I love Stack Overflow, and it's sure a valuable if imperfect resource, but this is something that drives me bonkers about it.
If the question is intelligible enough to receive an answer, and if your answer is potentially helpful to the asker, then it's well-asked as far as I can tell, and the scoring system can take care of its relative utility.
The additional level of moderation doesn't seem to have added much value over my time participating. The closest thing I can think of as nice is combining duplicates, though moderators often seem to miss subtle differences between questions and in some cases information gets lost in the end. Generally, the moderation focus often seems legalistic or driven by artificial incentives rather than primarily focused on improving the breadth, depth, and quality of the site as a technical resource.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure that a significant portion of the hostility people experience is coming from moderation actions.
I might hope the SO team has the intention of going to town on that problem in general, but I don't see it specifically mentioned in today's discussion. I'm sure that if they took it deeply seriously and engaged with enough specific situations where it's been a problem, they could find ways to do better.
I think today's announcement is a really good indication, though, that they're listening to people who are having problems with their SO experience, not just to people who'd congratulate them for their (deserved!) accomplishments and for whom everything is more or less fine.
If you could only meet the needs of one constituency, I'd say they made the right choice to favor expert answerers, but I think there are other solutions.
Specifically, if I was trying to fix this I'd set up a two-tier system for questions and answers. There are lots of people who would be happy to answer questions, even if the question is a dupe, and even if it's not framed very well. Give people points for answering these in a kind way, and moderate around that.
For questions that are sufficiently well-asked, and not duplicates, elevate them to a wikipedia-like status: allow them to be indexed by search engines, make them easier to see by the expert answerers that dislike sifting through novice questions, and moderate them for quality. Give points for people that review and elevate high-quality, non-duplicate questions, or that edit questions to become high-quality.
If there are very different personas that you're trying to appease, sometimes a multi-tier system is appropriate.
Question: How do I #include a 500MB text file in my C++ code as a string? My compiler explodes when I do this!
Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the text from a file instead!
Comment: -1 Dude this isn't helpful. What if it's code golf and you need to include a 500MB text file!? You never know. Get over yourself.
Stuff like this has happened to me so many times.
When a user asks a question on X, it would be better to first assume that he knows what he’s freaking doing.
E.g. yes there might be valid reasons for inserting 500 MB as a string, and myself as another user desperately searching for an answer to it, I get pretty annoyed when I see answers for a Y instead.
SO contributors should answer the freaking question first. Can it be done and how. Otherwise the answer is of no use to people having the same question but for a different problem. Not to mention that I’ve seen questions closed as duplicates.
This is why I rarely go to SO for answers. I don’t want an opinionated forum, I want a mailing list where people assume you’re a grownup that really wants a solution to the question and not something else.
The ones that can’t explain why are almost always unaware of the actual problem they need to solve.
Also good questions shouldn't need explanations for the reason you're trying to do something. It's not like I'm going to explain my business requirements on a public forum to complete strangers.
And I'm going to mention this again — if the purpose of SO is to provide a searchable database of questions and answers, then the answer has to match the question, not a supposed use case that the user may or may not have, because that answer is then useless to others.
Of course you can include 500 MB in a separate file and read that. It's totally uninteresting and now that SO question, along with its non-answer is showing up in search results, having precedence over others. Which is a pity, because I thought SO is a place where you can ask questions on obscure features of the tools we're using.
You can, as long as you're clear on why you need these obscure features. So there's nuance... if someone asks "hi, I want to call `add` like `add(10, 20, 30)` and it's not working" and the answer is "Use `10 + 20 + 30` instead!", they're answering the intent of the question. They've totally not answered the original question (I want to call add) but OP is probably misguided.
It'd totally be fair to say "Oh, declare a function with 3 params and return the sum, or even make a function with variable arguments, then enumerate over each of them, summing into an accumulator. You can also do this as a functional reduction. In fact, you can use the mapreduce framework to do this, and here's how to create an adder circuit" - Every tidbit of the above is just... overkill.
I totally empathize with you - it sucks to google "how to do X given good reasons Y Z" only to find a question "how to do X given terrible reasons A B" that's answered by "don't do X"! I think the way that's respectful of others' time is to ask another question and clarify why you truly need X.
If you've taught a multidisciplinary class, you'll have faced people who truly are confused - EE students who want to understand, for example, "how do I declare a 20 bit integer in C for this program that's running on Windows?"...
Not 100% for me, but easily 30%. And you can almost taste the authoritarian arrogance dripping from the moderators words. I was disappointed this incredibly negative aspect of the site wasn't even mentioned in the post.
But sometimes explaining how the situation arises:
* Violates NDA/secrecy/licensing agreements.
* It can be complicated to explain the conditions that created the situation to people that aren't working with a custom/proprietary tech stack.
* Is irrelevant. If the operation needed to solve my problem can be concisely stated, why type a distraction?
I remember one post where someone said something like: "It'd be better if you tried this, but if you really need to do X..." followed by an explanation that solved my problem. It made my day.
Yikes. SO is where I learned to program, and if this were the norm, I wouldn't have made it.
If I ask a question the premise of which suggests I'm _way_ off, I wanna know. I have to imagine this scenario is far more common than the one you outline, wherein the poster has arbitrary constraints on his/her problem that need to be respected.
Let the voting system decide which answers are useful for posterity & which aren't. But to the answerers who take the time to help askers tackle the spirit of a question--not just its text--I say: thanks.
I find the attitude of "solve your problem by ignoring stated constraints" particularly irritating among database gurus, who should be more in tune with the business world than a lot of people.
When someone simply refuses to accept the constraints of a problem, it doesn't demonstrate intelligence, even if the problem as stated is insoluble; better to just ignore it. All they are really saying is "sucks to be you, glad I don't have to work there" which is boorish and unproductive.
None of that means that people don't sometimes go down a rabbit hole that they didn't need to. But know-it-alls generally need to step back and either disengage entirely or consider the constraints on a problem.
Question: I'm trying to do Y so I can do X. I know Z is the right way to do X, but I'm not allowed to do it for $BUSINESS_REASON that I have absolutely no control over.
Response 1: Don't use Y to do X. Use Z.
