9 ms·

Stack Exchange is not a forum: the role of “niceness” on a Q&A site

60 points by bussetta 14y ago

ctdonath 14y ago
Dumbledore. Gandalf. Yoda. Keep them straight. /ob pedantic
- melling 14y ago
  It was an intentional geek troll. Geeks love to run into the weeds over stupid little things. I think that was part of his point.
  - Robin_Message 14y ago
    I think the GP made his point for him.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
radagaisus 14y ago
StackOverflow has been overrun by anal people. Internet power attracts this kind of douchebags like moths to light. If you write 'Hello,' in questions the system will automatically delete it, if you - god forbid - write 'Thanks!' other users will edit your question to remove it. I can't explain how fucking weird it is that people take time to remove the word 'Thanks' from a website they don't even own. StackOverflow is a crazy good system for Q&A. Just like in Wikipedia, the problem is no longer trolls - but bureaucracy and pedanticism of the moderators. People are assholes who like power, and I don't think any q&a software can solve this.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- franzus 14y ago
  The best thing was a post by John Carmack. It had a "edited by <some SO poweruser>" next to it ...
  - sysop073 14y ago
    You mean this one? http://superuser.com/a/419167 http://superuser.com/a/419167 It wasn't on SO, but in any case, all the edits did were fix spelling/capitalization; why would that be bad?
    - franzus 14y ago
      Disclaimer: I stopped using SO a while ago because of the uber pedantic mods and the overall unfriendly atmosphere there. > why would that be bad? Because I don't want some bozo messing around with something I wrote. If he wants to add something he should write a comment but not change my original contribution. I see this as a personal attack.
      - solutionyogi 14y ago
        If someone re-writes an entire sentence, I can see how you may feel it as a personal attack. If someone is fixing spelling and grammar and other things like formatting for linking to keywords etc., I think it is very useful. I don't know why you would think that such edits are personal attack. This is the Internet, you need to relax a bit.
        shurane 14y ago
        Yeah, franzus is certainly taking it a bit too personal. SO is interested in the preservation of knowledge for future visitors. I don't know why this isn't in your best interest, but it is certainly what SO focuses on and gets, to a good degree. SO is mostly information-based. They are not so interested in friendly civilities, greeting each other, asking "how do you do", and so on. Neither is SO a substitute for regular conversation, where topics meander, talk goes in all directions, and new ideas spark, among so many other qualities/possibilities. It is question, answer, and building up respect. So I don't see the problem with removing the personal component. If you really wanted to, you can just contact another SO-er for thanking them. Now that you've stopped using SO, what do you use instead, franzus? SO is a really impressive site, pedantic mods be damned. Same with Wikipedia. You'll be hard-pressed to find alternatives that try to maintain the same level of quality across as wide a berth of topics (anything, really) as SO.
- gizzlon 14y ago
  Actually, that makes sense to me.. SO tries very hard not to be a forum and therefore everything that resembles footers, signatures etc. should be left out. On SO you thank people by up-voting and accepting answers, not commenting. Questions should be as "clean" as possible, they are not emails or letters. They should be free of that type of "social etiquette". Or, actually, when I think about it, the social etiquette on SO is to leave all those niceties out. Thanks
  - dinkumthinkum 14y ago
    But does that really qualify as social etiquette or is it just mindless rule following? Honest question.
    - gizzlon 14y ago
      I think it is.. Remember reading about it (lost the link) and thinking that it made a lot of sense. Also, it seems like mindless rule-following is the definition of etiquette :D "Etiquette: noun a set of rules for behaving correctly in social situations"
      - dinkumthinkum 14y ago
        No etiquette is not mindless there are reasons that go beyond, "StackOverflow founder said and it was so."
- steve8918 14y ago
  I absolutely LOVE stackoverflow. I've been working on my own for about 9 months, and without SO, there would have been zero chance I would be able to make any progress. But I do agree about the criticism of the moderators. I also think that there is almost a "Stanford Prison Experiment" level of power-wielding amongst some of the mods. There are examples of someone/me asking a question, and then someone closing it as a dupe, when in fact the question isn't a dupe. It might be superficially similar, but the mods don't take enough time to actually read the question and see if it's a dupe or not. And the rest of us are powerless to do anything about it. But this is the minority of cases for me. For the most part, SO is a completely invaluable tool, and I love it immensely. I think removing "Thanks" is a bit too abrasive. Maybe 10+ years ago, the NYC subway system tried getting ticketing agents to stop saying "Thanks" because they thought it would make things more efficient, and all it did was piss off the passengers. It's trivial, but there has to be a base level of civility between participants. I get that upvoting is "Thanks", but we're still humans (at this point), and trying to make communication more "efficient" by removing natural human responses makes it too terse, and almost insulting sometimes. It's a small thing, and I think it's better to just leave it in, because it's nice to say "thanks".
