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I think Stack Overflow has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Their community is outright hostile to active discussion. Only directly answerable ques

by sajt 12y ago

I think Stack Overflow has been getting worse and worse in recent years. Their community is outright hostile to active discussion. Only directly answerable questions are tolerated. Microsoft is (as always) a few years late to the party.

endgame 12y ago
When it was young you could find veteran wizards who answered all sorts of obscure things because it was fun. The last straw for me was seeing a perfectly valid question about video memory in DOS get drive-by closed by some mod.
- benoits 12y ago
  Instead of the overzealous closing, why doesn't SO create a "Stack Overflow Opinions" Stack Exchange site where they move the offending questions?
  - fishtoaster 12y ago
    I was one of the early mods on programmers.stackexchange.com that was kinda-sorta aimed at being just that. Some participants wanted explicitly that, where offending questions would be automatically moved to P.SE. Others wanted "anything that'd be off-topic on SO" as the key criteria for P.SE. A lot of the early questions there were pulled directly from previously-closed questions on StackOverflow. Over time, though, P.SE drifted away from that model due largely to pressure from the SO/SE leadership. It was made clear that free-form discussion was not what the StackExchange platform was for- it was for answerable questions. And I can understand that. There exist a lot of places on the web to discuss technology (e.g., the one we’re commenting on now). Forums, IRC, blogs, and social media site have been around for a long time. They all sucked as a place to get answers. SO/SE built a better solution, and part of that was a strong anti-discussion bias. It worked, and there is now a great place on the internet to get answers instead of the endless morass of vBulletin sites. I can understand them not wanting to mess with a successful formula.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - teh_klev 12y ago
      Oh boy, P.SE had some seriously bad birthing pains. Speaking as a former diamond mod on Stack Overflow, I got spanked a few times by a particular former and overbearing P.SE mod for migrating what seemed like perfectly on-topic questions that were clearly not great for SO. Eventually I gave up and to this day yet I am still unclear what is considered on/off-topic on P.SE.
      - shagie 12y ago
        Back in April there was some discussion on meta.P.SE about updating the help center ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6590/ http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6590/ ) which resulted in some changes ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6604/ http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6604/ ). There's also a post trying to explain the spirit behind all of the reasons and interpretations (and history of those interpretations) the site has of the different close reasons ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/ http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/ ). If there is still confusion about what is and isn't on topic, asking another meta question or stopping into P.SE's chat room would likely meet with a good reception.
  - mlvljr 12y ago
    There once was a site named "crap overflow" doing smth like that, I think (or may be smth different, not sure), pity it got closed long ago.
fredley 12y ago
I am a mod on a similarly hostile StackExchange site. The community has always been outright hostile to active discussion (outside of chat, the area of the site for specifically this) for all but a brief period when it was still working out what it was. The fact it's hostile to active discussion is part of what enables it to continue to be a useful resource. That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems, but it's more the hostility (something which we're trying to address[1]) that's the problem than the stance against active discussion. [1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-be-nice-policy-code-of-conduct-updated-with-your-feedback https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-...
- lelandbatey 12y ago
  Yeah, I agree. I think it's actually fantastic that they focus so narrowly on answerable questions. It's still a super useful resource, and a tight focus means it will probably be able to stay on track for a long long time. However, I wish there was a place as fantastically focused on good discussion.
  - solistice 12y ago
    Isn't Jeff Atwoods working on Discourse right now?
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
      A good online community comes from the users and the management, not the software.
    - the_af 12y ago
      Isn't Discourse software aimed at improving internet forums rather than a discussion venue in itself? It's not comparable to stackexchange, which is software plus a community.
      - solistice 12y ago
        But stack-everything only has such a vibrant and focused community because community rules have been made as clear as they have. If you go through Jeff Atwoods blog, you'll see that they are making the same considerations for Discourse, which has it's own "community rules" that ship with it. They're not only writing better forum software, they're also investigating what makes great forums great and horrible forums horrid and they're baking it into their product.
kawsper 12y ago
I find the different websites they have very confusing. I would use it a lot more if it was a more integrated experience.
- fredley 12y ago
  I don't think you would. The split between topics allows sites to cultivate communities with strong domain knowledge. In fact, the whole process that sites go through to be created[1] relies on finding such a group to kick the site off. Many sites fail this process, becoming wastelands. Some are eventually shuttered. Those that make it to 'graduation' do so only because they have a community that helps create the content in the first place. If the sites were merged, this sense of community and ownership would be lost. This is why each site is separate, with a style somewhat picked/influenced by the site's community, with ads chosen by the community, and rules drawn up by the community. Stack Exchange is the sum of many small (and a few big) communities, not one big one. [1]: https://area51.stackexchange.com/faq https://area51.stackexchange.com/faq
meesterdude 12y ago
TBH i didn't know it was for active discussion. It's been purely Q&A in my experience, and I'm OK with that. I think other places, like here, or reddit, better facilitate more freeform discussion. Although I do agree I've noticed a change in community tone and tolerance that i don't like either; I think that's just the nature of it though, of any community. I don't know that it HAS to be that way, but that seems to be the default behavior.