Response 2: $BUSINESS_REASON is stupid, fix that.
Then some time later I'll come back and post my work around, with fair warning it isn't the right way to solve problem X, but if you have to use Y this is the best I've found.
In my experience I see more of the opposite: XY answers. I search for or ask X, and there's a bunch of "smart guys" trying to subvert a secret hidden context to the question resulting in a secret question Y. When I arrive from Google to see the Y answer on X question, the answer is useless because unmentioned condition Y doesn't apply to my scenario. Multiple answers are always great though, because sometimes there is a sane default answer, and one or more "well if Y applies, you might actually [...]". There's a lot of value in multiple answers with their nuances explained or why they're outdated or the new way explained, etc..
A better answer would be:
This is wrong because <reasons>. Consider loading the text from the file. If you want to #include it anyway here's what you can try.
This will ensure that the code golf people can do what they want and normal people try the recommended thing.
Of course there are cases in favor of both sides here or there. If you have reasons to go the esoteric route, then you should simply explain why. If you're browsing from the internet, you have to understand you're reading a conversation between two individuals, catered to the question-asker and not the rest of the universe.
there's also the third, silent, probably much larger group, who neither asks questions nor answers them.
it seems as though the single authoritative, comprehensive answers is what helps those people the most.
> Specifically, if I was trying to fix this I'd set up a two-tier system for questions and answers. ... For questions that are sufficiently well-asked, and not duplicates, elevate them to a wikipedia-like status ...
i think i'd very much like that to happen.
In the earlier days, it was designed to straddle the line more with a wiki; there were "community wiki" questions and answers, but people couldn't get reputation for those, and if someone's question or answer was edited enough it would automatically converted to "community wiki". However, people would get upset about losing the potential karma, so that feature was taken away, and major edits to other people's answers that change the meaning of it started to be discouraged.
However, there's no way for anyone other the person who originally asked a question to change which answer is accepted. So if someone asked a question 10 years ago, and someone gave a bad answer or an answer that is now out of date but which was accepted, and those two people have now left the site, there's no good way to get the first answer to the question to be the correct one. You can write a better answer, and even if it's upvoted, there will still be the accepted answer ahead of it.
I've tried following the original, more wiki-like spirit of the site by editing such answers, and then gotten other people reverting me because the edit would "give reputation to someone who didn't deserve it."
I feel like the incentives, and balance, and community of the site are just off right now. It still serves a useful purpose, but it could be a lot better, but whenever I've tried making suggestions for how to improve, I've gotten so much pushback that I've just given up.
I'm in that group and the problem is Google results seem to favor the recent, locked and left unanswered question over the so-called authoritative one
We tend to forget that even really basic things like googling for an answer are learned skills. Some people are so green, they don't even know what they are looking for. They have some collection of objects that they want in a certain order, but they don't know enough to know the name of the thing they are looking for is a sorting algorithm. Or you have a situation where someone needs a linked list, but they have no idea what to call it, so searching fails. I've seen genuinely bright people who are new to programming fail in this way and get really frustrated when people tell them to "just fucking google it" when they already did, but honestly didn't know what to call what they were looking for.
On the other side, you have some people who are not so interested in a single canonical answer to a well-formed question. There are people who really get a lot of enjoyment out of guiding people and teaching them.
I would say the quickest way to satisfy a lot of the dynamic here is to have a place to migrate really poor questions instead of just closing them down. Something like how-to.stackoverflow.com or whatever.
Yes, some people just don't want to learn and are looking for someone else to do their homework. It's true. But I think those are best evaluated by the kinds of people who want to hang out there and try to offer guidance rather than the population as a whole who is going for more of a nerdapedia site.
In other words, give the people who want to teach a place to teach, and give the general site a way to move those questions to that context. Let the teaching-focused users evaluate the genuinely bad actors.
As a junior, I've run into this, especially since I have no mentor and I just kind of have to wing it when it comes to my own education. Example, I have an Android project where I use the HackerNews API to get the top stories, but I got the IDs and then the JSON for each all in one go. At the time, my thought was that I wanted to do this dynamically; I had no idea how to describe this to people for weeks. Then someone told me I was probably looking for "pagination". Boom, that was it. Don't know how to actually implement my own pagination still because all of the articles on it are trash and end up recommending the libraries for pagination anyway, but now I know!
One thing I've been pondering is if it's possible to have a sort-of "Junior's Dictionary" where a common (or semi-common) scenario is laid out and terminology is attached to it. Would have been great to know I was looking for pagination the entire time.
The downside of disallowing ‘unworthy’ questions is that people feel made stupid for asking, and unwelcome. Also, people feel made stupid for answering, and unwelcome. There is plenty of elitism in tech, and you could keep the main stackoverflow for unique, well-asked questions, as well as adding the novice area.
The advantage of having a novice area of stackoverflow is that more people will use the site. While not every question will be great, the total number of great questions, and the total number of people helped, will be higher.
Turnover/churn. If a Q/A site allowed basic questions then the site would be flooded with them since the population of novices greatly exceeds sophomores or experts. Moderation would need to keep up with silo-ing these Qs into the 'novice area' you propose. Experts would need to sift more to get to the interesting, challenging or novel Qs if moderation can't keep up, which might affect the retention of these users, thus diminishing the resource pool available on the site.
To me it's clear that tact and grace is called for, and is currently mostly missing, when directing askers of basic Qs to existing answers, whether on- or off-site but there is such a thing as tragedy of the commons. Some stewardship and curation is required to maintain an acceptable SNR.
This is really excusing bad UI/UX (like surfacing existing answers while a user is typing a question) and a bad ranking algorithm. There is no such thing as "being flooded" only bad search algorithms, and bad UX. Google is "flooded" with a result set spanning the entire internet, and they manage to surface answers. Stack Overflow can do the same--they have more tools to rank and influence behavior (rewards, moderation, points) than google has because they control the site, its structure, and how it is gamified.
The only problem is if the question is not exact duplicate, but that doesn't happen very often with such easy questions.
The user's question seemed like a fairly standard one: how can I force kill a goroutine. But actually there was a question underneath it. The issue wasn't that they needed to kill the goroutine it was that the library they were using didn't have a mechanism for timeouts.
