10 ms·

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I

by jofer 12y ago

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ http://chat.stackoverflow.com/) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture around it has become rather toxic. It effectively gives anyone there an automatic close hammer. Furthermore, it's not the current "dupehammer", but a close hammer for any reason, as you can pretty instantly get 5 votes to close. Somehow, every question involving anything than popular web frameworks is apt to be closed as "too localized". I can't count the number of times I've been in the middle of answering an admittedly niche, but well-phrased and on-topic question, when it's closed before I can answer. The source of the sudden rash of close votes? Almost always a "cv-pls" in relevant tag's chat room.

jobu 12y ago
Wasn't there a similar debate over Quality vs Quantity with the Wikipedia community a few years back? It's been a while, but I remember seeing complaints about thousands of articles getting culled for being trivial (comic books, movies, anime, moderately famous people or places). It's hard to find many articles about it anymore, but I did find this from 2007: http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/ http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/
- mkremins 12y ago
  You might get more results searching for "deletionism vs inclusionism", which seems to be the most widely used name for the debate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...
  - angersock 12y ago
    What's the current general stance on that these days I wonder? What's the prevailing wind?
    - VLM 12y ago
      The deletionists won and quite a few people refuse to participate anymore. Which leads to declining quality of article and moderation...
      - chris_mahan 12y ago
        I was one of those who left. I let my adminship elapse after 10 years. I also don't contribute much to SO, or to any SE properties, despite being on the early public beta. (remember the signup as a google spreadhseet). I'm ID 479 on SO.
      - merrua 12y ago
        Yep. And the deletionists where more often the "majority" culture and male, which resulted in a feedback loop for the nonminority and female. New minority turn up, have a bad experience and leaves. I think it was studied let me see if I can find the paper. I know the results were replicated with comment bots. Update, not the ones I was thinking of but a good read. HBS Cases: How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn't) http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pdf/item/5605.pdf http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pdf/item/5605.pdf
    - indymike 12y ago
      That discussion has been deleted.
- quanticle 12y ago
  Well, it was more than a few years ago at this point, and the long and short of it is that the deletionists won. Gwern has a fairly thorough elegy for the (now dead) inclusionist beliefs: http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism.
- kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
  The funny thing is that the fanboys fight back against this tactic by putting in hundreds of citations to "legitmize" articles about video games. Browse through some of them and you'll often see more citations than most of the math and science articles. Meanwhile, worthwhile articles that don't have rabid fans get deleted due to lack of "noteworthiness" (by someone's arbitrary standard of the day) or citations.
  - reitanqild 12y ago
    If that is what it takes to get the deletionists away then feel free to add any valid reference I say. I have given up though.
afandian 12y ago
That's really depressing. Makes me question my participation in the site a little bit (never joined the chat or wanted to). Do you have any actual examples?
- 3JPLW 12y ago
  It's the first agenda item on the Python SO team's winter meeting: http://sopython.com/transcript/3/winter-2015-general-meeting/ http://sopython.com/transcript/3/winter-2015-general-meeting... They were just discussing it on chat today: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/6/15-16 http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/6/15-16 I've never gotten involved in Chat before, either, but just searching the most active chatroom for `cv-` brought that up immediately.
  - jofer 12y ago
    Huh, I didn't see that discussion before I wrote the comment, but I was specifically referring to sopython. They mean well, but it does feel a bit like a mob at times.
    - davidism 12y ago
      We recognize that it's gotten a bit out of control lately, hence the topic during the meeting. I think we ended up with some good guidelines for managing it.
    - ffisegydd 12y ago
      I'm sorry you feel that way Joe. The Room Owners have felt for a while now that it can sometimes get out of hand, that's why we had this discussion in our Room Meeting. As davidism has mentioned, we've put some extra guidelines down now. The main one being that unless it's necessary (something like spam, offensive, dupe, etc, where the OP isn't going to be able to improve the post) we're adding a 10 minute "grace period" before requesting a cv-pls. This gives OPs the chance to edit their question, to respond to comments, etc. I disagree with a few of your points, but I'm not really interested in getting drawn into a debate here. If you want to discuss it further then drop by chat. I know you've come into the room in the past to ask/speak about some particular cv-pls. If, in the future, you have anything to bring up, come and speak to us.
teh_klev 12y ago
The PHP chat room is/was quite bad in that respect and there's a small handful of particularly caustic individuals who go out of their way to spread unpleasantness for less well informed users.
- mschuster91 12y ago
  You mean the freenode channel ##php? Oh, I know what you mean. The problem is that very many people are not able to google and then ask in IRC. On the other side (the regulars), all they see every day is a torrent of "stupid noobs". And I totally understand everyone who either retires from answering questions or turning into a sarcastic a..hole towards noobs.
- ircmaxell 12y ago
  That's absolutely a valid experience. There are plenty of others who've had positive experiences as well. And those "caustic individuals" have a LOT to share if you're willing to engage in an open and healthy way.
  - teh_klev 12y ago
