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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#161

Post by ilaksh »

ubercow13 wrote: post #35

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.

I don't know if it's a new phenomenon. There has always been a big difference between popularity and merit. That's what voting is, a popularity contest. It's not uncommon for a good idea to be downvoted or ignored just because its coming from a different perspective.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#162

Post by dragonwriter »

mceachen wrote: post #158
dang wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People wouldn't follow such criteria anyway.

What if downvotes led to a popdown, with a series of radio buttons: ( ) I don't agree with this comment ( ) This comment is factually incorrect ( ) This comment is offtopic ( ) This comment is rude or inappropriate (Add and replace verbiage to taste, of course) Then people's downvotes would be imbued with some semblance of nuance. And get rid of the score, and make downvote categories have hidden negative values (so…

> Then people's downvotes would be imbued with some semblance of nuance.

Downvotes or not for nuance or dialog, that's what comments are for.

Downvotes are solely to demote content that is viewed, in the subjective opinion of the voter, as not contributing to productive discussion. If it deserves a nuanced response then it doesn't deserve a downvote.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#163

Post by chucksmash »

mholt wrote: post #72
vasili111 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's ironic

Not as ironic as you'd think[1].

[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/47635

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#164

Post by [deleted] »

jxfreeman wrote: post #159
the_duke wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on no downvotes for questions. For answers, I would also do away with the downvote button, and offer multiple options instead, like: "does not answer the question", "misleading information", "off topic", "outdated", "i don't like the solution", ... . That would still give SO the capability to sort answers based on some quality ranking algorithm and hopefully reduce the unwarranted downvoting. PS, this line fro…

Or downvote until the score is zero. I.e. don’t allow negative scores. Then take reputation away from people who actively attempt to downvote beyond zero. In addition, you use reputation to downvote.

[deleted]

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#165

Post by mumblemumble »

riazrizvi wrote: post #150

On Stackoverflow it costs you to downvote. Ask an ill-formed question with more than one easy to find good response, then you get downvoted at those users’ own expense. > “Is there a way to list all standard Go packages? I have a list of packages and I want to figure out if this is a standard package” ‘A list of packages ... if this is a standard package’, is ambiguous. What ‘this’? The list? Are you asking if there…

Downvoting costs newcomers. For old timers, it's basically free.

I've been on SO more-or-less since the beginning. I rarely log in, probably haven't in over a year, but I know that, every time I do, my karma's taken another big jump. I was lucky enough to get in early on and get in a few good questions and answers on some thorny technical issues, and now I just keep on getting karma for free because some fixed percentage of people who run into these problems will get sent to my SO answer on Google, and some fixed percentage of those will upvote. Sometimes I even get double points when I answered my own question.

So, insofar as I'm getting my karma for free, I don't value it much, and downvoting costs me basically nothing. I probably wouldn't start noticing the price unless the cost of a single downvote were at least 1% of my current karma.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#166

Post by nv-vn »

I'm glad to see that HN as a whole sees flaws in SO. I've avoided using SO as much as possible for years now and it seems like other people are coming to the same conclusions as I did. Between the "why would you want to do this?" answers and the downvoting beginner's questions and the "THIS IS A DUPLICATE" answers when the "duplicate" question is totally different and the "deleted as off-topic" on every interesting question, I find it really painful to support the site at all. The site has so much potential, but I find it less and less useful these days to the point where I can't justify ever checking the site out.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#167

Post by traderjane »

phonebanshee wrote: post #43
philliphaydon wrote: post #4

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.

Marked-as-answered shows their original vision of the site (with a homogeneous work queue), and that they didn't want "What are the best ways to organize state in your app?" But I think the lack of sites providing for more open-ended questions means people wanted Stack Overflow to do both.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#168

Post by jitbit »

I've been a SO moderator for years, but I'm 100% with the OP :(

And it's even more frustrating when people downvote answers.

Come on, someone made an effort, came up with a solution and tried to help out. This deserves some recognition even if the solution is not 100% right. Definitely not dowvoting.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#169

Post by rbonvall »

jxfreeman wrote: post #159
the_duke wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on no downvotes for questions. For answers, I would also do away with the downvote button, and offer multiple options instead, like: "does not answer the question", "misleading information", "off topic", "outdated", "i don't like the solution", ... . That would still give SO the capability to sort answers based on some quality ranking algorithm and hopefully reduce the unwarranted downvoting. PS, this line fro…

Or downvote until the score is zero. I.e. don’t allow negative scores. Then take reputation away from people who actively attempt to downvote beyond zero. In addition, you use reputation to downvote.

Downvoting already has a small reputation cost: https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/vote-down

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#170

Post by [deleted] »

jxfreeman wrote: post #159
the_duke wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on no downvotes for questions. For answers, I would also do away with the downvote button, and offer multiple options instead, like: "does not answer the question", "misleading information", "off topic", "outdated", "i don't like the solution", ... . That would still give SO the capability to sort answers based on some quality ranking algorithm and hopefully reduce the unwarranted downvoting. PS, this line fro…

Or downvote until the score is zero. I.e. don’t allow negative scores. Then take reputation away from people who actively attempt to downvote beyond zero. In addition, you use reputation to downvote.

[deleted]
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