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I've experienced a form of hostility in StackOverflow just recently--as in a couple of days ago. On a whim, I visited the website and answered a couple question

by warent 9y ago

I've experienced a form of hostility in StackOverflow just recently--as in a couple of days ago. On a whim, I visited the website and answered a couple questions, something I'd never done before. I realized it was actually a lot of fun, so I started rapidly answering the all JavaScript questions I could as they were asked. Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to stop answering certain questions, and only address "well asked" questions. After reading the guidelines, I noted that neither I or the asker had broken any rules, so I commented that I felt I was being treated unfairly, and I asked where I could discuss further since the comments on my questions seemed inappropriate. Suddenly another, even higher scoring person, deleted all the comments and locked my answer, noting that the discussion had stopped being productive. After that, my answers were left alone with no more meta criticism. In my limited experience, it's a bizarre community.

jamesb93 9y ago
They also outright get rid of questions that people provide good and helpful answers to. I once asked a question about a specific ML technique in regards to implementing in a specific c++ API. Higher ups said that the question was far too broad and against the guidelines, despite receiving at least 5 good answers to my questions before they got to it. They effectively shut up good conversation for the sake of a rule book they probably didn't write.
lainga 9y ago
Same situation as Wikipedia: Absolute power corrupts absolutely - but so does a small, petty amount.
- notatoad 9y ago
  I think it's significant though that both wikipedia and stack overflow, despite being ruled by petty assholes weilding the smallest amount of power in seemingly the stupidest way possible, have become two of the most valuable references in existence. Do toxic communities produce better content?
  - saint_fiasco 9y ago
    If there is a correlation, it's more likely that the sort of petty asshole who likes to feel important will prefer to invest more effort in a site that is valuable. So the more valuable a site becomes, the more it will attract highly motivated but slightly sociopathic moderators.
    - Viliam1234 9y ago
      Yes, this seems more likely. If you create a new website with first 10 toxic users, it will never grow, because they will scare away any potential 11th user. But if you create a new website with awesome users, it get useful content and grow. When it grows very large and attracts too many users, you will have to start moderating heavily. But moderating a website is an exhausting task, and awesome people usually have other things to do; so gradually the job will be taken by people hungry for some kind of power. Then the site becomes toxic.
  - lstyls 9y ago
    Not according to the linked post, at least: > Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness. Quality matters because it means posts can help more people. But a larger, more diverse community produces better artifacts, not worse ones. We need to stop justifying condescension with the pursuit of quality, and we need better tools and queues to help power users trying to keep quality high.
  - FussyZeus 9y ago
    I would argue there are way too many variables in that question to present a strong argument either way. One thing I will say on it though is how much of our humanity are we ready to sacrifice on the altar of this mythical "meritocracy" that every online community, especially those built on or around code, seems to aim for? And how long until we're ready to confront the fact that a lot of these meritocracies strangely produce very similar "top contributors" in terms of demographics, i.e. white, straight men? I'm not getting into either side of it, I'm just saying that you have to admit it's an astonishing coincidence that online communities, started by, moderated by, largely inhabited by, and currently operated by white men seemingly always have a cadre of white men on the top as the "most valuable contributors" and nobody ever seems to wonder if all those things are connected. Maybe the fears of POC/women are invalid. Maybe it's all a big damn misunderstanding. But I don't think it's right to have white men deciding if it is or not, and I don't think the best damn catalog of coding answers on the planet means a thing if everyone who isn't part of the in-crowd is too damn terrified to ask a question of it.
- mathattack 9y ago
  The fights are so big because the stakes are so small. (Also said by Kissinger about Harvard)
- vernie 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
- jamesrcole 9y ago
  And subreddit admins.
Confiks 9y ago
> Suddenly another, even higher ranking person, deleted all the comments and locked my answer, noting that the discussion had stopped being productive. After that, my answers were left alone with no more meta criticism. I can't see from your story if the "even higher scoring person" ever declared his intentions to you, which he probably should, but it can be a pretty routine moderation action on forum sites in general to remove meta comments not contributing to the original question, after that discussion has been had. In your story I could as well read that the lower rank moderator was told off about his interventions.
- tbodt 9y ago
  The "even higher scoring person" was definitely a moderator, only they have the power to delete comments and lock posts.
herogreen 9y ago
I personally very much like SO. I have <1k rep after more than two years of use but it is fine for me. I answer a question maybe 1 time a month and ask maybe 1 time a year. However a friend of mine (that I believe as a better level in programming than me) has the same feeling of "bizzare community" that you have, so I know that the issue is complex. That said I really have zero ideas about what they could do to improve the way they are seen by everyone without breaking the way the site currently works. Have you heard about the term "help vampire" ? Do you know how many people how do not take 3 minutes to search ? Do you think that the number of questions will remain manageable if the bar is leveled down ? Do you know that you are encouraged to edit questions to make them more "well asked" (at least if that is humanely possible) ? In my opinion SO is a specific tool that is very different from a forum, a chat or a mailing list. SO should not be the only tool that people have to solve their programming problems and it should not try to morph into it.
- kristianc 9y ago
  I wonder if there's a bit of "5 Whys" going on here. Most of the times I end up on Stack Overflow, I arrive via Google. I usually have to check for around 5 answers before I find one that hasn't been locked as "not constructive" or for some other arbitrary reason. Is it any wonder that people find it easier to ask their own questions? The name "help vampire" is so telling of how SO mods see themselves (as arbiters and gatekeepers of all that is good against the raging unwashed hordes) and a symptom of the problem. Don't aspire malice / incompetence to something that may well have a root cause within SO itself.
  - cf498 9y ago
    >Most of the times I end up on Stack Overflow, I arrive via Google. I usually have to check for around 5 answers before I find one that hasn't been locked as "not constructive" or for some other arbitrary reason. Thats kind of the point though isnt it? The idea is that you should find the right question and answer and not the x-th repost of them. Anyone familiar with the side know why reposts arent simply deleted instead of locked? It seems locking them only worsens the problem they aimed to combat?
mental1896 9y ago
I think you've touched on what's missing that could make it a more personable community--better communication. I posted an image as a part of an answer once and it was removed with the reason "don't use third party image hosts". Thing is, I used i.stack.imgur.com which is the only method provided in the answer form on the site! I knew the user who did it but since my answer had been deleted, I had no way to contact him for any sort of appeal. It was a while before I tried contributing to the site again.
wwweston 9y ago
> Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to stop answering certain questions, and only address "well asked" questions. I love Stack Overflow, and it's sure a valuable if imperfect resource, but this is something that drives me bonkers about it. If the question is intelligible enough to receive an answer, and if your answer is potentially helpful to the asker, then it's well-asked as far as I can tell, and the scoring system can take care of its relative utility. The additional level of moderation doesn't seem to have added much value over my time participating. The closest thing I can think of as nice is combining duplicates, though moderators often seem to miss subtle differences between questions and in some cases information gets lost in the end. Generally, the moderation focus often seems legalistic or driven by artificial incentives rather than primarily focused on improving the breadth, depth, and quality of the site as a technical resource. Honestly, I'm pretty sure that a significant portion of the hostility people experience is coming from moderation actions. I might hope the SO team has the intention of going to town on that problem in general, but I don't see it specifically mentioned in today's discussion. I'm sure that if they took it deeply seriously and engaged with enough specific situations where it's been a problem, they could find ways to do better. I think today's announcement is a really good indication, though, that they're listening to people who are having problems with their SO experience, not just to people who'd congratulate them for their (deserved!) accomplishments and for whom everything is more or less fine.
- wheelie_boy 9y ago
  I think the core problem is that they've focused too much on being like wikipedia (a single authoritative, comprehensive answer to each important question), and not enough on helping people to learn. Over time a site will grow a culture, and experts on the site will outweigh and overrule experts on the subject matter. In this case, we're also seeing answerers' needs outweigh askers'. If you could only meet the needs of one constituency, I'd say they made the right choice to favor expert answerers, but I think there are other solutions. Specifically, if I was trying to fix this I'd set up a two-tier system for questions and answers. There are lots of people who would be happy to answer questions, even if the question is a dupe, and even if it's not framed very well. Give people points for answering these in a kind way, and moderate around that. For questions that are sufficiently well-asked, and not duplicates, elevate them to a wikipedia-like status: allow them to be indexed by search engines, make them easier to see by the expert answerers that dislike sifting through novice questions, and moderate them for quality. Give points for people that review and elevate high-quality, non-duplicate questions, or that edit questions to become high-quality. If there are very different personas that you're trying to appease, sometimes a multi-tier system is appropriate.
mehrdadn 9y ago
Related to this, I'm sick of the moderators deleting comments and moving discussions to chats on a whim just because they're seeing too many comment. They don't seem to realize they're not helping anybody; they keep doing this as if it's Truth ordered by God. Like, StackExchange admins: If you're getting flags, there's offensive material, the comments are blatantly off-topic, etc., then OK, I get that; you can step in and moderate. But that's a tiny fraction of the time. When people are having a normal discussion that turns out to be long, maybe don't be a jerk who deletes all the comments from that post and tells people to go somewhere else? It kills the entire discussion, mood, and everyone's enthusiasm, along with lots of gems that were in the comments but that wouldn't fit inside any answers. You really expect the community to turn out happy and welcoming when you keep punching all the breaths out of the users and kicking them to some other corner just because more than 5 of them decided to commit the sin of commenting and sharing thoughts on a topic?
- kapauldo 9y ago
  Totally agree. It attracts a-holes as moderators.
- Johnny555 9y ago
  I agree with this -- sometimes the comments are more interesting and informative than the answer. And why is it ordained that "Comments aren't for extended discussion"? Only a handful of upvoted comments are shown by default, you have to deliberately expand the list to see more, so why not retain them all? If someone wants to wade through 200 commments and add one of his own, what's the real harm? They could add an option for askers/answerers to "Stop notifications for new comments', if that's the issue.
- jpindar 9y ago
  >discussion Ooooh, You used the d word! Closed because Stack overflow is not for discussion. What SO needs is a forum - not an ephemeral chat but a forum whose topics can be linked to the questions that people want to discuss.
  - mehrdadn 9y ago
cuckcuckspruce 9y ago
This is just a virch to appear on board with wider trends in the community, and addressing the issue you raised give StackOverflow no more recognition, advertising revenue, or standing in the community.
fossuser 9y ago
Yeah it's a weird mix of helpful content moderated by an irritating hall monitor like community wielding power and making changes nobody wants. I've been frustrated when trying to contribute - you'll have two people helping each other and then some third party comes in and declares it not valuable, incorrectly says something is a duplicate, or starts deleting things for arbitrary reasons. I just want the moderators to go away and leave us alone, it also makes me think stack overflow is successful in spite of this - not because of it.
- zbentley 9y ago
  > I just want the moderators to go away and leave us alone, it also makes me think stack overflow is successful in spite of this - not because of it. You can use the chat site, message them directly (if their contact information is listed) or anything else you like to help someone with a useless/duplicate/beginner/help-vampire-ey question. You just aren't allowed to do it inside the reputation system to mine these kinds of answers for karma, and aren't allowed to do it inside the wiki system so you don't pollute the results of searches.
- Sacho 9y ago
  But the goal of SO is not for you two to have a chat - it's to produce quality questions and answers for future visitors. When SO's moderation team does its job well, you only see them "harassing" you. When they don't, you google your question and get vague, poorly-worded questions answered by incorrect one-liners. SO's moderation is an effort to balance three parties with conflicting interests: - the people asking questions just want a solution for their specific problem, which may or may not be useful to SO. This can include homework problems, RTFM problems, vague and unclear questions, etc. - the people answering questions want interesting questions that stimulate them to keep using the site. SO really needs those people to feel happy answering questions, otherwise no one will visit the site! You need experts providing quality answers, who can find something interesting. - the people visiting the site after-the-fact. Those people are (usually) just googling a problem they have, but aren't willing to commit to a question. They need both the questioners and the answerers to have done their jobs, otherwise either the questions are too poor a quality to be sure it's the same problem, or the answers are too poor quality to be of use to them. To all those groups, effective SO moderation looks antagonistic, because they wouldn't go to the site if it had awful moderation - it would just be "that useless place where no one answers your questions and you keep getting the same question over and over".
gravyboat 9y ago
I had a similar experience recently with a question I had answered years ago. A highly ranked user came in, complained in a comment about the fact I linked to documentation instead of copy pasting the docs into the answer then downvoted me causing a loss of 2 karma. I reported the comment because it was ridiculous this person is scanning questions which are years old to try and find things to nitpick. I'm not sure if they removed the comment or if some other moderator did, but it was gone within a couple of days. My karma loss remained. It's absolutely ridiculous over there sometimes and these sorts of interactions are one of the big reasons I stopped participating.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  The best practice in this case is to edit your answer to include the docs as well as the link, so the next user can find the answer in one place, preserved even when external links inevitably break, change, or disappear over time. A good citizen would remove their downvote after you did that. A better citizen would have just made the edit themselves to help everyone.
JPGalt 9y ago
I have had similar issues on this site. I have had 3 high rep users of the site close a question I asked having never answered a single question in the technology I was referencing. That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that? I guess they could go look for a profile picture before they answer? If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP. My experience in general has been that there are a segment of users on StackOverflow that think they are better than everyone else and take every little opportunity they can to impress upon the rest of us how great they are in their own little world.
- Izkata 9y ago
