I've never been a user of SO, i don't find it useful except really obscure stuff; I always reach for docs first and those usually have my answer, and typically a better answer.. There are many occasions when co-workers will come and say "LOOK HERE's THE SO ANSWER THE GOLDEN KEY" and that answer many times was just wrong.. or half the time didn't apply at all to what was happening
The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
241–250 of 304 posts
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can edit the top answer or post a new answer, I have got 50 odd votes from adding asp.net's encryption/decryption methods that were added in 3.5 to old .net encryption questions. I've done it on a few other answers too, if the top answer seems clunky or inelegant, I tend to dig a bit deeper to see if there's a better way. Also, scrolling down a bit in the answers you usually find new ways of doing something as an…
> You can edit the top answer or post a new answer Nope you can't. - You'll be blocked if your edit is not "in the spirit of the originally post(er)". If you only have to add a separate and standalone paragraph at the end on a newer subfeature (like your asp example), it's generally fine. If you have to rewrite one of the main paragraph, the reviewers will systematically reject your edit. Typically, that means that t…
Absolutely this. I ran into the issue today where somebody had posted an ambiguous answer. Mods rejected edits to clarify, the user themselves said "it's not ambiguous to me", and the question itself is locked.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can. Most people can't. As the site gets aggressive against newcomers and old timers decide they have better things to do, there will be less and less people available edit them. And don't think those editions are as high quality as the ones that come by the official channel, where literally anybody in the world with the needed knowledge can reply, and there is a robust process for vetting. Besides, despite any t…
The site isn't aggressive against newcomers, it's aggressive against bad form questions/answers. Which is usually, it is true, done by newcomers because they don't know how to make a good form ones. This is a social problem which is very hard to solve - how to make people produce high quality content without discouraging them too much when they produce low quality. Some people would be annoyed and leave. But I think…
> it's aggressive against bad form questions/answers
You're absolutely wrong in that case. Particularly answers being "good" or "correct" is not part of the mission statement; and the rules reject fixes of questions by default for not being "in the spirit of the poster".
All SO aims for is having the most questions/answers. Nothing else.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
Highly upvoted answers are usually converted into "wiki entries", so that they can evolve, extend and restructure with time. It somehow alleviates the problem, as long as the both sides (asking and answering) care to actually update it.
SO could be the internet's technical manual if good answers were properly organised and maintained - if the point of providing answers was to document 'how to do programming' and you could only close a duplicate by explaining how to documented answer applies. But the incentive is get in fast, answer and move on to the next question.
That was the idea behind tag-wikis at one point ( see http://stackoverflow.com/tags/scala/info ) and was the utopian ideal of what Documentation would become.
Organizational and writing skill don't necessarily correlate well to programming skill. And when one adds gamification to that allowing for material curated by the masses without the corresponding community investment by those who _do_ have that skill set... well.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the term is condescending It perfectly encapsulates how those people are perceived. They drain the fun out of helping others. Playing language police is unlikely to gain you any more ears from people who feel drained by the vampires. > ton of speculation about the impact of this type of thing, zero data. Do you expect them to have a positive impact that would increase if moderation were decreased?
It's unprofessional for a company to refer to its users like this. Calling people names is childish and helps nothing. > Do you expect them to have a positive impact that would increase if moderation were decreased? My theory is that the cost of this behavior is near zero but "fighting" it is being used as cover for abusive mod behavior and a culture of intolerance that's chasing away high value users. I for one don'…
> It's unprofessional for a company to refer to its users like this.
You have to consider that this term is used by the community. That includes meta-discussion between the community and SO staff in the course of doing their job. So in a sense he is acting according to his profession.
What you call "calling names" is merely categorizing people according to their observable behavior. We categorize things and people every day. You could replace the term with another one, the underlying aspect of assigning a label to a cluster of behaviors remains unchanged. You would just end up treading the euphemism treadmill.
You cannot stop people from assigning labels to categorize negative patterns where someone else might end up offended by that label due to the negative connotations that the word will accumulate.
So why bother? Why not relabel it as "colloquial, but there's a story behind it" in your mind instead of asking everyone else to change their minds?
>abusive mod behavior and a culture of intolerance that's chasing away high value users.
If with "mod behavior" you mean downvotes and close votes, that's a large fraction of the user base that can do that and they can also be undone. While sometimes they might be doled out on a hair trigger it looks to me like there usually is some reason behind that, a reason which could be addressed by some changes to the question.
