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Removing downvotes from SO seems like it would be a net good. Instead of downvoting, people could be more encouraged to post better and more correct solutions.

Removing downvotes from SO seems like it would be a net good. Instead of downvoting, people could be more encouraged to post better and more correct solutions. A good intermediate solution would be to only record downvotes that come with a comment.

politician 5y ago
There's no salvaging what SO has become - the place where good complex questions are promptly closed by uninformed moderators. The place where questions about new versions of software are closed as duplicates of questions about older obsolete versions whose answers are no longer relevant. The place where popular questions with hundreds of upvotes and strong discussions are closed as off-topic.
- manquer 5y ago
  If you see SO as community for developers these are all problems yes, however if you see it as a high quality wiki or KB, most of these issues are not problems for readers[1] . All knowledge repositories go through this problem, Wikipedia sites are equally notorious for making it very hard to contribute. As a KB grows older and larger, it becomes hard to balance the need to keep the current KB clean and enable creation of new content. Typically administrators respond by making it harder for the contributors rather than taking risk of poorer quality for the users, to contribute you have to become effectively professional and abide by institutional rules you may not agree with. Distributed editing tools only solves part of the problem and cannot not solve how to keep generating professional quality content without paying. Strong moderation is what differentiates SO from Quora, I rather live with SO style rules as a contributor than suffer poor Quora type content quality as a user. [1] I am cognizant of outdated version problems you raised, my anecdotal experience is in general the quality of answers that are present for a reader has not dropped massively in last 10 years.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    If you see SO as a high quality anything, I'm not sure what to say. It's filled with people answering the question they wish was asked instead of ignoring the question they're not satisfied with.
    - manquer 5y ago
      I don't know a platform today that has better content than SO for technical questions. My code throughput have reduced a lot in recent years with changing roles and I prefer reading the actual documentation, I am no longer solving a immediate/specific problem. Even then I still click search hits on SO few times a week, and most times after clicking through a few questions I can find what I need. Your(others) experience will vary from my mine of course, but I don't see anyone attempting a better model or better content short of source documentation .
      - eitland 5y ago
        Like Google their main competitor is their former selves. As the mix of us who knew early versions of Google and Stack overflow gets diluted year by year by new users who don't know how well these systems used to work this will become less and less of a problem for them so they can sleep well at work. Until someone disrupts them. I'm happy to say it feels we are getting close to that moment now ;-)
    - jokethrowaway 5y ago
      The best use of SO for me is: - Write an elaborate question about an apparently unsolvable problem - Realise the mistake while trying to explain it to the SO crowd - Close the website At some point I wanted to have a high score to see if it would affect my daily rate (it didn't) or if I could use it somehow (same as having tons of stars on GitHub - another useless errand). I started replying to a bunch of questions and the sheer stupidity of most of them made me realise I wasn't ready for that. Most of the content on SO is not great. There are definitely few gems in there and I certainly enjoyed "the <center> cannot hold", but most of the times the docs are better. On a side note. I never understood people that copy code from Stack Overflow. I can understand people who are not familiar with a programming language - but surely if you're a minimum proficient it would be faster to just write what you need to do or look for a library to do it?
manquer 5y ago
It is likely I may know enough to judge a proposed solution is wrong or inadequate etc but not enough to write a better one. Vast majority of users who can down-vote would come under this category. Encouraging them to write their own solution or even a critique/comment is not necessarily better. You can also down vote questions not only answers, a question could be poor but it does not mean I can come up with a better one.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  IMO it's perfectly acceptable to not only not downvote but to ignore a question or answer if you don't know/don't want to put in more effort to figure it out. Maybe someone else has faced the problem and understands how the questioner came to write the question they did?
  - manquer 5y ago
    Many times it is not hard to figure out why the question was written in a bad way. Spending time in the review queue can give a good sense on bad types of content that are typical on the site. Common issues I come across are very vague statements without an actual question, very broad advisory /opinionated questions, very specific solve this bug in my day job/code , no examples/illustrations added, or a big log or code dump - i.e. no effort to separate out the actual problem statement, do my homework kind of questions, typically there will already be comments asking for improvements without much impact. I wouldn't down-vote a question that I don't fully understand ( I guess that is true for most users too), at the same time I want to make sure bad content is not encouraged. It is just internet points for both users, nothing to fret about.
tester756 5y ago
>Removing downvotes from SO seems like it would be a net good. Instead of downvoting, people could be more encouraged to post better and more correct solutions. and way more spam, no thanks.