  - cruise02 14y ago
    > There are examples... Where are these examples? This is the internet. Please provide links. > And the rest of us are powerless to do anything about it. That's simply not true. Stack Exchange provides a Meta site where you can take up issues with the entire community. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/ http://meta.stackoverflow.com/ You can also email the company. They do read your emails. As for removing "thanks," we really don't recommend doing that if it's the only thing you're going to change. However, it's not supposed to be included, so removing it while making other edits is encouraged.
    - yarrel 14y ago
      Enforced rudeness is weird.
      - 14y ago
- dionidium 14y ago
  I can't explain how fucking weird it is that people take time to remove the word 'Thanks' from a website they don't even own. And I can't explain how fucking weird it is that some people collect thimbles or attend dog shows.
- balakk 14y ago
  > pedanticism of the moderators. pedantry.
debacle 14y ago
I like that SE has taken a stance on this, and I like their stance. The programming community, especially as it pertains to blogging, news, etc, has been infiltrated by navel-gazing unproductive carebears that insist that you have to be nice to get things done. This isn't an MBA program, and HN/SE/reddit/etc are not networking arenas. They're discussion boards.
- hetman 14y ago
  And yet a major part of his point was that "discussion" is not enough. If someone presents facts in a way that causes the person they are responding to, to almost inevitably ignore everything they've said, then they've wasted their time (aside from generating fleeting feelings of smug superiority). It's funny how easy it is to lose sight of that (I've certainly done it before). A discussion is only a discussion when information flows between two parties, not when it is is broadcast into the void.
  - debacle 14y ago
    If you say something, and you're wrong, and I correct you, and you disregard what I've said because I was abrasive, you're still ignorant. I've lost nothing but hot air (or a few keystrokes).
    - Bootvis 14y ago
      But you also gained very little.
      - debacle 14y ago
        I gain nothing in either instance.
        Bootvis 14y ago
        I can't speak for everyone but it seems to me one does gain something. If you didn't, why bother at all? Whatever you gain may be small and it probably doesn't have any monetary value but there should be some extrinsic motivation to answer. There are plenty of alternative uses of your time. Thus, my greater point is: when you have decided to answer, you should give the best answer you can reasonably give in the time you want to use. It wont hurt you and will improve the world a little bit.
adaml_623 14y ago
The problem I see with Stack Exchange is that they are too highly ranked as a site in Google which means that the rubbish pages show up highly ranked. A very common experience for me is to be searching for a solution to a problem. Follow a link to Stack Overflow to find a page where somebody has asked the question and been told they are asking the question in the wrong place.
- officemonkey 14y ago
  >The problem I see with Stack Exchange is that they are too highly ranked as a site in Google which means that the rubbish pages show up highly ranked. Considering that before "Stack Exchange" it was a useless site called "Experts Exchange," it's an improvement.
- sedev 14y ago
  Contrary anecdote: I've several times had the experience of Googling for a question and finding my own Stack Overflow question as a result, and using the answer to solve my problem (again).
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    I am reminded of a story about my retired scientist grandfather. When he first used the Internet, he did some searches about his field of study. A few pages in, he thought, "this feels familiar" and checked the author of the paper he was reading. He had written it, about 30 years earlier.
melling 14y ago
Here's what happened to me when I threw out what I thought an interesting question then had a little debate about it on Meta. My question got extremely downvoted. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp-function-to-convert-url-to-html-link http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp... The "rule" is that you must show some sort of effort before you ask a question. I was honest and said that I didn't do anything, but I did make my question well-defined, and I thought that it was useful, in general. Anyway, if that's their rule, that's their rule. Personally, I'm interested in seeing a "Wikipedia of Programming", where all good questions exist with good answers. For example, "How do I do X in Java|Perl|Scala|Haskell|Elisp|...?" I think a site with enough questions would be the perfect site to take someone from novice to guru. The big thing missing from StackOverFlow, IMHO, is that there are lots of questions for popular topics like Java (280k) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java Where as topics like elisp (1200) are almost neglected. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/elisp http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/elisp StackOverFlow doesn't want to be the site that connects the dots, which isn't their business model. I think another site could fill the void.
