9 ms·

I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and

I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and just got 30 questions asking why I’m trying to do this” or “my question was closed for seemingly no reason”. It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.

NBJack 1y ago
Question closed; here's a link to another one that sounds vaguely related but doesn't actually address your problem. But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.
- zahlman 1y ago
  "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to the other question will answer yours as well. This also means you are responsible for overlooking irrelevant details, reading the answers, making your own attempts to apply them, etc. If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output. It's difficult sometimes, and curators do make mistakes. Most frustratingly, it's entirely possible for two completely different problems to be reasonably described with all the same keywords. I personally had a hell of a time disentangling https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827, while also explaining that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 really is the same as the first problem despite different phrasing. But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag: "I'm getting an IndentationError (or a TabError). How do I fix it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722) was written to replace "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, although the indentation looks correct" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387) and a few others, with reasoning stated there. "Asking the user for input until they give a valid response" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658) "Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
  - surgical_fire 1y ago
    > "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question? It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site. Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      >>You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. >If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question? You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer. That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. But you have to figure out where that gap is. > Either what I was looking for was already there The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
      - surgical_fire 1y ago
        > You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer. > That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. I see. That makes more sense, I misinterpreted your original reply. That said, many times I did find the specific question I had, but the question was closed as duplicate (or whatever jargon you use), but the existing answered question was for whatever reason not exactly what I was looking for. Not really encouraging for me to interact with the site, and would probably just sink my time furter. > The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). This used to be more common, many years ago. I can't orecise why, but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO. > When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem. I suppose I could. But asking a meaningful question takes effort, and I have no idea if the powers that be will share my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue. Not exactly encouraging to participation.
- Arnt 1y ago
  I've closed like that. One asker complained that his question about base64 encoding in one language was not like the duplicate I identified because the language was another one. "Vaguely related", he thought, but he asked precisely because he didn't know.
  - daedrdev 1y ago
    surely the answer is to tell him his language is wrong, if enough people have that problem that is the answer.
    - Arnt 1y ago
      Show, don't tell. Try answering some of the recently closed questions on SO, see how much time you're willing to spend on them. (As a practical matter: You can do it with the comment function, or search for questions that have two votes to close already.) Any mode of answering is okay. If you find out that it's not deathly tiring, let us know how.
      - daedrdev 1y ago
        This seems to somehow work fine on discord, where people ask the dumbest of questions on project discords yet get prompt responses even if it's just a link to a faq or wiki. I don't know how this happens, maybe something about the chat format or SO not retaining responders as well as discords do, but you really can see this it on discord servers for projects.
        mcejp 1y ago
        Maybe it works at a certain (small) scale. And if you don't care about being able to find the question again in 1 week / 6 months / 10 years.
mixmastamyk 1y ago
Yep, believe it's a direct result of Atwood's iron-fisted no-bullshit policy. To some extent it is great... don't want it turning into Yahoo Answers, do we? I think folks forget about that part. But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine. No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/
- zahlman 1y ago
  >No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/ I agree this complaint is legitimate. The problem is that the system expects unprivileged users to have their edits reviewed by three privileged users in a queue (so that people actually pay attention and vandalism doesn't just go unnoticed for months), so this is meant to limit the drain on that resource. You may be interested in my answer to "Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new reviewers in the suggested edits queue" on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612).
tstrimple 1y ago
