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Tired of Stack Overflow

• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• enriquto 7y ago
  the site jumped the shark when they removed the question "new programming jargon you coined" which was easily the best one they ever had
  • faitswulff 7y ago
    For the curious, the top 30 responses were reblogged by Jeff Atwood: https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ Archive.org link to the original question here: https://web.archive.org/web/20120210110752/https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2349378/new-programming-jargon-you-coined https://web.archive.org/web/20120210110752/https://stackover...
    • enriquto 7y ago
      I refuse to look at this. Basically the guy stole the work of many people for himself.
      • Jverse 7y ago
        He credits all contributions to their respective user
      • sowbug 7y ago
        The Creative Commons license disagrees with your characterization. Plus Jeff founded Stack Overflow, so it's odd to single him out if republishing works legally is stealing.
        • andrewl 7y ago
          Exactly. Atwood's post says "Unfortunately, we don't have a good designated place for deleted "too fun" questions to live, but all Stack Exchange content is licensed under Creative Commons in perpetuity. Which means, with proper attribution, we can give it a permanent home on our own blogs. And he does link each term to the StackOverflow user who posted it.
          • enriquto 7y ago
            > all Stack Exchange content is licensed under Creative Commons in perpetuity. Which means, with proper attribution, we can give it a permanent home on our own blogs. But can we, in practice? Where can I find all the answers to that question, including the comments?
        • enriquto 7y ago
          By "stealing" I refer to the removal of the original content from the main site, not to the copy itself.
• mnd999 7y ago
  Slashdot’s moderation with reasons / meta moderation worked pretty well for me. Despite it coping pretty well with the fully spectrum of posts that site solicited it doesn’t seem to have ever been copied - I’m not sure why.
• Avamander 7y ago
  > Can people truly not comprehend how downvoting a post to -20 (or more) is perceived by the author of that post? No, Stack Overflow high-rank users certainly do not. (A current community moderator literally said "Voting is not a friendly or unfriendly activity.") I've too suggested that the UI should be changed to be less abrasive and that high-rank people should be more accountable for their actions and been downvoted for that. It's worth noting that this phenomenon of lack of empathy exists mostly in Stack Overflow, much less so in smaller communities where people don't generally have that much rank. At least that's what I saw with my personal empirical observation of Arduino SE. Not to mention the high-rank users loathe the welcoming initiative SO made, because god forbid they can't be snarky asses without getting flagged any more.
  • jodrellblank 7y ago
    The SO guidelines are that voting is about the question, not about the author. Everyone who has a rant about SO shows that is not universally agreed on, to say the least. But for you to say "people should be kinder and more empathic", for downvoting within the rules of the site, while you go on a rant calling people unwelcoming snarky abrasive asses, is amusingly hatey.
    • Avamander 7y ago
      > for downvoting within the rules of the site Doesn't make it good for the site or it's users. It's a very poor excuse. > rant calling people unwelcoming snarky abrasive asses, is amusingly hatey. Are you a high-rank SO user? Also, what I stated is not a "rant" it's an empirical observation.
      • jodrellblank 7y ago
        > Doesn't make it good for the site or it's users. It's a very poor excuse. Excuse for what? SO has the UI instruction that you /should/, as a user who agreed to follow the rules, downvote low effort questions which show no research. Agreeing to follow the site rules, then not following the site rules and deciding it should be run the way you want it to be run instead, isn't good for the site either. > Are you a high-rank SO user? I've never thought so, but looking at the data[1] everyone with >500 rep is in the top 5%, so by that standard, yes. > Also, what I stated is not a "rant" it's an empirical observation. No, it's not. Saying that people "should be held accountable" for their downvotes on an internet site is not "provable by means of experiment", it's "people I disagree with should be punished". Calling people "snarky asses" is not experimental, it's subjective interpretation. Describing downvoting as lacking empathy, on a site where downvotes are intended to describe the question not the author, is subjective interpretation. [1] https://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/alltime/stackoverflow/2008-07-31?sort=reputationchange&page=1 https://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/alltime/stackoverflow/20... tables on the right hand side
• philliphaydon 7y ago
  One thing that always bothered me about SO was that it shows who answered and their score. It should display answers without the user until an answer is accepted. There’s been many cases where a high score user answers, gets a lot of upvotes cos people are like “oh his score is 30k so he must be right” yet the answer is not good or incorrect. And there is a better more correct answer by someone with a Low score who get few votes. Voting should be unbiased and be based on the answer. Not the person who answered.
  • y7 7y ago
    Maybe for Stack Overflow, but for more scientific Stack Exchange sites with smaller communities I find the username to be really useful.
    • philliphaydon 7y ago
      I’m not saying remove it for ever. Just for a period of time or until an answer is selected.
  • agumonkey 7y ago
    Even reddit made the switch to a similar system. unknown points until later.
    • Etheryte 7y ago
      The parenting comment suggest something different than what Reddit does. Reddit hides the comment's score, the comment suggest hiding the commenter's profile altogether so you can't see the commenter's reputation on the site.
      • agumonkey 7y ago
        True, but the principle is the same. Avoid apriori votes based on reflexes.
      • bhandziuk 7y ago
• abacadaba 7y ago
  Anecdotal: Searching github issues has long since surpassed the usefulness of stackoverflow for me. Possibly the types of questions I need answered has changed, but I think it's more that everything on stackoverflow is out of date or off topic. Or the people who could answer are also the people who are too busy and/or don't care enough to play the karma game.
  • slig 7y ago
    This has been my experience recently as well, specially with fast-moving JS frameworks and libraries.
    • Avamander 7y ago
      Yep, the time dimension is seriously overlooked by people flagging questions closed. IMO the duplicate close reason shouldn't accept questions older than a year.
      • baud147258 7y ago
        It depends on the tag, for some languages/framework that aren't moving that fast, you'd find a lot of older answer that are still valid
        • Avamander 7y ago
          Too hard to determine which questions expire or not. Most do.
    • sefrost 7y ago
      I’m the same and it’s a lot better since they added reactions to messages. If there are a lot of messages, I scroll straight to the bottom of the page, then slowly scroll up until I find a message with lots of thumb up or checkmark emoji reactions. So it’s like a slightly less efficient StackOverflow!
  • adamparsons 7y ago
• TooCleverByHalf 7y ago
  Oddly I realize that I rarely find a reason to end up on Stack Overflow these days.
• jonathaneunice 7y ago
  Yes, yes, and more YES. Some of my best SO experiences have been answering questions that got ridiculous downvotes (more -1 and -3 than -75, but still). If SO has already answered this particular question, then great—do a better job of leading questioners to it. If not, get out of the way and let's answer the question here.
• billfruit 7y ago
  I'm tired with their fragmenting their site into airtight topic specific QA sites, now with many questions one isn't sure where to post it to get max eyeballs. I feel that is something that could have avoided by design. Topics could have been managed through tags, instead of walling them off into separate sites. And the obsolescence, things are moving so fast in JavaScript, Android, even in QT, Clojure etc, many answers including accepted ones are obsolete, and misleading.
  • mrQozCodes 7y ago
    Blazor is a thing that's coming up if you're interested in using C# for websites (along with .NET).
  • pytester 7y ago
    >And the obsolescence, things are moving so fast in JavaScript, Android, even in QT, Clojure etc, many answers including accepted ones are obsolete, and misleading. This is the absolute worst aspect of the site to me. Some answers are version specific, some stop working overnight one day, some used to be good practice in 2011 and still work but really aren't any more and there is no sane mechanism for stack overflow to handle any of these things. This is quite apart from the multitude of answers which are voted to the top which are wrong, only partially right or bad answers.
    • mLuby 7y ago
      Runnable code snippets are helpful in this regard, but even better would be runnable test cases. Example: How to check for Invalid Date in JS? ```js function invalidDate (date){return isNaN(date.valueOf())} console.assert(invalidDate(new Date("foo")) === true) console.assert(invalidDate(new Date()) === false) ``` But I'd expect if someone noticed an out-of-date answer they'd just comment and it'd get fixed that way.
  • hanniabu 7y ago
    My biggest pain point with that is needing to register to each one. There's many times I've seen questions I'd love to answer, but then realize I'm no longer on stack overflow and I'm on some sys admin stack exchange that I can't comment on unless I sign up, in which case I just close the tab.
• el_cujo 7y ago
  I really think it's better to just have an up vote arrow and no down vote option, for questions at least. The only reason on a site like that to really vote something down should be if something is off topic or against the rules, in which case you have a report button. If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasonable response. I also know that since visibility is based on how your score matches up to others, some people will just go and vote down every other recent question so theirs stands out more (unless stack overflow has protection against such things, I know it happens on similar sites) I can maybe see an argument for answers to questions being down vote-able, since people may sometimes give answers that are wrong/misleading but maybe not to such a degree that they deserve to be expunged by moderators.
