I especially hate having to be so defensive.

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

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

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

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

For example:

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

"Why aren't you using an ORM?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

I call it the MacRumors Forums/Apple Discussions syndrome:

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

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

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

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

OT but my 7-year-old entryish-level iMac is still going strong running Mavericks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, but the very nature of computer science tends to mean it's a turtles on down scenario. You explain that (for example), no, you can't upgrade the machine to windows 7 from XP, and that's why your question is about XP, then you end up having to explain why you can't upgrade, which isn't just a simple reason. You go "well, because the framework we use only exists for XP" and now you're stuck explaining why you use that framework. Once you explain why you're using the framework, you're off to explain why you can only use that one framework and why nothing else will do. Then, you're explaining the problem that lead you to that framework, and on and on and on. It's typically never a simple "Well, we just chose X and that's why," it's almost always "We have to use x, because Y used N and M which don't work with L because J and we tried A, B, C, D and E, but only R worked, but R doesn't exist for the OS we use so we had to rewrite R in F and finally use it with X."

You kinda end up copy pasting your life's story every time you ask a simple question. Drives me nuts and makes me use IRC more often because the feedback loop ends quicker.

"What are you trying to do?" is probably the most passive-aggressive, most infuriating and least helpful answer to any technical question.

It usually translates to "I know the answer to your question, but instead of just answering it and letting us both get on with our lives, I'd like to show off my vast intellect by helping you embark on a major re-design that you neither asked for nor need at the moment."

I ask questions like this a lot, and that is not at all what it's about. The motivation for asking what somebody is trying to do is that I don't know a good answer to the question they asked, but I have a nagging feeling that their question might actually be reducible to a different question that I can answer easily. It would be presumptuous to just answer a completely different question, though, so I ask for clarification whether this is in fact the context that it looks like. To put it another way, they're asking "How do I hit glass with stone without breaking it?" but what they actually want to know is "How do I get the lid off a beer bottle?" The fact that they currently believe removing a beer lid involves striking the bottle with a rock doesn't necessarily mean that answers along those lines are the most helpful. But I can't be sure when I see that question whether they are thinking about a beer bottle.

For example, yesterday a guy asked a rather complicated question about hacking the Objective-C runtime to replace a class in the inheritance tree. But from his question, I was able to infer that what he actually wanted to do was globally change a class's behavior. So I answered the question that I read between the lines. His response was, "Oh, yeah, I don't know why I didn't do that to begin with." In that case I felt sure enough to answer without asking, but in other cases I'm not as confident whether this is actually a different question in disguise.

Sometimes there really is a better way to solve their problem. Sometimes, the problem they have can be guessed reasonably accurately, and solving it for them is useful. I've found such answers helpful in the past.

I've replied to "does anyone know where the nearest ATM is?" with "the pub we're going to has no card transaction fees or minimum spend". It doesn't necessarily solve their problem, but there's enough chance that it does, that I feel it's a useful thing to say.

I wouldn't assume it means they know the answer. On the lists I'm on, it usually means "I have no idea how to answer this question directly, but if you give me more context maybe I could answer a broader question that gets you what you want."

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

I can't say that this is generally always the case, but when people ask "what is it exactly you're trying to do?", it's often because they're trying to figure out if you have an XY Problem[0].

[0]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378/163250

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

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

I work in tech support, and I consider it bad taste to have user's reboot their machine without due reason.

Then again, I'm a linux guy too, so reboots are in general bad tatse.

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

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

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

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

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

- No answer or vague unhelpful answers.

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

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

I wouldn't sweat it too much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are some things built into the DNA of the system. Dowvnotes are there and an early blog post addresses that - http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/03/the-value-of-downvotin...

Note that down votes are a key part of what drives a number of automatic scripts that clean up things.

* People who waste too much of the communities time (asking poor questions that get closed and down voted ) get question banned - driven strongly impart by down votes.

* Closed questions that have a negative score and no answers with a positive score get deleted after a bit over a week. (If people complain about how much crud there is, one should look at how much crud gets automatically deleted).

