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Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?

• buro9 12y ago
  In the linked post, the difference between 1 & 2 emerge in most communities, it's the September that never ended, the inner circle pulling up the drawbridge at the sight of the hordes of outer circle people swarming in. Group 3 belong to group 2 and are hoping to jump to group 1 but just haven't managed it yet (and don't know what it takes). The caretakers seek to either preserve things how they were, or to make it conform to some twee memory (sentimental, nostalgic imagining of how it was, which doesn't conform to reality... i.e. people imagining HN was once better even though pg showed that the quality in the past and present was similar) or unrealistic ideal. I personally don't think the first two groups can co-exist peacefully without a degrading in the quality of the experience from the perspectives of both groups. To please either group will rub the other the wrong way. My take is that communities work best with gated circles and steps of promotion. That there is progression. I don't mean karma (the computer measurement of progression and merit). I mean that this is a social problem and people solve it and not computers. That all communities are able to recognise themselves pretty well, and would organise themselves accordingly. I mean cliques. Cliques cannot be coded out of existence as if they are a non-meritocratic scourge. They are an entirely natural way in which people organise themselves and people will continue to organise themselves thus. I think that attempting to apply a meritocratic measure (karma, a technical solution to a social problem) will always fail. It needs to be recognised that it's a social problem that merely needs technical tooling. By which, I mean that these self-identified networks, hierarchies, groups, should be able to control access, visibility for their collaborative work. In the context of Stack Overflow, it's obvious that the goal of keeping everything visible at the highest scope is to drive as many eyeballs to unanswered questions as possible. But I would argue that it is better to allow sub-communities to thrive and to allow them to control the granularity of those sub-groups... thus putting them in charge of how many eyeballs see their particular set of unanswered questions. Just like HN, a single SO tends to be far too broad. Just like HN, SO would benefit from allowing users to create smaller groups within the larger scope to deal with ever more niche interests. Communities don't scale, so allow them to perform their own version of cell-division to remain highly relevant to their members.
  • camus2 12y ago
    > I think that attempting to apply a meritocratic measure (karma, a technical solution to a social problem) will always fail. Give one exemple of a QandA site that has a better system than stackoverflow at that scale(i insist on the latter).There is none,because nobody has done better. > Communities don't scale, so allow them to perform their own version of cell-division to remain highly relevant to their members. Communities scale when they have strict rules that help promote civil discussions and interesting content.
    • yungchin 12y ago
      Maybe nobody has, but that doesn't make it a wrong observation. As one of the answers on the OP puts it, "I spend an excessive amount of time as of late trying to find a question that interests me enough to do the research to answer it." Karma SO-style doesn't solve that. I think buro9 has some really interesting ideas that might.
    • buro9 12y ago
      That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to answer with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger within the limited Q&A space. The reason it's the wrong question is that Q&A is merely one form of communication that can exist within a community. Conversations (forums) are another. News/Link/Image sharing (the reddits, HNs, Diggs, Slashdot, etc) are another. Even e-commerce has communities (through reviews and recommendations - Amazon reviews are an example). Communities are merely groups of people that have a shared interest and agree to use some form of communication to collaborate around that interest. I would argue that Reddit is a great example of a community that allows the type of division I describe (through subreddits). Reddit shows that by doing so that they are able to keep the quality very high with a low and highly varied moderation policy at every applicable level of scope. Communities don't scale. But providing tools that allow them to naturally divide into smaller communities increases the total size of that group of communities whilst retaining a high quality and low moderation effort within each area. Edit: You've edited to add another line, but maybe you want to read this: http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html (Audiences scale, communities don't) . Also, I think the Tragedy of the Commons applies http://dieoff.org/page95.htm http://dieoff.org/page95.htm and on Kuro5hin back in the day that argument was made fairly well and relates to the problems of scaling a community: http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2002/1/17/21155/1564/46#46 http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2002/1/17/21155/1564/46#46
• jzwinck 12y ago
  It's true: Stack Overflow has changed. It's not bad (yet?), but it is different. The discussion on the linked page focuses a lot on bad questions, and there are plenty. But it's also much, much harder to ask good questions. To some extent the site is a victim of its own success: whereas I used to ask a basic question [1] and get several up-votes and a good answer, now I ask a basic question [2] and get almost as many down-votes as up-votes, plus the answers themselves get as many down-votes as up-votes, including some answers I actually liked but the community decided were so bad they couldn't just leave them at 0, they had to push them down to -1 and into the leper colony. Tons of comments and answers insist I had an XY problem [3] when I did not. Some of it is because "The good questions have all been asked and answered," and some of it is that the legitimate complaints about absurdly low-quality questions have gotten people into such a mood that a so-so question from a veteran user makes them spend their own reputation to down-vote each others' answers. Stack Overflow has an XY problem: the real problem is that a lot of questions are just bad because the barrier to entry has remained too low for too long, but it thinks the problem is the XY problem. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/q/148951/ http://stackoverflow.com/q/148951/ [2] http://stackoverflow.com/q/22856977/ http://stackoverflow.com/q/22856977/ [3] http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem
• camus2 12y ago
  Loving SO. One of the best moderated site in the world. Yes it's not perfect but i've yet to see a site as big as SO with a better moderation,given all the crap that get posted and fortunatly moderated. One thing i wish I could do is to star a question in the question listing without visiting the actual question,so i can pick it up later,like a quick bookmark.Also i'd like to see more questions per page.
