6 ms·

Incorrect Stack Exchange answers make me angry

39 points by ingve 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Etherlord87 3y ago
> Notice how there is a comment on that answer saying that it's wrong but that comment has only 38 upvotes whereas the answer has 56 upvotes. A youtube comment won't get more upvotes than the video it refers to. It's just a matter of structure, of visibility. It's nice that there is a comment. The author apparently also doesn't know he can (propose to) edit the existing answer. If he doesn't have enough reputation, it will have to be approved by another member (it will be in a moderating queue). I can agree that it is frustrating sometimes to see an invalid answer being upvoted... Especially if you write the correct answer but the invalid one remains with the higher score just because it was there first, or because the voters are unable to tell it's incorrect and unable to tell your critique is correct. But that's not really related to SE.
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  This is a matter of a skewed voting system too. The comment explaining the answer is wrong has 38 upvotes, but the answer has only 12 downvotes. This means there are at least 26 people who agreed with the criticism, but were either unable to cast a downvote or refused to cast one (in the name of Positivity™, probably).
  - Etherlord87 3y ago
    You spend your reputation to downvote an answer (a question can be donwvoted freely). The positivity® is an issue too, I agree. Or maybe anti-negativity. On blender.stackexchange.com, where I'm active, we have a problem of few people caring to upvote questions. The best way yo motivate people to upvote a question is to... Downvote it. As long as a question isn't absolutely terrible, if it has negative score, people will upvote it to 0. Which generates reputation for the author of the question, because he gets -2 rep for a downvote and +10 for an upvote.
- ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
  But SE is not YouTube. On the latter, it doesn't matter what comment has the most likes. On SE however, one can say that what answer gets the most upvotes is the most important aspect of the site. For me, the date of the answer had become a key information to check before I even reading the answer. I use Django a lot and it significantly evolved over the years. And for too many times, I'd spend time implementing a solution, only to realize it no longer worked since version x.y that was published z years ago. The thing is, stack exchange was built to serve an industry characterized by its very rapid evolution overtime. Yet, it fails, IN MY OPINION, to adress such a key element in a graceful way. The documentation industry solved this years ago. Going back to Django again, its doc site allows users to select the version they're interested in order to show them relevant content. I think stack exchange needs to implement something similar for its answers. How can that work? Well, users can be allowed to add tags to mark versions where they know the solution doesn't apply anymore. It may not be the earliest version where this issue arises, and that's understandable. Other users can later refine the threshold data. SE can then display the info where searchers can easily spot it [Answer not applicable since x.y] and avoid them some confused head scratching. We can push this even further with multiple correct answers for a single question, depending on the version. Users can even add the version of different software they're interested in and see the correct answer that applies higher, regardless of number of upvotes. (Written on my phone. Apologies for typos.)
  - Etherlord87 3y ago
    On Steam there's a separate "recent" rating. I think SE/SO would benefit greatly from it as well. Allow people to set in their preferences to disregard old scores and use only the new score.
    - Avamander 3y ago
      Vote decay probably has been discussed a lot already on Meta StackExchange.
Faaak 3y ago
This person needs to take a breath and some relaxation classes. If you're so enraged about a simple wrong answer, how can you live peacefully ?
- lopatin 3y ago
  How can there be peace when someone is wrong in the internet?
- begueradj 3y ago
  That was the same thought I had :)
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
  And not only that, wrong answer on a privately owned for-profit website.
- asystole 3y ago
  So enraged that it makes you write a blog post with profanities in red, bold type no less!
- devnullbrain 3y ago
  It's not a simple wrong answer. It's a poorly designed system that causes a pattern of wrong answers, on this question and others. For comparison, consider the consensus on this site when that system is Google search giving wrong results.
  - Levitating 3y ago
    Google works like crap sometimes. So does stackoverflow. The takeaway here is just that information provided by a stranger should always be taken with a grain of salt.
- exe34 3y ago
  How do you sleep at night, knowing that somebody, somewhere in the world is wrong, and you are powerless to challenge their mistake? Speaking for myself, quite peacefully, thank you!
edflsafoiewq 3y ago
> it makes me angry that I can't post another answer on that question to debunk the existing incorrect answer because that question is closed as Duplicate Closing as duplicate is annoying. Unlike normal answers, which participate in voting and defer to the asker for acceptance, it effectively functions as a "super-answer" imposed unilaterally by a power user with few checks on if they were wrong.
- Avamander 3y ago
  It takes quite a few confirmations to mark a question as a duplicate except if it's a Community Moderator (with the diamond), there's only a few of them so it's unlikely they are the "unilateral" culprit.
ochronus 3y ago
Blogspot makes me angry.
- danesparza 3y ago
  Dear god. This site still exists????!!! I thought it shut down like ... 10 years ago.
pelagicAustral 3y ago
