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Done Answering Questions Stack Overflow

357 points by polm23 6y ago

chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> Comments can be deleted by any moderator with for any reason. They don't like you? They can delete all your comments. They hate LGBT people and believe you're LGBT? They can delete your comments. This is one reason why there is no visible comment history. That site is a dumpster fire.
- iamcreasy 6y ago
  It happened to me more than once on stats.stackexchange.com. There is one (ex) moderator who is very demeaning and from time to time delete mine and his comments to change the narrative of the discussion. This behavior makes me think twice before using that SE site.
  - nerpderp82 6y ago
    The function that SO serves should be owned by a non-profit. Everyone that posts to SO is working for free.
  - arp242 6y ago
    This is something you should report to SE (the company) via the contact form with some specific questions where it happened. This would be grounds for a stern conversation/warning at least, and possible mod removal depending on the severity/frequency.
    - iamcreasy 6y ago
      I thought about posting a meta thread, but I forgot to take screenshot of the those comments(which I intend to do next time) so I had no evidence since the mod already cleaned up the thread. Do they have track records of deleted comments? Based on other comments on this thread it appears SE do not track deleted comments.
      - arp242 6y ago
        Mods can see (and undelete) all deleted comments. There is no way to "permadelete" comments, or if there is, it's only available to SE employees. I think you can also see when a comment was deleted, but not 100% sure as I'm no longer a mod myself and can't check.
        iamcreasy 6y ago
        Perfect! In that case I'll report to SE via the contact form. Thank you! It has been a while but the event still bothers me.
- silly-silly 6y ago
  My favourite SO moment was when my comment had been edited to mean exactly the inverse of what I had stated. Whoever moderated it had assumed that I must have made a mistake and did not understand the problem space from the same depth I did.
- exporectomy 6y ago
  Doesn't the site advise you when you comment that comments were supposed to be for asking clarification or suggesting edits, Not for giving answers? People often use them to give half-hearted answers and I've had that urge too but written a formal half-hearted answer instead. It wouldn't get upvoted or accepted but if you feel you've got something helpful to say, why not say it as an answer? I think people are afraid to put their half-hearted answers as formal answers because they can get downvoted for being incomplete. But if you don't care about points like Gregg (and myself), then it doesn't matter. Comments like his "this site might be helpful" are annoying. You have no idea if the writer even understood your question and whether spending time digging through that site will actually help or not. They shouldn't post that. You can google for general information/tutorial sites.
  - thesteamboat 6y ago
    I think I'd rather have a comment "this site might be helpful" on the page than not. It doesn't take long to classify a link as either potentially helpful or useless, and I'm usually finding the SO page through a google search anyway. That may indicate I don't know the right query or jargon for what I want. In any case, I'd rather that SO err on the side of redundancy.
    - Shog9 6y ago
      The core of the problem there is that for Gregg, "this site might be helpful" is an understatement; he knows there is a good chance that it will be helpful, that there is direct relevance... ...and then there are the legions of folks who've been posting links to the first Google result with that same text for years. Those are over-selling it: sure, the link might be helpful, buuuut... Probably not. These have been the bane of many a forum, clogging up the first page or so of responses, sometimes discouraging folks with actual knowledge of the topic from even bothering to respond. There needs to be some way of distinguishing between the two.
      - exporectomy 6y ago
        Maybe we're supposed to consider how many reputation points the person has to judge the likely quality of their link. Those kinds of decisions are already built into StackOverflow with rules on who can write comments/etc. Maybe they just need tweaking so that posting a URL in a comment requires even higher reputation. If you don't have that reputation, you can do the harder work of writing an actual answer that includes the link.
- throwdbaaway 6y ago
  It is not just the moderators, comments can be abused by users as well. Once I had a top 25 user came to leave a wrong comment to my answer, in a rather aggressive tone. When called out, he just proceeded to delete the comment.
hunterloftis 6y ago
That's a pity for Stack Overflow, but I don't blame him one bit. Also: I recognized the name immediately because gman helped me out with a WebGL question* last year. * https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62784790/what-is-the-fastest-way-to-render-subsets-of-a-single-texture-onto-a-webgl-canva https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62784790/what-is-the-fas...
- pauljurczak 6y ago
  I just up voted a few of his answers. Quality work.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jotato 6y ago
I had this same realization a few years ago. One day it just hit me that I was working for a site for free. Answer questions, "moderating" content, etc... Worse yet, you ask a question and it gets closed as a "duplicate" and the original is several years old regarding a different version and not even remotely the same. (think Angualar1 VS Angular 6) SO has its place, but it isn't for me.
ajfjrbfbf 6y ago
> Over the last ~9 years I've spent way too much time answering questions on stack overflow. I don't know why. I want to say it's because I like helping people. It's certainly not for "internet points" I've asked myself the same question and couldn't find a satisfying answer. The best explanation I found was that StackOverflow had become for me a way to procrastinate, and then tell myself I've done something useful. I realized I don't care much about helping people, In fact the awful quality of the majority of the questions is depressing more than anything else. Perhaps I should consider stopping too.
- mdaniel 6y ago
  Aside from my own opinions about helping, I find it slots into the same brain receptor as playing Zachtronics games: it's solving puzzles, which feels like "work," but that one can do in 15 minute(?) chunks without having to deal with a lot of the extraneous stuff Unlike the games, however, hopefully both me and the asker learn something every now and then, since for any modern technology there are countless weird interactions or unexplored documentation pages I am cognizant of the "free labor" bug mentioned in the other comments, but since I am somewhere between mildly addicted and actually enjoying the problem solving, I don't feel exploited, or at least can quit when I think it becomes a problem Separately, I also participate in moderation activities, and I have violentmonkey scripts to ease the repetitive "you no read, huh?" silliness inevitably brought by new users, but that's the part I hate the most. I would pay real money if SO adopted the downvote (or even close) reason taxonomy from https://idownvotedbecau.se https://idownvotedbecau.se and if SO was open source I'd open a PR to add it
eyelidlessness 6y ago
I invested a lot of effort into SO early on and came to the same conclusion. I mostly avoid even viewing the site now the same way I avoid viewing w3schools, but when I do happen to click in I’m astonished to see edits to 10+ year old answers that are often superfluous or just plain wrong. And lots of comments on similar answers that are perfectly well meaning but have no context of how the relevant technologies have changed in that time. But none of that is why I find SO offputting. In theory that’s how it’s supposed to operate. What I find offputting is that despite all these edits and comments the general quality of a given SO page has become a much more visually noisy version of the hyphenated website its creators used to mock. Just absolutely bad advice on bad questions with no citation to be seen. At some point the volume of activity overtook the will or competency to moderate and it just became a Reddit skin.
taneq 6y ago
Stack Overflow has been steadily going downhill for years. At least I learned about https://webglfundamentals.org/ https://webglfundamentals.org/ and https://webgl2fundamentals.org/ https://webgl2fundamentals.org/ from this, they look fantastic.
RandallBrown 6y ago
I got lucky a few years ago and scored an answer to a VERY common iOS programming question. When you google the question, the top result is my answer and I have actually gotten some pretty strong moderator powers just from this question. Every once in awhile I go through the queue of things that people have proposed should be deleted and I almost always vote against deletion. Even most of the lower quality stuff has some merit. A comment asking to rephrase is much more constructive than just deleting their post!
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  Likewise, I haven’t contributed much in the last decade but my old answers continue to buff my account with points and privileges. It’s perhaps a broken system in that regard.
nerpderp82 6y ago
If gregg ever reads this, I understand.
9erdelta 6y ago
"Several people claimed comments have absolutely zero value. Therefore their deletion is irrelevent." What? Purely anecdotal I suppose, but I have found immensely helpful information in comments on SO.
nicolas_t 6y ago
I always feel a bit sad and wistful when thinking about Stack Overflow. It was a great idea and at the beginning it worked well but the moderation culture destroyed the site. There's too much emphasis on closing questions that are duplicates (when in fact they are not, and technology changes so a duplicate question asked 2 years later is going to get different responses), closing questions because they are too open ended (but those tend to give the most interesting answers) and moderation is both too heavy handed and opaque (no records of deleted comments). Also, often enough the accepted answer for a question is not the best answer and instead the best answer can be found by looking at other answers or the comments (which I agree with the author should not be seen as ephemeral but are instead critical) So, all in all, Stack overflow was great when it came out, the concept is good and it could be great but falls well short of that.
- FreeKill 6y ago
  I wonder if something more like a wiki format would be better long term. Say you take a question like "How to loop through a list of key,value pairs in JavaScript. Through the last 10 years, this has changed a lot through vanilla to libraries like jquery to new iterations like ES5/6. What I would love to see is just a page with this question asked, maintained over time with an emphasis on when the previous solution was relevant, and highlighting the most recent, preferred options for solving the problem. So, rather than a score based social network style system, turn the questions into living, and evolving documents. Also, sometimes a person gets stuck having to work on code that's a decade old, so it would be nice to have a history as well, and not just the most recent solution that may not work in their environment.
  - to11mtm 6y ago
    This doesn't sound bad on the surface, but my worry would be that we would wind up with Wiki-style moderation instead of SO style moderation. i.e. 'guarded articles', edit wars and power-mods overriding outside consensus.
    - LordDragonfang 6y ago
caymanjim 6y ago
I still visit Stack Overflow links when Google search turns them up, and still occasionally answer questions that I notice while visiting, but I don't go there just to answer questions anymore. The quality of questions is abysmal and getting worse at an exponential rate. It used to be a site where experienced developers ask focused, well-written questions, after doing some work to solve the problems on their own. Sure, there have always been crappy questions, but as recently as three years ago, the bulk of the questions on the front page were decent. A huge portion of questions now are homework assignments where the student just wants a canned answer and hasn't made an attempt to solve the problem; are written by people with such a poor grasp of English that they're worthless; endless repeats because no one has searched for existing answers; etc. I also used to moderate on a daily basis. The flood of low-quality content wore me out, but what really ended my moderation was constantly being challenged by the fake entries they shove at you to "make sure you're paying attention" while moderating. The bot suspended me from moderating a few times because, when presented with posts that required moderator attention, I didn't pick the exact category it thought needed fixing. I'm doing free labor for you and you're going to be a dick about it? No thanks. It's no wonder the quality has gone to shit. At one point I was "top 1%" in a number of topics, moderated, voted in elections, etc. Now I barely use the site. As much as I dislike Reddit, I increasingly click on Reddit links when I'm looking for answers. Stack Overflow is still a valuable resource but it's all downhill from here.