    Sure, but they don't have to be caustic and quite so unpleasant in the chat room. I am outing, specifically, Terenko. In all my years as a forum contributor/mod I don't think I've encountered such a poisonous dick as that person. I know you do a lot of good work for the PHP community, along with Gordon and many others, but, my friend terenko is truly a knob end and sadly encourages others who are up and coming PHP debutants to behave the same. It really made me weep as a diamond mod why you guys tolerated his snide comments and activities.
    - ircmaxell 12y ago
      Why did we tolerate it? Because we weren't given the tools to do anything about it. We couldn't kick or ban people. We couldn't moderate our own room. All we (as owners) could do was move messages or flag. We got yelled at every time we flagged something, so we learned to live with it. The only other option we had was to leave (which many users did, even leaders). Today, we have the ability to kick-ban. Awesome. But he's also calmed down a lot. And is seen as a resource. It's gotten a lot better over the years, but there is still work to be done in there. But now we're starting to get the tools to handle it. Which is awesome.
PinnBrain 12y ago
I really thought you were talking about a curriculum vitae there, but I suppose it's "close vote".
- tvon 12y ago
  Yeah, FWIW I had to google the terms and found this: https://gist.github.com/cspray/1689430 https://gist.github.com/cspray/1689430
monksy 12y ago
I was going to ask the following question [on 2 different situations] in the last 2 weeks: Are there any [lang] libraries that are backings for the [service] API? I stopped myself before going to SO because I knew that topic would get closed within seconds and I'd comments berating me for asking the wrong question. For the most part the only use I've gotten from SO has been from basic questions when I'm starting out with a language/tool/library. I haven't found it very useful for complex problems. Oh well. I've written about my rants on SO before. [I won't link here but it is in my submission history]
- gnarbarian 12y ago
  Rather than outright closing a question it would be more productive if moderators could move the question to the forum it belongs. This type of question is quite common and if the powers that be have decreed that it doesn't belong in the general stack overflow area then a place for these questions should be created.
  - i3arnon 12y ago
    What forum is that? SO doesn't have forums AFAIK, only questions and answers.
    - worldsayshi 12y ago
      I would assume that previous poster was referring to stackexchange forum other than stackoverflow.
    - gnarbarian 12y ago
      I was referring to the different stack exchange sites as forums.
- Arnt 12y ago
  Why would you ask that instead of browsing through the most recent 50 questions on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lang+service http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lang+service ?
InclinedPlane 12y ago
The problem is that the people who originally headed the community and drove the site have checked out. That means that the very serious institutional and design problems related around the community moderation features of SO are not going to get fixed, they're just going to be gamed by the people with the most effort and free time. There are very few checks and balances on abuse of power at SO, even though that's where you need them the most. The assumption is that users with high enough rep will simply be more polite, logical, and kind, without any sort of agenda to propel. That, of course, was a naive assumption which is slowly blowing up in their faces, if they notice. Meanwhile, nobody at the top cares because Jeff has moved on and everyone else just cares about site traffic and ad revenue (or at least that's my impression).
- codinghorror 12y ago
  This isn't true. Shog, Jay, and many others were hired from the community precisely because they were avid long term users who had demonstrated deep insight into the culture and organization of Stack. I would easily rate them as equal to myself if not, frankly, better at helping the Stack community govern itself. The reality is that good Q&A takes a fair bit of discipline to get right, and that means rules and standards. This rubs some people the wrong way, but it is the ONLY way to achieve reliable, sustainable, long term quality. If you have specific examples of where things went wrong in a question, take it to meta and discuss it so that the community can adapt and change. That is how community works, and Stack is a democracy in that sense -- anyone can provide evidence and push for change. (warning, though, scroll down in the comments here to see an example that turned out to be an anti-example when examined closely. A lot of times people just complain when they don't like rules, and the rules don't favor their personal needs versus the needs of the community or the greater Internet)
  - phaker 12y ago
    I'm afraid that many of the people you'll find in meta are the "soup nazis" the article complains about. Any community is a sieve. It takes effort to join and the more you get involved the more time and effort it consumes and at every step someone gives up and drops out. The meta subsite is not easy to stumble into, very few people will have any questions to ask there and very few will have a good answer to contribute so it takes a lot of effort to get there. That means that the crowd that hangs out in meta will be very different from the bulk of SO/SE. Several meta discussions were linked by ircmaxell above and another was posted in the r/programming discussion - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/286299/closing-questions-just-makes-people-feel-really-bad-can-we-make-it-harder-in-g/ http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/286299/closing-quest... - so let's take a look: those of questions that are expressing disagreement with how things are run (that cv-pls is a bad idea and that often questions are closed when they shouldn't) are currently at -20, -14, -24 and -13 points. But let's ignore the votes and look at the answers: the absolutely overwhelming consensus is that everything is right an nothing should be done. I'm not saying that "they" are wrong and "we" are wrong, just take note that there's zero overlap in opinions expressed here and there.
joelthelion 12y ago
