Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar experience here. Once I made an account and tried to be more active. I got told off for asking questions about issues I was having or because my answers weren't liked by someone with high rep. I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account. I use stackoverflow on a daily basis, to find preexisting issues around what I am working on and read possible solutions, but thats it. I don't consider logging in…
> I gave up on it. I never use my stackoverflow account. This roughly mirrors my experience... I went through a period of engagement, which ended abruptly after an unpleasant interaction. The author of a semi-well-known niche library took time out of his day to poo-poo a highly specific answer to a highly specific issue. Thing is, the questioner and myself were using that library a bit differently than it's primary u…
Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
631–640 of 739 posts
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
SO has NEVER been a forum. That's where most people are confused. It has NEVER been a platform for open discussion.
Perhaps, but it was more useful when they didn't enforce that. My recent experience with SO is: i reach it via googling a problem or feature, I find a question describing my problem that is closed because of being a duplicate of... ... except the other question isn't a duplicate in subtle ways and has nothing to do with my problem. I've also seen moderators encouraging people to post answers as code ready to copy pas…
Yeah, this is a slow-motion disaster that's been going on for a while now. I don't know why so many people have gotten it into their heads that a bespoke code snippet is unconditionally the right way to answer a Stack question. Explanations are so much more valuable in the long term.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#633Random idea: replace the terminology of "duplicate" questions with "similar" questions. Add a mechanism where, if an answer could apply to two very similar questions, show the answer in both places. Rather than closing a question as a "duplicate", add UI to group "similar" questions, eg, rather than filtering out "duplicate" questions from search results, instead show "similar" questions as groups, with the "best" qu…
This is not at all a bad thought, and it's a perfect example of something that Stack (company) could have tried to actually address complaints rather than just papering over them and telling users they're too mean. Addressing the actual UX issues would do far more to improve interactions than just policing language.
Unfortunately, we've gone around the sun many times with plenty of smart proposals like this simply being ignored by the company.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
Related to this, I'm sick of the moderators deleting comments and moving discussions to chats on a whim just because they're seeing too many comment. They don't seem to realize they're not helping anybody; they keep doing this as if it's Truth ordered by God. Like, StackExchange admins: If you're getting flags, there's offensive material, the comments are blatantly off-topic, etc., then OK, I get that; you can step i…
>discussion Ooooh, You used the d word! Closed because Stack overflow is not for discussion. What SO needs is a forum - not an ephemeral chat but a forum whose topics can be linked to the questions that people want to discuss.
I don't think tacking on a forum is the right way to make it even better.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#635"...serves a valuable purpose by keeping signal high, but also suggests that we just might be Zuckerbots who aren’t even trying very hard to pass as actual humans" A snarky dig at someone in a post about how SO wants to be less mean and snarky is an interesting editorial choice.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Exactly, if you are more prone to sunburn, wear more sunscreen. Same as handling your own feelings. If you could "handle your feelings" as easily as putting on sunscreen, literally every psychotherapist would be out of work. > And yes, feelings are completely in your head. Anything you will ever perceive is "in your head". You don't control a lot of it. "Positive thinking" doesn't cure depression or schizophrenia.…
It's not about easy or hard, the point is that it is under your control. If your emotions are subconscious and you yourself aren't fully in control then how could you possible blame someone else for them? If it's that simple to be affected then you could just as easily affect yourself back to the state you want to be in, hence it is a circular argument without basis. The world happens. You react. Equip and train your…
My point, if that hasn't been clear by now, is that your emotions are not under your control. Your physical reactions may or may not be.
> If your emotions are subconscious and you yourself aren't fully in control then how could you possible blame someone else for them?
People stimulate each other's emotions with their behavior, some behavior can certainly be measured to to elicit certain emotions. If I follow your argument, clearly people are in control of their behavior and they are also responsible for it (agreed). So, under certain circumstances, it should be possible to "blame" them, though I'm not focusing on that.
Your "solution" boils down to: "If you're so sensitive and not in control of your emotions, just go away." That's fine, but not every community needs to have such "low" standards.
> The world happens. You react. Equip and train yourself to react differently if you don't like the outcomes.