  > That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that? I guess they could go look for a profile picture before they answer? > If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP. Probably why the comments are disabled on that blog post. Doesn't want anyone pointing out the disconnects from reality.
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  > That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that? People extrapolate from names. ESPECIALLY if your name sounds indian.
  - ruirr 9y ago
    What names? You do extrapolate from the bad English. Loads of Indians using UK-sounding names and UK woman names.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  > I have had 3 high rep users of the site close a question I asked I have some mod privileges on SO and have been a user for ~8 years. The best way to not have your question locked or deleted, is to ensure you're following the best practices for asking a question and include a Minimum Complete Verifiable Example (MCVE). https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask If you feel you've done both and still don't get a good experience, it's worth speaking out on Meta for more specific advice. Most people on SO just want to help — it's easier to help on a question that meets these standards. > having never answered a single question in the technology I was referencing Moderator privileges are more about the style of a question/answer than the specifics of a particular tech. The moderation queues are irrespective of the tech tagged in the question.
muse900 9y ago
Similar experience here. Once I made an account and tried to be more active. I got told off for asking questions about issues I was having or because my answers weren't liked by someone with high rep. I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account. I use stackoverflow on a daily basis, to find preexisting issues around what I am working on and read possible solutions, but thats it. I don't consider logging in and asking about an issue I am having, let alone help anyone else. I feel like the toxicity around the community has led me into that. I do feel like people on stackoverflow are elitists, thats what I am getting about it. I feel like they are playing on a different league than me and they make me feel lesser although I am pretty certain that am competent enough to succeed. I am grateful for stackoverflow, but I definitely don't see using an account on there anytime soon, and its going to take a long long time for stackoverflow to win me over as a contributor :/ P.S - Out of about 30 devs I worked with in the past / working now with etc I've only seen 3 of them using stackoverflow by contributing to it, or when they get an issue they post about it. The rest of them use stackoverflow the same way I use it which proves a pattern here, at least on my personal circle.
- bonesss 9y ago
  > I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account. This roughly mirrors my experience... I went through a period of engagement, which ended abruptly after an unpleasant interaction. The author of a semi-well-known niche library took time out of his day to poo-poo a highly specific answer to a highly specific issue. Thing is, the questioner and myself were using that library a bit differently than it's primary usage (broad data generation instead of test-data management). So I had to debate with myself if I was really gonna be using my time explaining to someone I'd otherwise have loved to bump into at a conference that the world is a complicated place and sometimes I use butter knives to unscrew things regardless of what Ikea thinks about it... Haven't posted since.
  - donttrack 9y ago
    ... "butter knives to unscrew things"... Savage! This is why we cant have nice things.
IAmEveryone 9y ago
I think it's a natural reaction to dislike questions that are asked without much attention to detail, contain spelling mistakes (often in the headline), don't use code formatting or otherwise make it more difficult to understand. Note that these problems may not make answering the question impossible. If, for example, the headline/question is "How do I do this???", then you can still answer, provided the body is more specific. But such a meaningless title makes it harder to spot the question in lists when you're searching, or willing to answer questions. That's bad for the usefulness of SO, and moderators and other users who have spent a lot of time on the site may notice such problems far more than you do when first visiting it.
- caf 9y ago
  The right answer to this is to edit the question: fix the formatting, write a good title and select a good set of tags. I feel that if I do this, maybe the questioner will learn from the edits for their future questions. And even if they don't, at least I've made the question potentially valuable for other people coming along later, which is the main point.
nkkollaw 9y ago
Seems to me like many communities end up being like that. The extreme is some open source projects, in my experience.
caf 9y ago
This is one of the issues called out in the original post. And little makes me sadder than comments on answers saying, “Don’t answer questions like this – it encourages them.”
sebringj 9y ago
It is run by humans after all. Some of these humans, even in their high ranking are just that, humans. I usually avoid those types as they sometimes have an axe to grind and want to take it out on "underlings". My rep is high enough anyway there that those types are just pathetic.
flippyhead 9y ago
Same! I'm definitely qualified to answer some of the questions and for some reason actually willing to do so but totally gave up investing my time in doing so after a couple of similar experiences.
lambda 9y ago
I'm a high-scoring user who has been put off by this exact behavior. The problem is, the behavior is pervasive among other high scoring users, and whenever I advocate against this kind of behavior, I get a whole bunch of pushback about it. No one seems to want to change. No one seems to want to even engage with criticism about the culture; they just push back and pile on when criticism is brought up. After a couple times of seeing this kind of behavior, and pushing back, and then getting piled on by people rejecting the criticism, I started to get tired of it and withdrawing somewhat. Later on, I some blatant sexism in a chatroom that was laughed off when I pointed it out to the moderators. I've pretty much given up. I'll occasionally reply to questions people ask on my existing answers or if I see something that needs an answer or edit I'll make it, but I don't really feel like fighting the overwhelmingly elitist, sexist, and uncaring attitude on the site. I think that this post is a nice gesture, and good that it's coming from the company and not just another user, but I worry that's it's much too late. The community has been attracting people who like it the way it is, and repelling people like me who don't, for a long time.
- klenwell 9y ago
  Last time this subject came up on Hacker News here, I was inspired to post an idea I came up with after mulling the issue over a bit: mentors. I posted the idea on Meta here: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-request-mentors https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-requ... Turned out somebody posted the almost exact same idea here almost 3 years earlier: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/254205/opt-in-mentor-privilege-at-7-5k https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/254205/opt-in-mento... And StackOverflow even did an experiment with a different implementation last year: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-request-mentors?noredirect=1#comment572064_365720 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-requ... But while there definitely seems to be a movement afoot to tackle the issue, I can see why you're ready to give up. Look at the comments to my question and you'll find this (with a couple upvotes): @klenwell 'users who downvote without comment or explanation other new users who have given some obvious attention to the composition of their question' I hear these things often. I don't see them when using SO, nor have I seen any evidence that such a set of users exists, and I have asked for such evidence, many, many times. None has ever been forthcoming. I have concluded that such users do not actually exist. This after I provided a detailed personal account of this dynamic in action. I mean I guess I could start collecting timestamped screenshots or request the server logs from the Stack Overflow sysadmins. For now, I guess I'll just join the chorus of the disaffected here.
matt_j 9y ago
