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Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

160 points by luu 12y ago

cgatesman 12y ago
Seems kind of pointless if it is ignoring up-votes.
- pauldino 12y ago
  You can fork the query if you don't like it. :) For example here I added a condition to only show questions with negative scores: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/281235/most-down-voted-questions http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/281235/mos...
melling 12y ago
I've got the most downvoted Emacs question. It was actually even more downvoted at one point. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp-function-to-convert-url-to-html-link http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp... It was a pretty good question but I got into a debate with a moderator. That was my last question and I did a rage quit. As you can see it was a simple well-defined question, and it produced two good answers.
- wwweston 12y ago
  Is there any kind of Stack facility for complaining about the quality of moderation? Because the moderation here is so clearly wrong that I'm not sure the people who made that call should have posting privileges on the site, let alone moderation.
  - lambda 12y ago
    Actually, that's exactly the kind of question that StackOverflow wants to discourage; people just using it as requests for someone else to write their code for them.
    - wwweston 12y ago
      First: even if it's true that SO wants to discourage people from asking questions where they're starting from scratch and haven't written any code themselves yet... it's still a terrible moderation, because the explanation doesn't communicate anything close to expressing that. It says the question is unclear. That's flatly false. Second: is this really the kind of question SO doesn't want? Their privilege, if so, but in addition to being well-defined it's clearly content that more than a handful of people were interested in (at least 15 upvotes on the most popular answer, multiply it by the ratio of non-user visitors to user visitors). It's a programming question, it has a programming answer, and it certainly has instructional value as an elisp recipe beyond whatever intent the author had. And as for whether it's lazy -- that's basically the charge here, right? -- I'm not sure I see a functional difference between someone asking a question like this and someone who has written a larger pile of code and is missing a narrow piece of knowledge to complete it. There's possibly arguably a contextual/rhetorical difference where in the latter situation we see the context which led to the question being asked and in the former we don't... but honestly, nobody who's fundamentally asking other people to just do their work for them is asking about text->html transformations in elisp, it's pretty easy to read between the lines and see that. To underscore the point, let's just compare it to some other questions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5410757/delete-a-line-containing-a-specific-string-using-sed http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5410757/delete-a-line-con... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/59895/can-a-bash-script-tell-what-directory-its-stored-in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/59895/can-a-bash-script-t... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8168320/can-vim-highlight-matching-html-tags-like-notepad http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8168320/can-vim-highlight... It's pretty easy to see what most of these much more popular questions have in common with the one we're talking about here -- as part of whatever these askers are doing, they know there's a capability embedded in a tool that's part of the environment. They just don't know how to bring it out. You could, of course, just tell them to go RTFM for awk, until they get something simple like deleting a line from a file when it matches a string you know, but then again, you could also tell people to go more carefully read the relevant documentation for most programming problems, and if you accept the question and the answer you've got relevant content people are looking for on the site and a recipe people can start learning more from.
  - ayrx 12y ago
    You are clearly not a frequent user of Stack Exchange because you do not know about the meta sites which are available to discuss moderation decisions. And if you are not a frequent user who are you to say that "the moderation here is so clearly wrong that I'm not sure the people who made that call should have posting privileges on the site, let alone moderation"?
    - melling 12y ago
      That would be incorrect. I've asked hundreds of questions on SO. My complaint on Meta just got massively downvoted.
      - olavk 12y ago
        Can you post a link to one of these unfairly downvoted questions? I'm curious.
        melling 12y ago
        It was removed from Meta. If there are archives, perhaps my user id can link back? Are the deleted messages purged? My user id from the message: user568866 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lCRrEYJ:stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp-function-to-convert-url-to-html-link+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lC...
      - collyw 12y ago
        That sounds exactly like my experience. Challenge anything on moderators, and you will be down voted to hell. Its like normal site down voting on steroids. "Do not question the mods"
- lambda 12y ago
  > It was a pretty good question No, this is not a good question for StackOverflow. You simply asked for someone to write code for you, which is not what StackOverflow is intended to be for. It is intended for help on a particular specific problem you are having with your own code.
  - debaserab2 12y ago
    And yet there is at least one, if not two very useful answers to his supposed non-question. Thank god for these arbitrary community standards, shielding people from getting useful answers to questions that are deemed as formatted incorrectly.
  - melling 12y ago
    It was a short well-defined question with given input and a specific output. Elisp isn't the most widely used language so coming up to speed could be time consuming. Someone else even starred it so they must have found it to be useful. If I'd just ask to "Calculate someone's age in C#", that'd be a much better question? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9/how-do-i-calculate-someones-age-in-c http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9/how-do-i-calculate-some...
