11 ms·

Saying thanks: testing a new Reactions feature

71 points by bprasanna 6y ago

haolez 6y ago
I wonder what happens when you have a successful product that doesn't need any more tinkering but you still have a lot of people working on it. Maybe this is it :)
- hmu1 6y ago
  Continuous improvement is what happens...
  - shagie 6y ago
    The people who "got" the community on SO and how it worked have long since left or had their ability to advocate get squashed in the corporate structure. The people who are there with influence on direction have a very different view of what SO (and the rest of SE) should be. Most employees at corporate do not use any of the public sites in any way, shape or form and are disconnected about what the users and curators there need. And so, you get continuous improvement - on a vision that the unpaid volunteers who maintain the sites feel is wrong or counter productive.
- maybeOneDay 6y ago
  Stackoverflow have pretty solid metrics that show large numbers of users find the site unwelcoming. Just because you aren't one of those people doesn't mean that other people can't benefit from changes like this.
  - haolez 6y ago
    They had metrics for the "thank you" stuff as well.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - maire 6y ago
    The expectation of feeling welcomed is part of the problem. Is stack overflow an information sharing community or a social community? Is it wikipedia for programmers or reddit? The fact that most people don't comment at all indicates that most people want it to be a wikipedia for programmers. Some people want it to be a social community.
    - detaro 6y ago
      Wikipedia is a social community too, as soon as you do more than reading articles. And has well-documented issues in that regard, which limit its quality and who contributes to it. That's not the dichotomy you think it is.
    - majewsky 6y ago
      Even if it is a Q&A site where most users are read-only, it's still very bad to be sending the signal to the lurkers that if you ever ask a question, there's a high chance you're gonna get shat upon.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      Wikipedia can be pretty hostile to new users as well (especially in languages with fewer speakers). Some people think they own articles and are very territorial about them. The result is that domain experts are scared away while the prolific editors are those who are good at arcane formatting rules, editing conventions etc.
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    Sure, it's unwelcoming, like most support forums. But how does having more ways to upvote an answer address this at all? The problem with stackoverflow isn't lack of feedback.
    - duncanawoods 6y ago
      It's kind of crazy for something claiming to be a "community" to crack down on basic human niceties and politeness. If you say "thank you", your comment will be deleted. At least on a standard forum, you can say "hello" and "thank you".
      - shagie 6y ago
        A forum is for discussion. The early adopters of Stack Overflow saw it as something closer to Wikipedia. A source of technical documentation. This still exists in the closest thing to a mission statement that one can find: https://stackoverflow.com/tour https://stackoverflow.com/tour > This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat. One similarly doesn't see "hello" or "thank you" in encyclopedias or technical documentation. There are places for human interaction (chat in particular) - but in a question, answer, or comments it isn't useful. Consider that the summary part of a question that shows up shows the first line or so of the text. > Hello. I am a new user with Java but I know C#. I have searched everywhere but I cannot ... Compared to: > When using Java, I am trying to use a stream to select some data and write it out as a file ... For comments, this has been looked at in the past - https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204402/hide-trivial-comments https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204402/hide-trivial... and https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/210265/how-can-we-measure-the-cost-of-displaying-comments https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/210265/how-can-we-m... Having comments - especially trivial comments - means that voting doesn't happen as much and that then impacts the ability to get a signal to curate on.
      - bonoboTP 6y ago
        You have to understand how Stack Overflow came to be. It grew out of the frustration with forums (phpBB, etc.): they were filled with chitchat, back and forth and the solution was hidden somewhere in page 5 of 8. You were coming from Google and didn't care about who posted the stuff, their avatar, their signature etc, you wanted a solution to an immediate problem. Hence the Q&A format was born with upvoting the best answer to the top and deemphasizing the back-and-forth into comments. It got popular exactly because it cut through all the niceties and fluff and allowed you to get to the point quick. Some people don't share the preference for this, they would like a social community site instead of the above description. Instead of building their own site with that in mind, they want to bend SO away from its original goal. Predictably, the original people will probably move to a new site. It's a cycle: power users create a place, it gets popular because it's high quality, then it gets run over by lazy people and rules get adjusted to be welcoming and inclusive, the original people are pushed out, the quality decreases. When the originals create a new site, they will now try to be even less inclusive than the first time to avoid the same "eternal September" effect.
woogley 6y ago
Some pretty thorough discussion on Meta: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/398367/feature-test-thank-you-reaction https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/398367/feature-test...
- gortok 6y ago
