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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

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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.
warty 8y ago
There's nuance here. There are plenty of cases where individuals ask XY questions, meaning they've gone down a strange route to solve X and now need help solving Y, and it's always been debated within the community on whether you should solve X or oftentimes go to great lengths to solve Y. I've seen many questions where a solution to X is answered and heavily downvoted. I'm not sure how you resolve that. Question: How do I #include a 500MB text file in my C++ code as a string? My compiler explodes when I do this! Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the text from a file instead! Comment: -1 Dude this isn't helpful. What if it's code golf and you need to include a 500MB text file!? You never know. Get over yourself. Stuff like this has happened to me so many times.
- wolco 8y ago
  Bad questions bad accepted answers go hand in hand.
  - hackits 8y ago
    Oh look a question, oh look bellow the accepted answer is the real answer to the question!
    - wwweston 8y ago
      Yeah, this actually gets handled reasonable well by the combination of the accepted answer and voting dynamics. You can see which answer(s) everyone found most useful, and you can see the answer that the asker thought met their threshold.
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  > Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the text from a file instead! A better answer would be: This is wrong because <reasons>. Consider loading the text from the file. If you want to #include it anyway here's what you can try. This will ensure that the code golf people can do what they want and normal people try the recommended thing.
megaman22 8y ago
They tried running the documentation site for a while, but as far as I can tell it's already shuttered.
zaphirplane 8y ago
I think that will result in 10000 questions asking how do I add an entry to a vector. There are a lot of dear internet do my thinking for me, and no way those people are thinking or researching before posting
- wheelie_boy 8y ago
  If there are people who need an answer, and people happy to provide that answer (and perhaps a bit of kind coaching on how to find answers in the future), what is the downside of letting them connect on stackoverflow? Nothing is forcing people to hang out in the novice area answering repetitive questions if they don’t want to. The downside of disallowing ‘unworthy’ questions is that people feel made stupid for asking, and unwelcome. Also, people feel made stupid for answering, and unwelcome. There is plenty of elitism in tech, and you could keep the main stackoverflow for unique, well-asked questions, as well as adding the novice area. The advantage of having a novice area of stackoverflow is that more people will use the site. While not every question will be great, the total number of great questions, and the total number of people helped, will be higher.
  - mulvya 8y ago
    If there are people who need an answer, and people happy to provide that answer ... what is the downside ...? Turnover/churn. If a Q/A site allowed basic questions then the site would be flooded with them since the population of novices greatly exceeds sophomores or experts. Moderation would need to keep up with silo-ing these Qs into the 'novice area' you propose. Experts would need to sift more to get to the interesting, challenging or novel Qs if moderation can't keep up, which might affect the retention of these users, thus diminishing the resource pool available on the site. To me it's clear that tact and grace is called for, and is currently mostly missing, when directing askers of basic Qs to existing answers, whether on- or off-site but there is such a thing as tragedy of the commons. Some stewardship and curation is required to maintain an acceptable SNR.
    - ericb 8y ago
      > If a Q/A site allowed basic questions then the site would be flooded with them since the population of novices greatly exceeds sophomores or experts. This is really excusing bad UI/UX (like surfacing existing answers while a user is typing a question) and a bad ranking algorithm. There is no such thing as "being flooded" only bad search algorithms, and bad UX. Google is "flooded" with a result set spanning the entire internet, and they manage to surface answers. Stack Overflow can do the same--they have more tools to rank and influence behavior (rewards, moderation, points) than google has because they control the site, its structure, and how it is gamified.
ianamartin 8y ago
I agree with this. There are different goals for different people on SO, and while I think the blog is generally good and the idea for guiding questions is good, there's other low-hanging fruit here. We tend to forget that even really basic things like googling for an answer are learned skills. Some people are so green, they don't even know what they are looking for. They have some collection of objects that they want in a certain order, but they don't know enough to know the name of the thing they are looking for is a sorting algorithm. Or you have a situation where someone needs a linked list, but they have no idea what to call it, so searching fails. I've seen genuinely bright people who are new to programming fail in this way and get really frustrated when people tell them to "just fucking google it" when they already did, but honestly didn't know what to call what they were looking for. On the other side, you have some people who are not so interested in a single canonical answer to a well-formed question. There are people who really get a lot of enjoyment out of guiding people and teaching them. I would say the quickest way to satisfy a lot of the dynamic here is to have a place to migrate really poor questions instead of just closing them down. Something like how-to.stackoverflow.com or whatever. Yes, some people just don't want to learn and are looking for someone else to do their homework. It's true. But I think those are best evaluated by the kinds of people who want to hang out there and try to offer guidance rather than the population as a whole who is going for more of a nerdapedia site. In other words, give the people who want to teach a place to teach, and give the general site a way to move those questions to that context. Let the teaching-focused users evaluate the genuinely bad actors.
- rc-1140 8y ago
  > Some people are so green, they don't even know what they are looking for. As a junior, I've run into this, especially since I have no mentor and I just kind of have to wing it when it comes to my own education. Example, I have an Android project where I use the HackerNews API to get the top stories, but I got the IDs and then the JSON for each all in one go. At the time, my thought was that I wanted to do this dynamically; I had no idea how to describe this to people for weeks. Then someone told me I was probably looking for "pagination". Boom, that was it. Don't know how to actually implement my own pagination still because all of the articles on it are trash and end up recommending the libraries for pagination anyway, but now I know! One thing I've been pondering is if it's possible to have a sort-of "Junior's Dictionary" where a common (or semi-common) scenario is laid out and terminology is attached to it. Would have been great to know I was looking for pagination the entire time.