  • blisterpeanuts 12y ago
    I second that. I've found SO extremely useful. I have noticed some of the issues mentioned by others, like the overly zealous duplicate hunters and brainless comebacks like "You shouldn't do it that way". That's just line noise to me. I fast forward past it and find answers that save me hours of time. It seems that someone out there has already asked nearly every question I come up with. There's not always an answer that I can use, but at least it's good to see someone else formulating my question a little differently. I guess I don't really fit into the OP's 1-4 categories. I'm just a person who finds SO useful about once a week or so. I don't have the time or the deep knowledge to be answering questions on a daily basis and racking up huge karma. Just thankful the service exists, and have put in my 2 cents a few times when I had something useful to contribute.
• andreyf 12y ago
  I don't think "keeping the site clean", as the linked author mentions, should be the goal of moderators, with the exception of obvious spam or questions so confusing they don't make sense. Moderators who close questions they deem as "dirty" questions on SO (e.g. my question here [1]), remind me of the Wikipedia moderators who delete an article I'm explicitly looking for as not notable enough to be on the site. I wonder if their psychological motivations are similar, as well. 1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14779751/how-do-i-change-the-font-selection-in-a-gmail-compose-window-from-javascript https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14779751/how-do-i-change...
  • maaaats 12y ago
    No moderators were involved in the closing of your question, just normal users above 2-3k (can't remember) in rep.
    • captainmuon 12y ago
      Yeah, I think that's what he meant. The problem are often not the actual `moderators` in the strict sense of the word, but the moderating community members, the "hall monitors" of the site.
  • oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
    That question is clearly not a programming question and, therefore, not suitable for a programming q&a forum. I think the moderators got it right on this occasion. You could argue that SO should be for all kinds of questions, or all kinds of questions that are anything to do with computers, but the founders chose to handle that with other sites in the Stack Exchange network.
    • userbinator 12y ago
      That question is clearly not a programming question Not programming? When the first and only answer contains JavaScript code? Looks like SO has a rather odd definition of "programming". I don't use SO myself but often stumble across interesting bits of info on there from Google, and also a lot of the puzzling "is this really off-topic?" questions. That's mainly what put me off from registering and participating, even to answer someone else's question/leave a comment - the community looks far too rigidly moderated for my taste.
• maaaats 12y ago
  What I think is the problem is actually the SE way of never giving notifications for bad stuff, only for good stuff. Your questions are silently closed or edited, your bad "suggested edits" are silently discarded etc.. So a lot of users do, and continue to do, "bad" stuff because they don't know they're supposed to do differently. This means that single users act up, directly towards the offenders of the rules. This creates a lot of drama. I think that shouldn't be necessary, it's the job of the system, not single users to notify them about bad behavior.
  • JeremyBanks 12y ago
    I agree, but you do get notifications for edits to your posts.
• SeanDav 12y ago
  SO is brilliant for classes of questions that have black/white type answers and infuriating for almost any question that has an "it depends" somewhere in the answer. Unfortunately many legitimate and serious programming/technology questions can only be answered with "it depends" and "this is my opinion". For example: "Should I use NoSQL or an ACID based approach to my xyz development issue?" This is the type of issue that is common and without an explicit answer and is the type of question that will be closed because it requires an opinion or may lead to arguments. It is almost unbelievable to me the number of times I have found great information in SO questions/answers that have been closed by some mod for the above reasons.
  • josephlord 12y ago
    I wonder if it would work if they were left open but marked norep and allowed voting etc. but did not count towards Karma scores or scaled to a much reduced level.
  • camus2 12y ago
    It's an interesting question but it has no place on SO,it's open ended and ask for a recommendation. It depends on too many factors to encourage an accurate aOnly you knows your requirements. a good SO question is accurate,non trivial,with a reproducible test case. Why dont you try Quora instead?Quora is made for that type of question.I'm personally not interested in Quora as I find its content quality quite poor.
    • mlangdon 12y ago
      I love the 'try quora' advice. 'Not enjoying running our gauntlet? Maybe trying swimming in this rain filled dumpster? I wouldn't.'
    • Morgawr 12y ago
      >Why dont you try Quora instead?Quora is made for that type of question.I'm personally not interested in Quora as I find its content quality quite poor. I think you answered your own question yourself.
  • 12y ago
• akirk 12y ago
  I believe that there should be a higher burden for beginners to ask their question, before it can go live. New users need to prove that they have done research, this can be done with a few questions like "name the three google search terms that you have used to find a solution", "how much time did you spend on researching?" (easily faked, but maybe it gives people a hint to step back and try harder). There could also be a new-user queue where higher reputation users would review a question (but are unable to answer it) before it can go live, with the possibility to go back and forth before the question goes online. In my blog post I have detailed what I'd propose: http://alexander.kirk.at/2014/04/26/stack-overflow-ways-out-of-the-negativity/ http://alexander.kirk.at/2014/04/26/stack-overflow-ways-out-...
  • captainmuon 12y ago
    I don't know... I'm not bothered at all by new users or dumb questions. What bothers me are experienced users questioning my intentions, being patronizing and thinking I am dumb. I have to include a disclaimer with almost every second question: "Yes, I know what I am doing. No, I am not suffering from the XY problem. No, I will not treat you answer as legal advice. Yes, I have tried to solve the problem on my own. Here is a bunch of useless code to prove I am worthy of getting an answer." If I don't do that, I'll get - within seconds - comments like "show what you have done" or "don't do that! what are you actually trying to achive!" The other thing is that, increasingly, the kind of questions that would a) help me and b) I could answer with expertise are the kind of questions that are banned on the various SE sites. SE has ceased being useful to me a while ago.
    • akirk 12y ago
      I think the being patronized is an effect of the flood of the huge amount low quality. It is assumed that you did little to no research because this is the case most of the times. What kind of question are you referring to that are banned?
