It's funny that a huge chunk of the questions that I find extremely interesting and worth reading have been 'closed for <reason x>.'

At least closed questions are visible and you can decide for yourself if you like them. Other moderators just delete your question and you will never know why. There is no trail, no warning and no one can be held accountable. Unless you have 10k reputation. With 10k you can see deleted questions and it seems you can see who deleted it.

I note most of those questions are basically some awesome trivia some guy discovered on the way while solving tough problems.

Or recommendations to books/reading/tools etc.

Also, very difficult questions get relatively few points compared to very easy ones when they are answered.

I pride myself in answering some of the trickier questions in my domain, ie http://stackoverflow.com/q/10060242/154112

Those are easily the questions I feel the best about after answering, and really they generate the best encouragement by far. Much better than points is seeing this: http://i.imgur.com/POZmt.png

But compare the score of that tricky question to this very recent one, where both the question and answer garnered a lot of upvotes because the title was "why are my balls disappearing": http://stackoverflow.com/q/11066050/154112

Even with a bounty on the tricky question, hounding flippant questions can garner you more "reputation" far faster than giving thoughtful replies to hard questions, which can be a little disheartening.

"Also, very difficult questions get relatively few points compared to very easy ones when they are answered."

Yeah, this. It hurts my eyes to see that most of my rep on SO I got from A) Recommending the K&R for a starters' C book, and B) for explaining how the @ works for error message suppression in PHP.

While the numerous questions I answered that took actual experience and hard work, hardly ever get an upvote, let alone an 'accept', presumably because whoever asked it doesn't care enough about the issue to do the work required to solve a hard problem, even if the principles are handed to him.

This is one of the main reasons I hardly use SO anymore, myself.

With communities in general (not explicitly referencing SO here), I've always felt that moderators are their own worst enemies.

They dictate the terms of use through enforcement. It's not fun to use something until you find that you aren't allowed to.

The best tools do not limit their usage patterns, and communities adapt and evolve to make these tools solve their problems.

These aren't always the same problems that the creators of the system or moderators intended to be solved.

So moderators kill the potential utility of a tool.

One of those potentials (now referring back to SO) is the unification of people with a shared interest in a programming language or knowledge domain.

Without community, why should a user invest in it?

So I assert (overly simplistically) that moderators kill communities.

And yet, Stack Overflow gets 7000 questions a day, and manages to maintain a very high quality compared to sites with less moderation.

The very moderation which detracts from the community feeling is what's keeping the quality of the site up and helping create a valuable permanent resource on the Internet, which is our primary goal. Like Wikipedia, strict rules are what lead to a valuable artifact. Stack Overflow's rules and values are not intended to create a warm and cuddly discussion area for long-winding, far-reaching conversations, social networking, and "community" whatever that means. They are intended to create a body of precise questions and answers which are peer-reviewed, editable, and high-quality that you can search with Google.

That you don't know what community means is kind of sad, but it certainly explains the decisions that drove me (and others here) away from Stack Overflow.

Speaking as a Wikipedia admin, you're replicating a mistake that I think has harmed Wikipedia immensely without mirroring one of the key safety valves.

Wikipedia has a problem that's well-known in the community: active participants are burning out, editor activity is stagnant, and the existing social environment is very off-putting to newbies. Petty enforcement of petty rules, an obsession with particular notions of quality, and a lot of behavior that seems to the uninitiated like high-handed dickishness.

But one of Wikipedia's saving graces is this core policy: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." It reminds people that rules are the tail, not the dog.

With Wikipedia, strict rules aren't what leads to a valuable artifact. it's that a lot of people care about creating the world's best reference work together. They understand very clearly that it's the community that produces the encyclopedia. The rules are just there to record community consensus, and to help newbies think things through.

Is the quality of the site being kept up, though?

Questions certainly feel "worse" than they did 2 years ago when I first started following SO.

Way more "homework" or "newbie south-east Asian programmer asking for THE CODEZ" type questions than there ever was back in the day.

I'm not really sure how you fix that, although slightly raising the barrier to entry (perhaps require they at least pick a username?) might help reduce the "drive bys" who ask a poor question, and never accept an answer.

