7 ms·

so why are so many people convinced otherwise? most posts here are from people apparently tired of so. if you're only measuring positives, what are you missin

so why are so many people convinced otherwise? most posts here are from people apparently tired of so. if you're only measuring positives, what are you missing that explains the negatives? it's understandable being defensive. but maybe that reflex is causing you to miss something? [edit: also, how do you measure evaporative cooling?]

chavesn 14y ago
One possible explanation: People here, generally speaking, like a community that is about the people. Aside from meta.stackoverflow, Stack Overflow's model makes that difficult. That's ok, because Stack Overflow is not a social network - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/128552/143601 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/128552/143601
- wpietri 14y ago
  Well, they don't want Stack Overflow to be a social network. But like Soylent Green, it's made out of people. In SO's case, inconveniently alive people. Humans are inherently social, and the amount of effort SO staff and moderators have to go to trying to stamp that out is a sign that SO really is a social network. I always think it's a bad sign when product designers think they know much better than their users what they want. I think that's what killed Friendster. I think that's why Google Plus is kinda sad and sterile. If you're going to go to all the trouble of making a product for people, I'd rather you listened to them from time to time.
  - codinghorror 14y ago
    We do listen to the people! No other site gives so much power to regular users, up to and including moderator elections. The problem with listening to the people too much is that popularity becomes the most important metric, with predictable results: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popularity/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul... It's a balancing act. What people actually want, and what they think they want, are often two different hings.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - wpietri 14y ago
      Listening to people is entirely different than electing moderators. Nobody here is complaining that you aren't serving insiders. But I do see a lot of grumbling from people who feel like they have been forced out. In the link, you seem to be basically making a slippery slope argument. I am sure a lot of people agree that they don't want a sea of memes. But a lot of reasonable people feel you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. A modestly subjective question like "What are the relative merits of frameworks X, Y, and Z?" is not anything like a rage comic. Neither is a reasonable discussion on programming mistakes. Your "opportunity cost" argument strikes me as entirely wrongheaded. You pretend there are only two things people can do in the world: subjective questions and the objective ones. Your worry that a topic expert is spending 10 minutes on something he enjoys rather than the thing you want him to do is paternalistic and controlling. Every real community bonds not just over the practical stuff, but the fun stuff. It's as if you're saying that Golden Gate Park should be removed because those people should be out picking up trash or working to pay taxes.
      - codinghorror 14y ago
        I'm saying that Golden Gate Park is not the same as your office building, or school campus. I don't begrudge the park the right to exist, but places of learning aren't places of pure entertainment, at least not in the Stack Exchange worldview.
        wpietri 14y ago
        The analogy I was making was to the city of San Francisco. If you want to make an analogy to a place of learning, consider a college campus. People are encouraged to do things there beyond studying. Areas are set aside just for having fun. That kind of community bonding doesn't take away from education; it enhances and supports it. Also, nobody here is arguing that SO should be a place of pure entertainment. As far as I can tell, that's a straw man. Or perhaps more accurately, the imaginary bogeyman SO is fleeing.
  - cruise02 14y ago
