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It's a longtime trope of these "stack" sites: the best questions with the best answers are those that are marked as offtopic, closed, deleted, downvoted or othe

It's a longtime trope of these "stack" sites: the best questions with the best answers are those that are marked as offtopic, closed, deleted, downvoted or otherwise rejected. It's a marker of good quality at this point.

tux3 3y ago
Marker of good quality would be too far (and biased), as the every growing mass of genuinely hard to salvage closed question certainly outnumbers the interesting ones But it sure looks to be bimodal. Marker of the really bad, and the so-good-it's-closed
- mannykannot 3y ago
  I would guess that this bimodality correlates with one in the personalities of those who become moderators - on the one hand, those who are willing to put a lot of effort into keeping the community relevant, and on the other, those who abhor any perceived irregularity. On occasion, when I get invitations to participate in moderator elections, I look to see if I recognize any of the candidates. Once or twice, I have looked through the candidates' resumes, and one thing that struck me was that some of them did a lot more down-voting than up-voting. Make of that what you will.
jimhefferon 3y ago
I also have found that often the answers that make me reflect the most on SO are treated this way by the mods. Does this effect have a name?
- enriquto 3y ago
  But even the mods acknowledge this! Here you have it, straight from the mouth of the beast: https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ They explain why they deleted the most appreciated question ever in Stack Overflow, and how they magnanimously let you look at a few scraps of the answers (but not to all, these are DELETED!), and why we can't, after all, have nice things. > Does this effect have a name? If I wasn't against ad-hominems, and to avoid giving undue credit, I'd propose to call this effect "Jeff Atwooding". As in, the cool answer by Thurston on contributing to mathematics has been jeff atwooded recently.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    But it should be noted that the question in the blog post—share a bit of programming jargon you’ve made up—is not a good question for a Q/A site. It is a “fun to play with” social media engagement question, more suited for Reddit. The question on the original post seems more grey-area. It isn’t really a math question that can be answered in a math-y way, but it is the sort of thing that some folks might benefit from seeing anyway…
- crispyambulance 3y ago
  > Does this effect have a name? That's a good question. It should have a name. We've seen it around for a long time on stackoverflow and all stackexchange-sites. I bet there's a very long German word for this kind of behavior? It's a combination of extreme persnicketiness mixed with smug arrogance and some amount of glee in punching-down.
  - mejutoco 3y ago
    Institutional schadenfreude?
  - Tainnor 3y ago
    Blockwarttum
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    The "I'm angry at the moderators enforcing 'keep off the grass' because I want to be on the grass and I'm special so the rules shouldn't apply to me" effect? StackOverflow advertises itself as a place for precise questions and answers, and explicitly not for open ended questions and answers. It tells people who sign up not to post open ended questions and answers, and encourages participants to flag same, and moderators to close same. To then be bitter and rude because that happened exactly as the prophesies told you it would, is unreasonable.
    - enriquto 3y ago
      > moderators enforcing 'keep off the grass' That's a good analogy! These moderators act as angry old men booing people out of their lawn. People who were having innocent and wholesome fun, and overall improving the neighborhood. It's the same kind of guys who call the police on kids selling lemonade.
      - jodrellblank 3y ago
        It's the same kind of guys who call the police on festival goers trampling their land, ruining nice things, and using "you must be fun at parties" as if it was some kind of justification. You can't go to a vegetarian cook-out and start cooking burgers because "I want burgers" and then mock the hosts for being unhappy at you. Well you can, but you're the jerk in that situation. You can't go to Wikipedia and start posting questions and answers and saying "I wish it was StackOverflow you angry OLD MAN horrible moderators". > "People who were having innocent and wholesome fun, and overall improving the neighborhood." Misusing someone else's site, in a way the creators and existing users don't want it used, in a way you agreed not to use it when you signed up, is not "improving the neighborhood".
- js8 3y ago
  We could call it the Thurston effect - a mistaken belief that site like SO exists solely to give solutions to abstract computer problems and not as a communal mechanism maintained by the practitioners to disseminate and further understanding of the craft.
bee_rider 3y ago
What’s the alternative? We already have quora and Reddit for less moderated questions. Stack Overflow remain the site that, when you are looking for an actual answer to a technical question, is worth clicking on at least.
- _gabe_ 3y ago
  > Stack Overflow remain the site that, when you are looking for an actual answer to a technical question, is worth clicking on at least. These days I'm skipping Stack Overflow entirely and jumping straight to the docs, unless it's a common question that I can never remember properly (like some esoteric git-fu command). The answers on SO are outdated or crappy. When you can't ask questions about an evolving framework without it getting marked as duplicate, then the answers quickly lose all value. And the people that were answering because they wanted to give back (not because they want to farm karma) are leaving.