- Latty 6y ago
  This is such a classic HN moment. The post is about SO, the top comment is complaining that the moderation is too strict and draconian, and the second comment is this one complaining that the moderation isn't enough. So is always walking a tightrope. Moderation of so much content and trying to make sure only the good stuff sticks is hard, and it burns people out having to deal with the same annoying low-effort things all the time, which leads to them being harsh when people make genuine errors.
  - jerry80 6y ago
    >The post is about SO, the top comment is complaining that the moderation is too strict and draconian, and the second comment is this one complaining that the moderation isn't enough. They're both right. SO is moderating on the wrong things.
dvt 6y ago
I'm currently in the top 0.86% overall on Stack Overflow, even though I haven't been actively contributing since shortly after college (2015ish). I've always thought about writing this kind of blog post, but I think it's just pointless. SO, over the past decade, has been destroyed by power-hungry admins. These admins are (1) not technically competent, (2) not politically astute, and (3) do not have the best of the community in mind. Simply put, they're power hungry online weirdos that just want to be "in charge" of a community. I've witnessed this dozens of times, and there have been many (many) controversies concerning SO admins. After a few run-ins that rubbed me the wrong way, I no longer contribute. I feel that SO has become the new "Experts Exchange" or "Yahoo Answers" -- ironically, exactly what they were trying to replace.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- TwoBit 6y ago
  In order to be an active admin for a site, you need to have a lot of free time for it. And it's exactly these mentally inept people who have that time. There needs to be a name for this paradigm.
- dwd 6y ago
  The role of moderation is soul draining - all communities suffer from an Eternal September effect. There's always a someone new who didn't read or disregarded the rules. I do agree there are those who are simply attracted to the power of moderating a community; what is "Cancel Culture" but that same exercise of power? When a seasoned, prolific contributor gets disabused you know there's rot in the community; who is doing the moderation without knowing or ever communicating with the top contributors? That I don't get.
- Debug_Overload 6y ago
  > Simply put, they're power hungry online weirdos that just want to be "in charge" of a community. It's funny, I actually think that this is true for most of the mods we see online, be it Reddit, SO and the whole SE network, or any other forum. Comparing SO to Yahoo! Answers is a bit much, though.
treve 6y ago
Stack Overflow is extremely useful but also very toxic to many of it's contributes. I've found myself 30 minutes into an answer more than a few times, only to have the original question closed. Close votes tend to have a pile on effect, and many close votes are irrelevant. Just let me help the poster. Remove the question from searches so it doesn't bother future users, I don't care... don't prevent me from interacting with a person I can help. But it stings when things get removed by third parties that don't fully appreciate what was asked. Most juniors I work with find stack overflow flat out too hostile/intimidating to use.
MichaelMoser123 6y ago
SO still gives a lot of relevant answers to my web searches, despite its absurd moderation policies. Don't quite understand it why people on HN are so negative towards SO.
- A12-B 6y ago
  That's a different can of worms. They might claim their search results are good because they moderate a lot to remove noise, and maybe that's true, but it's this weird moderation that discourages good answers, and I think there are better ways of doing SEO so that you can have your cake and eat it too. I mean, a guy who spent hours on every answer just left the site. That should give you a clue.
- FillardMillmore 6y ago
  I think most peoples' negativity here is not towards the idea that it can be useful for quick Google searches, but rather that it has become a place that doesn't foster or encourage productive feedback and has become negatively affected by poor moderation. This will, in totality, greatly affect how valuable one appreciates time spent contributing there to be.
leephillips 6y ago
Do not contribute free work to SO, Wikipedia, or any other site that seeks to replace the web with its own brand. Instead, if you have useful knowledge to share, write it up on your own website. People will find your information using search engines. And when these agglomeration sites dry up, search engines will regain some of their lost usefulness. If you get good at writing you can even get paid for your articles, and the editorial process will make them even more useful for readers. SO, Wikipedia, and the like not only take and use your work for their own purposes, but are bad for the web. Their effect is to move the web away from a distributed network of knowledge under the control of individuals responsible for their words, and toward homogenized, voiceless near-monopolies of information. They are nearly as unhealthy for the web as Twitter and Facebook.
- benrbray 6y ago
  Wikipedia is bad for the web? Their whole policy is not to editorialize, and instead to provide direct citations to their sources. I often find interesting technical articles by looking at Wikipedia citations. > People will find your information using search engines. This is becoming really difficult, due to blog spam and SEO. I have so much trouble finding good info that I often end my searches with "site:reddit.com". I hoard RSS feeds collected from sites like HN and Reddit because I know if I lose them I'll never be able to find them again.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  This is great advice. The absolute best SEO tip of all time is this: remember what you searched for on Google and couldn’t find a decent answer or link in the first few pages? Now you write that answer or link on your website.
- sumanthvepa 6y ago
  Strongly agree. I simply post my solutions to my own website. And Google and other search engines do the rest.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  Both Stack Overflow and Wikipedia are Creative Commons licensed, so they can be reused and remixed freely. Contributing to them may not be optimal if your goal is to maximize your personal brand exposure in search results, but it does serve a greater good, and it's very different from contributing to a locked-down, copyrighted repo like Facebook, Instagram, etc.
A12-B 6y ago
I have left a complaint before on a non-tech stack exchange about how my question was not in fact off-topic. It was a question about how to do something impractical. They interpreted it as me wanting to do it rather than wanting to know the process out of pure curiosity, and so of course mods immediately flagged it and it just had comments asking me why i would want to do that thing. It seems they're just more interested in policing the site than growing knowledge.
jcuenod 6y ago
I've also abandoned participating in the SO "community". I wait with bated breath to see people defending SO as it currently exists (as opposed to SO as it was).
- umvi 6y ago
  I used to defend SO until I recently got burned by high rep gatekeepers actively preventing me from contributing (what I thought was) value to the site. And I have 4k+ rep myself. Now I when I see high rep users I instantly think they are out-of-touch power users who are completely unaware of how average developers use the site.
cryptoquick 6y ago
I really don't blame the author, here. It's uncanny how many negative experiences I've had with Stack Overflow. There are occasionally posts where I notice they have this heavy-handed brand of authoritarian moderation and adversarial approach to problem-solving that I find really frustrating. I've since stopped using it. I generally find more value in first-party documentation, the source, and GitHub issues, anyway.
- singularity2001 6y ago
  Github is becoming a refugium for an increasing number of burned contributers
saul_goodman 6y ago
I've fallen into the same trap with sites before. Discovering that your arcane knowledge is useful to others is fun and you enjoy helping random strangers with their questions. It seems like you are contributing to a public benefit and you are happy to continue giving away your time because it's helping people. But ultimately you are giving away your time so some 3rd party can make money off of your effort. But you're ok with this as it's still a pubic benefit right? But this company is in control of the "public benefit" and as they are doing this to make money, eventually you will find yourself running afoul of their rules because your goal is to help people, not to make the company money. Then you discover that your posts are not just getting deleted, they are getting moved to the a private part of the site for paying customers to see. Nope. So once you've found that you're coloring outside the lines too much or getting used in secret you start to author your own articles hosted on your own site. No reason to give away your IP, it's the best of both worlds as users trapped in the corporate portal get access to your insight and your IP stays your property. Then you discover that your sites URL (and others) are getting search-n-replace null-routed. Nope. The only way to ensure you have the freedom to fully help people is to setup a quick site, CMS, forums, etc. And before you know it you're hosting a few sites for various reasons which get a small amount of traffic. But hey you're free of the man and that's not nothing. Time goes by and you have less and less time to help your small flock of users. Eventually your sites are taken over by spam bots and they all get de-platformed by google to reduce the spread of the new malware your sites are hosting. Some day you take the sites down, usually just as your trim down your neckbeard. Helping people is fun, but all things must happen in moderation. There's nothing wrong with spending a few hours helping an internet stranger once in a while, but you need to avoid making it your main free-time activity for this exact reason. If you're doing it through someone else's site then you are generating revenue for someone. I don't work for free, and neither should you. Most of us have a shit ton of other projects always on the back-burner, go work on one of those instead.
- leephillips 6y ago
  “your sites URL (and others) are getting search-n-replace null-routed” What does this mean?
endisneigh 6y ago
Has there been any research on how to prevent what you might call the “volunteer-power-hunger” that occurs in communities where there’s emphasis on community moderation? It would be interesting to get an economist’s take on how to improve these sites. In particular I’ve found it strange that the karma community on various sites doesn’t “charge” you to do more things. For example on this site it would make sense if it costed you karma to up vote and downvote - this would create an emphasis to not spend too much so to speak.
- CrazyStat 6y ago
  I've often thought over the years that there was something to slashdot's moderation by randomly selected accounts, as it prevents a few power users from dominating. Slashdot comments are pretty garbage these days though so maybe not.
  - dialamac 6y ago
    I don’t think that is an indictment of the moderation system. You can’t replace a dead community with excellent moderation. Slashdot’s dead because it failed to produce worthwhile content and not be an even uglier pile of ass. The mod system can’t do anything about that.
- ajayyy 6y ago
  It does cost reputation to downvote
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    Just one brownie point, though. That feature might give additional power to mods on a roll by empowering only those who've got plenty.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
fortran77 6y ago
I still sometimes find useful information on Stack Overlflow, but I, too, am done answering questions, commenting, or even upvoting correct answers for very similar reasons to the author of this blog post.
hyperpallium2 6y ago
Researching and answering questions is a good way to learn a topic - exercises. I've also been driven away, but there seem pockets of goodness, e.g. bash people are super insightful and helpful. Perhaps a kind of society of affliction. I can see why, prima facie, linking your own site looks like spam. Seems there could be a way to facilitate this (e.g. authorise/whitelist legit sites; or even host them on SO), but probably out of scope - like "closed as "interesting". And links lose eyeballs, undermining SO's business model... hmmm... revenue-distortion sunk expertsexchange... perhaps soon time for another change?
mellosouls 6y ago
