Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/252077/321731

by tshepang • 12 years ago

197 213 12 years ago

meta.stackoverflow.com

buro93• 12 years ago

In the linked post, the difference between 1 & 2 emerge in most communities, it's the September that never ended, the inner circle pulling up the drawbridge at the sight of the hordes of outer circle people swarming in. Group 3 belong to group 2 and are hoping to jump to group 1 but just haven't managed it yet (and don't know what it takes).

The caretakers seek to either preserve things how they were, or to make it conform to some twee memory (sentimental, nostalgic imagining of how it was, which doesn't conform to reality... i.e. people imagining HN was once better even though pg showed that the quality in the past and present was similar) or unrealistic ideal.

I personally don't think the first two groups can co-exist peacefully without a degrading in the quality of the experience from the perspectives of both groups. To please either group will rub the other the wrong way.

My take is that communities work best with gated circles and steps of promotion. That there is progression.

I don't mean karma (the computer measurement of progression and merit).

I mean that this is a social problem and people solve it and not computers. That all communities are able to recognise themselves pretty well, and would organise themselves accordingly.

I mean cliques.

Cliques cannot be coded out of existence as if they are a non-meritocratic scourge. They are an entirely natural way in which people organise themselves and people will continue to organise themselves thus.

I think that attempting to apply a meritocratic measure (karma, a technical solution to a social problem) will always fail. It needs to be recognised that it's a social problem that merely needs technical tooling.

By which, I mean that these self-identified networks, hierarchies, groups, should be able to control access, visibility for their collaborative work.

In the context of Stack Overflow, it's obvious that the goal of keeping everything visible at the highest scope is to drive as many eyeballs to unanswered questions as possible. But I would argue that it is better to allow sub-communities to thrive and to allow them to control the granularity of those sub-groups... thus putting them in charge of how many eyeballs see their particular set of unanswered questions.

Just like HN, a single SO tends to be far too broad. Just like HN, SO would benefit from allowing users to create smaller groups within the larger scope to deal with ever more niche interests.

Communities don't scale, so allow them to perform their own version of cell-division to remain highly relevant to their members.

camus24• 12 years ago

I think that attempting to apply a meritocratic measure (karma, a technical solution to a social problem) will always fail.

Give one exemple of a QandA site that has a better system than stackoverflow at that scale(i insist on the latter).There is none,because nobody has done better.

Communities don't scale, so allow them to perform their own version of cell-division to remain highly relevant to their members.

Communities scale when they have strict rules that help promote civil discussions and interesting content.

yungchin• 12 years ago

Maybe nobody has, but that doesn't make it a wrong observation. As one of the answers on the OP puts it, "I spend an excessive amount of time as of late trying to find a question that interests me enough to do the research to answer it." Karma SO-style doesn't solve that. I think buro9 has some really interesting ideas that might.

buro93• 12 years ago

That's the wrong question. Plus you've precluded any ability for me to answer with an example as "at that scale" requires something equal or bigger within the limited Q&A space.

The reason it's the wrong question is that Q&A is merely one form of communication that can exist within a community.

Conversations (forums) are another.

News/Link/Image sharing (the reddits, HNs, Diggs, Slashdot, etc) are another.

Even e-commerce has communities (through reviews and recommendations - Amazon reviews are an example).

Communities are merely groups of people that have a shared interest and agree to use some form of communication to collaborate around that interest.

I would argue that Reddit is a great example of a community that allows the type of division I describe (through subreddits).

Reddit shows that by doing so that they are able to keep the quality very high with a low and highly varied moderation policy at every applicable level of scope.

Communities don't scale. But providing tools that allow them to naturally divide into smaller communities increases the total size of that group of communities whilst retaining a high quality and low moderation effort within each area.

Edit:

You've edited to add another line, but maybe you want to read this: http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html (Audiences scale, communities don't) .

Also, I think the Tragedy of the Commons applies http://dieoff.org/page95.htm and on Kuro5hin back in the day that argument was made fairly well and relates to the problems of scaling a community: http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2002/1/17/21155/1564/46#46

collyw7• 12 years ago

Give one exemple of a QandA site that has a better system than stackoverflow at that scale(i insist on the latter).There is none,because nobody has done better.

Ok, its not at the same scale, because it has a narrower focus, but PerlMonks is better for Perl questions and encourages the sort of discussion that SO hates. (It probably does have as many Perl specific questions as SO though).

The styling is kind of outdated now, but the content is better. Unfortunately it is Perl specific, and I am mainly using Python these days. You would look up how to do something and come away with more knowledge of the language and reason why things are done, rather than getting just enough material to copy paste until your code works.

rjtavares• 12 years ago

I wonder if a clique based karma method would work. You would be assigned to a clique based on your voting and posting history, and then see the karma attributed by that clique.

fzltrp• 12 years ago

At first, it seems that the needed data is already there: karma points are associated with tags, so it should be possible to set answering, voting, modding threshold based on the questions tags, though one would have to decide which tags are valid for a given question. And then there are subtopics: if I post a question on functional programming for instance, should a more specialized developer benefit from his clojure karma to gain privileges? Should it be a ratio? And then, if I update the question to focus solely on lisp, what happens of previous actions performed on now invalid privileges?

arethuza• 12 years ago

Having something like the Geek Code of ancient Internet times might be fun to auto-generate from user submissions to HN:

http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html

minikomi• 12 years ago

10 points for hufflepuff! (Might be fun, actually.)

dasil003• 12 years ago

Saying that Group 3 is a subset of Group 2 misunderstands the fundamental nature of Group 2. Help Vampires are a well understood phenomenon that predates Stack Overflow and even the web. It has to do with the fundamentally difficult nature of programming. There is a large subset of people who want to learn to program, but place a very low value on other peoples time, and see communities like SO as a free resource to the point that they expend next to no effort actually thinking and researching their problem. The worst part is when you give them an answer it does lead to critical thinking, but rather feeds their assumption that programming is about reciting the magic incantation which is easily obtained by asking a guru with a large memory of such incantations. In short, you don't want to encourage these people because they are just at a time sink that benefits no one (not even themselves).

dec0dedab0de• 12 years ago

In short, you don't want to encourage these people because they are just at a time sink that benefits no one

I have learned things by answering questions for people who were unable, or unwilling to do the research themselves. It's the most beneficial when its a topic I am familiar with, but have not had the need to actually try myself.

s_baby• 12 years ago

How am I supposed to research a problem if every other search result is a closed SO thread? I'm being hyperbolic but SO closed content hitting the top searches is also waste of everyone's time.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

Cliques cannot be coded out of existence as if they are a non-meritocratic scourge. They are an entirely natural way in which people organise themselves and people will continue to organise themselves thus.

Hiding HN usernames for 48 hours would help eliminate any HN clique. (I don't think there is a clique, but if there was this would be a simple enough fix.)

jzwinck• 12 years ago

It's true: Stack Overflow has changed. It's not bad (yet?), but it is different. The discussion on the linked page focuses a lot on bad questions, and there are plenty. But it's also much, much harder to ask good questions. To some extent the site is a victim of its own success: whereas I used to ask a basic question [1] and get several up-votes and a good answer, now I ask a basic question [2] and get almost as many down-votes as up-votes, plus the answers themselves get as many down-votes as up-votes, including some answers I actually liked but the community decided were so bad they couldn't just leave them at 0, they had to push them down to -1 and into the leper colony. Tons of comments and answers insist I had an XY problem [3] when I did not.

Some of it is because "The good questions have all been asked and answered," and some of it is that the legitimate complaints about absurdly low-quality questions have gotten people into such a mood that a so-so question from a veteran user makes them spend their own reputation to down-vote each others' answers.

