7 ms·

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 th

by 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."
  - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
    It's possible to ask a bash question that IS about programming, and it's possible to ask one that ISN'T. Without the question, we can't really judge here which one yours was - can you provide it?
    - jfc 12y ago
      It was closed because the person closing it didn't recognize bash as a language; the substance of my question wasn't even at issue. After others pointed out that it is a language, a mod re-opened it and it was answered.
      - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
        Well, that's clearly ridiculous, but it's good to hear that it was reopened and the system worked.
        hueving 12y ago
        It didn't work very well if all of those hoops had to be jumped through just to have the question recognized as valid.
        oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
        Bugs happen. If they get fixed, the process works. It's unrealistic to think that, in an open system, no-one will ever do the wrong thing.
        ebiester 12y ago
        If there are enough people complaining that the error recovery system is invoked far too often, the "one-off" bug should instead be given higher priority as a design flaw.
- Shog9 12y ago
  Yeah, that was the "Too Localized" reason - it was actually aimed more at things like "where's the error in this 500-line code dump?" but... uh, no one understood that. So we got rid of it about a year ago. There is a small but vocal population of users who will use any excuse to close questions they already know the answer to, regardless of how clearly-written or novel they are. That's... kinda insane, but in a community-moderated system there's a bit of a learning curve for everyone, including those moderating. If you see something that strikes you as wholly inappropriate (e.g., a good question closed for a bs reason, not a bad question closed for the wrong reason), don't hesitate to bring it up on meta for review: http://meta.stackoverflow.com http://meta.stackoverflow.com
aptwebapps 12y ago
And here I thought I was really bad at asking questions or something ...
rartichoke 12y ago
I wouldn't sweat it too much. I've also noticed that really in depth questions with a lot of code examples and explanations doesn't help either because then they get no responses or votes. It's funny when you're asked to supply detail but when you supply detail no one replies because they can't be bothered to spend 4 minutes reading the setup/code details.
- pekk 12y ago
  Because tacitly the point is to stand around jumping on newbies or people you perceive to be doing things wrong. If you can't quickly get that gratification you just move along to the next guy who left out a semicolon that wasn't germane to his question. Who has time to deal with other people's real problems?
rtpg 12y ago
can you link to your questions? I have had universally good responses to my questions, and have never seen the behaviour you are describing.
- platz 12y ago
  A lot of times one sees results like then when asking open-ended or subjective questions on SO, when SO is intended to be more like a wikipedia or a knowledge store of objective solutions to problems. Joel has spilled much ink on how SO is not a site for free form discussion. Discourse was created for that. Some frustration may occur when one realizes that certain kinds of problems or exploration are best suited to free-form discussion - those discussions need to happen on channels other than SO then. * edit - corrected Discourse attribution.
  - lucasnemeth 12y ago
    One correction: It was Jeff Atwood who created Discourse.
michh 12y ago
I especially hate having to be so defensive. E.g. in phrasing my question, specifically having to mention a whole bunch of things that obviously aren't the problem but people are going to insist on anyway unless I've already mentioned them myself. Or the whole "Well, you shouldn't be doing this in the first place so I'm not going to help you with your actual problem". It can be incredibly helpful to point this out. But often I'm doing things in a certain way for a reason (constraints that aren't relevant for the question, like "yeah but our entire codebase"). So when I say I'm doing it this way for a reason and looking for a way to make it work, either trust my judgment or decide I don't deserve to be helped and stop commenting. But it often ends up being a massive distracting derail preventing others from trying to answer the question I was actually asking in the first place. Most annoyingly, this behaviour is often rewarded with upvotes. For example: > "I can't connect to my database due to error 110, I have no idea what that means" "Why aren't you using an ORM?" > "I have good reason not to, besides, I'm just looking to fix error 110 now" "But a good ORM handles these types of errors for you, it'd be stupid not to use it" > "You're probably right, but that'd require a lot of rewriting and refactoring and that's simply not an option right now" "Ok, get back to me when you're actually using an ORM and still having trouble with your database" when all I'm looking for is "That's a connection timeout, tried checking your firewall configuration?"
- jfc 12y ago
  >So when I say I'm doing it this way for a reason and looking for a way to make it work, either trust my judgment or decide I don't deserve to be helped and stop commenting. ...Most annoyingly, this behaviour is often rewarded with upvotes. Totally agree with this. I can't stand it when people start mucking about in the comments. It's almost as if they are looking for something to do, and then feed off of each other. Eventually, all the activity draws the attention of a super-zealot, who promptly closes the question.
- dictum 12y ago
  >Or the whole "Well, you shouldn't be doing this in the first place so I'm not going to help you with your actual problem". I call it the MacRumors Forums/Apple Discussions syndrome: "Why would you WANT to hold your iPhone this way?" "What kind of moron would want to keep using their 5-year old Mac?" "Why are you trying to export this file? Just create a copy by hand, duh." "No, this can't be done. Terminal? No, don't use it. Here be dragons."
nhebb 12y ago
Maybe this problem could be mitigate by allowing users to tag their questions as novice, intermediate, or advanced (though intermediate is probably not necessary). The advanced tag would let the 1's help 1's, and the novice tag would let the 3's help 2's. With the Favorite Tags settings, users could filter out what they don't want to see.
- frik 12y ago
  That's a really good idea! Let's hope SO implements it soon.