cv-pls should be forbidden, plain and simple. It is detrimental to the quality and atmosphere of the site.
- ircmaxell 12y ago
  How do you solve the torrent of duplicates and low quality questions then? The review queue is backed up all the time (currently 11900 questions with 1+ close-vote). Ignoring the problem does not make it go away. If you think one of the ways people are trying to solve it should be forbidden, that's fine. Please share an effective alternative.
  - reitanqild 12y ago
    > If you think one of the ways people are trying to solve it should be forbidden, that's fine. Please share an effective alternative. We all agree about "send me teh codez", obvious duplicates etc. If however this is the biggest problem then why is asking a question still one of a few things you can do without having rep? If this is really the problem then raise the bar oh so slightly until you don't need to organize voting rings and detect duplicates at a speed that results in more than a few false positives.
  - ProAm 12y ago
    > How do you solve the torrent of duplicates and low quality questions then This is what voting/scoring is for on all the SE sites. The cream will rise to the top. It would be easy enough for SE to disallow questions to show up in google results with a low or negative score, but leave it open for people to discuss, clarify or solve. The moderators on SO don't give the real community a chance by closing things within minutes. Duplicates aren't even a real problem, there is nothing wrong with seeing the same questions answered from a different approach or method.
codinghorror 12y ago
We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.
- angersock 12y ago
  Sure, but my job isn't affected by voting rings on HN, nor does YCombinator justify a totalitarian moderation policy by claiming to be the best google-able SEO-optimized source for whatever it is I'm questioning.
  - apetresc 12y ago
    He's agreeing with you. He said they're going to look into [preventing] it.
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    How is your job affected by voting rings on SO? I'm not challenging you, just asking for more clarification because I don't follow and am curious!
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - jghn 12y ago
      An argument could be made that many people are hitting SO multiple times a day in the course of doing their jobs. If the questions and answers are biased by voting rings the results might not be optimal
    - angersock 12y ago
      So, GP suggested that the behavior of people in the chats was to basically rally to close questions, and likened it to voting rings on HN (which are, I believe, algorithmically regulated or at least are supposed to be). My issue is that SO is a dominating first-hit for lots of technical questions, and that by setting themselves into that position they kind of owe it to the community to make sure they don't have jerks (via voting rings or any such analogue) screwing up the quality of their results. For example, I've searched for "what is the best x for y?" or "what are the tradeoffs for x vs y", and had even (a long time ago) contributed answers to similar questions in their game development exchange--however, they (or their users) have decided that there is no value whatsoever in fielding questions of that variety.
apetresc 12y ago
Is that really as widespread as you say? I looked at the last few hours of the six most popular chat rooms and control-f'ed for "cv-pls" on all of them, and found a grand total of ONE hit: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28568303/python-3-object-takes-no-parameter http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28568303/python-3-object-... The question was closed because the asker himself answered it apologizing for posting it, the problem being something completely unrelated to the code he had pasted. Everybody agreed. I don't think it happens that frequently.
- jofer 12y ago
  At least looking through sopython, with the exception of today, it's an average of 1 every ~20 minutes during "peak" hours. There are deliberately fewer today, due to the room's discussion of them this morning, but have a look at: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/search?q=[cv-pls]&Room=6&sort=newest http://chat.stackoverflow.com/search?q=[cv-pls]&Room=6&sort=... as an example (particular days before today). The majority of those are questions that should be closed. It's just that a lot of wheat gets thrown out along with the chaff.
ircmaxell 12y ago
This has been discussed time and time again: - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/256501/338665 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/256501/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/271899/338665 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/271899/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/278092/338665 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/278092/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/285471/338665 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/285471/338665 Etc... And especially: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120275/is-asking-others-for-a-close-vote-appropriate http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120275/is-asking-oth... Basically, there's nothing wrong with the concept, unless it's used incorrectly. So if someone closes something incorrectly (you can point to a definite reason it's incorrectly closed), then re-open it or raise a meta post. If you want to remove the ability for the people helping moderate a community to moderate, then how do you expect it to be moderated? The big issue is that there are a LOT of low quality questions being asked. Duplicates. Many times literally copy/pasting the the question title into Google will give you the answer. Should these questions remain open because you want to repwhore? Should they remain open and further reduce the ability for Google to take you to a good canonical answer? Or should they be closed and point to the good canonical answer? That way people can find their way to good content, rather than littering the site with duplication and poor copies of other answers. The meaning of the CV reasons has changed over time as the community matures and figures out what works and what doesn't. I do disagree with closing questions about particular framework (unless there's a dedicated SE site for it). But bitching doesn't help. Raise a question on Meta. Step into the chat rooms and have a discussion. Get involved and help us fix things. All bitching does is make the people who are putting time and effort into the community feel like they are doing something bad. Which is the fastest way to kill a community.
