I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining • Hacker News Board

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#161

Post by crispyambulance » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 6:05 PM UTC

coryfklein wrote: post #147

crispyambulance wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, leaving a "thank you" will typically get deletions/nags from the self-appointed comment police. As much as I like (and heavily use) SO, it has a real problem with making people feel like shit when asking, answering and commenting. There are people who are exemplary in their politeness and helpfulness like the top-contributor, John Skeet. There are also quite "mean" people like Hans Passant (also super-hig…

Honestly, I am in the camp in favor of deleting "thank you" comments. I view the whole platform as a fantastic way to curate high-quality content for the whole web community. I don't come to Stack Overflow to socialize or make friends, I come because I'm trying to get my widget to work and I just want to find the solution to my problem. While expressing thanks is definitely an admirable human quality and should be la…

Regardless of their intended purpose according to the SO FAQ, the comments in Stackoverflow are often the most interesting part of a question or answer. They do more than coordinate improvement to the attached question/answer. The comments often provide valuable context, point to other resources, and can offer some opinion.

I agree that a comment consisting of nothing more than "thank you" isn't particularly helpful, but a "thank you" + some twist or application tip is interesting and valuable. Sadly, some SO-cops just see the words "thank you", ignore the rest of comment and then immediately recite the rules and/or delete the comment.

As for SO communicating the difference, I think they already do. Their problem is that people like me _deliberately_ ignore "the rules" and post whatever we think is appropriate-- the mods just can't keep up.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#162

Post by bhandziuk » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

domador wrote: post #98

I never even STARTED contributing to Stack Overflow, because of the high barrier to entry for new users. Since now you essentially can't post a question without answering several yourself, I didn't bother asking questions about certain thorny technical issues. I tried a couple of times, ran into the barrier, and gave up. Maybe some of these could have been the kind of thought-provoking questions that the blog post's…

I don't know if you were being hyperbolic but asking a question requires no previous community engagement. There is no barrier to entry.

This is part of the issue with SO though in that so many people ask questions without trying to figure things out for themselves or because it is their first time asking a question on the internet they have a very hard time with it. Veteran users are frustrated by new user's attitude and new user's attitude is often that they are asking a question because they are hitting a wall. They've stalled out on their task and are frustrated and the question they end up posting shows this. It will lack context, enough information to reproduce, be an XY problem or some issue like that. These questions are either difficult or impossible to answer. Making them stop is a very hard problem, unfortunately.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#163

Post by bhandziuk » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 6:15 PM UTC

kzisme wrote: post #74

I've recently began using SO more actively (providing answers). Most of the questions I've found and tried to answer were duplicates, but since I didn't have enough reputation to mark it as duplicate. (or enough rep to comment on a post to ask for more information on a poorly asked question) It's fairly depressing to attempt to try to be active on a site like SO when it's setup for failure in the beginning. It's irri…

FYI those moderators with 10k+ of rep are not gaining rep any longer for editing questions. You only get that +2 rep bump per edit when you are <1k (or <2k I forget) of rep. And Commenting never gets you any rep.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#164

Post by coryfklein » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 6:18 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #161

coryfklein wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I am in the camp in favor of deleting "thank you" comments. I view the whole platform as a fantastic way to curate high-quality content for the whole web community. I don't come to Stack Overflow to socialize or make friends, I come because I'm trying to get my widget to work and I just want to find the solution to my problem. While expressing thanks is definitely an admirable human quality and should be la…

Regardless of their intended purpose according to the SO FAQ, the comments in Stackoverflow are often the most interesting part of a question or answer. They do more than coordinate improvement to the attached question/answer. The comments often provide valuable context, point to other resources, and can offer some opinion. I agree that a comment consisting of nothing more than "thank you" isn't particularly helpful,…

> some SO-cops just see the words "thank you", ignore the rest of comment and then immediately recite the rules and/or delete the comment

If that happens, then the mod is out of line. But what can SO do to prevent that behaviour? If you have ideas I'm sure the community on Meta would be more than happy to entertain suggestions, that's how the platform evolves and grows.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#165

Post by r00fus » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 6:19 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #88

kzisme wrote: post #74

I've recently began using SO more actively (providing answers). Most of the questions I've found and tried to answer were duplicates, but since I didn't have enough reputation to mark it as duplicate. (or enough rep to comment on a post to ask for more information on a poorly asked question) It's fairly depressing to attempt to try to be active on a site like SO when it's setup for failure in the beginning. It's irri…

One of my least favorite SO patterns is seeing a top answer with ~150 points that's simply wrong, and then a second or third answer with ~20 points that's actually correct. For high-profile questions this gets sorted out eventually, but it sometimes persists indefinitely for niche questions, and it's really unfortunate. I know "first mover advantage" is hard to solve (cf. Reddit), but it's a really big deal for SO.

