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> One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that ne

> One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see. > > I care a lot about this. Being a developer gives you an unparalleled opportunity to write the script for the future. All the flak that Stack Overflow throws in the face of newbies trying to become developers is actively harmful to people, to society, and to Stack Overflow itself, by driving away potential future contributors. And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier. It's good to see that acknowledgement coming from Joel. I wasn't one of those newbies facing that snark, but as an earlier contributor it was really depressing to see the general attitude shift from "yeah OK this question's not the best but it was asked in good faith so I'll answer" to "you're a worthless human being for wasting our time with imperfection".

codeulike 8y ago
Its basically become ModOverflow edit: Thought I was coining something here but it was actually coined in 2015 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870816
- cletus 8y ago
  Oh I love the way you put this. I just checked and I've been a member for 10 years and 6 months. I used to answer questions. A lot. In the early days (at one point it was Jon Skeet, Marc Gravelli then me) and I'm kind of surprised how much karma I still get form those old answers. But I haven't really answered anything in 8+ years. Even one year in I commented on and started several threads on Meta about the "mod problem". And it's only gotten worse. To riff on a phrase, "those who can, answer, those who can't, mod", which is fine, but there is a particular kind of toxic personality that gets attracted to the authority of being a mod that then appoints itself the arbiter of content. You are fighting a constant battle to keep these toxic (but well-intentioned--mostly) souls out. I saw even then the trend of closing interesting questions as "subjective". My opinion then--and now--is you can ask a question like "what are the advantages of React.js vs Vue.js?" in an intelligent way without it being a flame war. The fact that it doesn't have an objective answer is (IMHO) irrelevant. You can divine useful information from the answers to that question that will help you go one way or the other. There is a lot of subjectivity in programming and a lot of not strictly better solutions. Giving people some points to consider as a starting point is incredibly valuable.
  - geoka9 8y ago
    I noticed the "subjective" closing many times and always wondered why that criterion was even introduced on SO. I mean what's wrong with a comment/question being subjective as long as it contains useful information?
    - saywhatnow 8y ago
      I believe the thinking is that what's wrong with it is that over time it tends to attract flamewars and downvotes which are not useful to people searching for answers to their questions.
- maze-le 8y ago
  That is a similar issue Wikipedia has. Being a mod is fine, when your role-profile is clearly defined. But sometimes mods evolve into bureaucrats. And at a certain point, they take over a platform, mostly in a cultural/role-model sense. Then active contributors [also mods, but not obsessed with rules and enforcement] are being sidelined and start to quit. This is a hard-to-solve problem for any community. Having lax regulation leads to scammers gaming the system. Having strict rule enforcement leads to a culture of punishment and death-by-process. There is a place for people like this in organizations (controlling, lower management) -- here they actually can provide value being a process-oriented control-freak. In communities these roles can become toxic if they start to dominate the culture. SO is dead to me since the bureaucrats have taken over, Wikipedia too for that matter. ----- [0]: people who value 'processes' more than outcome.
  - peeters 8y ago
    Yeah it's an observable phenomenon that I've seen on Stack Overflow et al, as well as every Wiki site I've been a part of. Content creators don't give a shit about process, so they don't participate in the moderation echo chamber, so moderators trick themselves into thinking that they are the ones creating value on the site. Stack Overflow's issue is fixable though IMO. I don't see the same level of aggressive moderation towards those who answer. So from a community attitude, it seems like answerers are recognized as the content creators who you shouldn't drive away. So the solution in my head is to do what you can to recognize the askers as content creators as well. Because they are a vital part of content creation!
nicoburns 8y ago
> I wasn't one of those newbies facing that snark, but as an earlier contributor it was really depressing to see the general attitude shift from "yeah OK this question's not the best but it was asked in good faith so I'll answer" to "you're a worthless human being for wasting our time with subperfection". This. 100%. My Stack Overflow account is approaching its 10th year, and I would credit a lot of my success as a self-taught developer to the welcoming almost overly helpful attitude of early Stack Overflow. I hope it gets that back at some point (the recent rule changes have helped I think).
- Quarrelsome 8y ago
  I often make this comment when the subject comes up but I'm one of those that tried to pay back the help I got over usenet on SO and did to an extent (top 2%). I also quit when people began to care more about correctness than helping and made my contributions much less valuable ("you cannot post, this question has been deleted"). It feels to me like an issue of framing. There's definitely a way to achieve this but I think you have to segregate "the library" (where you get truth) from the "playground" (where you seek help) as the cultures of the sort of people that prefer either place clash horribly. I'm a playground person, for reference. I like to try to understand what problems people are facing as opposed to what they might be asking.