This is pretty much par for the course at many (most?) fora; SO is just a particularly successful (and therefore also toxic) example. See also Wikipedia for large scale shenanigans of this sort. I long ago stopped investing significant time and emotional energy contributing to knowledge resources for similar reasons, though it should be remembered that there definitely are positives to contributors beyond the altruistic (I never improved as much in my technical skills as when sweating under the public spotlight after foolishly committing to answer a "simple" question that turned into significant unpaid work). It's internet culture (and tribal and other social gatherings before that), not StackOverflow particularly; the toxicity and crappy behaviour have been with the net since the get-go and will continue as long as the socially undeveloped see an opportunity to display their "power" or suck the energy out of those more publicly-spirited.
kkaranth 6y ago
I don't have anything to add to the discussion, I just want to thank greggman for going out of his way to help me understand a simple webgl issue a few years ago.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
yongjik 6y ago
> Several people claimed comments have absolutely zero value. Therefore their deletion is irrelevant. Seems like cooperative editing platforms always attract the "moderator" personalities, who will learn and internalize all rules and guidelines, especially those that contradict each other or reality (as the one quoted above), and use them as weapons in their semantic games. See also: Wikipedia.
llaolleh 6y ago
You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian I guess. When something becomes big enough the quality starts degrading rapidly as a function of complacency.
Clewza313 6y ago
Eh. SO has its problems, and the weird "comments are supposed to ephemeral" policy is one of them, but this still seems like a weird hill to die on. If SO thinks that comments consisting of links to your own site are spam, then maybe they are spam? If they instead provided an answer (which can even be a direct quote) and put in a "For more info see X" link at the end, it'd be just fine by SO policy as well.
- pm24601 6y ago
  why? SO is putting up barriers. I for one don't find it useful to jump over them. I don't even bother asking question there any more.
DodgyEggplant 6y ago
There is disproportion between the time/price required to participate and the time/price to moderate. And when people get high power with low price - they use it. SO should put some penalty on wrong moderation decisions.
kstrauser 6y ago
Pro tip for people wanting to answer a question there: upvote it before you start typing. SO question scores seem to be very bimodal: either they're positive or very negative. So if you see a question that sounds interesting, vote it up first. This is a sign to the next moderator who rolls along that maybe they shouldn't delete the damn thing out from under you.
hastradamus 6y ago
Very unfortunate. Stack overflow is toxic no doubt. Very useful, but toxic
kokizzu2 6y ago
i too dislike downvoted without explanation XD
emmanueloga_ 6y ago
Anybody remembers Experts Exchange? "Stack Overflow founder Jeff Atwood cited Experts-Exchange's poor reputation and paywall as a motivation for creating Stack Overflow." [1] Seems like these things follow a natural life cycle. Maybe 2021 is the year a new hope emerges? :-) By the way, are there any lesser known contenders already? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experts_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experts_Exchange
- arp242 6y ago
  There's https://codidact.org https://codidact.org – it got started by some disgruntled people after the whole firestorm last year. I never used it though.
  - emmanueloga_ 6y ago
    hmmm it looks more than decent! Just signed up.
  - singularity2001 6y ago
    their landing page is a failure though
tomcam 6y ago
First of all, thank you for all your hard work. Second of all, fuck them.
bachmeier 6y ago
It's infuriating to have a comment deleted. It's happened to me at least twice (that I remember) when something was selected as the correct answer but it turned out to be wrong. In one case, the answer was specific to Windows and a range of releases of the language. I posted my comment, it got deleted, I reposted, and it got deleted again. In another case, the answer marked correct didn't work and wasn't even a full answer - the provided code showed how to start the solution and left the rest as an exercise for the reader. When I commented that the answer was wrong (even the part that was given) my comment simply disappeared without explanation.
_cs2017_ 6y ago
I have been on SO for over 10 years (not a community moderator; just have the standard moderation powers auto-enabled based on 25k+ rep). I have seen many community moderators who are extremely disrespectful to helpful users, and exhibit the degree of zealous devotion to some abstract rules that would make Chairman Mao smile. My weak attempts to prevent them from bullying users have utterly failed. It's not an easy problem to solve. SO could simply let community moderators vote out the jerks from among them. That would work great, if only the vast majority of community moderators were kind, considerate, thoughtful people. However, just like with certain other professions, the moderator role tends to appeal either to super-altruists, or to power hungry fanatics. Sadly, the world has a lot more of the latter than the former. And even more so than with reddit (where at least there's some competition between different communitiies), there's only one SO. Also, the intrinsic importance of historical content on SO is a huge barrier to any competiition. So it's not like users can vote with their feet. So even if SO management wanted to fix the problem, what could they do? (That's assuming the SO management isn't happy with the current moderation style in the first place!) (Community moderators = diamond moderators are the only ones, besides SO employees of course, who can delete user comments.)
- umvi 6y ago
  I feel like this happened to me recently. I encountered a C++ question that I felt I could contribute an answer to, but it had been closed 10 years earlier. I opened a meta thread about it, and a helpful high rep user reopened it, only for a bunch of even higher rep users to come in and ruthlessly shut everything down, including deleting the answer I submitted. I've never seen a community so hostile toward someone trying to add value. Maybe I really was in the wrong here for trying to reopen that question; you can read the whole thread and judge for yourself: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405099/reopen-c-argument-parsing/405101 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405099/reopen-c-arg...
  - singularity2001 6y ago
    you were not in the wrong.
- 6y ago
Waterluvian 6y ago
Speaking of points, is there a way to reset them on HN? I'd rather not have to remake accounts every so often.
sergiotapia 6y ago
StackOverflow suffers from Internet Moderator syndrome. The people who actually want to be moderators are the people you don't want to be moderators. And so it goes. I wonder where greener pastures are. I miss SO as well. I barely used it a handful of times last year, compared to it's christening year when I was on there asking/answering about 5 times a day.
banana_giraffe 6y ago
My most upvoted answer on SO is a quote from a man page and a one liner explaining how to use a flag on a tool. My favorite answer I made on SO is explaining how to fix using two python libraries that aren't often used together that break in a confusing way when both are loaded, along with a discussion on how I solved it. That one is the only answer for the question, but not marked as the accepted answer despite a comment from the asker saying "thanks! that fixed it!". It's currently at -2 for reasons I can't quite fathom. At some point answering SO became a game of seeing if I could answer questions before the third close vote would kill discussion, and I realized I'm just there to prove some point to someone, not actually help people. It's a pity too. I see great value in a website where people can ask questions and get help. SO isn't that, it's some RPG now, with perverse incentives.
- pauljurczak 6y ago
  Agree. I still see a lot of value in SO and I participate from time to time. When I post there, I approach it like an interaction with an alcoholic prone to violent outbursts. I'm not expecting rational behavior. I'm not bothered any more by an occasional swift deletion of my question deemed "duplicate" or "off-topic" by a bunch of power hungry fundamentalists, who often didn't bother to read it carefully. Crazy uncle had a bad day. Let's try another time.
- GlennS 6y ago
  My most upvoted answer on SO is explaining how to rectangle select in Notepad++ (hold alt while dragging, works similarly in lots of editors and IDEs). It's trivial, but I like to think I made some people a tiny bit more productive for the rest of their working lives. The original question asked for a regex.
- XCSme 6y ago
  Same, I have many answers that I spent hours thinking for the best solution and implementing clever snippets, yet my highest voted answer is also a quote from the docs: https://stackoverflow.com/a/32811548/407650 https://stackoverflow.com/a/32811548/407650 "Q: Mongoose findOneAndUpdate doesn't return updated document". Initially the answer was simple, but the more traction it got I added some more details to it and kept it up to date over time.
ggm 6y ago
It's possible both things are true: it IS spam by the formalisms the mods determine. And, it IS sensible for them to want to promote their work, because the body of work is awesome. Not all true things are without conflict. This isn't maths. This is sociology. What people want is sometimes in conflict. The mods wanted "no spam" and they lost a content provider because they hung up on the issue. I think both sides lost, but I'd do what the submitter did.
ajhurliman 6y ago
In general, I think moderators (on many platforms) have an unnecessary bias against original content. If you made it and you're linking it, you must be an obnoxious shill spamming their own content probably trying to profit off of it. There's no room in these interpretations for someone selflessly spending their own time and effort to help just for the sake of helping. Reddit mods are particularly exacting on this subject.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
privacyfreako 6y ago
The nastiest community has to be the EE. Not the top guys (Oleg is awesome, if grumpy at times), but folks with points in the mid thousands.
mdoms 6y ago
This is not a problem particular to Stack Overflow and it's one of my biggest problems with internet culture today. Somehow, at some point in the distant internet past, we all decided culturally that self promotion is bad. Why? I don't know. Maybe someone else can answer. But the consequence is that sites like Reddit now are rife with stolen unattributed content, while original content is largely frowned upon - Reddit's own guildelines[0] suggest you should be posting a >9:1 ratio of other people's content to your own. Frankly this is something the newer generation gets right. Zoomers "shamelessly" plug their own original creations - post their soundclouds under their own viral tweets, link to their own onlyfans in their bios, plug their etsy accounts on insta. If you're a creator (a tiny fraction of internet users qualify) you god damn deserve to promote your own stuff! [0] https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddi...
bilkow 6y ago
> Several people claimed comments have absolutely zero value. Therefore their deletion is irrelevant. The author comments (no pun intended) on why it does have a vote system then, but I'd go further: If comments have no value, why do they even exist? They wouldn't need to be implemented and they're just taking up space. In many answers I found in SO, comments have been very valuable, sometimes more than the answer.
- roelschroeven 6y ago
  Maybe the idea is that eventually someone integrates the knowledge from the comments into the answer, making the answer better and the comments redundant maybe. But if that's the case, that's communicated not nearly clearly enough.
steve_adams_86 6y ago
I had a deep liking for stack overflow some 12 years ago and went really crazy, spending hours every week answering questions much the same way Gregg describes. It was almost like a fun game - I loved finding something hard to answer then trying to get a good answer in there to a) teach myself in the process and b) help someone out. I was well rewarded with internet points which was somewhat appealing at the time. But that got old pretty quickly. What got old even faster was how cold and unkind other users could be. Over time I noticed I would always be second or later in answering questions; people would hurriedly toss up something hoping for that green check mark, and their answers would be pretty mediocre in most cases. However, speed was key and my answers would end up passed over. I continued doing it for a while because I enjoyed the exercise of it, but watching the overall quality of the site decline so rapidly absolutely killed it for me. I lasted around 2 years in total, maybe 6 months of that spent as a very active user. These days I actually filter it from my search results, like medium, many git repository mirrors, and content-farmy sites which hit on all major popular topics with the thinnest and least professional content possible.