The sad thing was there was a PR available that fixed the problem.
Its like arguing with someone who takes everything you say completely literally and makes no attempt at a charitable interpretation.
The problem is, they added the review queues, which prompts people to review questions on topics they might know nothing about, and give badges based on how much people review. So people go through those review queues and might be motivated to just get through things quickly without thinking very much about the effect of what they are doing; there is no meta review, no downside to just making hasty decisions that just prevent other people from engaging in useful discussion.
There is. There are "audit" questions designed to test whether the reviewer is paying attention. If they improperly vote to close a "good" audit question or improperly vote to leave open a "bad" one, they get banned from reviewing for a while.
But I don't think that "audit" questions do much to address my issue. They enforce that someone is paying at least a little bit of attention; but they still emphasize things like voting to close a "bad" question, rather than helping the person asking the question ask a better question. They might help a little bit with people who are just not paying attention at all for questions which are black and white as to whether they are "good" or "bad" (such as blatant spam), but they don't help at all with pushing the "grey area" questions in the right direction.
That's the crux of the issue; the community is so focused on just cleaning up bad questions by closing them, rather than working with the person asking to help get them to be able to work better with the community.
Lets say that it takes 15 minutes in chat to help a person (who wants to be helped in asking a good question rather than getting the answer now).
Next, lets apply Sturgeon's law to Stack Overflow. There are 8000 questions a day and 90% of them are crap. Thats 7200 questions that need work. This is 1,800 hours of mentoring per day.
The close (and down vote) is such a minimal amount of work that it allows the group within the site that is striving for a particular vision of quality that it allows them to do the most they can. Furthermore, it is not infrequent that a person who provides assistant for trying to unravel a question from getting a "why can't you just help me now?" with assorted vulgarity interspersed.
On smaller sites, with a greatly reduced amount of questions per day the group capable of mentoring as well as moderating is able to spend the 15 minutes of time without significantly impacting the time taken to moderate and curate the rest of the questions.
With 8000 questions per day, its really hard to look at all of them. As I write this, there are only 16 people who have exhausted their close reviews for the day ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats - only 16 have 40 reviews). That doesn't show the people who are doing new questions, but it does give an idea of how shallow the bench of people who are spending time to moderate the site actually is.
Getting more people to help out would be great, but most people aren't doing anything to help.
There are also people who believe that up voting a newbie question and saying "welcome to the site" in the comments without improving the question is helpful.
The first post review and triage queues are intended for providing this help. You can see that this doesn't always work well ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 or https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 - note the not even trying to fix the grammar of the question or asking for the necessary information or providing help on how to improve the question, just no action needed)
I don't expect every bad question will lead to a valuable mentorship opportunity. I've certainly encountered my fair share of those that weren't worth spending my time on.
Bad answers are more problematic; there's good reason to be vigilent about those.
And of course spam, obvious homework, and just completely incomprehensible questions should be closed instantly.
What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed. So by the time I've written up an answer, the question is closed, and my answer is wasted. I can copy my answer elsewhere, and vote to re-open, maybe after editing the question to make it more clear, and it might get re-opened, but then I have to spend a lot more time and attention waiting for that. By closing out questions too aggressively, not only are people putting off newcomers, but also wasting the time of those answering questions.
> The first post review and triage queues are intended for providing this help. You can see that this doesn't always work well ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 or https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 - note the not even trying to fix the grammar of the question or asking for the necessary information or providing help on how to improve the question, just no action needed)
Yeah, one of the things that really frustrates me about the review process is that they just incentivize taking some quick and easy action, not actually doing the right thing.
Effective moderation is not easy, and a very different skill set than answering technical questions, but the rep needed to perform many of these mod duties is just given to those who accrue enough rep.
So that does exist, but it takes a LONG time for it to get cleaned up in some cases. And if people jump in with a "this might answer your question, hope it helps", it will likely never get deleted.
Its not that these questions hurt the site - bits are cheap. Its that they hurt the search results and the perception of the site. Admittedly a single reddit data point: https://www.reddit.com/r/stackoverflow/comments/8d15h4/10000...
> The toxicity is in all the unanswered questions.
---
> What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed.
Consider fixing the question with an edit before writing the answer so that it won't be closed when you get around to writing an answer. This way its a good question from an earlier point in the life of the question. Furthermore, it makes it easier for other people to provide answers too. Leaving the question in a poor state with an answer makes it harder for the google only user to find the question and understand what is being asked.
---
Doing the right thing in review takes time. Many of the first post or triage reviews are done by people who haven't... fully bought into the philosophy of answers for people who haven't asked the question yet. They look ok to the standards of a 500 rep user who doesn't see what Jeff and Joel were trying for with Stack Overflow ( https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/access-review-queu... ).
There's no instruction for people for how to help in the review queues. As such, everyone is doing their own thing with their own "this is the quality that I'd write at, it looks ok." The only way to correct this currently is with review bans... and that has its own problems with negativity and the perception of Stack Overflow as elitist.
Heard so much from so many colleagues over the years about how SO is inaccessible and unwelcoming, and started to realise why. I'm glad SO themselves have been on the same journey, because they're far better placed to do something about it!
Once I made an account and tried to be more active. I got told off for asking questions about issues I was having or because my answers weren't liked by someone with high rep.
I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account. I use stackoverflow on a daily basis, to find preexisting issues around what I am working on and read possible solutions, but thats it. I don't consider logging in and asking about an issue I am having, let alone help anyone else.
I feel like the toxicity around the community has led me into that. I do feel like people on stackoverflow are elitists, thats what I am getting about it. I feel like they are playing on a different league than me and they make me feel lesser although I am pretty certain that am competent enough to succeed.
I am grateful for stackoverflow, but I definitely don't see using an account on there anytime soon, and its going to take a long long time for stackoverflow to win me over as a contributor :/
P.S - Out of about 30 devs I worked with in the past / working now with etc I've only seen 3 of them using stackoverflow by contributing to it, or when they get an issue they post about it. The rest of them use stackoverflow the same way I use it which proves a pattern here, at least on my personal circle.