Stack Overflow has an XY problem: the real problem is that a lot of questions are just bad because the barrier to entry has remained too low for too long, but it thinks the problem is the XY problem.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/q/148951/

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/q/22856977/

[3] http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem

camus24• 12 years ago

Loving SO. One of the best moderated site in the world. Yes it's not perfect but i've yet to see a site as big as SO with a better moderation,given all the crap that get posted and fortunatly moderated.

One thing i wish I could do is to star a question in the question listing without visiting the actual question,so i can pick it up later,like a quick bookmark.Also i'd like to see more questions per page.

blisterpeanuts• 12 years ago

I second that. I've found SO extremely useful.

I have noticed some of the issues mentioned by others, like the overly zealous duplicate hunters and brainless comebacks like "You shouldn't do it that way". That's just line noise to me. I fast forward past it and find answers that save me hours of time.

It seems that someone out there has already asked nearly every question I come up with. There's not always an answer that I can use, but at least it's good to see someone else formulating my question a little differently.

I guess I don't really fit into the OP's 1-4 categories. I'm just a person who finds SO useful about once a week or so. I don't have the time or the deep knowledge to be answering questions on a daily basis and racking up huge karma. Just thankful the service exists, and have put in my 2 cents a few times when I had something useful to contribute.

andreyf• 12 years ago

I don't think "keeping the site clean", as the linked author mentions, should be the goal of moderators, with the exception of obvious spam or questions so confusing they don't make sense.

Moderators who close questions they deem as "dirty" questions on SO (e.g. my question here [1]), remind me of the Wikipedia moderators who delete an article I'm explicitly looking for as not notable enough to be on the site.

I wonder if their psychological motivations are similar, as well.

1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14779751/how-do-i-change...

maaaats2• 12 years ago

No moderators were involved in the closing of your question, just normal users above 2-3k (can't remember) in rep.

captainmuon6• 12 years ago

Yeah, I think that's what he meant. The problem are often not the actual `moderators` in the strict sense of the word, but the moderating community members, the "hall monitors" of the site.

oneeyedpigeon11• 12 years ago

That question is clearly not a programming question and, therefore, not suitable for a programming q&a forum. I think the moderators got it right on this occasion. You could argue that SO should be for all kinds of questions, or all kinds of questions that are anything to do with computers, but the founders chose to handle that with other sites in the Stack Exchange network.

userbinator• 12 years ago

That question is clearly not a programming question

Not programming? When the first and only answer contains JavaScript code? Looks like SO has a rather odd definition of "programming".

I don't use SO myself but often stumble across interesting bits of info on there from Google, and also a lot of the puzzling "is this really off-topic?" questions. That's mainly what put me off from registering and participating, even to answer someone else's question/leave a comment - the community looks far too rigidly moderated for my taste.

maaaats2• 12 years ago

What I think is the problem is actually the SE way of never giving notifications for bad stuff, only for good stuff. Your questions are silently closed or edited, your bad "suggested edits" are silently discarded etc.. So a lot of users do, and continue to do, "bad" stuff because they don't know they're supposed to do differently.

This means that single users act up, directly towards the offenders of the rules. This creates a lot of drama. I think that shouldn't be necessary, it's the job of the system, not single users to notify them about bad behavior.

JeremyBanks• 12 years ago

I agree, but you do get notifications for edits to your posts.

SeanDav• 12 years ago

SO is brilliant for classes of questions that have black/white type answers and infuriating for almost any question that has an "it depends" somewhere in the answer. Unfortunately many legitimate and serious programming/technology questions can only be answered with "it depends" and "this is my opinion".

For example: "Should I use NoSQL or an ACID based approach to my xyz development issue?" This is the type of issue that is common and without an explicit answer and is the type of question that will be closed because it requires an opinion or may lead to arguments.

It is almost unbelievable to me the number of times I have found great information in SO questions/answers that have been closed by some mod for the above reasons.

josephlord• 12 years ago

I wonder if it would work if they were left open but marked norep and allowed voting etc. but did not count towards Karma scores or scaled to a much reduced level.

camus24• 12 years ago

It's an interesting question but it has no place on SO,it's open ended and ask for a recommendation.

It depends on too many factors to encourage an accurate aOnly you knows your requirements.

a good SO question is accurate,non trivial,with a reproducible test case.

Why dont you try Quora instead?Quora is made for that type of question.I'm personally not interested in Quora as I find its content quality quite poor.

mlangdon3• 12 years ago

I love the 'try quora' advice. 'Not enjoying running our gauntlet? Maybe trying swimming in this rain filled dumpster? I wouldn't.'

Morgawr• 12 years ago

Why dont you try Quora instead?Quora is made for that type of question.I'm personally not interested in Quora as I find its content quality quite poor.

I think you answered your own question yourself.

captainmuon6• 12 years ago

What makes it incredibly bad is that if you ask for advice, your question is closed. But if you ask a simple question, people often think you are stupid and question your intentions and give you unsolicited advice.

What I do nowadays is to pretend to be stupid, "I have the xyz issue, how do I do that with MySQL", and usually someone will comment that I should really be using a NoSQL solution, or how to do it in a relational database.

Example: I was looking for a canvas library for Gtk. (A canvas library gives you "retained mode" drawing, you say "here is a rectangle, there is a circle", and they stay there and you can manipulate them later on. Its the opposite of "immediate mode" where you have a paint handler that redraws the screen each time. It has nothing to do with HTML5 Canvas.) There are a couple of Gtk canvas libraries, but most of them seem no longer developed and they have various issues. Its also very confusing since some are named very similarly. I posted a nice, informed question asking what libraries are out there that fulful certain criteria, and are still maintained. The question was closed in 5 minutes, and later even deleted. A few days later I posted another question, pretending to be clueless, asking "where is the canvas widget in Gtk? I know there is one but I can't make it work". Then, I got helpful comments like "AFAIK there is none built in, but I recommend this library...". The irony is that the non-deleted question is not very helpful to anybody, but the original one would have been an excellent reference.

When you have to jump through silly hoops to ask your question, something is clearly wrong with the community.

rwentk• 12 years ago

If you build 'Your question is bad and you are bad for asking it' into your constitution instead of finding a more constructive solution for noise, bad things will happen.

The principle that closing questions avoids arguments is causing serious arguments. :) So - yes, something is broken.

SO needs to decide if it's:

1. A Wiki-like repository of canonical solutions to common coding problems.

2. A mentoring network for professionals.

3. A mentoring and training network for amateurs/students with wildly varying degrees of actual clue and potential clue.

4. A social network for people who like talking about code.

5. A way for coders to advertise their skills to employers.

6. An industry forum for debate about best practices.

At the moment different users are expecting different things from it - which is never going to work, because those goals are mutually exclusive.

SO might be saved if it splits into different sub-forms with explicit cultural differences and user backgrounds.

Also - code academy schools with principles like 'no feigned surprise' and 'don't be a dick' have a lead on this. It's possible SO would have worked better with those principles from the start.

shagie4• 12 years ago

You might want to look at Stack Overflow's younger sibling(? child? cousin?) - http://programmers.stackexchange.com/ which is intended for the design type questions rather than the code type questions.

Realizing that these softer questions are very likely to stray into the discussion and debate realm the caretaker community of programmers.se can be very active in closing the questions (also with only ~50 questions/day, one can look at every question each day).

The exact phrasing of the "Should I use NoSQL or an ACID based approach..." question would likely run into this and cite the Gorilla vs Shark blog post ( http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/08/gorilla-vs-shark/ ) and close the question as a recommendation question.

However, if you went through and wrote it "Here is my problem, here is my design, here are the potential issues that I see with that design, would switching the database from A to B solve these issues without creating worse new ones?" it would likely be a question that remains open.

Programmers.SE really does try for a higher threshold of quality than stack overflow in that with higher quality questions it is possible to attract people who will give high quality answers.