  • eternalny1 7y ago
    On StackOverflow, a decent amount of site reputation is required before one can down-vote.
    • adossi 7y ago
      You also lose 1 reputation for down-voting which helps prevent people from getting too trigger happy
      • Avamander 7y ago
        1 rep doesn't matter at all for high-rank people, the rep loss should be based on total rep.
        • snazz 7y ago
          It should be something like 1% of your reputation. That’s significant enough to make even high-rank users have to think.
          • Swenrekcah 7y ago
• nullc 7y ago
  > and just had to add their own downvote On the Internet you don't exist unless you act, there are no points just for showing up. Thus the plethora of useless votes and comments (such as my comment here :) ).
• jnovek 7y ago
  This culture is why I've never contributed to Stack Overflow. I'm a reasonably senior engineer, I've been lucky to experience an extraordinary breadth of technology in my career, and I love helping people learn to program... but I just don't have the time or emotional energy for SO's top posters to pick apart the minutia of every word I say in an answer. The ROI for me is nil.
  • baud147258 7y ago
    On the tags with less question (<5 per days), it has never happened to me, I even managed to be among the top poster for one of them. And the few times I got corrections from more experienced posters, they were pretty cool about it. But then it's really tag-dependent.
  • flippyhead 7y ago
    I feel the same way. I tried a couple times to contribute but found it too demoralizing.
  • grogenaut 7y ago
    Agreed. Similar experience. Asked a question about architecture and dependency injection in .net. it was immediately removed as irrelavant because .net is better than Java. Posted a week later with a friend's account and it stayed but my friend panicked at loss of points and inability to do their job without them and removed it themselves (tho gave me answers firtst).
    • ptx 7y ago
      I thought dependency injection in Java was mainly a way to emulate modules (as in Python or JS), so how is .NET different here since it doesn't have modules either?
  • human20190310 7y ago
    At this point I just ask a question, get an answer, and if I don't like the commentary, I just delete it. I post there under my real name, which means I either have to address or accept dumb/nit-picking criticism, which is a no-win situation. If the person who answers actually needs the points, I'll give that some consideration, but it seems like a lot of the time the solution is offered in the comments anyway. I don't know why that is. Every once in a while I'll swoop in on a basic question and try to answer it before anyone else notices.
• 0xmohit 7y ago
  As per this meta question [0], the one you've linked to doesn't appear worthy of downvotes. However, when I was active on the site, it appeared that (some) users active in a tag tend to downvote questions when they didn't have an answer to it. That said, the reputation model also encourages low quality answers [1]. Overall, I found the site to be somewhat toxic and stopped visiting it several years back. [0] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252677/when-is-it-justifiable-to-downvote-a-question https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252677/when-is-it-j... [1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731/fastest-gun-in-the-west-problem https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9731/fastest-gun-in...
• beardedProgmr 7y ago
  This author should avoid Reddit at all costs. I got time -40 karma for saying I personally didn't care about screen refresh rates this week. Also as a stack overflow mod my group doesn't have such issues. Nor have I experienced these issues. Worst I've had was a few extremely technical questions require a bounty the get an answer. However my group spends a lot of time helping new users. The ones on the main group might have issues as there are more posts and less mods.
  • non-entity 7y ago
    I've quit reddit multiple times over getting to heated in arguments
    • beardedProgmr 7y ago
      A student reporter once left a mic with my ma. She posted on Reddit hoping to find them. She still talks about the horrible replies she got. I really cannot fathom what's wrong with those people.
• praptak 7y ago
  There's "Stack Overflow isn't very welcoming" blog post on stackoverflow.blog from Apr 2018, so they at least did notice.
• nerf_javascript 7y ago
  I understand closing questions as duplicates from a quality POV, but SO doesn't function as a high quality forum of expert users. The plain use case and majority perception of it is as a Q&A site where you can ask questions you're confused about and get the answer; in this case, closing questions as duplicates because they share a premise with another question is purely counter-intuitive. Let's take for example the Java Infinite Loop question from the article. The asker was an introductory user to Java who made it clear, and asked multiple questions with relation to how to make the program ask the question in an infinite loop. The duplicate marked was purely a "how to do infinite loops in java" question. While for a more comfortable software engineer this suffices since they can use the method for accomplishing the larger concept of an infinite loop in their specific use case, the user was clearly so new that the question should have been approached from a beginner's perspective, i.e. "You'll need to wrap your main question asking code in an infinite while loop like this so that it continues forever." Besides, the secondary question the user asked wasn't answered in the duplicate. While it makes sense to mark a question that was just "How to do infinite loops in Java" at a high level as a duplicate, this more specific question also requires the answer to identify where the loop should be placed and why it should be placed there. For a site that's supposed to be about helping the community, most of its high reputation users seem to be awfully focused on removing questions, discouraging askers, and the most minor of revisions (i.e. why so many questions I see on SO have been edited by a high rep user to add a line break or the most minor of cosmetic changes). Moreover, the actual mission they're supposed to accomplish by being a trusted member of the community goes largely unfulfilled. In most SO threads I browse now, the accepted answer is just plainly incorrect or outdated. There's no enforcement at all here, and often times it's been edited in the last couple months as just a cosmetic change instead of actually fixing the glaringly wrong issue. The correct answer usually lies further down below, ironically posted by low rep users who struggle with the incorrect answer, find a better working solution, and then post it with the pure intention of helping others who came across the issue. An obvious example is in many JS questions nowadays. The OP asks something very simple and direct, and most of the answers either: - solve the question using jQuery, which is usually unnecessary nowadays and adds bloat to a relatively simple task - use some random library or module, i.e. "simple, just learn the API for this open source lib instead and use it!" - contain a solution that doesn't work or works in a very small number of cases (i.e. with most regex questions where there are 10 competing regex answers and you've got to find the right one) - contain a correct solution but use extremely outdated methods to get there; i.e. using a giant XMLHttpRequest with a callback instead of just using async/await and Fetch, or lacking any sort of ES6 convention (using `var` everywhere) - contain an almost correct solution except for a few typos, but no one who has spotted the typo and has the right answer also has enough reputation to edit the answer, and so the resolution of the mistake is a buried comment ---- In my honest but probably worthless opinion, Stack Overflow is a Q&A forum with the extremely strict and overbearing rules of a high quality expert's forum, and just encourages this sort of behaviour on the platform to the point that it really just fails to serve its core purpose on many occasions.
• ubercow13 7y ago
  I feel like HN is turning a bit in this direction too. I feel like I’m seeing more downvoted comments, and they are more often than not perfectly good comments, and no one replies explaining why they don’t like the comment. Of course you can’t talk about it because it’s against the rules.
  • herodotus 7y ago
    agree. I sometimes upvote a downvoted comment just because it looks like a reasonable comment, and I cannot see any reason why it was downvoted.
    • ubercow13 7y ago
      I too do this daily.
    • 1_player 7y ago
      It happens, people are a little trigger happy on the Internet, but HN is a forum utopia compared to StackOverflow or Reddit. In my experience, on here people downvote when the answer is either off topic/spam or false with regards to the topic. Sometimes some good comments are greyed out because the profile has been (wrongly) shadowbanned, but the "vouch" feature is great for that. EDIT: is HN so good compared to the rest because of its moderation tools/upvote system, or because it attracts only a specific niche of people? Would a Reddit/SO with HN features work better than the current sites?
      • unilynx 7y ago
        I think it's mostly the community and its culture. As another example, lwn.net attracts a somewhat similar crowd, has no moderation tools at all (it's extremely rare for a comment to be removed) and has generally interesting comments. (just never mention init systems)
      • ahaferburg 7y ago
        People in this thread downvoted comments that express unpopular opinions. Even factually wrong posts should not be suppressed but corrected/challenged in a reply. As the rules state, assume good faith. Downvotes should be reserved for trolls and low effort posts. I agree that HN is much nicer than SO or Reddit, but that is largely due to the moderators here.
• moron4hire 7y ago
  I've found the only way to maintain a nice, helpful community is to be liberal with the ban hammer. If you are early and consistent with it, you don't have to use it that often. But people in general fear conflict, fear taking a position of authority, and exercising that authority. I have a weekend Meetup that I have been running for 5 years. I've had to ban three people. The first two were three years ago, after a spat of incidents. The last one was a month ago, and it was an easy and quick decision with little impact on the group. The activity in the group now conveys what sort of behavior is acceptable, so it takes a real, honest to goodness troll before we get any trouble. Being nice is a component of the quality of a community. If "quality" is so important to defend, being nice is important to defend.
