5 ms·

I agree that when I search for a question online I very often find a SO question with my exact problem. But it seems like almost EVERY SINGLE TIME, the question

by krilly 7y ago

I agree that when I search for a question online I very often find a SO question with my exact problem. But it seems like almost EVERY SINGLE TIME, the question has been locked for being unconstructive, off-topic, (wrongly) a duplicate, whatever. Despite having hundreds of upvotes and tens of thousands of views. So this page is at the top of the google search results for the query and it can never be updated with new info or given a better answer. I don't know anything about how the SO community works, but I suspect they resent the site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine results, and would rather all it's users to be active members of the community. I also think (and have seen) that the community dislikes questions that are answered in documentation or elsewhere on the internet. I often see comments on questions I arrive at through google saying 'just google it, here's the first google result it answers your question'. The source given is always inferior, and the SO question, with a much clearer and more concise format, has become the first google result. This seems like a good thing to me, but look, the question's locked. What exactly is the problem with SO being a more comprehensive knowledge store?

protomyth 7y ago
I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers.
- eitland 7y ago
  Problem is a good number of helpful pages has ben locked. Removing it would remove thebonly good answer to that question from the Internet.
  - mentat 7y ago
    Which is the OP's point, that they shouldn't be locked.
    - protomyth 7y ago
      Yep. If it's locked then it shouldn't be useful. If it's locked and useful then there is a problem.
      - eitland 7y ago
        This is the thing we are pointing out: Again and again we found that Stack Overflow would try to get rid of some of the most helpful ages I had found. For a while, more often than not it seemed, if you found a helpful answer it was locked or somehow on its way to destruction. I don't see this as often anymore but I also don't see that many good results in my search engine anymore and I don't know if it is because search engines has become more and more useless or if it is because Stack Overflow deleted a good chunk of the most useful questions they had. Possibly a combination if I had to guess :-/
    - eitland 7y ago
      Here is what OP wrote : > I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers. Something completely different in my opinion.
- kelnos 7y ago
  The problem is that I often land on a locked SO question, and it's actually incredibly helpful, leading me to wonder why it was locked in the first place.
  - protomyth 7y ago
    As mentat pointed out, it shouldn't be locked.
    - kelnos 7y ago
      "Shouldn't" is irrelevant; I run into plenty that are, and it's a shame.
  - shagie 7y ago
    The stack overflow model works well for a certain type of question. Part of this is the reaction to the resources of 2008 - trying to find things on page 15 of the a thread in the Java community forums. While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people interact with it. Still, people asked those questions. The problem is that while they are interesting questions, and everyone wants to answer them - that reduces their value while at the same time putting more work on the community to try to keep it useful. Look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-... and consider the challenge of keeping it useful and relevant. If you were to try to add an answer to that post (if it weren't locked and closed), would you read through all 296 answers to make sure you weren't repeating someone else? Some of these questions were recognized as taking more time of the people trying to maintain the site and focus on the questions that it handles well and were locked. The other option would have been to delete them, but stack overflow tends to have a "we don't delete useful content or break the web" philosophy. There are other sites that handle the types of questions that Stack Overflow doesn't handle well quite well themselves. Quora does anecdotes well. Slant.co does comparisons. And so on.
    - 7y ago
rocqua 7y ago
I mostly hit this locked question thing with recommendations like 'what graph database should I use'. I've found that for simpler straight up programming questions, there is much less locked questions.
jpindar 7y ago
> I suspect they resent the site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine results And yet this is what the creators of the site explicitly wanted it to become.
Nition 7y ago
Love it when you find someone who asked the same question you have, it was locked as a duplicate so no-one could help, and the question it's a "duplicate" of isn't the same.
- scardine 7y ago
  You can flag it for reopening (but you need at least 3k rep IINM).
  - Const-me 7y ago
    I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community. Apparently, SO community is trained for years to close vote every question they don’t understand. Once I was really motivated to reopen a question. It was an interesting question, it had 2 well written answers, one of them mine. Also it was from a new user account. I’ve spent hours trying to get or reopened, wrote questions on meta, wrote many more messages in chats, edited the question so I’m 100% sure it fits the site. It got reopened, then closed within days, with the exact same reason “too broad”. https://stackoverflow.com/q/57323981 https://stackoverflow.com/q/57323981 This discouraged me from answering questions on that site. I don’t do web development, I don’t program Java, JS or Python. But the majority of SO community are web developers. The questions I find good and interesting, they find too broad and unclear what’s asked.
    - coryfklein 7y ago
      > I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community. Actually, that's _exactly_ how you change the attitude of the community, by making your voice heard. Sure you as an individual aren't going to override everyone else, but if you don't voice your opinion then your complaint about other folks loses some of its ground.
      - Const-me 7y ago
        I answer questions on SO mostly for fun. I find it entertaining to answer hard questions. Sometimes I learn interesting things while I write an answer. Other times people post interesting comments to my answers. Flagging, appealing closes, and other BS politics is not fun at all. Unfortunately, over the last couple of years consensus, policies, and/or something else has changed. The questions that I find interesting to answer (hard ones, and related to my area of expertise which is desktop development, 3D graphics, SIMD, CAD/CAM and a few others) are now either too broad, or unclear what’s asking. A few times the close voters closed the question even before I’m able to write an answer. I’m probably too old and too lazy to make my voice heard. Apparently, web site owners now want SO to specialize on web development, and on deadly boring questions about it, like “how do I format date and time in PHP”, where an answer can be found within 2 minutes of using a search engine. SO is not my personal web site. If that’s what owners want, so be it.
viraptor 7y ago
> I don't know anything about how the SO community works, but I suspect they resent the site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine results, and would rather all it's users to be active members of the community. Why do you think that? I guess I'm a member of that community and really don't care how people reach SO. The site is also saturated to some extent now... There's a good chance that your question's already been asked, so I don't expect the site will get many new active users really. Maybe with some new languages/frameworks becoming popular - but if you're writing C for example, you're very unlikely to get actively involved in SO at all. It's still a good reference place for C. > the community dislikes questions that are answered in documentation or elsewhere on the internet "the community" is not an uniform blob. On one hand side it's tiring - if someone didn't bother to do a single obvious search, why should I spend time writing the answer. On the other, if you do answer that, the are rules about including actual answer and not just linking to a document which may disappear in the future. > the question has been locked for being unconstructive, off-topic, (wrongly) a duplicate, whatever You can vote to reopen. Or if you can't, you can flag for moderator attention and say why it should be reopened.
- someguydave 7y ago
  >why should I spend time writing the answer There's a world of difference between über (rare and awesome) active users ignoring "tiring" questions and actively downvoting and closing them, which is what the parent comment is complaining about.