- carrotleads 12y ago
  and I believe downvoting is not helpful and gives pissed off people the ability to influence outcomes. Upvotes by themselves should be enough to bring the best posts forward. IMO this is true for HN too.
  - shagie 12y ago
    There are some things built into the DNA of the system. Dowvnotes are there and an early blog post addresses that - http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvotin... Note that down votes are a key part of what drives a number of automatic scripts that clean up things. * People who waste too much of the communities time (asking poor questions that get closed and down voted ) get question banned - driven strongly impart by down votes. * Closed questions that have a negative score and no answers with a positive score get deleted after a bit over a week. (If people complain about how much crud there is, one should look at how much crud gets automatically deleted). * A down voted question helps signal to people reading to not waste their time reading it because its not useful. When you've got 8000 questions/day, someone saying "don't bother with this" can save you a bit of time reading it. For smaller communities where a person who wastes your time can get addressed through individual moderator attention. Where there are 8k questions per day asked by a similar number of people, you can't have every moderator address each poor question and time wasting troll. It is for this that simple down votes can help drive the automated system when there is enough signal that the person is wasting everyone's time without involving moderators. Update: So, because of how the system was designed, it isn't something that one can easily go back to and change (and remove down votes). Its part of the software and the culture of the group and the two are inseparable - the technological and social part of the community is tightly interwoven. Further reading on this at http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
RivieraKid 12y ago
> 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. Same for me. Here's how my questions end up: - With an actual, good answer. I'd say this happens for about half of the questions. - The answer confirms that what I'm trying to do is not possible. - I get stupid but confident answers by people who apparently didn't read the whole question. - No answer or vague unhelpful answers. - The question is put on hold, usually because it's too broad or not constructive. It's a shame that there's no place to discuss these type of questions with the SO community, I hink there's a lot of potential there.
- collyw 12y ago
  Yeah, I remember a post here a while ago, someone was going to open a site "not constructive" with these types of discussions as the goal. Unfortunately it never seemed to materialise...
akshatpradhan 12y ago
Check out bountify.co, you may like it as an alternative.
myhf 12y ago
I guess that makes you a "help vampire" for wanting your question answered in the first place.
mdmarra 12y ago
> 11 - Email the mods to get the downvote removed Mods can't reverse up/down votes
- mkingston 12y ago
  I think they can, actually. I had a disagreement with someone on SO; this person subsequently went on a downvoting spree on my previous answers. I wasn't terribly worried about the points but e-mailed the mods to report the behaviour. I was told they would reverse the downvotes if the user persisted, but that they preferred not to get involved (for obvious reasons).
  - mdmarra 12y ago
    Nope, they absolutely cannot. If you really doubt this, ask one in chat. Moderators cannot even see who voted a question up or down, never mind reversing votes. References: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144747/partial-fix-of-serial-downvotes/144762#144762 http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144747/partial-fix-o... http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/229173/reversing-an-unpopular-community-decision http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/229173/reversing-an-...
    - guycook 12y ago
      It is possible however for abusive user to be detected and removed, at which point their abusive voting will be reversed - see my own reputation page for an example: http://stackoverflow.com/users/1000900/guy-cook?tab=reputation http://stackoverflow.com/users/1000900/guy-cook?tab=reputati... Apparently someone was just upvoting everything they saw, hence I lost rep when they were deleted.
      - mdmarra 12y ago
        The moderators do not control this process. There is an automated serial vote detection algorithm. AFAIK, under no circumstances can a Stack Exchange moderator reverse a vote. More info on the serial vote detection process here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-serial-voting-and-how-does-it-affect-me http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-seria... edit: I just looked at your profile and the deletion/banning of a user account will remove rep too, so I suppose in that manner a mod can "reverse" voting, but it's all or nothing. They have no way to flip individual votes. edit2: Moderators are not employees of Stack Exchange, they are volunteers elected by the community. Of course employees can change whatever they feel like. This discussion is about the moderators.
autokad 12y ago
I'm glad that I am not the only one that feels this way When talking to young engineers, i say SO is a great place to find answers, but horrible place to ask questions. If you want to ask a question and find yourself ridiculed, belittled, and lectured on everything but actually having your question answered, then this is your place.
- collyw 12y ago
  I know, it amuses me the effort people will go into discussing why your question is crap, yet completely ignore the question. Not constructive indeed!
robomartin 12y ago
SO and, in general, SE derailed years ago. The mods ruined these communities. If you want to see the worst of it visit ServerFault, it was horrible a couple of years ago. I think that's how long it's been since I've been to an SE site. The misplaced moderation drives potential contributors and participants away.
- collyw 12y ago
  I find the over zealous moderators as annoying as anyone else (I imagine), but its wrong to say that they have been ruined. Stack overflow and Server Fault are still damn useful sites, even with the moderators.
  - robomartin 12y ago
    I say "ruined" from the perspective that a lot of people like me, who have expertise and are interested in sharing, refrain from doing so because we have exactly zero interes in dealing with moderator bullshit. The sites are useful. They could be better.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