One bit to note is that with a small amount of reputation on any stack exchange site, someone can get into the chat part of the site (the minimum rep is to keep the spammers out) where discussions are completely appropriate.

All of the Stack Exchange sites are designed around the "problem and solution" model. Furthermore, the model was designed to avoid some issues of the scale of community by making discussion difficult and not appropriate. To that end, I'd suggest reading A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

Much of the problems that Stack Overflow in particular is facing (compared to the smaller stack exchange sites) is a clash between the core group (read that group article) and the endless september.

It saddens me, but I do believe the endless september is winning in that the core group lacks the numbers or the tool to properly defend itself within the system.

akirk2• 12 years ago

I believe that there should be a higher burden for beginners to ask their question, before it can go live.

New users need to prove that they have done research, this can be done with a few questions like "name the three google search terms that you have used to find a solution", "how much time did you spend on researching?" (easily faked, but maybe it gives people a hint to step back and try harder).

There could also be a new-user queue where higher reputation users would review a question (but are unable to answer it) before it can go live, with the possibility to go back and forth before the question goes online.

In my blog post I have detailed what I'd propose: http://alexander.kirk.at/2014/04/26/stack-overflow-ways-out-...

captainmuon6• 12 years ago

I don't know... I'm not bothered at all by new users or dumb questions. What bothers me are experienced users questioning my intentions, being patronizing and thinking I am dumb. I have to include a disclaimer with almost every second question: "Yes, I know what I am doing. No, I am not suffering from the XY problem. No, I will not treat you answer as legal advice. Yes, I have tried to solve the problem on my own. Here is a bunch of useless code to prove I am worthy of getting an answer." If I don't do that, I'll get - within seconds - comments like "show what you have done" or "don't do that! what are you actually trying to achive!"

The other thing is that, increasingly, the kind of questions that would a) help me and b) I could answer with expertise are the kind of questions that are banned on the various SE sites. SE has ceased being useful to me a while ago.

akirk2• 12 years ago

I think the being patronized is an effect of the flood of the huge amount low quality. It is assumed that you did little to no research because this is the case most of the times.

What kind of question are you referring to that are banned?

berdario• 12 years ago

I fully agree with the first paragraph.

This issue is compounded by the flood of naive questions: patronizing users will thus spend less time reading decently written questions/answers/comments, and their reading comprehension will suffer from that. End result: even if you posted something that was actually helpful, you can easily get downvoted.

Theodores2• 12 years ago

I sometimes indulge in accepting/rejecting proposed edits to questions. What amazes me is the suggested edits where woeful English goes ignored and yet some code gets formatted. Naturally I then feel obliged to make an edit of my own. Typically I put some paragraphs in, sprinkle in some punctuation, remove the 'plz hlp' from the end and so on. Then I click whatever the 'save' button is to find out that the suggested edits have already been accepted. So low-quality English is obviously fine then!!!

I am also surprised at how many suggested edits are anti-pattern. Quite often there will be a question where the original starts with 'I am...' and someone has suggested changing that to 'I'm...'. Er.. No!!! It would truly annoy me if my own questions (written 'BBC Style Guide') were reduced to pigeon English in such soul destroying ways.

Added to your proposal, and wherever you are able to get with it, something simple can be done with the questions at time of entry. Much like the BBC has a Style Guide for their journalists to live by, so should Stack Overflow. There should also be some basic checks against it when someone asks a question. If the question contains 'plz' as a word and it is not in a code block then that should trigger some 'read the style guide before you ask questions' response.

I do understand that the site is for everyone regardless of ability with written English, however, a little note saying "in formal English we use 'I am...' instead of 'I'm...'" would actually be useful to know for anyone that does not have English as their first language.

Let's take a real world example:

Hello I started making an aplication on adroid, it's a simble BMI Calculator. The aplication has 2 activities (Main with a menu, and BMICalculator with the widgets).

That opening 'Hello' and the spellinz of adenoids and thimble should just make this question an instant reject. Plain and simple.

Next real world example:

my if query doesn't work. I'm always getting the invalid class. No matter if the file is an jpeg, png or txt.

Suggested edit has added extra code to provide some context.:

my if query doesn't work. I'm always getting the invalid class. No matter if the file is an jpeg, png or txt.

$('#some-input-file').change(function(e) {

This is a useful contribution, but the start of the question should be 'My' and not 'my'. This is basic primary school English that has been ignored.

So, to conclude, a lot of SO problems are garbage in, garbage out. A little bit of English language grammar and spelling - as has existed in basic versions of Word since the Windows 2.0 days - would help out enormously.

lilsunnybee• 12 years ago

This sounds like exactly the type of pedantry that is dragging down Stack Overflow.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

An elegant example of why SO fucking sucks for many users.

captainmuon6• 12 years ago

Expanded from a comment I left:

I think he is missing a camp, to which I'd count myself: 5. Those users who visit the site to solve their problems, and who like to help others.

Like 1 they want to have nice content on the site, but their number one criterion is "is it helpful (and civil)"? They don't care much about "is objective/it a good match for SE/constructive" and are frustrated by the wikipedia-like deletionism of 1. They would enjoy and benefit from even the "worst cardinal sin" kind of questions, like "What is the best node.js framework as of early 2014?". (The question would have many answers and would be a bit messy, but a novice could quickly gauge what frameworks there are, which ones are popular, and around which ones there is controversy.)

They dont't care much about 2 ("help vampires"), answer the questions if it is not much effort, otherwise ignore them. They don't like the term, and absolutely hate it when 1 accuses them of being one. It is incredibly rude when one closes your question for supposedly being "homework".

They don't care about 3 ("rep whores") either, and find the grudge of 1 against 3 silly. Let them have the rep they can get, if they're having fun and contributing useful content! Like 3, they enjoy getting rep (or XP), and try to unlock new features on the site, but isn't that the point of gamification?

Basically, these are the people who also care about the site and the community, but are less obsessive and deletionist (I'm looking for a less offensive word for anal-retentive...) than the vocal majority on SO and Wikipedia.

gnaffle2• 12 years ago

Agreed. There is a real problem that Stack Overflow comes out on top if you Google for most of the "best X framework/library/... for Y" questions.

Thus, many if not most of my encounters with SO are with closed, marked-as-offtopic questions that are still often the best resource to get an overview of the available alternatives.

I would love for someone to sift through the SO dataset for such questions and create a new, separate community catering to this specific need.

mlangdon3• 12 years ago

As is usually mentioned on the "Take my SO, please" discussions on HN, there is a site for that[1], which I usually forget about when I have that type of question.

[1] http://www.slant.co

xxs2• 12 years ago

my default searches include -stackoverflow

sparkie• 12 years ago

I'd count myself in that group, which is why I rarely use the site anymore. I'm in 4 because 1 forces me to be - every time I'm answering a nice question that doesn't follow "THE RULES", it's closed before I have chance.

Robadob• 12 years ago

I'd have to agree with this, my most often route to stack overflow is from googling to solving my own problems, then occasionally I'll checkout my favourite tags to see if there's anything I can give back in return. On the rare occasion I ask a question on Stack Overflow, they're normally too specific and don't receive any comments/answers/upvotes/downvotes.

phaemon2• 12 years ago

their number one criterion is "is it helpful (and civil)"? They don't care much about "is objective/it a good match for SE/constructive"

Then why don't they go to one of the million Q&A sites that don't have those restrictions? Oh, wait, is it perhaps because they don't have anywhere near as good content?

The very fact that out of SO's restrictions has emerged what is generally regarded as the best Q&A site that exists, might suggest it would be a bad idea to change it, simply because some people get upset that their questions suck.

captainmuon6• 12 years ago

There are other Q&A sites?! Quora and Yahoo answers has a different audience. Quora has an annoying sign-up policy and uses real names, and Yahoo made absolutely no effort in getting quality content. ExpertSexchange is dead and/or costs money, I don't know. I haven't found any others.