• spapas82 7y ago
  I was a heavy SO user before some years however I have stopped posting questions nowadays (mainly because of the reasons presented in the article) and I find answering too time consuming. What I've found really helpful when I need to learn a new language / paradigm is to use IRC (freenode). I more or less learned Kotlin and Elixir just by reading some online articles and asking things on the corresponding IRC channels. The people there are helpful and the most important thing is that asking a question will start a discussion about being idiomatic, other ways to solve a problem etc, things that are not possible in a Q/A site like SO. Also I had asked some very difficult questions about mysql and postgresql in the corresponding channels (that I expected to get no answer) and they were answered almost immediately. I urge you to try it: No walled gardens, no people selling/advertising through your data, no point system, complete freedom to ask (and answer) whatever you wish.
  • Avamander 7y ago
    > What I've found really helpful when I need to learn a new language / paradigm is to use IRC (freenode). Absolutely, for example my experience with PostgreSQL people there has been amazing.
  • prepend 7y ago
    I like this method. I think there’s something about IRC that’s just hard enough to use that it filters out a lot of people. If you described IRC to me, I wouldn’t think it would work. But almost 30 years later, I’m still using it. I think it’s another example of how protocols are better than apps for sustainability and true “value,” as opposed to fundraising.
  • jodrellblank 7y ago
    > use IRC (freenode) The underlying issue I see here, is the geek desire to answer a question once and for all, and have beginners just fuck off and read the damn faq and stop asking. (Everybody is a beginner in a task they don't know how to do, for all it matters, but experienced people will not stay that way as long as inexperienced people). Whereas beginners want to chat, have someone help/mentor/guide through which bits are relevant, current, idiomatic, easy, hard, tailored to their problem. Beginners don't know what to read, and can't spot it or make sense of it when they see it. (Again, everyone is a beginner, for if the seasoned expert knew what to read to answer their question, they'd be off reading it instead of posting a question on StackOverflow). People on realtime chat services are the kind of people who don't mind (or people in a state of mind where they don't mind) answering the same kinds of questions, and talking the same things, over and over and over. StackOverflow mixes people who want "one answer forever" nitpicking question and answers as if they were encyclopaedia editors to make them 'perfect' to be a forever-answer, with people who want "realtime help" asking, who don't care about exactly the right wording and terms and formatting and stuff. NB. that the people who would be asking, but are on the "one and done" side of things, are the people off studying the FAQ and documentation and code, and buying books and courses where they expect to find answers already existing, so they don't so often show up on the questions side of SO.
• mumblemumble 7y ago
  I think that the fundamental problem with the downvote, pretty much anywhere that has it, is that it's physically structured as being the inverse of an upvote, and then there are some community guidelines saying, "This isn't actually the inverse, it has some additional semantics associated with it." In SO's specific case, the problem it's ostensibly trying to solve is indicating that the question, as asked, needs work, or should have been asked elsewhere. But there's nothing in the mechanism to ensure that it's solving that problem. So, where what they needed was a constructive feedback mechanism, what they built was a ruler for whacking knuckles. I think that SO would be greatly improved if they simply took away the downvote, and replaced it with a more structured mechanism for giving the question asker feedback on how to improve their question. It would make the place more friendly, and it would replace a mechanism for brusquely chasing newcomers away with a mechanism for teaching them the community guidelines in a positive way.
  • caf 7y ago
    Yeah - I mean, there is even a mechanism for giving feedback on how the question can be improved: the comments. In my view, if you think a question needs work your first option should be to leave a comment, and your second should be to edit it yourself to improve it. If there isn't time in your busy schedule of bludging at work for either of those then maybe consider just ignoring it?
  • ahaferburg 7y ago
    Both downvotes and close votes should open a discussion, not be presented as a verdict. It should always be phrased as a question, e. g. "Have you seen this question over there, does the provided answer help you?" And the default assumption should be that no, the other question is significantly different, and the asker has good reason to post another question.
• commandersaki 7y ago
  Minus blog post I came to a similar conclusion; asking on StackOverflow is a waste of time. I asked a question about how to do X - which turned out wasn't possible or I misunderstood how the system worked, and rather get an answer, I was told to reformulate the question or have it closed. Then eventually I was told in the comments of the question that this question doesn't make much sense. It was still a valid question, deserved a simple response, at least to add to the knowledge base. Whatever, SO is a waste of time.
  • kwhitefoot 7y ago
    I don't ask many questions, well almost never any more, partly because very often when I search I find almost exactly the question I want answered only to find closed as off topic yet it has a half a dozen well reasoned answers and three dozen well reasoned comments. I think SO and Wikipedia have both suffered the same fate: they started with everyone on the same footing but now there is a core of 'professional' or at least habitual editors who enforce their own narrow view of what is right. I gave up editing Wikibooks after one too many deletes of perfectly valid graphics for nit picking reasons.
• jon889 7y ago
  Stack Overflow started going downhill when they stopped allowing "fun" questions. used to be that I'd go there, ask a question and browse through the questions, seeing which I could answer and also fun ones I could just read for interest and pick up sometimes useful sometimes not bits of information which would lead to other topics and so on. Since then it's just a constant stream of "noob" questions with basically no answers. There's nothing wrong with "noob" questions, the questions I've asked on there are pretty much all "noob" questions as I was first learning about programming. The problem is only having those types of questions and nothing to attract people capable of answering to the site.
• rgovostes 7y ago
  Now that I have a few hundred reputation points the site is much more usable, but the privilege system drove me crazy for a while. If you are an expert in something, you cannot even comment (50 pts) to explain why an answer is wrong. And there are editing minimums so fixing bugs in broken code can be tedious sometimes.
• lovelearning 7y ago
  I avoid SO too. However, I didn't understand this: [...] There is no pass by reference, so I’m not sure where you got that. You’re simply passing the value, which is a copy and not going to change the original. ...is parading that they’re stupid and wrong, while beating your chest about how much smarter you are. [...] It sounds neutrally worded to me. Can somebody here point out what part of it is considered hostile and how it can be improved?
  • rgoulter 7y ago
    Sometimes 'explaining what you said was wrong' is interpreted as showing you're a smarter/better person, rather than information sharing. I liked this blog post about it. https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-me/ https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-me/ Yes, that comment could just be trying to be helpful / clarifying. I think it's not much of a stretch to say the upvotes incentivise the "popularity seeking" behaviour over "information sharing" behaviour.
    • lovelearning 7y ago
      As a non-native speaker, I have to admit I find it very very subtle, the kind of sentence I might speak / write / hear without even realizing something is off. Thank you for the link - the author's done a great job explaining it.
• falsedan 7y ago
  I remember posting an answer to a CGI question with some grody, idiomatic solution, and getting scolded/downvoted by a high-rep dev (who montiored the subject tags) who responded with... a solution that didin't work! When the original asker responded, they directed them to file a bug. That contempt and disregard for the actual day-to-day tediousness of writing commercial code is an attitude I can do without. Also: https://imgur.com/C22vPFV https://imgur.com/C22vPFV
  • mplanchard 7y ago
    Wow! That screenshot is unbelievable. I’ve never seen his book before, but I went and looked it up so that I can be sure to never buy it and to recommend against it, due to the author, if it comes up in conversation.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• sergiotapia 7y ago
  The way forward isn't a global website like SO, it's niche forums from people you get to know in a weekly basis. For elixir we have a public forum specific to Elixir. For crystal, there's a crystal forum as well. For react, I'm still looking for one that's good.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• rsp1984 7y ago
  I find the described phenomena not only apply to SO but also to other internet forums, sometimes even to real life (e.g. work place) situations There is no “quality control” in downvoting a question to double-digits. The simple truth is that you’re just being a gigantic twat if you keep piling on votes like that. Not sure if there's an official name for this phenomenon in psychology but whenever it becomes "safe" to bash on someone or someone's opinion you can bet that more people are going to do it, even though the "marginal utiliy" diminishes very quickly. I think it's a variation of deriving some kind of satisfaction by "pushing yourself up by pushing others down". Personally, when I see people do this I know it's someone I definitely do not want to hang out or be friends with.
• rossdavidh 7y ago
  So, in "real life", we tend to automatically calibrate our response to somebody saying "I don't like that", depending on how often we've heard the same person say they don't like stuff. If they say it a lot, we don't give it much weight. If they rarely if ever say it, we give it more weight. Also, if two or three other people have already told someone (in "real life") that they don't like something, we tend to regard somebody else who jumps in to say it, negatively. It seems not too hard to implement on SO that downvoting a question that is already negative, should either be disabled or else weighted less. Lastly, in "real life" we are more tolerant of piling on, when the same person has been given modest negative feedback before, and keeps doing it. If a person has several questions with negative score, it might make sense to allow more downvotes. For example, with only one question with negative score (e.g. a newbie), it cannot go below -1. If you have two questions with negative score, it can go to -2, etc. All seems totally doable, but everything turns out to be more complicated than it looks from the outside, so I suppose they have reasons for not doing it.