The Stack Exchange model is a bit weird, looking at it now... The inherent evolutive nature of the tech business makes things obsolete so quick that it's hard for some of the answers to be correct for an extended period of time. Of course, I'm referring mainly to the StackOverflow, and other SE's like DBA. Very few good questions have received the love required to keep them relevant, and even then, the accepted answer is generally correct only for a setup that is so far behind in time it has now been superseded by a completely new set of tools and technologies. With the ones that do receive new answers, you still have an issue of visibility, they just hang in a lower position in the thread, and because the vote system mainly works with novel answers, the incentive to actually correct or update the knowledge on an old question is removed. This mechanic is probably just fine for stuff like the Language SEs or even code golf, but for for technical questions, especially for dev related stuff, the system has proven to have aged like milk.
- paol 3y ago
  I think the initial design principles of Stack Overflow - basically that the balance of incentives will determine the outcome - is still sound. And the initial years of the site showed the people in control were very smart and thoughtful about structuring and fine tuning the incentives. The problem is that fine tuning (and occasional restructuring) needs to be an ongoing process, and it has stopped. It feels like the original creators left and the site has been coasting on auto-pilot for a few years now. That's what worries me about the future of SO. It was an enormous improvement over what came before (in fact was created as a reaction to the horrible status quo - expertsexchange anyone?). But if it's left to continue to wither it will eventually become like those sites.
  - biorach 3y ago
    > The problem is that fine tuning (and occasional restructuring) needs to be an ongoing process, and it has stopped. This is exactly it. SO is ossifying. Plus a small number of power users have final say on things like e.g. duplicate status, with no way of revising their decision. The usefulness of the site is slowly decreasing and it's a shame
beardyw 3y ago
https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/
codeulike 3y ago
Initially StackOverflow gamified Q+A but then they accidentally gamified Moderation and thats when it went downhill
- biorach 3y ago
  Well said. Power users chasing points and power now dominate and their incentives are not fully aligned with maintaining a high quality Q&A site
- Avamander 3y ago
  If anything the fact that they haven't been overrun with spam and that they're so popular shows that it does work for a ridiculously large amount of people. That's not to say it's not annoying to get arbitration in a niche section of SO/SE site. The site could use a bit more transparency, but that's a difficult balance. I've been a community moderator and also on the receiving end of a power user's whims, so maybe it's perspective or maybe it's bias, but I can't say the system is necessarily going downhill.
danesparza 3y ago
It's a community driven site. What we had before Stackoverflow / Stackexchange was a mess. I'd suggest starting to provide correct answers and cite your sources. Build trust in the community and make things better.
- biorach 3y ago
  That's not enough on its own to fix the problems outlined
  - danesparza 3y ago
    I didn't say it would be quick or easy.
ceving 3y ago
SO is not wrong. People are wrong.
khaki54 3y ago
Huh? If you have any stack exchange points you can just edit the answer and move on. If you have like 500 points or so on one site you automatically get privileges on all the others.
- jurassicfoxy 3y ago
  As some higher-up comments have stated, since the answer is Closed as duplicate, it is more limited to interaction than a regular open answer. Also editing an answer to something completely different is definitely not in the right way to "solve" bad answers, I think. My guess is the edits would be revoked, in any case.
doctor_eval 3y ago
It’s a bit funny tho - after all this criticism of GPT hallucinating..!
bryanlarsen 3y ago
I have a "wrong but useful" answer on Stack Exchange. It was one of those numerous times where I realized I was trying to solve the problem the wrong way; once I realized that if I flipped the question around the answer was obvious and useful for my scenario. I figured there likely would be others in my situation so I posted an answer "if you flip the question the answer is obvious and might be useful, depending on your situation". I guess it was, because it gets a bunch of upvotes. But the high score for a wrong answer infuriates some people, so it also gets lots of down votes and comments too. My answer doesn't answer the question asked and is definitely not helpful for those who can't flip the question. Does it belong on the site? I'll link it since it isn't hard to find, but be nice. https://stackoverflow.com/a/8329572/91365 https://stackoverflow.com/a/8329572/91365
- Levitating 3y ago
  Those answers are answers to the question and deserve to be on the site. I've often benefitted from answers like these.
- i_am_jl 3y ago
  I feel like the move here is to post your question as a new post, answer your own question, and link to your question/answer in a comment on your answer in the original question.
beretguy 3y ago
1. Flag question with custom flag or something to bring moderator’s attention, explain the problem, so that you can try to write correct answer. 2. Ask new question and answer it yourself. It won’t become more popular but maybe it will help a few people who can find it. But, yeah, it sucks.
tacitusarc 3y ago
When I go to the linked answer, without being logged in, I get an option to submit an edit with an explanation that will go into a queue to be reviewed by moderators. This seems eminently reasonable. Why was the process not used by the post author? Why was it not mentioned?
ipython 3y ago
Don't worry, these incorrect answers will soon be spit back out as gospel by ChatGPT, which will then lead to further auto-generated blogspam, which is then used as a primary source for Wikipedia, ...
- milesvp 3y ago
  This is sort of my fear with LLMs. Not even that they spit out bad answers, since bad answers are everywhere, or even that there is no good way to verify the quality of the answers, it’s that it will drive away the use of overflow sites. I know that the article is a rant about SO, but they even admit the correct answer is present on the page. I look to stack overflow to find out what I don’t know about a question, not to find out what the top answer is. Comments and alternate solutions are it’s super power, and from what I’ve seen posted in the last year, usage numbers are down for SO.