politician 5y ago

There's no salvaging what SO has become - the place where good complex questions are promptly closed by uninformed moderators. The place where questions about new versions of software are closed as duplicates of questions about older obsolete versions whose answers are no longer relevant. The place where popular questions with hundreds of upvotes and strong discussions are closed as off-topic.

manquer 5y ago
If you see SO as community for developers these are all problems yes, however if you see it as a high quality wiki or KB, most of these issues are not problems for readers[1] . All knowledge repositories go through this problem, Wikipedia sites are equally notorious for making it very hard to contribute. As a KB grows older and larger, it becomes hard to balance the need to keep the current KB clean and enable creation of new content. Typically administrators respond by making it harder for the contributors rather than taking risk of poorer quality for the users, to contribute you have to become effectively professional and abide by institutional rules you may not agree with. Distributed editing tools only solves part of the problem and cannot not solve how to keep generating professional quality content without paying. Strong moderation is what differentiates SO from Quora, I rather live with SO style rules as a contributor than suffer poor Quora type content quality as a user. [1] I am cognizant of outdated version problems you raised, my anecdotal experience is in general the quality of answers that are present for a reader has not dropped massively in last 10 years.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  If you see SO as a high quality anything, I'm not sure what to say. It's filled with people answering the question they wish was asked instead of ignoring the question they're not satisfied with.
  - manquer 5y ago
    I don't know a platform today that has better content than SO for technical questions. My code throughput have reduced a lot in recent years with changing roles and I prefer reading the actual documentation, I am no longer solving a immediate/specific problem. Even then I still click search hits on SO few times a week, and most times after clicking through a few questions I can find what I need. Your(others) experience will vary from my mine of course, but I don't see anyone attempting a better model or better content short of source documentation .
    - eitland 5y ago
      Like Google their main competitor is their former selves. As the mix of us who knew early versions of Google and Stack overflow gets diluted year by year by new users who don't know how well these systems used to work this will become less and less of a problem for them so they can sleep well at work. Until someone disrupts them. I'm happy to say it feels we are getting close to that moment now ;-)
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    The best use of SO for me is: - Write an elaborate question about an apparently unsolvable problem - Realise the mistake while trying to explain it to the SO crowd - Close the website At some point I wanted to have a high score to see if it would affect my daily rate (it didn't) or if I could use it somehow (same as having tons of stars on GitHub - another useless errand). I started replying to a bunch of questions and the sheer stupidity of most of them made me realise I wasn't ready for that. Most of the content on SO is not great. There are definitely few gems in there and I certainly enjoyed "the <center> cannot hold", but most of the times the docs are better. On a side note. I never understood people that copy code from Stack Overflow. I can understand people who are not familiar with a programming language - but surely if you're a minimum proficient it would be faster to just write what you need to do or look for a library to do it?

manquer 5y ago

It is likely I may know enough to judge a proposed solution is wrong or inadequate etc but not enough to write a better one. Vast majority of users who can down-vote would come under this category. Encouraging them to write their own solution or even a critique/comment is not necessarily better. You can also down vote questions not only answers, a question could be poor but it does not mean I can come up with a better one.

notreallyserio 5y ago
IMO it's perfectly acceptable to not only not downvote but to ignore a question or answer if you don't know/don't want to put in more effort to figure it out. Maybe someone else has faced the problem and understands how the questioner came to write the question they did?
- manquer 5y ago
  Many times it is not hard to figure out why the question was written in a bad way. Spending time in the review queue can give a good sense on bad types of content that are typical on the site. Common issues I come across are very vague statements without an actual question, very broad advisory /opinionated questions, very specific solve this bug in my day job/code , no examples/illustrations added, or a big log or code dump - i.e. no effort to separate out the actual problem statement, do my homework kind of questions, typically there will already be comments asking for improvements without much impact. I wouldn't down-vote a question that I don't fully understand ( I guess that is true for most users too), at the same time I want to make sure bad content is not encouraged. It is just internet points for both users, nothing to fret about.

tester756 5y ago

>Removing downvotes from SO seems like it would be a net good. Instead of downvoting, people could be more encouraged to post better and more correct solutions. and way more spam, no thanks.