• sumanthvepa 7y ago
  I stopped attempting to post questions to stack overflow after the first couple years of attempts. It is a strictly read only site for me. Don’t waste time asking questions there.
• elchief 7y ago
  My solution is to give enormous bounties. Then the haters stfu I have lots of points to give away though
  • umvi 7y ago
    I think you are on to something here... maybe rep could be purchased for $$$. Then you can literally put your money where your mouth is.
• einpoklum 7y ago
  FYI: Some (most?) sites on the StackExchange network don't have this culture of violent downvoting and put-downs. Instead, the veterans use comments which are mostly constructive, and are much more likely to reward newbie efforts with upvotes.
• unlinkr 7y ago
  Stack Overflow have some infamous example of "snarky" answers getting highly upvoted - despite being outright wrong. I wrote a bit about such a case here: https://www.cargocultcode.com/solving-the-zalgo-regex/ https://www.cargocultcode.com/solving-the-zalgo-regex/ In short, the question here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... is complete legitimately and answerable, but nevertheless have dozens of answers ridiculing the question for trying to do something "impossible". In general I do like SO quite a lot and find it very useful. But this is one example where SO spread wrong and misleading information. But when I wrote a post on meta.stackoverflow to point out this particular problem, it was quickly downvoted to -25 before getting deleted.
  • banana_giraffe 7y ago
    The Zalgo response drives me slightly crazy. Most of the time I've actually seen people asking about regex's and HTML are asking for a very small subset of both, they generally just want to parse a bunch of pages generated by a small number of tools, and yet they get told it's impossible to use Regex to do it. The second answer is spot on, actually answers the question, yet the first one is the one that gets treated as gospel.
  • dehrmann 7y ago
    I keep trying to come up with one of these, usually in the form of an absurdly correct answer.
• lordnacho 7y ago
  At this stage SO is a reference work. The kind of things it's useful for are things like "what's the syntax for [algo] in [language]". There's specific answers people are looking for, and they stay that way. It also means everything(tm) is there. It's been ages since I've needed to ask anything at all there. Someone has had the problem before, and gotten the answer. Individual reputation might not matter much in this context. If the answer to your question has 100 upvotes, why does it matter who they fell to? If someone answers a question, does it matter how many other upvotes they got? Does it make them more authoritative? You'll find loads of simple answers with loads of upvotes, and deep dives with just a few. My own account is just as odd. The most upvoted answer by far is a one-liner that says "untick this box". That time I found an actual error in a Swift lib, I spent ages detailing it, and got barely any votes.
  • einpoklum 7y ago
    > At this stage SO is a reference work. That's absolutely not the case: * Not for the most upvoted questions. * Not for which questions get upvoted nowadays. * Not for what influential/highly-active users expect. > Individual reputation might not matter much in this context. It shouldn't matter all that much anyway. People tend to assign to much merit to these gamifications. > My own account is just as odd. The most upvoted answer by far is a one-liner that says "untick this box". Yes, that's one of the anomalies. The most interesting and imaginative questions, and their answers, rarely get upvoted much because people don't look for them or find them.
• dlandis 7y ago
  It's kind of baffling to me that SO hasn't made further significant attempts at improving the site's culture after identifying and documenting the problems over a year ago in their blog posts. I agree that nothing much has changed on the site since then. The pattern I see nowadays is that someone asks a reasonable (albeit basic) question and, even if it's not downvoted, people start immediately attempting to undermine it in the comments. Many people's goal seems not to be to answer the question (whatever the question may be) but to explain why the question is invalid and shouldn't have been asked in the first place. In my experience the top reputation users are not the problem either -- they are actually more likely to answer the question as asked and not simply try to undermine the questioners.
  • einpoklum 7y ago
    Over a year ago? It's been this way for at least 5 years and probably more. And it was a well-known fact. However! Remember that the primary goal of SO is not to answer your individual question, but to curate a collection of publicly-useful Q&A. That's why it's reasonable to "undermine" many newbie question. The trick is to do it in a way that's positive, friendly, and condusive to the asker getting an answer to what they want to know.
• RickJWagner 7y ago
  Thank God for Stack Overflow. Whenever I Google up some difficult question (which is often), SO has a good answer almost right away. Ah, the kindness of strangers! As for the downvoting, IMHO Hacker News suffers from this. It seem good comments are regularly downvoted if they don't adhere to other's social views. I think we should operate at a level higher than that.
• GnarfGnarf 7y ago
  Here's a suggestion: Whenever you encounter a question that has been unfairly downvoted, you, in turn, should have an option to "downvote the downvoters" . By clicking on a button, Stack Overflow will flag all the downvoters as "persona non grata" to yourself. When you view other questions, these people's downvotes will be subtracted or eliminated from your view of the question. Complicated? Yes, but SO's long-term viability may be at stake.
• simias 7y ago
  Sometimes I think that downvoting, including on websites like Hacker News, is a bad idea. It's easy to see the symmetry with upvotes and think that if you have one, you should probably have the other but psychologically speaking it's a very different type of interaction. In particular, and even on HN, the good old mantra "don't downvote if you disagree, downvote if the comment doesn't contribute to the discussion" is, from personal experience, not really followed by a significant chunk of the userbase. I try not to care about karma but it's always frustrating when you spend a few minutes of your time carefully composing a comment only to see it grayed out because people didn't like it. It's really toxic too because you don't feel welcome to express your point of view, even if it's in a completely respectful manner. When unchecked this tendency ends up with what you see on most of Reddit: dumb, content-free comments that go with the popular opinion raise to the top while insightful but controversial positions are buried under downvotes. Then you end up with echo chambers. I wonder how different HN wouldn't be if there were no downvotes at all and only the "flag" button to tag non-constructive comments. Basically the way it works for submissions. Personally I very rarely downvote comments on HN, if I find a comment that I don't find very insightful but is still technically contributing to the discussion I prefer to find a sibling comment that I deem more interesting and upvote that instead. I turn a negative interaction into a positive one. Instead of focusing on pushing people down you help those you find more interesting.
• JustSomeNobody 7y ago
  > I’m also wondering what went through the head of the person who saw the question at a score of -3 and just had to add their own downvote, because “fuck this question just a bit more”. This is exactly what went through their mind. This is group think. You get people who have to follow the heard and the next thing you know programmers are getting pulled out into the streets and beat because they use JavaScript.
• makecheck 7y ago
  Online activities shouldn’t have such a huge effort imbalance: - If I spend an hour writing and rewriting a question or answer, there shouldn’t be any “2-second torpedo” option where someone can ruin all that effort. Instead, they should have to spend some similar invested time, e.g. minimum length reasoning, peer review before posting or other hurdle. - Exactly the same problem with other sites, even online product searches. The “1 star” people seem to have infinite power, which has always been ridiculous. All this does is discourage actually useful contributions from appearing in the future, toward lowest common denominator.
• thekyle 7y ago
  This isn't directly related to the article, but I've noticed lots of Stack Overflow answers now contain outdated information in the highest voted answer. I wonder if moving to a velocity based ranking system (like HN and Reddit) instead of pure sorting by net votes would help with that. That way answers with more velocity (attracted more upvotes recently) would be ranked higher.
• gumby 7y ago
  I mentally substituted HN for SO when reading these comments. I see a similar pathology here, though far less extreme. I read HN both for the links and the commentary. Over the past couple of years I've noticed an increase in downvotes appearing to be used as "I disagree" which is a shame. I've disagreed with commentators whose comments have made me think, or even change my mind. Downvotes also get used on trivial or off topic comments, which seems what they are intended for. And I hardly consider it any sort of cesspool of social pathology (as seemed be be described in the recent article about HN moderating). But downvote use does seem to be trending the wrong way IMO. The result, of course, would be as described by the OP: self-deporting.
• d--b 7y ago
  The basic problem is that downvotes attract downvotes. > Hiding downvotes slightly increases the vote score of comments and substantially reduces the percentage of comments that receive a negative vote score, on average (from https://civilservant.io/do_downvotes_cause_bad_behavior_jan_2018.html https://civilservant.io/do_downvotes_cause_bad_behavior_jan_...)
• TCR19 7y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree with this article.