uyt 6y ago
I just wanted to say thanks for https://webglfundamentals.org/ https://webglfundamentals.org/. I referred to it a lot when I first starting out with webgl. Even simple questions like how to resize the canvas with correct pixel ratio is so disgustingly complicated, I don't understand why anyone would want to be restricted to the space of a single stackoverflow answer: https://webglfundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/webgl-resizing-the-canvas.html https://webglfundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/webgl-resizing-t...
rhdxmr 6y ago
I personally don't know Gregg Tavares, but I empathize with him. I also have answered hundreds of questions via tech communities but most of questioners do not thank me and they do not respond to my answers at all. I do not know whether they checked my solution or not. But I can keep this job as a hobby for many years because I do not expect that questioners thank me at all. I just do it for myself. Actually I do not think that I am helping people online. I consider myself that I am doing this just for fun. I can learn some lessons even from the silly questions written by the ignorant who do not have any background knowledge. I also have my answering history and I can use it for self promotion when I introduce myself to others. I even participate in developing some open source projects, but I also do not expect that somebody who like my code offer me a great job or help me improve my code. No one will give me a food on the table. No devotion, no pain. I just do something online that is fun for me, meaningful and additionally helpful to others.
jariel 6y ago
Stack Overflow exists because we are terrible at documentation. There should be a straight up solid answer for 80% of those questions in the relevant docs. Docs should have walk-throughs / overviews, common examples, and good reference with links to examples. And then a ton of secondary examples related to every corner, explaining everything. If it's not clear, then guess what? We all have to figure it out!. Every one of us has to labour through APIs to make those 1-5 a day mini-insights, when, if the docs were clear, we should not have to. If I 'owned' Java I would consider every common question about Java that wasn't made clear in the docs a failure of some kind. Not only that - why on earth do people think that publishing an API is good enough? Why doesn't Oracle/MS have respectable team of people literally just answering SE questions all day on Java/C#/TS etc. giving fairly definitive answers? I can only imagine this would have spectacular ROI. (I mean, aside from getting the free labour of volunteers, but MS can affordit)
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  There used to be the "FAQ" format for product/project documentation covering points that don't fit into regular documentation. There's also the format of "case studies". Not sure SO should be a place for the likes of Oracle/MS to answer questions about "their" language stacks. AFAICS, Oracle has pretty much pulled out of pushing Java years ago anyway. In contrast, MS is all over the place to advertise .net and TS. Don't need more of that on SO, with staged questions and distortion of public reception by sheer volume and SO stats.
pm24601 6y ago
I agree. I experienced the same situation. I don't even ask questions on SO. Too many times I have had questions closed "Too open-ended". HELLO I make them open ended because I don't want the answerers to be restricted.
- bmn__ 6y ago
  There is a disconnect between what SO wants and what you want. Between these two parties, who is allowed to determine what questions may be posted?
alexcpn 6y ago
SO has been invaluable for professional programmers like us who has to work on some many different platforms and use different frameworks that it is impossible to be master of all. But the one thing I don't like is being punished for a poor answer- the down votes, for just trying to help - a degree lesser than delete, but leaves a bad feeling still. I like more the medium way - just upvotes and then the rest naturally gravitate to the bottom
beshrkayali 6y ago
On the risk of sounding arrogant/selfish, I personally never saw value in answering questions on stackoverflow myself. I've been coding for 10+ years and of course I've looked up stuff on there, but from what I noticed, there are three types of questions: - Easy stuff, the kind the some proper digging within the docs or the logs would give the answer. This always seemed like the majority, even more within the last few years. I don't think I should spend my time answering those. I used to ask questions on forums before and got schooled a couple of times from people telling me to look it up in the docs or from other questions, it was more valuable than a direct answer itself. - Stuff that require digging, like 1-hour or more. Those are interesting, but again, I have my own issues that require 1+ hour research that I could spend my time on. I know not everyone is doing it for the points, but I didn't feel like the transaction is worth it. The knowledge I'd gain from researching a topic I don't currently care about to answer a random question might seem valuable (and it may be), but I think it's somewhat similar to the value of watching those short "educational" youtube videos, you feel like you learned something, but 2 days later you basically forget the whole thing. Maybe it's just me. - Stuff that you're the/a authority on, like if it's your language/library/framework/toolkit. I'm not either of those, but if I was, I don't think I'd be able to spend time answering random questions on a site I don't control. I'd probably feel much more compelled to give lengthy answers on the tracker/forum/qa site of the project itself.
King-Aaron 6y ago
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.
vbilopav 6y ago
And how the hell can admins figure out from your answers you are LGTB. If they can do that, your answer should be deleted and not because you are LGTB. Because it probably has nothing to do with the question.
jaygray0919 6y ago
Despite all the problems itemized here, I answer questions, or post comments, when I have experience with the issue. Reason: many of my questions have been answered by other stackoverflow contributors.
devwastaken 6y ago
Greggman and webglfundamentals have been a significant help to webgl. It would most likely not be as well understood or used without them. This is because they were essentially the person to respond to webgl questions on stack overflow and provide responses that fit your particular problem. I'd look at their avatar and think "yep that's the webgl guy" if I ever came across a webgl issue on stack overflow. I've had questions answered by them myself and it was a good help. What's stopping people from making up a new site? Call it heappointer, simple markdown editor and tagging system. Cache the heck out of it through cloudflare and your operating costs wouldn't be very large.
BrandoElFollito 6y ago
I have about 65k rep on SE. I asked a lot of questions, answered many. And still, when I ask a question, someone sometimes either requires a working example or show effort done to solve the problem myself. Even when I explained in the question why I cannot show an example, or that I simply do not know where to go. And then it gets closed because opinion based or whatever. This is when I wish the closer to always, for his all life, need to get up to get the remote after having comfortably installed themselves in the couch with all their food on the knees. I like answers such as "look up jhhyhgffg" (the concept that explains my question), ideally with a short comment. It does not always need to be working code.
wheybags 6y ago
Theory: the people who thought this was spam have never done any GPU programming. Normal programming often can be kind of "figured out" piecemeal, most often even complex APIs can be figured out with a small introduction and some examples. Graphics is much more conceptually heavy. If you don't know the basics, you will be flailing. IMO that makes posting a link to a basic tutorial a very good thing when it's clear the user is flailing. Even if they get this one thing working, it's not reallyhelpong if they still don't "get it".
5ersi 6y ago
I had a similar addiction to answering SO questions: answered 2000+ in about two years. It was the gamification that got me: watching that score grow, and getting reward tags.. But at some point I just got "saturated" by it and quit cold turkey.
british_india 6y ago
One rude asshole on SO convinced me to stop answering questions: g00glen00b.
74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago
StackOverflow was brutally murdered by lazy and incompetent developers from India, Bangladesh and some other countries in that region. The heap of trash questions and answers loaded on SO on a daily basis is just too much.
sklivvz1971 6y ago
Where to start... 1) Stack Overflow caters to millions of users and hundreds of thousands of answer-writers (if not millions). This means that no matter what moderation rules you have, including removing the rules you don't like and yes -- also changing the rules the way you might be thinking right now -- _will_ have unintended side effects, _will_ leave some user disgruntled or puzzled, _will_ lead to some niche minority feeling offended or possibly discriminated. That's unavoidable and most suggestions usually given to SO are well intended, but completely off the mark. Leave that comment? What about the other thousands of self promoting garbage comments that were deleted? 2) It's amazing how someone with so much participation does not know one of the basic rules of SO: put all relevant information in the answer; comments are meant to improve the answer, not as a side note to it. It's not difficult, it's a trivial concept.
- minimoose 6y ago
  if something has two valid answers, who are the moderators to judge the correct one for you?
  - sklivvz1971 6y ago
    They don't do that at all.
kthejoker2 6y ago
Fittingly it's the 100th anniversary of Freud's publishing of seminal monograph Group Psychology http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35877 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35877 Which in turn gave us Bion's Group Dynamics http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://tpocambodia.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Bion-Group-Dynamics-A-Review.pdf http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://tpocambodi... Which was the basis for Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownworstenemy.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit... And of course we can trace many of these observations and questions of group dynamics such as membership and leadership qualifications, rules making and enforcement, moderation, identity, cohesion, conflict resolution, growth and decay, prestige and influence, etc back further, to Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Avicenna, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Le Bon ... So it has ever been. Group dynamics are hard, film at eleven :)
amai 6y ago
If the Internet would be deleted tomorrow I would miss two pages: 1. Wikipedia 2. Stackoverflow and the Stackexchange network Stackoverflow has it's problems (often similar to Wikipedia) and everyone might have been treated unfair sometimes. But despite these issues the content makes it still the second most valuable webpage on the web. I donate regularly for Wikipedia and if it would be possible I would also donate for Stackoverflow.
coryfklein 6y ago
I like StackOverflow; whenever I have a question about how to code something I Google it and the answer is on StackOverflow about 95% of the time. I don't know what I would do without it. But I guess everyone here hates it? Seems a bit of an odd situation for a community of hackers to be in.
EricE 6y ago
No good deed goes unpunished. What's really nuts is I'd wager the majority of the "moderators" have contributed zero technical knowledge to the conversation. Content moderation is very hard to do, and if you try to outsource it to the crowd this is what you get.
simonblack 6y ago
I was an early adopter of Stack Overflow. I was also an early leaver of Stack Overflow. That was because the site seemed to cater to elitist anwerers and moderators than to the people asking the questions. All too often the answer to a question was :"this question doesn't suit our website" or "this question has been answered before" or "this question is below our prestige level". If the system was smart enough to answer that a question had been answered before, it should have been smart enough to merge the current question with the old question, or at a minimum, to just link the current question to the older question's answers. If a question wasn't relevant to the website, then a blanket 'offshoring' of the question to something like 'Let me Google that for you' would be better than a plain blank wall. As nicolas_t said above, "I always feel a bit sad and wistful when thinking about Stack Overflow. It was a great idea and at the beginning it worked well but the moderation culture destroyed the site.". My sentiments exactly.