by jfc 12y ago

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."
- oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
  It's possible to ask a bash question that IS about programming, and it's possible to ask one that ISN'T. Without the question, we can't really judge here which one yours was - can you provide it?
  - jfc 12y ago
    It was closed because the person closing it didn't recognize bash as a language; the substance of my question wasn't even at issue. After others pointed out that it is a language, a mod re-opened it and it was answered.
    - oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
      Well, that's clearly ridiculous, but it's good to hear that it was reopened and the system worked.
      - hueving 12y ago
        It didn't work very well if all of those hoops had to be jumped through just to have the question recognized as valid.
        oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
        Bugs happen. If they get fixed, the process works. It's unrealistic to think that, in an open system, no-one will ever do the wrong thing.
        ebiester 12y ago
        If there are enough people complaining that the error recovery system is invoked far too often, the "one-off" bug should instead be given higher priority as a design flaw.
Shog9 12y ago
Yeah, that was the "Too Localized" reason - it was actually aimed more at things like "where's the error in this 500-line code dump?" but... uh, no one understood that. So we got rid of it about a year ago. There is a small but vocal population of users who will use any excuse to close questions they already know the answer to, regardless of how clearly-written or novel they are. That's... kinda insane, but in a community-moderated system there's a bit of a learning curve for everyone, including those moderating. If you see something that strikes you as wholly inappropriate (e.g., a good question closed for a bs reason, not a bad question closed for the wrong reason), don't hesitate to bring it up on meta for review: http://meta.stackoverflow.com http://meta.stackoverflow.com

aptwebapps 12y ago

And here I thought I was really bad at asking questions or something ...

rartichoke 12y ago

I wouldn't sweat it too much. I've also noticed that really in depth questions with a lot of code examples and explanations doesn't help either because then they get no responses or votes. It's funny when you're asked to supply detail but when you supply detail no one replies because they can't be bothered to spend 4 minutes reading the setup/code details.

pekk 12y ago
Because tacitly the point is to stand around jumping on newbies or people you perceive to be doing things wrong. If you can't quickly get that gratification you just move along to the next guy who left out a semicolon that wasn't germane to his question. Who has time to deal with other people's real problems?