• riazrizvi 7y ago
  On Stackoverflow it costs you to downvote. Ask an ill-formed question with more than one easy to find good response, then you get downvoted at those users’ own expense. > “Is there a way to list all standard Go packages? I have a list of packages and I want to figure out if this is a standard package” ‘A list of packages ... if this is a standard package’, is ambiguous. What ‘this’? The list? Are you asking if there are standard ‘package lists’? And if I search ‘list standard go packages stackoverflow’ on duckduckgo I get answers with 25 and 50 upvotes already. In this situation I think Stackoverflow works.
  • mumblemumble 7y ago
    Downvoting costs newcomers. For old timers, it's basically free. I've been on SO more-or-less since the beginning. I rarely log in, probably haven't in over a year, but I know that, every time I do, my karma's taken another big jump. I was lucky enough to get in early on and get in a few good questions and answers on some thorny technical issues, and now I just keep on getting karma for free because some fixed percentage of people who run into these problems will get sent to my SO answer on Google, and some fixed percentage of those will upvote. Sometimes I even get double points when I answered my own question. So, insofar as I'm getting my karma for free, I don't value it much, and downvoting costs me basically nothing. I probably wouldn't start noticing the price unless the cost of a single downvote were at least 1% of my current karma.
• ilaksh 7y ago
  I just usually try to avoid participating in Stack Overflow now because it's not worth it. If there is any way for people to abuse you passive aggressively, they will. If you try to answer a question there is a good chance someone will come along and invalidate your effort somehow. Either pointing out a subtle issue that isn't really important, or copying your answer into a comment and voting the original question closed, or they will write a long-winded answer with a bunch of custom code that technically does what the original poster asked but is actually an outdated approach. Or any way to make your answer less important so they can get the points. The other problem I have with Stack Overflow is that a lot of times the answer to a question is to use an existing module or library but if you write that someone will come after you reinventing the wheel with some custom code they are supposed to copy paste and then nail you to the wall for not including code. I mean part of the concept of Stack Overflow is actually outdated because it is based on the idea that we should reuse a ton of code by copying and pasting snippets. And I know people love to hate on dependencies but copying and pasting a hundred functions is not a better solution.
• mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  What kind of culture do you expect for a subject matter that is heavily tied to Google-style whiteboard algorithm trivia / Wall Street brainteasers as ways in which freshly minted Ivy brogrammer grads are made to feel more valuable or important than people with diverse perspectives & years of actual experience. The social behavior of Stack Overflow is just an extension of tech culture. You can change message board formats, add community guidelines, add moderators, etc., not going to change anything until the capricious (& often socially harmful) cultures of tech are forced to change through significant legal accountability and through candidates simply saying “no” to touted jobs to punish the malignant culture.
• nv-vn 7y ago
  I'm glad to see that HN as a whole sees flaws in SO. I've avoided using SO as much as possible for years now and it seems like other people are coming to the same conclusions as I did. Between the "why would you want to do this?" answers and the downvoting beginner's questions and the "THIS IS A DUPLICATE" answers when the "duplicate" question is totally different and the "deleted as off-topic" on every interesting question, I find it really painful to support the site at all. The site has so much potential, but I find it less and less useful these days to the point where I can't justify ever checking the site out.
  • Ensorceled 7y ago
    > Between the "why would you want to do this?" answers This is my pet peeve: WHY ... DO ... YOU ... CARE. Also, duplicates that not only are a completely different question but THIS question is ranked #1 by both DDG and Google.
    • umvi 7y ago
      > This is my pet peeve: WHY ... DO ... YOU ... CARE. Because of X/Y problems. People want to make sure the person asking the question is asking the right question (often, they are not). You see newbies a lot asking suspicious questions like "How do I extract the string between the carets in '>I want this string<'?". Of course, you could just answer it at face value. Or... you could ask why they are doing this. They might respond "I'm trying to extract a string from a webpage HTML". In which case you would give a completely different answer. I've seen suspicious questions before where the asker didn't know what they really wanted was "JSON parsing" and were basically asking how to extract JSON fields using regex (but it wasn't completely obvious because they only pasted a small snippet of the JSON). You are saying I should've just given them what they wanted and not even questioned why they was doing it this way? Well, I'm sorry. I asked "is there a particular reason you need regex to extract these fields? Because this data looks very similar to JSON and there are better ways of extracting JSON fields" They replied that if there was a better way than regex, they were open to it, and I introduced the concept of JSON parsing. I personally think it's kind of conceited to believe that you know exactly what you are doing at all times and that it is an insult for people to question your methods. I only ask questions on SO extremely rarely, but when I do, I'm always open to such "why are you do it this way" questions because it indicates they believe there is a better way I could be doing it.
• jitbit 7y ago
  I've been a SO moderator for years, but I'm 100% with the OP :( And it's even more frustrating when people downvote answers. Come on, someone made an effort, came up with a solution and tried to help out. This deserves some recognition even if the solution is not 100% right. Definitely not dowvoting.
• runarberg 7y ago
  I had this meta effect happen to me on one of my answer[1]. I mistakenly accused a downvote on my answer as retaliatory and asked on meta if there were any actions available. The meta effect came in full swing, the meta tread quickly became quite toxic (I suggested closing it for that reason but was refused) and my answer got even more downvotes. This experience really caught me off guard. My experience with online communities has never been so hostile before. At the time I was taking a conscious effort and try to contribute back to SO, however this experience pushed me back. I’ve made a few contributions since then, but they probably would have been far more if people wouldn’t have been so hostile towards me in that meta thread. [1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/385061/retaliatory-downvote?noredirect=1#comment697118_385061 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/385061/retaliatory-... PS. I suspect the first downvote on my answer was because my answer was posted with a modern CSS, and I feel like (without having any evidence for) there are some people that actively downvote good HTML/CSS/JavaScript answers that use new syntax and features, while never explaining why the answer is “bad” in any way.
• timwaagh 7y ago
  The question sounds a bit nonsensical to me tbh. > I have a list of packages and I want to figure out if this is a standard package. He wants to figure out if his list of packages is a standard package? Doesn't sound logical. I don't like to downvote. I know what it's like to harvest 80 downvotes on reddit. But in this case, yeah. I approve downvoting nonsense.
• NobodyNada 7y ago
  Many of the culture problems with SO are a result of poor or outdated site design and moderation tooling -- and the high-rep users are aware of this and have been pushing for better tools for years. Unfortunately, the company has been neglecting the Q&A site and focusing instead on money-making products like Jobs and Teams. Over the past few years, Stack Overflow has launched several new products (Documentation, Developer Stories, Teams, etc.) and UI redesigns (which were often usability disasters, see [0] and [1]). Meanwhile, the moderation tools (downvotes, close votes, etc.) have not scaled well and are now woefully inadequate and inefficient. Requests for improved tooling have been silently ignored for years (see [2]) -- for example, an absolutely trivial request to re-word one sentence in the review queue guidance ([3]) was unimplemented for several years (and its eventual implementation was really just a token effort from the staff when tensions between the staff and the community were at an all-time high). Believe me: SO users know the site is not functioning well, and we've been doing everything we can to try to fix it (some users even create bots and userscripts to work around the site's deficiecies). However, there's only so much we can do without the cooperation of the staff. Tensions have been escalating over the past few years, and there's a lot of mistrust and cynicism on all sides between the company, the site's "power users," and new users. At this point, many of the power users are tired of fighting an uphill battle and have reached the point of giving up ([4]). Fortunately, there have been some encouraging signs recently: over the past few months, the company has finally started to implement some of the much-needed features we've been requesting for years ([5]). Hopefully these efforts will continue -- we'll just have to wait and see. If you're interested in reading some more of the history behind this, there's an excellent analysis at https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777 https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/331513/258777. [0]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/349118/3476191 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/349118/3476191 [1]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386505/3476191 [2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/285889/258777 https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/285889/258777 [3]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/332546/3476191 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/332546/3476191 [4]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386324/3476191 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/386324/3476191 [5]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/08/20/upcoming-on-stack-overflow/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/08/20/upcoming-on-stack-over...
• klausjensen 7y ago
  I have used SO since they opened. These days, at least half of my questions get closed as off topic or marked as duplicate - and I always do a lot of research first - but sometimes I just do not know the right keyword to search for - or do not understand the deeply obscure limitations to what is considered on or off topic... I will ask my question, hope to get an answer before it is closed.
• wuliwong 7y ago
  >Way forward I didn't see any mention of a way forward, just commentary on past changes and past articles citing a dislike of SO.
• luckydata 7y ago
  I can't imagine a worse place to be than a site that encourages the tedious (and most times irrelevant) nitpicking engineers are already usually guilty of. I asked a question a couple times on SO and quickly determined I don't need that kind of toxicity in my life.
