8 ms·

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 tha

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5 without getting bogged down in previous Angular stuff or seeing questions about tech choices that are ridiculously out of date because they stopped allowing people to post those questions in roughly 2010.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.
      - icebraining 9y ago
        Those questions invite lengthy discussion, which SO is totally not optimized for. A software like Reddit (not necessarily Reddit itself) would be more appropriate, in my opinion.
        Quarrelsome 9y ago
        Personally I don't see how Reddit really differs. They both have up/down they both support markdown. SO doesn't have a frontpage or specific subreddits (although it does have tags).
        icebraining 9y ago
        Reddit allows for long, threaded discussions. On SO you just have Answers, and then those limited comments below. There's no space for back-and-forth.
        Quarrelsome 9y ago
        That's a fair point but I find SO much better indexed. Now when I want an opinion on tech my options are: * Ancient SO post * Whoever is kicking around in freenode * Marketing fluff pieces
    - mcguire 9y ago
      An information repository that is badly out of date with no effort at curation?
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    It seems clear that their efforts to optimize for future readers have had a lot of success. It's a big part of why they are so popular and valuable. But I'd also be the first to agree they are far from perfect. So I'd think you'd want to sharpen or reform the rules they use, rather than uniformly push them in any one direction. And so I wouldn't agree with blanket criticism of the idea of an information repository.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  Complaints about SO remind me of the Louis CK bit about WiFi outage on airplanes. "Everything is AMAZING and no one is happy." SO is a miraculous effort that took a mob of people and harnessed the best aspects of their social nature to build the best Q&A site ever seen. But it's a little annoying sometimes to people with Copenhagen morality love to have on it. SO tram knows this of course and they make a lot of UI tricks to be very friendly and gamified. The site was designed by a world class product manager and it really shows. (It's one of the biggest and best Microsoft/ASP/.Net(!) sites on the internet, especially for non-Microsoft content!). The parts where they aren't perfect (like the ego burn of getting a question closed) are highlighted by contrast to the rest of the experience.
  - Quarrelsome 9y ago
    My annoyance is when a question is closed that I've understood and am answering by someone who hasn't understood it and has poorly marked it. Also the group think of librarians winning without a healthy conversation about it.
    - rrauenza 9y ago
      There is also a tendency to try to mark something off-topic as quickly as possible... occasionally you see this in the Hot Question feed. A good question was initially voted to be off topic.
      - cnaeotnh34nh 9y ago
        I saw this once with a question where some kid was asking about something wildly off-topic like how to make friends or meet a girl or something. Tons of people jumped in to answer. It was quickly closed, and rightfully so despite being interesting to the readers of the site, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with programming. Being a hot question doesn't suddenly make it on topic.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    That kind of attitude is a recipe for stagnation. Sure, SO was better than everything else when it came out, but there's always room for improvement. And, as it shows, if they don't keep improving, then the quality and usefulness of the site goes down.
olavk 9y ago
Don't get hung up about the rep, this mostly depends on how many people your answers are useful for, rather than how hard the question was to answer. I have answered some hard questions, but get 90% of my rep from a single answer which is the first Google hit for a commonly encountered .Net exception.
chipsambos 9y ago
There was a post on reddit a few years ago about a Java question posted by Larry Page: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lyeqc/larry_pages_java_question_1996_every_journey/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lyeqc/larry_p... Seems a lot of people could relate to one of the top comments: > The same conversation, if it took place on 2014 StackOverflow: > "Did you try RTFM Larry?" > "Closed as being similar to <some other question that also covers Java>"
whatshisface 9y ago
I think the problem comes from a similar place as Wikipedia's: someone who only changes things they understand will, all else being equal, change far fewer things than a megalomaniac with vastly inflated views of the quality of their own actions. Therefore the greatest fraction of all changes will be owed to the megalomaniac.
azeirah 9y ago
I wonder whether instead of closing topics as "off-topic", "duplicate" or "whatever", which can obviously be perceived as negative to someone, might it be a better alternative to do the opposite? Instead of blacklisting "bad" questions as "off-topic", how about whitelisting "good" questions? If Stackoverflow wants to build this library, let mods and enthusiasts decide whether a question is worth indexing, and let the questions that would otherwise be closed as duplicate or off-topic be as they are. Perhaps replace "duplicate" with "related to indexed question #XXXXXX"? It would certainly take a while to restructure SO like this, but with enough effort and time, lower-quality questions simply won't show up in searches unless there really isn't a better related question available.
- olavk 9y ago