39 points by ingve 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

> Notice how there is a comment on that answer saying that it's wrong but that comment has only 38 upvotes whereas the answer has 56 upvotes. A youtube comment won't get more upvotes than the video it refers to. It's just a matter of structure, of visibility. It's nice that there is a comment. The author apparently also doesn't know he can (propose to) edit the existing answer. If he doesn't have enough reputation, it will have to be approved by another member (it will be in a moderating queue). I can agree that it is frustrating sometimes to see an invalid answer being upvoted... Especially if you write the correct answer but the invalid one remains with the higher score just because it was there first, or because the voters are unable to tell it's incorrect and unable to tell your critique is correct. But that's not really related to SE.

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
This is a matter of a skewed voting system too. The comment explaining the answer is wrong has 38 upvotes, but the answer has only 12 downvotes. This means there are at least 26 people who agreed with the criticism, but were either unable to cast a downvote or refused to cast one (in the name of Positivity™, probably).
- Etherlord87 3y ago
  You spend your reputation to downvote an answer (a question can be donwvoted freely). The positivity® is an issue too, I agree. Or maybe anti-negativity. On blender.stackexchange.com, where I'm active, we have a problem of few people caring to upvote questions. The best way yo motivate people to upvote a question is to... Downvote it. As long as a question isn't absolutely terrible, if it has negative score, people will upvote it to 0. Which generates reputation for the author of the question, because he gets -2 rep for a downvote and +10 for an upvote.
ahmedfromtunis 3y ago
But SE is not YouTube. On the latter, it doesn't matter what comment has the most likes. On SE however, one can say that what answer gets the most upvotes is the most important aspect of the site. For me, the date of the answer had become a key information to check before I even reading the answer. I use Django a lot and it significantly evolved over the years. And for too many times, I'd spend time implementing a solution, only to realize it no longer worked since version x.y that was published z years ago. The thing is, stack exchange was built to serve an industry characterized by its very rapid evolution overtime. Yet, it fails, IN MY OPINION, to adress such a key element in a graceful way. The documentation industry solved this years ago. Going back to Django again, its doc site allows users to select the version they're interested in order to show them relevant content. I think stack exchange needs to implement something similar for its answers. How can that work? Well, users can be allowed to add tags to mark versions where they know the solution doesn't apply anymore. It may not be the earliest version where this issue arises, and that's understandable. Other users can later refine the threshold data. SE can then display the info where searchers can easily spot it [Answer not applicable since x.y] and avoid them some confused head scratching. We can push this even further with multiple correct answers for a single question, depending on the version. Users can even add the version of different software they're interested in and see the correct answer that applies higher, regardless of number of upvotes. (Written on my phone. Apologies for typos.)
- Etherlord87 3y ago
  On Steam there's a separate "recent" rating. I think SE/SO would benefit greatly from it as well. Allow people to set in their preferences to disregard old scores and use only the new score.
  - Avamander 3y ago
    Vote decay probably has been discussed a lot already on Meta StackExchange.