  - deleted 8y ago
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  - gregmac 8y ago
    > I also quit when people began to care more about correctness than helping and made my contributions much less valuable ("you cannot post, this question has been deleted"). Same boat here. I also have been a SO user for over 10 years and my account says "top 2%" (though this is entirely from my early participation, before I largely gave up on it). I've gone through spurts of trying to participate again by answering questions over the past 5 years but always come away depressed and demotivated about it. There's a bunch of things that happen: * Questions get closed as duplicate incorrectly. I've tried to argue for the question on a few occasions. One of my attempts was by providing a detailed answer which, by being clearly different from the "duplicate" answer, I hoped would prove the question was distinct. A moderator soon deleted the entire question. That demotivated me from answering anything for a year or so. Since then, I've only argued in comments the question wasn't duplicate, but basically always get outvoted and the question is closed and eventually deleted. It takes a lot of effort to argue the question should stay open, and it takes basically no effort to click "close" so really, this is what the majority want. * Questions get closed as duplicate -- correctly -- but the marked duplicate is a very old question and no longer contains the "best" answer. When there's already a half dozen answers, and the top one has tens or hundreds of votes, it's basically impossible to get visibility to a newer answer. This is so bad that when I'm looking at a question trying to help with something I'm doing myself, if I come across an old question I usually sort by 'newest' to find the best answer. More times than I can count, a recent answer with fewer than 1/10th the votes of the "best" answer is the current correct answer. Likewise, I have answered these but it takes years on an old question to get even a few upvotes, and it's pretty unfulfilling. * Poor quality questions If you try to look for older, unanswered questions (eg, don't want to participate in the "who can answer this new question fastest" game) it's very hard to find decent questions. There really is a lot of garbage that gets asked. My experience is when you do find one, after going through a few pages, you run into the next issue: * New users don't come back You answer a question from a new user, and maybe get one vote. The original user doesn't come back and mark your answer as accepted or comment as to why it wouldn't work. No one else provides any feedback about it being bad. It's just "internet points" but it is demotivating to put in the effort and have it go nowhere. Maybe I really am just bad at answering questions (but was good 10 years ago, and the high level position and respect I get at work is a figment of my imagination) but even then I'd prefer to get feedback. --- These are just my experiences and opinions. I'm also not sure how to solve these issues, and I don't think it'll be easy to. Seeing as the rules governing the site are largely made by the community, and the "community" behaviour is largely the cause of many of these, the community is essentially saying they don't see these as problems or want to fix them. Getting past that hurdle is the first step to improving things, and honestly, I have no idea how I can help with that (other than posting long rants like this and maybe helping slightly shift some tiny fraction of people's mindset). In its early stages, SO was an amazing site to learn from -- both asking and answering questions -- but I think the current policies and behaviours mean this isn't the case anymore. From what I can see, most new users are going to have a terrible time with the site if they try to actively participate. It's a shame.
jessriedel 8y ago
> It's good to see that acknowledgement coming from Joel. I believe he's acknowledged this problem many times on his blog in the past, and discussed possible ways to improve things.
- mark-r 8y ago
  The only way to improve things is to change the emphasis of the site. The guidelines were set over time to prefer improving the site as a resource over helping the individual. You can't optimize for both at the same time.
- peeters 8y ago
  Yes, I am quoting what was itself a quote from an earlier blog post . But it was new to me and is being cited as a challenge facing the next CEO. So I'm still glad to see he's treating it with a lot of importance.
barrad0s 8y ago
I've stopped contributing to the Webmasters page a couple of years ago because of this.
stareatgoats 8y ago
Social networks need to be explicit about requiring a positive and constructive attitude in responses and debates. And follow up with corrective measures (in a friendly way, obviously). Otherwise the tone will deteriorate. There should be a name for this law by now (could already exist, may have missed it).
- meritt 8y ago
  > There should be a name for this law by now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
- ryandrake 8y ago
  My belief is any forum that allows drive-by downvoting without making the downvoter constructively explain it (including Reddit and even HN), will suffer from this tone deterioration. I myself am guilty of this. Just hit that down arrow and move on—it’s too easy. Even good ol’ Slashdot made you at least pick from a canned list of justifications when you wanted to vote.
- gambler 8y ago