What I'm asking for is a site with the SE engine, where the most important criteria for posts are helpfulness and civility. Everything that is not helpful or not civil gets removed. People who are snarky and/or deletionist are not welcome there. If you apply these criteria, all the other "Q&A" sites fail.

It's not that yahoo and expertsexchange were full of "helpful and civil but not constructive answers", and failed because of that. They suffered from poorly-written, nonsensical posts.

cookiecaper• 12 years ago

Stack Overflow has definitely given better organization to the corpus of data borne of programmer on-the-fly discovery and for that I and all programmers are grateful, but SO has made some serious mistakes that have hamstrung it.

First, the reputation system is inadequate and there are many people who game it. SO tried some interesting things, but "accepted answers" and the push to accept answers has always sucked. It rewards rapid-fire, crappy responses instead of thorough ones. You'll often find people just copying the page summary from Google or some other tiny snippet of text without context so that they could post first and get the "accepted answer" checkmark and the upvotes that come from the short time at the top of the page. Someone else will take 20-30 minutes to type out a thorough, good response that considers ramifications and end up with nothing. There's no way to recognize multiple answers, so if multiple answers contain valuable information you have to pick one to favor. There's also no way to deprecate answers if new versions break things; the best you can hope for is that the OP will know about the change, remember giving that answer one day, and go back and edit it. You can't change acceptances once awarded, and some people will accept answers without even trying them.

Those basic flaws in the contrived reputation system have caused problems on SO since day one and deterred many good contributors who weren't interested in racing against amateurs who just wanted to copy and paste answers.

Second-most damaging imo is the aggressive insistence on moving everything to other StackExchange sites and everything becoming a closed or karmaless ("community wiki") question on SO. A lot of relevant things were killed off on SO and moved to obscure StackExchanges where they never got a good answer. This deterred contribution, especially on questions that were cross-disciplinary as your question would get stuck in a loop where moderators on SO would say "this should be on SuperUser" and moderators on SU would say "this should be on StackOverflow". Really it'd work fine on either. I think that part of why this got so out of hand was another component of the reputation system, that automatically gave those most likely to race to Google and copy and paste the first result moderation powers. If you give people shiny new toys, they'll want to use them, and you'll end up with a lot of unnecessary infractions being filed and stifling communication.

On top of all of that, a large reason SO even gained any popularity in the first place was the star power of Joel Spolsky. With such serious flaws in reputation systems, I'm honestly not sure that it would've gotten off the ground if not for his association.

I don't know that SO is ever going to grow out of these problems as they probably now feel their rep system is validated (falsely believing the rep system caused the site's success instead of acknowledging that the site is successful despite the rep system), and I think they've just relied on new people entering the groups outlined in this post. I don't know that they're going to run out of those people anytime soon, but it'll be interesting to see what happens.

erikb2• 12 years ago

Most of my upvotes come from years old questions and well written answers not from the first view interactions when the question is still on the top of the new ones. If you relax more, look for really good questions and take your time to answer them you will find that the questions aren't googleable, that you really need to put in time to find a good answer, etc. And you will see that even years later you still get upvotes for them.

everyone2• 12 years ago

As someone who has learned to program and embarked on a career as a game developer in the past few years I found stack overflow to be invaluable. I was, and still am, certainly a 2 (help vampire) If I encountered something I didnt understand or could not get working I would often post a question there. I was amazed at how helpful the 3s (repwhores) were. Their answers saved me a lot of time and accelerated my learning, though I have to say I was quite baffled by how helpful they were, I always wondered how people had time to be answering questions there.

Anyway I think for the purposes of learning programming nowadays this help vampire / repwhore relationship is very pragmatic, also I think it is the most important function of the site (1s be damned!) to help people learn.

I've found learning programming that often the initial learning curve is quite steep, and there is often not any proper documentation for things nowadays, there are things you could never figure out yourself and in those cases you just need to be pointed in the right direction by someone who knows.

Here is an example of a "bad" question I asked. It got downvoted, with snarky comments and answers but I dont care + it was very helpful for me mainly because in one of the comments someone mentioned the word "easing". It turns out What I was doing was easing but I just didnt know that word, learning that this kind of stuff is called "easing" was a huge help as now that I know what its called I can just search for resources on it. Theres no way I would have been able to figure out that these things are called "easing" by myself

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22070187/making-a-sine-wa...

TillE• 12 years ago

The reason you were given for closing the question is terrible ("lacks sufficient information", what?), but you were basically asking a simple math question on a programming site.

This is the trouble with being too specific. It's often better to say: here's what I want to do and why, what's the best way to accomplish that? Describe your actual problem first, before getting into your attempted solution.

oneeyedpigeon11• 12 years ago

Definitely better suited to the math stack exchange site, I would have thought

Karunamon• 12 years ago

It's often better to say: here's what I want to do and why, what's the best way to accomplish that?

Sounds like a great way to get your question torpedoed by overzealous moderators for being "not a good fit" since there's not a direct answer and it will "invite debate".

mlangdon3• 12 years ago

This is the fundamental problem that forces me to come back to SO and face the snark, though admittedly less and less. Having such a limited understanding of a new (to me) problem niche that I don't even know what words to search with. I keep wanting to ask _that_ question, maybe on programmers. How do you approach a problem when the real problem is just not knowing the specialized language?

watwut• 12 years ago

Google various sentences until you stumble upon something that contains the right search words. Then search for that right words.

For example, the above link stack overflow question with "easing" in it would be pure gold.

everyone2• 12 years ago

Oh no! Hackernews people are obviously upvoting it now, now its not as good an example of the negativity, lol!

erikb2• 12 years ago

I am also a caretaker (not on SO but in the communities I join) and therefore I think I can say that caretakers are not really the best of the four. We often overdo things, get too much involved, too much heated up, which doesn't decrease the stress and doesn't create a healthy atmosphere at all.

Also there are two more groups Mystikal doesn't see in his ambitions. One is the group of people who come from time to time to ask or answer some questions, moderate a little, just have fun and learn something. And there are also the people who actually work (I mean for money) to keep the community going. These people often are just interested to calm everything down. I think these two groups should not be underestimated because often they are the reason it didn't break completely. They don't need to voice their opinion to every single post, so they are not as visible. But they also don't have beef with anybody and they provide actual content most of the time, because that's the only reason they came in the first place.

marcus_holmes2• 12 years ago

I always wondered if this point would come.

Because there's no method of recycling karma from people who have left the community, there must be a source of new karma that will allow new members of the community to take part in the community.

Since the only way of creating karma is to answer questions, this means there must be a constant stream of new questions sufficient to provide karma for all the new people.

But new technologies aren't being generated fast enough to provide a constant stream of new questions that can be answered easily enough to generate the stream of new karma required.

So we see duplicate questions being answered instead of being marked as duplicate because answering them creates karma but flagging them as duplicate doesn't. Only the existing moderators, who have "enough" karma, care about flagging duplicates.

So we end up here, by design.

astrobe_• 12 years ago

That's an interesting point of view for the "karma economy" angle; I believe there's always enough karma sources, or rather there's always ways to create them if the scope of the site is wide enough. I would push the idea a bit further and introduce karma destruction. To me, the most useful way to destroy karma points is to introduce a karma-based site subscription; that is, one subscribes to the site in order to read/write it but there is a constant fee of N karma points per day. User contributions are tipped with karma points taken from the upvoter/downvoter's karma pool. Eventually, one may let user buy free access (but not karma points directly otherwise it becomes a plutocratic system) in order get some support money.

marcus_holmes2• 12 years ago

Or they could award karma for doing things that keep the community as they want it. Like flagging duplicates, tidying up code examples, etc.