  This is a really good point - people seem to get hung up about questions being closed, even though "closed as duplicate" is a win since it means somebody already answered your question. If you just called it "promoted to FAQ" or something...
  - DanBC 9y ago
    > even though "closed as duplicate" is a win since it means somebody already answered your question. That's only a win if the duplicate is real. Sometimes questions are closed when they aren't really duplicates.
    - olavk 9y ago
      Yes that is bad. You can vote to reopen if you have enough rep.
      - Bartweiss 9y ago
        > if you have enough rep. This is a substantial part of the fighting over the site, though - there are lengthy guides to picking up enough Stack Overflow rep to render the site usable. I usually see this dismissed with "just help some people and ask some good questions, you'll be there in no time", but when I talk to friends who are getting a self-taught start with programming, I consistently hear a different story. They're getting questions closed as dupes, either because they aren't experienced enough to recognize duplicate questions with different terms or because mods are squelching their genuinely novel questions. And they're new, so they can't answer hard questions - and the easy ones don't produce rep because they're inevitably closed, removing all the payouts for answering them. I understand the logic behind the rep gating system, it's not a bad idea. But it's just fuel on the fire when things go wrong, and they go wrong a lot in the form of wrongly closed questions.
amouat 9y ago
This almost exactly mirrors my experience. I really hate when questions get closed. Fixing it would take such a change in direction and leadership that it looks unlikely to happen. It seems such a shame.
pleasecalllater 9y ago
I'm in the top 3% and I've noticed another thing: it's enough to have 10k points to be in the top 3%. I haven't been answering anything for a couple of years, and I still get something like 200-400 points per week/month - it depends. So I think I will be in the top 1% next year doing absolutely nothing :)
- dv_dt 9y ago
  Unintentional modeling of wealth inequality...
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  Yeah I naturally rise off the basis of a few popular answers. Enjoyably one of these is a rant about the naming of different flavours of the MVC pattern (which I assert as pointless marketing).
dfsegoat 9y ago
Top 5% here. And yeah, I have not participated for the very same reasons: I simply do not have time to ensure my responses are in "tight enough" shape to stand up to what is quite honestly overzealous moderation for the pure sake of moderation. TLDR: The community focus on the "meta" aspects of SO: How we ask questions, Answer etc - has killed it for me.
- olavk 9y ago
  Have you experienced that your answers are removed by mods because they does not live up to standards? This is only supposed to happen if the answer is outright spam or offensive or totally unhelpful. Otherwise they are just downvoted. Can you provide a link to an answer by you which was unjustly moderated? I can vote to re-open it.
cnaeotnh34nh 9y ago
I'm a top 2% rep user as well and I couldn't agree less. First, it's not that they "gave those mods carte-blanche to enforce their way of viewing the site." Any user can either vote to close a post if they think it's off-topic, or they can flag to let a mod know it should be closed if they have low-rep. So what you're seeing really is the entire community deciding on what goes on. Furthermore, mods are elected, so you could choose to run as a mod if you want to change it, or you could at least vote and canvas for mods who you think "get it". Second, I think I've seen enough low-quality posts to understand why the rules are the way they are, and I think they make perfect sense. I personally really like how it works. I agree there are users who are sometimes rude to new users and I think more should be done to address that. However, I don't think the rules should be changed. I think the user interface could make it easier to understand the rules. (BTW, the rules on this particular forum are hilariously anti-new-user. You can't use all caps to emphasize a word? That's a fairly well agreed-upon standard on literally ever other site in the world, but new users are shouted down when they dare do something like that here.)
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  at the time where the mods began to gain power there was a groupthink, a culture and no election since has been able to shift that default. I don't like how the rules work but because I don't share the groupthink nobody cares. IIRC Whenever I tried to express these views on meta I got downvoted because "people are just blowing off steam, its a different culture here from SO". It was ugly, I hated it. It felt like I was 13 years old again.
sametmax 9y ago
Same here. I stopped contributing years ago because my stellar answers were completly rewritten by the community for stylistic purpose, not content or typo. I didn't recognize my work anymore. But i still get so much rep every day, passively. SO still sends me the top user goodies so i have mugs, tees, notebooks, and even jars of peanut butter. I still go regularly to SO to read answers and i consider the site as a success, an invaluable knowledge base. I love what it does for me as a consummer, but it's unfriendly as a producer. And unfair. I should not have this rep.
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  They took all the joy out of my character too. First it was the swearwords because of corporate firewall, then it was the cutesy language, then the slang, the capitalisation and at that point I no longer existed as a person anymore.
  - GuacheSuedeHN 9y ago
    Sounds like Dementia

