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> Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to stop answering certain questions, and only address "well 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. 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.
- sigstoat 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'. there's also the third, silent, probably much larger group, who neither asks questions nor answers them. it seems as though the single authoritative, comprehensive answers is what helps those people the most. > Specifically, if I was trying to fix this I'd set up a two-tier system for questions and answers. ... For questions that are sufficiently well-asked, and not duplicates, elevate them to a wikipedia-like status ... i think i'd very much like that to happen.
  - psyc 9y ago
    I'm in that third group because I perceive SO as a 'no good deed goes unpunished' culture. I already went through that with Wikipedia, and I've got better things to do than fight insiders.
    - b_t_s 9y ago
      truestory. I've been doing this for 2 decades and I've only ever posted one question on SO because it was super obscure technical thing that was totally un-googleable. I know not to ask anything less obscure. For community and "normal" questions there's reddit. I also only answer questions on reddit. I know there's prestige and it's good resume material to answer on SO, but reddit is a community whereas SO is documentation. Answering on SO is too aggravating.
  - lambda 9y ago
    Except part of the problem is that it's not even doing a very good job of giving a good authoritative answer either. In the earlier days, it was designed to straddle the line more with a wiki; there were "community wiki" questions and answers, but people couldn't get reputation for those, and if someone's question or answer was edited enough it would automatically converted to "community wiki". However, people would get upset about losing the potential karma, so that feature was taken away, and major edits to other people's answers that change the meaning of it started to be discouraged. However, there's no way for anyone other the person who originally asked a question to change which answer is accepted. So if someone asked a question 10 years ago, and someone gave a bad answer or an answer that is now out of date but which was accepted, and those two people have now left the site, there's no good way to get the first answer to the question to be the correct one. You can write a better answer, and even if it's upvoted, there will still be the accepted answer ahead of it. I've tried following the original, more wiki-like spirit of the site by editing such answers, and then gotten other people reverting me because the edit would "give reputation to someone who didn't deserve it." I feel like the incentives, and balance, and community of the site are just off right now. It still serves a useful purpose, but it could be a lot better, but whenever I've tried making suggestions for how to improve, I've gotten so much pushback that I've just given up.
lambda 9y ago
> 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. The problem is, they added the review queues, which prompts people to review questions on topics they might know nothing about, and give badges based on how much people review. So people go through those review queues and might be motivated to just get through things quickly without thinking very much about the effect of what they are doing; there is no meta review, no downside to just making hasty decisions that just prevent other people from engaging in useful discussion.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  > there is no meta review There is. There are "audit" questions designed to test whether the reviewer is paying attention. If they improperly vote to close a "good" audit question or improperly vote to leave open a "bad" one, they get banned from reviewing for a while.
  - lambda 9y ago
    OK, this may be a new feature, since I stopped paying close attention several years back when I got frustrated with the direction the community was going. But I don't think that "audit" questions do much to address my issue. They enforce that someone is paying at least a little bit of attention; but they still emphasize things like voting to close a "bad" question, rather than helping the person asking the question ask a better question. They might help a little bit with people who are just not paying attention at all for questions which are black and white as to whether they are "good" or "bad" (such as blatant spam), but they don't help at all with pushing the "grey area" questions in the right direction. That's the crux of the issue; the community is so focused on just cleaning up bad questions by closing them, rather than working with the person asking to help get them to be able to work better with the community.
cdoxsey 9y ago
An example of the duplicate issue: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41148357/force-kill-goroutine-after-timeout https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41148357/force-kill-goro... The user's question seemed like a fairly standard one: how can I force kill a goroutine. But actually there was a question underneath it. The issue wasn't that they needed to kill the goroutine it was that the library they were using didn't have a mechanism for timeouts. The sad thing was there was a PR available that fixed the problem. Its like arguing with someone who takes everything you say completely literally and makes no attempt at a charitable interpretation.
mathw 9y ago
I'm really happy about this announcement. As a fairly high-ranked user myself (7.8k at the moment) I try to use the tools the site lets me access to counteract some of the nonsense directed at new and enthusiastic people and the unreasonable suppression of certain questions and answers, but there's only so much you can do when you don't have hours every day to go through the close votes and edit queues. Heard so much from so many colleagues over the years about how SO is inaccessible and unwelcoming, and started to realise why. I'm glad SO themselves have been on the same journey, because they're far better placed to do something about it!