Faaak 3y ago

This person needs to take a breath and some relaxation classes. If you're so enraged about a simple wrong answer, how can you live peacefully ?

lopatin 3y ago
How can there be peace when someone is wrong in the internet?
begueradj 3y ago
That was the same thought I had :)
lkdfjlkdfjlg 3y ago
And not only that, wrong answer on a privately owned for-profit website.
asystole 3y ago
So enraged that it makes you write a blog post with profanities in red, bold type no less!
devnullbrain 3y ago
It's not a simple wrong answer. It's a poorly designed system that causes a pattern of wrong answers, on this question and others. For comparison, consider the consensus on this site when that system is Google search giving wrong results.
- Levitating 3y ago
  Google works like crap sometimes. So does stackoverflow. The takeaway here is just that information provided by a stranger should always be taken with a grain of salt.
exe34 3y ago
How do you sleep at night, knowing that somebody, somewhere in the world is wrong, and you are powerless to challenge their mistake? Speaking for myself, quite peacefully, thank you!

edflsafoiewq 3y ago

> it makes me angry that I can't post another answer on that question to debunk the existing incorrect answer because that question is closed as Duplicate Closing as duplicate is annoying. Unlike normal answers, which participate in voting and defer to the asker for acceptance, it effectively functions as a "super-answer" imposed unilaterally by a power user with few checks on if they were wrong.

Avamander 3y ago
It takes quite a few confirmations to mark a question as a duplicate except if it's a Community Moderator (with the diamond), there's only a few of them so it's unlikely they are the "unilateral" culprit.

ochronus 3y ago

Blogspot makes me angry.

danesparza 3y ago
Dear god. This site still exists????!!! I thought it shut down like ... 10 years ago.

pelagicAustral 3y ago

The Stack Exchange model is a bit weird, looking at it now... The inherent evolutive nature of the tech business makes things obsolete so quick that it's hard for some of the answers to be correct for an extended period of time. Of course, I'm referring mainly to the StackOverflow, and other SE's like DBA. Very few good questions have received the love required to keep them relevant, and even then, the accepted answer is generally correct only for a setup that is so far behind in time it has now been superseded by a completely new set of tools and technologies. With the ones that do receive new answers, you still have an issue of visibility, they just hang in a lower position in the thread, and because the vote system mainly works with novel answers, the incentive to actually correct or update the knowledge on an old question is removed. This mechanic is probably just fine for stuff like the Language SEs or even code golf, but for for technical questions, especially for dev related stuff, the system has proven to have aged like milk.

