
psyc 9y ago
It isn't just novices. I've been programming for 30 years, and I wouldn't dream of asking a question on SO, because I simply don't loathe myself that much. I've seen this before with Wikipedia. SO culture gives me the expectation that odds are asking my question will be a waste of my time.
- HenryBemis 9y ago
  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging I don't have a rubber duck near me, but I (sometimes) find it helpful, when I code and hit a wall, to 'talk to myself' (out loud). For someone who's been coding 30 years (you), you have practiced this enough to be able to debug easily (and silently:). For newbie coders (me)(not sarcastically) sometimes this helps. Oh, and SO is a great tool/forum, a true gift with many-many positive and helpful people.
  - psyc 9y ago
    I do appreciate that SO does help beginners. This is part of an ongoing recent discussion that has been critical of where SO fails. I am far from convinced that SO's culture is really some deliberate Miyagi-style ruse intended to teach you that you had the power inside you all along.
- edem 9y ago
  This is simply not true. I often ask on SO and I don't need more than 5 minutes to produce a good question. I've read the faq and the guidelines though...
chadlavi 9y ago
> The average programmer, in the world, has been helped by Stack Overflow 340 times. That seems low, to be honest.
fouc 9y ago
>The average programmer, in the world, has been helped by Stack Overflow 340 times. Seems suspiciously low to me, I suppose that's not counting page views.
sstanie 9y ago
For anyone that clicked through to his 1988 question on comp.lang.c ... what was causing what he was happening? I'm assuming something with an old version of gcc, but I can't reprocue it- I get the correct result using both cc and gcc. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.lang.c/spolsky%7Csort:date/comp.lang.c/BKhAacGNtZI/GLSW-QG_O3MJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.lang.c/spols... Are you allowed to use getchar() twice? (seems like a silly question? read on!) ---------------------------------------------------- kangaroo% cat test.c #include <stdio.h> main() { int c; c=getchar(); putchar(c); c=getchar(); putchar(c); putchar('\n'); } kangaroo% gcc test.c kangaroo% echo "Hi" | a.out H^@ kangaroo% cc test.c kangaroo% echo "Hi" | a.out Hi ---------------------------------- Anybody know what's going on?
- brianpgordon 9y ago
  It looks like for some reason GCC is returning EOF from the second getchar() call and his terminal is rendering it as ^@.
pjungwir 9y ago
Every HN conversation about Stack Overflow is full of carping, so I feel obliged to say: I love Stack Overflow. It has saved me days of work, and I've really enjoyed helping people when I could. It was a revolution, and I would hate to return to the days of searching old phpbb forums for help (and if I was really desperate creating yet another account to ask something myself). I've been on the site since the beginning, although my participation waxes and wanes. I often only check the "bounty" tab for tags I care about, since those tend to be better-asked questions. That's one way to engage off-and-on without much effort. When I do look through the non-bounty questions, I find a lot of beginners. Some questions are so badly-asked I won't engage, but a lot of questions show someone trying who is just not yet knowledgeable enough to know the right approach, or even how to ask for help. I feel like those are the most fun to answer. I could probably mark them all as duplicates somehow, but where is the fun in that? I'd rather offer an answer tailored to their own situation, possibly with links to other SO answers that elaborate on relevant (not "duplicate") topics. Joel's post here actually sounds less hard-line against duplicates than the Stack Overflow conventional wisdom. It sound like what he really cares about is whether the asker is trying. Personally I have never marked a question as a duplicate, because there is usually some room to explain how that other question applies to the asker's situation. With Rust I've been on the other side of that exchange, too. That is really the only region of Stack Overflow where I've seen the pedantry and unhelpfulness that others complain about---mostly from one person actually. And I wonder how many people have given up on Rust because of bad experiences there. What looks like a duplicate to an experienced developer may seem totally unrelated to a beginner. When your question is marked as a duplicate you get this sinking feeling of hopelessness, like someone is saying, "I can see the problem, but I won't tell you, and I'll make sure no one else sees your question either. Good bye!" Knowing what it feels like makes me even more inclined to answer every question in its uniqueness. And it is very rewarding to help someone out of their bind! Another fun question is the "Something is failing and I don't know why" type. If you have a lot of experience with that tech, you might be able to recognize the problem or guess it from little information. These questions are like fun puzzles, and they let you show off a bit of "magic". Anyway, every time I see a HN post about Stack Overflow, I want to write this comment. Joel, Jeff, and everyone else there: thank you so much for a huge gift to developers everywhere!
- 9y ago
mcguire 9y ago
Tl;dr: a question/answer forum is a poor way to build a reference library.
mcguire 9y ago
"What did we think of newbie questions?" That's the wrong question. (Hah!) A better one: What do you think about complicated, difficult questions? Answer: apparently, not much.
jnordwick 9y ago
Ask anything optimization or performance related and you get a string of "premature optimization", "let the compiler to it", or "use this library" comments. One of SO's biggest problems is the mod thinking they know better than the people asking and over-aggressively closing things down. And given a number of ways to ask the same question, they will often get closed down in not in the exact right form: - How do I do X in my programming language? - Is there a library to do X in my programming language? - What is the best library to do X in my programming language? While the three questions are slightly different, they will result in about the same answers. I see no reason to close any of them down since they all imply each other. Or the huge issues with decade old answers still coming up when they no longer apply to recent software versions. Once seeing an interesting Java question answered by Gosling himself, I made a suggestion on Meta to highlight answers by notable people. I thought it would be very interesting. Wow! Was ever a bad idea. Meta is even worse and nastier than SO regular. It seemed like the mods were fighting to be the biggest on the site and didn't want anybody to outshine them. Joel doesn't seem to want to understand the SO has large problems for many user types, and it needs more than just a little lipstick.
