The other day I was doing some searching on the use of express in node.js. I think I found about 10 relevant and useful threads of which I think only 1 was still open. All the other threads I actually found very useful had been closed by some moderator. Subjectively, I think this is a very typical ratio.
I just don't get it quite frankly.
It didn't leave me with a great impression of the community TBH, and felt overly draconian. Of course I didn't make a big scene about it, and will still contribute now and then after having adapted, but I think that's a shame in a sense, because often broad and open questions generate a lot of useful discussion.
Almost any technology answer usually has an "it depends" in it somewhere and that of course needs a discussion in order to fully explore the answer.
I've said it before, I'll say it again -- the creators of StackOverflow don't know what made the site successful in the first place.
SO is successful because it's an experts-exchange.com clone without the pushy subscription model plus a few social voting features added in.
THAT'S IT.
The problem also is that the site was essentially complete within the first year. But there are still people on staff and they took a bunch of VC money. The people on staff need to do something and the VC money needs to be spent.
So of course they start meddling with their already completed product. Editing is now seen as an Important Thing and many red herrings like "keeping the site from becoming Reddit" are trumpeted in order to justify this meddling.
Nonsense like "Gorilla's vs Sharks"[1] are trumpeted in order to justify this meddling.
And even worse than the meddling on the new stuff, they go back and close old questions, even ones that have been quantifiably validated by the votes of hundreds of people. I'd actually bookmarked many of them, only to find them mysteriously closed months later.
Holy shit, are you fucking kidding me, guys?
There have been a couple of suggestions in science fiction that would be interesting to see someone try. Heinlein suggested a special branch of government whose purpose was to repeal laws and regulations promulgated by the other branches. Frank Herbert went to an even greater extreme, by having an quasi-official "Bureau of Sabotage".
Perhaps online communities should have a separate group charged with reversing the decisions of editors/moderators/whatever they're called, with no discussion or appeal permitted.
So, yes, a system of meta-moderation, and preferably one that is mechanical and resistant to being gamed, is needed. As fascinating as it is to see emergent cultures in Wikipedia editing and reddit moderation, it ends up being dysfunctional, and that doesn't serve the goals of the communities from which those sites derive their value.
I like basketball. But I wouldn't expect stackoverflow to allow basketball questions.
This isn't a judgment on the value of discussions... but there are other sites for that.
Communities of Practice (Lave, Wenger) are held together by sharing a common repertoire of practices, and opinions. Newcomers may want to explore these shared opinions. SE is obviously not a place where they can do that, so I end up agreeing with your final sentence.
What are the drawbacks of Python? http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/15468/what-ar...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4492899
Just because you like something doesn't mean that it has to featured on Stack Overflow. Same as politics discussion on HN, many might want to debate Romney vs. Obama with the HN folks here, that doesn't mean HN has to tolerate that and turn into another Reddit.
I don't understand all the complaints about having discussions that can easily degenerate into flamewars with thousands of "answers" on Stackoverflow. If it's moved to a Stackexchange with less traffic, go hang out there and make it a better place.
>They aren't the ones creating a great site. Those that ask and answer questions are.
Sure. Look at a site where there is no moderation. http://answers.yahoo.com/
My experience with online communities tells me that the slippery slope in this case is very real. When new and immature folks generate content with back and forth among themselves(voting each others' comments up), the old timers simply pack up and leave since the site doesn't interest them anymore. Happened to Reddit right before my eyes.
So why not use programmers.stackexchange.com for such discussions? The more people use it, the more active it gets. Stackoverflow has already made their opinion clear on this.
The global recalc happened arround Feb10. They applied the new policy retroactively. My reaction was ffs.. how can I actually get credit for the participation. Theres no value in supporting the site other than the reputation you have. The reputation should reflect on how helpful you are. The karma you get there is helpful to demonstrate to employers how well you can help others, thats a little difficult to explain how your score just got deflated.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/03/important-reputation-r...
There were users who were earning huge swatches of rep by asking hundreds of questions and giving little back in return.
I lost ~1k in rep back when I was >20k, and 1k back then (relatively speaking) was a fair old chunk. It was disappointing at the time but it was the right thing to do.
That decision told me... hey tomorrow they can just decide that all users with name x, y, or has numbers in the name can go bankrupt on reputation.
If anything many of the recent changes have been to make the site more inclusive such as suggested edits, better review processes and so on, so that users who are still on their training wheels on the way to the the 10k and 20k tools can practice "community moderation" under the guidance of more experienced users.
That's the impression I got listening to all the SO podcasts. A quick search found this article, "Stack Overflow Careers: Amplifying Your Awesome" http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/11/stack-overflow-care... and this quote:
'If you're actively participating on Stack
Overflow, we now have another way to convert
those slices of effort into something that
actively furthers your professional goals
Stack Overflow Careers.' Coding Horror.may/maynot & explainable. Would and employer look at a third party like that without looking closer at the candidate? Or are they using the suspect rep numbers as a basis of exclusion?
So, SO is turning into Wikipedia…?
Literally over 50% of the SO pages I end up on are closed questions. If I'm lucky, some kind soul got off a good buzzer-beater answer before the Content Police showed up.
I was a frequent contributor to StackOverflow [2] but have largely stopped for a number of reasons, the most important of which is I got a new job that took up much more of my time.