* A down voted question helps signal to people reading to not waste their time reading it because its not useful. When you've got 8000 questions/day, someone saying "don't bother with this" can save you a bit of time reading it.

For smaller communities where a person who wastes your time can get addressed through individual moderator attention. Where there are 8k questions per day asked by a similar number of people, you can't have every moderator address each poor question and time wasting troll. It is for this that simple down votes can help drive the automated system when there is enough signal that the person is wasting everyone's time without involving moderators.

Update: So, because of how the system was designed, it isn't something that one can easily go back to and change (and remove down votes). Its part of the software and the culture of the group and the two are inseparable - the technological and social part of the community is tightly interwoven. Further reading on this at http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

In such cases downvoting needs have a crowd effect.

say 3 or 5 downvotes are required to start flagging inappropriate content.

surely if more than 3 people flag something, then its likely there is a case to answer. takes away power from pissed off people who can't stomach a diff viewpoint.

Downvotes serve to help signal to the person that there is something wrong - and it does it noticeably. Flags are things that go to various levels of moderation (close flags go to the close vote queue, moderator flags go to the elected moderators, low quality flags (only doable on negative score posts) go to the low quality review queue, and not an answer flags go to elected moderators).

Downvotes mean that its not helpful, or that its not correct, or that it insufficiently answers the question. Flags and downvotes are often orthogonal to each other - one doesn't mean the other is needed.

With a good question, viewpoints shouldn't be an issue at all - there's a question, there's an answer.

An individual who systematically down vote another individual will have the votes reversed by the system.

some folks don't like a question or the assumptions and inferences from it.

Downvotes are their weapon of choice. Now the question loses value because someone had an agenda.

Now at 3 downvotes, there could be a point is what I am trying to say.

The prospective of being downvoted by stuck up folks leads to unwanted self-censorship and in many case not bothering to ask the question.

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

TONS of people start their question with "I'm new to Java"...

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's possible to ask a bash question that IS about programming, and it's possible to ask one that ISN'T. Without the question, we can't really judge here which one yours was - can you provide it?

It's exactly this sort of autistic 'oh look at how closely I follow the rules' nonsense that made SO (and Wikipedia, but that's a different discussion) basically worthless for everybody who is not a first-year student any more, so basically all people who have actually something to contribute is actively hindered in contributing.

Pray tell, what is there to ask about bash that isn't programming? Now the SO zealot will say 'well the history is bash is not about programming', which is technically correct - and 'technically correct' is the worst kind of correct in existence. A question about the history of bash is close enough to being about programming, let it be.

(I don't know if the GP's question was actually about the history of bash, it's just an example of a situation I can imagine in painful realistic detail how it would go down)

Way to dump on autistic people, man. You really think they don't have enough problems, you gotta blame them for this too?

If you wanna make something better, call out specific behaviors - ideally, punctuated with specific examples - and explain why they're harmful. That way folks who care can learn something, and teach others. Yes, even if they do have autism.

>this sort of autistic 'oh look at how closely I follow the rules' nonsense //

He's not referring to autism he's referring to a sort of pharisaical uber-pedantry that fails to properly acknowledge the purpose of the rules, and the purpose of the forum, instead looking only at the letter of the regulations. You might call it lack of a good faith effort to interpret the question positively.

I'm guessing you knew that.

While your defense of his vitriol is noble, I'm less convinced of his good intentions.

Sadly, this isn't the first time I've run across statements like this; they're all too common in support emails sent to us at Stack Exchange. Rather than making an effort to express their concerns and disagreements, all too many people jump to the assumption that because someone disagrees with them they must have some deep-seated problem that they're inflicting on others rather than dealing with.

Perhaps it is cathartic for the person writing, but it is frustrating and wholly unproductive for everyone they subject to it.

Because when somebody says 'watch out where you're going, are you blind' when somebody almost runs them over, they mean that they think the person driving has 0% vision and that all blind people drive over other people? I'm not sure what your point is.