- reitanqild 12y ago
  And still the audience here find it interesting. Happily this isn't Stack Overflow and this discussion hasn't been closed yet just because a few admins didn't think think it would fit within "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups." Edit: to clarify - there are a number of reasons why this topic is interesting to quite a few of us[1]. Here are two: * the usability issue of what we experience as someone someone destroying a good resource. * reputation systems: a facinating thing in itself. [1]: as can be seen by the simple fact that this post is still on the frontpage despite - I guess - having been flagged multiple times : )
Danack 12y ago
The problem doesn't stem from people just being wankers in a chat room, it's a deeper problem than that. It's hard to know exactly why people voted to close the 'niche' question you're talking about, but I had to rant recently to someone else who was complaining about how their 'recommend me a library' question was closed unjustly. What is Stack Overflow's goal ----------------------------- To be a large repository of reasonably correct answers to small technical problems, where there is only one reasonably correct* answer. Everything else is considered off topic, and unfortunately not a good fit for the site, due to the lack of tools to manage other types of questions Although there are lots of other things that could be asked and answered, if they are out of that scope then they are considered off-topic and should be closed, according to the people who own StackOverflow. They're closed, not just to annoy people who want those other types of questions answered but because SO really lacks the tools to manage the answers to those questions reasonably. For example the question "how do you install and configure nginx on different operating systems" is definitely a question that could be asked. However it would require a massively long answer, without a provably correct answer, with different approaches based on how you prefer to configure stuff. i.e. not a single probably correct answer. Questions that ask for a recommendation for which library to use don't also meet the criteria of having a single reasonably correct answer. Which library you should use depends on lots of factors, and there's probably several, if not a hell of a lot more, possible libraries to use. Also, questions like that invite debate, multiple answers, spamming by companies trying to promote their software etc. Although people might like to ask all sorts of questions SO have decided to try to limit the number of off-topic questions. But hasn't the goal of being the large repository of answers already been achieved? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yup, which is why StackOverflow is a considered a shit-show by people who used to find it very useful. If I had to guess, I'd say that something like 95% of all questions that are 'on topic' have already been asked and answered. Although I've been using it a while, it's just incredibly rare for me to find a technical question that would be on topic for SO, that doing a google search for doesn't have an answer on SO in the top 5 results. I think the people who run StackOverflow are either morons or have business reasons for not dealing with this problem. Although the 'find me a library' questions are off-topic they aren't really a big problem - what is a big problem is just the same set of questions being asked day in, day out by people who are too stupid to be able to use Google to find answers to questions like "Q) Why is my compiler saying there is a syntax error on this line?" "A) There's a syntax error on that line." The vast majority of people who are asking questions on StackOverflow are people who either read their compiler's error message, or do a google search - so it's really unlikely that they're going to spend time trying to understand the ethos behind StackOverflow or spending much time formulating a short, self-contained, correct example. Because it's so easy for people to sign up to StackOverflow it only takes people a minute to post their badly formed question, which leads to the current torrent of the same questions day in day out. Without increasing either the 'cost' of asking a question or other barrier to prevent people who fail at using google, then it's inevitable that SO will continue to be besieged by bad questions. ------------- As I said, I think the real problem is that the vast majority of on topic questions have already been asked. The site needs better tools for finding duplicates or expanding into a wider set of questions, for which some answers will be longer, non-authoritative answers which just currently aren't a good fit for the site as it currently exists. The current system lacks lots of tools that would be required to manage questions and answers that are currently off-topic. Personally I'd prefer it if they improved the site to allow more wide ranging questions and answers and better filtering of 'questions' (e.g. why is the only tool available to mark a question as something that is asking for a recommendation of a library to close it? Why can't we just tag it as 'find me a library' so that people who are interested in answering that can answer it? *Note - even if an answer is provably incorrect, it won't get deleted unless it's downvoted into oblivion. Which leads to raising of eyebrows when answers to security questions have wrong answers that have been voted to 40+
DonHopkins 12y ago
Could you please explain what the motivation is to close questions? Who is benefiting from it, and who is it hurting?
danielweber 12y ago
I've stumbled upon "too localized" a few times and it's BS. Just because I'm daring to build a desktop app on OpenBSD doesn't mean it's not a real question. Google is very good at extracting needles from haystacks. If this SO mention is the only mention of an error message on the Internet, then someone else can find it in the future now.
- jaydles 12y ago
  I work at SE... and you're right. We eliminated this close reason because a huge percent of the cases it was used weren't appropriate.