There was a time when it was really good. Like legitimately good and useful. But over time it ended up becoming exactly what you describe. But there are still countless examples of the usefulness of SO in Google results. I stopped asking questions in 2012 and stopped answering questions in 2015. Before that though, it was a very useful tool.
Arnt 1y ago
I answer questions for a few tags, know the styles of the other people who answer on those tags, and I do consider my fellow answerers as kind. All of them. That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it. Askers who misunderstand will come across as overly entitled. In terms of practical effects: People who misunderstand don't tag their questions, or tag them incorrectly. They post screenshots full of text. They don't look for similar older questions in the existing knowledge base, or they insist that even slightly different questions are significantly different. All rather offputting, and often puzzling. How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?
- stormblooperz 1y ago
  Reading between the lines, this is extremely telling. Of course, nobody is a villain in their own story. Members of online communities who drive others away are often just simply blind to the impact they are having - an existential impact in the case of Stack Overflow sadly.
  - Arnt 1y ago
    Bah. I volunteer to do x and if you try to read some duty to also volunteer for y between the lines, you can do y yourself. If you expect kindness to someone I don't care to help, go on, show that kindness by doing y yourself. Nobody pays us answerers to do what we do. The key prerogative of a volunteer is that the volunteer alone chooses what to volunteer for.
    - stormblooperz 1y ago
      This. This is exactly it.
    - kulahan 1y ago
yuzzi 1y ago
Agree! A decade ago it wasn't like this. But it has devolved into a community of vandals who seem to take glee in criticizing the manner in which a question is asked, rather than contributing a solution.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > vandals How is it vandalism to enforce a quality standard? > who seem to take glee Why do you imagine so?
  - solongso 1y ago
    Damaging a contributor's reputation because they didn't initially conform to your standard is vandalism. Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement and let the poster bring the post into compliance? If that's what you want, do you think that by damaging my reputation you are motivating me toward compliance with your standards? No, you're motivating me to stop contributing. OK. I concede the point. Maybe it's not glee. Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      > Damaging a contributor's reputation because they didn't initially conform to your standard is vandalism. So, you tell me, vandalism is when you notice that someone's content doesn't meet standards, rate it accordingly using the system that was explicitly designed for that purpose, and it ends up incidentally (because of a system we don't get to change) "damaging the reputation" of its author... ? By the way, the only thing those reputation points are good for is gatekeeping access to privileges that are supposed to be exercised by people who understand how the site is supposed to work, so that they can help keep the site working as intended. So it's a little hard for me to get too bent out of shape about it. There are a ton of problems with the design (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356), but this is not one of them. > Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement I, personally, often do. But people are not required to, by policy, in part because they get cursed at when they try. Because most of these questions not conforming to standards come from people who don't give a damn about what the site is or what it's trying to accomplish, and feel entitled to a personalized answer about whatever it is. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/ https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/ But also because there is a relatively small, specific set of things that can be wrong with a question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/ https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/); when your question is closed, you are generally automatically told which applies (it comes from the system according to the close votes), and that's normally all the information you should need if you actually care about the site and have read the policy basics. It's no wonder LLMs have taken off in this space. They provide that exact service, by design. Stack Overflow does not, by design. > and let the poster bring the post into compliance? Nobody has ever been prevented from doing this except for actual spammers and vandals. Even if your question is "deleted" you still have an interface to access it, edit it and nominate it for undeletion. When your question is merely closed, that is explicitly soliciting you to fix it. > do you think that by damaging my reputation Oh, the other thing is that your reputation starts at 1 and cannot go below 1. So this doesn't matter in the slightest for new users. (There are rate limits, intended to make you pay attention to the guidelines and read the explanations in the Help Center before trying to post again.) > Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking. No, none of this is about punishment. Downvotes apply to the content, not to you. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/121350 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/121350 My community is not special. It has the same right to decide and enforce its standards that everywhere else on the Internet does. The fact that you see a shiny button labelled "Ask a Question" and a text input box does not change what those standards are. You are the one coming to a new space on the Internet; therefore, you are the one responsible for understanding the basics of what is expected in that space.