Instead of devoting paragraphs on 'detailed behaviors - ideally punctuated with specific examples', I use one word that perfectly conveys my intent. Not a single person (who is not autistic, which does make my post a catch-22 situation) would think that I actually meant that I am blaming people who are medically diagnosed as scoring high on the autism spectrum for the demise of SO.

(come to think of it, and given the context of this whole inane thread, I'm not sure if maybe you are just parodying the GP - if so, nicely done, and I admit it went over my head until after writing the above)

OK, as you suggest, I could counter with plenty of examples of questions about bash that aren't about programming, but - for the sake of discussion - let's assume those are all close enough since bash is most likely to be used by programmers than non-programmers.

where do you now draw the line? do you have a line at all? if not, don't you end up with something like yahoo answers that already exists and is pretty much useless to everyone?

The SO founders decided to draw the line at 'programming questions', then built a framework to enforce that. I don't see what's wrong with that.

P.S. If you're going to reply, can we keep it civil, please?

(edit: wow, someone really has it in for me today)

We consider questions one by one, just like on the first day SO opened (yes I was there), and the really idiotic ones are downvoted once or twice with their grey headline signaling to everybody who knows the mores of the land 'stay away'.

Everybody who isn't interested in more generic questions, recommendations for libraries, opinions etc stays away from those threads and everybody lives happily ever after.

What is more important is what shouldn't be done - pages and pages of rules and exact definitions of what is and is not worthy of being a question, with a bunch of language lawyers (who, by the way, for the most part have very little content knowledge yet don't let that stop them from having an opinion on everything) spending ungodly amounts of time combing through the details of every post to judge what does and does not conform to the all mighty 'rules'.

I have several times had people with no knowledge (judging from their comment history) and much less time on the site than I have, jump on questions or answers that didn't fit their mindlessly rigid mental image of 'how things should be' and actually detract from the usefulness of the question by their whining about formatting, phrasing of questions, how other content is linked etc.

'Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds', illustrated nowhere as dramatically (and saddeningly) as on Stack Overflow.

I'm way more bitter than I should be over something I rationally should just shrug of. But dammit every time something good pops up, the idiots take over after 2 or 3 years. Most Usenet groups, Slashdot, BoS forums, this site - tragedy of the commons, it's perfectly rational and explainable, I understand how and why, and still I hate when it happens, every time.

I was also right there from the beginning - before, in fact, since I listened to the podcast when it was just an idea Jeff and Joel were discussing. I remember them dealing with issues such as scope and clearly expressing a desire for it not to be too broad.

You're right, though - it can get far too pedantic. anywhere you have a subjective rule, that's a danger, I'm afraid. I don't use SO anywhere near as much as I used to, so I'm not a good judge of quality over time, but I still find great answers there 99% of the time, so it's definitely getting more right than it is wrong.

I was also there at the beginning (the beta). And both of you are right. I don't use SO much now either. Really, the only time I see it is when it pops in a search. And then, the question/solution is usually closed.

What I don't get is I've seen questions that were answered closed? Why close any question that's been marked as answered?

I would buy you hacker news gold for this rant. So true.

I don't see why this was downvoted. I don't necessarily agree with you, but there was nothing objectionable or even necessarily logically wrong with what you've said.

Nobody "has it in for you". You are exemplifying the poisonous, high-handed attitude which the rest of this thread is talking about, which tends to completely ruin forums for asking technical questions: you assume by default that the user is wrong and that the appropriate way to open the interaction is to build a case for the prosecution, even though 99% of the time a question about bash will be about programming (not e.g. 'who is the author of bash'). That's why you've taken a beating on score here. The internet points don't matter, but please reconsider the way you approach question

I fail to see what he's done that's so awful. He noted that SO was designed a certain way, for a specific purpose. There was nothing poisonous or high-handed about what he wrote. I don't see how you can say that.

It was closed because the person closing it didn't recognize bash as a language; the substance of my question wasn't even at issue.

After others pointed out that it is a language, a mod re-opened it and it was answered.

Well, that's clearly ridiculous, but it's good to hear that it was reopened and the system worked.