  Whenever I see a community that demands positive and constructive attitude it's always a dysfunctional community. All the functional communities I've ever seen created positive and constructive attitude through example and cultivation of good people. And they invariably had bare minimum of moderation, usually aimed at avoiding conflicts between members, rather than to enforce some kind of mandatory universal "values". StackOverflow is actually an example of this rule. Questions get downvoted and closed because they're supposedly not constructive. Yay, more constructiveness, right? But in the long run it creates the environment that feels like a clique hostile to all newcomers. Making demands on users, writing multi-page lists of rules and banning/locking/deleting does nothing to attract good people. It can only preserve something you already have, and even that isn't guaranteed. Way too many websites forget this, go all in on "corrective measures" and mandatory positivity, while not doing anything constructive on their own. An example of constructive moderation is running contests where people get recognition for doing something good. (This is no the same as having karma, which also leads to cliques in the long run.) Another related thing: a lot of larger websites pay moderators to ban stuff, but don't have anyone on staff whose primary job is to "lead by example" via answering questions and providing help. "Seeding" a website with good people and content is absolutely essential, and yet this is a topic I've never, ever seen discussed when someone writes about community management. And another thing. Beyond certain scale people stop perceiving website as a place with people and start looking at is as a service with users. This completely changes the tone for everyone. Larger websites need to put efforts in "federating", i.e. creating sub-spaces that still feel like a place where people can have a conversation and get to know the "regulars" to some extent. This might seem like it's not applicable to StackOverflow and YouTubes, but it is. A lot this is about visual design and ways information is structured.
Circuits 8y ago
It is nice to see but without proper enforcement I am afraid that change will never come. IMHO, the biggest step they need to take is to allow repeat questions or at least to mitigate the "murder the SO" mentality that's displayed whenever it happens. It's one thing to suggest the question already has an answer. It's a whole different beast when you type out how worthless the SO is for not doing research prior to posting the question and ban against them with 50 down votes, ostracizing them completely. Moderators should be given an option to punish users for incorrect/inappropriate comments and action on questions.
- macNchz 8y ago
  You're absolutely right about the culture changes needed to change the experience for new users, it's terrible right now. I imagine there could be a middle ground, where duplicates are allowed/answered/not aggressively downvoted, but once they're marked as a dupe they could 'fade out' to where they're eventually visible only via a user profile and not found in the main archive or search results.
  - bunderbunder 8y ago
    Languages and tools and practices evolve. Stack Overflow is now getting old enough that the answers a question originally got may no longer be the best way to do things, and sometimes aren't even workable anymore. If anything, what SO needs is a way to "fade out" old questions in favor of new ones.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Allowing repeat questions is absolutely essential to keeping a community vital. I've seen this pattern happen on so many Internet forums, going all the way back to the WELL, where eventually they develop this surface crust of long-time users who systematically chase anyone new away by informing them that the thing they want to talk about, whatever it is, has already been talked about. At first, it might start with a chatty response that provides a link to the old conversation and also provides a summary or some other additional input. And, when done that way, it generally is helpful and friendly. But, with practice, the procedure is optimized down to the point where the post is little more, and sometimes less, than "We've talked about this before: <hyperlink>" And that's toxic. The only way you could send a clearer message that someone's contributions are not valued is to come right out and say, "Your contribution is not valued." Stack Overflow has, unfortunately, stumbled upon a way to accelerate this process by gamifying it.
deleted 8y ago
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soneca 8y ago
As a junior developer for two years now, what frustrates me is not the responses to the questions I ask. I almost never had the urge to ask any questions, most of them are already asked and answered in a similar enough form so I can learn from them. What do frustrates me is how I, as a newbie, am incapable of contributing to the site. I can't upvote an answer that was particularly good to my case. Dozens (literally dozens) of times I clicked to upvote an answer that was just the right one for my case and it wasn't the accepted or most upvoted answer. Only to get this as a reply: - "Thanks for the feedback! Votes cast by those with less than 15 reputation are recorded, but do not change the publicly displayed post score." What?? As a junior learning through an answer, I want to contribute it right away and acknowledge the person who helped it. As well as signalizing to other people that that answer is a good one. Why my upvote do not count? I don't understand the reason behind this design decision. Then I try to comment on the answer to make it explicit how it helped me and I get: - "You must have 50 reputation to comment" This rule at least I kind of understand the logic (avoid spamming, flamewars maybe?), but it does not make it any less frustrating. I cannot contribute to the site and to the people that helped me so much at the beginning of my learning path. I can Ask, Answer and Edit without any reputation threshold. But those are precisely what a junior developer will most likely not want to do while learning the basic stuff through SO. These design choices made me totally give up of any urge to participate in SO and I only consult the answers without engaging or recognizing any of the humans that helped me.