There's a delicate balance for moderators to achieve and I don't envy them. Some questions are clearly daft, the person hasn't done any prior research, the question is vague, the problem is not apparent and it's a big waste of time trying to help. These questions are often shut down mercilessly and I think that's probably the best thing for them, but I've no doubt it's a terrible experience for the guy asking the question. I think the SO blog post addressed it pretty well by outlining a more streamlined question form with clear prompts for each part of the question. Other questions are not daft, but perhaps are not asked well. They need to be edited, re-framed, boiled down to the essential parts, an example included, the expected output included, that sort of thing. It's tiresome to run into questions like this over and over, and I can understand how people might comment out of frustration, but it's good to prompt the OP to fix their question up so it can (and probably will) be answered well. Kid gloves and kindness are important here, it's not always easy to ask a good question. The SO blog post went a long way to addressing this and I look forward to seeing some changes on the site. Overall I think SO is a fantastic resource with many amazing contributors, so it's good to see them responding to this problem and I hope they can make it even better.
- nookoking 9y ago
  In my experience, SO is just not useful anymore for asking questions. All the easy questions that could be solved by just RTFM have been answered, many times. And the more nuanced questions are fraught with bias (see: "The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List"). As for "boiling down" and "re-framing" questions, they won't get answered. Usually ever. You'll get a few comments from people trying to help, with suggestions you've already tried, pitying your high-effort question with no answers. Then, you'll go search through the annals of your language, either to find that one guy twenty years ago published a piece of your puzzle in his blog, or that there's nothing at all in any sort of literature on how to solve your specific problem. You'll then end up doing your own testing and research, spending an inordinate amount of time testing and verifying, until you come up with a brand spanking new type of abstraction that solves your problem perfectly. You'll write up your dissertation, post it on your question, and set it as "answered." Then you'll curse under your breath at how f useless SO is, besides being an over-glorified forum / "selected excerpts from the manual." I've stopped using SO, because I've realized all of your software problems can be solved with two things: 1). RTFM 2). Explore the software/language Anything else, IMO, breeds bad habits. I say this as someone who used to rely solely on internet tutorials and other people's examples before I had to do work where my code had to be perfect or else I'd be out of a job/sued/[something violent]. I had to quickly learn how to do things myself and find the answers to my problems by straight scientific method and I know I've become a better software engineer because of it. Having experience in both, I can say with conviction, that anyone who uses SO as anything more than a pair of training wheels that should be discarded after your first 6-12 months is liable to become a "bad" programmer (see: Ruby developer community).
beenBoutIT 9y ago
That seems to be the way it goes, at first.You basically need to visit the site every day and vote while editing typos and fixing other peoples mistakes.
freshhawk 9y ago
It is a bizarre system, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised about the community it shaped. The ways to get points combined with the way moderation powers slowly flow from them in this gamified rigid hierarchy is not a common approach. Only allowing a specific type of social interaction (objective questions whose answer(s) are of interest to many). It is weird. I think it is really interesting that the community isn't much worse. At that scale and, lets be honest, with programmers giving programming advice? Why is that? Which of those aspects can be borrowed for other stuff?
edem 9y ago
I can comment on this from the "other side" since I have discussed this on meta. The problem is that answering questions which are borderline low quality/too specific, etc or need imorovement before it can be answered are usually frowned upon because it encourages the asker to ask more low quality questions. The abuse you got is not OK though. If I comment at all on such questions it is always polite. What I think is also a big oroblem is closing questions as duplicates which are not duplicates. As with every system I think the incentives are the culprit so I expect SO to improve on this soon. They should be able to since they have all the data to do so
- learnstats2 9y ago
  Why do "low quality" questions matter? I don't believe "low quality" is really a problem. Stack Exchange could have dealt with this by developing a mechanism for identifying and promoting general and well-written questions to search engines, and so on. People sometimes have specific or incompletely formulated questions, and people sometimes enjoy figuring out answers to those questions. By stamping on these situations, Stack Exchange quickly removed almost all of its potential contributor base.
  - edem 9y ago
    > Why do "low quality" questions matter? As I have said it encourages additional low quality questions which is more work for the mods.
    - vk23 9y ago
      > As I have said it encourages additional low quality questions which is more work for the mods. "low quality" question could just be marked as such and kept mostly unmodorated. By marking them there is also an incentive to produce "high quality" questions. You could also make badges and reputation around it so asking good questions gets more rewarding. Also, answering those "low quality" can really help the asker to understand his problem better and improve his problem solving ability, so maybe the next time he can provide better information in his question. If you just close the question and tell people to go away you will just scare people off (which btw also leads to a smaller number of mods)
ItsMe000001 9y ago
With all due respect, but this kind of report is pretty useless to the rest of us without any context. A link to the question and a copy of your deleted answer at least. It's not like every single complaint is valid - plenty of people complain whose treatment seems entirely justified. There are plenty of useless answers that SO has to deal with.
telltruth 9y ago
Let me present you other side of the story. I have been user of SO and significant level contributor for as long as it’s been there. Virtually every day there is onslaught of people asking questions that are trivially answerable by simple search or not well formed or not even legibly written. Everyday lot of people end up spending their time in answering these rathar than focusing on questions that are far more worth their time. You may say, well, leave it up to folks to what they want to answer. The problem is that it doesn’t work that way. Spammy question often ends up overwhelming limited screen space and good questions gets buried like a needle in the haystack. Even worse, lot of people go after trivial stuff just to get more points. Even more worse people who ask bad questions get encouraged to keep doing same things. You can see where this is going. In nutshell, current system is not ideal but it has been put in place after lots of thoughts. No one is going to disagree with being more respectful and kind however the solution to this problem is much more of a technical challenge.
- viraptor 9y ago
  > Spammy question often ends up overwhelming limited screen space and good questions gets buried like a needle in the haystack. This is one of the issues with SO. I'd love to find a good question. I'd be happy to spend some time on it and learn something. But instead there are lots of questions about why the guessing game doesn't wait for input the second time, what's this syntax error, why doesn't this "if" work. Questions that will maybe help one person, but could be deleted immediately afterwards and nobody would notice. I don't even know what's the answer. Maybe a canonical "this is how you debug an if statement which doesn't work" or other topic answer would help. Maybe not.
  - tedmiston 9y ago
    > I'd love to find a good question. I'd be happy to spend some time on it and learn something. You can sort by most upvoted unanswered questions. https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes
reitanqild 9y ago
This is one of the things we've pointed out for years: A lot of SOers seems to enjoy moderation a lot more than answering questions. Unfortunately they even do get in the way of the rest of us.
tedmiston 9y ago
While I haven't experienced this personally, Meta exists to facilitate discussions like what you're describing. https://meta.stackoverflow.com https://meta.stackoverflow.com It's also worth noting that those who can lock discussions can also edit questions without approval (and others can with approval), so it's worth pushing back on editing the question into being "answerable", admittedly a non-binary state.