- SoftwareMaven 12y ago
  Not all questions have a single, definitive answer. Many engineering questions have trade-offs that need to be evaluated and different people have different experiences with those trade-offs. SO is a great site for the first five years of a developer's career. After that, it's value wanes as the questions become less "how do I do this?" and more "how should I do this?"
  - fredley 12y ago
    That's spot on. Questions like "How should I do this" are harder to answer, require extended research and investigation, and a lot of communication back and forth. Stack Overflow is not a good platform for this. What it is is a great platform for finding solutions to simply expressed stumbling blocks, or nuggets of domain-specific knowledge. The problem is, being a good site for both things would be difficult. There are plenty of places out there that cater to extended discussion within expert groups. Forums have been around in one form or other almost since the dawn of the web. The problem with these is that they're bad at one-shot Q&A (as the answer to a question might be pages after it was asked, or not there at all, or out of date, and it might take you a long time to work this out). This failing is exactly what Stack Overflow is about, and exactly why it's not good for deeper engineering questions. I'm unfamiliar with the state of IE Web Dev support at the moment, is it currently a good forum for extended discussion?
  - jsmeaton 12y ago
    That's kind of what I found codereview and programmers stackexchanges are more useful for. I've also started drifting towards more and more mailing lists for specific discussions on particular topics, though that can be hit or miss depending on the community.
farmdve 12y ago
I agree. Considering most people with IE will be regular computer users and not power users, I can see their questions being downvoted to oblivion and their questions closed. I consider myself a power user and I already have one account that was "suspended" due to too many downvoted questions of mine.
- Shog9 12y ago
  Absolutely. Given it's a site for programming questions, I would tend to assume that end-user questions would not do well at all. Perhaps this is why the article mentions using SO for Web Developer support and not end-user support?
- jsmeaton 12y ago
  The topics being moved to stack overflow are "web development with IE" not "IE web users".
  - xanderstrike 12y ago
    Which is basically what was happening already. Like the article says, over 40k questions are already asked and answered on stack.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
softdev12 12y ago
It may be getting worse. Not sure. There are definitely a lot of questions that have been marked "closed" or "off topic" that I would genuinely like to have seen more answers to. The bottom line is that it's still a really important archive of software coding. I'd say 80+ percent of the issues I face in coding, someone has seen before - and therefore, a place like SO could have solved my issue with almost zero time wasted.
stefan_kendall3 12y ago
People now seem to be afraid to answer for fear of downvotes, and those that do get downvoted go on a witch hunt and downvote anything you've ever posted. It's terrible.
- Avalaxy 12y ago
  No problem, SO detects that and reverts their downvotes :)
TrainedMonkey 12y ago
I think hostility to discussion is what separates SO from reddit. What SO trying to be is not the place to discover new knowledge through discussion, but rather repository of existing knowledge as shared by experts. That said, anyone wants to start a site oriented specifically towards discussion and discovering new solutions? Just need a workable idea on how to keep discussions from deteriorating into holy flame wars or getting philosophical.
sliverstorm 12y ago
Microsoft will almost certainly get the power to moderate their support section, no?
- teh_klev 12y ago
  Nope, not at all. MSFT employees will have to earn reputation just like all the other users. I imagine there's already a few on the site that have gained the usual kinda privileges - vote to close, downvote, flagging etc. And there'll be non-MSFT users who'll be IE tag specialists and already familiar with what is considered an acceptable IE question to ask.
  - jonathansampson 12y ago
    This is correct. We're normal users too. You can track my involvement at http://stackoverflow.com/users/54680/jonathan-sampson http://stackoverflow.com/users/54680/jonathan-sampson.
robertwharvey 12y ago
That's because Stack Overflow is not a discussion forum. It is, in fact, quite the opposite. Think back; remember the time when you actually got usable, timely help on a forum? Can't think of any? I didn't think so. Why? Because forums are flooded with useless, mindless crap, like users who can't be bothered to form complete sentences, who can't be bothered to do fundamental research or learn the most basic skills of their craft, who want someone to write their program for them, and who have an unbridled sense of entitlement. It's not the discussion Stack Overflow seeks to squelch; it's the noise. Unfortunately, discussion is one of the things that attracts noisy posts, so it's not exactly something that's actively encouraged.
- Perdition 12y ago
  I get useful timely help from forums all the time. I find voting systems tend to squelch most of the idiots on technically focused forums.
  - shagie 12y ago
    The key difference though is that you got timely help from a forum by asking a question. However, as the next person trying to find the answer to the same question, I would have to wade through multiple forums with pages of answers (the answer you got was on page 3 of 5) with people asking clarification and the tangent from someone else (on page 2) about drivers I care nothing about. Stack Overflow was designed so that the next person with the same question could find the answer more easily. The next person could avoid having to go through Sun's Java forums, and CodeRanch, and /r/Java, and /r/JavaHelp and the comments of someone's blog post, and ... Too many places with too much tangental knowledge that wasn't well indexed. Despite the idiots and trolls having posts removed, With Stack Overflow, one knows that if they ask a question there (admittedly, that fits within the focus and quality guidelines) they will get an answer - not someone commenting on another comment that is indistinguishable from an answer (comments vs answers). And if they search Stack Overflow, and find the question that has an answer - it is an answer. That is the key value proposition of Stack Overflow in that the next person who has the same question as you do can find it easily.
yAnonymous 12y ago
It has turned into something like Reddit, where many people will do everything for points. Some of them also have a very elitist mindset and are hostile towards new users who make mistakes.