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      It is arguably more specific. It'd be interesting if they would just register something like shitpile.com, set up an instance of Stack Exchange on it, turn off the moderation game, and push closed and deleted questions there instead of disappearing them. That would at least sort of be an experiment on whether all of the decisions they have made about what Stack Exchange sites are 'supposed to be' actually matter or not.
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        Now is it? It also asks basically to teach how subtraction works, which is something you should know when leaving primary school.
- fapjacks 12y ago
  Echoing other sentiments, this is not a good question at all. You haven't shown code that you've tried, you're not asking a specific question about the problem you're having writing such code, and (worst) you're basically asking someone to write the code for you. This is a code request, NOT a question about coding.
  - melling 12y ago
    * How do I loop over an Emacs buffer and process each line? * How do I split a string in Elisp? * How do I construct output to an Emacs buffer? All were answered in a little over a dozen lines of Elisp. Small, well-defined, pieces of code are a great way to learn.
    - maaaats 12y ago
      Why didn't you ask that question, then? A general concept with many uses is useful for many, and would have stayed.
- bjwbell 12y ago
  I have to laugh, the question is now deleted due to your linking to it from here I'm assuming .
- reneherse 12y ago
  Google's cache of the now deleted page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lCRrEYJ:stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp-function-to-convert-url-to-html-link+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lC...
  - wwweston 12y ago
    And, in case the cache goes when Google next indexes, here's screenshot of the cache: http://imgur.com/JLRc3tY http://imgur.com/JLRc3tY
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Apparently, the page is no longer deleted.
- function_seven 12y ago
  I'm getting a 404 now when I click your link. Was your question deleted after you posted this?
  - melling 12y ago
    Yes, that's how they roll on StackOverflow. Hope they fixed the bug so the guy who answered the question didn't lose his points. He was upvoted 13 times.
    - function_seven 12y ago
      Well it's back up now. SO looks like it has a Wikipedia problem[1]. [1] http://www.themarysue.com/wikipedia-losing-editors/ http://www.themarysue.com/wikipedia-losing-editors/
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Apparently. That's a pretty sick move. In other words, you can't talk even about stackoverflow on another forum without stackoverflow moderators trying to take control of the discussion. Whoever did this on SO should have their moderator privileges removed pronto, that's a very bad piece of advertising for SO and hurts its image much more than the rest of this discussion and the original article combined.
- olavk 12y ago
  I see lots of complaining over SO moderation in this thread and other places, but the actual examples shown always turn out to very sensible moderation. For example your question is clearly not appropriate for SO. You are not asking a specific question, you are just asking people to write code for you. That somebody was nice enough to actually write your code for you, does not mean it was a good question! Now there might actually be an audience for a "write my code" website, where users could post programming tasks or homework exercises, and other developers then might try to solve them for the fun and challenge of it. But SO clearly does not want to be that kind of website.
  - melling 12y ago
    The answer was 15 lines of very educational code that would have benefited anyone learning elisp.
    - olavk 12y ago
      To put it bluntly, it would have been much more educational for you if you had actually tried to code it yourself. If you during this had encountered a concrete problem or question which you couldn't solve on your own, you could have posted it on SO.
      - melling 12y ago
        But it's perfectly acceptable to ask how to split a string in C#? That's not covered many other places? It's a duplicate, yet highly up voted question. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8928601/how-can-i-split-a-string-with-a-string-delimiter http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8928601/how-can-i-split-a... There's probably 100x more C# information than elisp on the internet.
        maaaats 12y ago
        It is highly upvoted because many people have found it useful. Contrary to your question, it's a question with many uses. >That's not covered many other places? (...) >There's probably 100x more C# information than elisp on the internet. So what?
- jlarocco 12y ago
  That wasn't a question at all. It was letting people know you wanted them to write code for you. If your "question" starts out, "I'd like to create...", and finishes with the expectation that else somebody will write the code for you, it's a pretty good bet you're going to get down voted.
RyanRies 12y ago
TIL the third most down-voted question on Stack Overflow has 3,735 upvotes and almost 1000 favorites.
- Theodores 12y ago
  I think I am definitely going to start using the '-->' operator, it is awesome! If I mix in with a few 'Yoda conditionals' then the world is really going to love my code.
- vitd 12y ago
  You never know - it could be a favorite because it's so hilarious!
IgorPartola 12y ago
I was expecting horrible questions, basically spam. Nope, these are real and legitimate questions and I don't see why most of these were downvoted. I wonder what the data looks like beyond just some of the worst questions, and whether the trend is going to be more and more "legitimate questions that are either 'obvious' or already answered get downvoted." If so, that cannot be a good thing.
- lambda 12y ago
  The actual spam and completely incoherent questions are deleted. So what you're left with is things that are actually legitimate questions, so don't merit admins intervening and deleting, but which touch a nerve in some other way; like people asking about how to send out large volumes of (presumably) unsolicited email, people asking homework questions, and the like. Also, note that some of these "most downvoted questions" are also among the most upvoted as well, having very large positive scores, like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-name-of-the-operator https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-name.... Once a question becomes famous enough, there are likely to be a number of contrarians who don't like it and downvote it, and eventually that can add up. And then if you look in the comments of some of them, that seems to be not too bad but which have more downvotes than you'd expect, they got a downvote brigade because they complained about a few downvotes on meta. Pretty lame that people do that, but it happens.
