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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. Th

by 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
    Probably right, definitely justifiable, super annoying and actively driving away users.
    - Arnt 1y ago
      Most users don't ask. They search. The users who ask questions that nobody cares to answer aren't particularly attractive.
- zahlman 1y ago
  When someone new comes to Stack Overflow, and tries to get something from it that it's explicitly not there to provide, and I politely say "hey here are some documents about what the site is and what we expect from questions, I'm sorry but we can't allow people to answer this without addressing these problems, because the purpose of questions here isn't actually to work with you one-on-one and get your code to work", and then that person swears at me and is never heard from again... ... No, I am not at all "blind" to the fact that I'm "driving" people like that away, or to the "impact" I'm having. I've read many of their off-site rants, too. It's a popular art form, even. So popular that sometimes people bring links to it back to the meta site. So popular that the company staff occasionally try to lecture us about it. After all, it's bad for the bottom line when people don't stick around and watch ads (and to hell with whatever else they do on the site). But those documents objectively exist; the standards are established and thoroughly documented; the questions objectively are there to build a reference (this is even described right up front in https://stackoverflow.com/tour https://stackoverflow.com/tour , although the wording is still lacking and we aren't empowered to fix it); as an objective matter we don't provide a help desk, debugging service or support forum; and swearing at me is a code of conduct violation.
  - stormblooperz 1y ago
    I'm sorry you've been swore at, that's obviously not on. I guess I would say: look at the big picture, Stack Overflow is almost dead. It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction. At least the standards are established and thoroughly documented! The document objectively exists! Also: I know several kind and smart people who have sworn off Stack Overflow forever, not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation. You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.
    - zahlman 1y ago
      > not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation. I have read countless examples of this sort of thing, with people attesting to me that the people who wrote it do in fact understand the purpose of the site. I have yet to see a single example where I was convinced they actually did. They very frequently write in terms that imply complete ignorance of fundamentals (such as what a "moderator" is, and who has what privileges and responsibilities on the site). > You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it. I have paid attention. I have done close reading. I have been empathetic. I have spent many hours of my life on this. > It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction. Your implication is that the purpose I describe for Stack Overflow is somehow invalid. I disagree in the strongest possible terms, and find this implication actually offensive. But even if it weren't valid, that doesn't entitle other people to come in and try to change it. It didn't entitle them in 2008, either, even though the vision wasn't fully fleshed out and communicated yet. (It probably started to become clear around 2012, but still not in a way that allowed curators to coordinate and describe clear policy.)
yuzzi 1y ago
Seems to me like you're part of the problem. Of course it's not my problem anymore because I no longer contribute there.
- zahlman 1y ago
  From GP: > 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. Why is any of this a "problem"? Why should we not create this knowledge base? Why should we help you, personally, for free? Why should we write answers for a single person who asks, instead of for arbitrarily many people who find it later?
- int_19h 1y ago
  It's almost comical. SO is increasingly useless for new questions precisely because so many top contributors left (because they don't agree with this approach), while the ones that remain have convinced themselves that not only this new state of affairs is fine, it's actually preferable, and what they are doing is somehow beneficial.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    > while the ones that remain have convinced themselves that not only this new state of affairs is fine, it's actually preferable, and what they are doing is somehow beneficial. None of you have done anything at all to explain why it somehow isn't, except perhaps to indicate that it isn't how you want the site to work. Or that the company is losing business. (As a reminder, the company has never paid any of us a red cent.) Why is it "comical" for people you don't identify with to have a vision?
    - int_19h 1y ago
      It's comical because it has been explained to you specifically dozens of times by several different people already right here in HN comments, but every time you do the equivalent of "la la la can't hear you" in response. It's sad because most of us remember how much more useful SO used to be.
bdangubic 1y ago
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? this is easy part, I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem :)
- zahlman 1y ago
  > I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem You are supposed to have a question in the first place, not just a problem. (In fact, you are not required to have had anything go wrong with your code, nor to need to know how to do something, in order to ask a question. You only need to ask a question that meets standards.) If something was wrong with your code, and using Stack Overflow didn't enable you to fix the code, that is not Stack Overflow's concern, by design. If you expect that your interaction with a website will enable you to fix broken code that you have, and the only standard by which you judge the website is "did I end up fixing my broken code", then Stack Overflow is not the site you want. And that's fine. There are millions of other websites out there that will also not help you fix your broken code. Why should Stack Overflow be required to do so? Just because it's about programming and accepts user-generated content? (Did you know about https://wiki.python.org/moin/ https://wiki.python.org/moin/ , by the way?) If you analyzed some non-working code, and found a specific part that did something different from what you expected, and produced a MCVE (although we say https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), then you have an acceptable question. Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps. And when that question gets closed as a duplicate, you can bet that the accuracy rate is pretty high. You should try the answer, adapting it back to your own MCVE / specification, and then back to the original context.
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    The question is the problem, if I did not have a problem I wouldn’t be reaching out to a site named StackOverflow (one of the many problems I encountered over the years…). The problem is not just broken code, the problem is many different things like “how do I …?” or “I am trying to figure out how to …?” which is not about the broken code.
solongso 1y ago
If that's you're goal, you're going about it the wrong way. Thank you for introducing yourself and your fellow answerers. Let me introduce myself and my fellow questioners. I have a deadline and a problem. I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't. I've searched many sources, including SO. I've seen some articles which might have answered my problem. Tried the suggestions, but no joy. So now I'm six hour in, and my deadline is looming. It's probably around 1:00am. Between 1 and 2 I type up my problem and submit it to SO. I'm hopeful that perhaps in the morning someone who has successfully worked through my problem will have contributed a solution. 9:00am, I check SO. My reputation has decreased by 8 points, a number of self-styled enforcers have left negative comments comparing my issue to other issues which bear a superficial similarity to my posting, and my posting has been closed. I'm not the most powerful contributor but over several years I've achieved upwards of 1,000 points. So I am by no means a nudnick. I've posted some good ones and I've helped some of my peers along the way. But recently, my experience has devolved to the point where the experience I describe above is the rule, rather than the exception. And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting. So I left. And now we can have the conversation here. You can have all the justifications in the world for your approach, and you don't need to keep the audience you don't want. But if those of us voicing our displeasure here, are not simply a few malcontents, but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve? For starters, if you want a questioner to improve their posting or you have questions about why they posted, is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation? Ask your question, make your point, give the poster the opportunity to remediate or show you why you're the one who's off base (did you ever consider that possibility?) before decreasing someone's reputation. Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base. Your resistance to AI is somewhat ironic, given all the effort you've devoted toward eliminating all courtesy and gratitude from your knowledge base. Do you want humans communicating on your platform? Let them. Perhaps after a question has been asked, answered, let the posting remain dormant for 30 days and then have some AI process go ahead and scrub the posting. Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it. Just for starters. For now, I'm out of there. Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.