brudgers 9y ago
It's worth noting that Spolsky lost the "How do you move the turtle in LOGO" philosophical debate. [1] Atwood won and thus people get an excuse to treat people badly. Particularly relevant is that people get an excuse to treat new comers particularly badly. Sure, there's a scale at which aggressively closing questions is administratively necessary. [python] or [android] are at that scale. But the small corners of StackExchange are often dominated by Usenet behaviors because such behaviors are sanctioned from on high. Policies that encourage treating people badly are established by fix or sixteen votes on the related Meta site. And blessed in the moderator discussions as site wide policies based on the administrative needs of tags like [php] on StackOverflow. A lot of StackExchange is similar to comp.lang.c did in the Usenet era. As in the days of the Usenet, They tolerate and encourage those behaviors. I think there's a critical lower bound and a maximum upper bound for the number of users. The topic has to be big enough that there is a steady stream of new questions and small enough that regulars talking among themselves is a meaningful percentage of the activity. [1]: The discussion from 2009 in SO Podcast #58 (under the old numbering system): https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/18/podcast-58/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/18/podcast-58/
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  The question in question [1] was closed as "not a real question" and then further "locked". [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...
  - brudgers 9y ago
    As Spolsky describes in the recent article, the question was seen as problematic by Atwood because it didn't reflect enough research. Atwood even deleted it in 2011.[1] A moderator later restored for historical relevance. But the site's policies reflect a lot more of Atwood's personality than Spolsky's...most unfortunately. [1] See revision 16 https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions
munificent 9y ago
> we could improve the prompts we provide on the “Ask Question” page, and we could provide more tools for community moderation of comments where the snark currently runs unchecked. Here's an idea: On the ask question page, have a checkbox for "Help me ask my question". Check that, and the question temporarily goes into a separate corral where helpers can edit or refine the question. These self-selected subset of the Stack Overflow community help get the question ready before it goes "public" to the larger SO world.
- edem 9y ago
  There is already a review system in place. The problem is that there is almost no incentive to participate in it since you get no rep from it.
ken 9y ago
"And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier." Programming is complicated enough, and we should see our mission as making it simpler. That would benefit everyone, not just newcomers. I see the eventual harshness and gatekeeping in every forum (not just Usenet and SO) as the inevitable consequence of accidental complexity. We've got 173 layers between what we want to accomplish and what we have to type on on the keyboard today, and that naturally leads to ultra-specialization and Barton's "high priests". I don't think I can describe the modern web stack with a straight face. It's become its own parody of software development. I no longer think I understand how to stay secure on the modern internet, except by mindlessly following "best practices" I've been told. Complexity has a real cost for everyone. To change the background color on my C=64, you had to consult a memory map -- but there weren't dozens of other abstraction layers to think about, so even my parents weren't afraid to crack open the book and help. Abstraction is a necessary tool, but a lot of the layers we've got today are just plain bad, and exist mostly by historical accident. You either have to study the archaeology of all your software and hardware, or you have to memorize bizarre cargo cult rituals and recite them back without understanding why. The root cause can't be solved with a Q&A website, no matter how much you tweak the phrasing of the form fields.
edem 9y ago
I see a lot of people complaining about SO because of duplicates, barriers, etc but it seems that none of those people actually read the article. You have to go through all these hoops because you can't force your way through this learning process the same way as you can't have 9 women give birth to a baby in 1 month. Contributing to SO is a journey and the milestone system is geared towards helping people through it. You have to admit that nothing is perfect and complaining won't help. Criticizing something is easy but I see close to zero suggestions for improvement. Just ask yourself whether you can do better than Joel and the others or at least give some suggestions for improvement. Disclaimer: I'm also one of those 2% people and I also see problems but I think that it is not that serious as some people claim it to be.
Animats 9y ago
That post could have been much shorter. The picture of the San Francisco waterfront didn't help.
amp108 9y ago
"Closed as duplicate" is such a frustrating experience with SO, especially since the canonical answer for the original post so often has so little to do with the supposed "duplicate" post, other than a superficial similarity in how the question is posed. E.g.: Q1: I'm trying to do x and it isn't working. A1: You're missing a comma in the list on line 7. Q2: I'm trying to do x (and I've checked all of my commas), and it isn't working. A2: Closed as duplicate of Q1.
iamdemonhunter 9y ago
https://geekolive.com/download-change-my-software/ https://geekolive.com/download-change-my-software/
iamdemonhunter 9y ago
https://evelynnblackmore.tumblr.com https://evelynnblackmore.tumblr.com https://just-odette.tumblr.com https://just-odette.tumblr.com https://officialdarrell.tumblr.com https://officialdarrell.tumblr.com https://missvelmadinkley.tumblr.com https://missvelmadinkley.tumblr.com

