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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#111

Post by rgoulter »

lovelearning wrote: post #53

I avoid SO too. However, I didn't understand this: [...] There is no pass by reference, so I’m not sure where you got that. You’re simply passing the value, which is a copy and not going to change the original. ...is parading that they’re stupid and wrong, while beating your chest about how much smarter you are. [...] It sounds neutrally worded to me. Can somebody here point out what part of it is considered hostile…

Sometimes 'explaining what you said was wrong' is interpreted as showing you're a smarter/better person, rather than information sharing. I liked this blog post about it. https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-me/

Yes, that comment could just be trying to be helpful / clarifying.

I think it's not much of a stretch to say the upvotes incentivise the "popularity seeking" behaviour over "information sharing" behaviour.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#112

Post by dlandis »

It's kind of baffling to me that SO hasn't made further significant attempts at improving the site's culture after identifying and documenting the problems over a year ago in their blog posts. I agree that nothing much has changed on the site since then.

The pattern I see nowadays is that someone asks a reasonable (albeit basic) question and, even if it's not downvoted, people start immediately attempting to undermine it in the comments. Many people's goal seems not to be to answer the question (whatever the question may be) but to explain why the question is invalid and shouldn't have been asked in the first place. In my experience the top reputation users are not the problem either -- they are actually more likely to answer the question as asked and not simply try to undermine the questioners.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#113

Post by mLuby »

vasili111 wrote: post #45
el_cujo wrote: 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…

Here is my proposal for removing downvotes but people do not like it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252338/downvote-sys...

I found the first answer insightful: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/252340/1862046

Roughly, it seems downvotes are used by people to indicate not enough effort has gone into the question (easily researched, duplicate question, confusing/poor english, etc).

So either all unflagged questions is valid and should be nurtured into clear, well-written queries or pointed to existing questions, or questions are to be judged* "good-faith" or "lazy" by users and the latter receive downvotes.

*This judgement is fixed in time; the question is not necessarily re-judged if improvements are made.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#114

Post by einpoklum »

dlandis wrote: post #112

It's kind of baffling to me that SO hasn't made further significant attempts at improving the site's culture after identifying and documenting the problems over a year ago in their blog posts. I agree that nothing much has changed on the site since then. The pattern I see nowadays is that someone asks a reasonable (albeit basic) question and, even if it's not downvoted, people start immediately attempting to undermin…

Over a year ago? It's been this way for at least 5 years and probably more. And it was a well-known fact.

However! Remember that the primary goal of SO is not to answer your individual question, but to curate a collection of publicly-useful Q&A. That's why it's reasonable to "undermine" many newbie question. The trick is to do it in a way that's positive, friendly, and condusive to the asker getting an answer to what they want to know.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#115

Post by Avamander »

jodrellblank wrote: post #78
Avamander wrote: post #3

> Can people truly not comprehend how downvoting a post to -20 (or more) is perceived by the author of that post? No, Stack Overflow high-rank users certainly do not. (A current community moderator literally said "Voting is not a friendly or unfriendly activity.") I've too suggested that the UI should be changed to be less abrasive and that high-rank people should be more accountable for their actions and been downvo…

The SO guidelines are that voting is about the question, not about the author. Everyone who has a rant about SO shows that is not universally agreed on, to say the least. But for you to say "people should be kinder and more empathic", for downvoting within the rules of the site, while you go on a rant calling people unwelcoming snarky abrasive asses, is amusingly hatey.

> for downvoting within the rules of the site

Doesn't make it good for the site or it's users. It's a very poor excuse.

> rant calling people unwelcoming snarky abrasive asses, is amusingly hatey.

Are you a high-rank SO user? Also, what I stated is not a "rant" it's an empirical observation.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#116

Post by baud147258 »

prepend wrote: post #59
jnovek wrote: 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.

Same here, I’ve been a reader for 10 years or however long, but their rules were too difficult for me to follow in order to vote. I had to visit every day and do menial, non-useful things just to be able to vote or answer. This didn’t work for me because SO wasn’t something I typically visited every day. So I just couldn’t get into the habit of being enough of a user to browse and vote so it was a vicious cycle of ap…

> their rules were too difficult for me to follow in order to vote. I had to visit every day and do menial, non-useful things just to be able to vote or answer

Has it changed a few years ago? When I started 3 years ago, I could answer right from the start and I got the ability to vote quickly enough, after a pair of vote on an answer, without having to do menial tasks every day. Reputation can also be gained with edits, is that what you are talking about?

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#117

Post by golergka »

snazz wrote: post #79
Avamander wrote: post #33

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.

As for now at least, all operations on reputation are addition-based and therefore commutative: their order doesn't matter, and undoing an operation returns your reputation to the previous state.

With this 1% rule, however, it breaks down. For example, if you downvote someone when you have 1000 reputation points, and then undo the downvote and downvote him again when you have 10,000, it means that you'll lose 9 points for nothing.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#118

Post by baud147258 »

Avamander wrote: post #41
slig wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience recently as well, specially with fast-moving JS frameworks and libraries.

Yep, the time dimension is seriously overlooked by people flagging questions closed. IMO the duplicate close reason shouldn't accept questions older than a year.

It depends on the tag, for some languages/framework that aren't moving that fast, you'd find a lot of older answer that are still valid

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#119

Post by RickJWagner »

Thank God for Stack Overflow.

Whenever I Google up some difficult question (which is often), SO has a good answer almost right away. Ah, the kindness of strangers!

As for the downvoting, IMHO Hacker News suffers from this. It seem good comments are regularly downvoted if they don't adhere to other's social views. I think we should operate at a level higher than that.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#120

Post by mplanchard »

falsedan wrote: post #56

I remember posting an answer to a CGI question with some grody, idiomatic solution, and getting scolded/downvoted by a high-rep dev (who montiored the subject tags) who responded with... a solution that didin't work! When the original asker responded, they directed them to file a bug. That contempt and disregard for the actual day-to-day tediousness of writing commercial code is an attitude I can do without. Also: ht…

Wow! That screenshot is unbelievable. I’ve never seen his book before, but I went and looked it up so that I can be sure to never buy it and to recommend against it, due to the author, if it comes up in conversation.
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