tux3 3y ago

Marker of good quality would be too far (and biased), as the every growing mass of genuinely hard to salvage closed question certainly outnumbers the interesting ones But it sure looks to be bimodal. Marker of the really bad, and the so-good-it's-closed

mannykannot 3y ago
I would guess that this bimodality correlates with one in the personalities of those who become moderators - on the one hand, those who are willing to put a lot of effort into keeping the community relevant, and on the other, those who abhor any perceived irregularity. On occasion, when I get invitations to participate in moderator elections, I look to see if I recognize any of the candidates. Once or twice, I have looked through the candidates' resumes, and one thing that struck me was that some of them did a lot more down-voting than up-voting. Make of that what you will.

jimhefferon 3y ago

I also have found that often the answers that make me reflect the most on SO are treated this way by the mods. Does this effect have a name?

enriquto 3y ago
But even the mods acknowledge this! Here you have it, straight from the mouth of the beast: https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/ They explain why they deleted the most appreciated question ever in Stack Overflow, and how they magnanimously let you look at a few scraps of the answers (but not to all, these are DELETED!), and why we can't, after all, have nice things. > Does this effect have a name? If I wasn't against ad-hominems, and to avoid giving undue credit, I'd propose to call this effect "Jeff Atwooding". As in, the cool answer by Thurston on contributing to mathematics has been jeff atwooded recently.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  But it should be noted that the question in the blog post—share a bit of programming jargon you’ve made up—is not a good question for a Q/A site. It is a “fun to play with” social media engagement question, more suited for Reddit. The question on the original post seems more grey-area. It isn’t really a math question that can be answered in a math-y way, but it is the sort of thing that some folks might benefit from seeing anyway…
crispyambulance 3y ago
> Does this effect have a name? That's a good question. It should have a name. We've seen it around for a long time on stackoverflow and all stackexchange-sites. I bet there's a very long German word for this kind of behavior? It's a combination of extreme persnicketiness mixed with smug arrogance and some amount of glee in punching-down.
- mejutoco 3y ago
  Institutional schadenfreude?
- Tainnor 3y ago
  Blockwarttum
- jodrellblank 3y ago
  The "I'm angry at the moderators enforcing 'keep off the grass' because I want to be on the grass and I'm special so the rules shouldn't apply to me" effect? StackOverflow advertises itself as a place for precise questions and answers, and explicitly not for open ended questions and answers. It tells people who sign up not to post open ended questions and answers, and encourages participants to flag same, and moderators to close same. To then be bitter and rude because that happened exactly as the prophesies told you it would, is unreasonable.
  - enriquto 3y ago
    > moderators enforcing 'keep off the grass' That's a good analogy! These moderators act as angry old men booing people out of their lawn. People who were having innocent and wholesome fun, and overall improving the neighborhood. It's the same kind of guys who call the police on kids selling lemonade.
    - jodrellblank 3y ago
      It's the same kind of guys who call the police on festival goers trampling their land, ruining nice things, and using "you must be fun at parties" as if it was some kind of justification. You can't go to a vegetarian cook-out and start cooking burgers because "I want burgers" and then mock the hosts for being unhappy at you. Well you can, but you're the jerk in that situation. You can't go to Wikipedia and start posting questions and answers and saying "I wish it was StackOverflow you angry OLD MAN horrible moderators". > "People who were having innocent and wholesome fun, and overall improving the neighborhood." Misusing someone else's site, in a way the creators and existing users don't want it used, in a way you agreed not to use it when you signed up, is not "improving the neighborhood".
js8 3y ago
We could call it the Thurston effect - a mistaken belief that site like SO exists solely to give solutions to abstract computer problems and not as a communal mechanism maintained by the practitioners to disseminate and further understanding of the craft.

bee_rider 3y ago

What’s the alternative? We already have quora and Reddit for less moderated questions. Stack Overflow remain the site that, when you are looking for an actual answer to a technical question, is worth clicking on at least.

_gabe_ 3y ago
> Stack Overflow remain the site that, when you are looking for an actual answer to a technical question, is worth clicking on at least. These days I'm skipping Stack Overflow entirely and jumping straight to the docs, unless it's a common question that I can never remember properly (like some esoteric git-fu command). The answers on SO are outdated or crappy. When you can't ask questions about an evolving framework without it getting marked as duplicate, then the answers quickly lose all value. And the people that were answering because they wanted to give back (not because they want to farm karma) are leaving.