190 points by omnibrain 9y ago

What I hate the most about StackOveflow is people continuously questioning the poster's motive instead of answering the question. That often means that if the answer doesn't involve glittering golden code seeping perfection, people won't bother and will just answer: "Don't do that."

olavk 9y ago
Can you link to an example of that? (Not disputing your experience, just want to learn.)
- Pimpus 9y ago
  It took two seconds to find an example in my stackoverflow browser history: [0] > Question: Hide Show content-list with only CSS, no javascript used > Comment: Behavior is supposed to only exist in the realm of JavaScript. But my favorite example is the following, which I sacrificed a couple of minutes looking for because the exchange was so instructive: [1] > Question: How can I replace text with CSS? > Comment 1: To be honest it might be best to use javascript for this. > Comment 2: The question is how to do it with CSS. I am using a CMS that only allows me to change the CSS, which is why I arrived at this page while googling for the answer, and not a different one. That is why we answer the question that was asked instead of asking why the asker's situation isn't different. The thing people forget is that the question is not just about the person asking it, but about people coming across the question e.g. through Google who have to waste their time sifting through idiotic non-answers. For better or worse, SO tends to be ranked highly on Google for development-related queries and I've come to subconsciously ignore it because of its uselessness, in general. [0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17731457/hide-show-content-list-with-only-css-no-javascript-used https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17731457/hide-show-conte... [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7896402/how-can-i-replace-text-with-css/14261898#14261898 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7896402/how-can-i-replac...
  - dspillett 9y ago
    > I am using a CMS that only allows me to change the CSS The problem there is not the person commenting/answering being self-righteous, but the original poster not providing sufficient context for the question. People on the other side of the Internet are no more clairvoyant than anyone else, so aren't likely to guess that such a restriction is in play and currently unavoidable. > That is why we answer the question that was asked instead of asking why the asker's situation isn't different. Speaking of self-righteousness: when I see that sort of tone from someone asking for help I tend to walk away and go find someone else to assist (or something else to do entirely).
  - BeetleB 9y ago
    After reading the exchange on SO, I agree: Questioning motives is the right thing to do. The problem isn't that people are questioning the motives. The problem is that we have to. The question is very reasonable within a certain context, and it is the responsibility of the person posing the question to point out that context. For me personally, it has happened a bunch of times that I Googled something, which led me to SO, where the answer was "Don't try to do it the way you're asking - the better way is X". I'm really glad I got those answers because I was educated about why what I was trying to do was bad and how to do it properly. The times where I really needed to do it the poor way are a small minority.
  - olavk 9y ago
    For the first question, there are 12 answers providing pure CSS solutions. One of them is marked as accepted by the OP, which indicates it solved their problem. Then there is a single comment (not an answer) which says "you are not supposed to do that", which have received a single upvote. You say "people won't bother", but in reality, 12 people have bothered and provided detailed solutions with code. What more could you want? I don't really see the major problem here. The second question has 23 answers, the top one having 186 upvotes. And then there is a single comment (not an answer), saying JS is more appropriate for this, and a reply from the OP explaining why it needs to be pure CSS. Comments are for asking questions, request clarifications and providing information which does not constitute a regular answer. This seems to work exactly as intended. Several answers make it clear that the CSS solution is more fragile and worse supported than a JS solution, so I think it is pretty relevant to ask the OP (absent any information either way) if they couldn't use JS instead. I really have a hard time seeing the problem here?
egjerlow 9y ago
To me, this is a feature, not a bug. In my experience, usually the questioning of motive is well-founded and the poster is really doing something that in a perfect programming world shouldn't be done. Then, if the poster is able to explain why they are forced to take this particular route, people will usually accept it and answer.
- alien_at_work 9y ago
  No, this is unacceptable. Ideally you should first answer the question, then explain why it shouldn't be done. If you don't have enough time, then drop the second part. And the reason is not about the OP, the OP is irrelevant in such a site. SO is a collection of programming knowledge. So the problem is that an experienced software engineer comes along years later, forced into doing something they already know is bad but have no choice for some reason (normally some silly job constrained that they simply cannot change), google search to see if anyone has done it and guess what comes up? The exact question on SO but with these useless answers. And since it has been "answered" no one else bothers any more. And I can't come in an clarify why I need it, it's not my question. If I ask again, my question will probably flagged as a duplicate. If I could change only one thing on SO, it would be that anyone who answers "don't do that", in any form, without answering the question is banned from the site and their response removed.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - recursive 9y ago
    The majority of people arriving via that search years later probably don't already know, and are less equipped than the experienced engineer to tell the difference.
- psyc 9y ago
  This is horrible, and reminds me of the programmer mentality in general. I come as a human asking a question, and instead of answering like a normal person, they grill me until I've proven something to them.
stinos 9y ago
In all honesty, quite often the people are right. I've seen so many questions where the poster comes in and already 'solved' part of the problem by making false assumptions (note: this can be by accident, it's normal for novices and even more advanced programmers to have a lack of diagnostic insight) and then asks 'I want to do this, how do I do this?' which is at that point simply the wrong question. Practical analogy to one particular style of questions: I have a lamp and a switch, and I don't see any light when I toggle the switch and I go to SO to ask how to replace the lamp. SO people could of course come up with a perfectly valid and acceptable answer and leave it as-is. But SO people might know better and realize such answer might not fix the actual problem, which could be a myriad of other things (no power, no wires, switch broken, I'm blind, ....).
- alien_at_work 9y ago
  It's highly presumptious to assume you know better than the person asking. You might, but you might not. The fact that SO serves as a collection of programming knowledge, you do not know better than everyone who will ever search for that question even if you do actually know better than the OP who actually asked the first time. It would be fine to help with all these other possibilites but part of your answer should... actually answer the question that was asked, as it was asked and not doing so should result in a servere punishement.
  - stinos 9y ago
    It's highly presumptious to assume you know better than the person asking For me, questioning someone's question, asking more info, pointing out he/she might be doing the wrong thing, ... does not in any way involve me assuming knowing things better than the questioner or anyone. (e.g. for all I know, the asker is way more intelligent and wise and knowing than I am, but just temporarily confused - happens to me sometimes so can happen to others) Those two are orthogonal for me, it's just my nature to always question stuff. Including myself. And this certainly helps in finding solutions. And doesn't lead to me thinking I'm better. Perhaps different sometimes, yes. your answer should... actually answer the question that was asked, as it was asked and not doing so should result in a servere punishement. To stick with the enalogy: while the answer 'buy lamp, take ladder, unscrew old, screw in new' might perfectly answer the question, it is in my view completely useless if it doesn't solve the problem. So I'd leave a comment asking for more info. And if someone else would already have given that answer I'll probably leave a comment saying it's rather incomplete. Because it's imo the only way to actually help the OP. Why on earth should one get punished for that? Isn't it the right thing to do?
dspillett 9y ago
(I don't post answers on SO at all, but I do on some of the sibling sites (DBA.SE, SF, SU), so my experience might not be exactly the same, but...) > questioning the poster's motive The motive can be important. Where there are multiple explanations and/or solutions this can filter out some that are not going to be relevant or practical for their current situation. Also where what they are asking seems impossible/impractical/misguided/other it can help in providing a better solution (i.e. trying to give them what they ultimately want even if it isn't what they are specifically asking for) or give context that might quieten your gut "don't do that" reaction. The poster's motive is one of the most important bits of information: Where were you? What did you do? Why? What were you intending to happen? What happened instead? > "Don't do that." Sometimes "don't do that" or "you can't do that" is the only suitable answer though (such as where what they are trying to do is impossible, or just wildly impractical, or will open up a security nightmare, or there is a built-in method so they'd be reinventing a wheel, or one of many other reasons) with the important caveat that you don't answer with just "don't do that". Better is "don't do that because <good explanation>" or "you can't do that because <good explanation>". Even better still, if what is being asked it actually possible even if it is strongly recommended against: "You shouldn't do that because <explanation> but if you chose to ignore this recommendation you could try <method>".
fuzzy2 9y ago
This may seem off-putting at times, but I believe it is absolutely necessary. When colleagues come to me with questions (which they do a lot), I always ask about the background. And sometimes, I arrive at different conclusions that solve the actual problem with ease. If you expect a quality answer that actually solves the problem, explain everything. Provide clarification when asked to do so. Also, don't assume hostility and be friendly yourself.

