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What the StackOverflow company fails to get is that their product is assholes and industrial level asshole production. Every question is moderated by volunteer

What the StackOverflow company fails to get is that their product is assholes and industrial level asshole production. Every question is moderated by volunteers, who have curated every high value question there. From an askers perspective, sure you may have asked 1 slightly off-topic question, but for a reviewer, that’s the 30th off-topic question today - and SO gamifies reviewing so you are encouraged to do so. I used to be on StackOverflow and had high enough rep to access nearly all of the moderation tools. The quantity of garbage that gets submitted daily is astounding. And when your contribution to the community of high quality content is keep quality up you get tired of saying “hey can you please add more code” for the 100th time and just hit dupe. Because if the asker isn’t trying, why should you? Ultimately, this leads every reviewer to become an asshole, because to keep up with the quantity of rash coming in you need to be.

singularity2001 9y ago
Good explanation, but what's the purpose of deleting duplicates and "off-topic" questions other than saving some SO storage space? Edit: IMO closing duplicates makes sense, IFF users are asked 'does the linked duplicate answer you question' and confirm. Deleting only makes sense in case of exact duplicates, otherwise they might be useful variants worth linking.
- Izkata 9y ago
  Closing duplicates has multiple uses: * Directs the asker to a place where their question has already been answered. * Trains the user to search for an answer instead of blindly asking. * Gets new answerers to put their answers all in one place so it's easier for others to find later. * Not deleting it acts as a signpost for people searching on more variations of the same question. Closing off-topic questions should be obvious: Prevent scope creep and limit the "broken windows" effect.
- wool_gather 9y ago
  The general policy is exactly as you've described: duplicates are pointers; they are not deleted. That said, some queries reach a point where they become FAQs ("Why am I getting a NullPointerException?" being the canonical example) and at some point, there's diminishing returns from yet another search target for it.
jehlakj 9y ago
The thing about asking questions under an unfamiliar topic is that the asker isn’t knowledgeable enough to ask the appropriate questions. While this may seem like pure ignorance from a reviewers point of view, it’s much different for the asker. Unfortunately, these types of questions don’t work well in a q and a format. I’ve actually came across a few very good questions where the author answered his own in a very concise manner. and guess what? He had over 1k upvotes. Those are the questions that SO is catering. Which leads me to believe that by design, SO will never be able to fulfill their wishes in the blogpost.
your-nanny 9y ago
There are two functions stack overflow serves: 1. Answering questions people ask, q&a 2. Answering the questions of people stopping by looking for answers. The output of the former needn't directly be the input consumed by the latter. Bad questions can be tolerated in the former but are intolerable in the latter (noise). Solution: A curated site of answers searchable by public drawn from the best of q and a from an internal site not indexable by google, etc.
- svick 9y ago
  Except the great thing about SO is that if I have a super-obscure question, there is a good chance somebody already asked and answered it, so I can easily find the answer using Google. With your system, I would not be able to find the answer, because it wouldn't be in the curated list.
  - your-nanny 9y ago
    Costs and benefits. But curation can simply be in the form of a sufficient number of upvotes
faitswulff 9y ago
Never thought of it this way, but it is a content moderation problem, isn't it? The human collateral for moderation / quality enforcement is just ferocious on the internet, whether it's porn, NSFL.
javadocmd 9y ago
Maybe the solution to this is stop requiring (or tacitly encouraging) moderators to pull weeds and block all the bad questions, but rather allow them some sort of feature to identify particularly good questions. "But then we'll be flooded by bad content!" (I can hear SO mods screaming in the distance.) If old, low-score posts are clogging your search results, that's a problem with your search algorithms, not with moderation.
barrkel 9y ago
I think this is down to lack of good filtering tools. Primarily duplicate or lazy questions shouldn't even be seen by high-rep users most of the time. It's wasting everyone's time to maximize the exposure of those kind of questions. Low rep users could do with answering those kinds of questions, though - low-hanging fruit to get a leg up. I have 35k rep and a 4 digit user id on SO. I've pretty much stopped using it for years, though. The one feature [1] I asked for, that would have kept me engaged, is a way of only showing questions from high-rep askers. Because I'd know they'd be interesting questions, and not trivially solved (because you know high rep users know how to Google things and do basic research). I'd also like the bar against "subjective" questions lowered in these kinds of questions, because questions that are matters of fact are almost always solved by sufficient use of Google or experimentation or intelligence, all of which can be assumed as a given for high rep users. [1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19659/search-filters-by-minimum-rep-maximum-views-maximum-answers-etc https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19659/search-filter... Another: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3987/can-we-filter-questions-by-reputation https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3987/can-we-filter-...
- wool_gather 9y ago
  Exactly the problem with this blog post and the other similar initiatives preceding it. It's lipstick on a pig. Heart emoticons and "thanks" aren't going to improve the site. Improving UX, fixing problems that have been outstanding for years will reduce friction, make it easier for everyone to get along, and naturally lead to better feelings.