- hurin 12y ago
  Most down-voted doesn't mean it hadn't been upvoted, it just means a lot of the people looking at it thought it was a bad question. This one made me chuckle: What is the name of the “-->” operator?
  - lmm 12y ago
    Before I clicked through I thought that was going to be a scalaz question.
- pascal_cuoq 12y ago
  These are only questions that for some reason received a lot of visibility and as a consequence were seen by more people who thought they weren't interesting. They were also seen by more people who thought they were great questions and upvoted them. The only conclusion I draw from this database query is that “most downvoted” is not an interesting metric. You are right that these are old. The only way for a question to be in the top ranks for visibility is to have had a long time to be visible over. This doesn't mean that duplicate questions do not get asked, answered and upvoted. Too much so in my opinion.
ryan-allen 12y ago
The first one I looked at, "Favourite Programming Cartoons", was a blast. But hey, we've always been at war with Eurasia.
- blorgbeard 12y ago
  Er, no - the question is closed, not deleted, because StackOverflow acknowledges that we have not always been at war with Eurasia. Some time between that question being asked and now, StackOverflow's community decided that they didn't want to be /r/programmerhumor
denzil_correa 12y ago
The questions which are really poor in quality end up being deleted. We did some analysis of deleted questions and our results were published at WWW 2014 [0]. The dataset of deleted questions (up until June 2013) is also publicly available [1]. We also built a machine learning system to predict questions that would be deleted in the future using various features [2]. [0] http://www2014.kr/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/proceedings_p631.pdf http://www2014.kr/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/proceedings_p63... [1] https://archive.org/details/stackoverflow_2013_05_deleted_posts_stackoverflow https://archive.org/details/stackoverflow_2013_05_deleted_po... [2] https://github.com/denzilc/stackoverflow-deleted-prediction https://github.com/denzilc/stackoverflow-deleted-prediction
- ddebernardy 12y ago
  Fun paper. If I may highlight, though, your sample is completely flawed: 1. The close vote queue's backlog is such that most bad questions remain open and therefor don't ever get a chance to be deleted in the first place unless (as you've noted) a moderator randomly runs into them months later. 2. A problem experienced by SO is one-off accounts: users that get question banned end up coming back for more with a new account, and leave the abandonned ones unmaintained. Where a normal user may end up deleting their downvoted questions, an abandonned account's user will not. Put another way, your sample would be a heck of a lot larger if everything that should likely get deleted would be.
  - denzil_correa 12y ago
    Thanks. > If I may highlight, though, your sample is completely flawed: I would respectfully disagree. :) > The close vote queue's backlog is such that most bad questions remain open and therefor don't ever get a chance to be deleted in the first place unless (as you've noted) a moderator randomly runs into them months later. A question could be deleted even if it was not closed earlier. Closed Question is just "one way" for a question to be deleted (Refer Figure 1). In fact, only 14.38% of the questions which were deleted were marked as 'Closed' (Refer Table 6). Your intuition about "moderator random runs" was however found to be true. In case, you are suggesting that most 'closed' questions should be considered as future 'deleted' that is a call IMO would not like to make. In any case, we found that deleted questions are more poor in quality than closed questions (Refer Section 4.5 Sub section "Quality Pyramid"). In that light, it would make sense to treat them as separate entities. TL;DR - Deleted questions are beyond repair but Closed questions could be patched up > A problem experienced by SO is one-off accounts: users that get question banned end up coming back for more with a new account, and leave the abandonned ones unmaintained. Where a normal user may end up deleting their downvoted questions, an abandonned account's user will not. This may be true but it does not necessarily mean there is a problem with the dataset sample. It simply means that the problem is more challenging :) > Put another way, your sample would be a heck of a lot larger if everything that should likely get deleted would be. Since all closed questions do not get deleted, this may not necessarily be true. But, since you suggested closed questions, we had a prequel to our deleted questions paper which was about analysis and prediction of closed questions [0, 1]. You might like that as well! [0] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19882021/pdf/cosn-2013.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19882021/pdf/cosn-2013.p... [1] http://cosn.acm.org/2013/files/Session7/Session7Paper4.pdf http://cosn.acm.org/2013/files/Session7/Session7Paper4.pdf
youngButEager 12y ago
stackoverflow. S uch U niquely C harming K indly S ouls
vijayboyapati 12y ago
Sadly the Stackoverflow community seems to have become a lot more officious in the last few years and the number of petty bureaucrats has skyrocketed. I asked a genuine question which I didn't know the answer to and which I was hoping someone else may have come across. It was immediately downvoted for not having a proposed solution. Eventually it was upvoted and became positive because it was a genuinely useful question. That kind of officiousness is completely unnecessary and needlessly turns people off participating in the community.
- stinos 12y ago
  May I ask which part of the community, which tags? I hear a lot of these complaints here on HN about the unfriendly/bureaucratic/aggressive nature of SO but don't seem to encounter it all that much while using it. Which could mean either I'm not botered with it enough, or I really don't see it, or it's not there, for the tags I'm mostly active in (c++/labview/matlab/msbuild/c#). Is it possible there are a couple of subcommunities on HN, some (I'd guess web-related or so since that is a field I never looked into) more violent than the other.
  - scrapcode 12y ago