by warent 9y ago

jamesb93 9y ago

They also outright get rid of questions that people provide good and helpful answers to. I once asked a question about a specific ML technique in regards to implementing in a specific c++ API. Higher ups said that the question was far too broad and against the guidelines, despite receiving at least 5 good answers to my questions before they got to it. They effectively shut up good conversation for the sake of a rule book they probably didn't write.

lainga 9y ago

Same situation as Wikipedia: Absolute power corrupts absolutely - but so does a small, petty amount.

notatoad 9y ago
I think it's significant though that both wikipedia and stack overflow, despite being ruled by petty assholes weilding the smallest amount of power in seemingly the stupidest way possible, have become two of the most valuable references in existence. Do toxic communities produce better content?
- saint_fiasco 9y ago
  If there is a correlation, it's more likely that the sort of petty asshole who likes to feel important will prefer to invest more effort in a site that is valuable. So the more valuable a site becomes, the more it will attract highly motivated but slightly sociopathic moderators.
  - Viliam1234 9y ago
    Yes, this seems more likely. If you create a new website with first 10 toxic users, it will never grow, because they will scare away any potential 11th user. But if you create a new website with awesome users, it get useful content and grow. When it grows very large and attracts too many users, you will have to start moderating heavily. But moderating a website is an exhausting task, and awesome people usually have other things to do; so gradually the job will be taken by people hungry for some kind of power. Then the site becomes toxic.
- lstyls 9y ago
  Not according to the linked post, at least: > Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness. Quality matters because it means posts can help more people. But a larger, more diverse community produces better artifacts, not worse ones. We need to stop justifying condescension with the pursuit of quality, and we need better tools and queues to help power users trying to keep quality high.
- FussyZeus 9y ago
  I would argue there are way too many variables in that question to present a strong argument either way. One thing I will say on it though is how much of our humanity are we ready to sacrifice on the altar of this mythical "meritocracy" that every online community, especially those built on or around code, seems to aim for? And how long until we're ready to confront the fact that a lot of these meritocracies strangely produce very similar "top contributors" in terms of demographics, i.e. white, straight men? I'm not getting into either side of it, I'm just saying that you have to admit it's an astonishing coincidence that online communities, started by, moderated by, largely inhabited by, and currently operated by white men seemingly always have a cadre of white men on the top as the "most valuable contributors" and nobody ever seems to wonder if all those things are connected. Maybe the fears of POC/women are invalid. Maybe it's all a big damn misunderstanding. But I don't think it's right to have white men deciding if it is or not, and I don't think the best damn catalog of coding answers on the planet means a thing if everyone who isn't part of the in-crowd is too damn terrified to ask a question of it.
mathattack 9y ago
The fights are so big because the stakes are so small. (Also said by Kissinger about Harvard)
vernie 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
jamesrcole 9y ago
And subreddit admins.

Confiks 9y ago

> Suddenly another, even higher ranking person, deleted all the comments and locked my answer, noting that the discussion had stopped being productive. After that, my answers were left alone with no more meta criticism. I can't see from your story if the "even higher scoring person" ever declared his intentions to you, which he probably should, but it can be a pretty routine moderation action on forum sites in general to remove meta comments not contributing to the original question, after that discussion has been had. In your story I could as well read that the lower rank moderator was told off about his interventions.

tbodt 9y ago
The "even higher scoring person" was definitely a moderator, only they have the power to delete comments and lock posts.

herogreen 9y ago

I personally very much like SO. I have <1k rep after more than two years of use but it is fine for me. I answer a question maybe 1 time a month and ask maybe 1 time a year. However a friend of mine (that I believe as a better level in programming than me) has the same feeling of "bizzare community" that you have, so I know that the issue is complex. That said I really have zero ideas about what they could do to improve the way they are seen by everyone without breaking the way the site currently works. Have you heard about the term "help vampire" ? Do you know how many people how do not take 3 minutes to search ? Do you think that the number of questions will remain manageable if the bar is leveled down ? Do you know that you are encouraged to edit questions to make them more "well asked" (at least if that is humanely possible) ? In my opinion SO is a specific tool that is very different from a forum, a chat or a mailing list. SO should not be the only tool that people have to solve their programming problems and it should not try to morph into it.

kristianc 9y ago
I wonder if there's a bit of "5 Whys" going on here. Most of the times I end up on Stack Overflow, I arrive via Google. I usually have to check for around 5 answers before I find one that hasn't been locked as "not constructive" or for some other arbitrary reason. Is it any wonder that people find it easier to ask their own questions? The name "help vampire" is so telling of how SO mods see themselves (as arbiters and gatekeepers of all that is good against the raging unwashed hordes) and a symptom of the problem. Don't aspire malice / incompetence to something that may well have a root cause within SO itself.
- cf498 9y ago
  >Most of the times I end up on Stack Overflow, I arrive via Google. I usually have to check for around 5 answers before I find one that hasn't been locked as "not constructive" or for some other arbitrary reason. Thats kind of the point though isnt it? The idea is that you should find the right question and answer and not the x-th repost of them. Anyone familiar with the side know why reposts arent simply deleted instead of locked? It seems locking them only worsens the problem they aimed to combat?

mental1896 9y ago

I think you've touched on what's missing that could make it a more personable community--better communication. I posted an image as a part of an answer once and it was removed with the reason "don't use third party image hosts". Thing is, I used i.stack.imgur.com which is the only method provided in the answer form on the site! I knew the user who did it but since my answer had been deleted, I had no way to contact him for any sort of appeal. It was a while before I tried contributing to the site again.

wwweston 9y ago

> Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to stop answering certain questions, and only address "well asked" questions. I love Stack Overflow, and it's sure a valuable if imperfect resource, but this is something that drives me bonkers about it. If the question is intelligible enough to receive an answer, and if your answer is potentially helpful to the asker, then it's well-asked as far as I can tell, and the scoring system can take care of its relative utility. The additional level of moderation doesn't seem to have added much value over my time participating. The closest thing I can think of as nice is combining duplicates, though moderators often seem to miss subtle differences between questions and in some cases information gets lost in the end. Generally, the moderation focus often seems legalistic or driven by artificial incentives rather than primarily focused on improving the breadth, depth, and quality of the site as a technical resource. Honestly, I'm pretty sure that a significant portion of the hostility people experience is coming from moderation actions. I might hope the SO team has the intention of going to town on that problem in general, but I don't see it specifically mentioned in today's discussion. I'm sure that if they took it deeply seriously and engaged with enough specific situations where it's been a problem, they could find ways to do better. I think today's announcement is a really good indication, though, that they're listening to people who are having problems with their SO experience, not just to people who'd congratulate them for their (deserved!) accomplishments and for whom everything is more or less fine.

