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The latter group sounds like people who are sick of seeing SO being a place where people are rewarded for regurgitating documentation. I've some sympathy for t
by Kalium 12y ago
The latter group sounds like people who are sick of seeing SO being a place where people are rewarded for regurgitating documentation.
I've some sympathy for that.
- sanderjd 12y agoThis viewpoint only makes sense if you subscribe to the (very silly) ideas that there are a limited number of internet points available and that they matter. Why does it matter to you which people are being rewarded for what?
- Kalium 12y agoIt matters because people respond to incentives. If what you want to see encouraged is good answers to novel questions, you need a system that rewards that over copy-pasting from documentation. What do you think happens when the two are rewarded equally, but the latter can be done much more frequently per unit of time?
- exelius 12y agoSome people find difficult problems more rewarding to solve. Given that internet points are meaningless, someone interested in learning a language better could spend their time regurgitating documentation (and hopefully learning along the way). Eventually, one of those regurgitated responses gets picked up by Google and becomes the top answer, and nobody even needs to go to the SE forums to ask. I don't think they're mutually exclusive - there are multiple reward structures for multiple types of players. Both should be encouraged.
- Kalium 12y agoRight now, there's one reward structure. People who value and respond to that reward structure act rationally within it. This means that regurgitation gets rewarded over good answers to novel questions.
- seizethecheese 12y agoIt seems like the solution is to instead of close non-novel questions, just make them not award points.
- Kalium 12y agoI think this would be an excellent solution. Combine it with some semantic similarity analysis, and the vast majority of newbie questions could be replaced with "Here's a link to a pre-written answer that almost certainly addresses what you want".
- sanderjd 12y agoThey already do that analysis and show similar questions while you're asking a question. You can say "well they should do it better" (and I'm sure they try), but the whole beauty of the Q&A model is combining the strengths of computers and humans. Computers are better at organizing and storing tons of information, but humans are much better at figuring out what other humans are really asking.
- sanderjd 12y agoFair point on the question of why it matters. On the question of what should be encouraged, I think "good answers to novel questions" is only one of many possibilities. In my opinion, what should be encouraged is simply "people quickly and easily finding good answers to their questions", and I think copy-pasting (or linking to) the relevant section from documentation serves that goal just fine, and that voting is a good system for indicating what answers are useful, regardless of the form they take.
- Kalium 12y agoMy key point is that not all questions are created equal. Further, there's the question of how much effort the questioner should be expected to put in. In a great many technical question fora, the experience is that many noobs make no attempt to search out answers.
- EpicEng 12y agoIf I can find the answer I am after more quickly by searching and finding a hit on SO than I would by grepping documentation, how is that not providing value?
- Kalium 12y agoNow balance it against the more important questions that are unanswered or even unasked because SO becomes a place where there's no point to that. It's not as simple as that.
- EpicEng 12y agoI'm not sure I follow you. How does erring on the side of leaving a question open leave more questions unanswered or unasked?
- Kalium 12y agoWhen the reward system is such that novel questions do not receive answers, users will eventually stop asking those questions.
- EpicEng 12y agoI still don't see what one has to do with the other(s). Besides, go browse through SO's unanswered questions; this is the state of things today! Simple questions, the most common variety, get answers in minutes. The complex and/or specialized questions which cannot easily be answered by a large portion of the userbase tend to languish.
- Kalium 12y agoIndeed. The result is that SO is a lot less useful than it used to be. I have repeatedly found myself chasing an obscure error message only to dead-end on SO and be forced to backtrack.
- darkmighty 12y agoIsn't the incentive to answer those kinds of questions mostly intrinsic? I mean, the interesting questions and answers are more likely to be given exactly because they are so. The extrinsic reward is then complementarily useful for the opposite questions: the ones that are not very interesting but important nonetheless, such as the case of a reference to a cryptic documentation.
- Kalium 12y agoExtrinsic motivations displace intrinsic ones. Once you have the magical internet points, the intrinsic motivations fade.
- sanderjd 12y agoMaybe the difference of opinion largely comes down to whether you think the second sentence of your comment "sounds right". It seems false to me, but it must seem true to you, since you wrote it. I would be very interested in seeing an analysis of data relating a measure of how many "non-novel" answers are being given to how many difficult questions are being answered.
- baddox 12y agoI don't think what the site developers (or most users, for that matter) want to see is good answers to novel questions. I think they want to is good answers to all questions.
- pyre 12y agoI could see an argument that the people more equipped to answer more technical questions may leave if they have to wade through a bunch of questions that could be answered in the docs. If those sorts of answers "take over" then you'll have to wade through them to find more novel questions to post answers to.
- EpicEng 12y agoRewarded with what; internet points? How about rewarding the far larger portion of its userbase, i.e., the sector that doesn't care about upvotes, with information? Yes, I am in the former camp if I have to chose one. SO has become far too heavy handed an "noob hostile". I have been around since the beginning and am in the top 0.16% of users and I can't stand how stringently some adhere to the formal and informal guidelines.
- Kalium 12y agoUltimately, the site depends utterly on the internet points people. Without them there is only noobs asking questions, and they leave without people answering. So, yes. Internet points.
- EpicEng 12y agoThat's a fair point. It's not my motivation for being active, but I assume it is for most, and it is an effective carrot. I would just like the balance to be tipped a little back in the direction of the consumers of the site. I'm not suggesting we leave obviously terrible questions open, it's the borderline posts that get me. Interesting questions which may not have a black and white answer, but would still encourage discussion/opinions which would be useful to people down the road. I know "it's not a discussion site", but sometimes there are gray areas and it's useful to have the opinions of experts on the pros and cons of certain approaches/technologies/whatever.
- Kalium 12y agoThat gets into sticky moderation issues. My experience moderating support fora is that no matter how or where you draw the line, there's always a grey area. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and there's always going to be something that seems like a reasonable except that gets cut. I suspect that SOs answer to your need is "Go use a different site". At some point, that becomes a reasonable answer.
- EpicEng 12y ago
- code_duck 12y agoI'm tired of seeing stack overflow used as a place people go in lieu of actually reading documentation. However, I sympathize with the other point of view… Sometimes people just need something clearly explained to them and they can take it from there.