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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 ad

by lambda 8y 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 8y 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.
sanderjd 8y ago
Yeah fixing this sort of thing is going to require a persistent and unpopular effort from the very top. They'll have to force out people who have contributed huge amounts of time to the community but who are nonetheless causing these issues. There will be a vociferous backlash. The lovey-dovey tone of the OP doesn't necessarily convince me that they have the stomach for it. But I hope they do, because I think it would improve things.
Joeri 8y ago
I’m in the same boat. 10k rep on SO and softeng.se, and I barely participate anymore. For me the most frustrating part is that the rules forbid vague questions with opinionated answers, but that at this point in my career most of the things I find interesting are all like that so there’s almost nothing I want to get answers to that I can ask. Software architecture questions are very difficult to ask without triggering overbroadness. Another category that is off limits are getting started type questions, again they’re considered too vague (but that’s the whole point, the user doesn’t know where to start). And the illogical ban on pointing to research involving statistics also drives me batty. I’ve had arguments with moderators before where my answer was bad because it pointed to capers jones’ research, one of the most authorative sources of good software dev practices. I always feel like it’s a game of dodge the moderator bot to get questions to not be closed, unless they’re of the boring easy to answer briefly and precisely variety.
- bonesss 8y ago
  At an arms length it really seems like there should be some kind of delineations of the questions. "What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted answer since everyone is skinning a different cat. So instead of "overly broad, no discussion for you" I'd rather see those questions get routed to "conversation-SO" instead of "reference-SO"...
  - Lionsion 8y ago
    > "What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted answer since everyone is skinning a different cat. IIRC, they did something like that. It was called programmers.stackexchange.com, and I used it a couple times and it was great. Then some power-that-be decided it "wasn't working" (probably because it didn't fit the SO only-kind-of-good-question rubric) and changed the focus be a clone of SO with some minor difference in emphasis.
untangle 8y ago
> No one seems to want to change. No one seems to want to even engage with criticism about the culture No one wants the rules to change in a game that they perceive that they are winning (or have won). Moreso if they worked hard to win.
- lambda 8y ago
  > No one wants the rules to change in a game that they perceive that they are winning (or have won). Moreso if they worked hard to win. I'm one of those people who wants the rules to change in a game that I'm already winning. I worked hard to win; I fully engaged in the gamifiction, spending days at a time making sure I hit the max daily rep level, optimizing how I answered questions to get the highest score. Even then, I tried to focus my optimization on ways that would help people more. For instance, one way to optimize is to post a very short quick answer, so you are able to get early upvotes before there's been a flood of answers for a question; but I would then edit and flesh out my answer. This has both advantages for reputation, since I could get early upvotes, and then later provide a more detailed comprehensive answer that would be likely to get further upvotes. It's also helpful for the person asking; it's possible that the very quick reply will be helpful, so they get an answer soon, but it's also possible that the more detailed reply with references to docs is what they need, so it's a way of making the gamification actually work to help people out more. I think one of the big problems is when they added gamification of moderation. They added the review queues, which prompt you to review questions and answers that had been downvoted, voted to close, edited by other people, etc, and gave out badges based on numbers of reviews done. This means you'd go through a queue of questions and answers on topics you might know nothing about, and be prompted as for whether or not you agree with someone else's close vote or edit or the like. When a question is not great, you could just vote to close it, or you could try to engage with the person asking the question and help edit it into a better form. I generally try to talk to the person asking and edit the question to be better; but getting internet points for getting through a lot of reviews quickly incentivizes people to make quick judgements, sometimes on topic they don't know much about. After they added the review queues, I found a lot more questions were being closed before you had a chance to answer or to engage with the person in comments to get them to clarify their question. And while lots of people these days argue that closing a question is just a way to indicate that it's not up to standards but it can be fixed and re-opened, for people new to SO who aren't familiar with the culture it feels like a slap in the face and a rejection of their question. After a question is closed, it's a lot more likely that they'll just delete it, delete their account, or just stop participating. Anyhow, yeah, there is an aspect of people not wanting to change the rules of a game that they are playing and winning; I just wish either the incentives were changed, or more people would take the view that the point of the scoring is as a rough measure of how much they are helping people out, and helping people out is the ultimate goal, rather than being an end in itself. And I should also say that I'm not against closing truly bad or unsalvageable questions; I've had cases where I've tried to engage with someone to make their question better, and they just haven't made any effort, or cases in which people are obviously asking homework questions. But I really think that there should be some effort to help people out with asking their questions before just blindly deciding to close them out.

by lambda 8y ago

klenwell 8y 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.

sanderjd 8y ago

Yeah fixing this sort of thing is going to require a persistent and unpopular effort from the very top. They'll have to force out people who have contributed huge amounts of time to the community but who are nonetheless causing these issues. There will be a vociferous backlash. The lovey-dovey tone of the OP doesn't necessarily convince me that they have the stomach for it. But I hope they do, because I think it would improve things.

