211–220 of 517 posts
I asked a question a couple times on SO and quickly determined I don't need that kind of toxicity in my life.
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…
>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 reasonable response. Just remember that if you don't give users a built-in and formal downvote button, they will rebel against that UI and invent an informal downvote mechanism to express their disapproval. E.g. a bunch of stackoverflow users would type "-1 downvote" in the c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 reasonable response. Just remember that if you don't give users a built-in and formal downvote button, they will rebel against that UI and invent an informal downvote mechanism to express their disapproval. E.g. a bunch of stackoverflow users would type "-1 downvote" in the c…
> high-karma SO users like John Skeet, etc use the downvote button as a feedback mechanism for bad questions And it's very effective to provide "feedback" in the form of a drive-by downvote, isn't it?
A large portion of the people posting stupid low effort crap on internet forums are impossible to educate. If you spent your time trying you wouldn't do anything productive.
The internet being what it is someone will surely tell them what is wrong with their posts. If they get 17 downvotes and one person tells them why is that not sufficient?
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.
https://github.com/debiki/talkyard (I'm developing it)
There're no downvotes. Instead: Like, and Disagree votes, and it's fine to both Like and Disagree with something at the same time (they work in separate "dimensions"). (You have any thoughts or feedback?)
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...
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 judge…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Doesn't make it good for the site or it's users. It's a very poor excuse. Excuse for what? SO has the UI instruction that you /should/, as a user who agreed to follow the rules, downvote low effort questions which show no research. Agreeing to follow the site rules, then not following the site rules and deciding it should be run the way you want it to be run instead, isn't good for the site either. > Are you a high…
> Excuse for what? SO has the UI instruction that you /should/, as a user who agreed to follow the rules, downvote low effort questions which show no research. Agreeing to follow the site rules, then not following the site rules and deciding it should be run the way you want it to be run instead, isn't good for the site either. How many questions that get downvoted actually haven't done any research? I've seen a ton…
True. And I would say "random unjustified" down-votes. Because if they are not required to explain their down-vote the simplest Occam's Razor explanation for such down-votes is that they just wanted to be a jerk.
This is a system-problem with Stack Overflow. They could easily require that every down-vote is given a verbal justification AND also that down-votes can be down-voted (with a similar verbal justification).
Down-vote without explanation is like a punch in the face in the dark you can not counter-punch, and you know they know you can not, and therefore you know that is one factor on why they are doing it. That is the reason why it feels hostile. Now of course somebody who punches you can SAY they don't mean it as a hostile action, but do you believe them?
Anecdotal: Searching github issues has long since surpassed the usefulness of stackoverflow for me. Possibly the types of questions I need answered has changed, but I think it's more that everything on stackoverflow is out of date or off topic. Or the people who could answer are also the people who are too busy and/or don't care enough to play the karma game.
No, I think it's the former. I use SO to find out how to do equivalent tasks in new languages. For example, I use Python a lot; JavaScript, not so much. So when I do use JavaScript, I'm always searching for things like "js iterate over object" or "js string slicing", etc. SO is great for that. GitHub issues would be completely useless for that. I think you underestimate how many students/novices are reliant on SO for this type of searching.
GitHub issues are more for if you are having a specific problem with a specific library.
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 q…
> Between the "why would you want to do this?" answers This is my pet peeve: WHY ... DO ... YOU ... CARE. Also, duplicates that not only are a completely different question but THIS question is ranked #1 by both DDG and Google.
Because of X/Y problems. People want to make sure the person asking the question is asking the right question (often, they are not). You see newbies a lot asking suspicious questions like "How do I extract the string between the carets in '>I want this stringOf course, you could just answer it at face value. Or... you could ask why they are doing this. They might respond "I'm trying to extract a string from a webpage HTML". In which case you would give a completely different answer.
I've seen suspicious questions before where the asker didn't know what they really wanted was "JSON parsing" and were basically asking how to extract JSON fields using regex (but it wasn't completely obvious because they only pasted a small snippet of the JSON). You are saying I should've just given them what they wanted and not even questioned why they was doing it this way?
Well, I'm sorry. I asked "is there a particular reason you need regex to extract these fields? Because this data looks very similar to JSON and there are better ways of extracting JSON fields"
They replied that if there was a better way than regex, they were open to it, and I introduced the concept of JSON parsing.
I personally think it's kind of conceited to believe that you know exactly what you are doing at all times and that it is an insult for people to question your methods. I only ask questions on SO extremely rarely, but when I do, I'm always open to such "why are you do it this way" questions because it indicates they believe there is a better way I could be doing it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> lack of empathy I think this interpretation is colored by your own bias. Downvotes only show a lack of empathy if downvotes are a social mechanism to comment on the asker, not the question. Particularly given that the SO guidelines explicitly say that downvotes are for the question, not the asker... I'm reminded of every stop sign I've ever stopped at in my life. Some asshole is always waving me ahead of them, even…
> Interpreting downvotes as a lack of empathy is the same sort of wrong reasoning as thinking that letting somebody go in front of you at a stop sign is considerate. It disregards the well documented and publicly posted rules for something you made up. Interpreting downvotes as a considerate act is like stabbing tires on someone's car who just had a light go out. Saying nothing because downvotes don't give any useful…