- nandemo 14y ago
  > Where as topics like elisp (1200) are almost neglected. Not sure what is your complaint here. Of course there are few elisp questions compared to Java questions: there are so many fewer elisp programmers! And from what I see most of the elisp questions do get answers, i.e. they aren't neglected. In my experience the same holds for Haskell questions. That said, I don't think your question should have been downvoted and blocked, and I upvoted it just in case.
  - shurane 14y ago
    Not to mention, his question was answered and he got what he wanted. He's just unhappy for getting downvoted and doesn't want to comply with what SO wants out of how questions are asked.
- eykanal 14y ago
  Your question was downvoted because it basically reads as, "I want to do X. Please do it for me." The site is supposed to be a replacement for a smart coworker. You wouldn't ask your coworker to do something like that, you'd ask him for help with a specific part of it. Asking otherwise just comes across as freeloading.
Supermighty 14y ago
I can't count the number of times I've found the perfect StackEschange answer to my question and it was marked as "closed as not constructive" or closed for off topic. The worst is a question that's closed because it's a duplicate of another question that's two or three years old. These answers are not eternal, they should change over time based on the changing environment.
- cruise02 14y ago
  Then answer the old question. Or suggest an edit to one of the old answers if it's out of date. Anyone can do those things, even with only 1 reputation point. The system was designed specifically so answers can change over time.
  - nmcfarl 14y ago
    This has happened to me, I was looking for an answer, and found a blatantly wrong old answer (as some breaking changes in the toolkit had been made). What I didn't have was an answer to provide, and so I moved on. I'm not sure the tools given are effective enough for this problem.
- shurane 14y ago
  Could you give examples of some of these questions that are marked "closed as not constructive"? Otherwise, we have no idea what questions in particular you are talking about. I've had completely positive experiences with StackOverflow, so I can't personally imagine questions that might be useful to someone and not worthwhile to keep open. Except duplicate questions.
  - Supermighty 14y ago
    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/397229/reaching-up-to-hit-the-escape-key-sucks-especially-in-vim http://stackoverflow.com/questions/397229/reaching-up-to-hit...
    - cruise02 14y ago
wturner 14y ago
I actually like the coldness of StackOverflow. It facilitates a culture that conditions the participants to look things up before we go typing. From a first-person perspective I kind of appreciate it.
- Pfhreak 14y ago
  I agree. I want SO to approach reference documentation for common questions. When I want to know about the syntax for a Python list comprehension, for example, I want to see a number of examples arguing why they are a best practice in a concise, no bullshit manner.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
lkrubner 14y ago
Shameless plug here... Many times I have found myself needing to know about a technology with which I’ve had little experience. If I have time to spend learning something new, and if I think I’ll use the technology in the future, then I will enjoy learning about it in depth, but often times, working against a deadline, I have no time to learn, or perhaps I do not expect to ever use that technology again. An example of the latter would be my limited experience with the Perl programming language. I recall when I was working for Danforth Diamond in 2005. I had to modify some of the old Perl scripts they had on their server. I spent a week working with Perl, and it was the only week that I have ever worked with Perl. I would have loved to have been able to quickly hire my own private consultant for all of maybe 20 minutes, to ask some basic questions about the language. As it was, I wasted days tracking down information via Google, and reading tutorials that did not quite answer the exact question that I had in my head. My brain fought against me – it knew that I was not planning to work with Perl again, so it was resistant to learning it in the first place. I was stuck in a situation where I had to read through multiple articles about strings and escaping and how to handle variables inside of strings – many wasted hours. My life would have been much easier if I could have turned to someone who had a lot of experience with Perl, and handed them $20 for maybe 15 or 20 minutes of their time, to