zahlman
Why should I give a damn about what you or others think is required for a "successful" website? Not everything is about profit or popularity or anything else. Some things are about making the thing that you set out to make.
You are entirely missing the point of the comment exchange you're responding to. Someone else made it sound like they would ban you just for asking a single question that didn't meet the standards for questions. That is completely and utterly false.
The bots are specifically trained to do this because lots of people are dumb enough to prefer it that way.
It's something ELIZA could do in the 60s, and that worked unsettlingly well for an unsettling fraction of people who tried it.
Then maybe you shouldn't be making Youtube videos about it… ?
> (it's not the em-dashes, it's the load-bearing tapestries)
I suddenly feel an urge to turn this into an image prompt.
You're thinking of "<fraction> of <fraction>".
They just weren't the standards and culture that you feel they ought to have been.
Communities are supposed to get to decide these things for themselves, not conform to the expectation of outsiders as a condition of them considering the community legitimate.
Honestly, point seeking behaviour of people writing answers was one of the worst anti-patterns of SO. It would lead people in later years to quantity over quality (especially because of the bonus 15 rep that OP could give you by "accepting" an answer in addition to upvoting it). Worse, it would incentivize them to answer terrible questions that should have been swiftly closed and then deleted when OP inevitably failed to do anything about them. Instead, getting an answer in before closure would prevent the automatic timed deletion system from removing those bad questions.
Quality answers come from intrinsic motivation: from people wanting the site to be a place where people find quality answers. (Something I didn't personally understand in the early days is how important a quality question is to finding a quality answer.)
I have an article published on LWN. The process of getting a pitch approved and then submitting an article and polishing it to editorial standards is quite impressive, and that's part of why reading articles there is so pleasant. And of course, they didn't have to accept my idea, and there was the possibility of coming to an impasse when trying to figure out a rewrite.
Was this process "moderation"? Do you think other Internet users would call it that? I would not.
The problem really is that the framing is already wrong: what you write on Stack Overflow is not a "post" in the first place, except in a really generic sense (or perhaps if you're looking at the database schema or maybe the codebase). Posts are what you put on discussion forums. Stack Overflow is there specifically to be something else. User generated content is not all "posts". (Would you use that term for a Wikipedia article?) Calling your writing a "post" comes with rhetorical baggage that gives a false impression of the site model.
Pretty much, yeah.
There are multiple reasons to close a question, but fundamentally three categories: duplicates (which don't need to be changed unless you were misunderstood and a change would make it clear that you meant a different question); questions that can be fixed but require OP's private information to do so (e.g. expecting OP to focus on one question, or provide a proper example, or phrase things more clearly); and questions that fundamentally cannot be fixed (e.g. they're simply off topic).
Whenever a question can be fixed, it's expected that the asker tries to improve it.
But fundamentally the purpose of closing a question is to prevent answers to a question that doesn't meet the site standards. Where a question is fixable, this is only intended to last until it actually does get fixed.
> IIRC doing so automatically makes it eligible for reopening, without even having to ask.
It is immediately eligible for reopening from the moment it's closed. Sometimes people make mistakes.
But whenever anyone edits the question (including OP) there is a checkbox that can be used to assert that the edit resolves the problem, which puts it in a specific queue for consideration (otherwise, someone would have to stumble on it randomly).
> but if it's not caught by someone who knows about the older question the new one can become better
On rare occasions, there has been a deliberate organized effort to do a new question, because the old one was deemed simply insufficient (usually not a matter of becoming outdated, but simply failing to present and address the subject matter in a way that would be accessible to the target audience).
Where a community exists that is already organized around a common goal, following previous leadership, newcomers should not be permitted to decide that actually the community should/does work according to what they want. No matter how many of them there are.
For sure. The site was quite poorly designed for its stated goals.
> but we are yet to see the long term consequences of the capabilities which were created with the value extracted there.
I cannot see fit to blame people for the actions of others they enabled, even deliberately let alone inadvertently.
They were incorrect to take the approach that they did.
Last year, my friend's cat died. Imagine if he had gone to Wikipedia to edit the page for Cat, inserting his question in the page text, seeking veterinary advice. I hope you would agree that this would be an abuse of the system which should certainly not be rewarded.
Similarly, on a Q&A site like Stack Overflow when you ask a question, it is simply expected that you think about other people, and what their needs will be.
Specifically: a question and answer are added primarily so that, indefinitely into the future, other people can find them with a search engine, read the question and confirm that it matches what they're trying to find out, and go to the answers. Think about what those users would want the question and answer to look like. Think about whether they would ever be able to find the question with reasonable search terms, and whether an answer to you could possibly also answer them. Think about whether they would expect Stack Overflow to house that question. This is, really, at the root of all the reasons for closing a question.