      • captainmuon 12y ago
        On stackoverflow, it is not so clear-cut and I can't tell you one single kind of question. But on physics.stackexchange.com, my problem is that apparantly medium-level questions are frowned upon. We have some very high-level (research-level) questions, and many very low-level (popular science or below high-school level) questions. People rightfully complained about the low ratio of high to low level questions, but one thing they did against it was to ban "homework" and "homework-like" questions. This does not just include actual homework, but basically anything where you say "I'd like to calculate x, how do I do it?", and anything where you have to go through a few steps to find an answer. The problem is, after ~10 years at the university, studying and teaching, I'm basically an expert in "homework". I can answer most university-level questions. I prefer answering (and asking) questions where the answer is "do this, then this, and then you get that", maybe with a few formulas, to a few paragraphs of prose. After all, I personally think that fits better with the SE model and with physics. But actually, what's welcome at the moment are mostly "conceptional" questions where an answer explains an abstract concept with prose. The community has narrowed down the allowed scope a lot out of fear of 1) low-level questions, and 2) accidentally helping somebody with their homework (god forbid!). But instead of getting more expert-level questions, they get less mid-level questions. I've found that I can currently neither ask nor answer anything there.
• captainmuon 12y ago
  Expanded from a comment I left: I think he is missing a camp, to which I'd count myself: 5. Those users who visit the site to solve their problems, and who like to help others. Like 1 they want to have nice content on the site, but their number one criterion is "is it helpful (and civil)"? They don't care much about "is objective/it a good match for SE/constructive" and are frustrated by the wikipedia-like deletionism of 1. They would enjoy and benefit from even the "worst cardinal sin" kind of questions, like "What is the best node.js framework as of early 2014?". (The question would have many answers and would be a bit messy, but a novice could quickly gauge what frameworks there are, which ones are popular, and around which ones there is controversy.) They dont't care much about 2 ("help vampires"), answer the questions if it is not much effort, otherwise ignore them. They don't like the term, and absolutely hate it when 1 accuses them of being one. It is incredibly rude when one closes your question for supposedly being "homework". They don't care about 3 ("rep whores") either, and find the grudge of 1 against 3 silly. Let them have the rep they can get, if they're having fun and contributing useful content! Like 3, they enjoy getting rep (or XP), and try to unlock new features on the site, but isn't that the point of gamification? Basically, these are the people who also care about the site and the community, but are less obsessive and deletionist (I'm looking for a less offensive word for anal-retentive...) than the vocal majority on SO and Wikipedia.
  • gnaffle 12y ago
    Agreed. There is a real problem that Stack Overflow comes out on top if you Google for most of the "best X framework/library/... for Y" questions. Thus, many if not most of my encounters with SO are with closed, marked-as-offtopic questions that are still often the best resource to get an overview of the available alternatives. I would love for someone to sift through the SO dataset for such questions and create a new, separate community catering to this specific need.
    • mlangdon 12y ago
      As is usually mentioned on the "Take my SO, please" discussions on HN, there is a site for that[1], which I usually forget about when I have that type of question. [1] http://www.slant.co http://www.slant.co
• cookiecaper 12y ago
  Stack Overflow has definitely given better organization to the corpus of data borne of programmer on-the-fly discovery and for that I and all programmers are grateful, but SO has made some serious mistakes that have hamstrung it. First, the reputation system is inadequate and there are many people who game it. SO tried some interesting things, but "accepted answers" and the push to accept answers has always sucked. It rewards rapid-fire, crappy responses instead of thorough ones. You'll often find people just copying the page summary from Google or some other tiny snippet of text without context so that they could post first and get the "accepted answer" checkmark and the upvotes that come from the short time at the top of the page. Someone else will take 20-30 minutes to type out a thorough, good response that considers ramifications and end up with nothing. There's no way to recognize multiple answers, so if multiple answers contain valuable information you have to pick one to favor. There's also no way to deprecate answers if new versions break things; the best you can hope for is that the OP will know about the change, remember giving that answer one day, and go back and edit it. You can't change acceptances once awarded, and some people will accept answers without even trying them. Those basic flaws in the contrived reputation system have caused problems on SO since day one and deterred many good contributors who weren't interested in racing against amateurs who just wanted to copy and paste answers. Second-most damaging imo is the aggressive insistence on moving everything to other StackExchange sites and everything becoming a closed or karmaless ("community wiki") question on SO. A lot of relevant things were killed off on SO and moved to obscure StackExchanges where they never got a good answer. This deterred contribution, especially on questions that were cross-disciplinary as your question would get stuck in a loop where moderators on SO would say "this should be on SuperUser" and moderators on SU would say "this should be on StackOverflow". Really it'd work fine on either. I think that part of why this got so out of hand was another component of the reputation system, that automatically gave those most likely to race to Google and copy and paste the first result moderation powers. If you give people shiny new toys, they'll want to use them, and you'll end up with a lot of unnecessary infractions being filed and stifling communication. On top of all of that, a large reason SO even gained any popularity in the first place was the star power of Joel Spolsky. With such serious flaws in reputation systems, I'm honestly not sure that it would've gotten off the ground if not for his association. I don't know that SO is ever going to grow out of these problems as they probably now feel their rep system is validated (falsely believing the rep system caused the site's success instead of acknowledging that the site is successful despite the rep system), and I think they've just relied on new people entering the groups outlined in this post. I don't know that they're going to run out of those people anytime soon, but it'll be interesting to see what happens.