    I'm a hobby dev of 12+ years. I've yet to find a polite IRC channel or discussion forum that offers genuine help. The online community of hackers is MUCH unlike the real-world community of hackers that you'd meet at a conference etc, in my experience. =[
    - bjwbell 12y ago
      I've been surprised by how helpful some of the devs on the mozilla #servo channel are to noobies NOT like other IRC channels I could name. In my experience smaller communities are nicer on average.
      - EduardoBautista 12y ago
        The rust community is very helpful overall.
axg 12y ago
Made a 'Most Controversial' query: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/281279/most-controversial-questions http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/281279/mos... Sorry for the bad formatting, new to SQL
- nickcano 12y ago
  I liked this idea, but noticed the gap between up/down votes was actually quite large, meaning the questions weren't actually that controversial. I went ahead and made a change that filtered out results where ABS(up - down) is less than half of MAX(up, down). (its quite a bit messier than that, though, as there's no MAX function in sql that selects the greater of two operands). http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/282007/most-controversial-questions http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/282007/mos...
cranklin 12y ago
perhaps this would be more useful if it calculated the lowest upvote to downvote ratio
elchief 12y ago
I was hoping the top answer to the first question would be "Send 14300 emails daily for a week"
maaaats 12y ago
Some of these questions lack context. For instance the one about neural networks looks fine now, but you should have seen how the asker behaved..
pmelendez 12y ago
It's interesting. The "Single layer neural network" question has -75 but its accepted answer has 157
SiVal 12y ago
I can't stand Stack Overflow. Quite obviously it is dominated by people who would much rather show you who's the boss by competing, not for who can provide you with the most useful answer, but by who can be first to find a reason why your question doesn't deserve an answer (and then to block anyone willing to answer from being able to do so). Yes, of course, I understand the assertion: that by attacking questioners instead of helping them, the alpha dogs are laboring selflessly to defend the quality of Stack Overflow. You should thank them for biting you. What nonsense. Imagine if Google took the SO approach to quality and prioritized making you jump through hoops with your question over trying to find the best answer it can: "your phrasing is ambiguous; if you think otherwise, you can try rephrasing your query properly and try again", or "you have misspelled one of the search terms; you should figure out which one and look up the correct spelling before submitting a search; this is, you'll agree, in everyone's best interest". Or, "not a constructive search query; might lead to pages that include opinions". Or how about, "some of the words in your query resemble those in another query made several years ago; here are their results; if their results aren't helpful to you, you should have asked a better question." Of course SO, unlike Google, stores the questions, but SO could still learn from Google's example. Google is so useful, because instead of improving quality by strictly limiting what it will index and what you can ask ("no pages expressing opinions", "index no new pages discussing any aspect of a topic if some aspect of that topic was discussed on another page already in the index", "the answer to your query has been found but will not be displayed, because it was not of interest to our moderators"), it includes as much real (not fake) content as it can and uses technology to lead any question to the most relevant answer it can. How ironic that when you use Google to find a programming answer, it so often judges some Stack Overflow entry most relevant. Then, if you follow the link, you find that someone was trying to provide exactly the answer you were looking for, but the mods spotted him, ruled that what Google had correctly deemed most relevant to be "Not Constructive!" and had forbidden anyone else from answering. I'd love to see an alternative to SO that optimized for answering questions instead of controlling them. One that allowed almost any programming question, allowed anyone who wanted to answer to freely answer, that collected reams of overlapping explanations and answers to multiple variations of programming questions, and that used state of the art technology to lead questioners to those answers that were likely to be most successful at answering your specific question, while leaving the question open to anyone who wanted to volunteer new answers, even if they are repeats or opinions, or provide their own best-guess links to previous answers.
chippy 12y ago
The mod explanation for the Neural Net question is revealing: "This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet"
- DanBC 12y ago
  That's a canned response. When users vote to close a question they have to pick from a list. When a question is closed the most popular reason for closing is automatically shown. I guess it tells us that people will vote to close even if a question doesn't fit into any of the close reasons, and that a previously "too broad" question would be closed as "too narrow" if you tighten it up.
  - sesqu 12y ago
    That question clearly fit the canned reason for closing. It was a homework debugging question on a tight deadline.
jorjordandan 12y ago
For some reason some of these have tons of UPVOTES like the question about formatting Javascript dates. Something went wrong somewhere! Actually several of the questions have a bunch of upvotes. Certainly more than I've ever gotten on SO...
- olavk 12y ago
  A question need visibility to get such a large amount of downvotes. They are controversial questions which gets a high number of both up and downvotes.
biomimic 12y ago
This is actually fairly hilarious.
leereeves 12y ago
The history of the neural network question is an interesting case study in democratic moderation: http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3455660/revisions http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3455660/revisions 100,000 emails too, with many more moderators: http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3905734/revisions http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3905734/revisions
NeutronBoy 12y ago
The question about the single-layer neural networks being closed really bugs me. The entire reason Stack Overflow is so great is that that are experts there, that can answer my stupidly specific questions. If I wanted generic answers to a problem, I can Google them and find some half-assed forum post from 5 years ago.