by sajt 12y ago

endgame 12y ago

When it was young you could find veteran wizards who answered all sorts of obscure things because it was fun. The last straw for me was seeing a perfectly valid question about video memory in DOS get drive-by closed by some mod.

benoits 12y ago
Instead of the overzealous closing, why doesn't SO create a "Stack Overflow Opinions" Stack Exchange site where they move the offending questions?
- fishtoaster 12y ago
  I was one of the early mods on programmers.stackexchange.com that was kinda-sorta aimed at being just that. Some participants wanted explicitly that, where offending questions would be automatically moved to P.SE. Others wanted "anything that'd be off-topic on SO" as the key criteria for P.SE. A lot of the early questions there were pulled directly from previously-closed questions on StackOverflow. Over time, though, P.SE drifted away from that model due largely to pressure from the SO/SE leadership. It was made clear that free-form discussion was not what the StackExchange platform was for- it was for answerable questions. And I can understand that. There exist a lot of places on the web to discuss technology (e.g., the one we’re commenting on now). Forums, IRC, blogs, and social media site have been around for a long time. They all sucked as a place to get answers. SO/SE built a better solution, and part of that was a strong anti-discussion bias. It worked, and there is now a great place on the internet to get answers instead of the endless morass of vBulletin sites. I can understand them not wanting to mess with a successful formula.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - teh_klev 12y ago
    Oh boy, P.SE had some seriously bad birthing pains. Speaking as a former diamond mod on Stack Overflow, I got spanked a few times by a particular former and overbearing P.SE mod for migrating what seemed like perfectly on-topic questions that were clearly not great for SO. Eventually I gave up and to this day yet I am still unclear what is considered on/off-topic on P.SE.
    - shagie 12y ago
      Back in April there was some discussion on meta.P.SE about updating the help center ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6590/ http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6590/ ) which resulted in some changes ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6604/ http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6604/ ). There's also a post trying to explain the spirit behind all of the reasons and interpretations (and history of those interpretations) the site has of the different close reasons ( http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/ http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/ ). If there is still confusion about what is and isn't on topic, asking another meta question or stopping into P.SE's chat room would likely meet with a good reception.
- mlvljr 12y ago
  There once was a site named "crap overflow" doing smth like that, I think (or may be smth different, not sure), pity it got closed long ago.