• everyone 12y ago
  As someone who has learned to program and embarked on a career as a game developer in the past few years I found stack overflow to be invaluable. I was, and still am, certainly a 2 (help vampire) If I encountered something I didnt understand or could not get working I would often post a question there. I was amazed at how helpful the 3s (repwhores) were. Their answers saved me a lot of time and accelerated my learning, though I have to say I was quite baffled by how helpful they were, I always wondered how people had time to be answering questions there. Anyway I think for the purposes of learning programming nowadays this help vampire / repwhore relationship is very pragmatic, also I think it is the most important function of the site (1s be damned!) to help people learn. I've found learning programming that often the initial learning curve is quite steep, and there is often not any proper documentation for things nowadays, there are things you could never figure out yourself and in those cases you just need to be pointed in the right direction by someone who knows. Here is an example of a "bad" question I asked. It got downvoted, with snarky comments and answers but I dont care + it was very helpful for me mainly because in one of the comments someone mentioned the word "easing". It turns out What I was doing was easing but I just didnt know that word, learning that this kind of stuff is called "easing" was a huge help as now that I know what its called I can just search for resources on it. Theres no way I would have been able to figure out that these things are called "easing" by myself http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22070187/making-a-sine-wave-steeper http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22070187/making-a-sine-wa...
  • TillE 12y ago
    The reason you were given for closing the question is terrible ("lacks sufficient information", what?), but you were basically asking a simple math question on a programming site. This is the trouble with being too specific. It's often better to say: here's what I want to do and why, what's the best way to accomplish that? Describe your actual problem first, before getting into your attempted solution.
    • oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
      Definitely better suited to the math stack exchange site, I would have thought
• erikb 12y ago
  I am also a caretaker (not on SO but in the communities I join) and therefore I think I can say that caretakers are not really the best of the four. We often overdo things, get too much involved, too much heated up, which doesn't decrease the stress and doesn't create a healthy atmosphere at all. Also there are two more groups Mystikal doesn't see in his ambitions. One is the group of people who come from time to time to ask or answer some questions, moderate a little, just have fun and learn something. And there are also the people who actually work (I mean for money) to keep the community going. These people often are just interested to calm everything down. I think these two groups should not be underestimated because often they are the reason it didn't break completely. They don't need to voice their opinion to every single post, so they are not as visible. But they also don't have beef with anybody and they provide actual content most of the time, because that's the only reason they came in the first place.
• marcus_holmes 12y ago
  I always wondered if this point would come. Because there's no method of recycling karma from people who have left the community, there must be a source of new karma that will allow new members of the community to take part in the community. Since the only way of creating karma is to answer questions, this means there must be a constant stream of new questions sufficient to provide karma for all the new people. But new technologies aren't being generated fast enough to provide a constant stream of new questions that can be answered easily enough to generate the stream of new karma required. So we see duplicate questions being answered instead of being marked as duplicate because answering them creates karma but flagging them as duplicate doesn't. Only the existing moderators, who have "enough" karma, care about flagging duplicates. So we end up here, by design.
  • astrobe_ 12y ago
    That's an interesting point of view for the "karma economy" angle; I believe there's always enough karma sources, or rather there's always ways to create them if the scope of the site is wide enough. I would push the idea a bit further and introduce karma destruction. To me, the most useful way to destroy karma points is to introduce a karma-based site subscription; that is, one subscribes to the site in order to read/write it but there is a constant fee of N karma points per day. User contributions are tipped with karma points taken from the upvoter/downvoter's karma pool. Eventually, one may let user buy free access (but not karma points directly otherwise it becomes a plutocratic system) in order get some support money.
    • marcus_holmes 12y ago
      Or they could award karma for doing things that keep the community as they want it. Like flagging duplicates, tidying up code examples, etc. Karma Economics... I like it :)
      • ufo 12y ago
        They already award some karma for doing those stuff but its a very small amount and it sometimes has a cap (IIRC, you only gain karma for your firt 500 edits)
• btilly 12y ago
  I am in a 5th camp. I like going for interesting discussion. However after having people from group 1 decide that the discussion that I wanted was happening on off topic questions. There was one particular case where group 1, the moderation nazis, decided that the question was "off topic" and should be deleted. After I complained about it here, people went and voted it back into existence. But I've been pretty close to inactive there since once I'd had that taste of moderation and realized that, as far as the site was concerned, the moderation nazis were mostly correct - the kind of algorithm questions that I found fun were off topic. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11314077/algorithm-for-exclusion-of-numbers/11317787 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11314077/algorithm-for-ex... for the particular question that lead to my getting frustrated with the site.
  • ericb 12y ago
    I left for the same reason. I wish someone would open a competitor where we could have these discussions.
    • LunaSea 12y ago
      Wouldn't Quora be an alternative for subjective / vague questions ?
      • hueving 12y ago
        The forced sign-up is so scummy that it drives many users (including myself) away.
        • btilly 12y ago
          Ditto.
    • Cederfjard 12y ago
      I think the question mentioned above would fit in at http://cstheory.stackexchange.com http://cstheory.stackexchange.com, wouldn't it?
• Bahamut 12y ago
  Sometimes I wonder whether people are more interested in making an effort to help people or badmouth/downvote them on SO. I help people often on IRC with dev questions (so much so that I was given ops in a particular channel for a library), and it is kept professional for the most part - no badmouthing, no matter how simple the question. Just trying to figure out people's problems and giving them advice. SO seems to fail to do that often, and that's why I'm not interested in contributing.