357 points by polm23 6y ago

> Comments can be deleted by any moderator with for any reason. They don't like you? They can delete all your comments. They hate LGBT people and believe you're LGBT? They can delete your comments. This is one reason why there is no visible comment history. That site is a dumpster fire.

iamcreasy 6y ago
It happened to me more than once on stats.stackexchange.com. There is one (ex) moderator who is very demeaning and from time to time delete mine and his comments to change the narrative of the discussion. This behavior makes me think twice before using that SE site.
- nerpderp82 6y ago
  The function that SO serves should be owned by a non-profit. Everyone that posts to SO is working for free.
- arp242 6y ago
  This is something you should report to SE (the company) via the contact form with some specific questions where it happened. This would be grounds for a stern conversation/warning at least, and possible mod removal depending on the severity/frequency.
  - iamcreasy 6y ago
    I thought about posting a meta thread, but I forgot to take screenshot of the those comments(which I intend to do next time) so I had no evidence since the mod already cleaned up the thread. Do they have track records of deleted comments? Based on other comments on this thread it appears SE do not track deleted comments.
    - arp242 6y ago
      Mods can see (and undelete) all deleted comments. There is no way to "permadelete" comments, or if there is, it's only available to SE employees. I think you can also see when a comment was deleted, but not 100% sure as I'm no longer a mod myself and can't check.
      - iamcreasy 6y ago
        Perfect! In that case I'll report to SE via the contact form. Thank you! It has been a while but the event still bothers me.
silly-silly 6y ago
My favourite SO moment was when my comment had been edited to mean exactly the inverse of what I had stated. Whoever moderated it had assumed that I must have made a mistake and did not understand the problem space from the same depth I did.
exporectomy 6y ago
Doesn't the site advise you when you comment that comments were supposed to be for asking clarification or suggesting edits, Not for giving answers? People often use them to give half-hearted answers and I've had that urge too but written a formal half-hearted answer instead. It wouldn't get upvoted or accepted but if you feel you've got something helpful to say, why not say it as an answer? I think people are afraid to put their half-hearted answers as formal answers because they can get downvoted for being incomplete. But if you don't care about points like Gregg (and myself), then it doesn't matter. Comments like his "this site might be helpful" are annoying. You have no idea if the writer even understood your question and whether spending time digging through that site will actually help or not. They shouldn't post that. You can google for general information/tutorial sites.
- thesteamboat 6y ago
  I think I'd rather have a comment "this site might be helpful" on the page than not. It doesn't take long to classify a link as either potentially helpful or useless, and I'm usually finding the SO page through a google search anyway. That may indicate I don't know the right query or jargon for what I want. In any case, I'd rather that SO err on the side of redundancy.
  - Shog9 6y ago
    The core of the problem there is that for Gregg, "this site might be helpful" is an understatement; he knows there is a good chance that it will be helpful, that there is direct relevance... ...and then there are the legions of folks who've been posting links to the first Google result with that same text for years. Those are over-selling it: sure, the link might be helpful, buuuut... Probably not. These have been the bane of many a forum, clogging up the first page or so of responses, sometimes discouraging folks with actual knowledge of the topic from even bothering to respond. There needs to be some way of distinguishing between the two.
    - exporectomy 6y ago
      Maybe we're supposed to consider how many reputation points the person has to judge the likely quality of their link. Those kinds of decisions are already built into StackOverflow with rules on who can write comments/etc. Maybe they just need tweaking so that posting a URL in a comment requires even higher reputation. If you don't have that reputation, you can do the harder work of writing an actual answer that includes the link.
throwdbaaway 6y ago
It is not just the moderators, comments can be abused by users as well. Once I had a top 25 user came to leave a wrong comment to my answer, in a rather aggressive tone. When called out, he just proceeded to delete the comment.

hunterloftis 6y ago

That's a pity for Stack Overflow, but I don't blame him one bit. Also: I recognized the name immediately because gman helped me out with a WebGL question* last year. * https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62784790/what-is-the-fastest-way-to-render-subsets-of-a-single-texture-onto-a-webgl-canva https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62784790/what-is-the-fas...

pauljurczak 6y ago
I just up voted a few of his answers. Quality work.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jotato 6y ago

I had this same realization a few years ago. One day it just hit me that I was working for a site for free. Answer questions, "moderating" content, etc... Worse yet, you ask a question and it gets closed as a "duplicate" and the original is several years old regarding a different version and not even remotely the same. (think Angualar1 VS Angular 6) SO has its place, but it isn't for me.

ajfjrbfbf 6y ago

> Over the last ~9 years I've spent way too much time answering questions on stack overflow. I don't know why. I want to say it's because I like helping people. It's certainly not for "internet points" I've asked myself the same question and couldn't find a satisfying answer. The best explanation I found was that StackOverflow had become for me a way to procrastinate, and then tell myself I've done something useful. I realized I don't care much about helping people, In fact the awful quality of the majority of the questions is depressing more than anything else. Perhaps I should consider stopping too.

mdaniel 6y ago
Aside from my own opinions about helping, I find it slots into the same brain receptor as playing Zachtronics games: it's solving puzzles, which feels like "work," but that one can do in 15 minute(?) chunks without having to deal with a lot of the extraneous stuff Unlike the games, however, hopefully both me and the asker learn something every now and then, since for any modern technology there are countless weird interactions or unexplored documentation pages I am cognizant of the "free labor" bug mentioned in the other comments, but since I am somewhere between mildly addicted and actually enjoying the problem solving, I don't feel exploited, or at least can quit when I think it becomes a problem Separately, I also participate in moderation activities, and I have violentmonkey scripts to ease the repetitive "you no read, huh?" silliness inevitably brought by new users, but that's the part I hate the most. I would pay real money if SO adopted the downvote (or even close) reason taxonomy from https://idownvotedbecau.se https://idownvotedbecau.se and if SO was open source I'd open a PR to add it

eyelidlessness 6y ago

I invested a lot of effort into SO early on and came to the same conclusion. I mostly avoid even viewing the site now the same way I avoid viewing w3schools, but when I do happen to click in I’m astonished to see edits to 10+ year old answers that are often superfluous or just plain wrong. And lots of comments on similar answers that are perfectly well meaning but have no context of how the relevant technologies have changed in that time. But none of that is why I find SO offputting. In theory that’s how it’s supposed to operate. What I find offputting is that despite all these edits and comments the general quality of a given SO page has become a much more visually noisy version of the hyphenated website its creators used to mock. Just absolutely bad advice on bad questions with no citation to be seen. At some point the volume of activity overtook the will or competency to moderate and it just became a Reddit skin.

taneq 6y ago

Stack Overflow has been steadily going downhill for years. At least I learned about https://webglfundamentals.org/ https://webglfundamentals.org/ and https://webgl2fundamentals.org/ https://webgl2fundamentals.org/ from this, they look fantastic.

RandallBrown 6y ago

I got lucky a few years ago and scored an answer to a VERY common iOS programming question. When you google the question, the top result is my answer and I have actually gotten some pretty strong moderator powers just from this question. Every once in awhile I go through the queue of things that people have proposed should be deleted and I almost always vote against deletion. Even most of the lower quality stuff has some merit. A comment asking to rephrase is much more constructive than just deleting their post!

steve_adams_86 6y ago
Likewise, I haven’t contributed much in the last decade but my old answers continue to buff my account with points and privileges. It’s perhaps a broken system in that regard.

nerpderp82 6y ago

If gregg ever reads this, I understand.

9erdelta 6y ago

"Several people claimed comments have absolutely zero value. Therefore their deletion is irrelevent." What? Purely anecdotal I suppose, but I have found immensely helpful information in comments on SO.

nicolas_t 6y ago

I always feel a bit sad and wistful when thinking about Stack Overflow. It was a great idea and at the beginning it worked well but the moderation culture destroyed the site. There's too much emphasis on closing questions that are duplicates (when in fact they are not, and technology changes so a duplicate question asked 2 years later is going to get different responses), closing questions because they are too open ended (but those tend to give the most interesting answers) and moderation is both too heavy handed and opaque (no records of deleted comments). Also, often enough the accepted answer for a question is not the best answer and instead the best answer can be found by looking at other answers or the comments (which I agree with the author should not be seen as ephemeral but are instead critical) So, all in all, Stack overflow was great when it came out, the concept is good and it could be great but falls well short of that.

FreeKill 6y ago
I wonder if something more like a wiki format would be better long term. Say you take a question like "How to loop through a list of key,value pairs in JavaScript. Through the last 10 years, this has changed a lot through vanilla to libraries like jquery to new iterations like ES5/6. What I would love to see is just a page with this question asked, maintained over time with an emphasis on when the previous solution was relevant, and highlighting the most recent, preferred options for solving the problem. So, rather than a score based social network style system, turn the questions into living, and evolving documents. Also, sometimes a person gets stuck having to work on code that's a decade old, so it would be nice to have a history as well, and not just the most recent solution that may not work in their environment.
- to11mtm 6y ago
  This doesn't sound bad on the surface, but my worry would be that we would wind up with Wiki-style moderation instead of SO style moderation. i.e. 'guarded articles', edit wars and power-mods overriding outside consensus.
  - LordDragonfang 6y ago

caymanjim 6y ago

I still visit Stack Overflow links when Google search turns them up, and still occasionally answer questions that I notice while visiting, but I don't go there just to answer questions anymore. The quality of questions is abysmal and getting worse at an exponential rate. It used to be a site where experienced developers ask focused, well-written questions, after doing some work to solve the problems on their own. Sure, there have always been crappy questions, but as recently as three years ago, the bulk of the questions on the front page were decent. A huge portion of questions now are homework assignments where the student just wants a canned answer and hasn't made an attempt to solve the problem; are written by people with such a poor grasp of English that they're worthless; endless repeats because no one has searched for existing answers; etc. I also used to moderate on a daily basis. The flood of low-quality content wore me out, but what really ended my moderation was constantly being challenged by the fake entries they shove at you to "make sure you're paying attention" while moderating. The bot suspended me from moderating a few times because, when presented with posts that required moderator attention, I didn't pick the exact category it thought needed fixing. I'm doing free labor for you and you're going to be a dick about it? No thanks. It's no wonder the quality has gone to shit. At one point I was "top 1%" in a number of topics, moderated, voted in elections, etc. Now I barely use the site. As much as I dislike Reddit, I increasingly click on Reddit links when I'm looking for answers. Stack Overflow is still a valuable resource but it's all downhill from here.