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.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Those questions invite lengthy discussion, which SO is totally not optimized for. A software like Reddit (not necessarily Reddit itself) would be more appropriate, in my opinion.
      - Quarrelsome 9y ago
        Personally I don't see how Reddit really differs. They both have up/down they both support markdown. SO doesn't have a frontpage or specific subreddits (although it does have tags).
        icebraining 9y ago
        Reddit allows for long, threaded discussions. On SO you just have Answers, and then those limited comments below. There's no space for back-and-forth.
        Quarrelsome 9y ago
        That's a fair point but I find SO much better indexed. Now when I want an opinion on tech my options are: * Ancient SO post * Whoever is kicking around in freenode * Marketing fluff pieces
  - mcguire 9y ago
    An information repository that is badly out of date with no effort at curation?
- jessriedel 9y ago
  It seems clear that their efforts to optimize for future readers have had a lot of success. It's a big part of why they are so popular and valuable. But I'd also be the first to agree they are far from perfect. So I'd think you'd want to sharpen or reform the rules they use, rather than uniformly push them in any one direction. And so I wouldn't agree with blanket criticism of the idea of an information repository.
fjsolwmv 9y ago
Complaints about SO remind me of the Louis CK bit about WiFi outage on airplanes. "Everything is AMAZING and no one is happy." SO is a miraculous effort that took a mob of people and harnessed the best aspects of their social nature to build the best Q&A site ever seen. But it's a little annoying sometimes to people with Copenhagen morality love to have on it. SO tram knows this of course and they make a lot of UI tricks to be very friendly and gamified. The site was designed by a world class product manager and it really shows. (It's one of the biggest and best Microsoft/ASP/.Net(!) sites on the internet, especially for non-Microsoft content!). The parts where they aren't perfect (like the ego burn of getting a question closed) are highlighted by contrast to the rest of the experience.
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  My annoyance is when a question is closed that I've understood and am answering by someone who hasn't understood it and has poorly marked it. Also the group think of librarians winning without a healthy conversation about it.
  - rrauenza 9y ago
    There is also a tendency to try to mark something off-topic as quickly as possible... occasionally you see this in the Hot Question feed. A good question was initially voted to be off topic.
    - cnaeotnh34nh 9y ago
      I saw this once with a question where some kid was asking about something wildly off-topic like how to make friends or meet a girl or something. Tons of people jumped in to answer. It was quickly closed, and rightfully so despite being interesting to the readers of the site, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with programming. Being a hot question doesn't suddenly make it on topic.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  That kind of attitude is a recipe for stagnation. Sure, SO was better than everything else when it came out, but there's always room for improvement. And, as it shows, if they don't keep improving, then the quality and usefulness of the site goes down.

olavk 9y ago

Don't get hung up about the rep, this mostly depends on how many people your answers are useful for, rather than how hard the question was to answer. I have answered some hard questions, but get 90% of my rep from a single answer which is the first Google hit for a commonly encountered .Net exception.

chipsambos 9y ago

There was a post on reddit a few years ago about a Java question posted by Larry Page: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lyeqc/larry_pages_java_question_1996_every_journey/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2lyeqc/larry_p... Seems a lot of people could relate to one of the top comments: > The same conversation, if it took place on 2014 StackOverflow: > "Did you try RTFM Larry?" > "Closed as being similar to <some other question that also covers Java>"

whatshisface 9y ago

I think the problem comes from a similar place as Wikipedia's: someone who only changes things they understand will, all else being equal, change far fewer things than a megalomaniac with vastly inflated views of the quality of their own actions. Therefore the greatest fraction of all changes will be owed to the megalomaniac.

azeirah 9y ago

I wonder whether instead of closing topics as "off-topic", "duplicate" or "whatever", which can obviously be perceived as negative to someone, might it be a better alternative to do the opposite? Instead of blacklisting "bad" questions as "off-topic", how about whitelisting "good" questions? If Stackoverflow wants to build this library, let mods and enthusiasts decide whether a question is worth indexing, and let the questions that would otherwise be closed as duplicate or off-topic be as they are. Perhaps replace "duplicate" with "related to indexed question #XXXXXX"? It would certainly take a while to restructure SO like this, but with enough effort and time, lower-quality questions simply won't show up in searches unless there really isn't a better related question available.