rtpg 12y ago

can you link to your questions? I have had universally good responses to my questions, and have never seen the behaviour you are describing.

platz 12y ago
A lot of times one sees results like then when asking open-ended or subjective questions on SO, when SO is intended to be more like a wikipedia or a knowledge store of objective solutions to problems. Joel has spilled much ink on how SO is not a site for free form discussion. Discourse was created for that. Some frustration may occur when one realizes that certain kinds of problems or exploration are best suited to free-form discussion - those discussions need to happen on channels other than SO then. * edit - corrected Discourse attribution.
- lucasnemeth 12y ago
  One correction: It was Jeff Atwood who created Discourse.

michh 12y ago

I especially hate having to be so defensive. E.g. in phrasing my question, specifically having to mention a whole bunch of things that obviously aren't the problem but people are going to insist on anyway unless I've already mentioned them myself. Or the whole "Well, you shouldn't be doing this in the first place so I'm not going to help you with your actual problem". It can be incredibly helpful to point this out. But often I'm doing things in a certain way for a reason (constraints that aren't relevant for the question, like "yeah but our entire codebase"). So when I say I'm doing it this way for a reason and looking for a way to make it work, either trust my judgment or decide I don't deserve to be helped and stop commenting. But it often ends up being a massive distracting derail preventing others from trying to answer the question I was actually asking in the first place. Most annoyingly, this behaviour is often rewarded with upvotes. For example: > "I can't connect to my database due to error 110, I have no idea what that means" "Why aren't you using an ORM?" > "I have good reason not to, besides, I'm just looking to fix error 110 now" "But a good ORM handles these types of errors for you, it'd be stupid not to use it" > "You're probably right, but that'd require a lot of rewriting and refactoring and that's simply not an option right now" "Ok, get back to me when you're actually using an ORM and still having trouble with your database" when all I'm looking for is "That's a connection timeout, tried checking your firewall configuration?"

jfc 12y ago
>So when I say I'm doing it this way for a reason and looking for a way to make it work, either trust my judgment or decide I don't deserve to be helped and stop commenting. ...Most annoyingly, this behaviour is often rewarded with upvotes. Totally agree with this. I can't stand it when people start mucking about in the comments. It's almost as if they are looking for something to do, and then feed off of each other. Eventually, all the activity draws the attention of a super-zealot, who promptly closes the question.
dictum 12y ago
>Or the whole "Well, you shouldn't be doing this in the first place so I'm not going to help you with your actual problem". I call it the MacRumors Forums/Apple Discussions syndrome: "Why would you WANT to hold your iPhone this way?" "What kind of moron would want to keep using their 5-year old Mac?" "Why are you trying to export this file? Just create a copy by hand, duh." "No, this can't be done. Terminal? No, don't use it. Here be dragons."

nhebb 12y ago

Maybe this problem could be mitigate by allowing users to tag their questions as novice, intermediate, or advanced (though intermediate is probably not necessary). The advanced tag would let the 1's help 1's, and the novice tag would let the 3's help 2's. With the Favorite Tags settings, users could filter out what they don't want to see.

frik 12y ago
That's a really good idea! Let's hope SO implements it soon.
carrotleads 12y ago
and I believe downvoting is not helpful and gives pissed off people the ability to influence outcomes. Upvotes by themselves should be enough to bring the best posts forward. IMO this is true for HN too.
- shagie 12y ago
  There are some things built into the DNA of the system. Dowvnotes are there and an early blog post addresses that - http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvoting-or-how-hacker-news-gets-it-wrong/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvotin... Note that down votes are a key part of what drives a number of automatic scripts that clean up things. * People who waste too much of the communities time (asking poor questions that get closed and down voted ) get question banned - driven strongly impart by down votes. * Closed questions that have a negative score and no answers with a positive score get deleted after a bit over a week. (If people complain about how much crud there is, one should look at how much crud gets automatically deleted). * A down voted question helps signal to people reading to not waste their time reading it because its not useful. When you've got 8000 questions/day, someone saying "don't bother with this" can save you a bit of time reading it. For smaller communities where a person who wastes your time can get addressed through individual moderator attention. Where there are 8k questions per day asked by a similar number of people, you can't have every moderator address each poor question and time wasting troll. It is for this that simple down votes can help drive the automated system when there is enough signal that the person is wasting everyone's time without involving moderators. Update: So, because of how the system was designed, it isn't something that one can easily go back to and change (and remove down votes). Its part of the software and the culture of the group and the two are inseparable - the technological and social part of the community is tightly interwoven. Further reading on this at http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