wheelie_boy 9y ago
I think the core problem is that they've focused too much on being like wikipedia (a single authoritative, comprehensive answer to each important question), and not enough on helping people to learn. Over time a site will grow a culture, and experts on the site will outweigh and overrule experts on the subject matter. In this case, we're also seeing answerers' needs outweigh askers'. If you could only meet the needs of one constituency, I'd say they made the right choice to favor expert answerers, but I think there are other solutions. Specifically, if I was trying to fix this I'd set up a two-tier system for questions and answers. There are lots of people who would be happy to answer questions, even if the question is a dupe, and even if it's not framed very well. Give people points for answering these in a kind way, and moderate around that. For questions that are sufficiently well-asked, and not duplicates, elevate them to a wikipedia-like status: allow them to be indexed by search engines, make them easier to see by the expert answerers that dislike sifting through novice questions, and moderate them for quality. Give points for people that review and elevate high-quality, non-duplicate questions, or that edit questions to become high-quality. If there are very different personas that you're trying to appease, sometimes a multi-tier system is appropriate.

mehrdadn 9y ago

Related to this, I'm sick of the moderators deleting comments and moving discussions to chats on a whim just because they're seeing too many comment. They don't seem to realize they're not helping anybody; they keep doing this as if it's Truth ordered by God. Like, StackExchange admins: If you're getting flags, there's offensive material, the comments are blatantly off-topic, etc., then OK, I get that; you can step in and moderate. But that's a tiny fraction of the time. When people are having a normal discussion that turns out to be long, maybe don't be a jerk who deletes all the comments from that post and tells people to go somewhere else? It kills the entire discussion, mood, and everyone's enthusiasm, along with lots of gems that were in the comments but that wouldn't fit inside any answers. You really expect the community to turn out happy and welcoming when you keep punching all the breaths out of the users and kicking them to some other corner just because more than 5 of them decided to commit the sin of commenting and sharing thoughts on a topic?

kapauldo 9y ago
Totally agree. It attracts a-holes as moderators.
Johnny555 9y ago
I agree with this -- sometimes the comments are more interesting and informative than the answer. And why is it ordained that "Comments aren't for extended discussion"? Only a handful of upvoted comments are shown by default, you have to deliberately expand the list to see more, so why not retain them all? If someone wants to wade through 200 commments and add one of his own, what's the real harm? They could add an option for askers/answerers to "Stop notifications for new comments', if that's the issue.
jpindar 9y ago
>discussion Ooooh, You used the d word! Closed because Stack overflow is not for discussion. What SO needs is a forum - not an ephemeral chat but a forum whose topics can be linked to the questions that people want to discuss.
- mehrdadn 9y ago

cuckcuckspruce 9y ago

This is just a virch to appear on board with wider trends in the community, and addressing the issue you raised give StackOverflow no more recognition, advertising revenue, or standing in the community.

fossuser 9y ago

Yeah it's a weird mix of helpful content moderated by an irritating hall monitor like community wielding power and making changes nobody wants. I've been frustrated when trying to contribute - you'll have two people helping each other and then some third party comes in and declares it not valuable, incorrectly says something is a duplicate, or starts deleting things for arbitrary reasons. I just want the moderators to go away and leave us alone, it also makes me think stack overflow is successful in spite of this - not because of it.

zbentley 9y ago
> I just want the moderators to go away and leave us alone, it also makes me think stack overflow is successful in spite of this - not because of it. You can use the chat site, message them directly (if their contact information is listed) or anything else you like to help someone with a useless/duplicate/beginner/help-vampire-ey question. You just aren't allowed to do it inside the reputation system to mine these kinds of answers for karma, and aren't allowed to do it inside the wiki system so you don't pollute the results of searches.
Sacho 9y ago
But the goal of SO is not for you two to have a chat - it's to produce quality questions and answers for future visitors. When SO's moderation team does its job well, you only see them "harassing" you. When they don't, you google your question and get vague, poorly-worded questions answered by incorrect one-liners. SO's moderation is an effort to balance three parties with conflicting interests: - the people asking questions just want a solution for their specific problem, which may or may not be useful to SO. This can include homework problems, RTFM problems, vague and unclear questions, etc. - the people answering questions want interesting questions that stimulate them to keep using the site. SO really needs those people to feel happy answering questions, otherwise no one will visit the site! You need experts providing quality answers, who can find something interesting. - the people visiting the site after-the-fact. Those people are (usually) just googling a problem they have, but aren't willing to commit to a question. They need both the questioners and the answerers to have done their jobs, otherwise either the questions are too poor a quality to be sure it's the same problem, or the answers are too poor quality to be of use to them. To all those groups, effective SO moderation looks antagonistic, because they wouldn't go to the site if it had awful moderation - it would just be "that useless place where no one answers your questions and you keep getting the same question over and over".

gravyboat 9y ago

I had a similar experience recently with a question I had answered years ago. A highly ranked user came in, complained in a comment about the fact I linked to documentation instead of copy pasting the docs into the answer then downvoted me causing a loss of 2 karma. I reported the comment because it was ridiculous this person is scanning questions which are years old to try and find things to nitpick. I'm not sure if they removed the comment or if some other moderator did, but it was gone within a couple of days. My karma loss remained. It's absolutely ridiculous over there sometimes and these sorts of interactions are one of the big reasons I stopped participating.

tedmiston 9y ago
The best practice in this case is to edit your answer to include the docs as well as the link, so the next user can find the answer in one place, preserved even when external links inevitably break, change, or disappear over time. A good citizen would remove their downvote after you did that. A better citizen would have just made the edit themselves to help everyone.

JPGalt 9y ago

I have had similar issues on this site. I have had 3 high rep users of the site close a question I asked having never answered a single question in the technology I was referencing. That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that? I guess they could go look for a profile picture before they answer? If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP. My experience in general has been that there are a segment of users on StackOverflow that think they are better than everyone else and take every little opportunity they can to impress upon the rest of us how great they are in their own little world.