Clubber 9y ago

I'm happy to see Spolsky blogging again. Everyone should read his old stuff; most of it is spot on. I was young in my career when I found his blog; right around the dot bomb. His posts are very thoughtful and insigntful. They should be required reading for any programming manager, team lead, or developer. Joel, if you are reading this, it's difficult to find your archives on your new site.

daveslash 9y ago
Agreed. Good greats for anybody; excellent for people newer to software development (including managers, leads, and other non-programmers). On his website https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ scroll down to "Reading Lists"; he has a link to his archives, as well as top reading lists by topic.

jasode 9y ago

>, with this in mind, to read Jon Skeet’s checklist for writing the perfect question.[...] Sadly, not everybody finds his checklist. Maybe they found it and they don’t care. They’re having an urgent problem with code; they heard that Stack Overflow could help them; and they don’t have time to read some nerd’s complicated protocol for requesting help. As to the Jon Skeet checklist[1] that Spolsky linked, is there any reason why those questions can't be part of the UI when posting a question? The data entry for those fields can even be optional instead of mandatory. The incentive for filling them out is to boost the likelihood of the question getting visibility and getting answered. An analogy is "SEO" Search Engine Optimization and "pagerank". If you want your question to bubble up to the top of the answerers' queue, boost the "effort score" by answering those Jon Skeet questions. Any drawbacks for this? [1] https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2012/11/24/stack-overflow-question-checklist/ https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2012/11/24/stack-overflow-quest...