  Also one of the answers on that question was deleted by an employee (! — itself an unusual event) for satirically opposing the change. More information here. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/398507/16587 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/398507/16587 Overall, the biggest complaint against this is: 1. Not enough people vote on questions or answers. We know this because of the metrics of people who visit a page vs. those that vote vs. those that comment. I used to know these metrics since I was a Stack Overflow community elected moderator, but no longer have access to them since I resigned in October of last year: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427/16587 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427/16587 Anyway, the goal of this change is to reduce the number of 'thanks' comments left (and to hopefully make people feel like Stack Overflow is more than 'just' a Q&A site, that it has, itself, a personality that is welcoming); but the problem is that it doesn't address -- and indeed may even exacerbate the issue with not enough people voting. Voting is what helps ensure bad questions are tended to, good questions are rewarded, and good answers are rewarded (and as a positive reinforcement mechanism for people to post more answers). If people aren't voting, the Q&A model breaks down rather quickly. Which is Bad™. The hypothesis against is if people have reactions, why would they need to vote? Naturally, the people in the community who depend on votes to help their work (the curators) are pretty pissed off that at best this will distract from tackling the issue, and at worst will actively disrupt trying to fix the issue. There has been a tendency over the past year or so especially for Stack Overflow (The company) to not listen to its curators (it's been going on for much longer than that, but came to a head a year ago); and this is another instance in a long series of instances where at best Stack Overflow (the company) is tone deaf to the issues its community faces.
  - teruakohatu 6y ago
    It seems some basic NLP could detect a "thanks" comment and ask the user to vote. Or do they already do this?
mangatmodi 6y ago
How is it different from upvoting an answer? People who want to write will still write thanks, I already found some posts on the home page with thanks comment and the feature. Also what about the change in reputation when being thanked? It should be there in the blog post.
- wodenokoto 6y ago
  My understanding is that these are pure vanity. Doesn't require any reputation to give, doesn't give any reputation either, nor does it sort your post.
  - mangatmodi 6y ago
    I went to meta-discussion and learned more details. Most of the thanks comment are written by folks who already have upvote powers. Anyways its a fun read. Grab popkorn and go through it :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kjhughes 6y ago
For a long time now, StackOverflow has lost its way. Their voting system began as an outstanding mechanism to separate the QA wheat from the chaff. It evolved and improved organically. It provided a much needed means to surface the best questions and answers, and it provided a sort of incentive system, however imperfect, whereby contribution quality could be quantified. Then something happened. I think a major part of the problem was that leadership lost its way in guiding the system's evolution. Rather than continuing to evolve the scoring system to better reflect the quality of contributions, at some point they seemed to adopt the outlook that improvements were futile: It would always be possible to game the system such that scores would never approach true quality of contribution, so why try? I believe this was a mistake. Evolution from there ignored the scoring system. They went off in failed Documentation efforts. They focused on "being nice". They fought with their own volunteer moderators. They seemed to look everywhere else but the origin of their initial strength: Community contribution fairly rated in a manner that allowed good moderation to scale. They should have continued to improve this system to root out the problems of over-eager closure and popularity dominating whatever prefered qualities the community would have liked to have seen measured. An adjunct "thank you" mechanism that's redundant to the voting system is a sign that those in control do not appreciate the merit of, and do not know how to evolve, the voting system.
- k__ 6y ago
  People are always hating on reviews and ratings. I thought about this, why can't we do this like with monitoring. We alreday know that median isn't good enough, so so we look at the 95th or 99th percentile. Can't we do this with ratings too?
  - majewsky 6y ago
    What does x-th percentile mean when you have only one number (the upvote count)?
    - k__ 6y ago
      You have the upvotes and the downvotes.
throwaway4666 6y ago
The main issue I've had with SO, which while anecdotal seems to reflect the sentiment of a lot of people on here whenever the subject is brought up, is that it's infected with the YX problem. Now you guys probably know the XY problem (asking the wrong question X to when you really want to solve the problem Y). The YX problem, on the other hand, goes like this: User: "Hi, how do I do Y?" SO: "Why do you want to do Y?" User: "Because I want to do [use case]" SO: "Are you sure you don't want to do X instead?" User: "No I don't, I have this constraint and this use case so I'm pretty sure this isn't about X and I really want to do Y." SO: "Are you sure this isn't a duplicate of [some question involving X]?" User: "No it's not, the question while similar doesn't have the same constraint or usecase and I have searched SO for a while for questions that specifically involved these and didn't find any so I really need to do Y." SO: "Wow, I can't possibly imagine why you, for a use case you've examined for a while and which I have been made aware of five minutes ago, could possibly want to do Y while not doing X. I don't know and I rest my case. A solution to Y probably doesn't exist anyway." Answerer: "Hi to do Y you have to do this [hacky snippet]" (answer accepted) User: "Cool, thanks!" SO: "This is bad practice and I don't condone it. It shouldn't be upvoted or the accepted answer." -------- Of course this is the optimistic scenario, where the question does get eventually answered.