be allowed to fire away with questions like, “How do I put a variable in a heredoc string?” and gotten instant answers, answers that were tailored to me, answers that gave me exactly the information that I wanted, and nothing superfluous. Hoping to get fast answers to my questions, I started posting on various forums. I have sometimes gotten fantastic assistance from various programmers on these forums. One of the greatest things about the Internet is how much people are generally willing to help one another for free. If you are trying to learn a programming language such as Java, it is surprising how helpful people will be on sites such as Java Ranch. And if you are trying to get answers to your questions about WordPress, it is wonderful how much good information you can get over at the WordPress forums. And yet, over the years, I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with free forums. I find it frustrating when I post a question that is altogether unique, but someone mistakes it for a common question, and so the only reply I get is “RTFM!!!!!” When people offer you free help, sometimes they are wonderful, but sometimes they attack you for aspects of your project that are beyond your control. For instance, I was once asked to fix a Javascript slideshow that depended on jQuery for funtionality, and when I posted some of the code to a forum, the only response I got was “Do not use jQuery!” But it was the lead programmer on that project who had decided to use jQuery, and I didn’t have the power to change that. I only had the power to fix the problem that I had been assigned. We all seem a little stupid when we are learning a new skill. It doesn’t matter how smart we are. We ask what the experts think of as painfully dumb questions. Asking those dumb questions is essential to our learning process, but it is understandable that answering such questions may seem tiring to those who know a great deal about a given subject. Hoping to get some high quality answers about Perl, I signed up for Experts Exchange. At the time it cost $9.99 a month (as I said, this was back in 2005). Nowadays it costs $12 a month. The fact that it costs money seems to introduce a level of seriousness to the conversations that is often absent on the free forums. And yet, Experts Exchange suffers a fatal flaw – none of the money goes to the people who answer the questions! The corporation, Experts Exchange, keeps all the money to itself! This limits the usefulness of the site. What I needed was an easy way to hire an expert for all of maybe 20 minutes, and give them some money, so they would take my dumb questions seriously. For that reason, we decided to make a site where programmers could pay money to get fast, high quality help with their questions. I have found that even small amounts of money radically changes the social dynamic. Even $1 changes the social dynamic. As long as the advice is free, those giving the advice feel free to show scorn for what they feel are stupid questions. And yet, as soon as even a tiny amount of money is offered, the dynamic changes around: the answers are respectful. But then, after we launched our first site, we were confronted with another problem: as soon as the askers are allowed to offer money, they are the ones who become scornful. The askers can be rude or ignore community norms. We asked ourselves, how could we balance the power of the askers and the answerers, to achieve a perfect balance? Our first thought was, "What if we allow the askers and the answerers to vote on the money, and we average out everyone's vote?" We could impose the rule that answerers were not allowed to vote money to themselves. But wait, we realized, that doesn't work either: the answerers could just simply create a dozen dummy accounts, and use 11 fake accounts to vote money to their 1 real account. So how could this be achieved? After some careful thought, we decided the way to do this was to restrict voting to those experts who had earned some money answering lots of questions. If it took effort to gain the right to vote, then people could not easily establish fake accounts and vote money to themselves. We launched our first site, which is narrowly focused on just WordPress: http://www.wpquestions.com/ http://www.wpquestions.com/ The site gets moderate action, maybe $500 or $600 in questions a week. Over the last 2 years it has seen over $50,000 go through it. Next month we will start offering this software as a hosted service, so anyone can open up their own site.
dinkumthinkum 14y ago
SO is great, let's get that out of the way. Fine. Whatever. They are getting a bit ridiculous and taking themselves too seriously. I mean that foolish "graph of niceness," wow. There is a really good side to SO and a really weird side and I don't think the good part is made that way because of the weird side. The weird side is somewhat cultish, to just be honest. Honestly, this probably because of a culture derived from one of the founders, in fact a particular one of the founders would aggressively defend this cult of personality behavior Also, I found this strange: >But in the end, this sort of navel-gazing misses the point: we’re not here to pat each other on the back and hand out gold stars ... Isn't this basically what SO is?

