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Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

sonyaellenmann.com

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Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#51

Post by jrumbut »

Joeri wrote: post #34
Veedrac wrote: post #26

> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either. Great, so you've learnt something for next time. > Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place. Sorry, but no. "Stack Overflow i…

Meh, I'm an experienced dev and no questions that I might consider posing would get past the filters, either for being too vague, too specific, asking for off-site resources or asking for opinions. To be honest I don't even know what a good SO question is anymore, and i have 8000+ rep. You may believe the current rules and moderator brute squads work to keep the site clean, but from where i'm standing they work to ma…

Right on, I think the goal of having this pristine collection of content is not really feasible given how fast things change. Most good answers become bad after at most 4 years, on new tech it might not last a month.

It's good that there are rules, but what really matters is the community. People are on there are trying to get help following their passion or making their living. The stakes are often very high for the asker, making a rude response particularly painful.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#52

Post by catnaroek »

Veedrac wrote: post #26

> Maybe the original asker and I should have done ctrl + f for r% — but that didn’t occur to me, so I assume it didn’t occur to them either. Great, so you've learnt something for next time. > Beginners need guidance. They’re dumb and they flail around and they get stuck on “easy” problems. That’s why resources like Learn Python the Hard Way and Stack Overflow exist in the first place. Sorry, but no. "Stack Overflow i…

I don't disagree with the gist of your argument: the quality of Stack Overflow would greatly diminish if people (newbies or otherwise) were allowed to ask questions whose answers are in the manual. But there are better ways to correct undesired behavior. For starters:

(0) Don't downvote newbies to oblivion. That's just being a bully. (IMO, downvotes should be reserved for bad answers.)

(1) When contributing an answer, provide an option to flag the answer as “taken straight from the manual”. I'll call such answers “RTFM answers” for short.

(2) When a user receives their first RTFM answer, just tell them in a gentle way that they're expected to do their research, and perhaps provide useful links, depending on the tags associated to their question.

(3) Only if a user consistently asks questions with RTFM answers, punish their behavior in some way: reputation loss, decreased question visibility, etc.

I've asked my fair share of dumb questions and even posted dumb answers, and the community has treated me relatively kindly. (I have ~7k reputation as of now.) I wish others could be treated the same way.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#53

Post by phantom_oracle »

The filter goes both ways.

Some may feel discouraged when SO closes/downvotes you to the coldest pits of "I'm a newb and don't know anything", but imagine a situation far, far worse:

Imagine searching for this exact question and getting 36 SO questions all asking the same basic thing, just tweaked ever-so slightly.

It sucks to have mods putting in some effort with strict-filter rules, but without their filtering, the 'noise' ratio would be horrendous and would render the generally useful SO into oblivion.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#54

Post by current_call »

But hey, if you don’t want a friendly community or you don’t want more people to ~learn how to code~, then you’re doing it right.

I have all the community I want, thanks. If you think I'm being self centered, you have it backwards. I don't care what you do, but you think a community you aren't part of should cater to you.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#55

Post by jrumbut »

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #49

Disclaimer: I code for Stack Overflow and before that I was a mod. Many of these comments lack a sense of proportions regarding Stack Overflow. We get 8,000 questions... per day. There are more than 30 million posts, 12 millions of which are questions. Yeah, we have to close a lot of them, and we keep the ones which we can answer. Lists are disallowed for a reason. Opinions are disallowed for a reason. We aim to buil…

I guess what I genuinely don't understand is why lists are more harmful to the community than rudeness and vitriol.

If I post a question that asks for an opinion or list, someone will swoop in and edit it or delete it. Why can't we do the same when someone embeds a little bit of professional problem solving with a lot of unprofessional personal attacks?

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#56

Post by jedberg »

edem wrote: post #24
niftich wrote: post #13

Just as the article observes, it's really ironic that many, many google searches for "how to do X in language Y" lead to questions on SO that are marked as [closed], 'not a good question', etc. Often, the accepted answer is a variation of RTFM, but sometimes with an inline code example. Also ironic is when the question asks for help in choosing between frameworks or libraries of comparable functionality and it gets m…

> What's a good question then? Read the FAQ and you will know.

With respect, I have to vehemently disagree.

I've been using the site since the beta, have thousands of karma and twenty+ years of experience, and yet I can't ask or answer a question anymore.

When I answer a question, it gets downvoted and then an inaccurate answer gets accepted and upvoted.

When I ask a question, it gets marked as a duplicate, and then they link to the question it's a duplicate of, which is a question I found in my own research that was exactly the opposite of the question I had.

That community has become completely toxic and I can't participate it in anymore.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#58

Post by reitanqild »

an_ko wrote: post #46
reitanqild wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then maybe just maybe add a rule that you must lurk before asking questions? When the site clearly looks like as a place for noobs to get questions answered for free then maybe don't complain that you get just that.

"Duration of membership" seems a much less relevant metric here than "quality of post".

Yep, I only suggest there might be a correlation that could be taken advantage of if the main scaling problem is moderation.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#59

Post by jedberg »

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #49

Disclaimer: I code for Stack Overflow and before that I was a mod. Many of these comments lack a sense of proportions regarding Stack Overflow. We get 8,000 questions... per day. There are more than 30 million posts, 12 millions of which are questions. Yeah, we have to close a lot of them, and we keep the ones which we can answer. Lists are disallowed for a reason. Opinions are disallowed for a reason. We aim to buil…

> Lists are disallowed for a reason. Opinions are disallowed for a reason

but then

> Stack Overflow is not a community. Is the school of all developers.

Maybe the school you went to is different, but the one I went to definitely was a place where we got lists of useful things and had professors and classmates who expressed their opinions, which we then discussed.

If you want to be a school, then discussions of opinions is the number one thing you should be encouraging.

But regardless of that, the problems go much deeper. As I commented before, when I try to answer a question, it gets pushed down so that an inaccurate answer can be upvoted and accepted, and when I ask a question I get marked as "duplicate" when it is in fact the exact opposite of the question it is supposedly a duplicate of.

It's a lot easier to get some points for marking a question as a duplicate than it is to actually read the supposedly duplicate question to find out it isn't a duplicate but just happens to have some of the same words.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#60

Post by rajadigopula »

I am on SO and I once tried to help someone in similar situation. I could easily say search on google, but instead I helped them. Guess what - the converstion below my answer ended up me answering more fundemental questions from the same OP which are far worse than the actual asked question. Some of the follow up qustions, if I give them to the author of the above blog, might ask me to google them!
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