This roughly mirrors my experience...
I went through a period of engagement, which ended abruptly after an unpleasant interaction. The author of a semi-well-known niche library took time out of his day to poo-poo a highly specific answer to a highly specific issue. Thing is, the questioner and myself were using that library a bit differently than it's primary usage (broad data generation instead of test-data management).
So I had to debate with myself if I was really gonna be using my time explaining to someone I'd otherwise have loved to bump into at a conference that the world is a complicated place and sometimes I use butter knives to unscrew things regardless of what Ikea thinks about it... Haven't posted since.
No one seems to want to change. No one seems to want to even engage with criticism about the culture; they just push back and pile on when criticism is brought up.
After a couple times of seeing this kind of behavior, and pushing back, and then getting piled on by people rejecting the criticism, I started to get tired of it and withdrawing somewhat. Later on, I some blatant sexism in a chatroom that was laughed off when I pointed it out to the moderators.
I've pretty much given up. I'll occasionally reply to questions people ask on my existing answers or if I see something that needs an answer or edit I'll make it, but I don't really feel like fighting the overwhelmingly elitist, sexist, and uncaring attitude on the site.
I think that this post is a nice gesture, and good that it's coming from the company and not just another user, but I worry that's it's much too late. The community has been attracting people who like it the way it is, and repelling people like me who don't, for a long time.
Software architecture questions are very difficult to ask without triggering overbroadness. Another category that is off limits are getting started type questions, again they’re considered too vague (but that’s the whole point, the user doesn’t know where to start). And the illogical ban on pointing to research involving statistics also drives me batty. I’ve had arguments with moderators before where my answer was bad because it pointed to capers jones’ research, one of the most authorative sources of good software dev practices.
I always feel like it’s a game of dodge the moderator bot to get questions to not be closed, unless they’re of the boring easy to answer briefly and precisely variety.
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3698...
I'm sure the moderator feels entirely justified by closing this question, and going by the rules they are perfectly right, but it still feels wrong to me to turn this user away instead of working with them to figure out a way to make their questions fit the website's format.
But, that takes a lot of work, and moderators are volunteers whose time is entirely on their own dime. I suspect that if the stackexchange network had paid moderators the outcome would be very different, but they probably don't have the funding model to support that. I myself also don't do moderator duties on the SE network, so I really shouldn't be blaming the moderators. I merely want to point out the frustration and the non-optimal outcome, not lay blame at the moderators' feet.
"What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted answer since everyone is skinning a different cat.
So instead of "overly broad, no discussion for you" I'd rather see those questions get routed to "conversation-SO" instead of "reference-SO"...
IIRC, they did something like that. It was called programmers.stackexchange.com, and I used it a couple times and it was great.
Then some power-that-be decided it "wasn't working" (probably because it didn't fit the SO only-kind-of-good-question rubric) and changed the focus be a clone of SO with some minor difference in emphasis.
It takes a lot of work to maintain a free for all site by the community. It takes less work by the community to maintain a heavily moderated site.
The culture of a site is a reflection of how much work people are willing to put into keeping it that way.
You'll have to be more specific about what that "crud" is, as SO's culture seems to have a tendency to reclassify the baby as dirt and throw him out with the bathwater.
> the options were either abandon it completely (that was threatened) or clean it up along with the associated rules of what makes a good subjective question.
Seems like there should have been more options on the table than "abandon" or "remake in SO's image." SO has a better population to answer subjective questions than most of the alternatives it tries to push people towards. They really should have been more flexible.
The enforcement notice was with https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... (which also lists a lot of the water cooler days of PSE links).
The history is described in https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/a/3415 . Also give https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/17/merging-season/ a read. Note the:
> There’s an even longer list of things that really belong on the new Programmers Stack Exchange, which appears to be degrading into fairly stupid water-cooler nonsense, and could benefit from an infusion of more meaty subjects, like these proposals:
A lot of those links 404 for me, but a lot of that stuff could have been taken care of by being better at defining what was on and off topic, e.g. it's a site for subjective questions about programming, rather than programmers answering subjective questions. SO has the moderation resources to handle that.
The community that was there at the time wasn't doing any significant moderation or curation of those questions. Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417... and consider is that useful? curated? Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there? or "I tried to apply good programming technique to a language such as TI-83+ BASIC."? Count how many times "read books" or some variation is in that list.
It wasn't moderated or curated. Such pile on "give a pithy answer" was acceptable. And it made the site - trying for the more conceptual and architecture questions that Joel was asking for in his blog post harder to find, and they would get drowned out by the popular fun questions. That lead to https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...
Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites.
And so, with the lack of moderation and curation from the fun days of Programmers.SE a different philosophy of the site was able to establish itself... and the site grew in activity.
The culture of a site is a proof of work. You have to work to maintain it. If there isn't work to do it, it can change. Its probably far to late to change to the less moderated version of the site again. However, if one wants to do that, actively work to curate the site so that those questions are acceptable.
MathOverflow has a fair number of fun and soft questions - but that comes at a lot of work of moderation and curation from the entire community... which they do. The community on other sites that wants those fun and soft questions has not shown as much a desire to curate them, and so others moderate them (not desiring to curate them either).
Yes.
> curated?
It's not a worthless question. If you're talking about subjective questions, obsessive curation is not the answer.
> Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there?
Sure, considering there were better answers that had far more votes. It might have been better if it wasn't, and moderation could have taken care of it.
Answers like that are certainly not an indictment of the format.
> Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites.
That's never the kind of think I asked or liked at programmers.se, but like I said before, they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
You haven't really convinced me that subjective questions are "wrong for the format." All you've really shown it that an unmoderated free for all produces some garbage that doesn't fir in a high quality tech Q&A site.
The real answer for why programmers.se failed is probably that the powers-that-be weren't willing to spend the time and resources to meet a new challenge, so they gave up and did something else.
The format that SE provides is a very direct Q&A that tries to cut out all of the excess and gives a single good answer. There are other sites that are better cut out for polling questions and other sites that do a better job of "what is the best ...?"