- kfk 6y ago
  I think we need some kind of long form essay/how-to for this problem. It's a serious issue and I see millions being wasted this way. Point in case, we continue to push dashboarding tools in the analytics industry (Y) while what we really need is a way to better connect data and processes (X). There is a lot of knowledge in a lot of areas, but how do you vet it? Corporate people (me for instance) are stuck either with writing LinkedIn articles or Medium ones, neither of those promote any kind of fair way to measure "good" contributions.
- lucideer 6y ago
  Gotta echo this: this is absolutely the main issue I've had with SO. I'm not sure if this kind of stuff increase recently* or if it's always been an issue that I only began to notice later. I'm also not sure of the cause, nor the solution, but it does seem to indicate a switch from one definition of "education" to another: 1. "helping" users solve problems 2. "schooling" users on what they're doing wrong * I say "recently", but I just checked and it appears I joined SO ~11 years ago and haven't actively used it in ~7 years, so "recently" is probably not the right word...
fbelzile 6y ago
I'm more curious about what caused the recent spike in "thank" showing up in questions and answers. 19% -> 23% in a couple months seems statistically significant. Did the pandemic/lock down cause a slew of newer developers that are generally more appreciative?
- majewsky 6y ago
  Maybe because of home-office they cannot lean to the side and ask their peers, so they rely more on SO instead for basic questions.
  - RMPR 6y ago
    Basic questions which includes writing the whole program for the user https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62517918/how-do-i-make-a-reaction-based-menu-in-discord-py https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62517918/how-do-i-make-a...
    - mark-r 6y ago
      That's not a new problem at all, there have always been people who look at the site as a free code-writing service. Kind of the opposite of the "Thanks" problem are the question askers who complain that you didn't deliver them production-ready code.
- RMPR 6y ago
  >newer developers that are generally more appreciative? For me it's more like: newer developers that doesn't seem to like reading.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
My main issue with SO is that it has become a rather "snippy" place. The "be nice" ethos just means that the nasty is more eloquent. It's now quite painful to ask questions, there, because someone will pretty much always ding it. Usually, you have no idea why, or who. In fact, that happened to me just a day or so ago. Also, I think that downvoters should be notified when the question/answer is edited, so they can review if the downvote still applies. I once trolled a community (not SO) by writing an obviously inflammatory post, getting a gazillion downvotes, then editing it to be very reasonable, so everyone was on record as having downvoted a very decent post. Petty, but fun (They did not have edit records for posts, but you could see what users up/downvoted). I like the idea of a "Thank You" reaction, but that's really just porcine lip gloss. I think that it would be more valuable to require an explanation for a downvote, even if anonymously. I would have no problem telling folks why I downvoted a question or answer (in fact, when I do, I add a comment, mentioning the reason, unless it is blatantly obvious). As is evident by my HN profile, I am making a point of standing behind what I post. I got rid of my last anonymous Internet account months ago. Standing behind my words has helped me to be a bit more careful about what I post, and that's a good thing.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  > My main issue with SO is that it has become a rather "snippy" place. It's also true of other Stack Exchange sites. Sometimes you feel like in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy where you're sent from one site to the other and none of them think it's their job to deal with a question. And I don't mean the low-effort questions, but well written interesting ones that are deemed to broad, too opinion-based, too whatever. There is definitely an effect of territorialism, big egos and rule lawyering going on. As if people were playing a game of spot-the-broken-rule as some intellectual puzzle and going "heureka, there it is, you broke Rule No. 3, gotcha!!". Sites like SO and Wikipedia certainly attract people who get emotionally invested in this role and see themselves as powerful and enjoy feeling better than others. That's why the debate is complicated. There is a problem with trigger happy moderation, but also with low-effort content.
jp1016 6y ago
new comment : thanks for adding the 'thanks' button
eugenekolo 6y ago
The problem with SO is that it tries to be two things. One is a reference/encyclopedia of questions, and answers. And the other is a welcoming place to ask for help. Those two don't seem to line up 100%. It's clear the old school moderators seem to think of SO as a reference, but the company itself wants to view it as a place to seek help.
- identity0 6y ago
  I think that's the great thing about SO. It's a repository of common questions, yet also manages to be great for asking questions as well. A lot of people in this thread seem to hate SO, and I disagree with them. If I ask a question on SO, no matter how obscure of a library or language I'm using, I'll get a response back within a day. And if my question gets flagged for being a duplicate, then I've just been redirected to more resources to solving my problem. It may not be warm and welcoming, but it's very helpful. To be useful, SO doesn't need to be welcoming at all. It needs to be exclusive. If it wasn't elitist, it would be filled with Java programmers pasting 400 lines of code with little explanation. The elitism has caused me to write better questions and to really think about the hypothetical person answering my question. Elitism and helpfulness go hand in hand. If you want to see the horrors of a non-elitist Q&A forum, go check out the Unity forums or any popular Github repository.
IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
I'm Stackoverflow user #823 or so and still in the top 4% of reputation, and...I don't get how the narrative has turned against SO. I visit the site once or twice a day, and probably write two answers per month, which should make a decidedly average user. And for the life of me I could not tell you what people are complaining about? I still find answers there more often than anywhere else, so whatever is supposedly broken doesn't seem to affect the primary function too much. The imaginary points still mostly point in the right direction. If happened to feel they diverged from perfect meritocracy I would try really hard to care about real problems, instead. Failing that, I would hopefully manage not to complain about it too obnoxiously, fearing it would make me look childish. And then, much like Github, they seem to have committed the cardinal sin of tech communities of mildly opining that maybe racism or whatever isn't something they personally want to support with their work, which gets them into all kinds of strange arguments with one sort of people who are obviously not racists but just feeling the urge to defend some grand principle they just came up with, like ethics in game journalism. Github is a very similar example: they single-handedly got millions of people to contribute to open source code, and made working in this ecosystem so much better, compared to source forge and various crappy custom systems that came before it. StackOverflow similarly replaced the most obnoxious, google-spamming, click-baiting, sign-up-to-see-the-answer grifters, and I will forever be thankful for their contribution.
- Kaze404 6y ago
  The part where they try to paint "being nice" as a bad thing pretty much tells the kind of discourse this person wants to have.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    It's a clash of cultures and a power struggle. The "hacker" style people feel that the rug is being pulled out under them and a corporate-style top-down leadership is dictating how they should interact. Generally, hacker culture is very much against top-down authority and prefers organically grown, community-driven, distributed approach. It's no surprise that the facebookization of SO is not welcome by them. The same thing is happening on Reddit, Twitter and other platforms. The Internet is finishing the transformation from Napster, IRC, torrents, enthusiast content and hacking to corporate-sanitized marketing-compatible monetized influencer space. The new focus is engagement metrics, ad placement, brand protection etc. Traditional mainstream TV content is now taking up larger and larger share of online space, same with traditional newspapers. You have to take this larger context into account. If these people could shut down the web, they'd do it in a whim and forbid anonymity and reverse everything that made the web so popular and drive everything back to cable TV but with likes, followers and shares, of course with a real name policy, with phone and ID confirmation. This is not about the Thanks button, but a disregard for the community, and top-down dictates.
soheil 6y ago
The combination of Google + SO always seemed too good to me compared to most everything else on the Internet. It just works really well. I think this is the closest thing we have to mind reading at least when it comes to programming problems. It'd be shame for it to go away be it SO doing more and more dumb shit like adding touchy feely bs like "thank you" mechanism or Google being hit by antitrust into oblivion.
aarongray 6y ago
This is stupid. Why not give people a way to actually say thanks without cluttering up the comments? A real thank you written by a human is much more touching and encouraging than a clapping icon with a counter on it. The article starts with a beautiful image of real thank you’s, and then immediately turns around and implies that clicking a clap button is the same thing? These kind of things are what dehumanizes the internet, they don’t make for better human connections. It’s also basically the exact same as the current upvote icon. A way to send a message to the author privately saying thanks seems much more touching. Or even a hidden “thank you’s” list of grateful words that can be expanded on the question but that is hidden by default. Either of those would be better than this weird duplication of robotic thank you’s.
seph-reed 6y ago
Perhaps a new user sandbox would make sense. A place where new users can work together to triage each-others questions into something good enough. If SO was a video game, it'd make sense to have newbies team up.
- shagie 6y ago
  New users trying to help other new users to triage questions doesn't really work well. If someone doesn't grok the way that Stack Overflow works, the information that new users add (or ask for) may do more harm than good (see examples of people adding random formatting). Many times this just is reinforcing bad habits. If you feel this could be useful, I would encourage you to try helping out by editing questions in the Help and Improvement queue so that they are good questions with all the necessary information (and matching the style that Stack Overflow expects). There was a mentorship project at Stack Overflow a bit ago - but it didn't scale and the expectations were mismatched (many new users were expecting help with their problem /now/ rather than help with trying to make their question better). The video game analogy - its not that you need to team up to solve a problem, its realizing that the quest(ion) has already been solved by someone else so you don't need to do it again.
einpoklum 6y ago
Thanks, but no thanks. See my (slightly) longer post here: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/398494/1593077 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/398494/1593077 (and the rest of the discussion there.)