• KajMagnus 7y ago
  If you want your own StackOverflow like community for your project, at your own website, maybe Talkyard could be interesting: https://github.com/debiki/talkyard https://github.com/debiki/talkyard (I'm developing it) There're no downvotes. Instead: Like, and Disagree votes, and it's fine to both Like and Disagree with something at the same time (they work in separate "dimensions"). (You have any thoughts or feedback?)
• zxcvbn4038 7y ago
  I think you can argue the psychology and the merits of various ranking systems all day every day. I don’t think there is one correct answer and might work one moment on one population might not work for another population for even the same population at a later date. The OP might just be getting burned out on stack overflow -maybe time to take a break, scale back, or just do something new. I think stack overflow is a great resource and has a lot of life left in it. Long ago when I first started out there was no resource like Google, Stack Overflow, Experts Exchange, or Wikis. When I had a question I usually had to find a more knowledgeable peer, explain in excruciating detail exactly what I was doing, and then only if they agreed with me one hundred percent would they answer my question. If I deviated from the way they would do something then my question would go unanswered. Real PITA. But it was a great motivator to develop deep knowledge so that I wasn’t limited to replicating what my peers had done. Today when I have questions it’s all too easy to get an answer without all of the overhead I mentioned. Though I’ve noticed my younger peers often lack deep knowledge and instead have various aptitudes for finding relevant information and deriving a solution from similiar circumstances.
  • bsder 7y ago
    I suspect the author hit the Indian downvote brigades as well. The big issue I currently have with the Stack Overflow is that it seems like it has become some form of "scoring metric" for Indian programmers--presumably the consulting companies like Wipro. As such, if you don't immediately give a positive vote/response to even garbage answers, you get a downvote brigade burying the question. I suspect disallowing Indian IP's would improve Stack Overflow immensely, at this point. The structural problem I have with Stack Overflow is that there is no way to wipe out outdated answers. There are lots of heavily upvoted answers that were correct but are now wrong, and there is no way to mark that.
    • teh_klev 7y ago
      Tarring a whole country with the same brush is bordering on racist.
      • 7y ago
• verisimilitudes 7y ago
  Downvotes are useful for quality control, but there is no real difference between -3 and -4. This and many others comprise examples of precisely how downvotes aren't useful for much of anything. “How do I do X?”. Often, X is quite a simple thing, like “append to a list”, or “merge two dictionaries”. I find that the longer I program with all sorts of different languages, the more I struggle remembering all that sort of stuff. You don't know a programming language if you need Stack Overflow to recall trivial things. I'd go as far to state that you're barely a programmer if you must have an Internet connection to program. I'm of the opinion that Stack Overflow is primarily good for those who don't know and don't want to learn. That is, I've never used it for an APL question or an Ada question and not so for Common Lisp, either; note that these are all real languages, that are standardized, have books written about them, and have real documentation. So, if you want to play with JavaScript, then Stack Overflow seems like a good place, as that's a disgusting and poorly documented language, but real languages don't need this manner of thing. The author fails to recognize that having a stupid little voting system and stupid Internet points is precisely the cause of the issue. I'm accustomed to anonymous communications and people get along just fine, in part because the only thing you can do to voice disagreement is to write an actual reply instead of clicking a stupid little button and, since you're not vying for stupid Internet points, you only write a response if you actually want to help someone, with no expectation of receiving anything except perhaps a Thank You. out of it. The Vi & Vim Stack Exchange is much better in my opinion (I am a moderator there, so I may be biased). We actually had one user being a condescending prick for a while, so we kicked him off. The site has been much better ever since. That's another issue with this garbage. You get cases of Oh, you're not violating any rules, but you're being mean by my own idea and since we have accounts and lasting reputations and I've been observing you, I've decided you're banned just because.; I'm accustomed to the old-fashioned notion of having real rules that are enforced consistently; you can't moderate anonymous messages by any other means. So, in closing, you're likely only asking a question on Stack Overflow if you don't know what you're doing. Read a book or check the standards, instead. If your language doesn't have a standard or good books, learn a real language. If your standard is a pile of garbage, as the WWW is, then this would actually be a decent use of this tribal knowledge sharing, but the better solution is to avoid the garbage standard to start with. I could refine this message, but I'm not particularly concerned. Surely I'm not the only one here who thinks similarly.
• throwawayjimjam 7y ago
  Throwaway for reasons that will become obvious in this comment. Stack Overflow could easily be exchanged with HN for some of the OP’s points. I posted my first HN comment ever this morning after years of reading. I saw an interesting Show HN and decided to chip in my two cents. Suffice it to say that the content of the comment was on-topic and conscientious (if the tone of this post may serve as any indication). Checking back within minutes, I had a karma of -1. Seeing as how new members start with a karma of 1, and posting gives you 1, this means I had been downvoted three times within those few minutes. This affected me much deeper than I could have imagined. Having lurked on HN threads for a matter of years now upvoting insightful or illuminating comments, I found it jarring for my thoughts to be disqualified so quickly and thoroughly. My karma was not just rendered inert, but actively negative, draining. This activated in me all manner of imposter syndrome and shame. Worse, though, was this total sense of helplessness, this feeling that as even a noob I have to be in on the secret handshake lest I be branded as someone who doesn’t get it. I later combed through HN looking for general patterns in downvoting, and for every off-topic, non-contributory post was one like “depression is just the natural response to oppression” or any of the variations of “me too” that were spared a downvote. This helped me shift my thinking on this. I realized it was less about being on the outside of the exclusive club, and more about having been caught in the gears of the machinery that allows beginners to have experiences like this. It doesn’t make me feel better having reached a conclusion like this, and only makes me less likely to try again, but for the hope that the smattering of comments in this thread forming a connection between OP’s SO experience with HN starts a real conversation about this.
• scrame 7y ago
  Stack Overflow did a competent job at a community Q&A site, and marketed it well. I think the downside of it was that it was developed in the age of 'gamification', so it has a ton of badges and incentives for participating, but it incentivizes the wrong things. It's still miles better than expertsexchange.com (the hyphen site), but is very biased towards first answers for doing kids homework. The majority of questions I've asked there are when I seriously can't get to the bottom of a bug, and generally the answers aren't helpful like "you need to restructure your application". Its value is really in simple, dumb answers, which as the author points out, is very useful when you have to jump between languages and don't quite remember the right idiom for pushing something onto an "array" in PHP vs using a stack elsewhere. Like a lot of other web2.0 sites from the era, the incentive with reputation and badges is very effective at creating a community of people who want those points, but also offers a perverse incentive of racing to answer the easiest questions quickly. Unless that question has been determined by the community to be low quality (in the case of the infinite loop homework question referenced in the article). Like a lot of community sites where engagement gives you more privileges, there ends up being a meta-community of people with power dictating the tone and direction of the site, even if that is orthogonal to the actual goal of the site. The other issue is that for a software dev Q&A site, it can be very hard to find / suss out current info. If I'm looking for an issue migrating to Hibernate 5, and the most popular answers are something using the XML configs and migrating to hibernate 3 from 2012, that's not really helpful, and I don't think the tagging/search combo from 2008 can filter for that. I will say this, it seems to have avoided the tech forum pitfall of: "I'm getting this error, can anyone help? Edit: nm, figured it out."
• kzrdude 7y ago
  One thing I can't stand on SO are the people who do everything to write up an answer to a question according to the rules and standards, and want upvotes, while refusing to upvote the question they are answering because "it's not up to standard", basically not good enough.
  • umvi 7y ago
    One thing I can't stand on SO are the people who ask low effort questions, get upvotes and high quality answers, and don't reciprocate. They say "thanks" as a comment and disappear without upvoting or accepting any of the answers.
• waisbrot 7y ago
  Every year I see a post complaining about how unfriendly Stack Overflow is, how their pet question got downvoted so unfairly, and how Stack Overflow is dying. Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying. But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. And when I can't find an answer anywhere and I ask on SO I usually get a good answer quickly. (And when I don't I'm probably completely out of luck.) Stack Overflow provides clear guidance on how to ask a good question. (https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask) As someone who occasionally answers questions there, I do feel annoyed when someone clearly didn't take any time or effort. The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what? If they just said what they tried ("I expected it in `go help list` but didn't find it"), I think it would have been fine. The second question I don't see why anyone would want that on the site. There's 1001 Github pages of common interview questions and answers that are more interesting and better written. Who could this be useful for other than the rest of that particular CS class? Why do I want to help someone I've never met cheat at a class I don't know about for free?
  • DanBC 7y ago
    > . Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying. But even Stack Overflow agrees, which is why they keep having projects to improve the site for new users.
