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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#121

Post by banana_giraffe »

unlinkr wrote: post #106

Stack Overflow have some infamous example of "snarky" answers getting highly upvoted - despite being outright wrong. I wrote a bit about such a case here: https://www.cargocultcode.com/solving-the-zalgo-regex/ In short, the question here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... is complete legitimately and answerable, but nevertheless have dozens of answers ridiculing the question for trying t…

The Zalgo response drives me slightly crazy.

Most of the time I've actually seen people asking about regex's and HTML are asking for a very small subset of both, they generally just want to parse a bunch of pages generated by a small number of tools, and yet they get told it's impossible to use Regex to do it.

The second answer is spot on, actually answers the question, yet the first one is the one that gets treated as gospel.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#122

Post by maest »

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.

This also makes sense as high-rank users usually have a constant stream of rep coming from their answers/questions.

So, not only do high-rank users have lots of rep, they also gain rep at an accelerated pace (on average).

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#123

Post by GnarfGnarf »

Here's a suggestion:

Whenever you encounter a question that has been unfairly downvoted, you, in turn, should have an option to "downvote the downvoters" .

By clicking on a button, Stack Overflow will flag all the downvoters as "persona non grata" to yourself. When you view other questions, these people's downvotes will be subtracted or eliminated from your view of the question.

Complicated? Yes, but SO's long-term viability may be at stake.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#124

Post by einpoklum »

lordnacho wrote: post #108

At this stage SO is a reference work. The kind of things it's useful for are things like "what's the syntax for [algo] in [language]". There's specific answers people are looking for, and they stay that way. It also means everything(tm) is there. It's been ages since I've needed to ask anything at all there. Someone has had the problem before, and gotten the answer. Individual reputation might not matter much in this…

> At this stage SO is a reference work.

That's absolutely not the case:

* Not for the most upvoted questions. * Not for which questions get upvoted nowadays. * Not for what influential/highly-active users expect.

> Individual reputation might not matter much in this context.

It shouldn't matter all that much anyway. People tend to assign to much merit to these gamifications.

> My own account is just as odd. The most upvoted answer by far is a one-liner that says "untick this box".

Yes, that's one of the anomalies. The most interesting and imaginative questions, and their answers, rarely get upvoted much because people don't look for them or find them.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#125

Post by Avamander »

baud147258 wrote: post #118
Avamander wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Too hard to determine which questions expire or not. Most do.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#126

Post by wolrah »

baud147258 wrote: post #88
phonebanshee wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, the accepted answer means that the solution proposed worked for the asker, then there are the votes and comments to evaluate whether or not this is a good answer.

That's the theory, but it's amazing how often I click on a search result leading to SO and find an accepted answer that's either wrong or doesn't even answer the question.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#127

Post by dehrmann »

billfruit wrote: post #15

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…

I've been programming for 20-ish years, working for 13, and I google first, so when I have questions, they tend to be at boundaries of things where they don't fit neatly into one of their sites or near-duplicate questions with a subtle, but meaningful difference (that still gets tagged as a duplicate).

Then I see someone asking a homework question who clearly has tried anything themselves, or a question that should have been googled first.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#128

Post by simias »

Sometimes I think that downvoting, including on websites like Hacker News, is a bad idea. It's easy to see the symmetry with upvotes and think that if you have one, you should probably have the other but psychologically speaking it's a very different type of interaction.

In particular, and even on HN, the good old mantra "don't downvote if you disagree, downvote if the comment doesn't contribute to the discussion" is, from personal experience, not really followed by a significant chunk of the userbase. I try not to care about karma but it's always frustrating when you spend a few minutes of your time carefully composing a comment only to see it grayed out because people didn't like it. It's really toxic too because you don't feel welcome to express your point of view, even if it's in a completely respectful manner. When unchecked this tendency ends up with what you see on most of Reddit: dumb, content-free comments that go with the popular opinion raise to the top while insightful but controversial positions are buried under downvotes. Then you end up with echo chambers.

I wonder how different HN wouldn't be if there were no downvotes at all and only the "flag" button to tag non-constructive comments. Basically the way it works for submissions.

Personally I very rarely downvote comments on HN, if I find a comment that I don't find very insightful but is still technically contributing to the discussion I prefer to find a sibling comment that I deem more interesting and upvote that instead. I turn a negative interaction into a positive one. Instead of focusing on pushing people down you help those you find more interesting.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#129

Post by kwhitefoot »

commandersaki wrote: post #46

Minus blog post I came to a similar conclusion; asking on StackOverflow is a waste of time. I asked a question about how to do X - which turned out wasn't possible or I misunderstood how the system worked, and rather get an answer, I was told to reformulate the question or have it closed. Then eventually I was told in the comments of the question that this question doesn't make much sense. It was still a valid questi…

I don't ask many questions, well almost never any more, partly because very often when I search I find almost exactly the question I want answered only to find closed as off topic yet it has a half a dozen well reasoned answers and three dozen well reasoned comments.

I think SO and Wikipedia have both suffered the same fate: they started with everyone on the same footing but now there is a core of 'professional' or at least habitual editors who enforce their own narrow view of what is right. I gave up editing Wikibooks after one too many deletes of perfectly valid graphics for nit picking reasons.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#130

Post by dehrmann »

unlinkr wrote: post #106

Stack Overflow have some infamous example of "snarky" answers getting highly upvoted - despite being outright wrong. I wrote a bit about such a case here: https://www.cargocultcode.com/solving-the-zalgo-regex/ In short, the question here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... is complete legitimately and answerable, but nevertheless have dozens of answers ridiculing the question for trying t…

I keep trying to come up with one of these, usually in the form of an absurdly correct answer.
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