What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community
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Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community
#2> "Newbie Experience" picture
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> Over the next few quarters, we’re going to be taking a step back and re-evaluating how we deliver feedback to users about their questions. We want to make sure people are getting necessary feedback without feeling called out or publicly embarrassed.
My bet: they'll keep the mechanisms exactly the same and hide from the newbie user the information that their question has been flagged for closing, marked as a duplicate, etc., and show a 'temporary ghost score' capped at zero.
Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community
#3I think this is an important lesson for an awful lot of online communities -- in a public forum* some mild, warranted criticism is then published to your friends and they are then encouraged by the algorithm to put in their tuppence-worth. Should any of those be inclined to comment -- perhaps less sensitively, slightly more inflammatory -- then the cycle begins anew, with more fuel added to the fire.
* Mostly looking at Twitter and Facebook with their explicit "engagement means my friends will see this" algorithm
Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community
#4> "Newbie Experience" picture + > Over the next few quarters, we’re going to be taking a step back and re-evaluating how we deliver feedback to users about their questions. We want to make sure people are getting necessary feedback without feeling called out or publicly embarrassed. My bet: they'll keep the mechanisms exactly the same and hide from the newbie user the information that their question has been flagged…
And I feel that might well be an improvement for all involved.
Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community
#5Does Stack go the way of Yahoo answers at some point? The former has served me on countless assignments/reports, hope it remains useful.
Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community
#6Here's my Stack Overflow user hostile experience.
I asked a question as to _why_ some very well-used and robust database implementations, as a matter of "principle", don't have auto-increment fields. There must be a reason for it, like it violates the purity of a relational database, etc., but I'm not sure how or why.
This question was quickly edited/changed by someone else to "How do you do AUTO_INCREMENT in Oracle". And then it was marked as a duplicate and quickly closed.
I never asked a question on Stack Overflow again.
Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community
#7It's hilarious how self aware they are about the newbie experience[1] while at the same time having engineered an system that reinforces and enables all of those behaviors.
Stack Overflow doesn't care about helping users get answers to their questions; they care about creating a Google-indexed repository of high-quality questions and answers. These two aren't the same because of the concept of a "high" or "low" quality question. If you go to a consultant (or even a helpful fellow employee) with an vague, ill-formed question with a lot of specific detail about your exact context and problem they'll help you through it. Stack Overflow doesn't give a shit. No one is going to waste time giving you a nuanced answer to a complex real-world situation; nor is it with their time to cross-examine you to find out what your real question is. That would be both time consuming and unrewarding - unrewarding because it will help at most one person. No one else will care about your specific situation, so your ceiling is at most one upvote. If you want that kind of help, you have to pay for it, in one form or another. Unfortunately, most new users ask a question about something their genuinely confused about in a topic area they've just started to learn. Big mistake. Such questions were already asked 5 years ago and you'll get closed as a duplicate, or your confusion will be interpreted as cluelessness and closed as unclear. You'll get a ton of downvotes in either case.
I like stack exchange; I have a few thousand points on two different sites. I enjoy answering questions, or even just seeing what kinds of questions are being asked, and of course use it almost hourly when googling for different problems. I rarely ask a question though, and usually regret it when I do. But at this point let's just admit it's basically just a wiki with a psuedo-Q&A gimmick.
[1]: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/avINNb1_Dg2h6QfDRJOpnWVFWu...
Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community
#8Here's my Stack Overflow user hostile experience. I asked a question as to _why_ some very well-used and robust database implementations, as a matter of "principle", don't have auto-increment fields. There must be a reason for it, like it violates the purity of a relational database, etc., but I'm not sure how or why. This question was quickly edited/changed by someone else to "How do you do AUTO_INCREMENT in Oracle"…
Did you accidentally post this to the new twitter thread[1] first?
Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community
#9I feel like there's an "elite" of old users who are discontent that there are both people asking questions they don't like and people eager to answer those questions. If they could just elevate those old users to a different space where they don't interfere with this asking/answering which is the point of the site to begin with, everyone would probably be much happier.
Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community
#10It's hilarious how self aware they are about the newbie experience[1] while at the same time having engineered an system that reinforces and enables all of those behaviors. Stack Overflow doesn't care about helping users get answers to their questions; they care about creating a Google-indexed repository of high-quality questions and answers. These two aren't the same because of the concept of a "high" or "low" quali…
> Stack Overflow doesn't care about helping users get answers to their questions; they care about creating a Google-indexed repository of high-quality questions and answers.
I'll add that experienced Stack Overflow users don't care about helping other users. They care about badges and reputation, which is a proxy for helping users but not quite the same.
So to me it's more like a wiki with a pseudo-Q&A gimmick with a LinkedIn-meets-github-repository-activity-bragging aspect to it, which is particularly inviting to people who like taking down others and feeling intellectually superior, even if that means telling someone that their question is stupid – which means breaking a rule that is essentially the cornerstone of any other Q&A setting.