But another reason is that for me, as a (then) frequent answerer, it got a whole lot less interesting. This was due to two factors:
1. A lot of the low-hanging fruit had been answered so the questions became increasingly esoteric such that you were less likely to simply know an answer and had to spend more time researching. That extra time meant you were also less rewarded for the answer because less people were in a position to state that it was correct or not (if you consider karma a "reward"); and
2. The ceaseless campaign against "interesting" questions due to increasing closure due to "subjective and argumentative" and the fragmentation of SO into the many StackExchange sites (causing a lot of questions to be migrated).
There are three basic errors that Joel has (and Jeff had) made (IMHO):
1. Over-emphasis on editing.
In my mind there are three groups: askers, answerers and editors. Jeff & Joel made statements about editors are important and how editing is super-important, basically trying o elevate it to the same level as answering questions.
This is a problem.
Editors are the bureaucrats of the StackOverflow ecosystem. The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy [3]. The more editors you have the less each has to do. Rather than doing less, the kinds of people attracted to this kind of function prefer to simply create work for themselves.
What's more, from Meta StackOverflow, from interacting from the people who edit a lot (and answer very little if anything), this simply reinforced my view: these are the kinds of people who destroy communities.
Those who can, answer. Those who can't, edit.
I've seen many spurious edits to many of my higher voted answers. Some capitalize something. Others come along and uncapitalize it. I've seen people come and add lines to my answers saying I stole it from someone else (seriously).
The net result is virtually any highly voted answer I have has been edited into community wiki oblivion. That creates a strong disincentive for me to spend time coming up with a good answer: I'll basically get limited credit from it and then have to watch as wanna-be editors essentially vandalize it.
The other thing these people do is close questions on the drop of a hat. They, as a group, tend to have an incredibly festidious nature when it comes to the enforcement of rules. They constantly seek some purer, higher standard and don't quite get that those rules are guidelines that are a means to an end and not an end in themselves.
2. "Subjective and argumentative".
Jeff and Joel from the outset wanted to prevent flame war type questions, the kind of questions that have no definite answer. Questions like "Is Ruby better than Python?" That's fine but it's been taken too far, in part by the very editors I previously mentioned.
Questions like "Should I use Angular.js or Ember.js for developing a CRUD-type Web application?" would be shut down in a minute. But the extra context matters. You can answer that question by giving a list of comparative advantages without being necessarily biased or inflammatory. That's actually interesting content, particularly if you're trying to decide between a number of new technologies, languages, etc. But alas SO seems keen on shutting that down; and
3. Fragmentation.
There is another thread today about the difficulty of music classification [4]. The same goes for Q&A. Hierarchical classification schemes are too limited for Q&A. There are SO questions that have bounced around between a number of SE sites for this reason.
Just look at the Stack Exchange sites [5]. If I want to ask a question about being a programmer do I ask on OnStartups, on the Programmer SE or elsewhere?
The pragmatic answer is that there are some question that naturally fit on several sites. Yet the hierarchical pigeon-holing with esoteric and often subjective rules means it's harder to find content, it's hard to find where to place content and newbies inevitably get chastised for posting on the wrong site.
There is a reason tagging exists and is successful. Describe the traits of the question or, better yet, figure it out from the content, and show it when it's relevant to someone. Don't make me hunt across sites for it. That's a ridiculous solution.
I predict you'll see the rise of more tagging-oriented (at a higher level than say Java or C++) and automatic classification Q&A sites in the future.
With that out of my system, let me address som eof the points the OP specifically raised:
> The Eternal September Issue.
This one annoys me. And I don't mean new people. The negative reaction people have to them (eg [6]). When a community starts chastising newbies, that reflects badly on the community, not the newbies.
> Down voting as a means of closing a question.
The one part of downvoting I don't like is people use it as a means of saying "I disagree with this" (on purely subjective grounds), which is not the intended purpose. That problem seems to be nearly universal with voting systems (even here). The one good thing SO does is "charge" you for downvotes. That alone stops it being a huge problem (IMHO).
> This is another one of the odd cases on StackOverflow. A few of the “Exact Duplicate” questions are not duplicates due to minor, but important, differences.
True. The problem here again is that you have editors deciding to close things that they don't necessarily know anything about. The same problem infests Wikipedia (deleting articles on "notability" grounds).
> The value of reputation: After the global recalculation, the site’s creators made a bold statement that participation is not valued on the site.
I actually don't know what this is referring to but then again I've been largely inactive. There have been several recalculations though (eg question upvotes from 10 to 5 karma). I don't really have a problem with this. If you're too obsessed with your karma, you're focusing on the wrong things. And I like that the same rules apply to everyone (eg it's better than question upvotes before X are 10, after X are 5).
I worried when SO took VC money that they were going to turn something that is very successful in one segment and ruin it with attempts at making a general Q&A platform. 2+ years on I'm still failing to see traction in the SE sites beyond SO. This may yet still become a problem.
Perhaps the simplest answer here is that SO isn't a "community" as such. It went with the Q&A format (over, say, forums) to discourage discussion. People often criticized it for making discussion hard when that was kinda the point.
I certainly never went to SO to hang out. Some do I'm sure. The focus is (and should be IMHO) on the content not the community.
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4413684
[2]: http://stackoverflow.com/users/18393/cletus
[3]: http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/130452-the-bureaucracy-is-ex...
[4]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4493959
[5]: http://stackexchange.com/sites
[6]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9953/could-we-please...