by Arnt 1y ago

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
  Probably right, definitely justifiable, super annoying and actively driving away users.
  - Arnt 1y ago
    Most users don't ask. They search. The users who ask questions that nobody cares to answer aren't particularly attractive.
zahlman 1y ago
When someone new comes to Stack Overflow, and tries to get something from it that it's explicitly not there to provide, and I politely say "hey here are some documents about what the site is and what we expect from questions, I'm sorry but we can't allow people to answer this without addressing these problems, because the purpose of questions here isn't actually to work with you one-on-one and get your code to work", and then that person swears at me and is never heard from again... ... No, I am not at all "blind" to the fact that I'm "driving" people like that away, or to the "impact" I'm having. I've read many of their off-site rants, too. It's a popular art form, even. So popular that sometimes people bring links to it back to the meta site. So popular that the company staff occasionally try to lecture us about it. After all, it's bad for the bottom line when people don't stick around and watch ads (and to hell with whatever else they do on the site). But those documents objectively exist; the standards are established and thoroughly documented; the questions objectively are there to build a reference (this is even described right up front in https://stackoverflow.com/tour https://stackoverflow.com/tour , although the wording is still lacking and we aren't empowered to fix it); as an objective matter we don't provide a help desk, debugging service or support forum; and swearing at me is a code of conduct violation.
- stormblooperz 1y ago
  I'm sorry you've been swore at, that's obviously not on. I guess I would say: look at the big picture, Stack Overflow is almost dead. It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction. At least the standards are established and thoroughly documented! The document objectively exists! Also: I know several kind and smart people who have sworn off Stack Overflow forever, not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation. You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.
  - zahlman 1y ago
    > not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation. I have read countless examples of this sort of thing, with people attesting to me that the people who wrote it do in fact understand the purpose of the site. I have yet to see a single example where I was convinced they actually did. They very frequently write in terms that imply complete ignorance of fundamentals (such as what a "moderator" is, and who has what privileges and responsibilities on the site). > You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it. I have paid attention. I have done close reading. I have been empathetic. I have spent many hours of my life on this. > It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction. Your implication is that the purpose I describe for Stack Overflow is somehow invalid. I disagree in the strongest possible terms, and find this implication actually offensive. But even if it weren't valid, that doesn't entitle other people to come in and try to change it. It didn't entitle them in 2008, either, even though the vision wasn't fully fleshed out and communicated yet. (It probably started to become clear around 2012, but still not in a way that allowed curators to coordinate and describe clear policy.)

yuzzi 1y ago

Seems to me like you're part of the problem. Of course it's not my problem anymore because I no longer contribute there.