NBJack 1y ago

Question closed; here's a link to another one that sounds vaguely related but doesn't actually address your problem. But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.

zahlman 1y ago
"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to the other question will answer yours as well. This also means you are responsible for overlooking irrelevant details, reading the answers, making your own attempts to apply them, etc. If the other question is actually different, you are expected to edit the question to make this clear - not by adding an "Edit:" section like in a forum post, but by fixing the wording such that it's directly clear what you're looking for and how it's different. This might mean fixing your specification of input or desired output. It's difficult sometimes, and curators do make mistakes. Most frustratingly, it's entirely possible for two completely different problems to be reasonably described with all the same keywords. I personally had a hell of a time disentangling https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9764298 from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18016827, while also explaining that https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6618515 really is the same as the first problem despite different phrasing. But curators much more often get it right. Not only that, a few of us go out of our way to create artificial Q&A (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426205) for beginner issues that beginners never know how to explain, and put immense effort into both the question and answer. Some popular examples in the Python tag: "I'm getting an IndentationError (or a TabError). How do I fix it?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45621722) was written to replace "IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, although the indentation looks correct" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/492387) and a few others, with reasoning stated there. "Asking the user for input until they give a valid response" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23294658) "Why does "a == x or y or z" always evaluate to True? How can I compare "a" to all of those?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20002503) was written largely as an alternative to the organic "How to test multiple variables for equality against a single value?" (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15112125) after the latter was found not to help beginners very well (the original example was quite unclear, although it's since been improved).
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  > "Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question? It may sound a silly question, but what you are describing is the reason why I never actively interacted with SO (never asked, answered, nor upvoted). Either what I was looking for was already there, or I completely ignored the site. Maybe it is the reason why it is dying. It's just not that useful after all.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    >>You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. >If I can solve the problem myself, why do you think I would ask a question? You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer. That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. But you have to figure out where that gap is. > Either what I was looking for was already there The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem.
    - surgical_fire 1y ago
      > You are expected to be able to analyze the problem to the point where you have one specific question, get the answer, and solve the problem now that you have the answer. > That is: we will not do the analysis for you. We will fill in the gap in your knowledge. I see. That makes more sense, I misinterpreted your original reply. That said, many times I did find the specific question I had, but the question was closed as duplicate (or whatever jargon you use), but the existing answered question was for whatever reason not exactly what I was looking for. Not really encouraging for me to interact with the site, and would probably just sink my time furter. > The goal is to maximize the chance of this (and that you find what you're looking for promptly). This used to be more common, many years ago. I can't orecise why, but it has been a while that I found the answer I was looking for on SO. > When you don't find it, you can help by contributing the question part of what's missing. But, in turn, this is supposed to improve the chance that the next person can promptly find your question - and understand it, and be confident that you have the same question, and read the answer, and go on to solve a potentially very different problem. I suppose I could. But asking a meaningful question takes effort, and I have no idea if the powers that be will share my idea that the question is meaningful, or if it will be marked as a duplicate to some similar issue. Not exactly encouraging to participation.
Arnt 1y ago
I've closed like that. One asker complained that his question about base64 encoding in one language was not like the duplicate I identified because the language was another one. "Vaguely related", he thought, but he asked precisely because he didn't know.
- daedrdev 1y ago
  surely the answer is to tell him his language is wrong, if enough people have that problem that is the answer.
  - Arnt 1y ago
    Show, don't tell. Try answering some of the recently closed questions on SO, see how much time you're willing to spend on them. (As a practical matter: You can do it with the comment function, or search for questions that have two votes to close already.) Any mode of answering is okay. If you find out that it's not deathly tiring, let us know how.
    - daedrdev 1y ago
      This seems to somehow work fine on discord, where people ask the dumbest of questions on project discords yet get prompt responses even if it's just a link to a faq or wiki. I don't know how this happens, maybe something about the chat format or SO not retaining responders as well as discords do, but you really can see this it on discord servers for projects.
      - mcejp 1y ago
        Maybe it works at a certain (small) scale. And if you don't care about being able to find the question again in 1 week / 6 months / 10 years.

mixmastamyk 1y ago

Yep, believe it's a direct result of Atwood's iron-fisted no-bullshit policy. To some extent it is great... don't want it turning into Yahoo Answers, do we? I think folks forget about that part. But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine. No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/

zahlman 1y ago
>No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/ I agree this complaint is legitimate. The problem is that the system expects unprivileged users to have their edits reviewed by three privileged users in a queue (so that people actually pay attention and vandalism doesn't just go unnoticed for months), so this is meant to limit the drain on that resource. You may be interested in my answer to "Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new reviewers in the suggested edits queue" on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612).

tstrimple 1y ago

There was a time when it was really good. Like legitimately good and useful. But over time it ended up becoming exactly what you describe. But there are still countless examples of the usefulness of SO in Google results. I stopped asking questions in 2012 and stopped answering questions in 2015. Before that though, it was a very useful tool.