160 points by luu 12y ago

cgatesman 12y ago

Seems kind of pointless if it is ignoring up-votes.

pauldino 12y ago
You can fork the query if you don't like it. :) For example here I added a condition to only show questions with negative scores: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/281235/most-down-voted-questions http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/281235/mos...

melling 12y ago

I've got the most downvoted Emacs question. It was actually even more downvoted at one point. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp-function-to-convert-url-to-html-link http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp... It was a pretty good question but I got into a debate with a moderator. That was my last question and I did a rage quit. As you can see it was a simple well-defined question, and it produced two good answers.

wwweston 12y ago
Is there any kind of Stack facility for complaining about the quality of moderation? Because the moderation here is so clearly wrong that I'm not sure the people who made that call should have posting privileges on the site, let alone moderation.
- lambda 12y ago
  Actually, that's exactly the kind of question that StackOverflow wants to discourage; people just using it as requests for someone else to write their code for them.
  - wwweston 12y ago
    First: even if it's true that SO wants to discourage people from asking questions where they're starting from scratch and haven't written any code themselves yet... it's still a terrible moderation, because the explanation doesn't communicate anything close to expressing that. It says the question is unclear. That's flatly false. Second: is this really the kind of question SO doesn't want? Their privilege, if so, but in addition to being well-defined it's clearly content that more than a handful of people were interested in (at least 15 upvotes on the most popular answer, multiply it by the ratio of non-user visitors to user visitors). It's a programming question, it has a programming answer, and it certainly has instructional value as an elisp recipe beyond whatever intent the author had. And as for whether it's lazy -- that's basically the charge here, right? -- I'm not sure I see a functional difference between someone asking a question like this and someone who has written a larger pile of code and is missing a narrow piece of knowledge to complete it. There's possibly arguably a contextual/rhetorical difference where in the latter situation we see the context which led to the question being asked and in the former we don't... but honestly, nobody who's fundamentally asking other people to just do their work for them is asking about text->html transformations in elisp, it's pretty easy to read between the lines and see that. To underscore the point, let's just compare it to some other questions: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5410757/delete-a-line-containing-a-specific-string-using-sed http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5410757/delete-a-line-con... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/59895/can-a-bash-script-tell-what-directory-its-stored-in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/59895/can-a-bash-script-t... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8168320/can-vim-highlight-matching-html-tags-like-notepad http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8168320/can-vim-highlight... It's pretty easy to see what most of these much more popular questions have in common with the one we're talking about here -- as part of whatever these askers are doing, they know there's a capability embedded in a tool that's part of the environment. They just don't know how to bring it out. You could, of course, just tell them to go RTFM for awk, until they get something simple like deleting a line from a file when it matches a string you know, but then again, you could also tell people to go more carefully read the relevant documentation for most programming problems, and if you accept the question and the answer you've got relevant content people are looking for on the site and a recipe people can start learning more from.
- ayrx 12y ago
  You are clearly not a frequent user of Stack Exchange because you do not know about the meta sites which are available to discuss moderation decisions. And if you are not a frequent user who are you to say that "the moderation here is so clearly wrong that I'm not sure the people who made that call should have posting privileges on the site, let alone moderation"?
  - melling 12y ago
    That would be incorrect. I've asked hundreds of questions on SO. My complaint on Meta just got massively downvoted.
    - olavk 12y ago
      Can you post a link to one of these unfairly downvoted questions? I'm curious.
      - melling 12y ago
        It was removed from Meta. If there are archives, perhaps my user id can link back? Are the deleted messages purged? My user id from the message: user568866 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lCRrEYJ:stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp-function-to-convert-url-to-html-link+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lC...
    - collyw 12y ago
      That sounds exactly like my experience. Challenge anything on moderators, and you will be down voted to hell. Its like normal site down voting on steroids. "Do not question the mods"
lambda 12y ago
> It was a pretty good question No, this is not a good question for StackOverflow. You simply asked for someone to write code for you, which is not what StackOverflow is intended to be for. It is intended for help on a particular specific problem you are having with your own code.
- debaserab2 12y ago
  And yet there is at least one, if not two very useful answers to his supposed non-question. Thank god for these arbitrary community standards, shielding people from getting useful answers to questions that are deemed as formatted incorrectly.
- melling 12y ago
  It was a short well-defined question with given input and a specific output. Elisp isn't the most widely used language so coming up to speed could be time consuming. Someone else even starred it so they must have found it to be useful. If I'd just ask to "Calculate someone's age in C#", that'd be a much better question? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9/how-do-i-calculate-someones-age-in-c http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9/how-do-i-calculate-some...
  - maxerickson 12y ago
    It is arguably more specific. It'd be interesting if they would just register something like shitpile.com, set up an instance of Stack Exchange on it, turn off the moderation game, and push closed and deleted questions there instead of disappearing them. That would at least sort of be an experiment on whether all of the decisions they have made about what Stack Exchange sites are 'supposed to be' actually matter or not.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Now is it? It also asks basically to teach how subtraction works, which is something you should know when leaving primary school.
fapjacks 12y ago
Echoing other sentiments, this is not a good question at all. You haven't shown code that you've tried, you're not asking a specific question about the problem you're having writing such code, and (worst) you're basically asking someone to write the code for you. This is a code request, NOT a question about coding.
- melling 12y ago
  * How do I loop over an Emacs buffer and process each line? * How do I split a string in Elisp? * How do I construct output to an Emacs buffer? All were answered in a little over a dozen lines of Elisp. Small, well-defined, pieces of code are a great way to learn.
  - maaaats 12y ago
    Why didn't you ask that question, then? A general concept with many uses is useful for many, and would have stayed.
bjwbell 12y ago
I have to laugh, the question is now deleted due to your linking to it from here I'm assuming .
reneherse 12y ago
Google's cache of the now deleted page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lCRrEYJ:stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp-function-to-convert-url-to-html-link+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lC...
- wwweston 12y ago
  And, in case the cache goes when Google next indexes, here's screenshot of the cache: http://imgur.com/JLRc3tY http://imgur.com/JLRc3tY
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Apparently, the page is no longer deleted.
function_seven 12y ago
I'm getting a 404 now when I click your link. Was your question deleted after you posted this?
- melling 12y ago
  Yes, that's how they roll on StackOverflow. Hope they fixed the bug so the guy who answered the question didn't lose his points. He was upvoted 13 times.
  - function_seven 12y ago
    Well it's back up now. SO looks like it has a Wikipedia problem[1]. [1] http://www.themarysue.com/wikipedia-losing-editors/ http://www.themarysue.com/wikipedia-losing-editors/
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Apparently. That's a pretty sick move. In other words, you can't talk even about stackoverflow on another forum without stackoverflow moderators trying to take control of the discussion. Whoever did this on SO should have their moderator privileges removed pronto, that's a very bad piece of advertising for SO and hurts its image much more than the rest of this discussion and the original article combined.
olavk 12y ago
I see lots of complaining over SO moderation in this thread and other places, but the actual examples shown always turn out to very sensible moderation. For example your question is clearly not appropriate for SO. You are not asking a specific question, you are just asking people to write code for you. That somebody was nice enough to actually write your code for you, does not mean it was a good question! Now there might actually be an audience for a "write my code" website, where users could post programming tasks or homework exercises, and other developers then might try to solve them for the fun and challenge of it. But SO clearly does not want to be that kind of website.
- melling 12y ago
  The answer was 15 lines of very educational code that would have benefited anyone learning elisp.
  - olavk 12y ago
    To put it bluntly, it would have been much more educational for you if you had actually tried to code it yourself. If you during this had encountered a concrete problem or question which you couldn't solve on your own, you could have posted it on SO.
    - melling 12y ago
      But it's perfectly acceptable to ask how to split a string in C#? That's not covered many other places? It's a duplicate, yet highly up voted question. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8928601/how-can-i-split-a-string-with-a-string-delimiter http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8928601/how-can-i-split-a... There's probably 100x more C# information than elisp on the internet.
      - maaaats 12y ago
        It is highly upvoted because many people have found it useful. Contrary to your question, it's a question with many uses. >That's not covered many other places? (...) >There's probably 100x more C# information than elisp on the internet. So what?
jlarocco 12y ago
That wasn't a question at all. It was letting people know you wanted them to write code for you. If your "question" starts out, "I'd like to create...", and finishes with the expectation that else somebody will write the code for you, it's a pretty good bet you're going to get down voted.

