Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming – It’s Time for That to Change • Hacker News Board

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

#661

Post by reitanqild » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

shagie wrote: post #630

PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems likely. If you are mistreated for a given reason, you would likely attribute mistreatment elsewhere to having the same cause, and given that would be ones first impression of mistreatment, even with evidence that the mistreatment is for another more broader issue, people will likely contribute the mistreatment to the original reason they were mistreated in the first area. It is similar to making a bad firs…

With Stack Overflow, its also important to remember the 0th impressions of people finding the site through google. Finding material that is off topic but preserved for some reason is often cited as a negative experience. The "I searched for XYZ and it was closed as not constructive" (note: not constructive hasn't been a valid close reason for several years). This brings up the question of "should that material be fin…

You got this exactly wrong:

The negative experience is that the interesting/useful questions/answers aren't rewarded.

It's bad that they are closed with harsh and false ("not constructive" on some of the most useful question there was...). It would be even worse if they were entirely removed so we couldn't find the answer.

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

#662

Post by lambda » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 7:33 PM UTC

shagie wrote: post #637

lambda wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are far too many new questions each day for the people who are capable of mentoring an individual into asking a good question for Stack Overflow to scale. 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…

The thing is, bad questions don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. If a question is bad, and it gets no answers, it will just languish. You don't need to do anything about it. Maybe have an auto-close after a week of inactivity or something. It probably doesn't really matter, as long as you actually sort questions by things like score, answer score, etc, so the bad questions just go down to the ends of all of the lists on pages no one ever browses to. Bits are cheap, a few bad questions being present on the site and not closed doesn't really hurt.

I don't expect every bad question will lead to a valuable mentorship opportunity. I've certainly encountered my fair share of those that weren't worth spending my time on.

Bad answers are more problematic; there's good reason to be vigilent about those.

And of course spam, obvious homework, and just completely incomprehensible questions should be closed instantly.

What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed. So by the time I've written up an answer, the question is closed, and my answer is wasted. I can copy my answer elsewhere, and vote to re-open, maybe after editing the question to make it more clear, and it might get re-opened, but then I have to spend a lot more time and attention waiting for that. By closing out questions too aggressively, not only are people putting off newcomers, but also wasting the time of those answering questions.

> 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)

Yeah, one of the things that really frustrates me about the review process is that they just incentivize taking some quick and easy action, not actually doing the right thing.

Effective moderation is not easy, and a very different skill set than answering technical questions, but the rep needed to perform many of these mod duties is just given to those who accrue enough rep.

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

#663

Post by Lionsion » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 8:21 PM UTC

shagie wrote: post #648

Lionsion wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As the crud started piling up You'll have to be more specific about what that "crud" is, as SO's culture seems to have a tendency to reclassify the baby as dirt and throw him out with the bathwater. > the options were either abandon it completely (that was threatened) or clean it up along with the associated rules of what makes a good subjective question. Seems like there should have been more options on the table…

There's some remnants of this era on the meta site. For example, consider the argument for https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... asking "who would be the most efficacious patron saint of programmers". It was a the era of "what should I name my cat?" ( https://i.stack.imgur.com/HEZ2Z.png ) and Perks for new programmers ( https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1069... ), Do yo…

> It was a the era of "what should I name my cat?"

A lot of those links 404 for me, but a lot of that stuff could have been taken care of by being better at defining what was on and off topic, e.g. it's a site for subjective questions about programming, rather than programmers answering subjective questions. SO has the moderation resources to handle that.

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

#664

Post by shagie » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 8:28 PM UTC

lambda wrote: post #662

shagie wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are far too many new questions each day for the people who are capable of mentoring an individual into asking a good question for Stack Overflow to scale. 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…

The thing is, bad questions don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. If a question is bad, and it gets no answers, it will just languish. You don't need to do anything about it. Maybe have an auto-close after a week of inactivity or something. It probably doesn't really matter, as long as you actually sort questions by things like score, answer score, etc, so the bad questions just go down to the ends of al…

There is a system known as the Roomba ( https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/92006 ) that will automatically delete questions. A question has a negative score, and has no answers will be deleted in 30 days. A question that is at 0 or less, has no answers, has a low view count, and has at most 1 comment will be deleted after a year. A question that is closed, negatively scored, no accepted answer, and no answers with a positive score will be deleted in 9 days.

So that does exist, but it takes a LONG time for it to get cleaned up in some cases. And if people jump in with a "this might answer your question, hope it helps", it will likely never get deleted.

Its not that these questions hurt the site - bits are cheap. Its that they hurt the search results and the perception of the site. Admittedly a single reddit data point: https://www.reddit.com/r/stackoverflow/comments/8d15h4/10000...

> The toxicity is in all the unanswered questions.

---

> What I see is questions which are not phrased well but you can actually work out what they're asking being closed.

Consider fixing the question with an edit before writing the answer so that it won't be closed when you get around to writing an answer. This way its a good question from an earlier point in the life of the question. Furthermore, it makes it easier for other people to provide answers too. Leaving the question in a poor state with an answer makes it harder for the google only user to find the question and understand what is being asked.

---

Doing the right thing in review takes time. Many of the first post or triage reviews are done by people who haven't... fully bought into the philosophy of answers for people who haven't asked the question yet. They look ok to the standards of a 500 rep user who doesn't see what Jeff and Joel were trying for with Stack Overflow ( https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/access-review-queu... ).

There's no instruction for people for how to help in the review queues. As such, everyone is doing their own thing with their own "this is the quality that I'd write at, it looks ok." The only way to correct this currently is with review bans... and that has its own problems with negativity and the perception of Stack Overflow as elitist.