by jofer 12y ago

jobu 12y ago

Wasn't there a similar debate over Quality vs Quantity with the Wikipedia community a few years back? It's been a while, but I remember seeing complaints about thousands of articles getting culled for being trivial (comic books, movies, anime, moderately famous people or places). It's hard to find many articles about it anymore, but I did find this from 2007: http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/ http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/

mkremins 12y ago
You might get more results searching for "deletionism vs inclusionism", which seems to be the most widely used name for the debate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...
- angersock 12y ago
  What's the current general stance on that these days I wonder? What's the prevailing wind?
  - VLM 12y ago
    The deletionists won and quite a few people refuse to participate anymore. Which leads to declining quality of article and moderation...
    - chris_mahan 12y ago
      I was one of those who left. I let my adminship elapse after 10 years. I also don't contribute much to SO, or to any SE properties, despite being on the early public beta. (remember the signup as a google spreadhseet). I'm ID 479 on SO.
    - merrua 12y ago
      Yep. And the deletionists where more often the "majority" culture and male, which resulted in a feedback loop for the nonminority and female. New minority turn up, have a bad experience and leaves. I think it was studied let me see if I can find the paper. I know the results were replicated with comment bots. Update, not the ones I was thinking of but a good read. HBS Cases: How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn't) http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pdf/item/5605.pdf http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pdf/item/5605.pdf
  - indymike 12y ago
    That discussion has been deleted.
quanticle 12y ago
Well, it was more than a few years ago at this point, and the long and short of it is that the deletionists won. Gwern has a fairly thorough elegy for the (now dead) inclusionist beliefs: http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism http://www.gwern.net/In%20Defense%20Of%20Inclusionism.
kevin_thibedeau 12y ago
The funny thing is that the fanboys fight back against this tactic by putting in hundreds of citations to "legitmize" articles about video games. Browse through some of them and you'll often see more citations than most of the math and science articles. Meanwhile, worthwhile articles that don't have rabid fans get deleted due to lack of "noteworthiness" (by someone's arbitrary standard of the day) or citations.
- reitanqild 12y ago
  If that is what it takes to get the deletionists away then feel free to add any valid reference I say. I have given up though.

afandian 12y ago

That's really depressing. Makes me question my participation in the site a little bit (never joined the chat or wanted to). Do you have any actual examples?

3JPLW 12y ago
It's the first agenda item on the Python SO team's winter meeting: http://sopython.com/transcript/3/winter-2015-general-meeting/ http://sopython.com/transcript/3/winter-2015-general-meeting... They were just discussing it on chat today: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/6/15-16 http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/6/15-16 I've never gotten involved in Chat before, either, but just searching the most active chatroom for `cv-` brought that up immediately.
- jofer 12y ago
  Huh, I didn't see that discussion before I wrote the comment, but I was specifically referring to sopython. They mean well, but it does feel a bit like a mob at times.
  - davidism 12y ago
    We recognize that it's gotten a bit out of control lately, hence the topic during the meeting. I think we ended up with some good guidelines for managing it.
  - ffisegydd 12y ago
    I'm sorry you feel that way Joe. The Room Owners have felt for a while now that it can sometimes get out of hand, that's why we had this discussion in our Room Meeting. As davidism has mentioned, we've put some extra guidelines down now. The main one being that unless it's necessary (something like spam, offensive, dupe, etc, where the OP isn't going to be able to improve the post) we're adding a 10 minute "grace period" before requesting a cv-pls. This gives OPs the chance to edit their question, to respond to comments, etc. I disagree with a few of your points, but I'm not really interested in getting drawn into a debate here. If you want to discuss it further then drop by chat. I know you've come into the room in the past to ask/speak about some particular cv-pls. If, in the future, you have anything to bring up, come and speak to us.

teh_klev 12y ago

The PHP chat room is/was quite bad in that respect and there's a small handful of particularly caustic individuals who go out of their way to spread unpleasantness for less well informed users.