Karma Economics... I like it :)

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

Another option would be for karma to evaporate over time. You'd have to stay current, and if there simply wasn't enough fresh content being produced, then relative rankings would renormalize over time.

btilly4• 12 years ago

I am in a 5th camp. I like going for interesting discussion.

However after having people from group 1 decide that the discussion that I wanted was happening on off topic questions. There was one particular case where group 1, the moderation nazis, decided that the question was "off topic" and should be deleted. After I complained about it here, people went and voted it back into existence. But I've been pretty close to inactive there since once I'd had that taste of moderation and realized that, as far as the site was concerned, the moderation nazis were mostly correct - the kind of algorithm questions that I found fun were off topic.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11314077/algorithm-for-ex... for the particular question that lead to my getting frustrated with the site.

ericb• 12 years ago

I left for the same reason. I wish someone would open a competitor where we could have these discussions.

LunaSea• 12 years ago

Wouldn't Quora be an alternative for subjective / vague questions ?

Cederfjard2• 12 years ago

I think the question mentioned above would fit in at http://cstheory.stackexchange.com, wouldn't it?

oneeyedpigeon11• 12 years ago

That post was closed, 'incorrectly', then reopened a day later. It has a great answer. What's your complaint - this seems to be an example of the community working almost perfectly.

Edit: ok, I see your point, but you don't know that that wouldn't have happened anyway.

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

the kind of algorithm questions that I found fun were off topic

But what is on-topic? After seeing pretty much every interesting/useful question I encountered on SO "closed as not constructive", I just can't piece in my head what questions are OK.

The only ones that come to my mind that seems to be on-topic are the kind of "I'm too lazy to try and debug things for 5 minutes, so I need to ask on the Internet" kind.

Bahamut• 12 years ago

Sometimes I wonder whether people are more interested in making an effort to help people or badmouth/downvote them on SO.

I help people often on IRC with dev questions (so much so that I was given ops in a particular channel for a library), and it is kept professional for the most part - no badmouthing, no matter how simple the question. Just trying to figure out people's problems and giving them advice. SO seems to fail to do that often, and that's why I'm not interested in contributing.

jfc4• 12 years ago

When I first started programming, I could use SO without asking a question because everything I needed to know was fairly basic. It was great because many of the answers I came across helped me to understand more of the "broader universe" of issues I would encounter during development, and so encouraged me to research and learn more about the language.

Once I started asking questions, I was careful to respond to comments and accepted and upvoted the best answers. I wanted to be a good citizen of the community. And reciprocity was a part of that: eventually, I found myself able to respond to questions and I remember how great it felt to see the first +25 on my profile because someone accepted my answer.

These days, if I ask a question it's because I've spent a good amount of time on it and haven't been able to resolve it myself. Here's what happens when I ask a question on SO:

1 - I ask the question, post the code, and the error message I'm getting

2 - Question downvoted

3 - Respond to comment that says my question is a duplicate (it's not, which I clarify to avoid "closed as duplicate")

4 - Respond to comment about a missing semicolon that got deleted when I was cutting/pasting/formatting my code. (Despite the error msg making it clear that the missing semicolon isn't the issue)

5 - Question upvoted

6 - An answer! Says that I need to read the docs and provides a link to a non-relevant section (I've read the docs)

7 - Finally, a helpful answer! Looks pretty good, so I test it out and it does the job. I accept and upvote the answer.

8 - Notice a duplicate answer posted less than 1 minute after the accepted answer. Duplicate answer person complains that their entry was posted first. I advise them that the timestamp indicates the other poster was first and they reply that it is a time zone bug.

9 - Later I check back and notice this message: "Question closed as vague and cannot be answered"

10 - Check back one more time and see that someone has downvoted my question

11 - Email the mods to get the downvote removed

chris_wot4• 12 years ago

I once saw a question about the delete statement on the END of a C++ function (a C++11 feature) and it was closed as being to broad in terms of geography.

jfc4• 12 years ago

That's crazy. I haven't seen the geography message yet, but I did post a bash question once and someone closed it because it "wasn't about programming."

Shog94• 12 years ago

Yeah, that was the "Too Localized" reason - it was actually aimed more at things like "where's the error in this 500-line code dump?" but... uh, no one understood that. So we got rid of it about a year ago.

There is a small but vocal population of users who will use any excuse to close questions they already know the answer to, regardless of how clearly-written or novel they are. That's... kinda insane, but in a community-moderated system there's a bit of a learning curve for everyone, including those moderating. If you see something that strikes you as wholly inappropriate (e.g., a good question closed for a bs reason, not a bad question closed for the wrong reason), don't hesitate to bring it up on meta for review: http://meta.stackoverflow.com

aptwebapps• 12 years ago

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

rartichoke• 12 years ago

I wouldn't sweat it too much.

I've also noticed that really in depth questions with a lot of code examples and explanations doesn't help either because then they get no responses or votes.

It's funny when you're asked to supply detail but when you supply detail no one replies because they can't be bothered to spend 4 minutes reading the setup/code details.

pekk4• 12 years ago

Because tacitly the point is to stand around jumping on newbies or people you perceive to be doing things wrong.

If you can't quickly get that gratification you just move along to the next guy who left out a semicolon that wasn't germane to his question. Who has time to deal with other people's real problems?

rtpg• 12 years ago

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

platz• 12 years ago

A lot of times one sees results like then when asking open-ended or subjective questions on SO, when SO is intended to be more like a wikipedia or a knowledge store of objective solutions to problems.

Joel has spilled much ink on how SO is not a site for free form discussion. Discourse was created for that.

Some frustration may occur when one realizes that certain kinds of problems or exploration are best suited to free-form discussion - those discussions need to happen on channels other than SO then.

* edit - corrected Discourse attribution.

michh• 12 years ago

I especially hate having to be so defensive.

E.g. in phrasing my question, specifically having to mention a whole bunch of things that obviously aren't the problem but people are going to insist on anyway unless I've already mentioned them myself.

Or the whole "Well, you shouldn't be doing this in the first place so I'm not going to help you with your actual problem".

It can be incredibly helpful to point this out. But often I'm doing things in a certain way for a reason (constraints that aren't relevant for the question, like "yeah but our entire codebase").

So when I say I'm doing it this way for a reason and looking for a way to make it work, either trust my judgment or decide I don't deserve to be helped and stop commenting. But it often ends up being a massive distracting derail preventing others from trying to answer the question I was actually asking in the first place. Most annoyingly, this behaviour is often rewarded with upvotes.

For example:

"I can't connect to my database due to error 110, I have no idea what that means"

"Why aren't you using an ORM?"

"I have good reason not to, besides, I'm just looking to fix error 110 now"

"But a good ORM handles these types of errors for you, it'd be stupid not to use it"

"You're probably right, but that'd require a lot of rewriting and refactoring and that's simply not an option right now"

"Ok, get back to me when you're actually using an ORM and still having trouble with your database"

when all I'm looking for is "That's a connection timeout, tried checking your firewall configuration?"

jfc4• 12 years ago

So when I say I'm doing it this way for a reason and looking for a way to make it work, either trust my judgment or decide I don't deserve to be helped and stop commenting. ...Most annoyingly, this behaviour is often rewarded with upvotes.

Totally agree with this. I can't stand it when people start mucking about in the comments. It's almost as if they are looking for something to do, and then feed off of each other. Eventually, all the activity draws the attention of a super-zealot, who promptly closes the question.

dictum• 12 years ago

Or the whole "Well, you shouldn't be doing this in the first place so I'm not going to help you with your actual problem".

I call it the MacRumors Forums/Apple Discussions syndrome:

"Why would you WANT to hold your iPhone this way?"

"What kind of moron would want to keep using their 5-year old Mac?"

"Why are you trying to export this file? Just create a copy by hand, duh."