The biggest blocker to this is that the site itself did not provide ways for the community to fix the front matter, and the site ownership ignored pleas to fix that front matter and to take more action to make people read it before participating.
There's also a huge problem that people equate popularity with success. It's the same phenomenon that leads people to declare the site "dead" (or not) based on the rate of new incoming questions. No; it's dead because the site management pushes ever more AI involvement that fights against the policy forbidding AIGC in questions and answers; and because they're destroying the core principles of participation in the site in the hope of making that question rate go up again (while ignoring the voices of those who would otherwise answer those questions).
> but that is also why it came off as hostile when you subsequently collected down votes even after passing through this filter
Questions only really had downvotes because they went into a public queue immediately and that was the mechanism to hide low quality content. It is not a problem to ask a duplicate and fail to recognize it; someone closing your question as a duplicate is helping you get a cached answer immediately, while also helping make that answer easier to find in the future. Anyone who downvoted a question merely because it was a duplicate was misunderstanding the system. On the other hand, getting through that filter, and even if you had a genuinely new question, doesn't mean you had a good question.
It should never have worked like that; this was counterproductive to the site's stated goals (but it was what the founders came up with, and doing it the right way would have killed engagement right out of the gate). What you really want is for the question to start out effectively closed, in a state where it can be workshopped, without the voting system. Anything that made it through that system would, in theory, never attract downvotes because the legitimate reasons to downvote it would have been addressed already. And by doing it that way, you limit exposure to the question to people who are interested in fixing questions, and let the people interested in answering questions have their own feed. (Of course, people can also wear multiple hats, but you get the idea.)
In fact, we had something like that for a little while, called the Staging Ground. It was, in my view, the only good idea the company had after the Prosus acquisition, in a sea of bad ones. It was not perfect, but it was a damn sight better than the traditional system.
Generally, the people doing this are familiar with the material. Fast closures are motivated by an unconscious "ugh, not THIS question again". And the kinds of things that get asked over and over usually don't change very much.
There's a particular type of question asker who likes to say "what's the way to do this in [current year]?" as if to imply that it should be something different from before. But it very often isn't. And indeed, developers complain when languages/libraries/ecosystems change too quickly, which makes language designers/library authors more conservative about those changes.
Yes, it is. Especially considering that I too was mainly "trawling the new Python questions" for similar reasons, and being dismayed at how many dupes there were and how hard it was to find an actually good version of that question to use as the duplicate target for something that was constantly asked.
> I saw this constantly, so frequently that I'd be hard pressed to answer with specifics.
Without specifics I really can't engage with that, sorry. I would encourage you to check out the [reopen-closed] tag on the meta site, in chronological order (or take a random sample) and see what kinds of things people think should be reopened and how off-base they are (and also see how it is explained that things are in fact duplicates).
As it happens, I have a single "saved" (site bookmarking feature) question on the meta site with that tag, saved because I wrote what I think is a useful reference answer to the general question of why duplicates get closed so quickly: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/422581
> often because the original answer was ancient and obsolete
This does not make a question "not a duplicate". The fact that there are different ways to solve the problem now, doesn't make it not the same problem. It is, instead, a reason to write a new answer, but we still want all the high-quality answers in the same place.
From time to time, a new "canonical" gets chosen for FAQs, because the community recognizes that it's better quality. "Up-to-date" is one consideration in that equation. But a lot of the time, people argue that an old Q&A should be disregarded or replaced simply because it is old, and this is often just not true. For example, the question 'What does if __name__ == "__main__": do?' (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/419163) was posted in 2009; as it turns out, it still does the same thing in Python 3.15 and the reasons for using (or not using) it are the same as well.
For reference, here is the verbatim (except for code formatting for HN) Markdown of the initial version of a question asked in 2010, my answer to which became my highest-ever scoring answer (and which ended up getting over 2 million views):
if I have list of numbers as [1,2,3,4,5...........etc ]
and I want to calculate as that (2+1)/2
and for the second
(2+3)/2
third
(3+4)/2
...... etc
how can do as that ?
like sum the first point with the second and divide it by 2 .. then sum the second with third point then divide it by 2 .... etc ?
also how can i sum a list of number ?
a = [1,2,3,4,5,......ect ]
is it:
b = sum(a)
print b
in i get one number !?
it doesn't work with me
help me plz> Nothing's quite as demoralizing as
I can tell you from years and years of experience that this is just not what happened in the common case. Of course, there were a few incidents where someone slipped up, which is why there was a meta site to discuss these things. And in the cases where someone had a point about a wrong duplicate closure on meta, that was well received and the problem got fixed.