71 points by bprasanna 6y ago

I wonder what happens when you have a successful product that doesn't need any more tinkering but you still have a lot of people working on it. Maybe this is it :)

hmu1 6y ago
Continuous improvement is what happens...
- shagie 6y ago
  The people who "got" the community on SO and how it worked have long since left or had their ability to advocate get squashed in the corporate structure. The people who are there with influence on direction have a very different view of what SO (and the rest of SE) should be. Most employees at corporate do not use any of the public sites in any way, shape or form and are disconnected about what the users and curators there need. And so, you get continuous improvement - on a vision that the unpaid volunteers who maintain the sites feel is wrong or counter productive.
maybeOneDay 6y ago
Stackoverflow have pretty solid metrics that show large numbers of users find the site unwelcoming. Just because you aren't one of those people doesn't mean that other people can't benefit from changes like this.
- haolez 6y ago
  They had metrics for the "thank you" stuff as well.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- maire 6y ago
  The expectation of feeling welcomed is part of the problem. Is stack overflow an information sharing community or a social community? Is it wikipedia for programmers or reddit? The fact that most people don't comment at all indicates that most people want it to be a wikipedia for programmers. Some people want it to be a social community.
  - detaro 6y ago
    Wikipedia is a social community too, as soon as you do more than reading articles. And has well-documented issues in that regard, which limit its quality and who contributes to it. That's not the dichotomy you think it is.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    Even if it is a Q&A site where most users are read-only, it's still very bad to be sending the signal to the lurkers that if you ever ask a question, there's a high chance you're gonna get shat upon.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Wikipedia can be pretty hostile to new users as well (especially in languages with fewer speakers). Some people think they own articles and are very territorial about them. The result is that domain experts are scared away while the prolific editors are those who are good at arcane formatting rules, editing conventions etc.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  Sure, it's unwelcoming, like most support forums. But how does having more ways to upvote an answer address this at all? The problem with stackoverflow isn't lack of feedback.
  - duncanawoods 6y ago
    It's kind of crazy for something claiming to be a "community" to crack down on basic human niceties and politeness. If you say "thank you", your comment will be deleted. At least on a standard forum, you can say "hello" and "thank you".
    - shagie 6y ago
      A forum is for discussion. The early adopters of Stack Overflow saw it as something closer to Wikipedia. A source of technical documentation. This still exists in the closest thing to a mission statement that one can find: https://stackoverflow.com/tour https://stackoverflow.com/tour > This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat. One similarly doesn't see "hello" or "thank you" in encyclopedias or technical documentation. There are places for human interaction (chat in particular) - but in a question, answer, or comments it isn't useful. Consider that the summary part of a question that shows up shows the first line or so of the text. > Hello. I am a new user with Java but I know C#. I have searched everywhere but I cannot ... Compared to: > When using Java, I am trying to use a stream to select some data and write it out as a file ... For comments, this has been looked at in the past - https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204402/hide-trivial-comments https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/204402/hide-trivial... and https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/210265/how-can-we-measure-the-cost-of-displaying-comments https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/210265/how-can-we-m... Having comments - especially trivial comments - means that voting doesn't happen as much and that then impacts the ability to get a signal to curate on.
    - bonoboTP 6y ago
      You have to understand how Stack Overflow came to be. It grew out of the frustration with forums (phpBB, etc.): they were filled with chitchat, back and forth and the solution was hidden somewhere in page 5 of 8. You were coming from Google and didn't care about who posted the stuff, their avatar, their signature etc, you wanted a solution to an immediate problem. Hence the Q&A format was born with upvoting the best answer to the top and deemphasizing the back-and-forth into comments. It got popular exactly because it cut through all the niceties and fluff and allowed you to get to the point quick. Some people don't share the preference for this, they would like a social community site instead of the above description. Instead of building their own site with that in mind, they want to bend SO away from its original goal. Predictably, the original people will probably move to a new site. It's a cycle: power users create a place, it gets popular because it's high quality, then it gets run over by lazy people and rules get adjusted to be welcoming and inclusive, the original people are pushed out, the quality decreases. When the originals create a new site, they will now try to be even less inclusive than the first time to avoid the same "eternal September" effect.

woogley 6y ago

Some pretty thorough discussion on Meta: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/398367/feature-test-thank-you-reaction https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/398367/feature-test...