    • eitland 7y ago
      and it seems to work somewhat : Lately I've seen less abuse and I've even seen people corrected when they tried to abuse people who answered questions in good faith or similar.
    • crispyambulance 7y ago
      > ...which is why they keep having projects to improve the site for new users. I've noticed that. Unfortunately, there's a sizeable contingent that actively rejects any attempt at softening the hard edges for new users (or effectively anyone that dares ask a question, really). They're so tightly wound-up about what they perceive as "the rules" that they can't bring themselves to have any empathy for anyone who violates the rules, as they inflexibly interpret them. You can sometimes see them take it out on meta with harsh rhetoric. SO as resource is so huge and influential. I expect its community dynamics to someday be researched at length by social scientists. There's a lot of interesting things going on in there. Maybe we can learn something from it.
• blt 7y ago
  I think a big cause of SO's unpleasantness is the directive to eliminate duplicate questions. Judging whether two questions are duplicate has a lot of gray area, and most people seem too eager to hit the button. It's frustrating when someone marks your question as duplicate based on their own flawed understanding of what you asked. What is the harm in having multiple similar questions on the site? As the passive reader, it's no big deal to look through two or three similar pages. A massive academic field, Information Retrieval, gives us many sophisticated tools to rank similar chunks of information by relevance. As the number of duplicates increases, all possible ways of asking the question will be covered. When someone new comes to ask the same question, they'll see at least one duplicate in the real time results for "possible duplicates" as they type. So I don't think we need to worry about hundreds of duplicates.
  • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    The problem, as I see it, with duplicates is it leaves questions with poor answers when better answers already exist for the same question. For example I've recently been looking at a problem with /boot on the AskUbuntu SO site. There are multiple answers for the question of what to do when one has a lot of old kernels filling up your /boot (not the actual problem I had); one question is relatively well handled and has several "answers" including good answers (IMO). But other questions that aren't linked up to this particular one have some of the poorer answers, or lack the breadth of the canonical question page and so might lead people to do things that aren't optimal or leave them unable to boot their system. The problem with that is that often questions fall in to a looser grouping where the same answers apply, or very nearly to a group of questions but the questions aren't really identical. SO's current system is maybe a least worst approach? I'm not sure one can tell with out trying alternatives.
    • blt 7y ago
      When duplicate is detected/flagged, let the author of the newer question know, and they can decide whether or not to delete it?
• didibus 7y ago
  Okay, I read the meta page about the question the author says is responsible for them being very disappointed in SO here: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/318482/is-there-a-better-way-to-deal-with-low-quality-questions-that-have-a-bounty-atta https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/318482/is-there-a-b... And if you look at the 3rd answers, it mentions a bounty fraud ring. Woa! Is that a thing? If it is, this is a hard problem to tackle. Relax the rules, increase fraud, strengthen the rules, impact normal users. Good luck SO
• isu 7y ago
  Can confirm such issues, but I noticed it's the problem of some particular users/moderators who sit on Go channel. I haven't seen so many negative questions on other channels.
• jshowa3 7y ago
  If I was just starting out and I asked a question about how to loop a greeting message and it got downvoted almost 50 times, I'd feel like a piece of crap. So congrats, SO. You finally got your community. I'm honestly disappointed myself because I remember, fondly, how difficult it was for me to figure this stuff out on my own before SO even existed.
• afapx 7y ago
  When you have these types of issues, you should post about them on Meta Stack Overflow. That's where improvements for the site are discussed.
• dave1999x 7y ago
  I joined Stack Overflow on day 1 and I've found it very useful. You could argue that despite its flaws it has successfully achieved its goals. Stack Overflow is a great example of gamification. The reason for fatigue is not because of downvotes, but because it is no longer "fun". It's done. There is nothing left to add unless you want to jump on new technologies.
• dirtylowprofile 7y ago
  Was an avid contributor to the site way back (I even won there contest back then with tumbler and shirt swag) but the site is very hostile now. SO took a very long time to address this one but now it is too little too late. Very arrogant of them.
• meerita 7y ago
  What kind of replacement, Stack Overflow has? I never saw something similar, more curated that would please these people...
• yakubin 7y ago
  I get that people can take being downvoted personally. (I sometimes do.) And sure, downvoting something that already has -10 points is mean and doesn't serve anything. But being so protective of others in this regard, trying to protect them from receiving negative evaluations from people (random people from the internet you don't care about, no less!) is too much. I think that thick skin is something to be cultivated. Sure the other guy is mean, but if you feel so bad about it, then you should work on where your self-worth comes from. I'm not saying it's easy. From personal experience, I would say that it may very well be the case that you spend too much time focused on just this one thing (let's say computers) and so lack distance. Perhaps something else. Find out. Work on it.
• tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  Maybe hide downvotes and effects thereof of new questions for a certain limited duration, unless the downvoter comments. The downvoter would see a warning, possibly an encouragement to post and be friendly, and the downvote would eventually count. The exact duration that's best would be unique per site and question. It should depend on how many active users the stack exchange has, the length of the posters account exists, and how many "quick downvoters" attack the question within the first X minutes. Quick downvoters could be defined as users that downvote more than X questions that have appeared on the site for less than X minutes.
• dlphn___xyz 7y ago
  i like how SO takes moderating so seriously- you need to keep a certain standard otherwise you turn into quora or reddit.
• nimblegorilla 7y ago
  Their reputation system is the worst. I'm by no means a power user, but I've asked and answered some questions on the main overflow site. If I go to any of the subforums I have to start over with a reputation of zero and "re-earn" privileges. No thanks. Another problem is their aggressive pruning of questions. There have been dozens of times where I've found something relevant via google and found the question was locked for being off-topic or opinion based.
• SmileyRedBall 7y ago
  https://arp242.net/stackoverflow.html https://arp242.net/stackoverflow.html ‘What prompted this post was a basic but valid question getting downvoted to -4:’ “Is there a way to list all standard Go packages? I have a list of packages and I want to figure out if this is a standard package.” ‘Seems like a pretty valid question to me, so why is it downvoted to -4?’ Sounds very familiar, not that anyone round here would engage in such. I think it's because people see any kind of questioning as a personal attack on them. Or long-term-posters acquire the delusion that it is their personal fiefdom.
• juped 7y ago
  Pretty much every time I search for Stack Overflow type questions online I find a good answer on Stack Overflow. And pretty much every time I find a good answer on Stack Overflow, it's heaped with derision from Stack Overflow users and the system. I can't remember the last time I landed on a question that wasn't "closed" for "low quality" or whatever the various negative treatments are there, and piled with negative comments and possibly a snarky answer. This doesn't give me a good impression of Stack Overflow, a site I've never signed up for or felt interested in signing up for.
• lordleft 7y ago
  Why does there need to be a downvote system at all? Why not just flag a question if you think it's a poor fit for SO? I don't get why anyone would want to pile onto a poorly expressed question.
• wrd83 7y ago
  I wonder if the social bubble so often blamed for bias could be used for stack overflow. Imagine every user would only see the relevant questions rather than all of them. I guess this would remove the need for administration to a certain degree and perhaps then the frustrations and maybe in the long run the hostility. Of course this is a bit of a unicorn wish. Heading towards that could safe the community a bit.
• Trias11 7y ago
  My concern is more about moderators nazis closing relevant and interesting questions for their own reasons. It's been countless times i derived value from closed questions, luckily too late for moderators to do their own power round tantrum trip to disable it.
• harry8 7y ago
  view source <!-- If large amounts of people find you hostile and abrasive then you almost certainly are. -->
• arkh 7y ago
  > As if you need to be a dick to maintain “quality”. Maybe you can't. Being nice does not scale: being nice mean you take more time to answer and try to make people not offended. With an internationnal audience, good luck not finding something which won't offend someone (hint: not everyone shares the USA values). You can be nice in the PR and issue and wiki of your small projects with limited number of people around. If you want quality on a site serving millions of people? You'll have to cut to the chase. And some people (the author being one) will take it as being a dick. Some other people would take offense to the use of the expression "being a dick" for something negative.
  • tahoemph999 7y ago
    You have this backwards. Being mean doesn't scale. A small number of mean people can poison a large part of the community. That drives off future contributors at a high rate. Being reasonable does scale. When somebody isn't following reasonable guidelines it takes one person to point them at the FAQ, help them understand what they did wrong and why it could be done better next time, etc. One response[1] to point back in the right direction. Low investment for a good outcome. If more people decide to add like reasoning for why the question/comment/answer was off then more energy was spent to convince the original person that this is a hostile forum to use. Now you end up with more energy being spent to achieve a lesser effect. That is a lower ROI. There is a difference between being concise (cut to the chase) and being rude. And yea, language differences can blur that line. But it is a spectrum. Just 'cuz not everybody will think you are being NICE doesn't mean it is fine to be a jerk. [1] Due to the distributed nature of these platforms you can end up with a small multiple of simultaneous responses. Fine, most people get this is a possibility. One good way some people deal with this is to not knee jerk response to everything. Sadly that has a the effect of having the jerks do more of the responding.