• jfc 12y ago
  When I first started programming, I could use SO without asking a question because everything I needed to know was fairly basic. It was great because many of the answers I came across helped me to understand more of the "broader universe" of issues I would encounter during development, and so encouraged me to research and learn more about the language. Once I started asking questions, I was careful to respond to comments and accepted and upvoted the best answers. I wanted to be a good citizen of the community. And reciprocity was a part of that: eventually, I found myself able to respond to questions and I remember how great it felt to see the first +25 on my profile because someone accepted my answer. These days, if I ask a question it's because I've spent a good amount of time on it and haven't been able to resolve it myself. Here's what happens when I ask a question on SO: 1 - I ask the question, post the code, and the error message I'm getting 2 - Question downvoted 3 - Respond to comment that says my question is a duplicate (it's not, which I clarify to avoid "closed as duplicate") 4 - Respond to comment about a missing semicolon that got deleted when I was cutting/pasting/formatting my code. (Despite the error msg making it clear that the missing semicolon isn't the issue) 5 - Question upvoted 6 - An answer! Says that I need to read the docs and provides a link to a non-relevant section (I've read the docs) 7 - Finally, a helpful answer! Looks pretty good, so I test it out and it does the job. I accept and upvote the answer. 8 - Notice a duplicate answer posted less than 1 minute after the accepted answer. Duplicate answer person complains that their entry was posted first. I advise them that the timestamp indicates the other poster was first and they reply that it is a time zone bug. 9 - Later I check back and notice this message: "Question closed as vague and cannot be answered" 10 - Check back one more time and see that someone has downvoted my question 11 - Email the mods to get the downvote removed
  • chris_wot 12y ago
    I once saw a question about the delete statement on the END of a C++ function (a C++11 feature) and it was closed as being to broad in terms of geography.
    • jfc 12y ago
      That's crazy. I haven't seen the geography message yet, but I did post a bash question once and someone closed it because it "wasn't about programming."
• lnanek2 12y ago
  Post seems to be from someone who is in group 1. As someone not in group 1, if group 1 actually did a good job caretaking I'd have no problem with them. Really, though, they close the most interesting questions that could actually be helpful to me and only leave open stupid stuff that could be looking up in the docs trivially. So they make the site useless for me. Worse they tend to edit my answers to be incorrect just to make them look nicer. I wouldn't say they are care taking, I'd just say they've been given power and they enjoy enforcing rules for the hell of it.
• lispm 12y ago
  I'd like to filter out some people. Currently for example there is someone asking long and complex, but useless, Common Lisp / C / C++ questions without knowing the basics. He has also asked the same questions on the mailing list for this topic (it's about interfacing Common Lisp with C). He uses multiple accounts on stack overflow and asks multiple questions about similar things. Whenever he moves, slowly, forward, then something breaks and he asks. It's like asking about formula one motor electronics, while not capable to even work on the simplest piece of electronics. Stackoverflow really needs to adapt to these changing patterns of abuse.
• joelthelion 12y ago
  Instead of fighting people who ask subjective questions, they should find a way to accommodate them ( make the questions expire after a year?). All these question closings are rightly perceived as aggressive and cause a lot of needless problems.
• neurobro 12y ago
  I haven't completely lost interest in participating at SO, but I am mostly just thankful they don't delete all of the old "closed as not constructive" questions because they are some of the most helpful content on the site. The community wiki feature would be a better technical solution for questions that are a bit too subjective. But then there's the proliferation of SE sites with ambiguous/overlapping subject areas and only a handful of users. I'm solidly in the "don't give a shit" camp for those.
• davidgerard 12y ago
  Clay Shirky summarised every single discussion of this type in "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy": http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...
• NateDad 12y ago
  Where's #5 - moderation nazis? Often have overlap with #3, repwhores, they repwhore in order to get high enough reputation to get the power to do moderate as they see fit... note that #5 may think they're in camp #1, but they err too often on the side of closing posts because they want to exercise their power. This is my main problem with all stack exchange sites. It rewards repwhores with power. I'd prefer that reputation and power were divorced somehow. I don't know how to determine who would make a good moderator... but just "someone who posts a lot" is not really a good metric.
• eternalban 12y ago
  He assumes too much in the arc (1,4).
• aaron695 12y ago
  It's interesting, is stackoverflow a Q & A site? I'd say a definite nup. It's wikipedia, well that's where it's true value lies I think. But it's way to get content is 'suckering' people in thinking it's a Q&A site. It's value to the community is amazing. But it is a chameleon. Relevance. Not sure, perhaps if you dig to deep in anything the matrix spoils reality.
• menacingly 12y ago
  I'm most frustrated by the fact that their closed questions rank so well. It's not a good fit for a Q/A format, but it is a food fit for inbound traffic, so we're leaving it up. The keyword stuffing in the sidebar often makes the question rank for searches for which it isn't even relevant.
• kybernetyk 12y ago
  I found SO to be pretty useless for more complicated questions. Sure, if you ask something that you could answer by looking into the docs then you are flooded with answers by dozens of people. But as soon as it gets to some obscure API maybe a handful people uses currently you not only get no constructive answers but get downvoted, get useless but borderline hateful comments and in the end the question gets closed because of $reasons. Now if you go and start googling that obscure API it's inevitable that you will find SO questions about it. "Great, maybe I can find something there in the comments" you think. But no, that question most likely is closed because of $reasons and has no comments because comments on closed questions are not allowed. In the last few years I had a handful of cases where even discussing with someone who didn't know the solution to my problem might have brought me a little nearer to the solution. But you even can't start a discussion in SO questions because if it's not an answer the question gets closed down - no matter how helpful the discussion might turn out for people with said problem.
  • mattgreenrocks 12y ago
    Yeah, SO can be pretty bad for deep knowledge. Actually, the web is bad overall. It used to be a badge Of pride to stump SO; now it doesn't seem that hard. This is a real problem with SO: it seems to prize 'easier' information by design.
  • xxs 12y ago
    Comments are rarely deleted (they could be) - however the reputation whore is a reason few actually leave comments instead of attempt at answers. However SO is bad for not-so-common, above advanced knowledge. Some Tags (C# for example) have good support but some effectively don't (Java). OTOH: 500rep bounty usually can do that trick if there would be anyone to shed light.