60 points by bussetta 14y ago

ctdonath 14y ago

Dumbledore. Gandalf. Yoda. Keep them straight. /ob pedantic

melling 14y ago
It was an intentional geek troll. Geeks love to run into the weeds over stupid little things. I think that was part of his point.
- Robin_Message 14y ago
  I think the GP made his point for him.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

radagaisus 14y ago

StackOverflow has been overrun by anal people. Internet power attracts this kind of douchebags like moths to light. If you write 'Hello,' in questions the system will automatically delete it, if you - god forbid - write 'Thanks!' other users will edit your question to remove it. I can't explain how fucking weird it is that people take time to remove the word 'Thanks' from a website they don't even own. StackOverflow is a crazy good system for Q&A. Just like in Wikipedia, the problem is no longer trolls - but bureaucracy and pedanticism of the moderators. People are assholes who like power, and I don't think any q&a software can solve this.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
franzus 14y ago
The best thing was a post by John Carmack. It had a "edited by <some SO poweruser>" next to it ...
- sysop073 14y ago
  You mean this one? http://superuser.com/a/419167 http://superuser.com/a/419167 It wasn't on SO, but in any case, all the edits did were fix spelling/capitalization; why would that be bad?
  - franzus 14y ago
    Disclaimer: I stopped using SO a while ago because of the uber pedantic mods and the overall unfriendly atmosphere there. > why would that be bad? Because I don't want some bozo messing around with something I wrote. If he wants to add something he should write a comment but not change my original contribution. I see this as a personal attack.
    - solutionyogi 14y ago
      If someone re-writes an entire sentence, I can see how you may feel it as a personal attack. If someone is fixing spelling and grammar and other things like formatting for linking to keywords etc., I think it is very useful. I don't know why you would think that such edits are personal attack. This is the Internet, you need to relax a bit.
      - shurane 14y ago
        Yeah, franzus is certainly taking it a bit too personal. SO is interested in the preservation of knowledge for future visitors. I don't know why this isn't in your best interest, but it is certainly what SO focuses on and gets, to a good degree. SO is mostly information-based. They are not so interested in friendly civilities, greeting each other, asking "how do you do", and so on. Neither is SO a substitute for regular conversation, where topics meander, talk goes in all directions, and new ideas spark, among so many other qualities/possibilities. It is question, answer, and building up respect. So I don't see the problem with removing the personal component. If you really wanted to, you can just contact another SO-er for thanking them. Now that you've stopped using SO, what do you use instead, franzus? SO is a really impressive site, pedantic mods be damned. Same with Wikipedia. You'll be hard-pressed to find alternatives that try to maintain the same level of quality across as wide a berth of topics (anything, really) as SO.
gizzlon 14y ago
Actually, that makes sense to me.. SO tries very hard not to be a forum and therefore everything that resembles footers, signatures etc. should be left out. On SO you thank people by up-voting and accepting answers, not commenting. Questions should be as "clean" as possible, they are not emails or letters. They should be free of that type of "social etiquette". Or, actually, when I think about it, the social etiquette on SO is to leave all those niceties out. Thanks
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  But does that really qualify as social etiquette or is it just mindless rule following? Honest question.
  - gizzlon 14y ago
    I think it is.. Remember reading about it (lost the link) and thinking that it made a lot of sense. Also, it seems like mindless rule-following is the definition of etiquette :D "Etiquette: noun a set of rules for behaving correctly in social situations"
    - dinkumthinkum 14y ago
      No etiquette is not mindless there are reasons that go beyond, "StackOverflow founder said and it was so."
steve8918 14y ago
I absolutely LOVE stackoverflow. I've been working on my own for about 9 months, and without SO, there would have been zero chance I would be able to make any progress. But I do agree about the criticism of the moderators. I also think that there is almost a "Stanford Prison Experiment" level of power-wielding amongst some of the mods. There are examples of someone/me asking a question, and then someone closing it as a dupe, when in fact the question isn't a dupe. It might be superficially similar, but the mods don't take enough time to actually read the question and see if it's a dupe or not. And the rest of us are powerless to do anything about it. But this is the minority of cases for me. For the most part, SO is a completely invaluable tool, and I love it immensely. I think removing "Thanks" is a bit too abrasive. Maybe 10+ years ago, the NYC subway system tried getting ticketing agents to stop saying "Thanks" because they thought it would make things more efficient, and all it did was piss off the passengers. It's trivial, but there has to be a base level of civility between participants. I get that upvoting is "Thanks", but we're still humans (at this point), and trying to make communication more "efficient" by removing natural human responses makes it too terse, and almost insulting sometimes. It's a small thing, and I think it's better to just leave it in, because it's nice to say "thanks".
- cruise02 14y ago
  > There are examples... Where are these examples? This is the internet. Please provide links. > And the rest of us are powerless to do anything about it. That's simply not true. Stack Exchange provides a Meta site where you can take up issues with the entire community. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/ http://meta.stackoverflow.com/ You can also email the company. They do read your emails. As for removing "thanks," we really don't recommend doing that if it's the only thing you're going to change. However, it's not supposed to be included, so removing it while making other edits is encouraged.
  - yarrel 14y ago
    Enforced rudeness is weird.
    - 14y ago
dionidium 14y ago
I can't explain how fucking weird it is that people take time to remove the word 'Thanks' from a website they don't even own. And I can't explain how fucking weird it is that some people collect thimbles or attend dog shows.
balakk 14y ago
> pedanticism of the moderators. pedantry.

