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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

#11

Post by fortran77 »

rlguarino wrote: post #8
fortran77 wrote: post #6

Here'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? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20466641

???

Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community

#12

Post by xigency »

One big problem as a Stack Overflow viewer who comes from Google is that many times the top result for a search leads to a question/answer that is a dead end. The question is valid but it is closed because it was asked on the wrong website (Stack Overflow vs. Stack Exchange), it's too subjective, it's a duplicate, etc. Or the question is downvoted and there are no useful answers.

Another issue which comes about from the overzealous duplicate tagging is that not all software engineering questions last forever. If someone is asking how something works in C89 and gets the best answer, and then someone else asks the same question five years later, the answer will be the same. But if it is a question about JavaScript or new C++ or Python, then answers can get stale pretty fast. One workaround the community uses is taking those questions that are top hits or top quality and keeps editing them year after year. But that only works for the high profile questions and answers. The policy hurts the site overall.

Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community

#13

Post by torben-friis »

fortran77 wrote: post #6

Here'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"…

I've soldiered on through several experiences like that, and sort of assumed it was the usual (being non American, I guess I just assumed it was cultural differences with Americans or my English being annoying). I changed my mind after asking some questions on the math stack exchange, and seeing how answers there were night and day compared to what's usual in stackoverflow. People with phds in areas I couldn't even spell treated me with a level of kindness and patience that I really wasn't expecting... So I guess it isn't just the format of SO.

Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community

#14

Post by Analemma_ »

fortran77 wrote: post #6

Here'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"…

Stack Overflow has the same problem as Wikipedia: they know the only way to scale up a human knowledge repository is by leveraging volunteer effort (the organization itself could never cost-efficiently supply the necessary manpower), but volunteers like this are strongly self-selected to be a bunch of Poindexters who take perverse joy in finding exactly which minor infraction you're guilty of and using it to shut you down. I only contributed to Wikipedia a few times before my edits were reverted under WP:OMGWTFBBQ one too many times and I stopped bothering, and I've never even bothered with SO because I've heard it's much the same.

Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community

#15

Post by closetohome »

xigency wrote: post #12

One big problem as a Stack Overflow viewer who comes from Google is that many times the top result for a search leads to a question/answer that is a dead end. The question is valid but it is closed because it was asked on the wrong website (Stack Overflow vs. Stack Exchange), it's too subjective, it's a duplicate, etc. Or the question is downvoted and there are no useful answers. Another issue which comes about from…

My favorite is the recursive "just google this" answer in a thread that's the top search result on Google.

Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community

#17

Post by ProAm »

SO's problem was they wanted to a community that rewrote manuals and documentation, rather than be a community that helped programmers answer problems.

That created a problem that has snowballed and is probably to big to ever really fix now. It is caustic, its not user friendly (even to users with experience).

Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community

#18

Post by lostphilosopher »

olooney wrote: post #7

It'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…

Learning how to ask a good technical question is an extremely valuable skill in and of itself, and StackOverflow is one of the few ways you can learn to do it. Just as you've said - if you ask a coworker (or a real person in general) they'll work with you to dig the question out, but they aren't really teaching you how to ask it more efficiently in the first place. They aren't giving you specific feedback on your question.

StackOverflow on the other hand will often give you an actual critique of your question. That criticism can be really frustrating, but it's often good for you (it has been for me). Often the problem is a problem only because of how you perceive the problem space, or you're wrong about fundamentals. Other times you're not including important details because you didn't know they were important and just having that pointed out can help, or this problem is of a known form with a known solution - you just didn't know the "magic words."

There's even something to be said for forcing people to learn a bit about the community before jumping into it. As annoying as that is and as much as it is an on boarding obstacle - it helps people work together. The on boarding process for a driver's license sucks and puts up tons of barriers, but with good reason.

I don't disagree with anything you've said, or deny that super rude and unhelpful behavior occurs there, I just want to say that some of the "bugs" of StackOverflow are probably "features."

Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community

#19

Post by rat9988 »

lostphilosopher wrote: post #18
olooney wrote: post #7

It'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…

Learning how to ask a good technical question is an extremely valuable skill in and of itself, and StackOverflow is one of the few ways you can learn to do it. Just as you've said - if you ask a coworker (or a real person in general) they'll work with you to dig the question out, but they aren't really teaching you how to ask it more efficiently in the first place. They aren't giving you specific feedback on your que…

>StackOverflow is one of the few ways you can learn to do i >StackOverflow on the other hand will often give you an actual critique of your question.

You really are giving too much credit to SO here. It hasn't been my experience with it at all.

Re: What a bad day at work taught me about building Stack Overflow’s community

#20

Post by na85 »

fortran77 wrote: post #6

Here'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"…

My best worst experience was asking how to achieve a particular effect in latex and then having the question locked for not posting a minimal working example of something I didn't know how to do.
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