Izkata 9y ago
> That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that? I guess they could go look for a profile picture before they answer? > If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP. Probably why the comments are disabled on that blog post. Doesn't want anyone pointing out the disconnects from reality.
Mithaldu 9y ago
> That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that? People extrapolate from names. ESPECIALLY if your name sounds indian.
- ruirr 9y ago
  What names? You do extrapolate from the bad English. Loads of Indians using UK-sounding names and UK woman names.
tedmiston 9y ago
> I have had 3 high rep users of the site close a question I asked I have some mod privileges on SO and have been a user for ~8 years. The best way to not have your question locked or deleted, is to ensure you're following the best practices for asking a question and include a Minimum Complete Verifiable Example (MCVE). https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask If you feel you've done both and still don't get a good experience, it's worth speaking out on Meta for more specific advice. Most people on SO just want to help — it's easier to help on a question that meets these standards. > having never answered a single question in the technology I was referencing Moderator privileges are more about the style of a question/answer than the specifics of a particular tech. The moderation queues are irrespective of the tech tagged in the question.

muse900 9y ago

Similar experience here. Once I made an account and tried to be more active. I got told off for asking questions about issues I was having or because my answers weren't liked by someone with high rep. I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account. I use stackoverflow on a daily basis, to find preexisting issues around what I am working on and read possible solutions, but thats it. I don't consider logging in and asking about an issue I am having, let alone help anyone else. I feel like the toxicity around the community has led me into that. I do feel like people on stackoverflow are elitists, thats what I am getting about it. I feel like they are playing on a different league than me and they make me feel lesser although I am pretty certain that am competent enough to succeed. I am grateful for stackoverflow, but I definitely don't see using an account on there anytime soon, and its going to take a long long time for stackoverflow to win me over as a contributor :/ P.S - Out of about 30 devs I worked with in the past / working now with etc I've only seen 3 of them using stackoverflow by contributing to it, or when they get an issue they post about it. The rest of them use stackoverflow the same way I use it which proves a pattern here, at least on my personal circle.

bonesss 9y ago
> I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account. This roughly mirrors my experience... I went through a period of engagement, which ended abruptly after an unpleasant interaction. The author of a semi-well-known niche library took time out of his day to poo-poo a highly specific answer to a highly specific issue. Thing is, the questioner and myself were using that library a bit differently than it's primary usage (broad data generation instead of test-data management). So I had to debate with myself if I was really gonna be using my time explaining to someone I'd otherwise have loved to bump into at a conference that the world is a complicated place and sometimes I use butter knives to unscrew things regardless of what Ikea thinks about it... Haven't posted since.
- donttrack 9y ago
  ... "butter knives to unscrew things"... Savage! This is why we cant have nice things.

IAmEveryone 9y ago

I think it's a natural reaction to dislike questions that are asked without much attention to detail, contain spelling mistakes (often in the headline), don't use code formatting or otherwise make it more difficult to understand. Note that these problems may not make answering the question impossible. If, for example, the headline/question is "How do I do this???", then you can still answer, provided the body is more specific. But such a meaningless title makes it harder to spot the question in lists when you're searching, or willing to answer questions. That's bad for the usefulness of SO, and moderators and other users who have spent a lot of time on the site may notice such problems far more than you do when first visiting it.

caf 9y ago
The right answer to this is to edit the question: fix the formatting, write a good title and select a good set of tags. I feel that if I do this, maybe the questioner will learn from the edits for their future questions. And even if they don't, at least I've made the question potentially valuable for other people coming along later, which is the main point.

nkkollaw 9y ago

Seems to me like many communities end up being like that. The extreme is some open source projects, in my experience.

caf 9y ago

This is one of the issues called out in the original post. And little makes me sadder than comments on answers saying, “Don’t answer questions like this – it encourages them.”

sebringj 9y ago

It is run by humans after all. Some of these humans, even in their high ranking are just that, humans. I usually avoid those types as they sometimes have an axe to grind and want to take it out on "underlings". My rep is high enough anyway there that those types are just pathetic.

flippyhead 9y ago

Same! I'm definitely qualified to answer some of the questions and for some reason actually willing to do so but totally gave up investing my time in doing so after a couple of similar experiences.

lambda 9y ago

I'm a high-scoring user who has been put off by this exact behavior. The problem is, the behavior is pervasive among other high scoring users, and whenever I advocate against this kind of behavior, I get a whole bunch of pushback about it. No one seems to want to change. No one seems to want to even engage with criticism about the culture; they just push back and pile on when criticism is brought up. After a couple times of seeing this kind of behavior, and pushing back, and then getting piled on by people rejecting the criticism, I started to get tired of it and withdrawing somewhat. Later on, I some blatant sexism in a chatroom that was laughed off when I pointed it out to the moderators. I've pretty much given up. I'll occasionally reply to questions people ask on my existing answers or if I see something that needs an answer or edit I'll make it, but I don't really feel like fighting the overwhelmingly elitist, sexist, and uncaring attitude on the site. I think that this post is a nice gesture, and good that it's coming from the company and not just another user, but I worry that's it's much too late. The community has been attracting people who like it the way it is, and repelling people like me who don't, for a long time.

klenwell 9y ago
Last time this subject came up on Hacker News here, I was inspired to post an idea I came up with after mulling the issue over a bit: mentors. I posted the idea on Meta here: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-request-mentors https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-requ... Turned out somebody posted the almost exact same idea here almost 3 years earlier: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/254205/opt-in-mentor-privilege-at-7-5k https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/254205/opt-in-mento... And StackOverflow even did an experiment with a different implementation last year: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-request-mentors?noredirect=1#comment572064_365720 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-requ... But while there definitely seems to be a movement afoot to tackle the issue, I can see why you're ready to give up. Look at the comments to my question and you'll find this (with a couple upvotes): @klenwell 'users who downvote without comment or explanation other new users who have given some obvious attention to the composition of their question' I hear these things often. I don't see them when using SO, nor have I seen any evidence that such a set of users exists, and I have asked for such evidence, many, many times. None has ever been forthcoming. I have concluded that such users do not actually exist. This after I provided a detailed personal account of this dynamic in action. I mean I guess I could start collecting timestamped screenshots or request the server logs from the Stack Overflow sysadmins. For now, I guess I'll just join the chorus of the disaffected here.