debacle 14y ago

I like that SE has taken a stance on this, and I like their stance. The programming community, especially as it pertains to blogging, news, etc, has been infiltrated by navel-gazing unproductive carebears that insist that you have to be nice to get things done. This isn't an MBA program, and HN/SE/reddit/etc are not networking arenas. They're discussion boards.

hetman 14y ago
And yet a major part of his point was that "discussion" is not enough. If someone presents facts in a way that causes the person they are responding to, to almost inevitably ignore everything they've said, then they've wasted their time (aside from generating fleeting feelings of smug superiority). It's funny how easy it is to lose sight of that (I've certainly done it before). A discussion is only a discussion when information flows between two parties, not when it is is broadcast into the void.
- debacle 14y ago
  If you say something, and you're wrong, and I correct you, and you disregard what I've said because I was abrasive, you're still ignorant. I've lost nothing but hot air (or a few keystrokes).
  - Bootvis 14y ago
    But you also gained very little.
    - debacle 14y ago
      I gain nothing in either instance.
      - Bootvis 14y ago
        I can't speak for everyone but it seems to me one does gain something. If you didn't, why bother at all? Whatever you gain may be small and it probably doesn't have any monetary value but there should be some extrinsic motivation to answer. There are plenty of alternative uses of your time. Thus, my greater point is: when you have decided to answer, you should give the best answer you can reasonably give in the time you want to use. It wont hurt you and will improve the world a little bit.

adaml_623 14y ago

The problem I see with Stack Exchange is that they are too highly ranked as a site in Google which means that the rubbish pages show up highly ranked. A very common experience for me is to be searching for a solution to a problem. Follow a link to Stack Overflow to find a page where somebody has asked the question and been told they are asking the question in the wrong place.

officemonkey 14y ago
>The problem I see with Stack Exchange is that they are too highly ranked as a site in Google which means that the rubbish pages show up highly ranked. Considering that before "Stack Exchange" it was a useless site called "Experts Exchange," it's an improvement.
sedev 14y ago
Contrary anecdote: I've several times had the experience of Googling for a question and finding my own Stack Overflow question as a result, and using the answer to solve my problem (again).
- MartinCron 14y ago
  I am reminded of a story about my retired scientist grandfather. When he first used the Internet, he did some searches about his field of study. A few pages in, he thought, "this feels familiar" and checked the author of the paper he was reading. He had written it, about 30 years earlier.