All true, and far more real a risk. That's why we now (as of about 6 months ago) require registration to ask questions, for example.

SO is slowly driving away the more senior participants who haven't been drawn in by the gamification of the site. Every few months it seems like the questions on the site are more and more of the "I could have googled this but it was faster to ask it on SO." variety.

In short, SO is becoming a Mechanical Turk for searching for answers to software questions, and the reason is because Google is becoming less and less useful (as it tries to be more and more helpful) for searching for answers to software questions.

I don't know how that fits into the long-term goals of SO.

I think SO will be happy if they will be able to become a database for most common programming problems.

That is where the crowd is, mediocre programmers are plenty and they won't be asking expert questions either. They need hand holding at every step. And if you could answer all they question they have, you could serve a huge crowd.

On other hand, asking expert questions may make you an awesome site. But the target audience is to little.

Because number of people needing answers to expert questions themselves are scanty.

(blog author)

+1 aha this!

This is really the root cause perhaps?

This is why Joel and the chap whose own code is a horror are here talking quantity in reply to a blog post about quality perhaps?

> Like Wikipedia, strict rules are what lead to a valuable artifact.

What? Wikipedia's strict rules (really, a hideous mish mash of conflicting obscure scattered policy and guideline and suggestion and essay and convention) detract from the purpose of getting information about a subject from a variety of trusted sources into an article about that subject.

See, for example, the amount of time that goes into deciding whether to allow someone to have a username consisting of a bunch of digits or not. (Such a user name is "confusing". But what is it confused with? It's not confusing by itself. The policy is to prevent people using names that imply power. and so on for several megabytes, several times a year.) And then, when the community has taken several months (at a short time estimate) to agree on a policy they realise that the software has hard-coded limits which are different to the policy anyway. So it all starts again.

SO's mods are doing a good, but difficult job.

Wikipedia's admins, New Page Patrollers, Anti-Vandal Patrol, Recent Change Patrol, twinkle user, rollback user, are doing an inconsistent job.

I'll agree that I'm pretty anti the current WP experience.

"[StackOverflow's rules] are intended to create a body of precise questions and answers ..."

Suitable for informing a junior code monkey working to someone else's plan. Yes, we all understand this. Yes, we agree it is useful.

But junior code monkeys grow and learn. On their way to becoming a senior software engineer, they will ask a question like "how do I solve such and such problem with a Ruby hash" and the answer is "you probably don't want to--take the stakeholder to lunch and do some requirements analysis, then come back and we'll help you solve the systems architecture problem that you will have just discovered".

This answer will be expunged by the moderators for being subjective and argumentative. Yes, of course it is. The most valuable questions about software creation have to do with purpose and architecture. Software creators are people who need mentoring, not robots looking for answers from autistic oracles.

I have no objection to putting only objective questions on the standard view. It's expedient for people who need to learn some detail right now. It will get more eyeballs, more Google juice, and more monetization. But there is no need to delete subjective questions when they can be trivially tagged and filtered off into another view.

Actually, that answer would very likely be appreciated as long as you phrased it politely. I've very often told people on Stack Overflow that they were asking the wrong question, told them how to start off on the right path, and gotten the checkmark for it.

(I actually will sometimes answer the original question if it's not too involved or impossible, and include a note along the lines of "See this? This is why it sucks for what you want to do.")

This is the "Stack Overflow sucks because it doesn't have enough lolcats" argument. You might like lolcats, and good for you if so, but not every site is about lolcats and you should not try to force every site to become a meme-fueled jokestravaganza.

There's nothing wrong with having focus. Moderators do often prevent communities from growing as much as they otherwise would, but so will any filter that keeps quality high by some metric that isn't "Do we get the most readers possible?" In Stack Overflow's case, a large part of its utility is that it's a no-messing-around question and answer site. Being "the unification of people with a shared interest in a programming language or knowledge domain" is not the site's goal any more than hosting funny pictures of cats is, so no surprise that the moderators kill that potential.

I do think they draw the line a little closer than I would and a lot of stuff they kill I would think it's OK to allow, but that's just armchair quarterbacking. The broad strokes of what they do seems like a good thing.