  • stuaxo 12y ago
    Indeed - I tried a test after asking a difficult question, I asked an easy one, it was answered quickly + helped my reputation.
• joeblau 12y ago
  I'm a member of another community that was run almost exactly like that for musicians called future producers. I moved from a 3 to a 1,4 and now I'm a pure 4. The thing that the 1's need to come to grips with is that people are going to keep asking the same questions over and over. SO needs the concept of a `git merge` so you can take take questions which might be part of another question and merge them in. By merge i mean a true merge, not just a link to the other question. SO is beyond the Q&A phase and needs to transition into the data curation phase, but it's rudimentary vote/mark duplicate/close/delete system isn't designed to facilitate that.
  • aaronem 12y ago
    You've put your finger on the nub of it.
  • sampo 12y ago
    And they should award karma for spotting the duplicates, so people would do it.
• kijin 12y ago
  Stack Overflow needs to make people slow down. A lot of the time, how quickly you can post your answer is the single most important factor in how many upvotes you'll get. It doesn't matter how thoroughly you research the topic. Too many answerers (#3 "repwhores") are trying to beat the clock, half of them don't even read the question. If you waste 30 seconds trying to format your code or making sure that your solution actually works in jsfiddle, two other people will have already answered the question and the OP might even have accepted one of them. You know what's even worse? While you're still writing your answer, a message pops up and helpfully tells you that this has happened. Thanks a lot! Stop writing and close the damn tab. The whole system is rigged to discourage time-consuming research. The front page above the fold is always reserved for questions from the last 2-3 minutes, which sends a not-so-subtle message that if you can't grab someone's attention in the next 2-3 minutes, whatever you write will probably be buried forever. A few years ago, I used to repwhore. It's addictive, but I quit. Now I prefer to write long-form, comprehensive, thoroughly researched answers. On HN I feel confident in doing so, because I know that the community encourages that kind of behavior. On SO I rarely post any answers anymore, because I'm pretty sure that nobody will read them if it takes more than a few minutes to read or write.
  • collyw 12y ago
    I usually upvote anyone that takes the time to answer my question reasonably (unless its obviously wrong, or not answering the question). Seems like courtesy to me, but I noticed that it doesn't usually get returned.
• dpweb 12y ago
  Wish I knew the economics term when reward is gotten without paying a due price? Skin in the game, but not crazy about that term.. I think there's a knee jerk reaction 'hey this is great everything is free', but that can be a bad thing, and it applies to many other things. Value needs to be compensated with value. If the problem is too many bad questions, the thing is there is no barrier to entry for asking a question. Charge people a dollar or even 50 cents, or even 25 cents - the point is anything but free. You'll see a much better quality of questions. Easier to whine about it, which is also easy and free.
  • jjindev 12y ago
    Are there too many bad questions? Why not the Google answer, which is that search brings you "good" no matter how much "bad" there is?
• bikamonki 12y ago
  Once I saw a client typing part of her domain in the browser's search to then click on the first Google result: her site. What? Wait: use the address bar, you know the domain. My way is 'faster' she said. Not really I said: your way is type, wait, click. The fast, and correct, way is to type just a few letters on the address bar and if your browser is remembering: enter. The solution? Make the address bar and search bar one and be smart enough to know if the user is searching or just calling a usual site. So, if I have a question about xyz, type a few kwds and google-it, top 3-5 results are SO, then something else, then the 'official' docs. What? Wait: aren't the docs the most relevant trust-worthy correct answer? Docs always suck and SO is faster. Then hire SO wizards to write the docs and pay them dollars not karma ;) What? Wait: aren't I way off topic? Did I piss you off? Did you get enough hugs as a child? Enough beer last night? Happy weekend you wizards :) PS: Pardon my typos and grammar. English not my mother tounge. Yes, there are programmers past the border ;)
• frik 12y ago
  The JavaScript community on StackOverflow is very JQuery centric - quit annoying if someone prefers modern vanilla JavaScript. And their point system is not optimal and contributes to karma whores. Beside that, SO is a good resource that pops up in the top Google search results.
• jjindev 12y ago
  The striking thing for me was to Google a few questions in a row, to find good answers on SO, and then to see that each one was also closed/rejected for some reason. It was strange to see that the answers to these questions all had high ratings, but the question was closed anyway. I guess it's a vision opposite of the internet itself. Rather than "find one of a million pages that work for me" it is "there should only be one." (In the spirit of the internet, perhaps if a question cannot be found by a simple search on SO, that IS a reason to ask again, and to fill the search slot.)
• LinuxDevOps 12y ago
  I'm more familiar with Server Fault, I started contributing last month (made top of "new users") and it feels good to have helped a bunch of people that thanked you, but I'm a Camel's straw away for giving up between some moderators and how the system works.
• lyndonh 12y ago
  Me: I'm trying to do X, I know I need to do Y first but it doesn't work. Can someone please go through the basic principles I need to do this thing. Comment: Post some code Me: (posts summary code but it's a difficult problem and you can't make a trivial example) Comment: No idea 0 answers Me: I have this problem with X and Y, but it's not working. Answer (2 upvotes): You should (onerous and time consuming alternative approach suggestion with absolutely no evidence that it would solve the problem) My comment: How do I know this is going to solve my problem ? Comment: Try it first and come back. Someone: (difficult and useful question) ? 0 answers, 5 upvotes #1 result in Google; top 10 hits for every search on this and related subjects leads to this question on SO or mirror sites Another scenario - Me: (challenging question) ? 0 answers, 0 upvotes Another person: Why does j++(++)++++++++++ not give me the answer I expect ? 110 answers, accepted answer receives 200+ upvotes, question has 1000 upvotes and is locked because of too many frivolous answers/comments
  • pekk 12y ago
    What makes this worse is that sometimes the alternative approach to #2 really is much easier, if the asker would do it. And sometimes, the asker really is wrong to regard it as more onerous. So we can't categorically ban that kind of response. But it's not automatically valid either. People will generate instances of both problems all day. So we're back to moderation to solve that somehow and moderation always has problems. It's only a community problem when the community takes up a strong bias e.g. against the asker, and does things like closing questions aggressively. There is an underlying problem but the community has made it worse and closed off the natural compensation mechanisms. As for lack of response to serious/challenging/useful questions (which already has a 'reputation' incentive) I'm afraid there's no way to solve that unless cash bounties will work.