gortok 6y ago
Also one of the answers on that question was deleted by an employee (! — itself an unusual event) for satirically opposing the change. More information here. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/398507/16587 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/398507/16587 Overall, the biggest complaint against this is: 1. Not enough people vote on questions or answers. We know this because of the metrics of people who visit a page vs. those that vote vs. those that comment. I used to know these metrics since I was a Stack Overflow community elected moderator, but no longer have access to them since I resigned in October of last year: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427/16587 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/390427/16587 Anyway, the goal of this change is to reduce the number of 'thanks' comments left (and to hopefully make people feel like Stack Overflow is more than 'just' a Q&A site, that it has, itself, a personality that is welcoming); but the problem is that it doesn't address -- and indeed may even exacerbate the issue with not enough people voting. Voting is what helps ensure bad questions are tended to, good questions are rewarded, and good answers are rewarded (and as a positive reinforcement mechanism for people to post more answers). If people aren't voting, the Q&A model breaks down rather quickly. Which is Bad™. The hypothesis against is if people have reactions, why would they need to vote? Naturally, the people in the community who depend on votes to help their work (the curators) are pretty pissed off that at best this will distract from tackling the issue, and at worst will actively disrupt trying to fix the issue. There has been a tendency over the past year or so especially for Stack Overflow (The company) to not listen to its curators (it's been going on for much longer than that, but came to a head a year ago); and this is another instance in a long series of instances where at best Stack Overflow (the company) is tone deaf to the issues its community faces.
- teruakohatu 6y ago
  It seems some basic NLP could detect a "thanks" comment and ask the user to vote. Or do they already do this?

mangatmodi 6y ago

How is it different from upvoting an answer? People who want to write will still write thanks, I already found some posts on the home page with thanks comment and the feature. Also what about the change in reputation when being thanked? It should be there in the blog post.

wodenokoto 6y ago
My understanding is that these are pure vanity. Doesn't require any reputation to give, doesn't give any reputation either, nor does it sort your post.
- mangatmodi 6y ago
  I went to meta-discussion and learned more details. Most of the thanks comment are written by folks who already have upvote powers. Anyways its a fun read. Grab popkorn and go through it :)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kjhughes 6y ago

For a long time now, StackOverflow has lost its way. Their voting system began as an outstanding mechanism to separate the QA wheat from the chaff. It evolved and improved organically. It provided a much needed means to surface the best questions and answers, and it provided a sort of incentive system, however imperfect, whereby contribution quality could be quantified. Then something happened. I think a major part of the problem was that leadership lost its way in guiding the system's evolution. Rather than continuing to evolve the scoring system to better reflect the quality of contributions, at some point they seemed to adopt the outlook that improvements were futile: It would always be possible to game the system such that scores would never approach true quality of contribution, so why try? I believe this was a mistake. Evolution from there ignored the scoring system. They went off in failed Documentation efforts. They focused on "being nice". They fought with their own volunteer moderators. They seemed to look everywhere else but the origin of their initial strength: Community contribution fairly rated in a manner that allowed good moderation to scale. They should have continued to improve this system to root out the problems of over-eager closure and popularity dominating whatever prefered qualities the community would have liked to have seen measured. An adjunct "thank you" mechanism that's redundant to the voting system is a sign that those in control do not appreciate the merit of, and do not know how to evolve, the voting system.

k__ 6y ago
People are always hating on reviews and ratings. I thought about this, why can't we do this like with monitoring. We alreday know that median isn't good enough, so so we look at the 95th or 99th percentile. Can't we do this with ratings too?
- majewsky 6y ago
  What does x-th percentile mean when you have only one number (the upvote count)?
  - k__ 6y ago
    You have the upvotes and the downvotes.

throwaway4666 6y ago

The main issue I've had with SO, which while anecdotal seems to reflect the sentiment of a lot of people on here whenever the subject is brought up, is that it's infected with the YX problem. Now you guys probably know the XY problem (asking the wrong question X to when you really want to solve the problem Y). The YX problem, on the other hand, goes like this: User: "Hi, how do I do Y?" SO: "Why do you want to do Y?" User: "Because I want to do [use case]" SO: "Are you sure you don't want to do X instead?" User: "No I don't, I have this constraint and this use case so I'm pretty sure this isn't about X and I really want to do Y." SO: "Are you sure this isn't a duplicate of [some question involving X]?" User: "No it's not, the question while similar doesn't have the same constraint or usecase and I have searched SO for a while for questions that specifically involved these and didn't find any so I really need to do Y." SO: "Wow, I can't possibly imagine why you, for a use case you've examined for a while and which I have been made aware of five minutes ago, could possibly want to do Y while not doing X. I don't know and I rest my case. A solution to Y probably doesn't exist anyway." Answerer: "Hi to do Y you have to do this [hacky snippet]" (answer accepted) User: "Cool, thanks!" SO: "This is bad practice and I don't condone it. It shouldn't be upvoted or the accepted answer." -------- Of course this is the optimistic scenario, where the question does get eventually answered.