singularity2001 9y ago

Good explanation, but what's the purpose of deleting duplicates and "off-topic" questions other than saving some SO storage space? Edit: IMO closing duplicates makes sense, IFF users are asked 'does the linked duplicate answer you question' and confirm. Deleting only makes sense in case of exact duplicates, otherwise they might be useful variants worth linking.

Izkata 9y ago
Closing duplicates has multiple uses: * Directs the asker to a place where their question has already been answered. * Trains the user to search for an answer instead of blindly asking. * Gets new answerers to put their answers all in one place so it's easier for others to find later. * Not deleting it acts as a signpost for people searching on more variations of the same question. Closing off-topic questions should be obvious: Prevent scope creep and limit the "broken windows" effect.
wool_gather 9y ago
The general policy is exactly as you've described: duplicates are pointers; they are not deleted. That said, some queries reach a point where they become FAQs ("Why am I getting a NullPointerException?" being the canonical example) and at some point, there's diminishing returns from yet another search target for it.

jehlakj 9y ago

The thing about asking questions under an unfamiliar topic is that the asker isn’t knowledgeable enough to ask the appropriate questions. While this may seem like pure ignorance from a reviewers point of view, it’s much different for the asker. Unfortunately, these types of questions don’t work well in a q and a format. I’ve actually came across a few very good questions where the author answered his own in a very concise manner. and guess what? He had over 1k upvotes. Those are the questions that SO is catering. Which leads me to believe that by design, SO will never be able to fulfill their wishes in the blogpost.

your-nanny 9y ago

There are two functions stack overflow serves: 1. Answering questions people ask, q&a 2. Answering the questions of people stopping by looking for answers. The output of the former needn't directly be the input consumed by the latter. Bad questions can be tolerated in the former but are intolerable in the latter (noise). Solution: A curated site of answers searchable by public drawn from the best of q and a from an internal site not indexable by google, etc.

svick 9y ago
Except the great thing about SO is that if I have a super-obscure question, there is a good chance somebody already asked and answered it, so I can easily find the answer using Google. With your system, I would not be able to find the answer, because it wouldn't be in the curated list.
- your-nanny 9y ago
  Costs and benefits. But curation can simply be in the form of a sufficient number of upvotes

faitswulff 9y ago

Never thought of it this way, but it is a content moderation problem, isn't it? The human collateral for moderation / quality enforcement is just ferocious on the internet, whether it's porn, NSFL.

javadocmd 9y ago

Maybe the solution to this is stop requiring (or tacitly encouraging) moderators to pull weeds and block all the bad questions, but rather allow them some sort of feature to identify particularly good questions. "But then we'll be flooded by bad content!" (I can hear SO mods screaming in the distance.) If old, low-score posts are clogging your search results, that's a problem with your search algorithms, not with moderation.

barrkel 9y ago

I think this is down to lack of good filtering tools. Primarily duplicate or lazy questions shouldn't even be seen by high-rep users most of the time. It's wasting everyone's time to maximize the exposure of those kind of questions. Low rep users could do with answering those kinds of questions, though - low-hanging fruit to get a leg up. I have 35k rep and a 4 digit user id on SO. I've pretty much stopped using it for years, though. The one feature [1] I asked for, that would have kept me engaged, is a way of only showing questions from high-rep askers. Because I'd know they'd be interesting questions, and not trivially solved (because you know high rep users know how to Google things and do basic research). I'd also like the bar against "subjective" questions lowered in these kinds of questions, because questions that are matters of fact are almost always solved by sufficient use of Google or experimentation or intelligence, all of which can be assumed as a given for high rep users. [1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19659/search-filters-by-minimum-rep-maximum-views-maximum-answers-etc https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19659/search-filter... Another: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3987/can-we-filter-questions-by-reputation https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3987/can-we-filter-...

wool_gather 9y ago
Exactly the problem with this blog post and the other similar initiatives preceding it. It's lipstick on a pig. Heart emoticons and "thanks" aren't going to improve the site. Improving UX, fixing problems that have been outstanding for years will reduce friction, make it easier for everyone to get along, and naturally lead to better feelings.