• dandare 12y ago
  IM very HO SO has a UX problem, namely the tone they use can sound negative even if there was a good intention. Something around "Your question was closed ... = because you are bad person"
  • pekk 12y ago
    Besides defeating the purpose of posting the question, having a question closed is inherently deflating regardless of wording. And should be reserved for genuine need, and should not be the default that every newbie has to fight tooth and nail just to get valid questions answered.
• dandare 12y ago
  IM very HO SO has a UX problem, namely the tone they use can sound negative even if there was a good intention. Something around "Your question was closed ... = because you are bad person"
• spacemanmatt 12y ago
  NAILED. IT.
• jroseattle 12y ago
  There is a lot of reference material on SO that I find useful, and my own reputation score continues to increase on its own, but I haven't posted a new answer on the site in at least 2 years. To me, the gamification problem has simply led to what's really going on: users caring more about the score than about the quality of the content. 5 years ago, I can recall a single question eliciting awesome input from the likes of Jon Skeet, Marc Gravell, etc. While the scores were interesting (Skeet's rep off-the-charts), the content was fantastic. Motivations are skewed, now. People are trying to build reputation as a number rather than content. What I'm surprised at is why anyone would want to drive up a high rep score backed with completely inane content? What's the point? The gamification rules for the site seemed to have transitioned it from a knowledge center to nothing more than a game.
  • jacques_chester 12y ago
    > What's the point? Better job offers? Or maybe just invisible internet points.
    • jroseattle 12y ago
      > Better job offers? A better job offer due to a good Stack Overflow reputation score? Good grief.
      • collyw 12y ago
        There are plenty of jobs descriptions that ask for examples of open source contributions. In my current job, and every previous one for the last eleven years, the projects I work on are in house, so I have nothing I can show to potential employers. If I had a good SO reputation I would see it as a reasonable alternative to show to potential employers. (I am working on a side project at the moment mainly to get around the problem I described, but this is taking a whole lot more time than answering a some SO questions.)
        • jroseattle 12y ago
          > If I had a good SO reputation I would see it as a reasonable alternative to show to potential employers. I get the sentiment, but it holds little value for me. (I'm in the potential employer category.) I find it pointless as a meter of competency. > I am working on a side project at the moment mainly to get around the problem I described, but this is taking a whole lot more time than answering a some SO questions. Think about this comment for a minute. A side project takes longer to complete and requires more discipline and concerted effort. SO questions are quick hits, small scope, and are basically lather-rinse-repeat (find a question, answer it.) Care to hazard a guess which one of these choices of time I might find more appealing in a candidate?
• k__ 12y ago
  In my eyes the problem is pseudonymity and pseudo interaction. If the system isn't anonymous, people will try to use it for their personal reputation gains. See Github, Stackexchange, Wikipedia. If the system promotes pseudo interaction, like votes, it will lead people to empathise posts, which they _think_ are good, but don't have to be. You don't have to conduct real interaction with the content and users, like writing and reading, you just have to click, which leads to easy manipulation from people who don't know anything real to contribute.
• Al-Khwarizmi 12y ago
  Probably I'm a radical, but I just don't see the point of deleting factual information in the Internet, as long as it is true information. Someone creates an article in Wikipedia about a subject that is totally irrelevant for most people? It's fine. It's not as if I'm ever going to see it (as I only tend to see articles I search for), and a Wikipedia page doesn't exactly take a lot of space by today's standards. We have the technology to build a virtually unlimited repository of all human knowledge, with no effective physical limits, and some mods keep acting as if it had to fit into a physical bookshelf. With SO it's the same, why should I care if a question is considered to be irrelevant or even a duplicate? If I search for it on Google and it contains reliable information that solves my problem, it's useful for me. If it's really irrelevant, I'm not going to search for it, and therefore it's not going to make me lose any of my time. We have search tools that keep getting better and better and allow us to pinpoint what is useful for us among a vast sea of information. There's no need to spend valuable human time on deleting stuff, the search engine will filter it for me so that I get what I want, thank you very much!
• Uncompetative 12y ago
  4.
• jjindev 12y ago
  Should karma be an ephemeral thing? Should it age off in a week or so? There could be a downside to the early entrants benefit. Sure, you can explore new territory and carve out a huge position, but you become a "Land Barron" in a sense, and no friend of later "squatters." (Relatedly, Bitcoin) ("sure I've got 20000 points, but they guy just climbing from 100 to 200 is a repwhore")
• julie1 12y ago
  Still it reminds me of open source, help chans on IRC, wikipedia... - At the beginning it is fun and new you are a pioneer (phase discovery) - Then you understand the concept and experiments its power (fun) and you have grown a culture with your alpha wave of compadres you become a native of the place; - then it has success in a brutal fashion triggering a new massive phase of «new comers» (proportion of new might be bigger than the one of old), it is the mass immigration/colonization phase - then there is a «cultural conflict» between the old and the new regarding the way to use the tool/to be part of community. This part can last a long time and I call it the Babel tower effect. (I vaguely map the state machine described as a chronological effect) Every community big enough and successful will suffer it. However in the process the «native» ideas are often killed, and the original success can be lost. Plus there is never a consensus, so some people will be feeling unwelcomed. It can be seen optimistically as stochastic improvements (the pioneers will seed somewhere else and help discover new territories), or as a process of the mass integration the pioneers back into the crowd// normalization/colonization. Internet may have many virtues but when it comes to human beings it does not change the eternal problem of «doing something together». Every time you take part in improving the world and try to propose a worthfull alternative, there is a chance the culture will evolve in something different then what you help to build. My advice is to fight the tendency for bitterness and leave these communities the same way Odysseus left Nausicaa.