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.

sigstoat 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'. there's also the third, silent, probably much larger group, who neither asks questions nor answers them. it seems as though the single authoritative, comprehensive answers is what helps those people the most. > Specifically, if I was trying to fix this I'd set up a two-tier system for questions and answers. ... For questions that are sufficiently well-asked, and not duplicates, elevate them to a wikipedia-like status ... i think i'd very much like that to happen.
- psyc 9y ago
  I'm in that third group because I perceive SO as a 'no good deed goes unpunished' culture. I already went through that with Wikipedia, and I've got better things to do than fight insiders.
  - b_t_s 9y ago
    truestory. I've been doing this for 2 decades and I've only ever posted one question on SO because it was super obscure technical thing that was totally un-googleable. I know not to ask anything less obscure. For community and "normal" questions there's reddit. I also only answer questions on reddit. I know there's prestige and it's good resume material to answer on SO, but reddit is a community whereas SO is documentation. Answering on SO is too aggravating.
- lambda 9y ago
  Except part of the problem is that it's not even doing a very good job of giving a good authoritative answer either. In the earlier days, it was designed to straddle the line more with a wiki; there were "community wiki" questions and answers, but people couldn't get reputation for those, and if someone's question or answer was edited enough it would automatically converted to "community wiki". However, people would get upset about losing the potential karma, so that feature was taken away, and major edits to other people's answers that change the meaning of it started to be discouraged. However, there's no way for anyone other the person who originally asked a question to change which answer is accepted. So if someone asked a question 10 years ago, and someone gave a bad answer or an answer that is now out of date but which was accepted, and those two people have now left the site, there's no good way to get the first answer to the question to be the correct one. You can write a better answer, and even if it's upvoted, there will still be the accepted answer ahead of it. I've tried following the original, more wiki-like spirit of the site by editing such answers, and then gotten other people reverting me because the edit would "give reputation to someone who didn't deserve it." I feel like the incentives, and balance, and community of the site are just off right now. It still serves a useful purpose, but it could be a lot better, but whenever I've tried making suggestions for how to improve, I've gotten so much pushback that I've just given up.

lambda 9y ago

> 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. The problem is, they added the review queues, which prompts people to review questions on topics they might know nothing about, and give badges based on how much people review. So people go through those review queues and might be motivated to just get through things quickly without thinking very much about the effect of what they are doing; there is no meta review, no downside to just making hasty decisions that just prevent other people from engaging in useful discussion.

Ajedi32 9y ago
> there is no meta review There is. There are "audit" questions designed to test whether the reviewer is paying attention. If they improperly vote to close a "good" audit question or improperly vote to leave open a "bad" one, they get banned from reviewing for a while.
- lambda 9y ago
  OK, this may be a new feature, since I stopped paying close attention several years back when I got frustrated with the direction the community was going. But I don't think that "audit" questions do much to address my issue. They enforce that someone is paying at least a little bit of attention; but they still emphasize things like voting to close a "bad" question, rather than helping the person asking the question ask a better question. They might help a little bit with people who are just not paying attention at all for questions which are black and white as to whether they are "good" or "bad" (such as blatant spam), but they don't help at all with pushing the "grey area" questions in the right direction. That's the crux of the issue; the community is so focused on just cleaning up bad questions by closing them, rather than working with the person asking to help get them to be able to work better with the community.

cdoxsey 9y ago

An example of the duplicate issue: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41148357/force-kill-goroutine-after-timeout https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41148357/force-kill-goro... The user's question seemed like a fairly standard one: how can I force kill a goroutine. But actually there was a question underneath it. The issue wasn't that they needed to kill the goroutine it was that the library they were using didn't have a mechanism for timeouts. The sad thing was there was a PR available that fixed the problem. Its like arguing with someone who takes everything you say completely literally and makes no attempt at a charitable interpretation.

mathw 9y ago

I'm really happy about this announcement. As a fairly high-ranked user myself (7.8k at the moment) I try to use the tools the site lets me access to counteract some of the nonsense directed at new and enthusiastic people and the unreasonable suppression of certain questions and answers, but there's only so much you can do when you don't have hours every day to go through the close votes and edit queues. Heard so much from so many colleagues over the years about how SO is inaccessible and unwelcoming, and started to realise why. I'm glad SO themselves have been on the same journey, because they're far better placed to do something about it!