Arnt 1y ago

I answer questions for a few tags, know the styles of the other people who answer on those tags, and I do consider my fellow answerers as kind. All of them. That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it. Askers who misunderstand will come across as overly entitled. In terms of practical effects: People who misunderstand don't tag their questions, or tag them incorrectly. They post screenshots full of text. They don't look for similar older questions in the existing knowledge base, or they insist that even slightly different questions are significantly different. All rather offputting, and often puzzling. How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?

stormblooperz 1y ago
Reading between the lines, this is extremely telling. Of course, nobody is a villain in their own story. Members of online communities who drive others away are often just simply blind to the impact they are having - an existential impact in the case of Stack Overflow sadly.
- Arnt 1y ago
  Bah. I volunteer to do x and if you try to read some duty to also volunteer for y between the lines, you can do y yourself. If you expect kindness to someone I don't care to help, go on, show that kindness by doing y yourself. Nobody pays us answerers to do what we do. The key prerogative of a volunteer is that the volunteer alone chooses what to volunteer for.
  - stormblooperz 1y ago
    This. This is exactly it.
  - kulahan 1y ago

yuzzi 1y ago

Agree! A decade ago it wasn't like this. But it has devolved into a community of vandals who seem to take glee in criticizing the manner in which a question is asked, rather than contributing a solution.

zahlman 1y ago
> vandals How is it vandalism to enforce a quality standard? > who seem to take glee Why do you imagine so?
- solongso 1y ago
  Damaging a contributor's reputation because they didn't initially conform to your standard is vandalism. Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement and let the poster bring the post into compliance? If that's what you want, do you think that by damaging my reputation you are motivating me toward compliance with your standards? No, you're motivating me to stop contributing. OK. I concede the point. Maybe it's not glee. Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    > Damaging a contributor's reputation because they didn't initially conform to your standard is vandalism. So, you tell me, vandalism is when you notice that someone's content doesn't meet standards, rate it accordingly using the system that was explicitly designed for that purpose, and it ends up incidentally (because of a system we don't get to change) "damaging the reputation" of its author... ? By the way, the only thing those reputation points are good for is gatekeeping access to privileges that are supposed to be exercised by people who understand how the site is supposed to work, so that they can help keep the site working as intended. So it's a little hard for me to get too bent out of shape about it. There are a ton of problems with the design (https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356), but this is not one of them. > Why don't you make your suggestion for improvement I, personally, often do. But people are not required to, by policy, in part because they get cursed at when they try. Because most of these questions not conforming to standards come from people who don't give a damn about what the site is or what it's trying to accomplish, and feel entitled to a personalized answer about whatever it is. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/ https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/ But also because there is a relatively small, specific set of things that can be wrong with a question (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/ https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/); when your question is closed, you are generally automatically told which applies (it comes from the system according to the close votes), and that's normally all the information you should need if you actually care about the site and have read the policy basics. It's no wonder LLMs have taken off in this space. They provide that exact service, by design. Stack Overflow does not, by design. > and let the poster bring the post into compliance? Nobody has ever been prevented from doing this except for actual spammers and vandals. Even if your question is "deleted" you still have an interface to access it, edit it and nominate it for undeletion. When your question is merely closed, that is explicitly soliciting you to fix it. > do you think that by damaging my reputation Oh, the other thing is that your reputation starts at 1 and cannot go below 1. So this doesn't matter in the slightest for new users. (There are rate limits, intended to make you pay attention to the guidelines and read the explanations in the Help Center before trying to post again.) > Maybe it's just a misplaced conviction that punishment is the best way to motivate the behavior you are seeking. No, none of this is about punishment. Downvotes apply to the content, not to you. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/366889 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/121350 https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/121350 My community is not special. It has the same right to decide and enforce its standards that everywhere else on the Internet does. The fact that you see a shiny button labelled "Ask a Question" and a text input box does not change what those standards are. You are the one coming to a new space on the Internet; therefore, you are the one responsible for understanding the basics of what is expected in that space.