    • arkh 7y ago
      > When somebody isn't following reasonable guidelines it takes one person to point them at the FAQ, help them understand what they did wrong and why it could be done better next time, etc. If you haven't I encourage you doing that for some "low skill" tags on SO 1 or 2 hours per day. Php, js, css, java should be good examples.
• gerbilly 7y ago
  Because SO rewards you for answering questions, there is an incentive to convince the person to change the question to something that is easier to answer. This is why you see posters being badgered to change or recast their question so much. Sure many questions are ill posed, but there is a lot of pedantic meta discussion¹ on the site centred on the precise form of the question. 1: The word pettifogging comes to mind.
• cwyers 7y ago
  Stack Overflow announced changes to the site intended to help combat these issues less than a week ago: https://dev.to/stackoverflow/what-s-in-the-works-at-stack-overflow-improving-feedback-for-all-users-2ik3 https://dev.to/stackoverflow/what-s-in-the-works-at-stack-ov... I think the criticisms of Stack Overflow in general capture real problems, but I think people underestimate how difficult it is to enact solutions to these problems at scale, and they also underestimate the magnitude of the problems that led Stack Overflow to this place to begin with.
• qwerty456127 7y ago
  I agree 1000%. I'd even donate money to support an initiative to fight this bullshit. Valid questions downvoted, interesting questions with very useful and highly-upvoted answers closed and deleted (thanks to my karma I can see them an I'm amazed) for stupid reasons. I never donwvote anything but spam and offence, I don't care about what do the rules say when reason says the opposite and I usually upvote just to oppose downvotes.
• neves 7y ago
  Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.
  • cptaj 7y ago
    Preach, my brother! SO is on Wikipedia level of blessings to humanity. I wish every profession out there could have a resource like this. People often share negative experiences asking question in SO but really, I can't fathom how that could happen. Just follow the composition rules, take a few minutes to write and research your question and you will be fine. Don't be so lazy. If you have a question that hasn't already been asked, its worth it to take the time, follow the rules and do it properly. Don't think of it as YOUR question, its the community's question.
    • Annatar 7y ago
      "SO is on Wikipedia level of blessings to humanity." I think it's time to pick up my toys and go home. And never return here.
      • blaser-waffle 7y ago
        That's probably for the best
  • blisterpeanuts 7y ago
    Actually, you could perfectly well find answers in the pre-Internet times; you just had to dig deeper, grub through more books, talk to more colleagues, and experiment more.
    • squiggleblaz 7y ago
      Well yeah, but you could also travel from England to Australia in the pre-aeroplane days. Today, you can do it in about 24-36 hours. Back then it took months. Isn't that an improvement?
• surfsvammel 7y ago
  I love SO. Believe I have been using it my entire career (10+ years). But even after all these years and all this experience I am hesitant to ask questions at SO. It can be quite terrifying.
• simonblack 7y ago
  Why do SO proponents feel it's smart to answer questions with 'this question is closed because dupe' or some other useless bullshit answer. It's no harder to say 'this question is closed. You will find that the best answer can be found at <Stack Overflow link>'
• iandanforth 7y ago
  Is there a max down level here on HN? I feel like if comments didn't fade out I would have lost a lot more points a couple times.
• toadi 7y ago
  Sometimes I just have a feeling it's about language. I see it a lot in the software community (and Agile). You should say it that way because the other way is too (passive) aggressive or not PC. SE is a worldwide profession and the internet makes this true. For some people English is a second or even third language. Not always constructing the right sentences, not understanding subtleness all the time. As long as SO is useful for me I will use it. I want to solve problems. I'm not there for the warm community. If SO fails because there is no warm community and this is needed to succeed. I assume another site will get popular where people will contribute to answers that are useful for they community in general.
• turk73 7y ago
  SO has helped my career dramatically, but it has its warts. One thing is that as software products evolve, answers to questions change, but when you search you get all the old stuff, too. It is often very hard to discern what is current for a fast-moving technology. There's this thing called "experience" that SO does not provide--one must know how to make use of answers or be able to interpret them. I see too many copy & paste coders who try to solve problems they don't even understand. At one point I became a member on SO so I could answer questions and give back. Wow, that became a frustrating experience! I was not prepared for the many jerks down voting my answers long after they were made (sometimes a version of something changes or a preferred approach changes, but at the time of the answer my response was correct). And then there was the incessant arguments about things that the person clearly had no professional understanding of. It made me realize that Europe(?) must be full of "programming hobbyists" who seem to have never worked a day in their lives. God bless them! But whoever they were, they don't even know when they're wrong or had any shared perspective about my answers, which told me clearly they didn't actually work as developers. I have personally given tech interviews to hundreds of senior-level developers, I know who is on the level and who is bullshitting. The world needs what SO provides, but somehow the format needs to evolve, become curated and become an archive, a trove with "freshness dates" or something. Otherwise the site will lose most of its relevance as time progresses.
• hgoel 7y ago
  SO is great as long as the answers aren't some form of "Why are you even trying to solve this problem?" Or "Just use this library instead of doing it yourself" without any actual answer included. They should atleast be something like "this is what you can do/look into, BUT ...".
• sireat 7y ago
  What's worse is the hypocrisy of these active SO moderators. I spent time double checking my answer and answered a question on difference between 2 different web architectures only to see it closed for being too "broad" and the "right" answer being already on Google #1. The person who closed the question had a top rated SO answer for a trivial C# declaration which already had a perfect #2 answer on MSDN. https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-3.htm https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-3.htm comes to mind here
• Annatar 7y ago
  He calls it "Meta effect", I call it "Hacker" "News" effect. So he's had it, he picked up his toys and he's going home. Good on him. I cannot think of a better thing to do, because this is the eternal September.
• ykevinator 7y ago
  So has a snob problem. People elevate themselves by over zealous downvoting. It's toxic. The site is 50% of what it could be but the a-hole factor sucks so much value.
• greyhair 7y ago
  This rant reminds me of how I felt at the end times of usenet in the mid-late 90s'. Usenet groups were awesome, until they were overrun by spammers and angry egos. Then I had to go. The problem that others have pointed out, if reasonable people fatigue out and leave, it self-sorts for the people that love to show how smart they are, or what big angry egos they have, and it spirals down from there. On one of your points, I have had the grand blessing of working with a number of people way smarter than me. And the nearly universal quality of really smart people is that they never point out how smart they are. Oh there are outliers that will constantly remind people of that fact, but by and large, the really (really) smart people never bring that up.
• HeavyStorm 7y ago
  This looks like a tantrum. Sure, given time any web community becomes (at least a bit) toxic. But the idea is to have more good people than evil trolls, and that's how it works, questions that are good get more upvotes than down, eventually.
• bradenb 7y ago
  I think it's interesting that a lot of people are complaining about SO and saying how other systems would be more effective, yet nobody is trying to create a better SO. Maybe it's actually just a much harder problem than people realize.
• sankalp_sans 7y ago
  This made me visit SO and respond to a "noob" query right now. I hadn't answered any SO questions in probably over a year.
• ioconnor 7y ago
  Quit posting to stackoverflow perhaps a decade ago. Same is true with github. I'll use information from both sources but no way will I ever contribute anything to them.
• javaJake 7y ago
  From my experience, this behavior is common when volunteers answer questions. Personally, I think this behavior that the author is seeing is because volunteer work is thankless and tiring (even with karma) and when you've seen a hundred questions and answered 20 of them the same way, it's easy to fall into the trap of feeling lazy or angry, and get aggressive either way. This is the behavior I quickly learned to expect and brace myself against whenever I asked a question on IRC in the 2000's. I'd be mocked, the reasons behind my questions would be probed, and eventually I'd get an answer. I realized that If I asked an extremely specific question and, if someone probed, immediately provided full background, the mocking and probing would end, and I'd either get a shrug, or an answer. This is not intended to excuse the behavior. I have just stopped being surprised when I see it.
• tony2016 7y ago
  Stackoverflow is an awesome place to get help for programming questions. Except for the morons who roam in it downvoting all kinds of questions and they never leave a comment to as why they are downvoting. Even when requested to. Just recently I posted a question in meta for why one of my questions was being downvoted. That question in meta got a flurry of downvotes! Stupid moronic downvoters. It is a hostile place but I will use it as long as I get answers.