RyanRies 12y ago

TIL the third most down-voted question on Stack Overflow has 3,735 upvotes and almost 1000 favorites.

Theodores 12y ago
I think I am definitely going to start using the '-->' operator, it is awesome! If I mix in with a few 'Yoda conditionals' then the world is really going to love my code.
vitd 12y ago
You never know - it could be a favorite because it's so hilarious!

IgorPartola 12y ago

I was expecting horrible questions, basically spam. Nope, these are real and legitimate questions and I don't see why most of these were downvoted. I wonder what the data looks like beyond just some of the worst questions, and whether the trend is going to be more and more "legitimate questions that are either 'obvious' or already answered get downvoted." If so, that cannot be a good thing.

lambda 12y ago
The actual spam and completely incoherent questions are deleted. So what you're left with is things that are actually legitimate questions, so don't merit admins intervening and deleting, but which touch a nerve in some other way; like people asking about how to send out large volumes of (presumably) unsolicited email, people asking homework questions, and the like. Also, note that some of these "most downvoted questions" are also among the most upvoted as well, having very large positive scores, like https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-name-of-the-operator https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1642028/what-is-the-name.... Once a question becomes famous enough, there are likely to be a number of contrarians who don't like it and downvote it, and eventually that can add up. And then if you look in the comments of some of them, that seems to be not too bad but which have more downvotes than you'd expect, they got a downvote brigade because they complained about a few downvotes on meta. Pretty lame that people do that, but it happens.
hurin 12y ago
Most down-voted doesn't mean it hadn't been upvoted, it just means a lot of the people looking at it thought it was a bad question. This one made me chuckle: What is the name of the “-->” operator?
- lmm 12y ago
  Before I clicked through I thought that was going to be a scalaz question.
pascal_cuoq 12y ago
These are only questions that for some reason received a lot of visibility and as a consequence were seen by more people who thought they weren't interesting. They were also seen by more people who thought they were great questions and upvoted them. The only conclusion I draw from this database query is that “most downvoted” is not an interesting metric. You are right that these are old. The only way for a question to be in the top ranks for visibility is to have had a long time to be visible over. This doesn't mean that duplicate questions do not get asked, answered and upvoted. Too much so in my opinion.