- umvi 8y ago
  Yeah, low rep restrictions are annoying. I think it's to discourage bot abuse and spam. If you can get 200 rep in any StackExchange site, then joining any other one will give you 100 rep to start off with, so I found it was worth it to answer/edit questions until I hit 200 rep
  - ezrast 8y ago
    This was the answer for me. I accumulated 200 rep basically goofing off on codegolf.stackexchange.com and no longer feel hindered on other SE sites even as a mostly-passive user. If that's not your bag there are plenty of other subsites that are accessible to users with few tech chops: puzzling, worldbuilding, rpg, etc.
CodeSheikh 8y ago
IN the light of what he just said, then SO needs to stop banning people from posting questions even if their questions get continuously downvoted by experienced users. "You have reached your question limit Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account. See the Help Center to learn more."
- CodeSheikh 8y ago
  And perhaps better ways to discourage this behavior from new users. This is no different then imagine a few programming newbies join a "Introduction to Programming" class taught at a college by seasoned professor and assisted by graduate teaching assistants. What if TA's start discouraging new students from continuously asking mundane questions? Do the instructors care only about the "performance" of average students in the class so they can go back to their department at the end of the semester and show they have hit a satisfactory passing rate? Or they care about that every student walked away with a good understanding of programming at the end of the day?
- saywhatnow 8y ago
  Why? When you post a single question that gets downvoted you don't get banned. It's only when you repeatedly ignore the rules and ask terrible questions over and over refusing to learn from your past mistakes. There might be a discussion to be had about how to teach users what a bad question is, or how many is too many, but I don't understand why we should let people who repeatedly fail to clearly ask a question keep asking. Most people have no such problem. In fact, when experienced posters politely point out what the rules are and where to read more about them, you start to see new posters fall into 2 categories: 1. The people who say, "Oh, I didn't realize that's how it works. I'll update my question/do better next time/etc." 2. The people who insist that no, it's their platform and they'll ask whatever they want however they want. People in category 1 usually have no further problems using the site. People in category 2 usually end up banned. And of course, there are experienced users who are jerks and don't point out rules or don't do it politely. They should not be excused. But letting new posters continue to pollute the site with terrible questions isn't going to help anyone - especially not the people posting the question.
vitro 8y ago
Who is given the most space in media? Seems like those who do the most noise, no matter the content. It sells much more that some boring truth. If you see it all around you, after a while it becomes a norm. Have you noticed? When you start to be angry and hate a bit, somehow it spreads and sucks all these bad energies like a sponge. And if you don't know how to recover yourself and clean your mind, it is easy to become a hateful self-centered person. I wish we could change the direction.
kawsper 8y ago
> but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see. I remember one of my first interactions with other developers was the #php.dk channel on Quakenet in the start 00s, I had shared a PHP script with them that didn't work, and had included my development database settings, and back then NAT wasn't really a thing, so one of them figured out that he could login to my MySQL database and change the password! And I didn't know how to reset it, so they made me beg to get the new password, so they showed me how to change it to something new and they showed me how to protect myself from such things in the future. It was a nice life lessons, and I guess that IRC channels needed some strict moderation, but I'm not sure the shenanigans that went on back then (and likely still happens) is all that great for learners and newcomers.
wuliwong 8y ago
I have ran into the poor attitude on SO occasionally and it is definitely great to try to improve. That being said, SO has been such a useful tool for me in my career, I would be care when making changes that they didn't have the unintended consequence of hurting the quality of the product. I think it's similar to HN. HN downvoting can be really frustrating when I am making what I believe to be very good comments but I have to admit that overall I am happy with the product. I have been trained over the years to think a lot more about comments I leave in HN than I did in my early years here.
greymeister 8y ago
Anyone else remember the "Summer of Love"? [1] I had stopped attempting to answer or ask anything on the site due to the behavior I observed. It was pure gamesmanship for people trying to rack up their SO score and then summarily abuse it with enforcement of opaque, draconian rules. My favorite was when a question would be marked as a duplicate incorrectly, so what was the takeaway? That solution was barred from discussion on the site? Since then I simply look at SO when it happens to come up in a search. I'm not ever logged into the site anymore. If I want to describe how I fixed something, I do it in my own space, and only reference answer when linking to SO. 1. https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/07/20/kicking-off-the-summer-of-love/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/07/20/kicking-off-the-summer...