fredley 12y ago

I am a mod on a similarly hostile StackExchange site. The community has always been outright hostile to active discussion (outside of chat, the area of the site for specifically this) for all but a brief period when it was still working out what it was. The fact it's hostile to active discussion is part of what enables it to continue to be a useful resource. That's not to say Stack Overflow isn't without its problems, but it's more the hostility (something which we're trying to address[1]) that's the problem than the stance against active discussion. [1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-be-nice-policy-code-of-conduct-updated-with-your-feedback https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-...

lelandbatey 12y ago
Yeah, I agree. I think it's actually fantastic that they focus so narrowly on answerable questions. It's still a super useful resource, and a tight focus means it will probably be able to stay on track for a long long time. However, I wish there was a place as fantastically focused on good discussion.
- solistice 12y ago
  Isn't Jeff Atwoods working on Discourse right now?
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
    A good online community comes from the users and the management, not the software.
  - the_af 12y ago
    Isn't Discourse software aimed at improving internet forums rather than a discussion venue in itself? It's not comparable to stackexchange, which is software plus a community.
    - solistice 12y ago
      But stack-everything only has such a vibrant and focused community because community rules have been made as clear as they have. If you go through Jeff Atwoods blog, you'll see that they are making the same considerations for Discourse, which has it's own "community rules" that ship with it. They're not only writing better forum software, they're also investigating what makes great forums great and horrible forums horrid and they're baking it into their product.

kawsper 12y ago

I find the different websites they have very confusing. I would use it a lot more if it was a more integrated experience.

fredley 12y ago
I don't think you would. The split between topics allows sites to cultivate communities with strong domain knowledge. In fact, the whole process that sites go through to be created[1] relies on finding such a group to kick the site off. Many sites fail this process, becoming wastelands. Some are eventually shuttered. Those that make it to 'graduation' do so only because they have a community that helps create the content in the first place. If the sites were merged, this sense of community and ownership would be lost. This is why each site is separate, with a style somewhat picked/influenced by the site's community, with ads chosen by the community, and rules drawn up by the community. Stack Exchange is the sum of many small (and a few big) communities, not one big one. [1]: https://area51.stackexchange.com/faq https://area51.stackexchange.com/faq

meesterdude 12y ago

TBH i didn't know it was for active discussion. It's been purely Q&A in my experience, and I'm OK with that. I think other places, like here, or reddit, better facilitate more freeform discussion. Although I do agree I've noticed a change in community tone and tolerance that i don't like either; I think that's just the nature of it though, of any community. I don't know that it HAS to be that way, but that seems to be the default behavior.

SoftwareMaven 12y ago
Not all questions have a single, definitive answer. Many engineering questions have trade-offs that need to be evaluated and different people have different experiences with those trade-offs. SO is a great site for the first five years of a developer's career. After that, it's value wanes as the questions become less "how do I do this?" and more "how should I do this?"
- fredley 12y ago
  That's spot on. Questions like "How should I do this" are harder to answer, require extended research and investigation, and a lot of communication back and forth. Stack Overflow is not a good platform for this. What it is is a great platform for finding solutions to simply expressed stumbling blocks, or nuggets of domain-specific knowledge. The problem is, being a good site for both things would be difficult. There are plenty of places out there that cater to extended discussion within expert groups. Forums have been around in one form or other almost since the dawn of the web. The problem with these is that they're bad at one-shot Q&A (as the answer to a question might be pages after it was asked, or not there at all, or out of date, and it might take you a long time to work this out). This failing is exactly what Stack Overflow is about, and exactly why it's not good for deeper engineering questions. I'm unfamiliar with the state of IE Web Dev support at the moment, is it currently a good forum for extended discussion?
- jsmeaton 12y ago
  That's kind of what I found codereview and programmers stackexchanges are more useful for. I've also started drifting towards more and more mailing lists for specific discussions on particular topics, though that can be hit or miss depending on the community.

farmdve 12y ago

I agree. Considering most people with IE will be regular computer users and not power users, I can see their questions being downvoted to oblivion and their questions closed. I consider myself a power user and I already have one account that was "suspended" due to too many downvoted questions of mine.

