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Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

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Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#381

Post by droidist2 »

herogreen wrote: post #109
warent wrote: post #45

I've experienced a form of hostility in StackOverflow just recently--as in a couple of days ago. On a whim, I visited the website and answered a couple questions, something I'd never done before. I realized it was actually a lot of fun, so I started rapidly answering the all JavaScript questions I could as they were asked. Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to…

I personally very much like SO. I have However a friend of mine (that I believe as a better level in programming than me) has the same feeling of "bizzare community" that you have, so I know that the issue is complex. That said I really have zero ideas about what they could do to improve the way they are seen by everyone without breaking the way the site currently works. Have you heard about the term "help vampire" ?…

Oh my god, I looked up "help vampire" and it's so insightful and true. I've noticed this kind of behavior on Quora especially.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#382

Post by caf »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #333
warent wrote: post #45

I've experienced a form of hostility in StackOverflow just recently--as in a couple of days ago. On a whim, I visited the website and answered a couple questions, something I'd never done before. I realized it was actually a lot of fun, so I started rapidly answering the all JavaScript questions I could as they were asked. Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to…

I think it's a natural reaction to dislike questions that are asked without much attention to detail, contain spelling mistakes (often in the headline), don't use code formatting or otherwise make it more difficult to understand. Note that these problems may not make answering the question impossible. If, for example, the headline/question is "How do I do this???", then you can still answer, provided the body is more…

The right answer to this is to edit the question: fix the formatting, write a good title and select a good set of tags.

I feel that if I do this, maybe the questioner will learn from the edits for their future questions. And even if they don't, at least I've made the question potentially valuable for other people coming along later, which is the main point.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#383

Post by jsmeaton »

nanis wrote: post #331
jsmeaton wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a slightly different response that is hopefully more welcoming. “The error message says the problem is on line 49 but you haven’t shown that line in your example code. Can you please show the code referred to on line 49 and the surrounding code for context?” I think power users on SO are frustrated by newer users not learning the rules and not helping themselves. But if you respond with kindness you’re teachin…

> Can you please show the code referred to on line 49 and the surrounding code for context?” If you are paying me my hourly, I'll pretty please you to no end. Otherwise, I am not sure why I am expected to beg for people to give information that would help me help them.

Then move on and don't respond at all. Leave the begging to the users that want to help new users get better. There's a genuine complaint that responses to new users are often harsher than required. "I shouldn't have to beg for information" is not a valid response to that criticism.

Answerers have no idea about the skill level of the people asking the questions. Their english might not be so good. This might be the first time someone is programming and they don't know which line in a stack trace is particularly important. They Need Help. If you're not willing to help users at that skill level, then don't. But it's totally unfair to criticise them.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#384

Post by warty »

wheelie_boy wrote: post #283
wwweston wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to stop answering certain questions, and only address "well asked" questions. I love Stack Overflow, and it's sure a valuable if imperfect resource, but this is something that drives me bonkers about it. If the question is intelligible enough to receive an answer, and if your answer is potentially helpful to the asker, then…

I think the core problem is that they've focused too much on being like wikipedia (a single authoritative, comprehensive answer to each important question), and not enough on helping people to learn. Over time a site will grow a culture, and experts on the site will outweigh and overrule experts on the subject matter. In this case, we're also seeing answerers' needs outweigh askers'. If you could only meet the needs…

There's nuance here. There are plenty of cases where individuals ask XY questions, meaning they've gone down a strange route to solve X and now need help solving Y, and it's always been debated within the community on whether you should solve X or oftentimes go to great lengths to solve Y. I've seen many questions where a solution to X is answered and heavily downvoted. I'm not sure how you resolve that.

Question: How do I #include a 500MB text file in my C++ code as a string? My compiler explodes when I do this!

Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the text from a file instead!

Comment: -1 Dude this isn't helpful. What if it's code golf and you need to include a 500MB text file!? You never know. Get over yourself.