Joeri 8y ago

I’m in the same boat. 10k rep on SO and softeng.se, and I barely participate anymore. For me the most frustrating part is that the rules forbid vague questions with opinionated answers, but that at this point in my career most of the things I find interesting are all like that so there’s almost nothing I want to get answers to that I can ask. Software architecture questions are very difficult to ask without triggering overbroadness. Another category that is off limits are getting started type questions, again they’re considered too vague (but that’s the whole point, the user doesn’t know where to start). And the illogical ban on pointing to research involving statistics also drives me batty. I’ve had arguments with moderators before where my answer was bad because it pointed to capers jones’ research, one of the most authorative sources of good software dev practices. I always feel like it’s a game of dodge the moderator bot to get questions to not be closed, unless they’re of the boring easy to answer briefly and precisely variety.

bonesss 8y ago
At an arms length it really seems like there should be some kind of delineations of the questions. "What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted answer since everyone is skinning a different cat. So instead of "overly broad, no discussion for you" I'd rather see those questions get routed to "conversation-SO" instead of "reference-SO"...
- Lionsion 8y ago
  > "What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted answer since everyone is skinning a different cat. IIRC, they did something like that. It was called programmers.stackexchange.com, and I used it a couple times and it was great. Then some power-that-be decided it "wasn't working" (probably because it didn't fit the SO only-kind-of-good-question rubric) and changed the focus be a clone of SO with some minor difference in emphasis.

untangle 8y ago

> No one seems to want to change. No one seems to want to even engage with criticism about the culture No one wants the rules to change in a game that they perceive that they are winning (or have won). Moreso if they worked hard to win.

lambda 8y ago
> No one wants the rules to change in a game that they perceive that they are winning (or have won). Moreso if they worked hard to win. I'm one of those people who wants the rules to change in a game that I'm already winning. I worked hard to win; I fully engaged in the gamifiction, spending days at a time making sure I hit the max daily rep level, optimizing how I answered questions to get the highest score. Even then, I tried to focus my optimization on ways that would help people more. For instance, one way to optimize is to post a very short quick answer, so you are able to get early upvotes before there's been a flood of answers for a question; but I would then edit and flesh out my answer. This has both advantages for reputation, since I could get early upvotes, and then later provide a more detailed comprehensive answer that would be likely to get further upvotes. It's also helpful for the person asking; it's possible that the very quick reply will be helpful, so they get an answer soon, but it's also possible that the more detailed reply with references to docs is what they need, so it's a way of making the gamification actually work to help people out more. I think one of the big problems is when they added gamification of moderation. They added the review queues, which prompt you to review questions and answers that had been downvoted, voted to close, edited by other people, etc, and gave out badges based on numbers of reviews done. This means you'd go through a queue of questions and answers on topics you might know nothing about, and be prompted as for whether or not you agree with someone else's close vote or edit or the like. When a question is not great, you could just vote to close it, or you could try to engage with the person asking the question and help edit it into a better form. I generally try to talk to the person asking and edit the question to be better; but getting internet points for getting through a lot of reviews quickly incentivizes people to make quick judgements, sometimes on topic they don't know much about. After they added the review queues, I found a lot more questions were being closed before you had a chance to answer or to engage with the person in comments to get them to clarify their question. And while lots of people these days argue that closing a question is just a way to indicate that it's not up to standards but it can be fixed and re-opened, for people new to SO who aren't familiar with the culture it feels like a slap in the face and a rejection of their question. After a question is closed, it's a lot more likely that they'll just delete it, delete their account, or just stop participating. Anyhow, yeah, there is an aspect of people not wanting to change the rules of a game that they are playing and winning; I just wish either the incentives were changed, or more people would take the view that the point of the scoring is as a rough measure of how much they are helping people out, and helping people out is the ultimate goal, rather than being an end in itself. And I should also say that I'm not against closing truly bad or unsalvageable questions; I've had cases where I've tried to engage with someone to make their question better, and they just haven't made any effort, or cases in which people are obviously asking homework questions. But I really think that there should be some effort to help people out with asking their questions before just blindly deciding to close them out.