But we also got a constant stream of people complaining about the equivalent of:
Q. How do I iterate over a tuple?
A. [closed as a duplicate of "how do I iterate over a list?"]
and it became clear that the OP was not even willing to try the code provided, which would work for their situation.
There were cases where people refused to recognize a duplicate of what was clearly the same question, because a different code sample was provided with different variable names or something.
There were people whose argument essentially boiled down to "you shouldn't close duplicates as duplicates ever, because that's how I think it should work". IOW, a complete refusal to engage with the site's policy or the clearly established, stated reasons behind it (and the many years of history needed to refine that policy).
> but even I gave up trying to ask a question.
I think it's quite easy to ask a question that meets standards; it just requires skills (basic debugging / communicating a clear unambiguous specification) that don't necessarily align with the people who are most likely to want to ask questions generally (beginners).
If there's a specific question you wanted to ask but felt unable to, post it here and I'll be happy to explain where it might have been lacking.
If the community could have tweaked that system, we absolutely would have. The site owners never gave us that access, and it got much worse after getting bought by Prosus.
But yes, on a Q&A site you absolutely should be prevented from asking certain questions. The fact that they're facially "on topic" does not save them, just like how there are guidelines to post on HN that go beyond "make sure it has something to do with technology". Because it is not the purpose of a site like SO to answer your question just because you asked it. The purpose is to have good Q&A that everyone can refer to in order to learn something. The root of the "hostility" is in the selfishness of those who won't consider the perspective of everyone else who's going to see the question later. Which, you know, is the exact problem with the traditional discussion forums that SO was created explicitly to provide an alternative to.
However, they didn't really understand what makes a question valuable, or why low-quality beginner questions are low quality, and thus what exactly to expect in order to get higher quality things that could be helpful to other beginners. And yes, they did initially make some gestures towards some threshold of question difficulty, but this was a misstep (and also hard to disentangle from question complexity, as well as whether a question is interesting and to whom). And yes there were experiments like the Documentation project (which I lamented the loss of). And yes the reputation system was a totally broken idea and implementation, inconsistent with stated goals.
It turns out that when you have a critical mass of users and the alternatives are frustrating enough, you can get away with a lot of those missteps.
As for enforcement, that's what happens when the overwhelming majority of it is assigned as the community's responsibility. Misconceptions about the site's purpose compound when some users get away with them and then gain reputation from a single old/popular Q&A. (I had some, too.)
Fundamentally the site failed to figure out how to impress those values upon people before they got too involved. I think this was out of a fear of scaring users away, but clearly this was counterproductive — surfacing the misconceptions and conflicts later on only made things worse. An ideal system would have started questions closed, so that having one closed on you wouldn't feel like a final judgement (despite it not being one); and it would have shielded you from downvotes until question opening (because the entire point of this would be to recognize that questions require work by default to meet the site standards). In other worse, what the half-baked Staging Ground was trying to accomplish (and mostly did, for the small minority of questions the system decided to send there at random).
No, they absolutely do not.
They propose that you might be having an XY problem because they have seen people commonly ask the same thing before and turn out to have that same XY problem, and they want to help you by making sure that you are asking a question where the answer will actually be useful to you. Or else they genuinely cannot understand why a person would want to solve X.
There was never any restriction on posting answers unless you had explicitly and repeatedly violated policy. Posting questions and answers was a default privilege extended to everyone at account creation.
It did require a small amount of reputation (50 points) to comment on posts that were not your own.
But none of {questions, answers, comments} are "reply posts". That's just not at all how the site worked. It also comes across that you imagine that "helping others" on Stack Overflow entails writing something (either a comment or an answer) that addresses what the OP is asking. That, too, is not how the site worked. A Q&A site like Stack Overflow works by producing reference material in Q&A format.
The point is that other people can search it later, and get direct answers without having to parse through someone else's comment discussion, walking a beginner through debugging steps just to get the necessary information to understand the question, etc.
2. Have you seen https://meta.stackoverflow.com ? It is the exact thing you believe they "needed". As for "layers", the tiny group of people with diamond symbols next to their names (the actual moderators) did in fact have authority over others.
3. As demonstrated by the posts there, the large majority of "toxicity" came from the people who refused to accept the site's standards, and the large majority of question closures were clearly correct.
4. To me, the word "asshole" suggests a sense of entitlement. This was most clearly demonstrated by those who felt entitled to get people on the Internet to volunteer to solve their problems for free, without heed to whether the resulting Q&A could be of benefit to others. That is not how the site worked, or how it was designed to work.