Stuff like this has happened to me so many times.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#385

Post by caf »

warent wrote: post #45

I've experienced a form of hostility in StackOverflow just recently--as in a couple of days ago. On a whim, I visited the website and answered a couple questions, something I'd never done before. I realized it was actually a lot of fun, so I started rapidly answering the all JavaScript questions I could as they were asked. Suddenly a "higher ranking" individual started leaving comments on my answers that I needed to…

This is one of the issues called out in the original post.

And little makes me sadder than comments on answers saying, “Don’t answer questions like this – it encourages them.”

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#386

Post by jsmeaton »

bitL wrote: post #192
jsmeaton wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a slightly different response that is hopefully more welcoming. “The error message says the problem is on line 49 but you haven’t shown that line in your example code. Can you please show the code referred to on line 49 and the surrounding code for context?” I think power users on SO are frustrated by newer users not learning the rules and not helping themselves. But if you respond with kindness you’re teachin…

Make a Deep Learning bot inserting whatever ornamentation of sentences you like. You can choose multiple styles and personalize for whatever makes you feel good. Why require one single standard from everyone? The answer that was "offensive" was just a standard dry answer like you hear at any top university everywhere; I found "(brutal) exercise is left to the reader" way more offensive.

No one claimed the answer was offensive. It's unnecessarily condescending though. If you, as a senior developer, spoke to a junior developer on their first day at a new job in the same way, they'd be very unlikely to come to you for help in the future.

Learning how to interpret error messages and extract the important information is a skill. What may seem obvious to you may not be obvious to someone with barely any experience.

> was just a standard dry answer like you hear at any top university everywhere

Which makes it OK? If university lecturers are speaking to new students trying to learn in this way, they shouldn't be teaching new students.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#387

Post by jehlakj »

legostormtroopr wrote: post #201

What the StackOverflow company fails to get is that their product is assholes and industrial level asshole production. Every question is moderated by volunteers, who have curated every high value question there. From an askers perspective, sure you may have asked 1 slightly off-topic question, but for a reviewer, that’s the 30th off-topic question today - and SO gamifies reviewing so you are encouraged to do so. I us…

The thing about asking questions under an unfamiliar topic is that the asker isn’t knowledgeable enough to ask the appropriate questions. While this may seem like pure ignorance from a reviewers point of view, it’s much different for the asker. Unfortunately, these types of questions don’t work well in a q and a format.

I’ve actually came across a few very good questions where the author answered his own in a very concise manner. and guess what? He had over 1k upvotes. Those are the questions that SO is catering. Which leads me to believe that by design, SO will never be able to fulfill their wishes in the blogpost.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#388

Post by jsmeaton »

Karunamon wrote: post #95
nanis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's something she complains about (she posted a screenshot of a comment): "If the error says line 49, it tells you exactly where the problem lies. If you post 7 lines of code here, we clearly cannot tell you what the problem is in line 49." [1] I see nothing wrong with that. As luck would have it, today some random stranger recognized me from my Stackoverflow profile at a Panera and asked me to help him debug his…

This also struck me - as far as some of the treatment I've seen and read about on SO, this is downright courteous. She didn't provide enough information to actually answer the question, so literally what the fuck did she want?

> as far as some of the treatment I've seen and read about on SO, this is downright courteous

> so literally what the fuck did she want

Help? Perhaps it was their first time writing a program, and they can't interpret error messages. This is exactly the kind of elitist behaviour people are discussing - and if you're unable to see how the answer might keep people away, then you have no business trying to help new users.

Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change

#390

Post by VikingCoder »

From an old Reddit post of mine:

Your reply has been Cursed to Hades for not being stack overflowy enough, even though it was the accepted answer, and has received hundreds of votes. Also the whole question has been Excommunicated for not being mumblemumblemumble enough. Even though it was the highest voted question of all time, with thousands of responses from beloved members of the community. You both should feel ashamed of yourselves.

-by Vlad The Impaler, Feb 2 '14 at 20:41

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2c59xe/what_i_...

I love that they wanted to be an answers site. I hate that they forgot sometimes the answers people desperately need are, "What do you think is the right way to do this?" Or, "What's your favorite solution to this problem?" It could have been another Stack Exchange site, sure. But they just didn't do it. And they should have.

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