ryan-allen 12y ago

The first one I looked at, "Favourite Programming Cartoons", was a blast. But hey, we've always been at war with Eurasia.

blorgbeard 12y ago
Er, no - the question is closed, not deleted, because StackOverflow acknowledges that we have not always been at war with Eurasia. Some time between that question being asked and now, StackOverflow's community decided that they didn't want to be /r/programmerhumor

denzil_correa 12y ago

The questions which are really poor in quality end up being deleted. We did some analysis of deleted questions and our results were published at WWW 2014 [0]. The dataset of deleted questions (up until June 2013) is also publicly available [1]. We also built a machine learning system to predict questions that would be deleted in the future using various features [2]. [0] http://www2014.kr/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/proceedings_p631.pdf http://www2014.kr/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/proceedings_p63... [1] https://archive.org/details/stackoverflow_2013_05_deleted_posts_stackoverflow https://archive.org/details/stackoverflow_2013_05_deleted_po... [2] https://github.com/denzilc/stackoverflow-deleted-prediction https://github.com/denzilc/stackoverflow-deleted-prediction

ddebernardy 12y ago
Fun paper. If I may highlight, though, your sample is completely flawed: 1. The close vote queue's backlog is such that most bad questions remain open and therefor don't ever get a chance to be deleted in the first place unless (as you've noted) a moderator randomly runs into them months later. 2. A problem experienced by SO is one-off accounts: users that get question banned end up coming back for more with a new account, and leave the abandonned ones unmaintained. Where a normal user may end up deleting their downvoted questions, an abandonned account's user will not. Put another way, your sample would be a heck of a lot larger if everything that should likely get deleted would be.
- denzil_correa 12y ago
  Thanks. > If I may highlight, though, your sample is completely flawed: I would respectfully disagree. :) > The close vote queue's backlog is such that most bad questions remain open and therefor don't ever get a chance to be deleted in the first place unless (as you've noted) a moderator randomly runs into them months later. A question could be deleted even if it was not closed earlier. Closed Question is just "one way" for a question to be deleted (Refer Figure 1). In fact, only 14.38% of the questions which were deleted were marked as 'Closed' (Refer Table 6). Your intuition about "moderator random runs" was however found to be true. In case, you are suggesting that most 'closed' questions should be considered as future 'deleted' that is a call IMO would not like to make. In any case, we found that deleted questions are more poor in quality than closed questions (Refer Section 4.5 Sub section "Quality Pyramid"). In that light, it would make sense to treat them as separate entities. TL;DR - Deleted questions are beyond repair but Closed questions could be patched up > A problem experienced by SO is one-off accounts: users that get question banned end up coming back for more with a new account, and leave the abandonned ones unmaintained. Where a normal user may end up deleting their downvoted questions, an abandonned account's user will not. This may be true but it does not necessarily mean there is a problem with the dataset sample. It simply means that the problem is more challenging :) > Put another way, your sample would be a heck of a lot larger if everything that should likely get deleted would be. Since all closed questions do not get deleted, this may not necessarily be true. But, since you suggested closed questions, we had a prequel to our deleted questions paper which was about analysis and prediction of closed questions [0, 1]. You might like that as well! [0] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19882021/pdf/cosn-2013.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19882021/pdf/cosn-2013.p... [1] http://cosn.acm.org/2013/files/Session7/Session7Paper4.pdf http://cosn.acm.org/2013/files/Session7/Session7Paper4.pdf

youngButEager 12y ago

stackoverflow. S uch U niquely C harming K indly S ouls

vijayboyapati 12y ago

Sadly the Stackoverflow community seems to have become a lot more officious in the last few years and the number of petty bureaucrats has skyrocketed. I asked a genuine question which I didn't know the answer to and which I was hoping someone else may have come across. It was immediately downvoted for not having a proposed solution. Eventually it was upvoted and became positive because it was a genuinely useful question. That kind of officiousness is completely unnecessary and needlessly turns people off participating in the community.

stinos 12y ago
May I ask which part of the community, which tags? I hear a lot of these complaints here on HN about the unfriendly/bureaucratic/aggressive nature of SO but don't seem to encounter it all that much while using it. Which could mean either I'm not botered with it enough, or I really don't see it, or it's not there, for the tags I'm mostly active in (c++/labview/matlab/msbuild/c#). Is it possible there are a couple of subcommunities on HN, some (I'd guess web-related or so since that is a field I never looked into) more violent than the other.
- scrapcode 12y ago
  I'm a hobby dev of 12+ years. I've yet to find a polite IRC channel or discussion forum that offers genuine help. The online community of hackers is MUCH unlike the real-world community of hackers that you'd meet at a conference etc, in my experience. =[
  - bjwbell 12y ago
    I've been surprised by how helpful some of the devs on the mozilla #servo channel are to noobies NOT like other IRC channels I could name. In my experience smaller communities are nicer on average.
    - EduardoBautista 12y ago
      The rust community is very helpful overall.