kfk 6y ago
I think we need some kind of long form essay/how-to for this problem. It's a serious issue and I see millions being wasted this way. Point in case, we continue to push dashboarding tools in the analytics industry (Y) while what we really need is a way to better connect data and processes (X). There is a lot of knowledge in a lot of areas, but how do you vet it? Corporate people (me for instance) are stuck either with writing LinkedIn articles or Medium ones, neither of those promote any kind of fair way to measure "good" contributions.
lucideer 6y ago
Gotta echo this: this is absolutely the main issue I've had with SO. I'm not sure if this kind of stuff increase recently* or if it's always been an issue that I only began to notice later. I'm also not sure of the cause, nor the solution, but it does seem to indicate a switch from one definition of "education" to another: 1. "helping" users solve problems 2. "schooling" users on what they're doing wrong * I say "recently", but I just checked and it appears I joined SO ~11 years ago and haven't actively used it in ~7 years, so "recently" is probably not the right word...

fbelzile 6y ago

I'm more curious about what caused the recent spike in "thank" showing up in questions and answers. 19% -> 23% in a couple months seems statistically significant. Did the pandemic/lock down cause a slew of newer developers that are generally more appreciative?

majewsky 6y ago
Maybe because of home-office they cannot lean to the side and ask their peers, so they rely more on SO instead for basic questions.
- RMPR 6y ago
  Basic questions which includes writing the whole program for the user https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62517918/how-do-i-make-a-reaction-based-menu-in-discord-py https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62517918/how-do-i-make-a...
  - mark-r 6y ago
    That's not a new problem at all, there have always been people who look at the site as a free code-writing service. Kind of the opposite of the "Thanks" problem are the question askers who complain that you didn't deliver them production-ready code.
RMPR 6y ago
>newer developers that are generally more appreciative? For me it's more like: newer developers that doesn't seem to like reading.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

My main issue with SO is that it has become a rather "snippy" place. The "be nice" ethos just means that the nasty is more eloquent. It's now quite painful to ask questions, there, because someone will pretty much always ding it. Usually, you have no idea why, or who. In fact, that happened to me just a day or so ago. Also, I think that downvoters should be notified when the question/answer is edited, so they can review if the downvote still applies. I once trolled a community (not SO) by writing an obviously inflammatory post, getting a gazillion downvotes, then editing it to be very reasonable, so everyone was on record as having downvoted a very decent post. Petty, but fun (They did not have edit records for posts, but you could see what users up/downvoted). I like the idea of a "Thank You" reaction, but that's really just porcine lip gloss. I think that it would be more valuable to require an explanation for a downvote, even if anonymously. I would have no problem telling folks why I downvoted a question or answer (in fact, when I do, I add a comment, mentioning the reason, unless it is blatantly obvious). As is evident by my HN profile, I am making a point of standing behind what I post. I got rid of my last anonymous Internet account months ago. Standing behind my words has helped me to be a bit more careful about what I post, and that's a good thing.

bonoboTP 6y ago
> My main issue with SO is that it has become a rather "snippy" place. It's also true of other Stack Exchange sites. Sometimes you feel like in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy where you're sent from one site to the other and none of them think it's their job to deal with a question. And I don't mean the low-effort questions, but well written interesting ones that are deemed to broad, too opinion-based, too whatever. There is definitely an effect of territorialism, big egos and rule lawyering going on. As if people were playing a game of spot-the-broken-rule as some intellectual puzzle and going "heureka, there it is, you broke Rule No. 3, gotcha!!". Sites like SO and Wikipedia certainly attract people who get emotionally invested in this role and see themselves as powerful and enjoy feeling better than others. That's why the debate is complicated. There is a problem with trigger happy moderation, but also with low-effort content.

jp1016 6y ago

new comment : thanks for adding the 'thanks' button

eugenekolo 6y ago

The problem with SO is that it tries to be two things. One is a reference/encyclopedia of questions, and answers. And the other is a welcoming place to ask for help. Those two don't seem to line up 100%. It's clear the old school moderators seem to think of SO as a reference, but the company itself wants to view it as a place to seek help.

identity0 6y ago
I think that's the great thing about SO. It's a repository of common questions, yet also manages to be great for asking questions as well. A lot of people in this thread seem to hate SO, and I disagree with them. If I ask a question on SO, no matter how obscure of a library or language I'm using, I'll get a response back within a day. And if my question gets flagged for being a duplicate, then I've just been redirected to more resources to solving my problem. It may not be warm and welcoming, but it's very helpful. To be useful, SO doesn't need to be welcoming at all. It needs to be exclusive. If it wasn't elitist, it would be filled with Java programmers pasting 400 lines of code with little explanation. The elitism has caused me to write better questions and to really think about the hypothetical person answering my question. Elitism and helpfulness go hand in hand. If you want to see the horrors of a non-elitist Q&A forum, go check out the Unity forums or any popular Github repository.

IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago

I'm Stackoverflow user #823 or so and still in the top 4% of reputation, and...I don't get how the narrative has turned against SO. I visit the site once or twice a day, and probably write two answers per month, which should make a decidedly average user. And for the life of me I could not tell you what people are complaining about? I still find answers there more often than anywhere else, so whatever is supposedly broken doesn't seem to affect the primary function too much. The imaginary points still mostly point in the right direction. If happened to feel they diverged from perfect meritocracy I would try really hard to care about real problems, instead. Failing that, I would hopefully manage not to complain about it too obnoxiously, fearing it would make me look childish. And then, much like Github, they seem to have committed the cardinal sin of tech communities of mildly opining that maybe racism or whatever isn't something they personally want to support with their work, which gets them into all kinds of strange arguments with one sort of people who are obviously not racists but just feeling the urge to defend some grand principle they just came up with, like ethics in game journalism. Github is a very similar example: they single-handedly got millions of people to contribute to open source code, and made working in this ecosystem so much better, compared to source forge and various crappy custom systems that came before it. StackOverflow similarly replaced the most obnoxious, google-spamming, click-baiting, sign-up-to-see-the-answer grifters, and I will forever be thankful for their contribution.

Kaze404 6y ago
The part where they try to paint "being nice" as a bad thing pretty much tells the kind of discourse this person wants to have.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  It's a clash of cultures and a power struggle. The "hacker" style people feel that the rug is being pulled out under them and a corporate-style top-down leadership is dictating how they should interact. Generally, hacker culture is very much against top-down authority and prefers organically grown, community-driven, distributed approach. It's no surprise that the facebookization of SO is not welcome by them. The same thing is happening on Reddit, Twitter and other platforms. The Internet is finishing the transformation from Napster, IRC, torrents, enthusiast content and hacking to corporate-sanitized marketing-compatible monetized influencer space. The new focus is engagement metrics, ad placement, brand protection etc. Traditional mainstream TV content is now taking up larger and larger share of online space, same with traditional newspapers. You have to take this larger context into account. If these people could shut down the web, they'd do it in a whim and forbid anonymity and reverse everything that made the web so popular and drive everything back to cable TV but with likes, followers and shares, of course with a real name policy, with phone and ID confirmation. This is not about the Thanks button, but a disregard for the community, and top-down dictates.

soheil 6y ago

The combination of Google + SO always seemed too good to me compared to most everything else on the Internet. It just works really well. I think this is the closest thing we have to mind reading at least when it comes to programming problems. It'd be shame for it to go away be it SO doing more and more dumb shit like adding touchy feely bs like "thank you" mechanism or Google being hit by antitrust into oblivion.

aarongray 6y ago

This is stupid. Why not give people a way to actually say thanks without cluttering up the comments? A real thank you written by a human is much more touching and encouraging than a clapping icon with a counter on it. The article starts with a beautiful image of real thank you’s, and then immediately turns around and implies that clicking a clap button is the same thing? These kind of things are what dehumanizes the internet, they don’t make for better human connections. It’s also basically the exact same as the current upvote icon. A way to send a message to the author privately saying thanks seems much more touching. Or even a hidden “thank you’s” list of grateful words that can be expanded on the question but that is hidden by default. Either of those would be better than this weird duplication of robotic thank you’s.

seph-reed 6y ago

Perhaps a new user sandbox would make sense. A place where new users can work together to triage each-others questions into something good enough. If SO was a video game, it'd make sense to have newbies team up.

shagie 6y ago
New users trying to help other new users to triage questions doesn't really work well. If someone doesn't grok the way that Stack Overflow works, the information that new users add (or ask for) may do more harm than good (see examples of people adding random formatting). Many times this just is reinforcing bad habits. If you feel this could be useful, I would encourage you to try helping out by editing questions in the Help and Improvement queue so that they are good questions with all the necessary information (and matching the style that Stack Overflow expects). There was a mentorship project at Stack Overflow a bit ago - but it didn't scale and the expectations were mismatched (many new users were expecting help with their problem /now/ rather than help with trying to make their question better). The video game analogy - its not that you need to team up to solve a problem, its realizing that the quest(ion) has already been solved by someone else so you don't need to do it again.

einpoklum 6y ago

Thanks, but no thanks. See my (slightly) longer post here: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/398494/1593077 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/398494/1593077 (and the rest of the discussion there.)