Trying to make everything fit in the SE framework puts a burden on the community that moderates and curates the material, and at some point people have said "enough" because they don't want to and others haven't stepped up to do it.
The "wrong for the format" is part of the design of the site. Note here that we're talking in a thread. You can follow the discussion. SE was designed to make discussions awkward. When there's a discussion on a site of significant scale, it becomes unmanageable and detracts from the Q&A focus. If that is a good design decision or a bad one is up to debate - but it is the design decision of SE. And there are so many other places where that discussion could be had. Why not ask that question here? or over on a competing discourse site ( https://www.askquestions.tech was started by April who wrote the post that sparked much of this)?
If Programmers (now Software Engineering) has failed is also up for debate. The name change wasn't so much of a "it failed" but rather "people keep getting the wrong impression of topicality" because yes, it took too much time to keep trying to keep the topic on what the powers that be wanted to moderate and no one else was willing to do the job of curating the content of the larger programmers scope... and after all, they're all volunteers - its really hard to make volunteers volunteer to do something they're not interested in doing.
The name change meta post is at https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... (see also the linked questions).
Are you trying to use SO or the Software Engineering site?
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/
They also have a site for software recommendations now, so they created alternative sites for some categories of questions forbidden on SO.
I'm not sure if it hadn't been better to try to integrate it into SO though, using tags for example.
It's right there in the parent's text.
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-requ...
Turned out somebody posted the almost exact same idea here almost 3 years earlier:
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/254205/opt-in-mento...
And StackOverflow even did an experiment with a different implementation last year:
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/365720/feature-requ...
But while there definitely seems to be a movement afoot to tackle the issue, I can see why you're ready to give up. Look at the comments to my question and you'll find this (with a couple upvotes):
@klenwell 'users who downvote without comment or explanation other new users who have given some obvious attention to the composition of their question' I hear these things often. I don't see them when using SO, nor have I seen any evidence that such a set of users exists, and I have asked for such evidence, many, many times. None has ever been forthcoming. I have concluded that such users do not actually exist.
This after I provided a detailed personal account of this dynamic in action. I mean I guess I could start collecting timestamped screenshots or request the server logs from the Stack Overflow sysadmins. For now, I guess I'll just join the chorus of the disaffected here.
No one wants the rules to change in a game that they perceive that they are winning (or have won). Moreso if they worked hard to win.
I'm one of those people who wants the rules to change in a game that I'm already winning. I worked hard to win; I fully engaged in the gamifiction, spending days at a time making sure I hit the max daily rep level, optimizing how I answered questions to get the highest score.
Even then, I tried to focus my optimization on ways that would help people more. For instance, one way to optimize is to post a very short quick answer, so you are able to get early upvotes before there's been a flood of answers for a question; but I would then edit and flesh out my answer. This has both advantages for reputation, since I could get early upvotes, and then later provide a more detailed comprehensive answer that would be likely to get further upvotes. It's also helpful for the person asking; it's possible that the very quick reply will be helpful, so they get an answer soon, but it's also possible that the more detailed reply with references to docs is what they need, so it's a way of making the gamification actually work to help people out more.
I think one of the big problems is when they added gamification of moderation. They added the review queues, which prompt you to review questions and answers that had been downvoted, voted to close, edited by other people, etc, and gave out badges based on numbers of reviews done. This means you'd go through a queue of questions and answers on topics you might know nothing about, and be prompted as for whether or not you agree with someone else's close vote or edit or the like.
When a question is not great, you could just vote to close it, or you could try to engage with the person asking the question and help edit it into a better form. I generally try to talk to the person asking and edit the question to be better; but getting internet points for getting through a lot of reviews quickly incentivizes people to make quick judgements, sometimes on topic they don't know much about. After they added the review queues, I found a lot more questions were being closed before you had a chance to answer or to engage with the person in comments to get them to clarify their question.
And while lots of people these days argue that closing a question is just a way to indicate that it's not up to standards but it can be fixed and re-opened, for people new to SO who aren't familiar with the culture it feels like a slap in the face and a rejection of their question. After a question is closed, it's a lot more likely that they'll just delete it, delete their account, or just stop participating.
Anyhow, yeah, there is an aspect of people not wanting to change the rules of a game that they are playing and winning; I just wish either the incentives were changed, or more people would take the view that the point of the scoring is as a rough measure of how much they are helping people out, and helping people out is the ultimate goal, rather than being an end in itself.
And I should also say that I'm not against closing truly bad or unsalvageable questions; I've had cases where I've tried to engage with someone to make their question better, and they just haven't made any effort, or cases in which people are obviously asking homework questions. But I really think that there should be some effort to help people out with asking their questions before just blindly deciding to close them out.
Like, StackExchange admins: If you're getting flags, there's offensive material, the comments are blatantly off-topic, etc., then OK, I get that; you can step in and moderate. But that's a tiny fraction of the time. When people are having a normal discussion that turns out to be long, maybe don't be a jerk who deletes all the comments from that post and tells people to go somewhere else? It kills the entire discussion, mood, and everyone's enthusiasm, along with lots of gems that were in the comments but that wouldn't fit inside any answers. You really expect the community to turn out happy and welcoming when you keep punching all the breaths out of the users and kicking them to some other corner just because more than 5 of them decided to commit the sin of commenting and sharing thoughts on a topic?
Only a handful of upvoted comments are shown by default, you have to deliberately expand the list to see more, so why not retain them all? If someone wants to wade through 200 commments and add one of his own, what's the real harm? They could add an option for askers/answerers to "Stop notifications for new comments', if that's the issue.
Ooooh, You used the d word! Closed because Stack overflow is not for discussion.
What SO needs is a forum - not an ephemeral chat but a forum whose topics can be linked to the questions that people want to discuss.
A lot of the time if there's many comments on a question or answer it's because there's some nuance that needs to be brought out or the answer has limitations etc. Someone arriving from search probably needs and wants to know that - and will take but a moment to decide if the comments look worthwhile enough to expand and read more.
SO displays it well enough technically by only picking out the top 4 or 5 comments. What SO needs is the mods leaving the comments well alone unless they're abusive or spam.
Note that in that post, everyone who has a diamond after their name is a StackOverflow employee.
