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Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

sonyaellenmann.com

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Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#81

Post by metafunctor »

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 would imagine that if one was versed with the Tridion CME, whatever that is, the question would make some sense.

Sure, there are typos, and the question could be worded better. But is it the kind of question that deserves the “fuck off” it got?

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#82

Post by Latty »

jedberg wrote: post #59
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 opinio…

The discussion doesn't generally go on in the margins of the textbook. If you want a discussion, great - yes, there is value in that, but it's a transient value. Use an IRC channel or the SO chats.

As to your second point - you don't get points for voting to close a question or flagging one. Yes, sometimes people make mistakes voting, but generally a comment clarifying why they are wrong is enough, if that doesn't work, flag the issue.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#83

Post by lloyd-christmas »

jrumbut wrote: post #44
mehrdada wrote: post #15

I had been participating in Stack Overflow since its public beta (though I'm not an active participant anymore), and this topic comes up every now and then, but the astronomical growth of Stack Overflow has not stopped. The composition of all-time high users are also quite a bit different from a few years ago. I am not saying there is not a problem, but I take complaints like this with a grain of salt these days. End…

What I think the experienced users are missing is that newbie questions are an opportunity to let a newbie answerer learn to teach. When I decided I wanted to start helping out on SO I found it almost impossible for months because the easy questions were instantly shut down with a frustrated response from an elder statesman user. It's like when there's one guy who has maintained a system for years and won't let anyon…

I'm a 2k user and I've never asked a question. I find that the greatest benefit to my learning has been trying to answer someone else's question. That being said, I'd say on average there are 2 "async loop" questions on the "newest javascript questions", both of which tend to get an answer by a newbie and still get marked as a dupe. Just because it gets closed, doesn't mean you can't work on answering it. The research will benefit you whether or not you get the validation from answering it. However, I do understand that it's hard to know if it's the right answer without the feedback of an upvote or two.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#84

Post by reitanqild »

Latty wrote: post #82
jedberg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 opinio…

The discussion doesn't generally go on in the margins of the textbook. If you want a discussion, great - yes, there is value in that, but it's a transient value. Use an IRC channel or the SO chats. As to your second point - you don't get points for voting to close a question or flagging one. Yes, sometimes people make mistakes voting, but generally a comment clarifying why they are wrong is enough, if that doesn't wo…

Comparing Stack Overflow to the textbook is not very relevant: manuals etc are textbooks. Stackoverflow is a forum with very customized rules. Or if I'm generous: a reference.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#85

Post by toyg »

Latty wrote: post #80
toyg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a bit like Wikipedia: the more you hang around, the less you like it. It's understandable though; after the 12324th question that basically boils down to "please do my homework", even a saint would lose his shit. It's the inevitable fate of every "beginners' resource", from IRC to forums, in the long run. Personally, I had decent experiences in most cases. I never got over the fact that it refuses to bec…

If people really wanted or needed those lists, someone would create a site for that purpose. The reality is that such a site would fail terribly, because those kinds of lists are opinions people won't agree on, and go out of date incredibly quickly. If you search for such a thing, you'll find blog posts from people giving such lists, and most of them will be useless because they are out of date. StackOverflow is a go…

> those kinds of lists are opinions people won't agree on

That's why you need voting, same as traditional SO.

> and go out of date incredibly quickly

I can see that being a problem -- but it's a problem even for regular SO questions, since languages evolve (the best way to do X in python 2.3 is not the same as in python 2.4, let alone 3.x).

You could simply timestamp votes and progressively devalue old ones, like tajen suggested.

> If you search for such a thing, you'll find blog posts [...] useless because they are out of date

Absolutely. Blog posts and wikis are terrible at keeping up, they are fundamentally static and require a lot of work. For example Fullstack Python [1] is nice but it's probably an immense effort. It would be nice to have some semiautomated way to highlight stacks that can self-maintain and stay relevant.

[1] http://www.fullstackpython.com

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#86

Post by brudgers »

StackOverflow founders Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood disagreed over whether a question can be too basic. Spolsky authored the famous "How do I move the turtle in Logo" question [1]. Atwood's view won out providing asshats plausible deniability for asshattery toward novices and students.

On the other hand, some languages are better than others. Ask a question, even a homework question, about Racket and odds are that someone deep into extending it will answer.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1003841/how-do-i-move-th...

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#87

Post by mmgutz »

Many of the approved answers on SO are outdated and in some cases just outright incorrect in their approach. You can't just read the selected answer anymore, you also have to read hidden comments that may point to the correct answer. SO needs a feature where the community can select a better answer.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#88

Post by ricree »

tajen wrote: post #29
toyg wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a bit like Wikipedia: the more you hang around, the less you like it. It's understandable though; after the 12324th question that basically boils down to "please do my homework", even a saint would lose his shit. It's the inevitable fate of every "beginners' resource", from IRC to forums, in the long run. Personally, I had decent experiences in most cases. I never got over the fact that it refuses to bec…

Where are we supposed to get opinions from? Would we have a success if we started "OpinionStack.com"? I believe if we did so, we should outdate the votes, so the top answer would be the most fashionable nowadays .

This seems like a good use case of their community wiki feature. List the major ones, and suggest the rationale and tradeoffs for the different major choices.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#89

Post by brudgers »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #23

I do generally agree that Stack Overflow as a community is too enthusiastic about closing down some questions. It's always particularly frustrating to Google for some weird error message and find a Stack Overflow discussion which has been killed off because the question was inappropriate :) But, that said… I'm not sure this is a particularly convincing example of this phenomenon. This is an example of something which…

The big idea of StackOverflow was to move information out of silos. The first targets were message boards and expertsexchange and mailing lists. But part of its success has been making information more accessible than official documentation -- all of the vagaries of Javascript's scoping is right there in the spec.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#90

Post by sklivvz1971 »

jrumbut wrote: post #55
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?

Thanks for your comment, let me give you more context.

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

Lists were allowed, turned out to be an unmaintainable mess with our current format, which was sincerely hurting the community. The top voted content was bad content. This in turn primed and encouraged users to post even more bad content.

Rudeness and offensive behavior against other users are not tolerated. No ifs and no buts. I might have given you the impression that we allow users to insult each other. We don't.

http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/240839/the-new-new-b...

However, unless we put a word filter on any possible bad word, there will always be rough comments. The only thing we can do is ask the users to flag such comments and remove them as appropriate.

A user flagged the comment one hour ago and the comment has since been deleted.

Read facebook. Read twitter. Stack overflow is not remotely like those places, yet it is one of the top 30 networks in the world by traffic.

We heavily moderate rudeness, but we are not going to be able to moderate every opinion that someone is going to find remotely offensive before it offends anyone. What you are expecting is simply not realistic.

> 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?

As I said, we do delete such comments, as we did in this case.

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