Latty 6y ago
This is such a classic HN moment. The post is about SO, the top comment is complaining that the moderation is too strict and draconian, and the second comment is this one complaining that the moderation isn't enough. So is always walking a tightrope. Moderation of so much content and trying to make sure only the good stuff sticks is hard, and it burns people out having to deal with the same annoying low-effort things all the time, which leads to them being harsh when people make genuine errors.
- jerry80 6y ago
  >The post is about SO, the top comment is complaining that the moderation is too strict and draconian, and the second comment is this one complaining that the moderation isn't enough. They're both right. SO is moderating on the wrong things.

dvt 6y ago

I'm currently in the top 0.86% overall on Stack Overflow, even though I haven't been actively contributing since shortly after college (2015ish). I've always thought about writing this kind of blog post, but I think it's just pointless. SO, over the past decade, has been destroyed by power-hungry admins. These admins are (1) not technically competent, (2) not politically astute, and (3) do not have the best of the community in mind. Simply put, they're power hungry online weirdos that just want to be "in charge" of a community. I've witnessed this dozens of times, and there have been many (many) controversies concerning SO admins. After a few run-ins that rubbed me the wrong way, I no longer contribute. I feel that SO has become the new "Experts Exchange" or "Yahoo Answers" -- ironically, exactly what they were trying to replace.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TwoBit 6y ago
In order to be an active admin for a site, you need to have a lot of free time for it. And it's exactly these mentally inept people who have that time. There needs to be a name for this paradigm.
dwd 6y ago
The role of moderation is soul draining - all communities suffer from an Eternal September effect. There's always a someone new who didn't read or disregarded the rules. I do agree there are those who are simply attracted to the power of moderating a community; what is "Cancel Culture" but that same exercise of power? When a seasoned, prolific contributor gets disabused you know there's rot in the community; who is doing the moderation without knowing or ever communicating with the top contributors? That I don't get.
Debug_Overload 6y ago
> Simply put, they're power hungry online weirdos that just want to be "in charge" of a community. It's funny, I actually think that this is true for most of the mods we see online, be it Reddit, SO and the whole SE network, or any other forum. Comparing SO to Yahoo! Answers is a bit much, though.

treve 6y ago

Stack Overflow is extremely useful but also very toxic to many of it's contributes. I've found myself 30 minutes into an answer more than a few times, only to have the original question closed. Close votes tend to have a pile on effect, and many close votes are irrelevant. Just let me help the poster. Remove the question from searches so it doesn't bother future users, I don't care... don't prevent me from interacting with a person I can help. But it stings when things get removed by third parties that don't fully appreciate what was asked. Most juniors I work with find stack overflow flat out too hostile/intimidating to use.

MichaelMoser123 6y ago

SO still gives a lot of relevant answers to my web searches, despite its absurd moderation policies. Don't quite understand it why people on HN are so negative towards SO.

A12-B 6y ago
That's a different can of worms. They might claim their search results are good because they moderate a lot to remove noise, and maybe that's true, but it's this weird moderation that discourages good answers, and I think there are better ways of doing SEO so that you can have your cake and eat it too. I mean, a guy who spent hours on every answer just left the site. That should give you a clue.
FillardMillmore 6y ago
I think most peoples' negativity here is not towards the idea that it can be useful for quick Google searches, but rather that it has become a place that doesn't foster or encourage productive feedback and has become negatively affected by poor moderation. This will, in totality, greatly affect how valuable one appreciates time spent contributing there to be.

leephillips 6y ago

Do not contribute free work to SO, Wikipedia, or any other site that seeks to replace the web with its own brand. Instead, if you have useful knowledge to share, write it up on your own website. People will find your information using search engines. And when these agglomeration sites dry up, search engines will regain some of their lost usefulness. If you get good at writing you can even get paid for your articles, and the editorial process will make them even more useful for readers. SO, Wikipedia, and the like not only take and use your work for their own purposes, but are bad for the web. Their effect is to move the web away from a distributed network of knowledge under the control of individuals responsible for their words, and toward homogenized, voiceless near-monopolies of information. They are nearly as unhealthy for the web as Twitter and Facebook.

benrbray 6y ago
Wikipedia is bad for the web? Their whole policy is not to editorialize, and instead to provide direct citations to their sources. I often find interesting technical articles by looking at Wikipedia citations. > People will find your information using search engines. This is becoming really difficult, due to blog spam and SEO. I have so much trouble finding good info that I often end my searches with "site:reddit.com". I hoard RSS feeds collected from sites like HN and Reddit because I know if I lose them I'll never be able to find them again.
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
This is great advice. The absolute best SEO tip of all time is this: remember what you searched for on Google and couldn’t find a decent answer or link in the first few pages? Now you write that answer or link on your website.
sumanthvepa 6y ago
Strongly agree. I simply post my solutions to my own website. And Google and other search engines do the rest.
Clewza313 6y ago
Both Stack Overflow and Wikipedia are Creative Commons licensed, so they can be reused and remixed freely. Contributing to them may not be optimal if your goal is to maximize your personal brand exposure in search results, but it does serve a greater good, and it's very different from contributing to a locked-down, copyrighted repo like Facebook, Instagram, etc.

A12-B 6y ago

I have left a complaint before on a non-tech stack exchange about how my question was not in fact off-topic. It was a question about how to do something impractical. They interpreted it as me wanting to do it rather than wanting to know the process out of pure curiosity, and so of course mods immediately flagged it and it just had comments asking me why i would want to do that thing. It seems they're just more interested in policing the site than growing knowledge.

jcuenod 6y ago

I've also abandoned participating in the SO "community". I wait with bated breath to see people defending SO as it currently exists (as opposed to SO as it was).

umvi 6y ago
I used to defend SO until I recently got burned by high rep gatekeepers actively preventing me from contributing (what I thought was) value to the site. And I have 4k+ rep myself. Now I when I see high rep users I instantly think they are out-of-touch power users who are completely unaware of how average developers use the site.

cryptoquick 6y ago

I really don't blame the author, here. It's uncanny how many negative experiences I've had with Stack Overflow. There are occasionally posts where I notice they have this heavy-handed brand of authoritarian moderation and adversarial approach to problem-solving that I find really frustrating. I've since stopped using it. I generally find more value in first-party documentation, the source, and GitHub issues, anyway.

singularity2001 6y ago
Github is becoming a refugium for an increasing number of burned contributers

saul_goodman 6y ago

I've fallen into the same trap with sites before. Discovering that your arcane knowledge is useful to others is fun and you enjoy helping random strangers with their questions. It seems like you are contributing to a public benefit and you are happy to continue giving away your time because it's helping people. But ultimately you are giving away your time so some 3rd party can make money off of your effort. But you're ok with this as it's still a pubic benefit right? But this company is in control of the "public benefit" and as they are doing this to make money, eventually you will find yourself running afoul of their rules because your goal is to help people, not to make the company money. Then you discover that your posts are not just getting deleted, they are getting moved to the a private part of the site for paying customers to see. Nope. So once you've found that you're coloring outside the lines too much or getting used in secret you start to author your own articles hosted on your own site. No reason to give away your IP, it's the best of both worlds as users trapped in the corporate portal get access to your insight and your IP stays your property. Then you discover that your sites URL (and others) are getting search-n-replace null-routed. Nope. The only way to ensure you have the freedom to fully help people is to setup a quick site, CMS, forums, etc. And before you know it you're hosting a few sites for various reasons which get a small amount of traffic. But hey you're free of the man and that's not nothing. Time goes by and you have less and less time to help your small flock of users. Eventually your sites are taken over by spam bots and they all get de-platformed by google to reduce the spread of the new malware your sites are hosting. Some day you take the sites down, usually just as your trim down your neckbeard. Helping people is fun, but all things must happen in moderation. There's nothing wrong with spending a few hours helping an internet stranger once in a while, but you need to avoid making it your main free-time activity for this exact reason. If you're doing it through someone else's site then you are generating revenue for someone. I don't work for free, and neither should you. Most of us have a shit ton of other projects always on the back-burner, go work on one of those instead.

leephillips 6y ago
“your sites URL (and others) are getting search-n-replace null-routed” What does this mean?

endisneigh 6y ago

Has there been any research on how to prevent what you might call the “volunteer-power-hunger” that occurs in communities where there’s emphasis on community moderation? It would be interesting to get an economist’s take on how to improve these sites. In particular I’ve found it strange that the karma community on various sites doesn’t “charge” you to do more things. For example on this site it would make sense if it costed you karma to up vote and downvote - this would create an emphasis to not spend too much so to speak.

CrazyStat 6y ago
I've often thought over the years that there was something to slashdot's moderation by randomly selected accounts, as it prevents a few power users from dominating. Slashdot comments are pretty garbage these days though so maybe not.
- dialamac 6y ago
  I don’t think that is an indictment of the moderation system. You can’t replace a dead community with excellent moderation. Slashdot’s dead because it failed to produce worthwhile content and not be an even uglier pile of ass. The mod system can’t do anything about that.
ajayyy 6y ago
It does cost reputation to downvote
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Just one brownie point, though. That feature might give additional power to mods on a roll by empowering only those who've got plenty.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

fortran77 6y ago

I still sometimes find useful information on Stack Overlflow, but I, too, am done answering questions, commenting, or even upvoting correct answers for very similar reasons to the author of this blog post.

hyperpallium2 6y ago

Researching and answering questions is a good way to learn a topic - exercises. I've also been driven away, but there seem pockets of goodness, e.g. bash people are super insightful and helpful. Perhaps a kind of society of affliction. I can see why, prima facie, linking your own site looks like spam. Seems there could be a way to facilitate this (e.g. authorise/whitelist legit sites; or even host them on SO), but probably out of scope - like "closed as "interesting". And links lose eyeballs, undermining SO's business model... hmmm... revenue-distortion sunk expertsexchange... perhaps soon time for another change?

mellosouls 6y ago

This is pretty much par for the course at many (most?) fora; SO is just a particularly successful (and therefore also toxic) example. See also Wikipedia for large scale shenanigans of this sort. I long ago stopped investing significant time and emotional energy contributing to knowledge resources for similar reasons, though it should be remembered that there definitely are positives to contributors beyond the altruistic (I never improved as much in my technical skills as when sweating under the public spotlight after foolishly committing to answer a "simple" question that turned into significant unpaid work). It's internet culture (and tribal and other social gatherings before that), not StackOverflow particularly; the toxicity and crappy behaviour have been with the net since the get-go and will continue as long as the socially undeveloped see an opportunity to display their "power" or suck the energy out of those more publicly-spirited.

kkaranth 6y ago

I don't have anything to add to the discussion, I just want to thank greggman for going out of his way to help me understand a simple webgl issue a few years ago.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

yongjik 6y ago

> Several people claimed comments have absolutely zero value. Therefore their deletion is irrelevant. Seems like cooperative editing platforms always attract the "moderator" personalities, who will learn and internalize all rules and guidelines, especially those that contradict each other or reality (as the one quoted above), and use them as weapons in their semantic games. See also: Wikipedia.

llaolleh 6y ago

You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villian I guess. When something becomes big enough the quality starts degrading rapidly as a function of complacency.

