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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#221

Post by chiefalchemist »

dragonwriter wrote: post #162
mceachen wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So the person asking the question is supposed to understand what each individual was thinking based on a single click? I don't see how this is possible.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#222

Post by Avamander »

will4274 wrote: post #220
Avamander wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The signals aren't for the person who asked the question. Downvoting signals to other stack overflow users that this question probably doesn't contain the information they are looking for. When done correctly, this is considerate because it reduces the amount of time users spend searching for an answer. The goal of SO isn't to answer your question, it's to build up a massive high quality FAQ, and you should interpret…

> When done correctly, this is considerate because it reduces the amount of time users spend searching for an answer.

But it isn't done correctly. It's done rather arbitrarily, because who could have predicted that accurate rating of questions is hard and that in the end what matters is having a quality knowledge base on various subjects not only the ones some specific people think are useful.

I'd also not ignore that pretty much noone except the asker care about questions' votes when primary traffic to questions is from search engines.

Oh, and I almost forgot, your claims of how downvotes are not meant as a signal for the asker, then why are they displayed the votes? Why should they lose rep if it's not meant as a signal to them?

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#223

Post by testplzignore »

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.

I think they should support both the "accepted" and "best" answer use cases. Have separate indicators in the UI for them.

In the common case, the accepted and best answers will probably be the same, so keep the classic green checkmark there.

When the accepted and best answers don't match, have two checkmarks (or whatever) - one that explicitly says "user XXX accepted this answer" and the other that says "this is the best answer".

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#224

Post by jasode »

bachmeier wrote: post #203
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…

Make downvotes require a comment. Let other users vote on the reasoning. If it's a BS reason like "Duplicate! Duplicate!" that's wrong, let others erase that vandalism from the site. One of the stupidest things on the internet is when someone comments that it's a duplicate question and then posts something that makes it obvious they read neither the question nor the supposed duplicate. Most downvotes are never explai…

>Make downvotes require a comment.

I cited some meta SE threads about that idea in my other comment but I forgot to add this thread as well:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/why-isnt-pro...

Forcing comments on downvotes looks reasonable but it doesn't work at the high-traffic scale of StackOverflow.

[To downvoters, (1) are there any other discussion websites with comparable high traffic to StackOverflow that have forced-downvote-explanations so we can see if they work ... and (2) are you aware of the degraded-signal-noise-ratio reason in 2011 that Jeff Atwood made downvotes easier (free) instead of harder?]

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#225

Post by michaelmrose »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #191
jasode wrote: post #140

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…

It would be much better if users added their down-votes in the comments because then they would feel some need to explain why they down-vote something. In fact I think IT SHOULD BE REQUIRED to give a reason for your down-vote (if down-votes are allowed in general) An SO down-vote is not simply an "opinion", it affects your karma-score, perhaps even your chances of getting hired.

Why do you think that their obligation derives from how you imagine their downvote will effect your life instead of the rules of the site?

Neither stack overflow nor your fellow users are obliged to you beyond the standards set by the site and general human decency.

It takes 1 second to downvote a low value comment. It might take 5-20 minutes of conversing with a stranger who is likely to respond rudely to criticism. Less voting means less curation means wading through more lower quality materials. I don't want to use worse websites so you can have more imaginary internet points.

Don't like it use a different website.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#226

Post by will4274 »

Avamander wrote: post #222
will4274 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The signals aren't for the person who asked the question. Downvoting signals to other stack overflow users that this question probably doesn't contain the information they are looking for. When done correctly, this is considerate because it reduces the amount of time users spend searching for an answer. The goal of SO isn't to answer your question, it's to build up a massive high quality FAQ, and you should interpret…

> When done correctly, this is considerate because it reduces the amount of time users spend searching for an answer. But it isn't done correctly. It's done rather arbitrarily, because who could have predicted that accurate rating of questions is hard and that in the end what matters is having a quality knowledge base on various subjects not only the ones some specific people think are useful. I'd also not ignore tha…

Do you believe that downvoters have no empathy or that they have empathy, they are just bad at downvoting well because the problem is hard? Your comments seem to contradict on this point.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#227

Post by Ensorceled »

umvi wrote: post #219
Ensorceled wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> This is my pet peeve: WHY ... DO ... YOU ... CARE. 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 string Of course, you could just answer it at face value. Or... you could ask why they are doing this. They might…

But the other half of the time the question descends into chaos. I'm there because the question is the same as I asked, 9/10 the digression is not useful.

Also, if you suspect that the user is doing something wrong or there is a better approach, a better way to do this is to ask "are you parsing JSON? because Python has a builtin JSON library" instead of "Why would you even want to do this?".

I guess what I really want is for people to update the question if it no longer applies because a different question was answered and accepted.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#228

Post by Aperocky »

bachmeier wrote: post #203
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…

Make downvotes require a comment. Let other users vote on the reasoning. If it's a BS reason like "Duplicate! Duplicate!" that's wrong, let others erase that vandalism from the site. One of the stupidest things on the internet is when someone comments that it's a duplicate question and then posts something that makes it obvious they read neither the question nor the supposed duplicate. Most downvotes are never explai…

I agree that we should make downvotes only ok with a comment.

But then again there's a fine line that both side seem to constantly walk over. 30% of question consists of "how to do this on my homework, please submit a full solution", while the other 30% that are legitimate question being over zealously patrolled.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#229

Post by waisbrot »

aflag wrote: post #216
mLuby wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's the problem with being lazy? If you are even lazier, just don't answer. If it's a duplicate, just link it to the delicate question. Having useless questions shouldn't be a problem while searching for answers.

The problem is that just looking through the queue of unanswered questions takes effort.

If I have a list of good, honestly-asked questions, I'm willing to look for a few that I know how to answer and answer them. If I have a vast pile of "plz do this homework for me [transcribed question with errors or link to a private PDF]" then I just won't use Stack Overflow.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#230

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

I think you can argue the psychology and the merits of various ranking systems all day every day. I don’t think there is one correct answer and might work one moment on one population might not work for another population for even the same population at a later date.

The OP might just be getting burned out on stack overflow -maybe time to take a break, scale back, or just do something new.

I think stack overflow is a great resource and has a lot of life left in it. Long ago when I first started out there was no resource like Google, Stack Overflow, Experts Exchange, or Wikis. When I had a question I usually had to find a more knowledgeable peer, explain in excruciating detail exactly what I was doing, and then only if they agreed with me one hundred percent would they answer my question. If I deviated from the way they would do something then my question would go unanswered. Real PITA. But it was a great motivator to develop deep knowledge so that I wasn’t limited to replicating what my peers had done.

Today when I have questions it’s all too easy to get an answer without all of the overhead I mentioned. Though I’ve noticed my younger peers often lack deep knowledge and instead have various aptitudes for finding relevant information and deriving a solution from similiar circumstances.

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