An online community is not "the world", we get to design such environments. In "the world", there are tigers and lions, but you wouldn't argue to set them loose on main street just to make people stronger and more vigilant, would you?
> Predictability does not mean causation, especially when it is not accurate 100% of the time and therefore subjective.
That's a pretty weak argument though, in "the world" you always have to go by approximations, even in science we struggle to remove subjectivity completely.
> Sure, when you yell at someone, they might become upset. But another person might not care at all.
Let's say I had the desire to punch a random person in the face, there's certainly an off-chance that some masochist would love to have this happen to them. It's clearly a subjective reaction. Yet, it's not acceptable to go out punching people, don't you agree?
> So are you now causing both anger and apathy in these individuals with the same statement? Or is it that they react as individuals instead and it's really under none of your control?
I must appeal to your common sense. If some behavior of yours causes, for example "50% anger, 30% apathy, 19% annoyance and 1% joy" across a selection of subjects, then the chance that any of it is not negative is 1%. Yelling at people probably isn't so far off from that, DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I MEAN? Sure, I can't predict with 100% certainty what the reaction will be, but if something is 99% bad, it'll better have some strong upside for me to accept it in my community. Yelling at people doesn't have that upside, it's generally frowned upon, so it's reasonable to not allow it. Of course, most people generally understand and follow that without it having to be made a rule.
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there is no meta review There is. There are "audit" questions designed to test whether the reviewer is paying attention. If they improperly vote to close a "good" audit question or improperly vote to leave open a "bad" one, they get banned from reviewing for a while.
OK, this may be a new feature, since I stopped paying close attention several years back when I got frustrated with the direction the community was going. But I don't think that "audit" questions do much to address my issue. They enforce that someone is paying at least a little bit of attention; but they still emphasize things like voting to close a "bad" question, rather than helping the person asking the question a…
Lets say that it takes 15 minutes in chat to help a person (who wants to be helped in asking a good question rather than getting the answer now).
Next, lets apply Sturgeon's law to Stack Overflow. There are 8000 questions a day and 90% of them are crap. Thats 7200 questions that need work. This is 1,800 hours of mentoring per day.
The close (and down vote) is such a minimal amount of work that it allows the group within the site that is striving for a particular vision of quality that it allows them to do the most they can. Furthermore, it is not infrequent that a person who provides assistant for trying to unravel a question from getting a "why can't you just help me now?" with assorted vulgarity interspersed.
On smaller sites, with a greatly reduced amount of questions per day the group capable of mentoring as well as moderating is able to spend the 15 minutes of time without significantly impacting the time taken to moderate and curate the rest of the questions.
With 8000 questions per day, its really hard to look at all of them. As I write this, there are only 16 people who have exhausted their close reviews for the day ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/close/stats - only 16 have 40 reviews). That doesn't show the people who are doing new questions, but it does give an idea of how shallow the bench of people who are spending time to moderate the site actually is.
Getting more people to help out would be great, but most people aren't doing anything to help.
There are also people who believe that up voting a newbie question and saying "welcome to the site" in the comments without improving the question is helpful.
The first post review and triage queues are intended for providing this help. You can see that this doesn't always work well ( https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19570266 or https://stackoverflow.com/review/first-posts/19569647 - note the not even trying to fix the grammar of the question or asking for the necessary information or providing help on how to improve the question, just no action needed)
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: Ho…
My experience is always been like this: Question: I'm trying to do Y so I can do X. I know Z is the right way to do X, but I'm not allowed to do it for $BUSINESS_REASON that I have absolutely no control over. Response 1: Don't use Y to do X. Use Z. Response 2: $BUSINESS_REASON is stupid, fix that. Then some time later I'll come back and post my work around, with fair warning it isn't the right way to solve problem X,…
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Re: Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
At an arms length it really seems like there should be some kind of delineations of the questions. "What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted a…
> "What document backend to use with Drupal?" is a question whose answers are in constant flux. It is a bad match for and Authoritative Language Compendium. But it's also the kinds of thing people wonder about, it's a relevant tech question, and the dialog around something like that is easily as valuable as the accepted answer since everyone is skinning a different cat. IIRC, they did something like that. It was call…