Clewza313 6y ago

Eh. SO has its problems, and the weird "comments are supposed to ephemeral" policy is one of them, but this still seems like a weird hill to die on. If SO thinks that comments consisting of links to your own site are spam, then maybe they are spam? If they instead provided an answer (which can even be a direct quote) and put in a "For more info see X" link at the end, it'd be just fine by SO policy as well.

pm24601 6y ago
why? SO is putting up barriers. I for one don't find it useful to jump over them. I don't even bother asking question there any more.

DodgyEggplant 6y ago

There is disproportion between the time/price required to participate and the time/price to moderate. And when people get high power with low price - they use it. SO should put some penalty on wrong moderation decisions.

kstrauser 6y ago

Pro tip for people wanting to answer a question there: upvote it before you start typing. SO question scores seem to be very bimodal: either they're positive or very negative. So if you see a question that sounds interesting, vote it up first. This is a sign to the next moderator who rolls along that maybe they shouldn't delete the damn thing out from under you.

hastradamus 6y ago

Very unfortunate. Stack overflow is toxic no doubt. Very useful, but toxic

kokizzu2 6y ago

i too dislike downvoted without explanation XD

emmanueloga_ 6y ago

Anybody remembers Experts Exchange? "Stack Overflow founder Jeff Atwood cited Experts-Exchange's poor reputation and paywall as a motivation for creating Stack Overflow." [1] Seems like these things follow a natural life cycle. Maybe 2021 is the year a new hope emerges? :-) By the way, are there any lesser known contenders already? 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experts_Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experts_Exchange

arp242 6y ago
There's https://codidact.org https://codidact.org – it got started by some disgruntled people after the whole firestorm last year. I never used it though.
- emmanueloga_ 6y ago
  hmmm it looks more than decent! Just signed up.
- singularity2001 6y ago
  their landing page is a failure though

tomcam 6y ago

First of all, thank you for all your hard work. Second of all, fuck them.

bachmeier 6y ago

It's infuriating to have a comment deleted. It's happened to me at least twice (that I remember) when something was selected as the correct answer but it turned out to be wrong. In one case, the answer was specific to Windows and a range of releases of the language. I posted my comment, it got deleted, I reposted, and it got deleted again. In another case, the answer marked correct didn't work and wasn't even a full answer - the provided code showed how to start the solution and left the rest as an exercise for the reader. When I commented that the answer was wrong (even the part that was given) my comment simply disappeared without explanation.

_cs2017_ 6y ago

I have been on SO for over 10 years (not a community moderator; just have the standard moderation powers auto-enabled based on 25k+ rep). I have seen many community moderators who are extremely disrespectful to helpful users, and exhibit the degree of zealous devotion to some abstract rules that would make Chairman Mao smile. My weak attempts to prevent them from bullying users have utterly failed. It's not an easy problem to solve. SO could simply let community moderators vote out the jerks from among them. That would work great, if only the vast majority of community moderators were kind, considerate, thoughtful people. However, just like with certain other professions, the moderator role tends to appeal either to super-altruists, or to power hungry fanatics. Sadly, the world has a lot more of the latter than the former. And even more so than with reddit (where at least there's some competition between different communitiies), there's only one SO. Also, the intrinsic importance of historical content on SO is a huge barrier to any competiition. So it's not like users can vote with their feet. So even if SO management wanted to fix the problem, what could they do? (That's assuming the SO management isn't happy with the current moderation style in the first place!) (Community moderators = diamond moderators are the only ones, besides SO employees of course, who can delete user comments.)

umvi 6y ago
I feel like this happened to me recently. I encountered a C++ question that I felt I could contribute an answer to, but it had been closed 10 years earlier. I opened a meta thread about it, and a helpful high rep user reopened it, only for a bunch of even higher rep users to come in and ruthlessly shut everything down, including deleting the answer I submitted. I've never seen a community so hostile toward someone trying to add value. Maybe I really was in the wrong here for trying to reopen that question; you can read the whole thread and judge for yourself: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405099/reopen-c-argument-parsing/405101 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/405099/reopen-c-arg...
- singularity2001 6y ago
  you were not in the wrong.
6y ago

Waterluvian 6y ago

Speaking of points, is there a way to reset them on HN? I'd rather not have to remake accounts every so often.

sergiotapia 6y ago

StackOverflow suffers from Internet Moderator syndrome. The people who actually want to be moderators are the people you don't want to be moderators. And so it goes. I wonder where greener pastures are. I miss SO as well. I barely used it a handful of times last year, compared to it's christening year when I was on there asking/answering about 5 times a day.

banana_giraffe 6y ago

My most upvoted answer on SO is a quote from a man page and a one liner explaining how to use a flag on a tool. My favorite answer I made on SO is explaining how to fix using two python libraries that aren't often used together that break in a confusing way when both are loaded, along with a discussion on how I solved it. That one is the only answer for the question, but not marked as the accepted answer despite a comment from the asker saying "thanks! that fixed it!". It's currently at -2 for reasons I can't quite fathom. At some point answering SO became a game of seeing if I could answer questions before the third close vote would kill discussion, and I realized I'm just there to prove some point to someone, not actually help people. It's a pity too. I see great value in a website where people can ask questions and get help. SO isn't that, it's some RPG now, with perverse incentives.

pauljurczak 6y ago
Agree. I still see a lot of value in SO and I participate from time to time. When I post there, I approach it like an interaction with an alcoholic prone to violent outbursts. I'm not expecting rational behavior. I'm not bothered any more by an occasional swift deletion of my question deemed "duplicate" or "off-topic" by a bunch of power hungry fundamentalists, who often didn't bother to read it carefully. Crazy uncle had a bad day. Let's try another time.
GlennS 6y ago
My most upvoted answer on SO is explaining how to rectangle select in Notepad++ (hold alt while dragging, works similarly in lots of editors and IDEs). It's trivial, but I like to think I made some people a tiny bit more productive for the rest of their working lives. The original question asked for a regex.
XCSme 6y ago
Same, I have many answers that I spent hours thinking for the best solution and implementing clever snippets, yet my highest voted answer is also a quote from the docs: https://stackoverflow.com/a/32811548/407650 https://stackoverflow.com/a/32811548/407650 "Q: Mongoose findOneAndUpdate doesn't return updated document". Initially the answer was simple, but the more traction it got I added some more details to it and kept it up to date over time.

ggm 6y ago

It's possible both things are true: it IS spam by the formalisms the mods determine. And, it IS sensible for them to want to promote their work, because the body of work is awesome. Not all true things are without conflict. This isn't maths. This is sociology. What people want is sometimes in conflict. The mods wanted "no spam" and they lost a content provider because they hung up on the issue. I think both sides lost, but I'd do what the submitter did.

ajhurliman 6y ago

In general, I think moderators (on many platforms) have an unnecessary bias against original content. If you made it and you're linking it, you must be an obnoxious shill spamming their own content probably trying to profit off of it. There's no room in these interpretations for someone selflessly spending their own time and effort to help just for the sake of helping. Reddit mods are particularly exacting on this subject.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

privacyfreako 6y ago

The nastiest community has to be the EE. Not the top guys (Oleg is awesome, if grumpy at times), but folks with points in the mid thousands.

mdoms 6y ago

This is not a problem particular to Stack Overflow and it's one of my biggest problems with internet culture today. Somehow, at some point in the distant internet past, we all decided culturally that self promotion is bad. Why? I don't know. Maybe someone else can answer. But the consequence is that sites like Reddit now are rife with stolen unattributed content, while original content is largely frowned upon - Reddit's own guildelines[0] suggest you should be posting a >9:1 ratio of other people's content to your own. Frankly this is something the newer generation gets right. Zoomers "shamelessly" plug their own original creations - post their soundclouds under their own viral tweets, link to their own onlyfans in their bios, plug their etsy accounts on insta. If you're a creator (a tiny fraction of internet users qualify) you god damn deserve to promote your own stuff! [0] https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddi...

bilkow 6y ago

> Several people claimed comments have absolutely zero value. Therefore their deletion is irrelevant. The author comments (no pun intended) on why it does have a vote system then, but I'd go further: If comments have no value, why do they even exist? They wouldn't need to be implemented and they're just taking up space. In many answers I found in SO, comments have been very valuable, sometimes more than the answer.

roelschroeven 6y ago
Maybe the idea is that eventually someone integrates the knowledge from the comments into the answer, making the answer better and the comments redundant maybe. But if that's the case, that's communicated not nearly clearly enough.

steve_adams_86 6y ago

I had a deep liking for stack overflow some 12 years ago and went really crazy, spending hours every week answering questions much the same way Gregg describes. It was almost like a fun game - I loved finding something hard to answer then trying to get a good answer in there to a) teach myself in the process and b) help someone out. I was well rewarded with internet points which was somewhat appealing at the time. But that got old pretty quickly. What got old even faster was how cold and unkind other users could be. Over time I noticed I would always be second or later in answering questions; people would hurriedly toss up something hoping for that green check mark, and their answers would be pretty mediocre in most cases. However, speed was key and my answers would end up passed over. I continued doing it for a while because I enjoyed the exercise of it, but watching the overall quality of the site decline so rapidly absolutely killed it for me. I lasted around 2 years in total, maybe 6 months of that spent as a very active user. These days I actually filter it from my search results, like medium, many git repository mirrors, and content-farmy sites which hit on all major popular topics with the thinnest and least professional content possible.

