6 ms·

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

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.
totaldude87 6y ago
>> They focused on "being nice". They fought with their own volunteer moderator. Some times i feel the moderators are bit rude and harsh. especially to the newbies who submit their first questions. I could be wrong, but this is what i saw and felt..
- mark-r 6y ago
  Sometimes though it's deserved. The other day I saw a post with a title something like "Hey, help a newbie out". The post itself did not contain a description of any kind of problem, just a couple of links off-site. I responded with a comment, "Hey help us by using a descriptive title". Yes it was rude, but far less than the question itself deserved. I believe it was closed shortly after. I can no longer find the comment in my history, so I can only assume the question was deleted.
  - crispyambulance 6y ago
    No question "deserves" rudeness. Sure if it's obviously spam, or some kind of ridiculous screed, it should be deleted asap-- without votes, answers or commentary. The problem is when people write questions earnestly, but because they lack subject-matter orientation, aren't able to formulate their questions in a way that SO experts would like to hear. Too many questions are smugly dismissed this way. It doesn't help anyone and it pisses a lot of people off. I think many of these earnest but "bad" questions just need answers in the form of heuristic advice or pointers to get them on the right track. Being able to formulate a question is half the battle. Understanding ALWAYS begins with some amount of confusion. Admittedly, that's not optimal for a site where well-defined questions are supposed to get crisp answers that others can use over and over. But that still doesn't excuse rudeness.
    - mark-r 6y ago
      I'm not going to apologize. If you can't actually ask a question on a site that is all about asking questions, you get no respect from me. I actually LIKE answering questions, that's why I participate. It wasn't about formulating the question, I don't mind prodding people in the right direction for that. There simply wasn't a question, either in the title or the body of the text.
crispyambulance 6y ago
I think SO has more-or-less solved the problem of providing a high quality crowdsourced information resource focused on software development. They deserve credit for that. There's serious issues, however, with people being made to feel like crap for daring to post a question/comment that does measure-up to arbitrarily persnickety expectations from other users and often moderators who take their interpretation of what they think are "the rules" to absurd levels of pedantry (which they would call "being objective"). For whatever reason certain personality types are attracted to this kind of behavior and thus dominate the moderation tasks on SO. Saying "THANK YOU" to someone is NORMAL human behavior. It doesn't need an over-engineered system. It doesn't need anything extra at all. Comments are PERFECTLY FINE for stuff like that. SO could, perhaps, cull comments by automatically deleting them after a year or so. That would solve the problem of too much cruft, but no, that would take away the joy that the off-topic-police take in offending people who are communicating like human beings.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  1. "Normal human behavior" is not tapping at a keyboard staring at a rectangle with lit-up points... 2. The way you say "Thank you" on StackOverflow is with an upvote (and/or accepting the answer if you asked the question). You can also explain your upvote with a comment.
  - crispyambulance 6y ago
    The way you say "thank you" as a human is by saying "thank you"-- preferably with an interesting explanation or side-bar.
nevster 6y ago
The over-eager closure thing is kind of like the Deletionists on Wikipedia.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bluedino 6y ago
This seems like something that someone came up with that was so far disconnected with the actual way StackExchange should work...
adventured 6y ago
> For a long time now, StackOverflow has lost its way. A big tell on this, is their homepage is no longer about the Q&A platform. The new stack: https://i.imgur.com/RkzckLF.png https://i.imgur.com/RkzckLF.png The old stack: https://i.imgur.com/kY1kkAi.png https://i.imgur.com/kY1kkAi.png The new image says: we took a lot of venture capital and there's not enough money in knowledge services. We've got returns to generate. We're going to sell you something, and hey we <3 people who code ("we less than three people who code"), we swear. The old image (from 2015, when they were still in their prime) says: we're a knowledge service, we have a knowledge mission and that's what we're all about. Few frills, let's get to learning and sharing. Do you suppose their tag line is revealing how few people at Stack actually still code? It's all MBAs now I suppose. Or maybe it means their new organization is less than the value of three people who code.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Exactly, it's a switch from "we are people who code, no bullshit" to "we <3 people who code" with the cute marketing-compatible techish <3. > Or maybe it means their new organization is less than the value of three people who code. I chuckled :)
XCSme 6y ago
I usually like to answer questions, but for me it feels like the quality of the questions and the community has gone down overall. Most of the questions asked are from new users and are low effort, duplicated, one google search away from hundreds of answers, all of them at once. I feel like it turned into a social network, where 90% of the content generated is garbage or just duplicated content. Why I don't like this is that it encourages bad habbits for new programmers, where instead of trying to figure out how to solve a basic issue, they just ask on SO and expect a complete answer that includes valid code, so they don't actually learn anything from asking that question, they just want someone else to do their "homework".
xtiansimon 6y ago
> "Then something happened" Population of new users grows faster than technological growth invalidates old answers? Users with astronomically high points are deeply invested. How do you get to +10k points without being highly invested? Expert. Super User. Equals highly opinionated. I make Python automation scripts at work, without formal training. I fall into many different pitfalls--all the time. One of my "favorites" is posting something to CodeReview. Then it get's closed (because CodeReview, despite its name, has a narrow focus). Then I try it over at SoftwareEngineering, only to get downvoted and flamed because I'm not asking a _serious_ question. I've grown up with SO as a programmer (BTW, I'm over 40) just enough to be dangerous as SO becomes increasingly conservative and less interested in the questions and more interested in routine administering of rules. > "They should have continued to improve this system..." I'm divided on this. On the one hand there is room for improvement as tech questions age. I frequently get answers that are nearly 10 years old for some questions. Sometimes they're relevant, and sometimes they're not. The community has MonkeyPatched this problem by opening and editing old answers with "UPDATE 2020" or "UPDATE v3" addendums. On the other side it's rare to get past the gimmick (voting; q&a site) that make the product so successful. The site's usefulness is growing old, while the community continues to grow, resulting in frustration, confusion and pain in the you know what. It's sad _and_ true.