codeulike 8y ago

Its basically become ModOverflow edit: Thought I was coining something here but it was actually coined in 2015 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9870816

cletus 8y ago
Oh I love the way you put this. I just checked and I've been a member for 10 years and 6 months. I used to answer questions. A lot. In the early days (at one point it was Jon Skeet, Marc Gravelli then me) and I'm kind of surprised how much karma I still get form those old answers. But I haven't really answered anything in 8+ years. Even one year in I commented on and started several threads on Meta about the "mod problem". And it's only gotten worse. To riff on a phrase, "those who can, answer, those who can't, mod", which is fine, but there is a particular kind of toxic personality that gets attracted to the authority of being a mod that then appoints itself the arbiter of content. You are fighting a constant battle to keep these toxic (but well-intentioned--mostly) souls out. I saw even then the trend of closing interesting questions as "subjective". My opinion then--and now--is you can ask a question like "what are the advantages of React.js vs Vue.js?" in an intelligent way without it being a flame war. The fact that it doesn't have an objective answer is (IMHO) irrelevant. You can divine useful information from the answers to that question that will help you go one way or the other. There is a lot of subjectivity in programming and a lot of not strictly better solutions. Giving people some points to consider as a starting point is incredibly valuable.
- geoka9 8y ago
  I noticed the "subjective" closing many times and always wondered why that criterion was even introduced on SO. I mean what's wrong with a comment/question being subjective as long as it contains useful information?
  - saywhatnow 8y ago
    I believe the thinking is that what's wrong with it is that over time it tends to attract flamewars and downvotes which are not useful to people searching for answers to their questions.
maze-le 8y ago
That is a similar issue Wikipedia has. Being a mod is fine, when your role-profile is clearly defined. But sometimes mods evolve into bureaucrats. And at a certain point, they take over a platform, mostly in a cultural/role-model sense. Then active contributors [also mods, but not obsessed with rules and enforcement] are being sidelined and start to quit. This is a hard-to-solve problem for any community. Having lax regulation leads to scammers gaming the system. Having strict rule enforcement leads to a culture of punishment and death-by-process. There is a place for people like this in organizations (controlling, lower management) -- here they actually can provide value being a process-oriented control-freak. In communities these roles can become toxic if they start to dominate the culture. SO is dead to me since the bureaucrats have taken over, Wikipedia too for that matter. ----- [0]: people who value 'processes' more than outcome.
- peeters 8y ago
  Yeah it's an observable phenomenon that I've seen on Stack Overflow et al, as well as every Wiki site I've been a part of. Content creators don't give a shit about process, so they don't participate in the moderation echo chamber, so moderators trick themselves into thinking that they are the ones creating value on the site. Stack Overflow's issue is fixable though IMO. I don't see the same level of aggressive moderation towards those who answer. So from a community attitude, it seems like answerers are recognized as the content creators who you shouldn't drive away. So the solution in my head is to do what you can to recognize the askers as content creators as well. Because they are a vital part of content creation!

nicoburns 8y ago

> I wasn't one of those newbies facing that snark, but as an earlier contributor it was really depressing to see the general attitude shift from "yeah OK this question's not the best but it was asked in good faith so I'll answer" to "you're a worthless human being for wasting our time with subperfection". This. 100%. My Stack Overflow account is approaching its 10th year, and I would credit a lot of my success as a self-taught developer to the welcoming almost overly helpful attitude of early Stack Overflow. I hope it gets that back at some point (the recent rule changes have helped I think).

