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Tired of Stack Overflow

arp242.net

61–70 of 517 posts

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#61
The way forward isn't a global website like SO, it's niche forums from people you get to know in a weekly basis.

For elixir we have a public forum specific to Elixir.

For crystal, there's a crystal forum as well.

For react, I'm still looking for one that's good.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#62
post #16

I really think it's better to just have an up vote arrow and no down vote option, for questions at least. The only reason on a site like that to really vote something down should be if something is off topic or against the rules, in which case you have a report button. If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasona…

https://lobste.rs has downvote explanations[1]: when you want to vote a post/comment down, you're required to state why (pick from a list). Since the user can see why they're downvoted, misuse hardly an issue.

I think such a system could work for stackoverflow too: provide reasons like [off-topic, hostile, spam, ...], but don't provide others ([stupid-question, too-easy, ...]).

[1]: https://lobste.rs/about#downvotes

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#63
post #52
post #21

This culture is why I've never contributed to Stack Overflow. I'm a reasonably senior engineer, I've been lucky to experience an extraordinary breadth of technology in my career, and I love helping people learn to program... but I just don't have the time or emotional energy for SO's top posters to pick apart the minutia of every word I say in an answer. The ROI for me is nil.

I have a small number of answers, and the most successful / least criticized ones were always on niche languages or topics. C/C++/Java? No chance. I corrected a wrong answer on a question in C++ once, which was immediately reverted with “nope, your answer is too different from the original, make a new answer”. Great, so now there’s an answer that is fundamentally wrong with 26 upvotes that apparently can’t be correct…

That's apparently the intended design; SO bills itself as "questions and correct answers", but they've made it clear in the Meta site or in blog posts, I don't remember where, that the accepted answer and upvotes are not "this is correct" but "people found this helpful", and people can find "wrong" answers helpful, so they stay.

The intended outcome here is that you post your own answer, and leave a comment on the most upvoted one summarising your concern with it.

And that readers don't just pick the most upvoted one, (even though it's obviously the site's design that they should be able to do that).

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re using a public forum for health questions then you have bigger problems to worry about. But put it this way. Trained surgeon A who has 5 years experience and has been on the site for 3 years has 4000 reputation. Answers a question. A trained surgeon with 26 years experience who joined the site last week and has a reputation of 200 supplies a far better answer with added explanation of why and how etc. You l…

> If you're using a public form If you don't understand how comparisons work, you have a bigger problem to worry about. > put it this way The question then becomes... the 26 year veteran surgeon does boob jobs and tummy tucks. The 5 year veteran does emergency room and brain surgery. Given how complicated something as simple as "surgery" is... how do you plan on registering and ranking something with multiple levels…

lol what neurologist is taking shifts in the ER. last hospital visit I had I was extremely grateful to get a consult from a plastic surgeon (who was not a cosmetic surgeon)

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#65

One thing that always bothered me about SO was that it shows who answered and their score. It should display answers without the user until an answer is accepted. There’s been many cases where a high score user answers, gets a lot of upvotes cos people are like “oh his score is 30k so he must be right” yet the answer is not good or incorrect. And there is a better more correct answer by someone with a Low score who g…

This is a feature. The person who answered is specifically indicated with their reputation to help sort among answers. It's like if you have a health-related question and get answers from two people: A trained surgeon and your mate from the pub (Edit: who's obviously not trained or knowledgeable on the topic, jeez). A priori whose answer is the more insightful? If you're not knowledgeable and get a number of anonymou…

It's a feature up to a point, but it also introduces the problem of "compound reputation", where comments by those who have previously been heavily upvoted tend to attract upvotes regardless of merit. In particular, they tend to attract upvotes more than other comments by people who haven't yet established the same level of reputation on that forum, even if the latter comments are actually more helpful in that particular discussion.

I'm not aware of any discussion forum that has yet come up with an effective way to balance those competing effects. I suspect it would need a more complicated moderation/voting system that grades a comment on multiple scales independently, with credibility/correctness being one of them. But then you have a new problem of how to keep the system manageable so that users can still operate it with negligible effort and without the scoring system becoming confusing and more trouble than it's worth.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#66
I find the described phenomena not only apply to SO but also to other internet forums, sometimes even to real life (e.g. work place) situations

There is no “quality control” in downvoting a question to double-digits. The simple truth is that you’re just being a gigantic twat if you keep piling on votes like that.

Not sure if there's an official name for this phenomenon in psychology but whenever it becomes "safe" to bash on someone or someone's opinion you can bet that more people are going to do it, even though the "marginal utiliy" diminishes very quickly.

I think it's a variation of deriving some kind of satisfaction by "pushing yourself up by pushing others down". Personally, when I see people do this I know it's someone I definitely do not want to hang out or be friends with.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#67
So, in "real life", we tend to automatically calibrate our response to somebody saying "I don't like that", depending on how often we've heard the same person say they don't like stuff. If they say it a lot, we don't give it much weight. If they rarely if ever say it, we give it more weight.

Also, if two or three other people have already told someone (in "real life") that they don't like something, we tend to regard somebody else who jumps in to say it, negatively. It seems not too hard to implement on SO that downvoting a question that is already negative, should either be disabled or else weighted less.

Lastly, in "real life" we are more tolerant of piling on, when the same person has been given modest negative feedback before, and keeps doing it. If a person has several questions with negative score, it might make sense to allow more downvotes. For example, with only one question with negative score (e.g. a newbie), it cannot go below -1. If you have two questions with negative score, it can go to -2, etc.

All seems totally doable, but everything turns out to be more complicated than it looks from the outside, so I suppose they have reasons for not doing it.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#68

One thing that always bothered me about SO was that it shows who answered and their score. It should display answers without the user until an answer is accepted. There’s been many cases where a high score user answers, gets a lot of upvotes cos people are like “oh his score is 30k so he must be right” yet the answer is not good or incorrect. And there is a better more correct answer by someone with a Low score who g…

I get the desire for answers to be evaluated on their own merits, but here is an argument for the system staying the same as it currently is: 1. If you're asking for help on a topic, then--by definition-- you are in an information asymmetric situation. You don't know what the right answer is. There's a decent chance that you, as the asker of the question, are not in a position to evaluate the answer on its merits. 2.…

Really Good points. Maybe show reputation to the question asker then. But not to the people voting. I would like to think that when you vote an answer it’s because you agree with the answer and not just the person who answered.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#70

I'm tired with their fragmenting their site into airtight topic specific QA sites, now with many questions one isn't sure where to post it to get max eyeballs. I feel that is something that could have avoided by design. Topics could have been managed through tags, instead of walling them off into separate sites. And the obsolescence, things are moving so fast in JavaScript, Android, even in QT, Clojure etc, many answ…

My biggest pain point with that is needing to register to each one. There's many times I've seen questions I'd love to answer, but then realize I'm no longer on stack overflow and I'm on some sys admin stack exchange that I can't comment on unless I sign up, in which case I just close the tab.
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