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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

#531

Post by Rainymood »

The problem, and I'm personally guilty of this as well, is that sometimes you have a small quick problem and you're stuck. You quickly whip up some text and post it to stackoverflow. Then you get aweful reactions because you didn't put enough effort in your question and SO isn't going to make your homework. The point is that a lot of people have quick and dirty questions and don't need a full answer of half a page. All they need is a push in the right direction but SO is exactly not what that is about. SO is a site for detailed questions with detailed and high-quality answers. The point is that there are a lot of "low-hanging" fruit questions and SO is the best place to go, alhtough it is not meant for that.

There should be like a StackOverflow for "bad" questions. If someone asks "How do I append to a list in python?" it wouldn't be closed but someone could just comment "read the #$# manual (link to docs here)".

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

#532

Post by kabacha »

As a pretty big contributor to stackoverflow I feel that this is getting blown out of proportion.

I'll usually go extra mile to help someone out but I like my time and the platform to be respected. I often feel that people either expect for their minds to be read or are just bad at explaining there problem. I don't think SO community has to carry the burden of teaching people how to request help - I think it's a skill you earn by trying and failing. Sure your question got closed and someone pointed you to "how to ask a question" FAQ - just reformat your thoughts try again! It hurts nobody.

A lot of other issues like racism, sexism are pretty much unheard of so to me it seems like this article is very much just to pander some recent threads.

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

#533

Post by k__ »

They have the Wikipedia delete-nazi problem.

First they wanted all content, then they started to go for quality, whatever that means.

But the culture they built doesn't change as fast as the shareholders like, often it never changes and they lose users to a new service.

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

#534

Post by ItsMe000001 »

Joeri wrote: post #475
lambda wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a high-scoring user who has been put off by this exact behavior. The problem is, the behavior is pervasive among other high scoring users, and whenever I advocate against this kind of behavior, I get a whole bunch of pushback about it. No one seems to want to change. No one seems to want to even engage with criticism about the culture; they just push back and pile on when criticism is brought up. After a couple t…

I’m in the same boat. 10k rep on SO and softeng.se, and I barely participate anymore. For me the most frustrating part is that the rules forbid vague questions with opinionated answers, but that at this point in my career most of the things I find interesting are all like that so there’s almost nothing I want to get answers to that I can ask. Software architecture questions are very difficult to ask without triggerin…

> Software architecture questions

Are you trying to use SO or the Software Engineering site?

https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/

They also have a site for software recommendations now, so they created alternative sites for some categories of questions forbidden on SO.

I'm not sure if it hadn't been better to try to integrate it into SO though, using tags for example.

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

#535

Post by nottorp »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #425

I thoroughly disagree that SO is hostile to "everyone". I've been there for nearly nine years and find that the only people who complain about such things, as listed here, are those who never took "The Tour" and aren't aware of the rules for asking and answering questions as out lined in the Help Center. I rarely ask questions anymore but, when I did, they have never been downvoted or questioned because ... I follow…

The fact that SO isn't a forum any more is a problem because it has stopped encouraging learning. If you can't discuss the problem, all you'll get is canned answers for copy/paste monkeys. And then you'll wonder why you can't hire a competent programmer any more...

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

#536

Post by GenericsMotors »

A good rule of thumb for asking questions on StackOverflow is to only do it as a last resort.

And then, put effort into your question:

- explain clearly what you've tried, and how it didn't work

- link to other resources that appear on the surface to be the answer, but really aren't because of x, y, and z reasons.

- provide code! don't just dump a metric tone of it in the answer though, provide only what is necessary to demonstrate the problem. if for some reason you can't provide the actual code for IP reasons, try to reproduce the problem separately with a very minimal example. for larger code samples, linking to Github gists or repos is a good idea.

I've asked very few questions over the years, and one of the main reasons is because I ended up finding the solution myself; the steps above force you to review your own work thoroughly, and lay out the problem clearly, so you might catch a mistake that wasn't obvious after cursing at your screen the first time around.