"No, this can't be done. Terminal? No, don't use it. Here be dragons."

stelonix• 12 years ago

I couldn't agree more. I've gone on and on endless rants on how people in the computer science/software engineering field (including but not limited to SO users) usually avoid "unusual" questions by asking what is it exactly you're trying to do, instead of being objective and answering.

When I've decided to post on SO, it means I've failed miserably at finding a solution on the internet and it's usually a very unusual question. I'm sure there's a nice design pattern I could be using or there's a different, more standard way to do it, but I do not post on SO as a newbie in the field (or at least I avoid such questions).

My solution to avoid that kind of answer is to open my post giving all the reasons why I'm not doing it the usual way (for example, why I'm using plain WINAPI instead of MFC, .NET or whatever newer technology is out there). I still get suggestions I'm doing The Wrong Thing ™[0] though.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9199542/disabling-visual...

EDIT: After posting this, the comment linked in [0] seems to be removed, but it was something along the lines of "Any reason you want your app to look old? :)"

mkartic• 12 years ago

Its like how you're asked to restart your computer everytime you call the support with an issue.

theycallmemorty• 12 years ago

The worst is "Tell your boss that the way you're doing it is wrong and you should use an ORM"

nhebb• 12 years ago

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

frik2• 12 years ago

That's a really good idea! Let's hope SO implements it soon.

carrotleads3• 12 years ago

and I believe downvoting is not helpful and gives pissed off people the ability to influence outcomes.

Upvotes by themselves should be enough to bring the best posts forward. IMO this is true for HN too.

piokuc• 12 years ago

I feel assessing if a question is novice, intermediate or advanced is too subjective to be practical, but it would be interesting to see if it works, anyway.

daphneokeefe• 12 years ago

But isn't everyone's question "advanced"? Who's gonna self-identify as "novice"?

RivieraKid• 12 years ago

These days, if I ask a question it's because I've spent a good amount of time on it and haven't been able to resolve it myself.

Same for me. Here's how my questions end up:

- With an actual, good answer. I'd say this happens for about half of the questions.

- The answer confirms that what I'm trying to do is not possible.

- I get stupid but confident answers by people who apparently didn't read the whole question.

- No answer or vague unhelpful answers.

- The question is put on hold, usually because it's too broad or not constructive. It's a shame that there's no place to discuss these type of questions with the SO community, I hink there's a lot of potential there.

collyw7• 12 years ago

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

akshatpradhan• 12 years ago

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

myhf• 12 years ago

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

mdmarra3• 12 years ago

11 - Email the mods to get the downvote removed

Mods can't reverse up/down votes

mkingston• 12 years ago

I think they can, actually. I had a disagreement with someone on SO; this person subsequently went on a downvoting spree on my previous answers. I wasn't terribly worried about the points but e-mailed the mods to report the behaviour. I was told they would reverse the downvotes if the user persisted, but that they preferred not to get involved (for obvious reasons).

jaydles• 12 years ago

The term "mod" is a red herring here. The engine will auto-reverse obviously targeted voting, and the community team reverses cases too subtle for the engine to handle, but that are clearly personally targeted.

autokad• 12 years ago

I'm glad that I am not the only one that feels this way

When talking to young engineers, i say SO is a great place to find answers, but horrible place to ask questions.

If you want to ask a question and find yourself ridiculed, belittled, and lectured on everything but actually having your question answered, then this is your place.

collyw7• 12 years ago

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

robomartin2• 12 years ago

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

collyw7• 12 years ago

I find the over zealous moderators as annoying as anyone else (I imagine), but its wrong to say that they have been ruined. Stack overflow and Server Fault are still damn useful sites, even with the moderators.

lnanek2• 12 years ago

Post seems to be from someone who is in group 1. As someone not in group 1, if group 1 actually did a good job caretaking I'd have no problem with them. Really, though, they close the most interesting questions that could actually be helpful to me and only leave open stupid stuff that could be looking up in the docs trivially. So they make the site useless for me. Worse they tend to edit my answers to be incorrect just to make them look nicer. I wouldn't say they are care taking, I'd just say they've been given power and they enjoy enforcing rules for the hell of it.

lispm• 12 years ago

I'd like to filter out some people. Currently for example there is someone asking long and complex, but useless, Common Lisp / C / C++ questions without knowing the basics. He has also asked the same questions on the mailing list for this topic (it's about interfacing Common Lisp with C). He uses multiple accounts on stack overflow and asks multiple questions about similar things. Whenever he moves, slowly, forward, then something breaks and he asks.

It's like asking about formula one motor electronics, while not capable to even work on the simplest piece of electronics.

Stackoverflow really needs to adapt to these changing patterns of abuse.

joelthelion• 12 years ago

Instead of fighting people who ask subjective questions, they should find a way to accommodate them ( make the questions expire after a year?). All these question closings are rightly perceived as aggressive and cause a lot of needless problems.

neurobro• 12 years ago

I haven't completely lost interest in participating at SO, but I am mostly just thankful they don't delete all of the old "closed as not constructive" questions because they are some of the most helpful content on the site. The community wiki feature would be a better technical solution for questions that are a bit too subjective.

But then there's the proliferation of SE sites with ambiguous/overlapping subject areas and only a handful of users. I'm solidly in the "don't give a shit" camp for those.

davidgerard• 12 years ago

Clay Shirky summarised every single discussion of this type in "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy":

http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...

NateDad• 12 years ago

Where's #5 - moderation nazis? Often have overlap with #3, repwhores, they repwhore in order to get high enough reputation to get the power to do moderate as they see fit... note that #5 may think they're in camp #1, but they err too often on the side of closing posts because they want to exercise their power.

This is my main problem with all stack exchange sites. It rewards repwhores with power. I'd prefer that reputation and power were divorced somehow. I don't know how to determine who would make a good moderator... but just "someone who posts a lot" is not really a good metric.

eternalban• 12 years ago

He assumes too much in the arc (1,4).

aaron695• 12 years ago

It's interesting, is stackoverflow a Q & A site? I'd say a definite nup.

It's wikipedia, well that's where it's true value lies I think. But it's way to get content is 'suckering' people in thinking it's a Q&A site.

It's value to the community is amazing. But it is a chameleon.

Relevance. Not sure, perhaps if you dig to deep in anything the matrix spoils reality.

menacingly• 12 years ago

I'm most frustrated by the fact that their closed questions rank so well. It's not a good fit for a Q/A format, but it is a food fit for inbound traffic, so we're leaving it up.

The keyword stuffing in the sidebar often makes the question rank for searches for which it isn't even relevant.

kybernetyk• 12 years ago

I found SO to be pretty useless for more complicated questions. Sure, if you ask something that you could answer by looking into the docs then you are flooded with answers by dozens of people.

But as soon as it gets to some obscure API maybe a handful people uses currently you not only get no constructive answers but get downvoted, get useless but borderline hateful comments and in the end the question gets closed because of $reasons.

Now if you go and start googling that obscure API it's inevitable that you will find SO questions about it. "Great, maybe I can find something there in the comments" you think. But no, that question most likely is closed because of $reasons and has no comments because comments on closed questions are not allowed.

In the last few years I had a handful of cases where even discussing with someone who didn't know the solution to my problem might have brought me a little nearer to the solution. But you even can't start a discussion in SO questions because if it's not an answer the question gets closed down - no matter how helpful the discussion might turn out for people with said problem.

mattgreenrocks• 12 years ago

Yeah, SO can be pretty bad for deep knowledge. Actually, the web is bad overall. It used to be a badge Of pride to stump SO; now it doesn't seem that hard.

This is a real problem with SO: it seems to prize 'easier' information by design.

xxs2• 12 years ago

Comments are rarely deleted (they could be) - however the reputation whore is a reason few actually leave comments instead of attempt at answers.

However SO is bad for not-so-common, above advanced knowledge. Some Tags (C# for example) have good support but some effectively don't (Java).