I don't think tacking on a forum is the right way to make it even better.
That's kind of what Meta is.
I posted an image as a part of an answer once and it was removed with the reason "don't use third party image hosts". Thing is, I used i.stack.imgur.com which is the only method provided in the answer form on the site! I knew the user who did it but since my answer had been deleted, I had no way to contact him for any sort of appeal. It was a while before I tried contributing to the site again.
Do toxic communities produce better content?
I would say heavily moderated ones often do. That's because in general, a community without much in the way of moderation often becomes a wasteland filled with spammers and useless posts and misinformation, as seen on many webmaster forums over the years. If Stack Overflow and Wikipedia are doing well here, it's merely because their assholery has also stopped the SEO merchants and junk peddlers from turning it into Warrior Forums or Wikia.
But that doesn't mean a toxic community is better. It's entirely possible to have a fair, evenly moderated forum with a high level of quality control, as seen on the likes of Ask Historians over at Reddit.
A truly toxic community will eventually die or be replaced, as seen by one I won't name which banned people for making typos or disagreeing with the staff on any topic in history.
Edit: Though I think even this may be a simplification. Basically, a small or niche forum can be extremely relaxed yet still have a high level of quality (see my own Wario Forums site), but it'll have to make a decision between going downhill in terms of quality or becoming harsher on the moderation as it turns into a big board if it doesn't want to become a wasteland.
Name calling of "borderline autistic" and "absolute jerk" would be met with fairly quick community moderation and condemnation there or on Wikipedia. Meanwhile, calling someone autistic as either a pejorative or an insult here (or reddit) is seemingly acceptable and is being defended.
Autistic and borderline are barely perceived as positive words in our society so I can follow the argument of insult when you describe wikipedia authors as borderline and autistic. Although I see that you did not mean to do harm with your sociological background.
> Let’s reject the false dichotomy between quality and kindness. Quality matters because it means posts can help more people. But a larger, more diverse community produces better artifacts, not worse ones. We need to stop justifying condescension with the pursuit of quality, and we need better tools and queues to help power users trying to keep quality high.
I don't think that's the right way to think about it.
Rather, I would say that tightly-moderated communities of experts tend to produce better reference material ("wikis"). But this type of structure is "toxic" to discussions ("forums") and novices.
The SO founders and key contributors built a wiki. The site's incentive structure pointed in this direction so everyone was complicit in this outcome.
Now, site management seems to be saying that they want a "help-everyone" forum. They are -- like all big orgs with something to lose -- soliciting ideas, forming interdisciplinary committees, and giving "<3"-warming (yuk) speeches.
Given how ingrained the current culture is, I believe that meaningful change would entail significant risk.
Well I'm not sure about that. Wikipedia is the better of the two, but that's a low bar. Articles are poorly written, inconsistent, and targeted at wildly variable levels of existing knowledge. I rarely use it for anything other quick lookups of trivial facts (and even then only for unimportant purposes). It's much-visited, but that's an indicator only of ubiquitous availability. I remember long ago reading some study or other comparing its quality favourably to old-fashioned encyclopedias, but it was just a fairly risible surface fact-checking operation. Of course Wikipedia is huge so there may be vast areas of excellent quality unrelated to my interests.
SO is worse, but a little more useful because of its narrower scope.
So, no, IMO toxicity of community and quality of output aren't related (in either direction).
So the more valuable a site becomes, the more it will attract highly motivated but slightly sociopathic moderators.
If you create a new website with first 10 toxic users, it will never grow, because they will scare away any potential 11th user.
But if you create a new website with awesome users, it get useful content and grow. When it grows very large and attracts too many users, you will have to start moderating heavily. But moderating a website is an exhausting task, and awesome people usually have other things to do; so gradually the job will be taken by people hungry for some kind of power. Then the site becomes toxic.
Wikipedia is quite valuable. These days, I find StackOverflow to be nearly-useless.
Personally I think it's just that knowledge-building communities that win the network-effects battle produce good content due to the number of smart and generous people in the world who find out about them, entirely despite their toxicity. But winning the network-effects battle also seems to lead inevitably to toxicity, so we may never have a counter-example non-toxic knowledge-building community to compare to.
And how long until we're ready to confront the fact that a lot of these meritocracies strangely produce very similar "top contributors" in terms of demographics, i.e. white, straight men?
I'm not getting into either side of it, I'm just saying that you have to admit it's an astonishing coincidence that online communities, started by, moderated by, largely inhabited by, and currently operated by white men seemingly always have a cadre of white men on the top as the "most valuable contributors" and nobody ever seems to wonder if all those things are connected.
Maybe the fears of POC/women are invalid. Maybe it's all a big damn misunderstanding. But I don't think it's right to have white men deciding if it is or not, and I don't think the best damn catalog of coding answers on the planet means a thing if everyone who isn't part of the in-crowd is too damn terrified to ask a question of it.
i don't mean to imply that we should preserve the toxic communities for the point of good content. but there seems to be a correlation here, and it's worth studying what positive effects the toxicity might create, otherwise it's going to be very difficult to re-create it without the toxicity and the sites that value the human creators over the content will always be at a natural disadvantage to the other sites.
IMHO, no problem ever, software related or otherwise has benefited or been solved better by way of having fewer brains involved, and the shortest path to having more brains is having more people, i.e. being more open and inclusive. It would seem to be that SO already has excellent tools to moderate quality without resorting to allowing users to treat each other in such a poor manner.
One of the interesting bits in there is:
> The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
Which can be seen in Stack Overflow (its the newbies that don't read that are messing everything up) and reddit (Stack Overflow aka Downvote and Duplicate). Each group is making their group stronger and a more firmer identification by vilifying the other group (merited or not).
This happens in all groups.
--
The "everyone is mean" nature of some of the communities, I believe, comes from further down in the 'three things to accept':
> 2.) The second thing you have to accept: Members are different than users. A pattern will arise in which there is some group of users that cares more than average about the integrity and success of the group as a whole. And that becomes your core group, Art Kleiner's phrase for "the group within the group that matters most."
