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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

#31

Post by pugworthy »

I'm a top 2% on a stack (gamedev), and find it very frustrating when I try to help the new users with an answer or in comments, and have the other mods come down on me for trying to help. I've had my fellow mods berate me in comments for trying to help. "With your reputation you should know better!" was one comment I got. At least I can still try to be helpful in comments on closed questions. And I can vote up questions that I see are getting pushed down with negativity.

To me, a lot of times naive and new user questions are excellent opportunities for learning, mentoring, and sharing. You have this little moment where you influence someone in a positive way, make them feel welcome, and maybe put them on a path to growth as a developer.

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

#32

Post by yulaow »

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"…

The entire fact that a moderator can decide what you really wanted to ask even if you are clear that's not the question you want to ask, is, honestly, ridiculous.

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

#33

Post by metalliqaz »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #21

The best questions on Stack Overflow are, without fail, those marked as "not a good fit for Stack Overflow"

this. I used to write long screeds about my latest experience or why I didn't like how it worked there, but no more. Now I just say, "my most productive experiences at SO were on questions that would never be allowed today."

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

#34

Post by pkteison »

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"…

In case you're still curious, I think the reason it isn't included is because auto-increment is a hard problem to do right, ends up being a leaky abstraction for technical reasons, causes bugs, and is philosophically sub-optimal for basically any use case you can dream up. Want to order? Dates are probably always a better thing to order by, or else some natural property of the data like name or title. Want to link two records together? GUIDs are so much better it's not even a contest.

In development, auto-increment appears to be previous field +1. Developers write code expecting that behavior and relying on continuous IDs without gaps. But, well, for example, Oracle doesn't rollback sequence values. They also pull them in blocks (I think blocks of 20?). So sometimes you can end up with numbering like 1,2,3,20,22 if things were weird at just the right time, and you probably never saw it during development or QA unless you happened to know to try to force it.

Then you get things like SQL Server resets auto increment field values on database export/import, so numbering which used to have gaps in the original will have no gaps in the import, causing the numbers to change. (I have no idea why, just seems like a bug/disaster waiting to happen.) Changing some ID fields tends to cause obvious disasters, as you usually have several tables which store a copy of the old auto ID value to join on.

I've seen several production data loss issues as I learned about the joys of this data type and prefer to avoid them as I learned more.

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

#36

Post by ianmcgowan »

Kaiyou wrote: post #9

I 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.

It must be a little soul-crushing to be one of the old-time users and seeing the same questions over-and-over. I think instead of booting those elite users, SO should have a quarantine (or nursery) where badly-asked/homework/do-my-job questions can be shunted off to the side instead of closed immediately. Probably with do-not-crawl robots.txt.

I use SO multiple times a day and sometimes feel the urge to contribute back. I don't have enough expertise to help with deep problems, but am patient enough to work a newbie through their bash/awk/sql questions and it's enough for me to hopefully make one struggling person's day a little better.

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

#37

Post by bluntfang »

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 see what you're saying and it's hard when something you care about gets changed in a way that doesn't align with your original intentions, but this is something professional Software Developers have to deal with on a daily basis when working on teams, and granted, is a very hard mentality to embrace.

WHY questions are not good use cases for what Stack Overflow is trying to accomplish. WHY questions to a community that isn't the original developer of a tool have subjective answers and Stack Overflow is trying to be a place of objective problem solving. Possibly your question was better suited for an app like Quora.

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

#38

Post by xboxnolifes »

metalliqaz wrote: post #30
gota wrote: post #2

> "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…

How is that an improvement to the user? In some ways, it's like a kind of shadowban. The user's question is effectively dead, but they aren't made aware of it.

Exactly

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

#39

Post by Fellshard »

Analemma_ wrote: post #14
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…

Actually, the StackOverflow systems encourage that, in a gentle way, by encouraging you to slot questions into concrete categories. If you've accumulated enough cred to have access to those tools, you'll see that they present you with possibly similar questions that you can browse. Volunteers with little time and a lot of items in their queue are probably likely to notice similarities in the questions and just choose the 'identical question' option, and then move on. More detailed feedback on the question itself is hard to give, and for every one that can genuinely be improved by feedback, there's dozens that are unsalvageable, or truly are duplicates.

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

#40

Post by edgarvaldes »

yulaow wrote: post #32
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"…

The entire fact that a moderator can decide what you really wanted to ask even if you are clear that's not the question you want to ask, is, honestly, ridiculous.

SO says that the question you ask on their site is not yours, so they can do whatever they want with it.

I just stopped asking questions there.

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