paol 3y ago
I think the initial design principles of Stack Overflow - basically that the balance of incentives will determine the outcome - is still sound. And the initial years of the site showed the people in control were very smart and thoughtful about structuring and fine tuning the incentives. The problem is that fine tuning (and occasional restructuring) needs to be an ongoing process, and it has stopped. It feels like the original creators left and the site has been coasting on auto-pilot for a few years now. That's what worries me about the future of SO. It was an enormous improvement over what came before (in fact was created as a reaction to the horrible status quo - expertsexchange anyone?). But if it's left to continue to wither it will eventually become like those sites.
- biorach 3y ago
  > The problem is that fine tuning (and occasional restructuring) needs to be an ongoing process, and it has stopped. This is exactly it. SO is ossifying. Plus a small number of power users have final say on things like e.g. duplicate status, with no way of revising their decision. The usefulness of the site is slowly decreasing and it's a shame

beardyw 3y ago

https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/

codeulike 3y ago

Initially StackOverflow gamified Q+A but then they accidentally gamified Moderation and thats when it went downhill

biorach 3y ago
Well said. Power users chasing points and power now dominate and their incentives are not fully aligned with maintaining a high quality Q&A site
Avamander 3y ago
If anything the fact that they haven't been overrun with spam and that they're so popular shows that it does work for a ridiculously large amount of people. That's not to say it's not annoying to get arbitration in a niche section of SO/SE site. The site could use a bit more transparency, but that's a difficult balance. I've been a community moderator and also on the receiving end of a power user's whims, so maybe it's perspective or maybe it's bias, but I can't say the system is necessarily going downhill.

danesparza 3y ago

It's a community driven site. What we had before Stackoverflow / Stackexchange was a mess. I'd suggest starting to provide correct answers and cite your sources. Build trust in the community and make things better.

biorach 3y ago
That's not enough on its own to fix the problems outlined
- danesparza 3y ago
  I didn't say it would be quick or easy.

ceving 3y ago

SO is not wrong. People are wrong.

khaki54 3y ago

Huh? If you have any stack exchange points you can just edit the answer and move on. If you have like 500 points or so on one site you automatically get privileges on all the others.

jurassicfoxy 3y ago
As some higher-up comments have stated, since the answer is Closed as duplicate, it is more limited to interaction than a regular open answer. Also editing an answer to something completely different is definitely not in the right way to "solve" bad answers, I think. My guess is the edits would be revoked, in any case.

doctor_eval 3y ago

It’s a bit funny tho - after all this criticism of GPT hallucinating..!

bryanlarsen 3y ago

I have a "wrong but useful" answer on Stack Exchange. It was one of those numerous times where I realized I was trying to solve the problem the wrong way; once I realized that if I flipped the question around the answer was obvious and useful for my scenario. I figured there likely would be others in my situation so I posted an answer "if you flip the question the answer is obvious and might be useful, depending on your situation". I guess it was, because it gets a bunch of upvotes. But the high score for a wrong answer infuriates some people, so it also gets lots of down votes and comments too. My answer doesn't answer the question asked and is definitely not helpful for those who can't flip the question. Does it belong on the site? I'll link it since it isn't hard to find, but be nice. https://stackoverflow.com/a/8329572/91365 https://stackoverflow.com/a/8329572/91365

Levitating 3y ago
Those answers are answers to the question and deserve to be on the site. I've often benefitted from answers like these.
i_am_jl 3y ago
I feel like the move here is to post your question as a new post, answer your own question, and link to your question/answer in a comment on your answer in the original question.

beretguy 3y ago

1. Flag question with custom flag or something to bring moderator’s attention, explain the problem, so that you can try to write correct answer. 2. Ask new question and answer it yourself. It won’t become more popular but maybe it will help a few people who can find it. But, yeah, it sucks.

tacitusarc 3y ago

When I go to the linked answer, without being logged in, I get an option to submit an edit with an explanation that will go into a queue to be reviewed by moderators. This seems eminently reasonable. Why was the process not used by the post author? Why was it not mentioned?

ipython 3y ago

Don't worry, these incorrect answers will soon be spit back out as gospel by ChatGPT, which will then lead to further auto-generated blogspam, which is then used as a primary source for Wikipedia, ...

milesvp 3y ago
This is sort of my fear with LLMs. Not even that they spit out bad answers, since bad answers are everywhere, or even that there is no good way to verify the quality of the answers, it’s that it will drive away the use of overflow sites. I know that the article is a rant about SO, but they even admit the correct answer is present on the page. I look to stack overflow to find out what I don’t know about a question, not to find out what the top answer is. Comments and alternate solutions are it’s super power, and from what I’ve seen posted in the last year, usage numbers are down for SO.