zahlman 1y ago
From GP: > 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. Why is any of this a "problem"? Why should we not create this knowledge base? Why should we help you, personally, for free? Why should we write answers for a single person who asks, instead of for arbitrarily many people who find it later?
int_19h 1y ago
It's almost comical. SO is increasingly useless for new questions precisely because so many top contributors left (because they don't agree with this approach), while the ones that remain have convinced themselves that not only this new state of affairs is fine, it's actually preferable, and what they are doing is somehow beneficial.
- zahlman 1y ago
  > while the ones that remain have convinced themselves that not only this new state of affairs is fine, it's actually preferable, and what they are doing is somehow beneficial. None of you have done anything at all to explain why it somehow isn't, except perhaps to indicate that it isn't how you want the site to work. Or that the company is losing business. (As a reminder, the company has never paid any of us a red cent.) Why is it "comical" for people you don't identify with to have a vision?
  - int_19h 1y ago
    It's comical because it has been explained to you specifically dozens of times by several different people already right here in HN comments, but every time you do the equivalent of "la la la can't hear you" in response. It's sad because most of us remember how much more useful SO used to be.

bdangubic 1y ago

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? this is easy part, I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem :)

zahlman 1y ago
> I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem You are supposed to have a question in the first place, not just a problem. (In fact, you are not required to have had anything go wrong with your code, nor to need to know how to do something, in order to ask a question. You only need to ask a question that meets standards.) If something was wrong with your code, and using Stack Overflow didn't enable you to fix the code, that is not Stack Overflow's concern, by design. If you expect that your interaction with a website will enable you to fix broken code that you have, and the only standard by which you judge the website is "did I end up fixing my broken code", then Stack Overflow is not the site you want. And that's fine. There are millions of other websites out there that will also not help you fix your broken code. Why should Stack Overflow be required to do so? Just because it's about programming and accepts user-generated content? (Did you know about https://wiki.python.org/moin/ https://wiki.python.org/moin/ , by the way?) If you analyzed some non-working code, and found a specific part that did something different from what you expected, and produced a MCVE (although we say https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), then you have an acceptable question. Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps. And when that question gets closed as a duplicate, you can bet that the accuracy rate is pretty high. You should try the answer, adapting it back to your own MCVE / specification, and then back to the original context.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  The question is the problem, if I did not have a problem I wouldn’t be reaching out to a site named StackOverflow (one of the many problems I encountered over the years…). The problem is not just broken code, the problem is many different things like “how do I …?” or “I am trying to figure out how to …?” which is not about the broken code.

solongso 1y ago

If that's you're goal, you're going about it the wrong way. Thank you for introducing yourself and your fellow answerers. Let me introduce myself and my fellow questioners. I have a deadline and a problem. I've already spent 5 hours researching why what should work - according the the documentation and the conventional advice - doesn't. I've searched many sources, including SO. I've seen some articles which might have answered my problem. Tried the suggestions, but no joy. So now I'm six hour in, and my deadline is looming. It's probably around 1:00am. Between 1 and 2 I type up my problem and submit it to SO. I'm hopeful that perhaps in the morning someone who has successfully worked through my problem will have contributed a solution. 9:00am, I check SO. My reputation has decreased by 8 points, a number of self-styled enforcers have left negative comments comparing my issue to other issues which bear a superficial similarity to my posting, and my posting has been closed. I'm not the most powerful contributor but over several years I've achieved upwards of 1,000 points. So I am by no means a nudnick. I've posted some good ones and I've helped some of my peers along the way. But recently, my experience has devolved to the point where the experience I describe above is the rule, rather than the exception. And when I tried to have the discussion we are having now, on the stack overflow meta site, your fellow enforcers shut down the discussion and deleted the posting. So I left. And now we can have the conversation here. You can have all the justifications in the world for your approach, and you don't need to keep the audience you don't want. But if those of us voicing our displeasure here, are not simply a few malcontents, but a significant chunk of your former user base, you might want to look inward, and at the same time ask with a certain measure of humility - what are we doing wrong and how can we improve? For starters, if you want a questioner to improve their posting or you have questions about why they posted, is it necessary to start off by immediately deducting from the poster's reputation? Ask your question, make your point, give the poster the opportunity to remediate or show you why you're the one who's off base (did you ever consider that possibility?) before decreasing someone's reputation. Stop dehumanizing your knowledge base. Your resistance to AI is somewhat ironic, given all the effort you've devoted toward eliminating all courtesy and gratitude from your knowledge base. Do you want humans communicating on your platform? Let them. Perhaps after a question has been asked, answered, let the posting remain dormant for 30 days and then have some AI process go ahead and scrub the posting. Don't ding people for saying please and thank you and expect them to like you for it. Just for starters. For now, I'm out of there. Change your game, maybe I'll be back one day.