by krilly 7y ago

protomyth 7y ago

I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers.

eitland 7y ago
Problem is a good number of helpful pages has ben locked. Removing it would remove thebonly good answer to that question from the Internet.
- mentat 7y ago
  Which is the OP's point, that they shouldn't be locked.
  - protomyth 7y ago
    Yep. If it's locked then it shouldn't be useful. If it's locked and useful then there is a problem.
    - eitland 7y ago
      This is the thing we are pointing out: Again and again we found that Stack Overflow would try to get rid of some of the most helpful ages I had found. For a while, more often than not it seemed, if you found a helpful answer it was locked or somehow on its way to destruction. I don't see this as often anymore but I also don't see that many good results in my search engine anymore and I don't know if it is because search engines has become more and more useless or if it is because Stack Overflow deleted a good chunk of the most useful questions they had. Possibly a combination if I had to guess :-/
  - eitland 7y ago
    Here is what OP wrote : > I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers. Something completely different in my opinion.
kelnos 7y ago
The problem is that I often land on a locked SO question, and it's actually incredibly helpful, leading me to wonder why it was locked in the first place.
- protomyth 7y ago
  As mentat pointed out, it shouldn't be locked.
  - kelnos 7y ago
    "Shouldn't" is irrelevant; I run into plenty that are, and it's a shame.
- shagie 7y ago
  The stack overflow model works well for a certain type of question. Part of this is the reaction to the resources of 2008 - trying to find things on page 15 of the a thread in the Java community forums. While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people interact with it. Still, people asked those questions. The problem is that while they are interesting questions, and everyone wants to answer them - that reduces their value while at the same time putting more work on the community to try to keep it useful. Look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-c https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-... and consider the challenge of keeping it useful and relevant. If you were to try to add an answer to that post (if it weren't locked and closed), would you read through all 296 answers to make sure you weren't repeating someone else? Some of these questions were recognized as taking more time of the people trying to maintain the site and focus on the questions that it handles well and were locked. The other option would have been to delete them, but stack overflow tends to have a "we don't delete useful content or break the web" philosophy. There are other sites that handle the types of questions that Stack Overflow doesn't handle well quite well themselves. Quora does anecdotes well. Slant.co does comparisons. And so on.
  - 7y ago