• glynjackson 12y ago
  When I first started asking questions I learned a lot, the most articulated answers always came from the same users. It was also these same users that downvoted me, then upvoted when I corrected my mistakes. I've learned so much from my mistakes. I now welcome the downvotes just so I can prove myself! After a year on Stack I started answering questions and still today don't hesitate to downvote users that don't understand what constitutes a valid question. I find people 'used' to react well commenting... "what did I do wrong?". Its the recent reaction to downvotes that changed.
• justinhj 12y ago
  I think stackoverflow is working just fine, it's just weird. For example a question I posted recently I got a great answer in minute or so, as well as grumpy comments and closed. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21889666/facial-recognition-software-that-can-detect-eye-positions http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21889666/facial-recogniti...
  • shagie 12y ago
    On Programmers.StackExchange there is some additional about the recommendation for a tool, library or other: http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/why-was-my-question-closed-or-down-voted/6487#6487 http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/why... One of the bits in that is a note of a Stack Exchange for Software Recommendations - http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com which can deal with recommendation questions. This is a social example of 'branch on incompatible policy' from vcs. http://www.bradapp.com/acme/branching/branch-creation.html#PolicyBranch http://www.bradapp.com/acme/branching/branch-creation.html#P... Key to asking there is making sure there is enough information being presented so that someone can give the right recommendation: http://meta.softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/336/ http://meta.softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/336/
  • sampo 12y ago
    You probably should not have used `linux` and `osx` tags for such a specific question.
    • justinhj 12y ago
      I was looking for a solution that worked on either
      • sampo 12y ago
        Yeah, but it injected your question to the feeds of people who follow the `linux` or `osx` tag, 99.9+% of whom have no idea how to answer your question, and this resulted in some of them closing your question as off-topic. Whereas, the people following the `image-processing` and `face-recognition` would probably (my guess) not have closed your question as off-topic.
• mattst88 12y ago
  We know how successful karma/reputation systems are at encouraging users to contribute good content. The unexpected thing I've learned from Stack Overflow is that the reputation system, when it doesn't work as expected, can also be demotivating. My personal experience has been mixed with regards to how successfully my answers are accepted. On multiple occasions, I've answered questions first, only to have another answer accepted that contained the same content as mine but was posted hours later. I don't know if this is a common experience or if my sample size is too small. In any case it's a bit frustrating.
• mcgwiz 12y ago
  It's a complex problem, but with a "training/welcome period" (explained below) for new users, these specific issues can be addressed: - experts (users having rep above EXPERT_THRESHOLD, say 5000) want "interesting" questions - most new questions are not interesting - "new users" (having rep below some REGULAR_THRESHOLD, say 100) are not educated and have unrealistic expectations - it is expensive for the community to manually educate new users - asking questions is inexpensive for the asker, but answering questions is costly to the community (to research, comment, close, find dupes) - it's hard for new users to gain rep by answering questions because rep-whores are more experienced with the site. thus new users are instead encouraged to gain rep by asking questions. Some ideas mentioned on SE would help: - require rep for asking questions - give rep for finding duplicates (discouraging repwhores from answering dupes, encouraging dupe linking) - give rep for taking a quiz about the 2-Minute Tour or other FAQs Additionally, a training/welcome period for new users (during which they interact a slightly more among themselves than directly with experts) would go a long way toward fixing a lot of deeper issues. New user questions (which tend to be uninteresting dupes) would be hidden from experts for some period of time NEW_Q_DUR (say 1 day). During that time, only other new users or regular users can answer the question. Experts can un-hide them with a Setting but can only comment, not answer. Benefits: - new/regular users (that care about the site) are incentivized to answer questions, find dupes, work with others at their rep-level and do some of the (educational) activities that experts see as menial, rather than just ask questions - experts get a higher signal/noise ratio of interesting questions, as bad questions can be cleaned up by new/regular users and interesting questions will likely remain unanswered after NEW_Q_DUR (since new users tend to be less experienced and less able to answer difficult, good questions from other new users) - dupe rep-whoring is mitigated because once a rep-whore becomes an expert, they cannot answer dupe questions without new/regular users having time NEW_Q_DUR to flag as dupe - new user expectations are made more realistic. until they've participated a certain amount, they cannot expect to draw immediate attention from experts. also, they become aware of the dupe problem. A caveat might be that new user questions with enough upvotes can become answerable by experts before the normal time limit. Also, if/when new user question quality improves, NEW_Q_DUR can be reduced. Some very minor drawbacks: - new users would be slightly deterred from asking certain questions because they do not value answers from non-experts (leading them to do more research on their own) - more class-ful community, potentially creating stronger biases (I don't think this is too bad because class mobility is clear and feasible) - some new users that would care about the site might instead be turned off by the welcome period on some principal and never participate
• n1ghtmare_ 12y ago
  Well I found lately that asking anything on SO that is not trivial doesn't get an answer. My last 3 questions were up-voted, but never answered. I'm a regular SO user, I know the rules, I'm doing my research, my questions are not subjective, they are "answerable", yet they remain without answers.