Quarrelsome 8y ago
I often make this comment when the subject comes up but I'm one of those that tried to pay back the help I got over usenet on SO and did to an extent (top 2%). I also quit when people began to care more about correctness than helping and made my contributions much less valuable ("you cannot post, this question has been deleted"). It feels to me like an issue of framing. There's definitely a way to achieve this but I think you have to segregate "the library" (where you get truth) from the "playground" (where you seek help) as the cultures of the sort of people that prefer either place clash horribly. I'm a playground person, for reference. I like to try to understand what problems people are facing as opposed to what they might be asking.
- deleted 8y ago
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- gregmac 8y ago
  > I also quit when people began to care more about correctness than helping and made my contributions much less valuable ("you cannot post, this question has been deleted"). Same boat here. I also have been a SO user for over 10 years and my account says "top 2%" (though this is entirely from my early participation, before I largely gave up on it). I've gone through spurts of trying to participate again by answering questions over the past 5 years but always come away depressed and demotivated about it. There's a bunch of things that happen: * Questions get closed as duplicate incorrectly. I've tried to argue for the question on a few occasions. One of my attempts was by providing a detailed answer which, by being clearly different from the "duplicate" answer, I hoped would prove the question was distinct. A moderator soon deleted the entire question. That demotivated me from answering anything for a year or so. Since then, I've only argued in comments the question wasn't duplicate, but basically always get outvoted and the question is closed and eventually deleted. It takes a lot of effort to argue the question should stay open, and it takes basically no effort to click "close" so really, this is what the majority want. * Questions get closed as duplicate -- correctly -- but the marked duplicate is a very old question and no longer contains the "best" answer. When there's already a half dozen answers, and the top one has tens or hundreds of votes, it's basically impossible to get visibility to a newer answer. This is so bad that when I'm looking at a question trying to help with something I'm doing myself, if I come across an old question I usually sort by 'newest' to find the best answer. More times than I can count, a recent answer with fewer than 1/10th the votes of the "best" answer is the current correct answer. Likewise, I have answered these but it takes years on an old question to get even a few upvotes, and it's pretty unfulfilling. * Poor quality questions If you try to look for older, unanswered questions (eg, don't want to participate in the "who can answer this new question fastest" game) it's very hard to find decent questions. There really is a lot of garbage that gets asked. My experience is when you do find one, after going through a few pages, you run into the next issue: * New users don't come back You answer a question from a new user, and maybe get one vote. The original user doesn't come back and mark your answer as accepted or comment as to why it wouldn't work. No one else provides any feedback about it being bad. It's just "internet points" but it is demotivating to put in the effort and have it go nowhere. Maybe I really am just bad at answering questions (but was good 10 years ago, and the high level position and respect I get at work is a figment of my imagination) but even then I'd prefer to get feedback. --- These are just my experiences and opinions. I'm also not sure how to solve these issues, and I don't think it'll be easy to. Seeing as the rules governing the site are largely made by the community, and the "community" behaviour is largely the cause of many of these, the community is essentially saying they don't see these as problems or want to fix them. Getting past that hurdle is the first step to improving things, and honestly, I have no idea how I can help with that (other than posting long rants like this and maybe helping slightly shift some tiny fraction of people's mindset). In its early stages, SO was an amazing site to learn from -- both asking and answering questions -- but I think the current policies and behaviours mean this isn't the case anymore. From what I can see, most new users are going to have a terrible time with the site if they try to actively participate. It's a shame.

jessriedel 8y ago

> It's good to see that acknowledgement coming from Joel. I believe he's acknowledged this problem many times on his blog in the past, and discussed possible ways to improve things.

mark-r 8y ago
The only way to improve things is to change the emphasis of the site. The guidelines were set over time to prefer improving the site as a resource over helping the individual. You can't optimize for both at the same time.
peeters 8y ago
Yes, I am quoting what was itself a quote from an earlier blog post . But it was new to me and is being cited as a challenge facing the next CEO. So I'm still glad to see he's treating it with a lot of importance.

barrad0s 8y ago

I've stopped contributing to the Webmasters page a couple of years ago because of this.

stareatgoats 8y ago

Social networks need to be explicit about requiring a positive and constructive attitude in responses and debates. And follow up with corrective measures (in a friendly way, obviously). Otherwise the tone will deteriorate. There should be a name for this law by now (could already exist, may have missed it).