mistermann 9y ago
This seems like an absolute no brainer great idea to me. I've often wondered why moderators don't do the same on subreddits....how often when you're doing a search do you see results with useless titles like "Need help!" or "What should I do here!!??".

fergie 9y ago

SO has never quite cracked the "be nice" rule. You can still get some pretty nasty feedback on your questions, and I completely understand why some beginners would be put off. Its also worth noting that the top result for a software question in Google often takes you to a SO question that is "closed as off-topic" or "marked as duplicate". I have a lot of sympathy with Joel's view that you should mercilessly enforce standards, but some of the "SO approved" moderation and feedback is not just rude, its actually wrong and unhelpful in the wider scheme of things.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
olavk 9y ago
If the question is "marked as duplicate" then there is always a link to the duplicate, where the question is hopefully answered. I think it is a good thing that the same question has answers in a single place. But of course there is a grey zone when it is not exactly the same question. As for off-topic questions, this is annoying, but I also think it is necessary for any useful site to maintain a focus. For example, StackOverflow does not allow requests for software recommendations even though this a frequent kind of question. But it is not a good fit for the format of the site since you often cannot say a recommendation is the "correct" one.
- oldcynic 9y ago
  It often seems that the duplicate is different enough that they should remain separate. Or just as frustrating the duplicate relates to a previous release where the same question begs a different answer.
  - olavk 9y ago
    Can you provide a few links? I can vote to re-open if appropriate.
- GCU-Empiricist 9y ago
  In my own experience ~7/10 times the duplicate question is something entirely different and I have to spend longer searching because of someone's ignorant pedantry.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

SO has long been the butt of jokes about over-moderation. Any arbitrary SO link found in the wild is 90% likely to be closed for some reason or another, even though it probably solves the problemn you ended up on that page to solve. It's hard to read from this blog post, but if fixing this is one of the forthcoming changes I think it's a good move.

olavk 9y ago
Can you link to a few examples? (I sometimes moderate on SO, so would like to learn from previous mistakes.)
- malvosenior 9y ago
  Anytime a question that has interesting or thoughtful replies is closed, it does a disservice to the community and content of the site. It's something moderators don't seem to agree with the users about. Here are a few of many, many examples: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2847655/find-threads-running-for-a-particular-process-in-linux https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2847655/find-threads-run... https://web.archive.org/web/20150404191857/http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5574241/using-sun-misc-unsafe-in-real-world https://web.archive.org/web/20150404191857/http://stackoverf... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5574241/why-does-sun-misc-unsafe-exist-and-how-can-it-be-used-in-the-real-world https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5574241/why-does-sun-mis... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/961942/what-is-the-worst-programming-language-you-ever-worked-with https://stackoverflow.com/questions/961942/what-is-the-worst... I'm sure mods can explain why those don't fit on the site but closing them makes people not want to use SO and develop a negative opinion of the moderation team.
  - recursive 9y ago
    If posts don't fit on the site, it seems fair for moderators to close them. (It's called putting "on hold" now) Most of the questions that are put on hold are not put on hold by moderators, but just ordinary users. Your 4 links go to a total of 3 distinct questions. By my estimation, 2 of those are just general open-ended discussion questions without specific correct technical answers. If users form a negative opinion of the site or moderation team for closing those, they probably never had a chance to like SO in the first place.

jancsika 9y ago

> To novices, the long bureaucratic rigmarole associated with asking your first question on Stack Overflow can feel either completely unnecessary, or just plain weird. I just think of SO as being "read-only." It might as well be Encyclopedia Brittannica for all I know. I also think of the errors I read in SO as being part of that immutable encyclopedia. The only alternative is to spend time trying to correct an error which led me down this rabbit hole: 1. Realize that the site makes you jump through all kinds of hoops just to respond to a (wrong) answer or comment on a question. 2. Spend a total of 45 minutes researching and emailing two people who already are SO members. Sending them a link to the SO page that has a clearly wrong statement, and politely asking them to add a comment or whatever to make it clear that the statement is wrong. Ironically, that wrong statement was about one of the old string-handling functions in the C standard library. So while the old usenet might have gotten a cranky response from a C Jedi who knows all the answers, it is prohibitively expensive to even provide the right answer on SO. Luckily SO has enough correct information on it that treating it like an immutable datastore still has great benefit.

justherefortart 9y ago
SO was great 8 or so years ago. Now it's mostly "you're doing it wrong" answers as the top shit I see when I search on google. Wading through that nonsense takes longer than finding and implementing a helpful solution. Sad really.
- maw 9y ago
  Don't forget about the comments that read, basically, "why haven't you googled this, peon?" usually found in the first hit, often the first several hits, in Google.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  What's better than SO?
  - psyc 9y ago
    SO is, if it ever gets around to listening to the recent outcry, and stops doubling down on the narrative they have going, which is something like, "Actually, the problem is you are a n00b, and we haven't communicated our godly ethos in a n00b-friendly way. So we'll solve the problem by explaining ourselves. And have we mentioned that only n00bs have this problem with us?"