RivieraKid 12y ago

> 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. Same for me. Here's how my questions end up: - With an actual, good answer. I'd say this happens for about half of the questions. - The answer confirms that what I'm trying to do is not possible. - I get stupid but confident answers by people who apparently didn't read the whole question. - No answer or vague unhelpful answers. - The question is put on hold, usually because it's too broad or not constructive. It's a shame that there's no place to discuss these type of questions with the SO community, I hink there's a lot of potential there.

collyw 12y ago
Yeah, I remember a post here a while ago, someone was going to open a site "not constructive" with these types of discussions as the goal. Unfortunately it never seemed to materialise...

akshatpradhan 12y ago

Check out bountify.co, you may like it as an alternative.

myhf 12y ago

I guess that makes you a "help vampire" for wanting your question answered in the first place.

mdmarra 12y ago

> 11 - Email the mods to get the downvote removed Mods can't reverse up/down votes

mkingston 12y ago
I think they can, actually. I had a disagreement with someone on SO; this person subsequently went on a downvoting spree on my previous answers. I wasn't terribly worried about the points but e-mailed the mods to report the behaviour. I was told they would reverse the downvotes if the user persisted, but that they preferred not to get involved (for obvious reasons).
- mdmarra 12y ago
  Nope, they absolutely cannot. If you really doubt this, ask one in chat. Moderators cannot even see who voted a question up or down, never mind reversing votes. References: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144747/partial-fix-of-serial-downvotes/144762#144762 http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144747/partial-fix-o... http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/229173/reversing-an-unpopular-community-decision http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/229173/reversing-an-...
  - guycook 12y ago
    It is possible however for abusive user to be detected and removed, at which point their abusive voting will be reversed - see my own reputation page for an example: http://stackoverflow.com/users/1000900/guy-cook?tab=reputation http://stackoverflow.com/users/1000900/guy-cook?tab=reputati... Apparently someone was just upvoting everything they saw, hence I lost rep when they were deleted.
    - mdmarra 12y ago
      The moderators do not control this process. There is an automated serial vote detection algorithm. AFAIK, under no circumstances can a Stack Exchange moderator reverse a vote. More info on the serial vote detection process here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-serial-voting-and-how-does-it-affect-me http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-seria... edit: I just looked at your profile and the deletion/banning of a user account will remove rep too, so I suppose in that manner a mod can "reverse" voting, but it's all or nothing. They have no way to flip individual votes. edit2: Moderators are not employees of Stack Exchange, they are volunteers elected by the community. Of course employees can change whatever they feel like. This discussion is about the moderators.

autokad 12y ago

I'm glad that I am not the only one that feels this way When talking to young engineers, i say SO is a great place to find answers, but horrible place to ask questions. If you want to ask a question and find yourself ridiculed, belittled, and lectured on everything but actually having your question answered, then this is your place.

collyw 12y ago
I know, it amuses me the effort people will go into discussing why your question is crap, yet completely ignore the question. Not constructive indeed!

robomartin 12y ago

SO and, in general, SE derailed years ago. The mods ruined these communities. If you want to see the worst of it visit ServerFault, it was horrible a couple of years ago. I think that's how long it's been since I've been to an SE site. The misplaced moderation drives potential contributors and participants away.

collyw 12y ago
I find the over zealous moderators as annoying as anyone else (I imagine), but its wrong to say that they have been ruined. Stack overflow and Server Fault are still damn useful sites, even with the moderators.
- robomartin 12y ago
  I say "ruined" from the perspective that a lot of people like me, who have expertise and are interested in sharing, refrain from doing so because we have exactly zero interes in dealing with moderator bullshit. The sites are useful. They could be better.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]