uyt 6y ago

I just wanted to say thanks for https://webglfundamentals.org/ https://webglfundamentals.org/. I referred to it a lot when I first starting out with webgl. Even simple questions like how to resize the canvas with correct pixel ratio is so disgustingly complicated, I don't understand why anyone would want to be restricted to the space of a single stackoverflow answer: https://webglfundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/webgl-resizing-the-canvas.html https://webglfundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/webgl-resizing-t...

rhdxmr 6y ago

I personally don't know Gregg Tavares, but I empathize with him. I also have answered hundreds of questions via tech communities but most of questioners do not thank me and they do not respond to my answers at all. I do not know whether they checked my solution or not. But I can keep this job as a hobby for many years because I do not expect that questioners thank me at all. I just do it for myself. Actually I do not think that I am helping people online. I consider myself that I am doing this just for fun. I can learn some lessons even from the silly questions written by the ignorant who do not have any background knowledge. I also have my answering history and I can use it for self promotion when I introduce myself to others. I even participate in developing some open source projects, but I also do not expect that somebody who like my code offer me a great job or help me improve my code. No one will give me a food on the table. No devotion, no pain. I just do something online that is fun for me, meaningful and additionally helpful to others.

jariel 6y ago

Stack Overflow exists because we are terrible at documentation. There should be a straight up solid answer for 80% of those questions in the relevant docs. Docs should have walk-throughs / overviews, common examples, and good reference with links to examples. And then a ton of secondary examples related to every corner, explaining everything. If it's not clear, then guess what? We all have to figure it out!. Every one of us has to labour through APIs to make those 1-5 a day mini-insights, when, if the docs were clear, we should not have to. If I 'owned' Java I would consider every common question about Java that wasn't made clear in the docs a failure of some kind. Not only that - why on earth do people think that publishing an API is good enough? Why doesn't Oracle/MS have respectable team of people literally just answering SE questions all day on Java/C#/TS etc. giving fairly definitive answers? I can only imagine this would have spectacular ROI. (I mean, aside from getting the free labour of volunteers, but MS can affordit)

tannhaeuser 6y ago
There used to be the "FAQ" format for product/project documentation covering points that don't fit into regular documentation. There's also the format of "case studies". Not sure SO should be a place for the likes of Oracle/MS to answer questions about "their" language stacks. AFAICS, Oracle has pretty much pulled out of pushing Java years ago anyway. In contrast, MS is all over the place to advertise .net and TS. Don't need more of that on SO, with staged questions and distortion of public reception by sheer volume and SO stats.

pm24601 6y ago

I agree. I experienced the same situation. I don't even ask questions on SO. Too many times I have had questions closed "Too open-ended". HELLO I make them open ended because I don't want the answerers to be restricted.

bmn__ 6y ago
There is a disconnect between what SO wants and what you want. Between these two parties, who is allowed to determine what questions may be posted?

alexcpn 6y ago

SO has been invaluable for professional programmers like us who has to work on some many different platforms and use different frameworks that it is impossible to be master of all. But the one thing I don't like is being punished for a poor answer- the down votes, for just trying to help - a degree lesser than delete, but leaves a bad feeling still. I like more the medium way - just upvotes and then the rest naturally gravitate to the bottom

beshrkayali 6y ago

On the risk of sounding arrogant/selfish, I personally never saw value in answering questions on stackoverflow myself. I've been coding for 10+ years and of course I've looked up stuff on there, but from what I noticed, there are three types of questions: - Easy stuff, the kind the some proper digging within the docs or the logs would give the answer. This always seemed like the majority, even more within the last few years. I don't think I should spend my time answering those. I used to ask questions on forums before and got schooled a couple of times from people telling me to look it up in the docs or from other questions, it was more valuable than a direct answer itself. - Stuff that require digging, like 1-hour or more. Those are interesting, but again, I have my own issues that require 1+ hour research that I could spend my time on. I know not everyone is doing it for the points, but I didn't feel like the transaction is worth it. The knowledge I'd gain from researching a topic I don't currently care about to answer a random question might seem valuable (and it may be), but I think it's somewhat similar to the value of watching those short "educational" youtube videos, you feel like you learned something, but 2 days later you basically forget the whole thing. Maybe it's just me. - Stuff that you're the/a authority on, like if it's your language/library/framework/toolkit. I'm not either of those, but if I was, I don't think I'd be able to spend time answering random questions on a site I don't control. I'd probably feel much more compelled to give lengthy answers on the tracker/forum/qa site of the project itself.

King-Aaron 6y ago

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

vbilopav 6y ago

And how the hell can admins figure out from your answers you are LGTB. If they can do that, your answer should be deleted and not because you are LGTB. Because it probably has nothing to do with the question.

jaygray0919 6y ago

Despite all the problems itemized here, I answer questions, or post comments, when I have experience with the issue. Reason: many of my questions have been answered by other stackoverflow contributors.

devwastaken 6y ago

Greggman and webglfundamentals have been a significant help to webgl. It would most likely not be as well understood or used without them. This is because they were essentially the person to respond to webgl questions on stack overflow and provide responses that fit your particular problem. I'd look at their avatar and think "yep that's the webgl guy" if I ever came across a webgl issue on stack overflow. I've had questions answered by them myself and it was a good help. What's stopping people from making up a new site? Call it heappointer, simple markdown editor and tagging system. Cache the heck out of it through cloudflare and your operating costs wouldn't be very large.

BrandoElFollito 6y ago

I have about 65k rep on SE. I asked a lot of questions, answered many. And still, when I ask a question, someone sometimes either requires a working example or show effort done to solve the problem myself. Even when I explained in the question why I cannot show an example, or that I simply do not know where to go. And then it gets closed because opinion based or whatever. This is when I wish the closer to always, for his all life, need to get up to get the remote after having comfortably installed themselves in the couch with all their food on the knees. I like answers such as "look up jhhyhgffg" (the concept that explains my question), ideally with a short comment. It does not always need to be working code.

wheybags 6y ago

Theory: the people who thought this was spam have never done any GPU programming. Normal programming often can be kind of "figured out" piecemeal, most often even complex APIs can be figured out with a small introduction and some examples. Graphics is much more conceptually heavy. If you don't know the basics, you will be flailing. IMO that makes posting a link to a basic tutorial a very good thing when it's clear the user is flailing. Even if they get this one thing working, it's not reallyhelpong if they still don't "get it".

5ersi 6y ago

I had a similar addiction to answering SO questions: answered 2000+ in about two years. It was the gamification that got me: watching that score grow, and getting reward tags.. But at some point I just got "saturated" by it and quit cold turkey.

british_india 6y ago

One rude asshole on SO convinced me to stop answering questions: g00glen00b.

74d-fe6-2c6 6y ago

StackOverflow was brutally murdered by lazy and incompetent developers from India, Bangladesh and some other countries in that region. The heap of trash questions and answers loaded on SO on a daily basis is just too much.

sklivvz1971 6y ago

Where to start... 1) Stack Overflow caters to millions of users and hundreds of thousands of answer-writers (if not millions). This means that no matter what moderation rules you have, including removing the rules you don't like and yes -- also changing the rules the way you might be thinking right now -- _will_ have unintended side effects, _will_ leave some user disgruntled or puzzled, _will_ lead to some niche minority feeling offended or possibly discriminated. That's unavoidable and most suggestions usually given to SO are well intended, but completely off the mark. Leave that comment? What about the other thousands of self promoting garbage comments that were deleted? 2) It's amazing how someone with so much participation does not know one of the basic rules of SO: put all relevant information in the answer; comments are meant to improve the answer, not as a side note to it. It's not difficult, it's a trivial concept.

minimoose 6y ago
if something has two valid answers, who are the moderators to judge the correct one for you?
- sklivvz1971 6y ago
  They don't do that at all.

kthejoker2 6y ago

Fittingly it's the 100th anniversary of Freud's publishing of seminal monograph Group Psychology http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35877 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35877 Which in turn gave us Bion's Group Dynamics http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://tpocambodia.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Bion-Group-Dynamics-A-Review.pdf http://scholar.google.com/scholar_url?url=https://tpocambodi... Which was the basis for Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisitsownworstenemy.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit... And of course we can trace many of these observations and questions of group dynamics such as membership and leadership qualifications, rules making and enforcement, moderation, identity, cohesion, conflict resolution, growth and decay, prestige and influence, etc back further, to Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Avicenna, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Le Bon ... So it has ever been. Group dynamics are hard, film at eleven :)

amai 6y ago

If the Internet would be deleted tomorrow I would miss two pages: 1. Wikipedia 2. Stackoverflow and the Stackexchange network Stackoverflow has it's problems (often similar to Wikipedia) and everyone might have been treated unfair sometimes. But despite these issues the content makes it still the second most valuable webpage on the web. I donate regularly for Wikipedia and if it would be possible I would also donate for Stackoverflow.

coryfklein 6y ago

I like StackOverflow; whenever I have a question about how to code something I Google it and the answer is on StackOverflow about 95% of the time. I don't know what I would do without it. But I guess everyone here hates it? Seems a bit of an odd situation for a community of hackers to be in.

EricE 6y ago

No good deed goes unpunished. What's really nuts is I'd wager the majority of the "moderators" have contributed zero technical knowledge to the conversation. Content moderation is very hard to do, and if you try to outsource it to the crowd this is what you get.

simonblack 6y ago

I was an early adopter of Stack Overflow. I was also an early leaver of Stack Overflow. That was because the site seemed to cater to elitist anwerers and moderators than to the people asking the questions. All too often the answer to a question was :"this question doesn't suit our website" or "this question has been answered before" or "this question is below our prestige level". If the system was smart enough to answer that a question had been answered before, it should have been smart enough to merge the current question with the old question, or at a minimum, to just link the current question to the older question's answers. If a question wasn't relevant to the website, then a blanket 'offshoring' of the question to something like 'Let me Google that for you' would be better than a plain blank wall. As nicolas_t said above, "I always feel a bit sad and wistful when thinking about Stack Overflow. It was a great idea and at the beginning it worked well but the moderation culture destroyed the site.". My sentiments exactly.