That really isn't the argument I was trying to make.

More, that communities evolve and the demographics change. And as the demographics change, the needs and demands grow more diverse. Sure the fundamental core need that unified people remains, but new needs emerge.

The problem with empowering the core to be moderators is that they enforce their idea of the what the community should be based on their use at the time. This means that they're excluding new uses, and more specifically that new demographics would use the tools provided in unexpected ways... thus revealing the new needs. But if moderators prevent the use of tools in unexpected ways... then you not only don't discover the new needs of the community, but you send a message to that new demographic of users that they aren't wholly welcome (on the users terms).

And to in part respond to spolsky, I've immense respect for you and SO and what it's achieved (thank you for saving me from expertsexchange). So I know you've probably already got ideas and views on how to react to the evolution of the community.

I would say one thing... I recall someone posting on HN a while ago a picture of an org structure... it might even be related to where you are. And in this org structure the pyramid was inverted, managers were merely admin to engineers.

This is what I believe moderators should be. That moderators should be led, rather than lead.

If nobody is complaining about your moderators, they aren't doing their jobs.

Moderators are there to protect the community from itself, as described in http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul...

It's a tough job. But if you disagree with the way the moderation works, bring it up on meta, and/or run for the position of moderator in the next election.

How many other sites offer either of those options?

The one thing that drove me away from participating in SO are the moderators. I swear, every time I get a google hit for a highly-relevant, informed discussion on a non-trivial programming topic, it's a question that has been closed by moderators for some stupid excuse.

You talk about there being other forums, like programming. or whatever else... Well, moderators should move the question instead of closing it. Why not do a mass query for these high-upvote yet moderator-closed questions on SO and move them to whatever other forum? Why gag the community for the sake of moderator ego?

Anyway. I gave up on the idea of proving I am a good programmer by participating and pumping up my SO score. Participation in SO is painful, moderators destroy good will. It seems they have an antenna that detects good discussion about programming and they step into it and destroy it.

So my response is: I don't care anymore. I certainly won't bring it up on meta, enough ignoring the userbase was done on there before when SE flip-flopped from for-profit, give us your money to "we'll dictate what q/a sites can be created" for me to go back and expect any consideration.

So no. For me SO is a great place to find answers by informed people on several topics, but it's not a place to invest yourself.

Anyway, just one less user for SO.

Discussion is not the point of SO, or any Stack Exchange site. See http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su...

Well, whatever. Mods close good, interesting stuff on the other sites too:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/45776/why-do-...

So either the site visitors are mostly stupid and cannot follow directions (see the number of votes on everything mentioned in that closed, "not constructive" thread), or Joel and you are forcing SE sites into an inferior subset of what the visitors actually want.

A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

'The moderators are also awful.' +1 the more interesting questions about beautiful code, attitude to coding etc are closed. If it's not "set X to Y", they close it.

In my opinion, that's a feature and not a bug.

That's interesting. I also found that my more difficult questions never got answered.

Perhaps a fix to create an incentive to answer hard questions would be to create a ratio to estimate difficulty (how much time has gone by without an accepted or high-voted answer? number of views that don't add a good answer?) and then give more reward points to someone who successfully answers a "hard" question.

There is the "bounty" system[0]: you (or anyone else) can offer up some of your own reputation as a bonus for answering the question. (For example: this Haskell question[1], and this C/GCC question[2] have had no/poor answers for a while, and the bounties have prompted more/better answers.)

[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/privileges/set-bounties [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11060565/tying-the-knot-w... [2]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11015672/gcc-removes-inli...

I've had this happen to me a lot, but I also have noticed that sometimes I see an interesting question that deserves a long answer and I want to answer it, but I have this nagging suspicion someone else is already working on an answer and by the time I write mine theirs will already have received some kind of critical mass of upvotes and my work will not get any upvotes at all.

The best strategy seems to be incremental editing. Post a short and to-the-point answer first and then edit it to expand and add finer points. This way your answer is already competing with others even as you write it (properly).

It feels slightly weird to be forced to employ such a tactic, but at SO's scale it might just be necessary.

