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Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

sonyaellenmann.com

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Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#91

Post by brudgers »

mmgutz wrote: post #87

Many of the approved answers on SO are outdated and in some cases just outright incorrect in their approach.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.

It has that feature...well kind of. Anyone can edit any question and any answer. Until a certain level of internet points those edits get reviewed by someone with enough points to be trusted. After a certain level of internet points a person is trusted to edit questions without review.

Anyone can fix what is broken or at least do the bulk of the work.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#92

Post by cooper12 »

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 feel a similar struggle on Wikipedia where I have to revert a ton of good-faith edits. The editors think they're improving the article, but it always falls afoul of being original research or trivia. I'd hate to discourage potential editors so I always explain why in human terms [0] in the edit summaries but to them it probably solidifies in their mind that Wikipedia is byzantine and bureaucratic. I'd much rather prefer to write content than edit war with newbies, but unfortunately every article has a half-life [1] if its not maintained. Just like for Stack Overflow, caring about the health and quality of the community is often mistaken for elitism and being territorial. (Or maybe it's a natural defense against eternal september?) [2]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WTF%3F_OMG!_TMD_TLA....! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_half-life [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#93

Post by sklivvz1971 »

hackuser wrote: post #68
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…

That may serve Stack Overflow's interests, but not the interests of many users. > So what if he calls a question stupid? This question should be closed. :) Such behavior isn't acceptable in any serious place, from the workplace to the classroom to any polite conversation to even on HN. The reasons are very well-known, even to children, and if you don't know them they are easy to find. > We can only ask them to be nic…

I removed the first question as "unclear what you are asking".

However the second one should be left open. We do read the research, but there are no clear answers there, yet.

Edit: typo

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#94

Post by Shog9 »

ricree wrote: post #88
tajen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can actually find a few of these questions floating around marked as "wiki answer" and locked to prevent the otherwise inevitable flood of duplicate answers.

Problem is that most people don't want to maintain these lists. The handful of exceptions stand out precisely because they have a few dedicated maintainers who've dutifully kept them relevant for years... Most of them, though, died from neglect and were eventually deleted out of mercy.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#95

Post by sklivvz1971 »

reitanqild wrote: post #84
Latty wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Stack overflow is not a "forum". It was born as a mix of forums, blogs, wikipedia and reddit.

See our original about page here: https://web.archive.org/web/20120131154217/http://stackoverf...

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#96

Post by jrumbut »

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #90
jrumbut wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For my own context, I've been a StackOverflow user since the more free-form days. I appreciate the focus on quality, it has created a culture of quality. I think a focus on kindness can similarly create a culture of kindness.

I'm not looking for advanced sentiment detection algorithms or even new rules, just a few blog posts and some leadership.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#97

Post by jedberg »

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…

> The discussion doesn't generally go on in the margins of the textbook.

You're right. In my courses, the textbook was a written version of the discussion. We had books that were basically photocopies of the most recent papers and essays, often disagreeing with each other.

> you don't get points for voting to close a question or flagging one

I'm aware that you don't get SO points, I meant points in the "brownie points" sense. ie. Look how active this moderator is they must be good they are closing a lot of duplicate questions!

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#98

Post by jrumbut »

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #83
jrumbut wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 researc…

Ha! I'm in almost exactly the same place. I set a goal of asking a positively ranked question recently and finally made it happen.

What I'm trying to get at is not that low quality questions should be accepted, it's that when they are rejected a kind tone should be used so that new users are able to take the suggestion without being defensive and so that they feel encouraged to get better and try to keep participating.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#99

Post by jrumbut »

amag wrote: post #65
jrumbut wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point the author is making is that what can be easily found in a language's docs is subject to the same learning curve as what can be easily done with the language. Skill in docs reading comes with skill in the practice and understanding the concepts of a technology. Someone can make an honest and unsuccessful search for something that is blindingly obvious to another. If new users have difficulty using t…

The problem of writing documentation is that it's not possible to write it to suite every person. While most documentation certainly can be improved upon it's always the matter of where to best spend my time. Developing a feature or document an old feature in yet another way to serve people with a different mindset than my own. With the risk of sounding a bit of "it's programming it's meant to be hard", I feel the au…

I agree with your take on documentation, and I agree that there are some difficult concepts even in basic programming that you just have to work hard to learn.

Reading dense documentation is a programming skill, so it doesn't seem ridiculously out of bounds to be still in the process of learning it when on a programming education site.

What I'm trying to say is more along the lines of "if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all." Saying "oh hey try ctrl f on that documentation page you looked at" would be a valuable response, saying that asking the question is dumb isn't a positive contribution and is likely to make the asker defensive and unlikely to really learn from the experience.

Re: Stack Overflow and Discouraging Beginners

#100

Post by [deleted] »

keithnz wrote: post #39

SO is a bit of a culture shock from other places. Its not a forum, it's a little bit wikipedia ish. Having your question closed is not a hostile act, it's part of creating crowd sourced editing of content. Sometimes questions that could be good get closed, sometimes questions that are bad don't get closed ( at least for several years ). While you may wish it to be a little more friendly, its main goal is to provide h…

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