mschuster91 12y ago
You mean the freenode channel ##php? Oh, I know what you mean. The problem is that very many people are not able to google and then ask in IRC. On the other side (the regulars), all they see every day is a torrent of "stupid noobs". And I totally understand everyone who either retires from answering questions or turning into a sarcastic a..hole towards noobs.
ircmaxell 12y ago
That's absolutely a valid experience. There are plenty of others who've had positive experiences as well. And those "caustic individuals" have a LOT to share if you're willing to engage in an open and healthy way.
- teh_klev 12y ago
  Sure, but they don't have to be caustic and quite so unpleasant in the chat room. I am outing, specifically, Terenko. In all my years as a forum contributor/mod I don't think I've encountered such a poisonous dick as that person. I know you do a lot of good work for the PHP community, along with Gordon and many others, but, my friend terenko is truly a knob end and sadly encourages others who are up and coming PHP debutants to behave the same. It really made me weep as a diamond mod why you guys tolerated his snide comments and activities.
  - ircmaxell 12y ago
    Why did we tolerate it? Because we weren't given the tools to do anything about it. We couldn't kick or ban people. We couldn't moderate our own room. All we (as owners) could do was move messages or flag. We got yelled at every time we flagged something, so we learned to live with it. The only other option we had was to leave (which many users did, even leaders). Today, we have the ability to kick-ban. Awesome. But he's also calmed down a lot. And is seen as a resource. It's gotten a lot better over the years, but there is still work to be done in there. But now we're starting to get the tools to handle it. Which is awesome.

PinnBrain 12y ago

I really thought you were talking about a curriculum vitae there, but I suppose it's "close vote".

tvon 12y ago
Yeah, FWIW I had to google the terms and found this: https://gist.github.com/cspray/1689430 https://gist.github.com/cspray/1689430

monksy 12y ago

I was going to ask the following question [on 2 different situations] in the last 2 weeks: Are there any [lang] libraries that are backings for the [service] API? I stopped myself before going to SO because I knew that topic would get closed within seconds and I'd comments berating me for asking the wrong question. For the most part the only use I've gotten from SO has been from basic questions when I'm starting out with a language/tool/library. I haven't found it very useful for complex problems. Oh well. I've written about my rants on SO before. [I won't link here but it is in my submission history]

gnarbarian 12y ago
Rather than outright closing a question it would be more productive if moderators could move the question to the forum it belongs. This type of question is quite common and if the powers that be have decreed that it doesn't belong in the general stack overflow area then a place for these questions should be created.
- i3arnon 12y ago
  What forum is that? SO doesn't have forums AFAIK, only questions and answers.
  - worldsayshi 12y ago
    I would assume that previous poster was referring to stackexchange forum other than stackoverflow.
  - gnarbarian 12y ago
    I was referring to the different stack exchange sites as forums.
Arnt 12y ago
Why would you ask that instead of browsing through the most recent 50 questions on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lang+service http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lang+service ?

InclinedPlane 12y ago

The problem is that the people who originally headed the community and drove the site have checked out. That means that the very serious institutional and design problems related around the community moderation features of SO are not going to get fixed, they're just going to be gamed by the people with the most effort and free time. There are very few checks and balances on abuse of power at SO, even though that's where you need them the most. The assumption is that users with high enough rep will simply be more polite, logical, and kind, without any sort of agenda to propel. That, of course, was a naive assumption which is slowly blowing up in their faces, if they notice. Meanwhile, nobody at the top cares because Jeff has moved on and everyone else just cares about site traffic and ad revenue (or at least that's my impression).

codinghorror 12y ago
This isn't true. Shog, Jay, and many others were hired from the community precisely because they were avid long term users who had demonstrated deep insight into the culture and organization of Stack. I would easily rate them as equal to myself if not, frankly, better at helping the Stack community govern itself. The reality is that good Q&A takes a fair bit of discipline to get right, and that means rules and standards. This rubs some people the wrong way, but it is the ONLY way to achieve reliable, sustainable, long term quality. If you have specific examples of where things went wrong in a question, take it to meta and discuss it so that the community can adapt and change. That is how community works, and Stack is a democracy in that sense -- anyone can provide evidence and push for change. (warning, though, scroll down in the comments here to see an example that turned out to be an anti-example when examined closely. A lot of times people just complain when they don't like rules, and the rules don't favor their personal needs versus the needs of the community or the greater Internet)
- phaker 12y ago
  I'm afraid that many of the people you'll find in meta are the "soup nazis" the article complains about. Any community is a sieve. It takes effort to join and the more you get involved the more time and effort it consumes and at every step someone gives up and drops out. The meta subsite is not easy to stumble into, very few people will have any questions to ask there and very few will have a good answer to contribute so it takes a lot of effort to get there. That means that the crowd that hangs out in meta will be very different from the bulk of SO/SE. Several meta discussions were linked by ircmaxell above and another was posted in the r/programming discussion - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/286299/closing-questions-just-makes-people-feel-really-bad-can-we-make-it-harder-in-g/ http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/286299/closing-quest... - so let's take a look: those of questions that are expressing disagreement with how things are run (that cv-pls is a bad idea and that often questions are closed when they shouldn't) are currently at -20, -14, -24 and -13 points. But let's ignore the votes and look at the answers: the absolutely overwhelming consensus is that everything is right an nothing should be done. I'm not saying that "they" are wrong and "we" are wrong, just take note that there's zero overlap in opinions expressed here and there.