douglaswlance 9y ago

Open source StackOverflow, Joel. Let us fix it!

nlawalker 9y ago

I find that a lot of askers on SO are really in need of a consultation with a tutor or technical mentor, not a singular answer. Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but to me, really poor SO questions often look like opportunities - what if the asker was open to a 30 minute chat with someone knowledgeable that could totally illuminate things and set them on the right path, but there's just no forum for accomplishing that (or they don't know about it)? Is there any site/service out there that facilitates this? Paid, unpaid, whatever, I'm just curious if anyone in the HN community has done something like this, on either side (as either the tutor, or the tutored).

stinos 9y ago
Very good point. Best thing you can do on SO is starting a chat with the user I think, or sometimes you can give a 'teach a man how to fish'-style answer where you don't just give a code-only answer (i.e. how), or maybe don't even give a complete direct answer at all, but explain the bigger picture (i.e. why). Problem with the latter approach is that if the OP doesn't leave any comment you don't really know if it helped at all, whereas chat is more direct. But if you do get a 'well now I learned something' type of comment there's a good chance it actually helped the OP becoming more knowledgeable.
- kqr 9y ago
  > Problem with the latter approach is that if the OP doesn't leave any comment you don't really know if it helped at all I have thought before that somehow responding to people's answers should be mandatory to get them, but I have yet to figure out a good scheme for this.
jamessb 9y ago
I think hackhands is what you are describing: https://hackhands.com/how-it-works/ https://hackhands.com/how-it-works/
- arbie 9y ago
  This looks amazing! Any experience with getting help on an enterprise codebase?

ILikeConemowk 9y ago

The absolute best quote in the OP: These questions feel like showing up on a medical website and saying something like “I think my kidney has been hurting. How can I remove it?”

slantyyz 9y ago
>> These questions feel like showing up on a medical website and saying something like “I think my kidney has been hurting. How can I remove it?” While I laughed at this example for a few seconds, I also think this is a question that needs to be answered. While we'd like to think that everyone who uses the Internet has a basic level of intelligence and a grasp of common sense, this is often not true. Having a real expert answering this question properly (in simple, non-patronizing language) could prevent someone who may not be thinking rationally/logically from doing something incredibly stupid.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

peterwwillis 9y ago

I notice a lot of people talking about moderation on SO. It reminds me of the moderation on HN. It's all focused on one of two things: being "nice", or being "interesting". Which is really bizarre. It's not reasonable to expect people to act in an artificial way. People are emotional, and usually not all that smart or interesting. We're monkeys with hats. Just because you can train a monkey to paint a picture does not mean it won't fling poo at you. SO wants to keep some beginner questions, but also keep the really complicated questions, and you have to do some homework, but really most questions are okay, and you shouldn't ask a question again, and you have to be nice, ... These are so many subjective rules that serve to make everything "look" a certain way. It's almost like playing a game. Ah, you didn't say please and thank you! You lose five points. In a world where not everyone agrees with you or behaves the way you want, I wonder what the goal of this particular game is? I guess what I'm driving at is how thinking you can just make up a list of rules of how humans should behave and expect it to go okay, is maybe not the best idea. It's like expecting that you can write some shell scripts that tell a computer how to work, and it will always work that way. Bad news: computers don't always follow simple rules, and neither do humans. Moderators are the equivalent of health checks that go around restarting things that died. That may be fine for your massively scaled enterprise application, but humans have something computer programs don't have: feelings. Which brings up a completely unrelated question: In the future, when computers have emotions, will server automation be considered equivalent to chicken farms? Yes, we're killing all these living creatures after they have a meager existence in cramped spaces, but have you tasted this amazing chicken cordon bleu? (Inb4 flagged for "incendiary topic: animal rights")

Quarrelsome 9y ago

This is why I quit stackoverflow. I'm a top 2% but there became a point where people seemed to care more about the correctness of the information repository than they did about helping people. It changed from a community vibe into a library and then mods started to stamp on some very good questions that people asked and closed them as duplicates (linking to a slightly different question) or as "too open-ended" or "off-topic". They gave those mods carte-blanche to enforce their way of viewing the site, of data and people and then meta.overflow adopted a hostile culture to shame people who questioned this world-view. I really like that site but ended up hating it. My 2% rep is also a lie. I got so much from simple answers and so little from much more complicated ones.

jessriedel 9y ago
> care more about the correctness of the information repository than they did about helping people Not whether you meant "useful" or "rule-abiding" when you say "correct". Optimizing for the future reader rather than the current asker is explicitly part of SO design.
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  and they haven't succeeded. Try finding something for Angular 5 without getting bogged down in previous Angular stuff or seeing questions about tech choices that are ridiculously out of date because they stopped allowing people to post those questions in roughly 2010.
  - mycomments2017 9y ago
    there's a place for freenode/gitter/matrix.org's '#programming' room and there's a place for 'correctness of the information repository' that SO provides
    - Quarrelsome 9y ago
      you think there is no value in an open question with upsie/downsie on SO? On freenode the answers are very much dependent on the time the question is asked.

psyc 9y ago

It isn't just novices. I've been programming for 30 years, and I wouldn't dream of asking a question on SO, because I simply don't loathe myself that much. I've seen this before with Wikipedia. SO culture gives me the expectation that odds are asking my question will be a waste of my time.