axg 12y ago

Made a 'Most Controversial' query: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/281279/most-controversial-questions http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/281279/mos... Sorry for the bad formatting, new to SQL

nickcano 12y ago
I liked this idea, but noticed the gap between up/down votes was actually quite large, meaning the questions weren't actually that controversial. I went ahead and made a change that filtered out results where ABS(up - down) is less than half of MAX(up, down). (its quite a bit messier than that, though, as there's no MAX function in sql that selects the greater of two operands). http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/282007/most-controversial-questions http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/282007/mos...

cranklin 12y ago

perhaps this would be more useful if it calculated the lowest upvote to downvote ratio

elchief 12y ago

I was hoping the top answer to the first question would be "Send 14300 emails daily for a week"

maaaats 12y ago

Some of these questions lack context. For instance the one about neural networks looks fine now, but you should have seen how the asker behaved..

pmelendez 12y ago

It's interesting. The "Single layer neural network" question has -75 but its accepted answer has 157

SiVal 12y ago

I can't stand Stack Overflow. Quite obviously it is dominated by people who would much rather show you who's the boss by competing, not for who can provide you with the most useful answer, but by who can be first to find a reason why your question doesn't deserve an answer (and then to block anyone willing to answer from being able to do so). Yes, of course, I understand the assertion: that by attacking questioners instead of helping them, the alpha dogs are laboring selflessly to defend the quality of Stack Overflow. You should thank them for biting you. What nonsense. Imagine if Google took the SO approach to quality and prioritized making you jump through hoops with your question over trying to find the best answer it can: "your phrasing is ambiguous; if you think otherwise, you can try rephrasing your query properly and try again", or "you have misspelled one of the search terms; you should figure out which one and look up the correct spelling before submitting a search; this is, you'll agree, in everyone's best interest". Or, "not a constructive search query; might lead to pages that include opinions". Or how about, "some of the words in your query resemble those in another query made several years ago; here are their results; if their results aren't helpful to you, you should have asked a better question." Of course SO, unlike Google, stores the questions, but SO could still learn from Google's example. Google is so useful, because instead of improving quality by strictly limiting what it will index and what you can ask ("no pages expressing opinions", "index no new pages discussing any aspect of a topic if some aspect of that topic was discussed on another page already in the index", "the answer to your query has been found but will not be displayed, because it was not of interest to our moderators"), it includes as much real (not fake) content as it can and uses technology to lead any question to the most relevant answer it can. How ironic that when you use Google to find a programming answer, it so often judges some Stack Overflow entry most relevant. Then, if you follow the link, you find that someone was trying to provide exactly the answer you were looking for, but the mods spotted him, ruled that what Google had correctly deemed most relevant to be "Not Constructive!" and had forbidden anyone else from answering. I'd love to see an alternative to SO that optimized for answering questions instead of controlling them. One that allowed almost any programming question, allowed anyone who wanted to answer to freely answer, that collected reams of overlapping explanations and answers to multiple variations of programming questions, and that used state of the art technology to lead questioners to those answers that were likely to be most successful at answering your specific question, while leaving the question open to anyone who wanted to volunteer new answers, even if they are repeats or opinions, or provide their own best-guess links to previous answers.

chippy 12y ago

The mod explanation for the Neural Net question is revealing: "This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet"

DanBC 12y ago
That's a canned response. When users vote to close a question they have to pick from a list. When a question is closed the most popular reason for closing is automatically shown. I guess it tells us that people will vote to close even if a question doesn't fit into any of the close reasons, and that a previously "too broad" question would be closed as "too narrow" if you tighten it up.
- sesqu 12y ago
  That question clearly fit the canned reason for closing. It was a homework debugging question on a tight deadline.

jorjordandan 12y ago

For some reason some of these have tons of UPVOTES like the question about formatting Javascript dates. Something went wrong somewhere! Actually several of the questions have a bunch of upvotes. Certainly more than I've ever gotten on SO...

olavk 12y ago
A question need visibility to get such a large amount of downvotes. They are controversial questions which gets a high number of both up and downvotes.

biomimic 12y ago

This is actually fairly hilarious.

leereeves 12y ago

The history of the neural network question is an interesting case study in democratic moderation: http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3455660/revisions http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3455660/revisions 100,000 emails too, with many more moderators: http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3905734/revisions http://stackoverflow.com/posts/3905734/revisions

NeutronBoy 12y ago

The question about the single-layer neural networks being closed really bugs me. The entire reason Stack Overflow is so great is that that are experts there, that can answer my stupidly specific questions. If I wanted generic answers to a problem, I can Google them and find some half-assed forum post from 5 years ago.