joelthelion 12y ago

cv-pls should be forbidden, plain and simple. It is detrimental to the quality and atmosphere of the site.

ircmaxell 12y ago
How do you solve the torrent of duplicates and low quality questions then? The review queue is backed up all the time (currently 11900 questions with 1+ close-vote). Ignoring the problem does not make it go away. If you think one of the ways people are trying to solve it should be forbidden, that's fine. Please share an effective alternative.
- reitanqild 12y ago
  > If you think one of the ways people are trying to solve it should be forbidden, that's fine. Please share an effective alternative. We all agree about "send me teh codez", obvious duplicates etc. If however this is the biggest problem then why is asking a question still one of a few things you can do without having rep? If this is really the problem then raise the bar oh so slightly until you don't need to organize voting rings and detect duplicates at a speed that results in more than a few false positives.
- ProAm 12y ago
  > How do you solve the torrent of duplicates and low quality questions then This is what voting/scoring is for on all the SE sites. The cream will rise to the top. It would be easy enough for SE to disallow questions to show up in google results with a low or negative score, but leave it open for people to discuss, clarify or solve. The moderators on SO don't give the real community a chance by closing things within minutes. Duplicates aren't even a real problem, there is nothing wrong with seeing the same questions answered from a different approach or method.

codinghorror 12y ago

We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.

angersock 12y ago
Sure, but my job isn't affected by voting rings on HN, nor does YCombinator justify a totalitarian moderation policy by claiming to be the best google-able SEO-optimized source for whatever it is I'm questioning.
- apetresc 12y ago
  He's agreeing with you. He said they're going to look into [preventing] it.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  How is your job affected by voting rings on SO? I'm not challenging you, just asking for more clarification because I don't follow and am curious!
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - jghn 12y ago
    An argument could be made that many people are hitting SO multiple times a day in the course of doing their jobs. If the questions and answers are biased by voting rings the results might not be optimal
  - angersock 12y ago
    So, GP suggested that the behavior of people in the chats was to basically rally to close questions, and likened it to voting rings on HN (which are, I believe, algorithmically regulated or at least are supposed to be). My issue is that SO is a dominating first-hit for lots of technical questions, and that by setting themselves into that position they kind of owe it to the community to make sure they don't have jerks (via voting rings or any such analogue) screwing up the quality of their results. For example, I've searched for "what is the best x for y?" or "what are the tradeoffs for x vs y", and had even (a long time ago) contributed answers to similar questions in their game development exchange--however, they (or their users) have decided that there is no value whatsoever in fielding questions of that variety.

apetresc 12y ago

Is that really as widespread as you say? I looked at the last few hours of the six most popular chat rooms and control-f'ed for "cv-pls" on all of them, and found a grand total of ONE hit: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28568303/python-3-object-takes-no-parameter http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28568303/python-3-object-... The question was closed because the asker himself answered it apologizing for posting it, the problem being something completely unrelated to the code he had pasted. Everybody agreed. I don't think it happens that frequently.

jofer 12y ago
At least looking through sopython, with the exception of today, it's an average of 1 every ~20 minutes during "peak" hours. There are deliberately fewer today, due to the room's discussion of them this morning, but have a look at: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/search?q=[cv-pls]&Room=6&sort=newest http://chat.stackoverflow.com/search?q=[cv-pls]&Room=6&sort=... as an example (particular days before today). The majority of those are questions that should be closed. It's just that a lot of wheat gets thrown out along with the chaff.

ircmaxell 12y ago

This has been discussed time and time again: - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/256501/338665 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/256501/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/271899/338665 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/271899/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/278092/338665 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/278092/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/285471/338665 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/285471/338665 Etc... And especially: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120275/is-asking-others-for-a-close-vote-appropriate http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120275/is-asking-oth... Basically, there's nothing wrong with the concept, unless it's used incorrectly. So if someone closes something incorrectly (you can point to a definite reason it's incorrectly closed), then re-open it or raise a meta post. If you want to remove the ability for the people helping moderate a community to moderate, then how do you expect it to be moderated? The big issue is that there are a LOT of low quality questions being asked. Duplicates. Many times literally copy/pasting the the question title into Google will give you the answer. Should these questions remain open because you want to repwhore? Should they remain open and further reduce the ability for Google to take you to a good canonical answer? Or should they be closed and point to the good canonical answer? That way people can find their way to good content, rather than littering the site with duplication and poor copies of other answers. The meaning of the CV reasons has changed over time as the community matures and figures out what works and what doesn't. I do disagree with closing questions about particular framework (unless there's a dedicated SE site for it). But bitching doesn't help. Raise a question on Meta. Step into the chat rooms and have a discussion. Get involved and help us fix things. All bitching does is make the people who are putting time and effort into the community feel like they are doing something bad. Which is the fastest way to kill a community.

