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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

#561

Post by LandR »

GenericsMotors wrote: post #536

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…

Exactly this. I've had a couple of issues I've wanted to go to stack overflow with but in the process of clearly elucidating my problem, I've ended up solving it / realising what my issue was.

Too many low effort questions make SO a pretty useless place nowadays IMO.

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

#562

Post by LandR »

waydowntogo wrote: post #274

I tried answer questions the best way I could and I had nice respond from asker mostly like it BUT there was almost everytime some smartass (with higher points than me and voted down my answer) who had some problem with that - bad words or word-order (i'm not kinding); too short answer etc. So I left. I wanted share my knowlidge but they didn't wanted them. Now admins/owners are crying. Just epic!

I got an answer downvoted for helping someone and snarky comments about how I shouldn't have helped him because the person felt it wasn't a good enough question.

There was enough info the question to allow me to solve his issue, ok it wasn't a great question, but it was good enough IMO. I think his entire question ended up getting deleted and with it my answer.

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

#563

Post by barrkel »

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…

I think this is down to lack of good filtering tools.

Primarily duplicate or lazy questions shouldn't even be seen by high-rep users most of the time. It's wasting everyone's time to maximize the exposure of those kind of questions. Low rep users could do with answering those kinds of questions, though - low-hanging fruit to get a leg up.

I have 35k rep and a 4 digit user id on SO. I've pretty much stopped using it for years, though. The one feature [1] I asked for, that would have kept me engaged, is a way of only showing questions from high-rep askers. Because I'd know they'd be interesting questions, and not trivially solved (because you know high rep users know how to Google things and do basic research). I'd also like the bar against "subjective" questions lowered in these kinds of questions, because questions that are matters of fact are almost always solved by sufficient use of Google or experimentation or intelligence, all of which can be assumed as a given for high rep users.

[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19659/search-filter...

Another:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3987/can-we-filter-...

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

#564

Post by bmn__ »

pbowyer wrote: post #176
ggregoire wrote: post #61

I've been an active user for 7 years… and I lived my very first case of moderator abuse last week. A moderator closed a 1.5 year old question[1] with 20 upvotes, 25 stars, 9000 views and an answer at 28 upvotes without any vote or consultation, because it was too broad for him. StackOverflow has all the tools to allow the users to moderate the platform by themselves, kinda democratically. From my experience, it works…

> because it was too broad for him Too broad has been the bane of my questions on StackOverflow. [0] As cpburns2009 says in a sibling comment: > When you're working with an unfamiliar technology, you frequently don't even know what to ask. And if they don't, then provide some other place for questions which are exploring a field, or are more complicated than "How do I do X?" 0. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/376…

Two years too late, but here it goes. That's not an question suitable for SO, the closing votes were correct.

A suitable question would be if you already had started programming, and encountered a specific problem, and asked how to solve it. There's probably a different stackexchange or forum for broad questions, but SO is out of scope.

> provide some other place for questions

It's up to you to find these places, the company behind SO and the site users have no obligation to provide you with the other place.

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

#566

Post by talltimtom »

A side note to the article. We really have come full circle back to the mid 90’ies. What’s that LEGO unicorn doing in the middle of the article? I might as well have been a flame gif. It’s just a random “I thought this was cool so I put it right smack in the middle of everything”. Naturally it is much more calculated today and ofcause it is aimed specifically at popular memes... buck back in the day flame gifs where popular, and one day we too will grow tired of unicorn-everything and doge memes. Some faster than others.

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

#567

Post by bmn__ »

Someone1234 wrote: post #110

> We set them up for failure, and our power users have been asking us to help them for ages. Your Power Users are the ones making SO toxic. They don't need better tools, they need to have their privileges pulled until they learn to use them responsibly. The whole "SO is an encyclopedia not a help site" thing started this, and it encouraged a lot of "content curators" to the site, who view their role as squishing ever…

> the site needs something akin to a constitution setting out what the purpose of the site is

I assert this already exists, laid out in the inaugural blogs posts and formally codified in the tour and help centre.

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

#568

Post by thinkingemote »

Rainymood wrote: post #531

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. A…

I find IRC to be best for quick and dirty questions. But there's still etiquette and finding the right room

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

#569

Post by viraptor »

telltruth wrote: post #550
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…

Let me present you other side of the story. I have been user of SO and significant level contributor for as long as it’s been there. Virtually every day there is onslaught of people asking questions that are trivially answerable by simple search or not well formed or not even legibly written. Everyday lot of people end up spending their time in answering these rathar than focusing on questions that are far more worth…

> Spammy question often ends up overwhelming limited screen space and good questions gets buried like a needle in the haystack.

This is one of the issues with SO. I'd love to find a good question. I'd be happy to spend some time on it and learn something. But instead there are lots of questions about why the guessing game doesn't wait for input the second time, what's this syntax error, why doesn't this "if" work. Questions that will maybe help one person, but could be deleted immediately afterwards and nobody would notice.

I don't even know what's the answer. Maybe a canonical "this is how you debug an if statement which doesn't work" or other topic answer would help. Maybe not.

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

#570

Post by talltimtom »

Interesting that they are not doing the extremely simple technical change that would help out with a lot of the unwelcome signaling: removing negative scores. There is absolutely no value in a post being -10, it just tells the poster that 10 unkind people disliked the individual for not knowing the answer to his own question. Just let new questions sit at 0 if no one upvotes. New inexperienced users should not feel like they are being put on display for stupidity when they ask questions for fear of it being a duplicate something trivial or what else.
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