HenryBemis 9y ago
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging I don't have a rubber duck near me, but I (sometimes) find it helpful, when I code and hit a wall, to 'talk to myself' (out loud). For someone who's been coding 30 years (you), you have practiced this enough to be able to debug easily (and silently:). For newbie coders (me)(not sarcastically) sometimes this helps. Oh, and SO is a great tool/forum, a true gift with many-many positive and helpful people.
- psyc 9y ago
  I do appreciate that SO does help beginners. This is part of an ongoing recent discussion that has been critical of where SO fails. I am far from convinced that SO's culture is really some deliberate Miyagi-style ruse intended to teach you that you had the power inside you all along.
edem 9y ago
This is simply not true. I often ask on SO and I don't need more than 5 minutes to produce a good question. I've read the faq and the guidelines though...

chadlavi 9y ago

> The average programmer, in the world, has been helped by Stack Overflow 340 times. That seems low, to be honest.

fouc 9y ago

>The average programmer, in the world, has been helped by Stack Overflow 340 times. Seems suspiciously low to me, I suppose that's not counting page views.

sstanie 9y ago

For anyone that clicked through to his 1988 question on comp.lang.c ... what was causing what he was happening? I'm assuming something with an old version of gcc, but I can't reprocue it- I get the correct result using both cc and gcc. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.lang.c/spolsky%7Csort:date/comp.lang.c/BKhAacGNtZI/GLSW-QG_O3MJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.lang.c/spols... Are you allowed to use getchar() twice? (seems like a silly question? read on!) ---------------------------------------------------- kangaroo% cat test.c #include <stdio.h> main() { int c; c=getchar(); putchar(c); c=getchar(); putchar(c); putchar('\n'); } kangaroo% gcc test.c kangaroo% echo "Hi" | a.out H^@ kangaroo% cc test.c kangaroo% echo "Hi" | a.out Hi ---------------------------------- Anybody know what's going on?

brianpgordon 9y ago
It looks like for some reason GCC is returning EOF from the second getchar() call and his terminal is rendering it as ^@.

pjungwir 9y ago

Every HN conversation about Stack Overflow is full of carping, so I feel obliged to say: I love Stack Overflow. It has saved me days of work, and I've really enjoyed helping people when I could. It was a revolution, and I would hate to return to the days of searching old phpbb forums for help (and if I was really desperate creating yet another account to ask something myself). I've been on the site since the beginning, although my participation waxes and wanes. I often only check the "bounty" tab for tags I care about, since those tend to be better-asked questions. That's one way to engage off-and-on without much effort. When I do look through the non-bounty questions, I find a lot of beginners. Some questions are so badly-asked I won't engage, but a lot of questions show someone trying who is just not yet knowledgeable enough to know the right approach, or even how to ask for help. I feel like those are the most fun to answer. I could probably mark them all as duplicates somehow, but where is the fun in that? I'd rather offer an answer tailored to their own situation, possibly with links to other SO answers that elaborate on relevant (not "duplicate") topics. Joel's post here actually sounds less hard-line against duplicates than the Stack Overflow conventional wisdom. It sound like what he really cares about is whether the asker is trying. Personally I have never marked a question as a duplicate, because there is usually some room to explain how that other question applies to the asker's situation. With Rust I've been on the other side of that exchange, too. That is really the only region of Stack Overflow where I've seen the pedantry and unhelpfulness that others complain about---mostly from one person actually. And I wonder how many people have given up on Rust because of bad experiences there. What looks like a duplicate to an experienced developer may seem totally unrelated to a beginner. When your question is marked as a duplicate you get this sinking feeling of hopelessness, like someone is saying, "I can see the problem, but I won't tell you, and I'll make sure no one else sees your question either. Good bye!" Knowing what it feels like makes me even more inclined to answer every question in its uniqueness. And it is very rewarding to help someone out of their bind! Another fun question is the "Something is failing and I don't know why" type. If you have a lot of experience with that tech, you might be able to recognize the problem or guess it from little information. These questions are like fun puzzles, and they let you show off a bit of "magic". Anyway, every time I see a HN post about Stack Overflow, I want to write this comment. Joel, Jeff, and everyone else there: thank you so much for a huge gift to developers everywhere!