It's not weird, it's intentional, and desired. The short and to-the-point answer is marginally more helpful if it arrives sooner, because it solves the problem quickly, so it will tend to earn a little more reputation. Coming back later and embellishing the answer with details, sample code, whatever, and you will earn a flood of well-deserved reputation. Doing both--providing a quick answer and then embellishing the details so that the Internet has a great resource--is the ideal outcome and therefore rewarded with the most reputation.

I tried to do incremental editing of a self-answered question. As I was editing and improving the post, within 30 minutes of originally posting, my question was closed for not being a real question. Which was true, the original question was a problem statement.

I continued to improve the post, including the feedback from downvoters. However, I had to flag the post to have a mod reopen the question and none of the downvoters have returned to modify their vote.

It's annoying to end up with negative feedback after attempting to be helpful and taking time to improve a post. Maybe encourage closers to come back after a post is reopened?

For reference, the post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10748274/faces-are-black-...

bookmark it (using the so interface - click on the star thing) and look again in a day or so. by then it will be clear if it's going to be answered or not.

main trouble with this is that some simple, dumb answer may have been marked correct by then.

The marked answer may be changed, so there's still hope. The problem is when the question is asked by someone who won't be back to see your new awesome answer because they've already moved on.

I don't follow, are you answering to gain upvotes or to, erm, answer the question ?

I hadn't given this much thought prior to your and Joel's remarks. But I think it's a fair question and it deserves reflection.

I do wonder to what extent it's possible to participate meaningfully on Stack Overflow with those goals completely separated.

There needs to be an embargo period where votes don't show up for the first 15-30mins to stop the snowballing effect of the first answer - like with real election results

This was actually discussed to death on StackOverflow's Meta site in the "old days".

The reason they stick to this system: They prefer people answering quickly. This is the perfect incentive to get people to answer ASAP.

And to the argument "but I have a much better, more thought out answer", most people will say "Yes, but I want my answer now. I don't care about the history behind git, I want to know how to stage removed files".

But in the early days there were fewer people asking and answering.

Now there are a larger number of answerers and a bigger pool of people wanting/needing to gain rep by writing the quickest (but not necessarily correct) answer. This leads to a state where people don't bother clicking on questions with an answer on the front page - because they are already 'behind' in the race

I agree completely. And what makes SO even more frustrating is finding out the mods got all their rep 4 years ago from 'Programmer Cartoon' questions that would be closed in 10 seconds today.

Instead of closing those questions, they could move them to the "Programmers" site. http://programmers.stackexchange.com/faq?mnu=1

All subjective questions are expected to be constructive. How do we define that? Constructive subjective questions:

  -inspire answers that explain “why” and “how”.
  -tend to have long, not short, answers.
  -have a constructive, fair, and impartial tone.
  -invite sharing experiences over opinions.*

The mods on programmers are even worse than the mods on SO, in my opinion.

Bunch of obnoxious punks, them Programmers moderators... Especially the Greek guy...

OK, so much for that idea.

all good points. also, the obsession with pushing "off topic" questions to other sites means that the range of questions you see on any one site goes down, which makes it less interesting as a place to go to answer.

another way of looking at this is that originally i could design my own filter (via tags) to select what i wanted to answer. but increasingly that is being done for me by mods, and what i find interesting (which tends to be "harder" questions that are cross-discipline) is sent elsewhere. meanwhile, other people are complaining that harder questions are not answered.

i guess they may go full circle and provide a way to combine from multiple sites in a single interface...

and i guess you can argue that what they have now - many fragmented sites - is a better fit to (and a response to) the problem they used to have when there were still many simple/easy questions to ask. they're late solving the problem they had and, at the same time, are making worse the problem they have which is too few eyeballs on the complex problems.

This. I have ~5000 rep, but have pretty much gone to not using at all for the past year, primarily due to shoving questions to ancillary SE sites. I dabble in administration, but not enough to constantly view ServerFault. I'm interested in algorithms, but I'm not going to spend all day only on that. The old StackOverflow seemed to be perfect for renaissance techies; there was a little bit of everything all in one place. I'd answer a question on C#, then ruby, then design patterns, then server admin. Now it's fragmented, I guess taking the "silo approach" to Q&A. It really kills it for those of us who have a variety of interests. That's not even getting into the "too few eyeballs" problem.

