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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…
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.
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.
For instance "how do you concat strings" for various languages is highly upvoted. Senior advice about general code structure and maintainability doesn't really have a title.
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…
On StackOverflow, a decent amount of site reputation is required before one can down-vote.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1 rep doesn't matter at all for high-rank people, the rep loss should be based on total rep.
It should be something like 1% of your reputation. That’s significant enough to make even high-rank users have to think.
Edit: wow I’m tired. I read this whole thread thinking of HN instead of SO. Time to go home and rest..
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…
Here is my proposal for removing downvotes but people do not like it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252338/downvote-sys...
I was a heavy SO user before some years however I have stopped posting questions nowadays (mainly because of the reasons presented in the article) and I find answering too time consuming. What I've found really helpful when I need to learn a new language / paradigm is to use IRC (freenode). I more or less learned Kotlin and Elixir just by reading some online articles and asking things on the corresponding IRC channel…
The underlying issue I see here, is the geek desire to answer a question once and for all, and have beginners just fuck off and read the damn faq and stop asking. (Everybody is a beginner in a task they don't know how to do, for all it matters, but experienced people will not stay that way as long as inexperienced people).
Whereas beginners want to chat, have someone help/mentor/guide through which bits are relevant, current, idiomatic, easy, hard, tailored to their problem. Beginners don't know what to read, and can't spot it or make sense of it when they see it. (Again, everyone is a beginner, for if the seasoned expert knew what to read to answer their question, they'd be off reading it instead of posting a question on StackOverflow).
People on realtime chat services are the kind of people who don't mind (or people in a state of mind where they don't mind) answering the same kinds of questions, and talking the same things, over and over and over.
StackOverflow mixes people who want "one answer forever" nitpicking question and answers as if they were encyclopaedia editors to make them 'perfect' to be a forever-answer, with people who want "realtime help" asking, who don't care about exactly the right wording and terms and formatting and stuff. NB. that the people who would be asking, but are on the "one and done" side of things, are the people off studying the FAQ and documentation and code, and buying books and courses where they expect to find answers already existing, so they don't so often show up on the questions side of SO.
I feel like HN is turning a bit in this direction too. I feel like I’m seeing more downvoted comments, and they are more often than not perfectly good comments, and no one replies explaining why they don’t like the comment. Of course you can’t talk about it because it’s against the rules.
agree. I sometimes upvote a downvoted comment just because it looks like a reasonable comment, and I cannot see any reason why it was downvoted.
In my experience, on here people downvote when the answer is either off topic/spam or false with regards to the topic. Sometimes some good comments are greyed out because the profile has been (wrongly) shadowbanned, but the "vouch" feature is great for that.
EDIT: is HN so good compared to the rest because of its moderation tools/upvote system, or because it attracts only a specific niche of people? Would a Reddit/SO with HN features work better than the current sites?
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…
Marked as answered is a fundamentally horrible idea and that feature should be removed. The problem is that the person asking the question isn't capable of determining a correct answer. Far, far to often they pick something that appears to solve their problem but actually is a terrible idea.
I know because I write those kinds of answers.
I wish they would unpin those answers from the top - leave the green checkmark, just let me sort by whatever has the most votes recently - say in the past year. Then we'd get more up-to-date answers more attention, and more readers would find them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…