meritt 8y ago
> There should be a name for this law by now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
ryandrake 8y ago
My belief is any forum that allows drive-by downvoting without making the downvoter constructively explain it (including Reddit and even HN), will suffer from this tone deterioration. I myself am guilty of this. Just hit that down arrow and move on—it’s too easy. Even good ol’ Slashdot made you at least pick from a canned list of justifications when you wanted to vote.
gambler 8y ago
Whenever I see a community that demands positive and constructive attitude it's always a dysfunctional community. All the functional communities I've ever seen created positive and constructive attitude through example and cultivation of good people. And they invariably had bare minimum of moderation, usually aimed at avoiding conflicts between members, rather than to enforce some kind of mandatory universal "values". StackOverflow is actually an example of this rule. Questions get downvoted and closed because they're supposedly not constructive. Yay, more constructiveness, right? But in the long run it creates the environment that feels like a clique hostile to all newcomers. Making demands on users, writing multi-page lists of rules and banning/locking/deleting does nothing to attract good people. It can only preserve something you already have, and even that isn't guaranteed. Way too many websites forget this, go all in on "corrective measures" and mandatory positivity, while not doing anything constructive on their own. An example of constructive moderation is running contests where people get recognition for doing something good. (This is no the same as having karma, which also leads to cliques in the long run.) Another related thing: a lot of larger websites pay moderators to ban stuff, but don't have anyone on staff whose primary job is to "lead by example" via answering questions and providing help. "Seeding" a website with good people and content is absolutely essential, and yet this is a topic I've never, ever seen discussed when someone writes about community management. And another thing. Beyond certain scale people stop perceiving website as a place with people and start looking at is as a service with users. This completely changes the tone for everyone. Larger websites need to put efforts in "federating", i.e. creating sub-spaces that still feel like a place where people can have a conversation and get to know the "regulars" to some extent. This might seem like it's not applicable to StackOverflow and YouTubes, but it is. A lot this is about visual design and ways information is structured.

Circuits 8y ago

It is nice to see but without proper enforcement I am afraid that change will never come. IMHO, the biggest step they need to take is to allow repeat questions or at least to mitigate the "murder the SO" mentality that's displayed whenever it happens. It's one thing to suggest the question already has an answer. It's a whole different beast when you type out how worthless the SO is for not doing research prior to posting the question and ban against them with 50 down votes, ostracizing them completely. Moderators should be given an option to punish users for incorrect/inappropriate comments and action on questions.

macNchz 8y ago
You're absolutely right about the culture changes needed to change the experience for new users, it's terrible right now. I imagine there could be a middle ground, where duplicates are allowed/answered/not aggressively downvoted, but once they're marked as a dupe they could 'fade out' to where they're eventually visible only via a user profile and not found in the main archive or search results.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Languages and tools and practices evolve. Stack Overflow is now getting old enough that the answers a question originally got may no longer be the best way to do things, and sometimes aren't even workable anymore. If anything, what SO needs is a way to "fade out" old questions in favor of new ones.
bunderbunder 8y ago
Allowing repeat questions is absolutely essential to keeping a community vital. I've seen this pattern happen on so many Internet forums, going all the way back to the WELL, where eventually they develop this surface crust of long-time users who systematically chase anyone new away by informing them that the thing they want to talk about, whatever it is, has already been talked about. At first, it might start with a chatty response that provides a link to the old conversation and also provides a summary or some other additional input. And, when done that way, it generally is helpful and friendly. But, with practice, the procedure is optimized down to the point where the post is little more, and sometimes less, than "We've talked about this before: <hyperlink>" And that's toxic. The only way you could send a clearer message that someone's contributions are not valued is to come right out and say, "Your contribution is not valued." Stack Overflow has, unfortunately, stumbled upon a way to accelerate this process by gamifying it.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

soneca 8y ago

As a junior developer for two years now, what frustrates me is not the responses to the questions I ask. I almost never had the urge to ask any questions, most of them are already asked and answered in a similar enough form so I can learn from them. What do frustrates me is how I, as a newbie, am incapable of contributing to the site. I can't upvote an answer that was particularly good to my case. Dozens (literally dozens) of times I clicked to upvote an answer that was just the right one for my case and it wasn't the accepted or most upvoted answer. Only to get this as a reply: - "Thanks for the feedback! Votes cast by those with less than 15 reputation are recorded, but do not change the publicly displayed post score." What?? As a junior learning through an answer, I want to contribute it right away and acknowledge the person who helped it. As well as signalizing to other people that that answer is a good one. Why my upvote do not count? I don't understand the reason behind this design decision. Then I try to comment on the answer to make it explicit how it helped me and I get: - "You must have 50 reputation to comment" This rule at least I kind of understand the logic (avoid spamming, flamewars maybe?), but it does not make it any less frustrating. I cannot contribute to the site and to the people that helped me so much at the beginning of my learning path. I can Ask, Answer and Edit without any reputation threshold. But those are precisely what a junior developer will most likely not want to do while learning the basic stuff through SO. These design choices made me totally give up of any urge to participate in SO and I only consult the answers without engaging or recognizing any of the humans that helped me.

umvi 8y ago
Yeah, low rep restrictions are annoying. I think it's to discourage bot abuse and spam. If you can get 200 rep in any StackExchange site, then joining any other one will give you 100 rep to start off with, so I found it was worth it to answer/edit questions until I hit 200 rep
- ezrast 8y ago
  This was the answer for me. I accumulated 200 rep basically goofing off on codegolf.stackexchange.com and no longer feel hindered on other SE sites even as a mostly-passive user. If that's not your bag there are plenty of other subsites that are accessible to users with few tech chops: puzzling, worldbuilding, rpg, etc.