Shog9 12y ago
Absolutely. Given it's a site for programming questions, I would tend to assume that end-user questions would not do well at all. Perhaps this is why the article mentions using SO for Web Developer support and not end-user support?
jsmeaton 12y ago
The topics being moved to stack overflow are "web development with IE" not "IE web users".
- xanderstrike 12y ago
  Which is basically what was happening already. Like the article says, over 40k questions are already asked and answered on stack.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

softdev12 12y ago

It may be getting worse. Not sure. There are definitely a lot of questions that have been marked "closed" or "off topic" that I would genuinely like to have seen more answers to. The bottom line is that it's still a really important archive of software coding. I'd say 80+ percent of the issues I face in coding, someone has seen before - and therefore, a place like SO could have solved my issue with almost zero time wasted.

stefan_kendall3 12y ago

People now seem to be afraid to answer for fear of downvotes, and those that do get downvoted go on a witch hunt and downvote anything you've ever posted. It's terrible.

Avalaxy 12y ago
No problem, SO detects that and reverts their downvotes :)

TrainedMonkey 12y ago

I think hostility to discussion is what separates SO from reddit. What SO trying to be is not the place to discover new knowledge through discussion, but rather repository of existing knowledge as shared by experts. That said, anyone wants to start a site oriented specifically towards discussion and discovering new solutions? Just need a workable idea on how to keep discussions from deteriorating into holy flame wars or getting philosophical.

sliverstorm 12y ago

Microsoft will almost certainly get the power to moderate their support section, no?

teh_klev 12y ago
Nope, not at all. MSFT employees will have to earn reputation just like all the other users. I imagine there's already a few on the site that have gained the usual kinda privileges - vote to close, downvote, flagging etc. And there'll be non-MSFT users who'll be IE tag specialists and already familiar with what is considered an acceptable IE question to ask.
- jonathansampson 12y ago
  This is correct. We're normal users too. You can track my involvement at http://stackoverflow.com/users/54680/jonathan-sampson http://stackoverflow.com/users/54680/jonathan-sampson.

robertwharvey 12y ago

That's because Stack Overflow is not a discussion forum. It is, in fact, quite the opposite. Think back; remember the time when you actually got usable, timely help on a forum? Can't think of any? I didn't think so. Why? Because forums are flooded with useless, mindless crap, like users who can't be bothered to form complete sentences, who can't be bothered to do fundamental research or learn the most basic skills of their craft, who want someone to write their program for them, and who have an unbridled sense of entitlement. It's not the discussion Stack Overflow seeks to squelch; it's the noise. Unfortunately, discussion is one of the things that attracts noisy posts, so it's not exactly something that's actively encouraged.

Perdition 12y ago
I get useful timely help from forums all the time. I find voting systems tend to squelch most of the idiots on technically focused forums.
- shagie 12y ago
  The key difference though is that you got timely help from a forum by asking a question. However, as the next person trying to find the answer to the same question, I would have to wade through multiple forums with pages of answers (the answer you got was on page 3 of 5) with people asking clarification and the tangent from someone else (on page 2) about drivers I care nothing about. Stack Overflow was designed so that the next person with the same question could find the answer more easily. The next person could avoid having to go through Sun's Java forums, and CodeRanch, and /r/Java, and /r/JavaHelp and the comments of someone's blog post, and ... Too many places with too much tangental knowledge that wasn't well indexed. Despite the idiots and trolls having posts removed, With Stack Overflow, one knows that if they ask a question there (admittedly, that fits within the focus and quality guidelines) they will get an answer - not someone commenting on another comment that is indistinguishable from an answer (comments vs answers). And if they search Stack Overflow, and find the question that has an answer - it is an answer. That is the key value proposition of Stack Overflow in that the next person who has the same question as you do can find it easily.

yAnonymous 12y ago

It has turned into something like Reddit, where many people will do everything for points. Some of them also have a very elitist mindset and are hostile towards new users who make mistakes.