OTOH: 500rep bounty usually can do that trick if there would be anyone to shed light.

stuaxo• 12 years ago

Indeed - I tried a test after asking a difficult question, I asked an easy one, it was answered quickly + helped my reputation.

joeblau• 12 years ago

I'm a member of another community that was run almost exactly like that for musicians called future producers. I moved from a 3 to a 1,4 and now I'm a pure 4. The thing that the 1's need to come to grips with is that people are going to keep asking the same questions over and over. SO needs the concept of a `git merge` so you can take take questions which might be part of another question and merge them in. By merge i mean a true merge, not just a link to the other question. SO is beyond the Q&A phase and needs to transition into the data curation phase, but it's rudimentary vote/mark duplicate/close/delete system isn't designed to facilitate that.

aaronem• 12 years ago

You've put your finger on the nub of it.

sampo3• 12 years ago

And they should award karma for spotting the duplicates, so people would do it.

kijin• 12 years ago

Stack Overflow needs to make people slow down.

A lot of the time, how quickly you can post your answer is the single most important factor in how many upvotes you'll get. It doesn't matter how thoroughly you research the topic. Too many answerers (#3 "repwhores") are trying to beat the clock, half of them don't even read the question. If you waste 30 seconds trying to format your code or making sure that your solution actually works in jsfiddle, two other people will have already answered the question and the OP might even have accepted one of them. You know what's even worse? While you're still writing your answer, a message pops up and helpfully tells you that this has happened. Thanks a lot! Stop writing and close the damn tab.

The whole system is rigged to discourage time-consuming research. The front page above the fold is always reserved for questions from the last 2-3 minutes, which sends a not-so-subtle message that if you can't grab someone's attention in the next 2-3 minutes, whatever you write will probably be buried forever.

A few years ago, I used to repwhore. It's addictive, but I quit. Now I prefer to write long-form, comprehensive, thoroughly researched answers. On HN I feel confident in doing so, because I know that the community encourages that kind of behavior. On SO I rarely post any answers anymore, because I'm pretty sure that nobody will read them if it takes more than a few minutes to read or write.

collyw7• 12 years ago

I usually upvote anyone that takes the time to answer my question reasonably (unless its obviously wrong, or not answering the question). Seems like courtesy to me, but I noticed that it doesn't usually get returned.

dpweb• 12 years ago

Wish I knew the economics term when reward is gotten without paying a due price? Skin in the game, but not crazy about that term.. I think there's a knee jerk reaction 'hey this is great everything is free', but that can be a bad thing, and it applies to many other things. Value needs to be compensated with value.

If the problem is too many bad questions, the thing is there is no barrier to entry for asking a question. Charge people a dollar or even 50 cents, or even 25 cents - the point is anything but free. You'll see a much better quality of questions. Easier to whine about it, which is also easy and free.

jjindev3• 12 years ago

Are there too many bad questions?

Why not the Google answer, which is that search brings you "good" no matter how much "bad" there is?

bikamonki• 12 years ago

Once I saw a client typing part of her domain in the browser's search to then click on the first Google result: her site. What? Wait: use the address bar, you know the domain. My way is 'faster' she said. Not really I said: your way is type, wait, click. The fast, and correct, way is to type just a few letters on the address bar and if your browser is remembering: enter. The solution? Make the address bar and search bar one and be smart enough to know if the user is searching or just calling a usual site.

So, if I have a question about xyz, type a few kwds and google-it, top 3-5 results are SO, then something else, then the 'official' docs. What? Wait: aren't the docs the most relevant trust-worthy correct answer? Docs always suck and SO is faster. Then hire SO wizards to write the docs and pay them dollars not karma ;)

What? Wait: aren't I way off topic? Did I piss you off? Did you get enough hugs as a child? Enough beer last night?

Happy weekend you wizards :)

PS: Pardon my typos and grammar. English not my mother tounge. Yes, there are programmers past the border ;)

frik2• 12 years ago

The JavaScript community on StackOverflow is very JQuery centric - quit annoying if someone prefers modern vanilla JavaScript. And their point system is not optimal and contributes to karma whores.

Beside that, SO is a good resource that pops up in the top Google search results.

jjindev3• 12 years ago

The striking thing for me was to Google a few questions in a row, to find good answers on SO, and then to see that each one was also closed/rejected for some reason. It was strange to see that the answers to these questions all had high ratings, but the question was closed anyway.

I guess it's a vision opposite of the internet itself. Rather than "find one of a million pages that work for me" it is "there should only be one."

(In the spirit of the internet, perhaps if a question cannot be found by a simple search on SO, that IS a reason to ask again, and to fill the search slot.)

LinuxDevOps2• 12 years ago

I'm more familiar with Server Fault, I started contributing last month (made top of "new users") and it feels good to have helped a bunch of people that thanked you, but I'm a Camel's straw away for giving up between some moderators and how the system works.

lyndonh• 12 years ago

  Me: I'm trying to do X, I know I need to do Y first but it doesn't work. Can someone
      please go through the basic principles I need to do this thing.
  Comment: Post some code
  Me: (posts summary code but it's a difficult problem and you can't make a trivial example)
  Comment: No idea
  0 answers

  Me: I have this problem with X and Y, but it's not working.
  Answer (2 upvotes): You should (onerous and time consuming alternative approach
    suggestion with absolutely no evidence that it would solve the problem)
  My comment: How do I know this is going to solve my problem ?
  Comment: Try it first and come back.

  Someone: (difficult and useful question) ?
  0 answers, 5 upvotes
  #1 result in Google; top 10 hits for every search on this and related subjects leads to
  this question on SO or mirror sites

Another scenario -

  Me: (challenging question) ?
  0 answers, 0 upvotes

  Another person: Why does j++(++)++++++++++ not give me the answer I expect ?
  110 answers, accepted answer receives 200+ upvotes, question has 1000 upvotes and is
  locked because of too many frivolous answers/comments

pekk4• 12 years ago

What makes this worse is that sometimes the alternative approach to #2 really is much easier, if the asker would do it. And sometimes, the asker really is wrong to regard it as more onerous. So we can't categorically ban that kind of response. But it's not automatically valid either. People will generate instances of both problems all day. So we're back to moderation to solve that somehow and moderation always has problems.

It's only a community problem when the community takes up a strong bias e.g. against the asker, and does things like closing questions aggressively. There is an underlying problem but the community has made it worse and closed off the natural compensation mechanisms.

As for lack of response to serious/challenging/useful questions (which already has a 'reputation' incentive) I'm afraid there's no way to solve that unless cash bounties will work.

dandare• 12 years ago

IM very HO SO has a UX problem, namely the tone they use can sound negative even if there was a good intention. Something around "Your question was closed ... = because you are bad person"

pekk4• 12 years ago

Besides defeating the purpose of posting the question, having a question closed is inherently deflating regardless of wording. And should be reserved for genuine need, and should not be the default that every newbie has to fight tooth and nail just to get valid questions answered.

spacemanmatt• 12 years ago

NAILED. IT.

jroseattle3• 12 years ago

There is a lot of reference material on SO that I find useful, and my own reputation score continues to increase on its own, but I haven't posted a new answer on the site in at least 2 years.

To me, the gamification problem has simply led to what's really going on: users caring more about the score than about the quality of the content. 5 years ago, I can recall a single question eliciting awesome input from the likes of Jon Skeet, Marc Gravell, etc. While the scores were interesting (Skeet's rep off-the-charts), the content was fantastic.

Motivations are skewed, now. People are trying to build reputation as a number rather than content. What I'm surprised at is why anyone would want to drive up a high rep score backed with completely inane content? What's the point?

The gamification rules for the site seemed to have transitioned it from a knowledge center to nothing more than a game.

jacques_chester2• 12 years ago

What's the point?