reitanqild 12y ago
And still the audience here find it interesting. Happily this isn't Stack Overflow and this discussion hasn't been closed yet just because a few admins didn't think think it would fit within "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups." Edit: to clarify - there are a number of reasons why this topic is interesting to quite a few of us[1]. Here are two: * the usability issue of what we experience as someone someone destroying a good resource. * reputation systems: a facinating thing in itself. [1]: as can be seen by the simple fact that this post is still on the frontpage despite - I guess - having been flagged multiple times : )

Danack 12y ago

The problem doesn't stem from people just being wankers in a chat room, it's a deeper problem than that. It's hard to know exactly why people voted to close the 'niche' question you're talking about, but I had to rant recently to someone else who was complaining about how their 'recommend me a library' question was closed unjustly. What is Stack Overflow's goal ----------------------------- To be a large repository of reasonably correct answers to small technical problems, where there is only one reasonably correct* answer. Everything else is considered off topic, and unfortunately not a good fit for the site, due to the lack of tools to manage other types of questions Although there are lots of other things that could be asked and answered, if they are out of that scope then they are considered off-topic and should be closed, according to the people who own StackOverflow. They're closed, not just to annoy people who want those other types of questions answered but because SO really lacks the tools to manage the answers to those questions reasonably. For example the question "how do you install and configure nginx on different operating systems" is definitely a question that could be asked. However it would require a massively long answer, without a provably correct answer, with different approaches based on how you prefer to configure stuff. i.e. not a single probably correct answer. Questions that ask for a recommendation for which library to use don't also meet the criteria of having a single reasonably correct answer. Which library you should use depends on lots of factors, and there's probably several, if not a hell of a lot more, possible libraries to use. Also, questions like that invite debate, multiple answers, spamming by companies trying to promote their software etc. Although people might like to ask all sorts of questions SO have decided to try to limit the number of off-topic questions. But hasn't the goal of being the large repository of answers already been achieved? ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yup, which is why StackOverflow is a considered a shit-show by people who used to find it very useful. If I had to guess, I'd say that something like 95% of all questions that are 'on topic' have already been asked and answered. Although I've been using it a while, it's just incredibly rare for me to find a technical question that would be on topic for SO, that doing a google search for doesn't have an answer on SO in the top 5 results. I think the people who run StackOverflow are either morons or have business reasons for not dealing with this problem. Although the 'find me a library' questions are off-topic they aren't really a big problem - what is a big problem is just the same set of questions being asked day in, day out by people who are too stupid to be able to use Google to find answers to questions like "Q) Why is my compiler saying there is a syntax error on this line?" "A) There's a syntax error on that line." The vast majority of people who are asking questions on StackOverflow are people who either read their compiler's error message, or do a google search - so it's really unlikely that they're going to spend time trying to understand the ethos behind StackOverflow or spending much time formulating a short, self-contained, correct example. Because it's so easy for people to sign up to StackOverflow it only takes people a minute to post their badly formed question, which leads to the current torrent of the same questions day in day out. Without increasing either the 'cost' of asking a question or other barrier to prevent people who fail at using google, then it's inevitable that SO will continue to be besieged by bad questions. ------------- As I said, I think the real problem is that the vast majority of on topic questions have already been asked. The site needs better tools for finding duplicates or expanding into a wider set of questions, for which some answers will be longer, non-authoritative answers which just currently aren't a good fit for the site as it currently exists. The current system lacks lots of tools that would be required to manage questions and answers that are currently off-topic. Personally I'd prefer it if they improved the site to allow more wide ranging questions and answers and better filtering of 'questions' (e.g. why is the only tool available to mark a question as something that is asking for a recommendation of a library to close it? Why can't we just tag it as 'find me a library' so that people who are interested in answering that can answer it? *Note - even if an answer is provably incorrect, it won't get deleted unless it's downvoted into oblivion. Which leads to raising of eyebrows when answers to security questions have wrong answers that have been voted to 40+

DonHopkins 12y ago

Could you please explain what the motivation is to close questions? Who is benefiting from it, and who is it hurting?

danielweber 12y ago

I've stumbled upon "too localized" a few times and it's BS. Just because I'm daring to build a desktop app on OpenBSD doesn't mean it's not a real question. Google is very good at extracting needles from haystacks. If this SO mention is the only mention of an error message on the Internet, then someone else can find it in the future now.

jaydles 12y ago
I work at SE... and you're right. We eliminated this close reason because a huge percent of the cases it was used weren't appropriate.