> The core group on Communitree was undifferentiated from the group of random users that came in. They were separate in their own minds, because they knew what they wanted to do, but they couldn't defend themselves against the other users. But in all successful online communities that I've looked at, a core group arises that cares about and gardens effectively. Gardens the environment, to keep it growing, to keep it healthy.
> Now, the software does not always allow the core group to express itself, which is why I say you have to accept this. Because if the software doesn't allow the core group to express itself, it will invent new ways of doing so.
When the core group lacks the tools necessary to maintain the vision / success of the site as a whole, they are going to find other ways to defend themselves from excessive workload. The easiest way is to be rude to people so they go away (and the overall workload is reduced).
I believe that this pairs with the (misguided?) efforts of Stack Overflow to become more inclusive by lowering barriers to participate (see design for #3) and making it harder for the core group to moderate content (be nice, changing close reasons, removing 10k rep flagging assistance, reducing 15k rep protection ability, a diamond moderator culture of "if it got upvoted it shouldn't be deleted unless there's vote fraud").
--
The entire article is a very interesting read. The author's credentials is also an interesting read - https://www.bloomberg.com/research//stocks/private/person.as... . Check what organizations he's a member of the board at.
Of course these things are connected, everything is. It isn't an astonishing coincidence at all, its the exact expected result given the environment.
Why does the color/gender matter? Flip it universally and do you feel the same way?
"When roles are reversed,
opinions are too"
However a friend of mine (that I believe as a better level in programming than me) has the same feeling of "bizzare community" that you have, so I know that the issue is complex.
That said I really have zero ideas about what they could do to improve the way they are seen by everyone without breaking the way the site currently works.
Have you heard about the term "help vampire" ? Do you know how many people how do not take 3 minutes to search ? Do you think that the number of questions will remain manageable if the bar is leveled down ? Do you know that you are encouraged to edit questions to make them more "well asked" (at least if that is humanely possible) ?
In my opinion SO is a specific tool that is very different from a forum, a chat or a mailing list. SO should not be the only tool that people have to solve their programming problems and it should not try to morph into it.
Most of the times I end up on Stack Overflow, I arrive via Google. I usually have to check for around 5 answers before I find one that hasn't been locked as "not constructive" or for some other arbitrary reason.
Is it any wonder that people find it easier to ask their own questions? The name "help vampire" is so telling of how SO mods see themselves (as arbiters and gatekeepers of all that is good against the raging unwashed hordes) and a symptom of the problem.
Don't aspire malice / incompetence to something that may well have a root cause within SO itself.
Its not untrue though, is it? Its really easy for such communities to really rapidly degrade.
That SO and wikipedia have both retained quality for so long, while also having strict moderators hunting a strong ideal, in areas where so many of their peers have fallen prey to the unwashed hordes, implies that it may not be so easy to discard the strategy.
It might even be necessary at such large volumes. The particulars of their activity might be maleable, but just approaching the problem (very) defensively might bot be.
People seem to think that duplicate questions are bad and something to be avoided. I think they're a terrific asset. It helps search-ability to have the same question phrased several different ways; especially when the ultimate goal is to funnel the searchers into the discussion page with the highest quality version of the question and answer. In my mind, the issue ISN'T that the mods are holding the gates against the barbarians, it is that the culture and SO itself has not given the mods the tools to convert what the "barbarians" are contributing into a valuable resource.
But as the population increases, driveby-posting becomes the norm rather than the outlier, and large swathes of newcomers can join at once, the culture cannot be taught at a rapid enough pace to survive. It either degrades, or enforces itself by means of an iron fist.
My thinking essentially stems from eternal september. Wikipedia's early success did not require heavy moderation, but once it became the predominant wiki, it's survival, I think, neccitated it.
The details may have issues, but the overarching idea, defending the culture from the unwashed masses, might still be correct.
Thats kind of the point though isnt it? The idea is that you should find the right question and answer and not the x-th repost of them.
Anyone familiar with the side know why reposts arent simply deleted instead of locked? It seems locking them only worsens the problem they aimed to combat?
Back then the reason behind locking rather than deleting was because the duplicate may be asked in a different way, using different keywords. So keeping it viewable allowed people searching for an answer to effectively have multiple entry points into finding the answer because perhaps they were googling the wrong combination of keywords to get the original to show up, but the duplicate would match.
I can't see from your story if the "even higher scoring person" ever declared his intentions to you, which he probably should, but it can be a pretty routine moderation action on forum sites in general to remove meta comments not contributing to the original question, after that discussion has been had.
In your story I could as well read that the lower rank moderator was told off about his interventions.
I've been frustrated when trying to contribute - you'll have two people helping each other and then some third party comes in and declares it not valuable, incorrectly says something is a duplicate, or starts deleting things for arbitrary reasons.
I just want the moderators to go away and leave us alone, it also makes me think stack overflow is successful in spite of this - not because of it.
- the people asking questions just want a solution for their specific problem, which may or may not be useful to SO. This can include homework problems, RTFM problems, vague and unclear questions, etc.
- the people answering questions want interesting questions that stimulate them to keep using the site. SO really needs those people to feel happy answering questions, otherwise no one will visit the site! You need experts providing quality answers, who can find something interesting.
- the people visiting the site after-the-fact. Those people are (usually) just googling a problem they have, but aren't willing to commit to a question. They need both the questioners and the answerers to have done their jobs, otherwise either the questions are too poor a quality to be sure it's the same problem, or the answers are too poor quality to be of use to them.
To all those groups, effective SO moderation looks antagonistic, because they wouldn't go to the site if it had awful moderation - it would just be "that useless place where no one answers your questions and you keep getting the same question over and over".
You can use the chat site, message them directly (if their contact information is listed) or anything else you like to help someone with a useless/duplicate/beginner/help-vampire-ey question. You just aren't allowed to do it inside the reputation system to mine these kinds of answers for karma, and aren't allowed to do it inside the wiki system so you don't pollute the results of searches.
In nutshell, current system is not ideal but it has been put in place after lots of thoughts. No one is going to disagree with being more respectful and kind however the solution to this problem is much more of a technical challenge.