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.

totaldude87 6y ago

>> They focused on "being nice". They fought with their own volunteer moderator. Some times i feel the moderators are bit rude and harsh. especially to the newbies who submit their first questions. I could be wrong, but this is what i saw and felt..

mark-r 6y ago
Sometimes though it's deserved. The other day I saw a post with a title something like "Hey, help a newbie out". The post itself did not contain a description of any kind of problem, just a couple of links off-site. I responded with a comment, "Hey help us by using a descriptive title". Yes it was rude, but far less than the question itself deserved. I believe it was closed shortly after. I can no longer find the comment in my history, so I can only assume the question was deleted.
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  No question "deserves" rudeness. Sure if it's obviously spam, or some kind of ridiculous screed, it should be deleted asap-- without votes, answers or commentary. The problem is when people write questions earnestly, but because they lack subject-matter orientation, aren't able to formulate their questions in a way that SO experts would like to hear. Too many questions are smugly dismissed this way. It doesn't help anyone and it pisses a lot of people off. I think many of these earnest but "bad" questions just need answers in the form of heuristic advice or pointers to get them on the right track. Being able to formulate a question is half the battle. Understanding ALWAYS begins with some amount of confusion. Admittedly, that's not optimal for a site where well-defined questions are supposed to get crisp answers that others can use over and over. But that still doesn't excuse rudeness.
  - mark-r 6y ago
    I'm not going to apologize. If you can't actually ask a question on a site that is all about asking questions, you get no respect from me. I actually LIKE answering questions, that's why I participate. It wasn't about formulating the question, I don't mind prodding people in the right direction for that. There simply wasn't a question, either in the title or the body of the text.