Do you have an example? Honestly curious.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#166

Post by r00fus » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 6:21 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #109

kzisme wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's frustrating as well when the question that was asked gets answered by me, and I receive a slew of down-votes since I answered it first. The next few answers are essentially copy/paste of my answers or other answers on the question...but I'm still negatively impacted by the down-votes since I only have ~39 rep and wow has getting started been a pain.

A weird observation: starting with SO is particularly punishing if you come to it as an established programmer. The karma restrictions don't chafe much if you're a novice who mostly asks questions, and occasionally answers a simple topic they recognize. If you're experienced, you want to give more complex answers, and perhaps comment on other answers that you think are suboptimal. Doing that, you feel the new users r…

Huh. Maybe the site has changed in the past 5 years, but when I started - I gave answers on stuff I knew (basic JS, advanced SQL) and asked questions about stuff I didn't know (Obj-C, advanced JS/jQuery, Ruby).

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#167

Post by r00fus » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 6:30 PM UTC

raesene6 wrote: post #48

Lapsa wrote: post #5

top 2% here i can understand the reasoning but i left SO when they broke it into pieces with StackExchange network i actually enjoyed stuff like code golfs, joke questions (minus endless flow of repetitive xkcd references) have always been interested in THAT programming part where problem meets consciousness meets technology. spent a lot of time puzzling around questions on design, patterns - more ethereal side of pr…

interestingly I thought that breaking things up helped a lot and that they could do better by continuing that trend.. For me a big part of the problem of SO (as opposed to other SE sites) is that it's too big for the mods to really have much option other than applying blanket rules without exception. On the smaller sites there seems to be more scope for a more flexible approach to moderation as the question/answer fl…

The only problem with the break-up is that it results in the moderations of "not appropriate for this forum" when e.g. you ask about effects of say SSD cloud storaage on your app performance and you're asking on stackoverflow instead of serverfault or soemthing.

And the moderation is not helpful in migrating your question to the other forum either.

One analogy might be if the US were split into 50 states with their own, strict, immigration policies.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#168

Post by r00fus » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 6:36 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #142

therealbobsmoot wrote: post #99

Biggest problem on SO is the constant need by the moderators to mark a question as 'not a question', when it's actually a really question and gets a lot of good answers.

How were these questions stated? Whenever I have seen this happen, it's because the user was behaving like they were posting on a vBulletin help forum. For example, the title might be "question about rails" and the body might say something like "Uploads don't work. Here's my controller code." There are two problems here. First, no actual question is being asked. There may be an implicit question, but that's not what…

Maybe better moderation responses would help - ie, recommendations, links to guidelines, etc. Have those improved recently?

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#169

Post by lloyd-christmas » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 7:33 PM UTC

wheaties wrote: post #73

corobo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ones that really get my gripe are the ones that are flagged for being off topic.. Off what topic? This is a place where technical questions are asked and answered and this is a technical question that needs answering - Why is it closed?

I have flagged many questions for being off topic. You could say I'm part of the "problem" but from my standpoint, someone will ask a question that can be answered so many ways that the scope is too broad. Many times the person asking doesn't know enough to understand just how broad the question they've asked is. That's why I also leave a comment telling them _why_ I just voted to close. This is, unfortunately, an un…

Leaving a comment is more than enough. Question/answers that are ridiculous and "don't contribute" tend to disappear into the bowels of the internet anyway. There's no reason to force it away when it will disappear naturally.

Re: I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

#170

Post by Silhouette » Mon, Sep 26, 2016, 7:36 PM UTC

Shog9 wrote: post #144

Silhouette wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are usually even worse. What I would prefer to see is whichever search results organically rise to the top excluding the huge but more-hype-than-substance sites by default. I often find there is real expert commentary via official docs, blog posts, archived mailing lists, presentations at conferences, and so on, sitting just underneath all those SO links that clog up the first results page.

This has pretty much always been true in my experience; if you're really determined to learn something in depth , you gotta go past page 1 of the search results and look for the folks who've spent years writing about some obscure topic and only get links from other people who are similarly dedicated. And then hope their blog doesn't disappear from the 'Net before you finish digesting or need to refer back to that inf…

It's always been true to some extent, but I think it's SO that changed relatively recently, not the rest of the web.

In the earlier days of SO, it used to be that a search engine might return an SO link or two but they had a decent chance of being relevant. At that time, SO was smaller, the questions being asked were more common and general, and thus the answers were mostly correct and widely applicable.

Today, unfortunately, my usual experience is that there might be as many as 4-5 SO questions turning up on the first results page for a programming-related search, yet none of them is actually relevant. Some will probably already be closed with some hostile and quite possibly incorrect status. Some are effectively keyword stuffing and not actually relevant to what I was looking for, but don't get penalised as such by the search engines because SO as a whole is so well established. Particularly irritating, it's no longer rare to find that a question shows up that is relevant but either it has no answer or it has nothing but wrong or misleading answers (which may well have been voted up or accepted anyway).

It's not providing information in bite-sized chunks that's the problem, it's providing irrelevant, incorrect or out-of-date information, or attracting attention but then providing no information at all.