rocqua 7y ago

I mostly hit this locked question thing with recommendations like 'what graph database should I use'. I've found that for simpler straight up programming questions, there is much less locked questions.

jpindar 7y ago

> I suspect they resent the site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine results And yet this is what the creators of the site explicitly wanted it to become.

Nition 7y ago

Love it when you find someone who asked the same question you have, it was locked as a duplicate so no-one could help, and the question it's a "duplicate" of isn't the same.

scardine 7y ago
You can flag it for reopening (but you need at least 3k rep IINM).
- Const-me 7y ago
  I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community. Apparently, SO community is trained for years to close vote every question they don’t understand. Once I was really motivated to reopen a question. It was an interesting question, it had 2 well written answers, one of them mine. Also it was from a new user account. I’ve spent hours trying to get or reopened, wrote questions on meta, wrote many more messages in chats, edited the question so I’m 100% sure it fits the site. It got reopened, then closed within days, with the exact same reason “too broad”. https://stackoverflow.com/q/57323981 https://stackoverflow.com/q/57323981 This discouraged me from answering questions on that site. I don’t do web development, I don’t program Java, JS or Python. But the majority of SO community are web developers. The questions I find good and interesting, they find too broad and unclear what’s asked.
  - coryfklein 7y ago
    > I can flag, I can appeal, but it doesn’t change the attitude of the community. Actually, that's _exactly_ how you change the attitude of the community, by making your voice heard. Sure you as an individual aren't going to override everyone else, but if you don't voice your opinion then your complaint about other folks loses some of its ground.
    - Const-me 7y ago
      I answer questions on SO mostly for fun. I find it entertaining to answer hard questions. Sometimes I learn interesting things while I write an answer. Other times people post interesting comments to my answers. Flagging, appealing closes, and other BS politics is not fun at all. Unfortunately, over the last couple of years consensus, policies, and/or something else has changed. The questions that I find interesting to answer (hard ones, and related to my area of expertise which is desktop development, 3D graphics, SIMD, CAD/CAM and a few others) are now either too broad, or unclear what’s asking. A few times the close voters closed the question even before I’m able to write an answer. I’m probably too old and too lazy to make my voice heard. Apparently, web site owners now want SO to specialize on web development, and on deadly boring questions about it, like “how do I format date and time in PHP”, where an answer can be found within 2 minutes of using a search engine. SO is not my personal web site. If that’s what owners want, so be it.

viraptor 7y ago

> I don't know anything about how the SO community works, but I suspect they resent the site's status as a kind of reference to be accessed through search engine results, and would rather all it's users to be active members of the community. Why do you think that? I guess I'm a member of that community and really don't care how people reach SO. The site is also saturated to some extent now... There's a good chance that your question's already been asked, so I don't expect the site will get many new active users really. Maybe with some new languages/frameworks becoming popular - but if you're writing C for example, you're very unlikely to get actively involved in SO at all. It's still a good reference place for C. > the community dislikes questions that are answered in documentation or elsewhere on the internet "the community" is not an uniform blob. On one hand side it's tiring - if someone didn't bother to do a single obvious search, why should I spend time writing the answer. On the other, if you do answer that, the are rules about including actual answer and not just linking to a document which may disappear in the future. > the question has been locked for being unconstructive, off-topic, (wrongly) a duplicate, whatever You can vote to reopen. Or if you can't, you can flag for moderator attention and say why it should be reopened.

someguydave 7y ago
>why should I spend time writing the answer There's a world of difference between über (rare and awesome) active users ignoring "tiring" questions and actively downvoting and closing them, which is what the parent comment is complaining about.