CodeSheikh 8y ago

IN the light of what he just said, then SO needs to stop banning people from posting questions even if their questions get continuously downvoted by experienced users. "You have reached your question limit Sorry, we are no longer accepting questions from this account. See the Help Center to learn more."

CodeSheikh 8y ago
And perhaps better ways to discourage this behavior from new users. This is no different then imagine a few programming newbies join a "Introduction to Programming" class taught at a college by seasoned professor and assisted by graduate teaching assistants. What if TA's start discouraging new students from continuously asking mundane questions? Do the instructors care only about the "performance" of average students in the class so they can go back to their department at the end of the semester and show they have hit a satisfactory passing rate? Or they care about that every student walked away with a good understanding of programming at the end of the day?
saywhatnow 8y ago
Why? When you post a single question that gets downvoted you don't get banned. It's only when you repeatedly ignore the rules and ask terrible questions over and over refusing to learn from your past mistakes. There might be a discussion to be had about how to teach users what a bad question is, or how many is too many, but I don't understand why we should let people who repeatedly fail to clearly ask a question keep asking. Most people have no such problem. In fact, when experienced posters politely point out what the rules are and where to read more about them, you start to see new posters fall into 2 categories: 1. The people who say, "Oh, I didn't realize that's how it works. I'll update my question/do better next time/etc." 2. The people who insist that no, it's their platform and they'll ask whatever they want however they want. People in category 1 usually have no further problems using the site. People in category 2 usually end up banned. And of course, there are experienced users who are jerks and don't point out rules or don't do it politely. They should not be excused. But letting new posters continue to pollute the site with terrible questions isn't going to help anyone - especially not the people posting the question.

vitro 8y ago

Who is given the most space in media? Seems like those who do the most noise, no matter the content. It sells much more that some boring truth. If you see it all around you, after a while it becomes a norm. Have you noticed? When you start to be angry and hate a bit, somehow it spreads and sucks all these bad energies like a sponge. And if you don't know how to recover yourself and clean your mind, it is easy to become a hateful self-centered person. I wish we could change the direction.

kawsper 8y ago

> but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see. I remember one of my first interactions with other developers was the #php.dk channel on Quakenet in the start 00s, I had shared a PHP script with them that didn't work, and had included my development database settings, and back then NAT wasn't really a thing, so one of them figured out that he could login to my MySQL database and change the password! And I didn't know how to reset it, so they made me beg to get the new password, so they showed me how to change it to something new and they showed me how to protect myself from such things in the future. It was a nice life lessons, and I guess that IRC channels needed some strict moderation, but I'm not sure the shenanigans that went on back then (and likely still happens) is all that great for learners and newcomers.

wuliwong 8y ago

I have ran into the poor attitude on SO occasionally and it is definitely great to try to improve. That being said, SO has been such a useful tool for me in my career, I would be care when making changes that they didn't have the unintended consequence of hurting the quality of the product. I think it's similar to HN. HN downvoting can be really frustrating when I am making what I believe to be very good comments but I have to admit that overall I am happy with the product. I have been trained over the years to think a lot more about comments I leave in HN than I did in my early years here.

greymeister 8y ago

Anyone else remember the "Summer of Love"? [1] I had stopped attempting to answer or ask anything on the site due to the behavior I observed. It was pure gamesmanship for people trying to rack up their SO score and then summarily abuse it with enforcement of opaque, draconian rules. My favorite was when a question would be marked as a duplicate incorrectly, so what was the takeaway? That solution was barred from discussion on the site? Since then I simply look at SO when it happens to come up in a search. I'm not ever logged into the site anymore. If I want to describe how I fixed something, I do it in my own space, and only reference answer when linking to SO. 1. https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/07/20/kicking-off-the-summer-of-love/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/07/20/kicking-off-the-summer...