For those questions that I have asked, I've never been downvoted or had the question closed; at most no replies but that was it. If readers see you put in effort to ask a question, then they are also more inclined to put in effort to help.

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

#537

Post by ItsMe000001 »

javadocmd wrote: post #493
CM30 wrote: post #59

> Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place True. There's definitely an elitist undertone at Stack Overflow, and the voting system has a huge effect on that... > especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups. But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it, and generally my perception seems…

> But this isn't true... You completely missed this point. To quote the article: > Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us. Hanlon doesn't claim to know why the marginalized groups feel unwelcome. He doesn't even claim that the root cause is a bias of action -- conscious or subconscious -- on the part of SO's users or staff. What he said was these groups…

> > Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.

This particular argument is really bad IMHO. OP has a point - nobody knows who you are. That means if some people feel they are treated worse it is due to their own perception. After all, objectively they are not treated worse then everybody else. Which to me sounds more like a bias in their perception. They may have that perception for a reason, but that does not seem to me to be something attributable to SO.

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

#538

Post by zaarn »

corobo wrote: post #311
Ajedi32 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason why HN has both up/down votes, and actual moderators.

> HN has both up/down votes This separates the good from the bad > and actual moderators This stops the trolling and spammy pump and dump comments/posts It works pretty well. I've never felt unwelcome on HN, even when something I've posted gets downvoted. I come away with a more "ehhh, yeah I get it" feel rather than anything resembling the bitterness I feel whenever StackOverflow is the only option in search results…

As you have correctly observed, people will start pushing out other people from the site. But who is doing the pushing?

On HN, there is a very heavy liberal and left-leaning bias in this pushing (not accusing, this is imply observational data), Reddit is more of a mixed bag for example with some places having a much more strong push from the right and conservatives. People on HN would likely not feel welcome there.

If you give power to the people you ultimately end up having a site that reflects how the majority of it's users think. If that is good or bad is another discussion.

The mechanisms of a downvote play heavily into this too. Downvotes on HN are rare and only enabled for the elite (+500 karma elite to be specific, this is the exact 'give people power based on how much they use the site'), IIRC SO has a similar policy for some actions, not sure on downvotes.

I don't think that is inherently bad, people who are long-time contributors to a community should usually have a better idea on how to improve it than a newcomer. The crucial point might be that on HN there is a limit of power you can achieve. After you get your downvotes, that's it. It only filters out young and inactive (or controversial) accounts but not people who engage in the community.

SO might benefit from implementing a similar power ceiling to HN, so that users can't abuse their amount of reputation over others.

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

#539

Post by [deleted] »

javadocmd wrote: post #493
CM30 wrote: post #59

> Too many people experience Stack Overflow¹ as a hostile or elitist place True. There's definitely an elitist undertone at Stack Overflow, and the voting system has a huge effect on that... > especially newer coders, women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups. But this isn't true. No one knows anything about a user on Stack Overflow unless they explicitly announce it, and generally my perception seems…

> But this isn't true... You completely missed this point. To quote the article: > Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us. Hanlon doesn't claim to know why the marginalized groups feel unwelcome. He doesn't even claim that the root cause is a bias of action -- conscious or subconscious -- on the part of SO's users or staff. What he said was these groups…

[deleted]

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

#540

Post by Sacho »

sanderjd wrote: post #465
closeparen wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, SO has not retained quality. It’s a wasteland of promising questions that moderators turned into dead ends, to the point that finding an SO link relevant to your issue in a Google searches is practically guaranteed to leave you more frustrated than before. It pollutes the troubleshooting process with false hope.

Yeah, a haystack full of needles is better than a single needle in a haystack. That is to say: having the same information repeated tons of times is better than not being able to find the one canonical place the information is written.

Are those the only two options? How about a haystack full of maybe-needles, where each answer is subtly wrong because no one has the willingness to go through and vet all of them?
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