    I'm one of the moderators on Stack Overflow. It's not my goal to stamp out any sign that SO is a social network, but I do want to prevent it from turning into Yahoo! Answers. Some level of moderation is necessary to maintain quality. Just because some users want to use Stack Overflow to ask off-topic questions doesn't mean we should let them.
    - wpietri 14y ago
      Has anybody here complained about wanting off-topic questions? The linked article sure isn't.
      - codinghorror 14y ago
        Your definition of "on-topic" is not the same as ours, therefore you do want off-topic questions. Saying that our definition of the topic is wrong, does not mean you aren't asking for off-topic questions to be allowed. It's the same thing.
        wpietri 14y ago
        I agree that the definitions are different. However, look at what you're saying. You've divided the world into us and them. It's you, the defender of the one true definition, versus the ignorant outsider fools. It's utterly close-minded. It's your bat and ball, naturally, so you're welcome to keep on driving off the people who have different views. But don't go around saying you listen to your users when you talk like this.
      - cruise02 14y ago
        From the linked article: > ...throw out the gazillion-sub-site silliness and broaden allowed topics for discussion.
        wpietri 14y ago
        Right. That's a sign that people disagree about what exactly is on-topic. Not a sign that people want to turn it into an anything-goes meme factory.
DanBC 14y ago
People have different expectations from a Q&A site. SO is pretty rigid about what they want. That's a good thing - their servers, their rules. Firm guidelines allow users to find either post useful questions, or find some other site. Except, that's not what happens. Someone asks a question that's a lousy fit for the SE format; and people like it, and upvote it and answer it and the answers get upvotes. Then some mod comes along and closes it, and there's a bunch of negative feeling. SO is huge, and needs constant tending to keep it useful. Cool urls don't change, but when Mark Pilgrim (who has a gajillion urls over SE) leaves the Internet there's a gajillion urls that need to be found and changed. (No, I have no idea why a site run by programmers, for programmers, can't kludge together a script to search for and replace urls.) That's one small example. There are plenty of other examples. Then there's the "problem" of duplicate answers. Ideally, there would be one great question, with a bunch of answers, with the best answer being upvoted most and the answer most fitting being accepted. But very few people searches before asking, and all the tags are not useful, so there are a lot of duplicates. That could be okay, except the dupes are usually worse quality than one great question. And the answers lose quality over time - there's only so many times that someone is going to write a great answer. Then the gamification is broken on some of the sites. You start off almost unable to make any contribution, and people with low scores do not get the upvotes. (This guy with a million votes must know what he's talking about, UPVOTE.) In theory you could concentrate on an obscure segment. In practice not much on SO is obscure because there are so many users. The fragmentation is a bigger problem, I think. I want to ask a question about linux software, on my Ubuntu install. Already there are two different SE's I could ask on. There could be more depending on the software. This is a more vicious form of the duplicates problem. The proliferation of SEs into ever more niche segments is okay, I think. They either sink or swim. Lousy for you if you've invested time and effort into something that sinks. There is definitely a niche for a subjective version though. All those questions that peope love to ask, and answer. ("What's your favorite monspace font?" "What are your 3 most important programming pearls of wisdom?" "What book did you find most useful when you started, and what is most useful today?" etc etc. Obviously, versions of these questions exist in reddit and /prog/ and news:comp.* and etc etc. FWIW I love the SE sites, and I love the fierce moderation. I've disagreed with it at times, and certainly with the cold way it gets implemented. But I'm glad SE exists. I just wish I knew a where I could ask different questions and have them seen by a huge crowd of clueful users.