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

#665

Post by shagie » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 8:45 PM UTC

Lionsion wrote: post #663

shagie wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some remnants of this era on the meta site. For example, consider the argument for https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... asking "who would be the most efficacious patron saint of programmers". It was a the era of "what should I name my cat?" ( https://i.stack.imgur.com/HEZ2Z.png ) and Perks for new programmers ( https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1069... ), Do yo…

> It was a the era of "what should I name my cat?" A lot of those links 404 for me, but a lot of that stuff could have been taken care of by being better at defining what was on and off topic, e.g. it's a site for subjective questions about programming, rather than programmers answering subjective questions. SO has the moderation resources to handle that.

SO might have had the moderation resources. The early PSE site didn't (as described in https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/200144 ). The moderation actions trying to deal with that were done mostly by diamond moderator fiat and occasionally Jeff or Joel saying "no."

The community that was there at the time wasn't doing any significant moderation or curation of those questions. Consider https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4417... and consider is that useful? curated? Should "Quit my last job." (entire answer) be there? or "I tried to apply good programming technique to a language such as TI-83+ BASIC."? Count how many times "read books" or some variation is in that list.

It wasn't moderated or curated. Such pile on "give a pithy answer" was acceptable. And it made the site - trying for the more conceptual and architecture questions that Joel was asking for in his blog post harder to find, and they would get drowned out by the popular fun questions. That lead to https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...

Its not that those aren't interesting questions, its that they are the wrong fit for that format. There are better places to ask for the best programming joke than Stack Overflow and Exchange sites.

And so, with the lack of moderation and curation from the fun days of Programmers.SE a different philosophy of the site was able to establish itself... and the site grew in activity.

The culture of a site is a proof of work. You have to work to maintain it. If there isn't work to do it, it can change. Its probably far to late to change to the less moderated version of the site again. However, if one wants to do that, actively work to curate the site so that those questions are acceptable.

MathOverflow has a fair number of fun and soft questions - but that comes at a lot of work of moderation and curation from the entire community... which they do. The community on other sites that wants those fun and soft questions has not shown as much a desire to curate them, and so others moderate them (not desiring to curate them either).

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

#666

Post by ruirr » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

Mithaldu wrote: post #507

JPGalt wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had similar issues on this site. I have had 3 high rep users of the site close a question I asked having never answered a single question in the technology I was referencing. That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that? I guess they could go look for a profile picture before they answer? If you have people doing that then there is a much b…

> That said I have never felt that because I was not white I was treated differently, how would anyone even know that? People extrapolate from names. ESPECIALLY if your name sounds indian.

What names? You do extrapolate from the bad English. Loads of Indians using UK-sounding names and UK woman names.

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

#667

Post by Viliam1234 » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

saint_fiasco wrote: post #115

notatoad wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's significant though that both wikipedia and stack overflow, despite being ruled by petty assholes weilding the smallest amount of power in seemingly the stupidest way possible, have become two of the most valuable references in existence. Do toxic communities produce better content?

If there is a correlation, it's more likely that the sort of petty asshole who likes to feel important will prefer to invest more effort in a site that is valuable. So the more valuable a site becomes, the more it will attract highly motivated but slightly sociopathic moderators.

Yes, this seems more likely.

If you create a new website with first 10 toxic users, it will never grow, because they will scare away any potential 11th user.

But if you create a new website with awesome users, it get useful content and grow. When it grows very large and attracts too many users, you will have to start moderating heavily. But moderating a website is an exhausting task, and awesome people usually have other things to do; so gradually the job will be taken by people hungry for some kind of power. Then the site becomes toxic.

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

#668

Post by ruirr » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 9:46 PM UTC

coryfklein wrote: post #623

jakear wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. While I do think “newer coders” may very likely feel unwelcome, as an extension of the elitism issue, there’s no mechanism by which “people of color”, “women”, or “minorities” can even be identified... I fear people are subconsciously correlating these groups with “less able coders”. Obviously this correlation serves only to damage.

> there’s no mechanism by which ... “women” ... can even be identified _No_ mechanism? Seriously? How about when the user is named "Jane Smith"? Or, heaven forbid, they actually use a PROFILE PICTURE with their ACTUAL FACE. Oh god the horror! I, as a white male with a caucasian sounding name have the privilege of being able to use my actual name on the internet. Women that want to be taken seriously don't even have t…

meh. Loads of Asians pretending to be white women to see if they get away with more attention. Often in a while when they take photos we even see the reflection of the actual guy. They are have probably more "discrimination" for the bad questions than for being a "woman".

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

#669

Post by ruirr » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 9:51 PM UTC

kadenshep wrote: post #601

kevintb wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard to take your claims seriously, when you proudly and publically publish meandering rants (linked to your HN account) about how gaming communities are in no way toxic, while completely denying Gamergate, its ties to white supremacists and a wealth of other examples [1]. [1] https://gamingreinvented.com/nintendoarticles/no-the-gaming-...

There's always a trail or sign with these people.

There is also a trail to politically correct to the nauseous people like you probably. Fanatics at both extremes are not nice.

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

#670

Post by ruirr » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 9:54 PM UTC

ctack wrote: post #555

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

StackOverflow is good if you come there via a search. Otherwise, in my experience, it is utterly worthless for getting actual answers. For instance, I've asked a total of 4 questions on the DBA Stack Exchange. Almost all of them were specific but easily generalized, weren't answered anywhere else. Three of them would have been easily answered by someone with good knowledge of the relevant products. (The other was onl…

Agreed. Great if your question has already been answered, but it's less than useless if you have a question - it's actually counter productive and a waste of time. I'd given up on questions until seeing this post featured today, so I decided to ask my 3rd question in 7 years (SO). It was down voted within 5 minutes and no idea why. I'll just roll my own solution based on my own suggestion.

Have you wondered why there are questions being upvoted just for a minute?