"the system worked"

A system that requires moderation / higher authority to work normally isn't really working, it just has an error recovery mechanism. Systems built on the negative being right and the positive needing proof are particularly painful.

It didn't work very well if all of those hoops had to be jumped through just to have the question recognized as valid.

Bugs happen. If they get fixed, the process works. It's unrealistic to think that, in an open system, no-one will ever do the wrong thing.

If there are enough people complaining that the error recovery system is invoked far too often, the "one-off" bug should instead be given higher priority as a design flaw.

The problem is, it's easy to pull out specific examples that illustrate bad attitudes, mistakes, etc. Stack Overflow gets somewhere between 8 and 9 thousand questions every day - even with only a small % of those being closed, downvoted, dumped on, etc. that's still a lot of opportunity for error - in both directions (plenty of embarrassingly-bad and outright abusive/trolling posts stick around too long too).

So, there are checks and balances and venues for appeal and we try and provide opportunities for both automated systems and humans to review and appeal any decision. If you're patient, it works. If you're not... Well, it's probably not a good place for you to be.

This wasn't a bugfix, it was a workaround.

Why do you think that he or anyone wants you to judge it?

As a user here and a reader on SO, I'll say this:

Go to hell.

Your responses are less than worthless. You argue and banter, just to be right 'on the internet'. You and comments like yours poisons community after community. Disconnect from the Internet and leave the rest of us in peace.

The abusive nature of this comment was entirely innappropriate for Hacker News. There was nothing poisonous about the poster's comment, it written in a reasonable tone, wasn't unnecessarily argumentative, didn't say anything objectionable about a particular person and seemed to make a reasonable point.

Please try to address the matter without virtiol next time. You can disagree in a civil manner. The above comment has absolutely no valuable content in it, and is extremely poisonous to discussion on HN. Ironically, you just became the person you rail about in your comment!

I'm sorry you feel that way, but I think you're overreacting. I never intended to invoke such feelings, but don't worry, I'm going to leave this whole topic alone now.

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

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

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

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

* edit - corrected Discourse attribution.

One correction: It was Jeff Atwood who created Discourse.

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

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

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

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

I say "ruined" from the perspective that a lot of people like me, who have expertise and are interested in sharing, refrain from doing so because we have exactly zero interes in dealing with moderator bullshit. The sites are useful. They could be better.

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

> 11 - Email the mods to get the downvote removed

Mods can't reverse up/down votes

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

Nope, they absolutely cannot. If you really doubt this, ask one in chat.

Moderators cannot even see who voted a question up or down, never mind reversing votes.

References:

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/144747/partial-fix-o...

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/229173/reversing-an-...

It is possible however for abusive user to be detected and removed, at which point their abusive voting will be reversed - see my own reputation page for an example: http://stackoverflow.com/users/1000900/guy-cook?tab=reputati...

Apparently someone was just upvoting everything they saw, hence I lost rep when they were deleted.

The moderators do not control this process. There is an automated serial vote detection algorithm.

AFAIK, under no circumstances can a Stack Exchange moderator reverse a vote.

More info on the serial vote detection process here: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/126829/what-is-seria...

edit: I just looked at your profile and the deletion/banning of a user account will remove rep too, so I suppose in that manner a mod can "reverse" voting, but it's all or nothing. They have no way to flip individual votes.

edit2: Moderators are not employees of Stack Exchange, they are volunteers elected by the community. Of course employees can change whatever they feel like. This discussion is about the moderators.

Moderators can ask someone from the SE community team to look into it, and they can see individual votes and invalidate votes between certain users. The only cases where this actually happens are users using sock puppets to upvote themselves, colleagues/friends/family going through every post and upvoting everything or users targeting a specific user with a large number of downvotes.

The one thing they all have in common is a larger pattern of votes. SE does not act on individual votes, and emailing them about those is a waste of time.

I'm going to guess that anyone with access to the database can do a whole bunch of impossible things.

Such as, I dunno, the people who work at StackOverflow HQ.

Can moderators see who flagged his comment? there's one particular moderator who is so unprofessional every other comment should be flagged

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