melling 14y ago

Here's what happened to me when I threw out what I thought an interesting question then had a little debate about it on Meta. My question got extremely downvoted. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp-function-to-convert-url-to-html-link http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp... The "rule" is that you must show some sort of effort before you ask a question. I was honest and said that I didn't do anything, but I did make my question well-defined, and I thought that it was useful, in general. Anyway, if that's their rule, that's their rule. Personally, I'm interested in seeing a "Wikipedia of Programming", where all good questions exist with good answers. For example, "How do I do X in Java|Perl|Scala|Haskell|Elisp|...?" I think a site with enough questions would be the perfect site to take someone from novice to guru. The big thing missing from StackOverFlow, IMHO, is that there are lots of questions for popular topics like Java (280k) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java Where as topics like elisp (1200) are almost neglected. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/elisp http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/elisp StackOverFlow doesn't want to be the site that connects the dots, which isn't their business model. I think another site could fill the void.

nandemo 14y ago
> Where as topics like elisp (1200) are almost neglected. Not sure what is your complaint here. Of course there are few elisp questions compared to Java questions: there are so many fewer elisp programmers! And from what I see most of the elisp questions do get answers, i.e. they aren't neglected. In my experience the same holds for Haskell questions. That said, I don't think your question should have been downvoted and blocked, and I upvoted it just in case.
- shurane 14y ago
  Not to mention, his question was answered and he got what he wanted. He's just unhappy for getting downvoted and doesn't want to comply with what SO wants out of how questions are asked.
eykanal 14y ago
Your question was downvoted because it basically reads as, "I want to do X. Please do it for me." The site is supposed to be a replacement for a smart coworker. You wouldn't ask your coworker to do something like that, you'd ask him for help with a specific part of it. Asking otherwise just comes across as freeloading.

Supermighty 14y ago

I can't count the number of times I've found the perfect StackEschange answer to my question and it was marked as "closed as not constructive" or closed for off topic. The worst is a question that's closed because it's a duplicate of another question that's two or three years old. These answers are not eternal, they should change over time based on the changing environment.

cruise02 14y ago
Then answer the old question. Or suggest an edit to one of the old answers if it's out of date. Anyone can do those things, even with only 1 reputation point. The system was designed specifically so answers can change over time.
- nmcfarl 14y ago
  This has happened to me, I was looking for an answer, and found a blatantly wrong old answer (as some breaking changes in the toolkit had been made). What I didn't have was an answer to provide, and so I moved on. I'm not sure the tools given are effective enough for this problem.
shurane 14y ago
Could you give examples of some of these questions that are marked "closed as not constructive"? Otherwise, we have no idea what questions in particular you are talking about. I've had completely positive experiences with StackOverflow, so I can't personally imagine questions that might be useful to someone and not worthwhile to keep open. Except duplicate questions.
- Supermighty 14y ago
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/397229/reaching-up-to-hit-the-escape-key-sucks-especially-in-vim http://stackoverflow.com/questions/397229/reaching-up-to-hit...
  - cruise02 14y ago

wturner 14y ago

I actually like the coldness of StackOverflow. It facilitates a culture that conditions the participants to look things up before we go typing. From a first-person perspective I kind of appreciate it.

Pfhreak 14y ago
I agree. I want SO to approach reference documentation for common questions. When I want to know about the syntax for a Python list comprehension, for example, I want to see a number of examples arguing why they are a best practice in a concise, no bullshit manner.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