Better job offers? Or maybe just invisible internet points.

jroseattle3• 12 years ago

Better job offers?

A better job offer due to a good Stack Overflow reputation score?

Good grief.

k__• 12 years ago

In my eyes the problem is pseudonymity and pseudo interaction.

If the system isn't anonymous, people will try to use it for their personal reputation gains. See Github, Stackexchange, Wikipedia.

If the system promotes pseudo interaction, like votes, it will lead people to empathise posts, which they _think_ are good, but don't have to be. You don't have to conduct real interaction with the content and users, like writing and reading, you just have to click, which leads to easy manipulation from people who don't know anything real to contribute.

Al-Khwarizmi• 12 years ago

Probably I'm a radical, but I just don't see the point of deleting factual information in the Internet, as long as it is true information.

Someone creates an article in Wikipedia about a subject that is totally irrelevant for most people? It's fine. It's not as if I'm ever going to see it (as I only tend to see articles I search for), and a Wikipedia page doesn't exactly take a lot of space by today's standards. We have the technology to build a virtually unlimited repository of all human knowledge, with no effective physical limits, and some mods keep acting as if it had to fit into a physical bookshelf.

With SO it's the same, why should I care if a question is considered to be irrelevant or even a duplicate? If I search for it on Google and it contains reliable information that solves my problem, it's useful for me. If it's really irrelevant, I'm not going to search for it, and therefore it's not going to make me lose any of my time.

We have search tools that keep getting better and better and allow us to pinpoint what is useful for us among a vast sea of information. There's no need to spend valuable human time on deleting stuff, the search engine will filter it for me so that I get what I want, thank you very much!

Uncompetative• 12 years ago

jjindev3• 12 years ago

Should karma be an ephemeral thing? Should it age off in a week or so?

There could be a downside to the early entrants benefit. Sure, you can explore new territory and carve out a huge position, but you become a "Land Barron" in a sense, and no friend of later "squatters." (Relatedly, Bitcoin)

("sure I've got 20000 points, but they guy just climbing from 100 to 200 is a repwhore")

julie1• 12 years ago

Still it reminds me of open source, help chans on IRC, wikipedia...

- At the beginning it is fun and new you are a pioneer (phase discovery) - Then you understand the concept and experiments its power (fun) and you have grown a culture with your alpha wave of compadres you become a native of the place; - then it has success in a brutal fashion triggering a new massive phase of «new comers» (proportion of new might be bigger than the one of old), it is the mass immigration/colonization phase - then there is a «cultural conflict» between the old and the new regarding the way to use the tool/to be part of community. This part can last a long time and I call it the Babel tower effect.

(I vaguely map the state machine described as a chronological effect)

Every community big enough and successful will suffer it. However in the process the «native» ideas are often killed, and the original success can be lost. Plus there is never a consensus, so some people will be feeling unwelcomed.

It can be seen optimistically as stochastic improvements (the pioneers will seed somewhere else and help discover new territories), or as a process of the mass integration the pioneers back into the crowd// normalization/colonization.

Internet may have many virtues but when it comes to human beings it does not change the eternal problem of «doing something together».

Every time you take part in improving the world and try to propose a worthfull alternative, there is a chance the culture will evolve in something different then what you help to build.

My advice is to fight the tendency for bitterness and leave these communities the same way Odysseus left Nausicaa.

glynjackson• 12 years ago

When I first started asking questions I learned a lot, the most articulated answers always came from the same users. It was also these same users that downvoted me, then upvoted when I corrected my mistakes. I've learned so much from my mistakes. I now welcome the downvotes just so I can prove myself!

After a year on Stack I started answering questions and still today don't hesitate to downvote users that don't understand what constitutes a valid question. I find people 'used' to react well commenting... "what did I do wrong?". Its the recent reaction to downvotes that changed.

justinhj2• 12 years ago

I think stackoverflow is working just fine, it's just weird. For example a question I posted recently I got a great answer in minute or so, as well as grumpy comments and closed.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21889666/facial-recogniti...

shagie4• 12 years ago

On Programmers.StackExchange there is some additional about the recommendation for a tool, library or other: http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/why...

One of the bits in that is a note of a Stack Exchange for Software Recommendations - http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com which can deal with recommendation questions. This is a social example of 'branch on incompatible policy' from vcs. http://www.bradapp.com/acme/branching/branch-creation.html#P...

Key to asking there is making sure there is enough information being presented so that someone can give the right recommendation: http://meta.softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/336/

sampo3• 12 years ago

You probably should not have used `linux` and `osx` tags for such a specific question.

justinhj2• 12 years ago

I was looking for a solution that worked on either

mattst88• 12 years ago

We know how successful karma/reputation systems are at encouraging users to contribute good content. The unexpected thing I've learned from Stack Overflow is that the reputation system, when it doesn't work as expected, can also be demotivating.

My personal experience has been mixed with regards to how successfully my answers are accepted. On multiple occasions, I've answered questions first, only to have another answer accepted that contained the same content as mine but was posted hours later.

I don't know if this is a common experience or if my sample size is too small. In any case it's a bit frustrating.

mcgwiz• 12 years ago

It's a complex problem, but with a "training/welcome period" (explained below) for new users, these specific issues can be addressed:

- experts (users having rep above EXPERT_THRESHOLD, say 5000) want "interesting" questions

- most new questions are not interesting

- "new users" (having rep below some REGULAR_THRESHOLD, say 100) are not educated and have unrealistic expectations

- it is expensive for the community to manually educate new users

- asking questions is inexpensive for the asker, but answering questions is costly to the community (to research, comment, close, find dupes)

- it's hard for new users to gain rep by answering questions because rep-whores are more experienced with the site. thus new users are instead encouraged to gain rep by asking questions.

Some ideas mentioned on SE would help:

- require rep for asking questions

- give rep for finding duplicates (discouraging repwhores from answering dupes, encouraging dupe linking)

- give rep for taking a quiz about the 2-Minute Tour or other FAQs

Additionally, a training/welcome period for new users (during which they interact a slightly more among themselves than directly with experts) would go a long way toward fixing a lot of deeper issues. New user questions (which tend to be uninteresting dupes) would be hidden from experts for some period of time NEW_Q_DUR (say 1 day). During that time, only other new users or regular users can answer the question. Experts can un-hide them with a Setting but can only comment, not answer. Benefits:

- new/regular users (that care about the site) are incentivized to answer questions, find dupes, work with others at their rep-level and do some of the (educational) activities that experts see as menial, rather than just ask questions

- experts get a higher signal/noise ratio of interesting questions, as bad questions can be cleaned up by new/regular users and interesting questions will likely remain unanswered after NEW_Q_DUR (since new users tend to be less experienced and less able to answer difficult, good questions from other new users)

- dupe rep-whoring is mitigated because once a rep-whore becomes an expert, they cannot answer dupe questions without new/regular users having time NEW_Q_DUR to flag as dupe

- new user expectations are made more realistic. until they've participated a certain amount, they cannot expect to draw immediate attention from experts. also, they become aware of the dupe problem.

A caveat might be that new user questions with enough upvotes can become answerable by experts before the normal time limit. Also, if/when new user question quality improves, NEW_Q_DUR can be reduced.

Some very minor drawbacks:

- new users would be slightly deterred from asking certain questions because they do not value answers from non-experts (leading them to do more research on their own)

- more class-ful community, potentially creating stronger biases (I don't think this is too bad because class mobility is clear and feasible)

- some new users that would care about the site might instead be turned off by the welcome period on some principal and never participate

n1ghtmare_• 12 years ago

Well I found lately that asking anything on SO that is not trivial doesn't get an answer. My last 3 questions were up-voted, but never answered. I'm a regular SO user, I know the rules, I'm doing my research, my questions are not subjective, they are "answerable", yet they remain without answers.

Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?

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