If you see it as a trade, haggling on a bazaar to provide a good question (that may serve future users) in exchange for a good answer (that may serve you) instead of draconian mods cracking down on you then those downvotes are nothing more than a "your offer isn't good enough" statement.
So maybe it is just a communication issue, to make it clear that users should have the expectation that they may need to refine their questions?
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. For the first time in a while, I've picked up a language I have not used for almost 15 years. Google is helping immensely, and I've been shocked at how often (>95%) of the time the first result is SO, and that answer is perfect. So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open. It might not be perfect, though I'd say it's the best by a massive margin.
Sorry, but I disagree. While, yes, I've found that Google searches often led me to answers on SO, I've also lost count of the number of times Google has decided that a question on a StackOverflow page was the MOST RELEVANT to the question I was asking, but SO mods had put a big, fat stamp at the top from moderators announcing that THEY weren't going to permit anyone to answer it. I don't know how many times I've scan…
I always Google with the timeframe set to "last year"
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#247Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the comm…
You could at the very least make it your mission statement to provide correct answers, and remind all of your moderators of this, instead of having them maintain the "spirit of the poster" on answers that are wrong and on locked questions.
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. In that case, I have a serious question for you: What's your plan for refreshing the site on the long term? Lemme explain. The "community" is actively closing new questions as "duplicate" if anything similar is already present. At the same time, the old answer (that all duplicates are redirecting to) is often locked down for various reasons. The blocking prevent…
> How do you intend to prevent that? Very very few posts are actually uneditable at all, and editing is open to all users (some need approval). If a post is locked and outdated it's likely that the question was locked because it was the kind of question that does not provide long-lasting answers (for example a software recommendation list).
> editing is open to all users (some need approval).
Technically true, factually false, since correctness of an edit does not trump "spirit of the poster".
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. In that case, I have a serious question for you: What's your plan for refreshing the site on the long term? Lemme explain. The "community" is actively closing new questions as "duplicate" if anything similar is already present. At the same time, the old answer (that all duplicates are redirecting to) is often locked down for various reasons. The blocking prevent…
I think the stance on duplicates needs to be relaxed, with some filters/tools to help prevent higher rep users from seeing them during normal use. For example, don't show high rep users questions from low rep ones. Let other low rep users answer the question independently. It encourages participation. Let the site link duplicates together, but in a symbiotic way (even show highly voted answers from other questions as…
So you want low rep users who don't understand the expected quality for the site to be answering questions while the high rep users who are familiar with the duplicates and expectations are prevented from helping?
Preventing high rep users from answering _good_ questions from low rep users means Jon Skeet and Eric Lippert won't see them and be able to give their often spectacular answers. You're suggesting cheating low rep users who do a good job of reading the help documentation first from getting the best possible answer... and encouraging people who ask and answer poorly to continue doing so.
How many more answers to How do I fix a null pointer exception in Java ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) do you want to have on the site?
Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)
#250I found myself a little incensed at this article, rather than by it. Yup, there are limits on new users' privileges. Yes, there are users that play The Reputation Game. Yes, there are many questions that don't get answered to one's satisfaction. Yes, there are trolls. Yes, there are disillusioned users. Yes, yes, yes.
Even so, I also find all of this to be Perfect-As-Enemy-of-Good whinging. Instead it could've been a plea full of suggestions. A Call To Action!
So let's do that now, though I may come off as a prick here because I kinda think all of this whining is the real problem of the internet.
> The privilege limits
IMHO they're are rational and reasonable, but your specific use-case was about new folks not being able to leave comments. So how could we solve this? Perhaps new users ought to be able to, but only the author'd be able to see them. When either the Q or A author upvoted it, it'd become visible to the world?
> Troll responses to your bad/incorrect/misleading answer
That sounded like a bummer. You know you can flag these comments already so... punish these bad actors in the provided way and move on.
> Respond to comment that says my question is a duplicate (it’s not, which I clarify to avoid “closed as duplicate”) > [...] > Another issue with this is that duplicates show up despite the crotchety moderators complaining about it.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. It's casual, usually-helpful internet folk doing their (usually) altruistic best to help. Most of the time, this works great. Blog posts like this point out the exception, and are valuable, and they're very enticing clickbait. But when they offer only boo-hoo's and no ah-hah's, move on.