lkrubner 14y ago

Shameless plug here... Many times I have found myself needing to know about a technology with which I’ve had little experience. If I have time to spend learning something new, and if I think I’ll use the technology in the future, then I will enjoy learning about it in depth, but often times, working against a deadline, I have no time to learn, or perhaps I do not expect to ever use that technology again. An example of the latter would be my limited experience with the Perl programming language. I recall when I was working for Danforth Diamond in 2005. I had to modify some of the old Perl scripts they had on their server. I spent a week working with Perl, and it was the only week that I have ever worked with Perl. I would have loved to have been able to quickly hire my own private consultant for all of maybe 20 minutes, to ask some basic questions about the language. As it was, I wasted days tracking down information via Google, and reading tutorials that did not quite answer the exact question that I had in my head. My brain fought against me – it knew that I was not planning to work with Perl again, so it was resistant to learning it in the first place. I was stuck in a situation where I had to read through multiple articles about strings and escaping and how to handle variables inside of strings – many wasted hours. My life would have been much easier if I could have turned to someone who had a lot of experience with Perl, and handed them $20 for maybe 15 or 20 minutes of their time, to be allowed to fire away with questions like, “How do I put a variable in a heredoc string?” and gotten instant answers, answers that were tailored to me, answers that gave me exactly the information that I wanted, and nothing superfluous. Hoping to get fast answers to my questions, I started posting on various forums. I have sometimes gotten fantastic assistance from various programmers on these forums. One of the greatest things about the Internet is how much people are generally willing to help one another for free. If you are trying to learn a programming language such as Java, it is surprising how helpful people will be on sites such as Java Ranch. And if you are trying to get answers to your questions about WordPress, it is wonderful how much good information you can get over at the WordPress forums. And yet, over the years, I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with free forums. I find it frustrating when I post a question that is altogether unique, but someone mistakes it for a common question, and so the only reply I get is “RTFM!!!!!” When people offer you free help, sometimes they are wonderful, but sometimes they attack you for aspects of your project that are beyond your control. For instance, I was once asked to fix a Javascript slideshow that depended on jQuery for funtionality, and when I posted some of the code to a forum, the only response I got was “Do not use jQuery!” But it was the lead programmer on that project who had decided to use jQuery, and I didn’t have the power to change that. I only had the power to fix the problem that I had been assigned. We all seem a little stupid when we are learning a new skill. It doesn’t matter how smart we are. We ask what the experts think of as painfully dumb questions. Asking those dumb questions is essential to our learning process, but it is understandable that answering such questions may seem tiring to those who know a great deal about a given subject. Hoping to get some high quality answers about Perl, I signed up for Experts Exchange. At the time it cost $9.99 a month (as I said, this was back in 2005). Nowadays it costs $12 a month. The fact that it costs money seems to introduce a level of seriousness to the conversations that is often absent on the free forums. And yet, Experts Exchange suffers a fatal flaw – none of the money goes to the people who answer the questions! The corporation, Experts Exchange, keeps all the money to itself! This limits the usefulness of the site. What I needed was an easy way to hire an expert for all of maybe 20 minutes, and give them some money, so they would take my dumb questions seriously. For that reason, we decided to make a site where programmers could pay money to get fast, high quality help with their questions. I have found that even small amounts of money radically changes the social dynamic. Even $1 changes the social dynamic. As long as the advice is free, those giving the advice feel free to show scorn for what they feel are stupid questions. And yet, as soon as even a tiny amount of money is offered, the dynamic changes around: the answers are respectful. But then, after we launched our first site, we were confronted with another problem: as soon as the askers are allowed to offer money, they are the ones who become scornful. The askers can be rude or ignore community norms. We asked ourselves, how could we balance the power of the askers and the answerers, to achieve a perfect balance? Our first thought was, "What if we allow the askers and the answerers to vote on the money, and we average out everyone's vote?" We could impose the rule that answerers were not allowed to vote money to themselves. But wait, we realized, that doesn't work either: the answerers could just simply create a dozen dummy accounts, and use 11 fake accounts to vote money to their 1 real account. So how could this be achieved? After some careful thought, we decided the way to do this was to restrict voting to those experts who had earned some money answering lots of questions. If it took effort to gain the right to vote, then people could not easily establish fake accounts and vote money to themselves. We launched our first site, which is narrowly focused on just WordPress: http://www.wpquestions.com/ http://www.wpquestions.com/ The site gets moderate action, maybe $500 or $600 in questions a week. Over the last 2 years it has seen over $50,000 go through it. Next month we will start offering this software as a hosted service, so anyone can open up their own site.

dinkumthinkum 14y ago

SO is great, let's get that out of the way. Fine. Whatever. They are getting a bit ridiculous and taking themselves too seriously. I mean that foolish "graph of niceness," wow. There is a really good side to SO and a really weird side and I don't think the good part is made that way because of the weird side. The weird side is somewhat cultish, to just be honest. Honestly, this probably because of a culture derived from one of the founders, in fact a particular one of the founders would aggressively defend this cult of personality behavior Also, I found this strange: >But in the end, this sort of navel-gazing misses the point: we’re not here to pat each other on the back and hand out gold stars ... Isn't this basically what SO is?