> ... to other sites ...

That wouldn't be so bad if SO didn't try to keep your user accounts for each site separate. I really don't want or need one account per site, or the constant barrage of "welcome back" animations and all that crap. Now I just ignore any site that I don't already have an account on.

Totally agree on the so called subjective questions. The idea should be "wide-open your minds" instead of everybody's "how can I cast it to list" questions.

Why would you want Stack Overflow to be about "wide-open your minds", when Hacker News is perfectly suitable for that?

Right! Also, why would I want a restaurant to serve coffee, when there's a perfectly good cafe not a mile away?

I agree with your point about hard questions. They ought to provide escalating reward for answering older questions.

They do some of this. For example, the silver Necromancer badge is awarded when you "Answered a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more"

http://stackoverflow.com/badges

You can put a bounty on your hard question if nobody answers it.

You can, but you are penalised for doing so.

Penalised? You spend some imaginary points and in return you get more chances for a good answer to your question... That's a fair tradeoff, if you ask me...

This was one of the things that drove me away from Quora (amongst plenty of other things). It felt extremely bureaucratic and arbitrary, and the tone of the moderator replies on Quora really brought down morale - along with the downvote feature.

I will grant SO that you always know when you are being moderated; Hacker News and Quora does this more surreptitiously, which is more infuriating by an order of magnitude.

I have the opposite impression of Quora, really, and I think their voting design is brilliant. It's designed to maximize viewer utility and poster enjoyment at the expense of transparency. I get how it's infuriating to a certain type of user, but in doing so they've removed a lot of opportunities for negative interactions.

How does poster enjoyment figure? I don't think it's very gratifying when an answer with fewer upvotes than mine is ranked higher, because downvotes are offsetting the difference in upvotes.

They might as well just hide the points. After all, people only post on the site to help others - not to discuss matters like on Hacker News - so biting the hand that feeds you in this way seems self-defeating.

Getting upvoted is a positive experience. Getting downvoted is a negative one. If you don't know that you've been downvoted, you can't get upset about it. It's true that if you go back to a question, look for your relative position, and do the math, you may also have a negative experience, but that's much rarer.

Note that voting isn't the only thing than ranks answers. They also have some subtle reputation system going on.

It sounds like you haven't experienced or seen Quora moderation. up/down voting is not moderation.

I was responding mainly to his comment on downvoting. At 200+ answers I've seen some moderation, but never been on the receiving end of it.

Having been a Wikipedia admin, I'd say Quora's doing a reasonable job. Moderation always feels arbitrary to people on the receiving end of it. And bureaucratic, too, if more than a few people do the moderating.

I accidentally hit the downvote button on your comment. Sorry about that. Someone else can feel free to counter it by upvoting the comment. I completely agree with what you are saying, by the way.

A linked issue is that an answer to an easy question will gain much more rep as more people will feel able to judge the quality of the answer. Often the only person qualified to quickly judge if the answer to a hard question is correct is the person who asked it.

'The moderators are also awful.' SO is holding elections right now. If you feel the moderators are doing a poor job, why not vote for a moderator who shares your beliefs?

that seems futile. unless you're a serious power user you're not going to keep track of who the good/bad moderators are. i guess everyone could go back to their closed questions and see who closed them? although it usually takes a few votes and i'm not sure if you can even see who the close votes came from. I couldn't agree more that moderators on SO are awful, but not going to spend time tracking them down and down voting in hopes this will somehow change their behavior. All of my slightly subjective questions got closed, and in frustration i'd see similar types of questions get up to hundreds or thousands of points. What is this subjective rule anyway? why do they have to be closed? can't users just read the question and decide if they want to move on? if a question is getting up voted, who cares how subjective it is? it's obviously liked by some people.

Do you have examples for those closed subjective questions? Or have they been deleted meanwhile?

Because I'm not involved in the community because the community doesn't really exist.

Maybe a simple answer to having a question closed/moved as subjective would be that at least two mods find flag it as such.