matt_j 9y ago

There's a delicate balance for moderators to achieve and I don't envy them. Some questions are clearly daft, the person hasn't done any prior research, the question is vague, the problem is not apparent and it's a big waste of time trying to help. These questions are often shut down mercilessly and I think that's probably the best thing for them, but I've no doubt it's a terrible experience for the guy asking the question. I think the SO blog post addressed it pretty well by outlining a more streamlined question form with clear prompts for each part of the question. Other questions are not daft, but perhaps are not asked well. They need to be edited, re-framed, boiled down to the essential parts, an example included, the expected output included, that sort of thing. It's tiresome to run into questions like this over and over, and I can understand how people might comment out of frustration, but it's good to prompt the OP to fix their question up so it can (and probably will) be answered well. Kid gloves and kindness are important here, it's not always easy to ask a good question. The SO blog post went a long way to addressing this and I look forward to seeing some changes on the site. Overall I think SO is a fantastic resource with many amazing contributors, so it's good to see them responding to this problem and I hope they can make it even better.

nookoking 9y ago
In my experience, SO is just not useful anymore for asking questions. All the easy questions that could be solved by just RTFM have been answered, many times. And the more nuanced questions are fraught with bias (see: "The Definitive C++ Book Guide and List"). As for "boiling down" and "re-framing" questions, they won't get answered. Usually ever. You'll get a few comments from people trying to help, with suggestions you've already tried, pitying your high-effort question with no answers. Then, you'll go search through the annals of your language, either to find that one guy twenty years ago published a piece of your puzzle in his blog, or that there's nothing at all in any sort of literature on how to solve your specific problem. You'll then end up doing your own testing and research, spending an inordinate amount of time testing and verifying, until you come up with a brand spanking new type of abstraction that solves your problem perfectly. You'll write up your dissertation, post it on your question, and set it as "answered." Then you'll curse under your breath at how f useless SO is, besides being an over-glorified forum / "selected excerpts from the manual." I've stopped using SO, because I've realized all of your software problems can be solved with two things: 1). RTFM 2). Explore the software/language Anything else, IMO, breeds bad habits. I say this as someone who used to rely solely on internet tutorials and other people's examples before I had to do work where my code had to be perfect or else I'd be out of a job/sued/[something violent]. I had to quickly learn how to do things myself and find the answers to my problems by straight scientific method and I know I've become a better software engineer because of it. Having experience in both, I can say with conviction, that anyone who uses SO as anything more than a pair of training wheels that should be discarded after your first 6-12 months is liable to become a "bad" programmer (see: Ruby developer community).

beenBoutIT 9y ago

That seems to be the way it goes, at first.You basically need to visit the site every day and vote while editing typos and fixing other peoples mistakes.

freshhawk 9y ago

It is a bizarre system, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised about the community it shaped. The ways to get points combined with the way moderation powers slowly flow from them in this gamified rigid hierarchy is not a common approach. Only allowing a specific type of social interaction (objective questions whose answer(s) are of interest to many). It is weird. I think it is really interesting that the community isn't much worse. At that scale and, lets be honest, with programmers giving programming advice? Why is that? Which of those aspects can be borrowed for other stuff?

edem 9y ago

I can comment on this from the "other side" since I have discussed this on meta. The problem is that answering questions which are borderline low quality/too specific, etc or need imorovement before it can be answered are usually frowned upon because it encourages the asker to ask more low quality questions. The abuse you got is not OK though. If I comment at all on such questions it is always polite. What I think is also a big oroblem is closing questions as duplicates which are not duplicates. As with every system I think the incentives are the culprit so I expect SO to improve on this soon. They should be able to since they have all the data to do so

learnstats2 9y ago
Why do "low quality" questions matter? I don't believe "low quality" is really a problem. Stack Exchange could have dealt with this by developing a mechanism for identifying and promoting general and well-written questions to search engines, and so on. People sometimes have specific or incompletely formulated questions, and people sometimes enjoy figuring out answers to those questions. By stamping on these situations, Stack Exchange quickly removed almost all of its potential contributor base.
- edem 9y ago
  > Why do "low quality" questions matter? As I have said it encourages additional low quality questions which is more work for the mods.
  - vk23 9y ago
    > As I have said it encourages additional low quality questions which is more work for the mods. "low quality" question could just be marked as such and kept mostly unmodorated. By marking them there is also an incentive to produce "high quality" questions. You could also make badges and reputation around it so asking good questions gets more rewarding. Also, answering those "low quality" can really help the asker to understand his problem better and improve his problem solving ability, so maybe the next time he can provide better information in his question. If you just close the question and tell people to go away you will just scare people off (which btw also leads to a smaller number of mods)

ItsMe000001 9y ago

With all due respect, but this kind of report is pretty useless to the rest of us without any context. A link to the question and a copy of your deleted answer at least. It's not like every single complaint is valid - plenty of people complain whose treatment seems entirely justified. There are plenty of useless answers that SO has to deal with.

telltruth 9y ago

Let me present you other side of the story. I have been user of SO and significant level contributor for as long as it’s been there. Virtually every day there is onslaught of people asking questions that are trivially answerable by simple search or not well formed or not even legibly written. Everyday lot of people end up spending their time in answering these rathar than focusing on questions that are far more worth their time. You may say, well, leave it up to folks to what they want to answer. The problem is that it doesn’t work that way. Spammy question often ends up overwhelming limited screen space and good questions gets buried like a needle in the haystack. Even worse, lot of people go after trivial stuff just to get more points. Even more worse people who ask bad questions get encouraged to keep doing same things. You can see where this is going. In nutshell, current system is not ideal but it has been put in place after lots of thoughts. No one is going to disagree with being more respectful and kind however the solution to this problem is much more of a technical challenge.

viraptor 9y ago
> Spammy question often ends up overwhelming limited screen space and good questions gets buried like a needle in the haystack. This is one of the issues with SO. I'd love to find a good question. I'd be happy to spend some time on it and learn something. But instead there are lots of questions about why the guessing game doesn't wait for input the second time, what's this syntax error, why doesn't this "if" work. Questions that will maybe help one person, but could be deleted immediately afterwards and nobody would notice. I don't even know what's the answer. Maybe a canonical "this is how you debug an if statement which doesn't work" or other topic answer would help. Maybe not.
- tedmiston 9y ago
  > I'd love to find a good question. I'd be happy to spend some time on it and learn something. You can sort by most upvoted unanswered questions. https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered/tagged/?tab=votes

reitanqild 9y ago

This is one of the things we've pointed out for years: A lot of SOers seems to enjoy moderation a lot more than answering questions. Unfortunately they even do get in the way of the rest of us.

tedmiston 9y ago

While I haven't experienced this personally, Meta exists to facilitate discussions like what you're describing. https://meta.stackoverflow.com https://meta.stackoverflow.com It's also worth noting that those who can lock discussions can also edit questions without approval (and others can with approval), so it's worth pushing back on editing the question into being "answerable", admittedly a non-binary state.