sigstoat 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.

warty 8y ago

There's nuance here. There are plenty of cases where individuals ask XY questions, meaning they've gone down a strange route to solve X and now need help solving Y, and it's always been debated within the community on whether you should solve X or oftentimes go to great lengths to solve Y. I've seen many questions where a solution to X is answered and heavily downvoted. I'm not sure how you resolve that. Question: How do I #include a 500MB text file in my C++ code as a string? My compiler explodes when I do this! Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the text from a file instead! Comment: -1 Dude this isn't helpful. What if it's code golf and you need to include a 500MB text file!? You never know. Get over yourself. Stuff like this has happened to me so many times.

wolco 8y ago
Bad questions bad accepted answers go hand in hand.
- hackits 8y ago
  Oh look a question, oh look bellow the accepted answer is the real answer to the question!
  - wwweston 8y ago
    Yeah, this actually gets handled reasonable well by the combination of the accepted answer and voting dynamics. You can see which answer(s) everyone found most useful, and you can see the answer that the asker thought met their threshold.
dingo_bat 8y ago
> Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the text from a file instead! A better answer would be: This is wrong because <reasons>. Consider loading the text from the file. If you want to #include it anyway here's what you can try. This will ensure that the code golf people can do what they want and normal people try the recommended thing.

megaman22 8y ago

They tried running the documentation site for a while, but as far as I can tell it's already shuttered.

zaphirplane 8y ago

I think that will result in 10000 questions asking how do I add an entry to a vector. There are a lot of dear internet do my thinking for me, and no way those people are thinking or researching before posting

wheelie_boy 8y ago
If there are people who need an answer, and people happy to provide that answer (and perhaps a bit of kind coaching on how to find answers in the future), what is the downside of letting them connect on stackoverflow? Nothing is forcing people to hang out in the novice area answering repetitive questions if they don’t want to. The downside of disallowing ‘unworthy’ questions is that people feel made stupid for asking, and unwelcome. Also, people feel made stupid for answering, and unwelcome. There is plenty of elitism in tech, and you could keep the main stackoverflow for unique, well-asked questions, as well as adding the novice area. The advantage of having a novice area of stackoverflow is that more people will use the site. While not every question will be great, the total number of great questions, and the total number of people helped, will be higher.
- mulvya 8y ago
  If there are people who need an answer, and people happy to provide that answer ... what is the downside ...? Turnover/churn. If a Q/A site allowed basic questions then the site would be flooded with them since the population of novices greatly exceeds sophomores or experts. Moderation would need to keep up with silo-ing these Qs into the 'novice area' you propose. Experts would need to sift more to get to the interesting, challenging or novel Qs if moderation can't keep up, which might affect the retention of these users, thus diminishing the resource pool available on the site. To me it's clear that tact and grace is called for, and is currently mostly missing, when directing askers of basic Qs to existing answers, whether on- or off-site but there is such a thing as tragedy of the commons. Some stewardship and curation is required to maintain an acceptable SNR.
  - ericb 8y ago
    > If a Q/A site allowed basic questions then the site would be flooded with them since the population of novices greatly exceeds sophomores or experts. This is really excusing bad UI/UX (like surfacing existing answers while a user is typing a question) and a bad ranking algorithm. There is no such thing as "being flooded" only bad search algorithms, and bad UX. Google is "flooded" with a result set spanning the entire internet, and they manage to surface answers. Stack Overflow can do the same--they have more tools to rank and influence behavior (rewards, moderation, points) than google has because they control the site, its structure, and how it is gamified.

ianamartin 8y ago

I agree with this. There are different goals for different people on SO, and while I think the blog is generally good and the idea for guiding questions is good, there's other low-hanging fruit here. We tend to forget that even really basic things like googling for an answer are learned skills. Some people are so green, they don't even know what they are looking for. They have some collection of objects that they want in a certain order, but they don't know enough to know the name of the thing they are looking for is a sorting algorithm. Or you have a situation where someone needs a linked list, but they have no idea what to call it, so searching fails. I've seen genuinely bright people who are new to programming fail in this way and get really frustrated when people tell them to "just fucking google it" when they already did, but honestly didn't know what to call what they were looking for. On the other side, you have some people who are not so interested in a single canonical answer to a well-formed question. There are people who really get a lot of enjoyment out of guiding people and teaching them. I would say the quickest way to satisfy a lot of the dynamic here is to have a place to migrate really poor questions instead of just closing them down. Something like how-to.stackoverflow.com or whatever. Yes, some people just don't want to learn and are looking for someone else to do their homework. It's true. But I think those are best evaluated by the kinds of people who want to hang out there and try to offer guidance rather than the population as a whole who is going for more of a nerdapedia site. In other words, give the people who want to teach a place to teach, and give the general site a way to move those questions to that context. Let the teaching-focused users evaluate the genuinely bad actors.

rc-1140 8y ago
> Some people are so green, they don't even know what they are looking for. As a junior, I've run into this, especially since I have no mentor and I just kind of have to wing it when it comes to my own education. Example, I have an Android project where I use the HackerNews API to get the top stories, but I got the IDs and then the JSON for each all in one go. At the time, my thought was that I wanted to do this dynamically; I had no idea how to describe this to people for weeks. Then someone told me I was probably looking for "pagination". Boom, that was it. Don't know how to actually implement my own pagination still because all of the articles on it are trash and end up recommending the libraries for pagination anyway, but now I know! One thing I've been pondering is if it's possible to have a sort-of "Junior's Dictionary" where a common (or semi-common) scenario is laid out and terminology is attached to it. Would have been great to know I was looking for pagination the entire time.