chavesn 14y ago

One possible explanation: People here, generally speaking, like a community that is about the people. Aside from meta.stackoverflow, Stack Overflow's model makes that difficult. That's ok, because Stack Overflow is not a social network - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/128552/143601 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/128552/143601

wpietri 14y ago
Well, they don't want Stack Overflow to be a social network. But like Soylent Green, it's made out of people. In SO's case, inconveniently alive people. Humans are inherently social, and the amount of effort SO staff and moderators have to go to trying to stamp that out is a sign that SO really is a social network. I always think it's a bad sign when product designers think they know much better than their users what they want. I think that's what killed Friendster. I think that's why Google Plus is kinda sad and sterile. If you're going to go to all the trouble of making a product for people, I'd rather you listened to them from time to time.
- codinghorror 14y ago
  We do listen to the people! No other site gives so much power to regular users, up to and including moderator elections. The problem with listening to the people too much is that popularity becomes the most important metric, with predictable results: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popularity/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul... It's a balancing act. What people actually want, and what they think they want, are often two different hings.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - wpietri 14y ago
    Listening to people is entirely different than electing moderators. Nobody here is complaining that you aren't serving insiders. But I do see a lot of grumbling from people who feel like they have been forced out. In the link, you seem to be basically making a slippery slope argument. I am sure a lot of people agree that they don't want a sea of memes. But a lot of reasonable people feel you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. A modestly subjective question like "What are the relative merits of frameworks X, Y, and Z?" is not anything like a rage comic. Neither is a reasonable discussion on programming mistakes. Your "opportunity cost" argument strikes me as entirely wrongheaded. You pretend there are only two things people can do in the world: subjective questions and the objective ones. Your worry that a topic expert is spending 10 minutes on something he enjoys rather than the thing you want him to do is paternalistic and controlling. Every real community bonds not just over the practical stuff, but the fun stuff. It's as if you're saying that Golden Gate Park should be removed because those people should be out picking up trash or working to pay taxes.
    - codinghorror 14y ago
      I'm saying that Golden Gate Park is not the same as your office building, or school campus. I don't begrudge the park the right to exist, but places of learning aren't places of pure entertainment, at least not in the Stack Exchange worldview.
      - wpietri 14y ago
        The analogy I was making was to the city of San Francisco. If you want to make an analogy to a place of learning, consider a college campus. People are encouraged to do things there beyond studying. Areas are set aside just for having fun. That kind of community bonding doesn't take away from education; it enhances and supports it. Also, nobody here is arguing that SO should be a place of pure entertainment. As far as I can tell, that's a straw man. Or perhaps more accurately, the imaginary bogeyman SO is fleeing.
- cruise02 14y ago
  I'm one of the moderators on Stack Overflow. It's not my goal to stamp out any sign that SO is a social network, but I do want to prevent it from turning into Yahoo! Answers. Some level of moderation is necessary to maintain quality. Just because some users want to use Stack Overflow to ask off-topic questions doesn't mean we should let them.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    Has anybody here complained about wanting off-topic questions? The linked article sure isn't.
    - codinghorror 14y ago
      Your definition of "on-topic" is not the same as ours, therefore you do want off-topic questions. Saying that our definition of the topic is wrong, does not mean you aren't asking for off-topic questions to be allowed. It's the same thing.
      - wpietri 14y ago
        I agree that the definitions are different. However, look at what you're saying. You've divided the world into us and them. It's you, the defender of the one true definition, versus the ignorant outsider fools. It's utterly close-minded. It's your bat and ball, naturally, so you're welcome to keep on driving off the people who have different views. But don't go around saying you listen to your users when you talk like this.
    - cruise02 14y ago
      From the linked article: > ...throw out the gazillion-sub-site silliness and broaden allowed topics for discussion.
      - wpietri 14y ago
        Right. That's a sign that people disagree about what exactly is on-topic. Not a sign that people want to turn it into an anything-goes meme factory.

DanBC 14y ago

People have different expectations from a Q&A site. SO is pretty rigid about what they want. That's a good thing - their servers, their rules. Firm guidelines allow users to find either post useful questions, or find some other site. Except, that's not what happens. Someone asks a question that's a lousy fit for the SE format; and people like it, and upvote it and answer it and the answers get upvotes. Then some mod comes along and closes it, and there's a bunch of negative feeling. SO is huge, and needs constant tending to keep it useful. Cool urls don't change, but when Mark Pilgrim (who has a gajillion urls over SE) leaves the Internet there's a gajillion urls that need to be found and changed. (No, I have no idea why a site run by programmers, for programmers, can't kludge together a script to search for and replace urls.) That's one small example. There are plenty of other examples. Then there's the "problem" of duplicate answers. Ideally, there would be one great question, with a bunch of answers, with the best answer being upvoted most and the answer most fitting being accepted. But very few people searches before asking, and all the tags are not useful, so there are a lot of duplicates. That could be okay, except the dupes are usually worse quality than one great question. And the answers lose quality over time - there's only so many times that someone is going to write a great answer. Then the gamification is broken on some of the sites. You start off almost unable to make any contribution, and people with low scores do not get the upvotes. (This guy with a million votes must know what he's talking about, UPVOTE.) In theory you could concentrate on an obscure segment. In practice not much on SO is obscure because there are so many users. The fragmentation is a bigger problem, I think. I want to ask a question about linux software, on my Ubuntu install. Already there are two different SE's I could ask on. There could be more depending on the software. This is a more vicious form of the duplicates problem. The proliferation of SEs into ever more niche segments is okay, I think. They either sink or swim. Lousy for you if you've invested time and effort into something that sinks. There is definitely a niche for a subjective version though. All those questions that peope love to ask, and answer. ("What's your favorite monspace font?" "What are your 3 most important programming pearls of wisdom?" "What book did you find most useful when you started, and what is most useful today?" etc etc. Obviously, versions of these questions exist in reddit and /prog/ and news:comp.* and etc etc. FWIW I love the SE sites, and I love the fierce moderation. I've disagreed with it at times, and certainly with the cold way it gets implemented. But I'm glad SE exists. I just wish I knew a where I could ask different questions and have them seen by a huge crowd of clueful users.