olavk 9y ago
This is a really good point - people seem to get hung up about questions being closed, even though "closed as duplicate" is a win since it means somebody already answered your question. If you just called it "promoted to FAQ" or something...
- DanBC 9y ago
  > even though "closed as duplicate" is a win since it means somebody already answered your question. That's only a win if the duplicate is real. Sometimes questions are closed when they aren't really duplicates.
  - olavk 9y ago
    Yes that is bad. You can vote to reopen if you have enough rep.
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      > if you have enough rep. This is a substantial part of the fighting over the site, though - there are lengthy guides to picking up enough Stack Overflow rep to render the site usable. I usually see this dismissed with "just help some people and ask some good questions, you'll be there in no time", but when I talk to friends who are getting a self-taught start with programming, I consistently hear a different story. They're getting questions closed as dupes, either because they aren't experienced enough to recognize duplicate questions with different terms or because mods are squelching their genuinely novel questions. And they're new, so they can't answer hard questions - and the easy ones don't produce rep because they're inevitably closed, removing all the payouts for answering them. I understand the logic behind the rep gating system, it's not a bad idea. But it's just fuel on the fire when things go wrong, and they go wrong a lot in the form of wrongly closed questions.

amouat 9y ago

This almost exactly mirrors my experience. I really hate when questions get closed. Fixing it would take such a change in direction and leadership that it looks unlikely to happen. It seems such a shame.

pleasecalllater 9y ago

I'm in the top 3% and I've noticed another thing: it's enough to have 10k points to be in the top 3%. I haven't been answering anything for a couple of years, and I still get something like 200-400 points per week/month - it depends. So I think I will be in the top 1% next year doing absolutely nothing :)

dv_dt 9y ago
Unintentional modeling of wealth inequality...
Quarrelsome 9y ago
Yeah I naturally rise off the basis of a few popular answers. Enjoyably one of these is a rant about the naming of different flavours of the MVC pattern (which I assert as pointless marketing).

dfsegoat 9y ago

Top 5% here. And yeah, I have not participated for the very same reasons: I simply do not have time to ensure my responses are in "tight enough" shape to stand up to what is quite honestly overzealous moderation for the pure sake of moderation. TLDR: The community focus on the "meta" aspects of SO: How we ask questions, Answer etc - has killed it for me.

olavk 9y ago
Have you experienced that your answers are removed by mods because they does not live up to standards? This is only supposed to happen if the answer is outright spam or offensive or totally unhelpful. Otherwise they are just downvoted. Can you provide a link to an answer by you which was unjustly moderated? I can vote to re-open it.

cnaeotnh34nh 9y ago

I'm a top 2% rep user as well and I couldn't agree less. First, it's not that they "gave those mods carte-blanche to enforce their way of viewing the site." Any user can either vote to close a post if they think it's off-topic, or they can flag to let a mod know it should be closed if they have low-rep. So what you're seeing really is the entire community deciding on what goes on. Furthermore, mods are elected, so you could choose to run as a mod if you want to change it, or you could at least vote and canvas for mods who you think "get it". Second, I think I've seen enough low-quality posts to understand why the rules are the way they are, and I think they make perfect sense. I personally really like how it works. I agree there are users who are sometimes rude to new users and I think more should be done to address that. However, I don't think the rules should be changed. I think the user interface could make it easier to understand the rules. (BTW, the rules on this particular forum are hilariously anti-new-user. You can't use all caps to emphasize a word? That's a fairly well agreed-upon standard on literally ever other site in the world, but new users are shouted down when they dare do something like that here.)

Quarrelsome 9y ago
at the time where the mods began to gain power there was a groupthink, a culture and no election since has been able to shift that default. I don't like how the rules work but because I don't share the groupthink nobody cares. IIRC Whenever I tried to express these views on meta I got downvoted because "people are just blowing off steam, its a different culture here from SO". It was ugly, I hated it. It felt like I was 13 years old again.

sametmax 9y ago

Same here. I stopped contributing years ago because my stellar answers were completly rewritten by the community for stylistic purpose, not content or typo. I didn't recognize my work anymore. But i still get so much rep every day, passively. SO still sends me the top user goodies so i have mugs, tees, notebooks, and even jars of peanut butter. I still go regularly to SO to read answers and i consider the site as a success, an invaluable knowledge base. I love what it does for me as a consummer, but it's unfriendly as a producer. And unfair. I should not have this rep.

Quarrelsome 9y ago
They took all the joy out of my character too. First it was the swearwords because of corporate firewall, then it was the cutesy language, then the slang, the capitalisation and at that point I no longer existed as a person anymore.
- GuacheSuedeHN 9y ago
  Sounds like Dementia