9y ago

mcguire 9y ago

Tl;dr: a question/answer forum is a poor way to build a reference library.

mcguire 9y ago

"What did we think of newbie questions?" That's the wrong question. (Hah!) A better one: What do you think about complicated, difficult questions? Answer: apparently, not much.

jnordwick 9y ago

Ask anything optimization or performance related and you get a string of "premature optimization", "let the compiler to it", or "use this library" comments. One of SO's biggest problems is the mod thinking they know better than the people asking and over-aggressively closing things down. And given a number of ways to ask the same question, they will often get closed down in not in the exact right form: - How do I do X in my programming language? - Is there a library to do X in my programming language? - What is the best library to do X in my programming language? While the three questions are slightly different, they will result in about the same answers. I see no reason to close any of them down since they all imply each other. Or the huge issues with decade old answers still coming up when they no longer apply to recent software versions. Once seeing an interesting Java question answered by Gosling himself, I made a suggestion on Meta to highlight answers by notable people. I thought it would be very interesting. Wow! Was ever a bad idea. Meta is even worse and nastier than SO regular. It seemed like the mods were fighting to be the biggest on the site and didn't want anybody to outshine them. Joel doesn't seem to want to understand the SO has large problems for many user types, and it needs more than just a little lipstick.

brudgers 9y ago

It's worth noting that Spolsky lost the "How do you move the turtle in LOGO" philosophical debate. [1] Atwood won and thus people get an excuse to treat people badly. Particularly relevant is that people get an excuse to treat new comers particularly badly. Sure, there's a scale at which aggressively closing questions is administratively necessary. [python] or [android] are at that scale. But the small corners of StackExchange are often dominated by Usenet behaviors because such behaviors are sanctioned from on high. Policies that encourage treating people badly are established by fix or sixteen votes on the related Meta site. And blessed in the moderator discussions as site wide policies based on the administrative needs of tags like [php] on StackOverflow. A lot of StackExchange is similar to comp.lang.c did in the Usenet era. As in the days of the Usenet, They tolerate and encourage those behaviors. I think there's a critical lower bound and a maximum upper bound for the number of users. The topic has to be big enough that there is a steady stream of new questions and small enough that regulars talking among themselves is a meaningful percentage of the activity. [1]: The discussion from 2009 in SO Podcast #58 (under the old numbering system): https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/18/podcast-58/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2009/06/18/podcast-58/

Quarrelsome 9y ago
The question in question [1] was closed as "not a real question" and then further "locked". [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-the-turtle-in-logo https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...
- brudgers 9y ago
  As Spolsky describes in the recent article, the question was seen as problematic by Atwood because it didn't reflect enough research. Atwood even deleted it in 2011.[1] A moderator later restored for historical relevance. But the site's policies reflect a lot more of Atwood's personality than Spolsky's...most unfortunately. [1] See revision 16 https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions https://stackoverflow.com/posts/1003841/revisions

munificent 9y ago

> we could improve the prompts we provide on the “Ask Question” page, and we could provide more tools for community moderation of comments where the snark currently runs unchecked. Here's an idea: On the ask question page, have a checkbox for "Help me ask my question". Check that, and the question temporarily goes into a separate corral where helpers can edit or refine the question. These self-selected subset of the Stack Overflow community help get the question ready before it goes "public" to the larger SO world.

edem 9y ago
There is already a review system in place. The problem is that there is almost no incentive to participate in it since you get no rep from it.

ken 9y ago

"And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier." Programming is complicated enough, and we should see our mission as making it simpler. That would benefit everyone, not just newcomers. I see the eventual harshness and gatekeeping in every forum (not just Usenet and SO) as the inevitable consequence of accidental complexity. We've got 173 layers between what we want to accomplish and what we have to type on on the keyboard today, and that naturally leads to ultra-specialization and Barton's "high priests". I don't think I can describe the modern web stack with a straight face. It's become its own parody of software development. I no longer think I understand how to stay secure on the modern internet, except by mindlessly following "best practices" I've been told. Complexity has a real cost for everyone. To change the background color on my C=64, you had to consult a memory map -- but there weren't dozens of other abstraction layers to think about, so even my parents weren't afraid to crack open the book and help. Abstraction is a necessary tool, but a lot of the layers we've got today are just plain bad, and exist mostly by historical accident. You either have to study the archaeology of all your software and hardware, or you have to memorize bizarre cargo cult rituals and recite them back without understanding why. The root cause can't be solved with a Q&A website, no matter how much you tweak the phrasing of the form fields.

edem 9y ago

I see a lot of people complaining about SO because of duplicates, barriers, etc but it seems that none of those people actually read the article. You have to go through all these hoops because you can't force your way through this learning process the same way as you can't have 9 women give birth to a baby in 1 month. Contributing to SO is a journey and the milestone system is geared towards helping people through it. You have to admit that nothing is perfect and complaining won't help. Criticizing something is easy but I see close to zero suggestions for improvement. Just ask yourself whether you can do better than Joel and the others or at least give some suggestions for improvement. Disclaimer: I'm also one of those 2% people and I also see problems but I think that it is not that serious as some people claim it to be.

Animats 9y ago

That post could have been much shorter. The picture of the San Francisco waterfront didn't help.

amp108 9y ago

"Closed as duplicate" is such a frustrating experience with SO, especially since the canonical answer for the original post so often has so little to do with the supposed "duplicate" post, other than a superficial similarity in how the question is posed. E.g.: Q1: I'm trying to do x and it isn't working. A1: You're missing a comma in the list on line 7. Q2: I'm trying to do x (and I've checked all of my commas), and it isn't working. A2: Closed as duplicate of Q1.

iamdemonhunter 9y ago

https://geekolive.com/download-change-my-software/ https://geekolive.com/download-change-my-software/

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