crispyambulance 6y ago

I think SO has more-or-less solved the problem of providing a high quality crowdsourced information resource focused on software development. They deserve credit for that. There's serious issues, however, with people being made to feel like crap for daring to post a question/comment that does measure-up to arbitrarily persnickety expectations from other users and often moderators who take their interpretation of what they think are "the rules" to absurd levels of pedantry (which they would call "being objective"). For whatever reason certain personality types are attracted to this kind of behavior and thus dominate the moderation tasks on SO. Saying "THANK YOU" to someone is NORMAL human behavior. It doesn't need an over-engineered system. It doesn't need anything extra at all. Comments are PERFECTLY FINE for stuff like that. SO could, perhaps, cull comments by automatically deleting them after a year or so. That would solve the problem of too much cruft, but no, that would take away the joy that the off-topic-police take in offending people who are communicating like human beings.

einpoklum 6y ago
1. "Normal human behavior" is not tapping at a keyboard staring at a rectangle with lit-up points... 2. The way you say "Thank you" on StackOverflow is with an upvote (and/or accepting the answer if you asked the question). You can also explain your upvote with a comment.
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  The way you say "thank you" as a human is by saying "thank you"-- preferably with an interesting explanation or side-bar.

nevster 6y ago

The over-eager closure thing is kind of like the Deletionists on Wikipedia.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bluedino 6y ago

This seems like something that someone came up with that was so far disconnected with the actual way StackExchange should work...

adventured 6y ago

> For a long time now, StackOverflow has lost its way. A big tell on this, is their homepage is no longer about the Q&A platform. The new stack: https://i.imgur.com/RkzckLF.png https://i.imgur.com/RkzckLF.png The old stack: https://i.imgur.com/kY1kkAi.png https://i.imgur.com/kY1kkAi.png The new image says: we took a lot of venture capital and there's not enough money in knowledge services. We've got returns to generate. We're going to sell you something, and hey we <3 people who code ("we less than three people who code"), we swear. The old image (from 2015, when they were still in their prime) says: we're a knowledge service, we have a knowledge mission and that's what we're all about. Few frills, let's get to learning and sharing. Do you suppose their tag line is revealing how few people at Stack actually still code? It's all MBAs now I suppose. Or maybe it means their new organization is less than the value of three people who code.

bonoboTP 6y ago
Exactly, it's a switch from "we are people who code, no bullshit" to "we <3 people who code" with the cute marketing-compatible techish <3. > Or maybe it means their new organization is less than the value of three people who code. I chuckled :)

XCSme 6y ago

I usually like to answer questions, but for me it feels like the quality of the questions and the community has gone down overall. Most of the questions asked are from new users and are low effort, duplicated, one google search away from hundreds of answers, all of them at once. I feel like it turned into a social network, where 90% of the content generated is garbage or just duplicated content. Why I don't like this is that it encourages bad habbits for new programmers, where instead of trying to figure out how to solve a basic issue, they just ask on SO and expect a complete answer that includes valid code, so they don't actually learn anything from asking that question, they just want someone else to do their "homework".

xtiansimon 6y ago

> "Then something happened" Population of new users grows faster than technological growth invalidates old answers? Users with astronomically high points are deeply invested. How do you get to +10k points without being highly invested? Expert. Super User. Equals highly opinionated. I make Python automation scripts at work, without formal training. I fall into many different pitfalls--all the time. One of my "favorites" is posting something to CodeReview. Then it get's closed (because CodeReview, despite its name, has a narrow focus). Then I try it over at SoftwareEngineering, only to get downvoted and flamed because I'm not asking a _serious_ question. I've grown up with SO as a programmer (BTW, I'm over 40) just enough to be dangerous as SO becomes increasingly conservative and less interested in the questions and more interested in routine administering of rules. > "They should have continued to improve this system..." I'm divided on this. On the one hand there is room for improvement as tech questions age. I frequently get answers that are nearly 10 years old for some questions. Sometimes they're relevant, and sometimes they're not. The community has MonkeyPatched this problem by opening and editing old answers with "UPDATE 2020" or "UPDATE v3" addendums. On the other side it's rare to get past the gimmick (voting; q&a site) that make the product so successful. The site's usefulness is growing old, while the community continues to grow, resulting in frustration, confusion and pain in the you know what. It's sad _and_ true.