This is one of the issues with SO. I'd love to find a good question. I'd be happy to spend some time on it and learn something. But instead there are lots of questions about why the guessing game doesn't wait for input the second time, what's this syntax error, why doesn't this "if" work. Questions that will maybe help one person, but could be deleted immediately afterwards and nobody would notice.
I don't even know what's the answer. Maybe a canonical "this is how you debug an if statement which doesn't work" or other topic answer would help. Maybe not.
You can sort by most upvoted unanswered questions.
If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP. My experience in general has been that there are a segment of users on StackOverflow that think they are better than everyone else and take every little opportunity they can to impress upon the rest of us how great they are in their own little world.
> If you have people doing that then there is a much bigger issue then what has been described by the EVP.
Probably why the comments are disabled on that blog post. Doesn't want anyone pointing out the disconnects from reality.
I have some mod privileges on SO and have been a user for ~8 years.
The best way to not have your question locked or deleted, is to ensure you're following the best practices for asking a question and include a Minimum Complete Verifiable Example (MCVE).
https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask
If you feel you've done both and still don't get a good experience, it's worth speaking out on Meta for more specific advice.
Most people on SO just want to help — it's easier to help on a question that meets these standards.
> having never answered a single question in the technology I was referencing
Moderator privileges are more about the style of a question/answer than the specifics of a particular tech. The moderation queues are irrespective of the tech tagged in the question.
It's mildly annoying when wrong answers get voted up, but it's even more annoying when moderation tools are used that way. This new user got screwed over by high-ranking close voters who didn't actually read the question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/49847677/331041
It reminds me of when SO added the feature to make front-end code snippets in answers runnable. Perhaps an evolution of that is to provide the equivalent for backend code. Do you think this would solve the voting problem you described?
To the linked question - Do you know if it's possible to undo a "mark as dupe"?
People extrapolate from names. ESPECIALLY if your name sounds indian.
I'm not sure if they removed the comment or if some other moderator did, but it was gone within a couple of days. My karma loss remained. It's absolutely ridiculous over there sometimes and these sorts of interactions are one of the big reasons I stopped participating.
A good citizen would remove their downvote after you did that.
A better citizen would have just made the edit themselves to help everyone.
Some questions are clearly daft, the person hasn't done any prior research, the question is vague, the problem is not apparent and it's a big waste of time trying to help. These questions are often shut down mercilessly and I think that's probably the best thing for them, but I've no doubt it's a terrible experience for the guy asking the question. I think the SO blog post addressed it pretty well by outlining a more streamlined question form with clear prompts for each part of the question.
Other questions are not daft, but perhaps are not asked well. They need to be edited, re-framed, boiled down to the essential parts, an example included, the expected output included, that sort of thing. It's tiresome to run into questions like this over and over, and I can understand how people might comment out of frustration, but it's good to prompt the OP to fix their question up so it can (and probably will) be answered well. Kid gloves and kindness are important here, it's not always easy to ask a good question. The SO blog post went a long way to addressing this and I look forward to seeing some changes on the site.
Overall I think SO is a fantastic resource with many amazing contributors, so it's good to see them responding to this problem and I hope they can make it even better.
nookoking, if you see this, maybe mail the mods. I have no idea why you'd be banned, your history looks fine, but all but your very first post are dead.
Note that these problems may not make answering the question impossible. If, for example, the headline/question is "How do I do this???", then you can still answer, provided the body is more specific.
But such a meaningless title makes it harder to spot the question in lists when you're searching, or willing to answer questions.
That's bad for the usefulness of SO, and moderators and other users who have spent a lot of time on the site may notice such problems far more than you do when first visiting it.
I feel that if I do this, maybe the questioner will learn from the edits for their future questions. And even if they don't, at least I've made the question potentially valuable for other people coming along later, which is the main point.
The ways to get points combined with the way moderation powers slowly flow from them in this gamified rigid hierarchy is not a common approach. Only allowing a specific type of social interaction (objective questions whose answer(s) are of interest to many). It is weird.
I think it is really interesting that the community isn't much worse. At that scale and, lets be honest, with programmers giving programming advice? Why is that? Which of those aspects can be borrowed for other stuff?
https://meta.stackoverflow.com
It's also worth noting that those who can lock discussions can also edit questions without approval (and others can with approval), so it's worth pushing back on editing the question into being "answerable", admittedly a non-binary state.
And little makes me sadder than comments on answers saying, “Don’t answer questions like this – it encourages them.”
The problem is that answering questions which are borderline low quality/too specific, etc or need imorovement before it can be answered are usually frowned upon because it encourages the asker to ask more low quality questions.
The abuse you got is not OK though. If I comment at all on such questions it is always polite.
What I think is also a big oroblem is closing questions as duplicates which are not duplicates.
As with every system I think the incentives are the culprit so I expect SO to improve on this soon. They should be able to since they have all the data to do so
Stack Exchange could have dealt with this by developing a mechanism for identifying and promoting general and well-written questions to search engines, and so on.
People sometimes have specific or incompletely formulated questions, and people sometimes enjoy figuring out answers to those questions.
By stamping on these situations, Stack Exchange quickly removed almost all of its potential contributor base.
As I have said it encourages additional low quality questions which is more work for the mods.
"low quality" question could just be marked as such and kept mostly unmodorated. By marking them there is also an incentive to produce "high quality" questions. You could also make badges and reputation around it so asking good questions gets more rewarding.
Also, answering those "low quality" can really help the asker to understand his problem better and improve his problem solving ability, so maybe the next time he can provide better information in his question.
If you just close the question and tell people to go away you will just scare people off (which btw also leads to a smaller number of mods)
A lot of SOers seems to enjoy moderation a lot more than answering questions.
Unfortunately they even do get in the way of the rest of us.
The extreme is some open source projects, in my experience.
Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to stop answering certain questions, and only address "well asked" questions. After reading the guidelines, I noted that neither I or the asker had broken any rules, so I commented that I felt I was being treated unfairly, and I asked where I could discuss further since the comments on my questions seemed inappropriate.
Suddenly another, even higher scoring person, deleted all the comments and locked my answer, noting that the discussion had stopped being productive. After that, my answers were left alone with no more meta criticism.
In my limited experience, it's a bizarre community.