i like how SO takes moderating so seriously- you need to keep a certain standard otherwise you turn into quora or reddit.
Tired of Stack Overflow
311–320 of 517 posts
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#312Earlier 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…
I can see the appeal of the idea but I don't think it would be a source of good information in practice. Most people won't say "I don't agree" when they can say a comment is wrong or bad instead. My instinct is that it would just lead to even more bickering about downvoting, the exact opposite of what we want.
Then we (and in extreme cases, you) could at least review it and point out if the reasons where nuts (i.e. if an answer has 5 downvotes for wrong then we can factcheck it and point it out)
I'm mentioning lobste.rs for the second time in this discussion, but lobste.rs has this and it works kind of well IMO, both to think twice when I downvote and also to try to figure out why someone was downvoted.
Then again, lobste.rs is a different community and there is a reason or maybe several why I hang both here and there :-)
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish SO had the courage of its convictions and stopped all locked pages from being seen by search engines. That way unhelpful links wouldn't waste people's time when searching for answers.
The problem is that I often land on a locked SO question, and it's actually incredibly helpful, leading me to wonder why it was locked in the first place.
The stack overflow model works well for a certain type of question. Part of this is the reaction to the resources of 2008 - trying to find things on page 15 of the a thread in the Java community forums.
While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people interact with it.
Still, people asked those questions. The problem is that while they are interesting questions, and everyone wants to answer them - that reduces their value while at the same time putting more work on the community to try to keep it useful. Look at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9033/hidden-features-of-... and consider the challenge of keeping it useful and relevant. If you were to try to add an answer to that post (if it weren't locked and closed), would you read through all 296 answers to make sure you weren't repeating someone else?
Some of these questions were recognized as taking more time of the people trying to maintain the site and focus on the questions that it handles well and were locked. The other option would have been to delete them, but stack overflow tends to have a "we don't delete useful content or break the web" philosophy.
There are other sites that handle the types of questions that Stack Overflow doesn't handle well quite well themselves. Quora does anecdotes well. Slant.co does comparisons. And so on.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#314I 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…
> It's easy to ask bad questions. It's harder to ask well-researched and high-effort questions. This asymmetry inevitably results in the SO site being flooded with bad questions.
A few ideas to make it harder to ask dumb questions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20861911
In short: when accounts are free, activate instantly and can ask questions immediately, don't be surprised that people ask stupid questions.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#315Their reputation system is the worst. I'm by no means a power user, but I've asked and answered some questions on the main overflow site. If I go to any of the subforums I have to start over with a reputation of zero and "re-earn" privileges. No thanks.
Another problem is their aggressive pruning of questions. There have been dozens of times where I've found something relevant via google and found the question was locked for being off-topic or opinion based.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#316https://arp242.net/stackoverflow.html
‘What prompted this post was a basic but valid question getting downvoted to -4:’
“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.”
‘Seems like a pretty valid question to me, so why is it downvoted to -4?’
Sounds very familiar, not that anyone round here would engage in such. I think it's because people see any kind of questioning as a personal attack on them. Or long-term-posters acquire the delusion that it is their personal fiefdom.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite are the interrogations. Because surely the poster doesn't really want to list the standard packages; they must be needing something else and getting distracted by listing standard packages so if we press them hard enough they will spill the beans.. /s
When i was taking freshman CS classes, this was a running joke with my classmates. Wed take to google for helping fixing an error, and 90-95% of C++ 101 questions have at least one answer in the form: "why are you trying to do this? Unless you know what you're doing (which by your question you probably dont), you should by using different methods entirely." Friend having a coding problem? Give 'em the SO special: "Ha…
My favorite anecdote, and the one I trot out every time this comes up, was the time I was asking for help in golang-nuts and on the IRC figuring out a few things about unsafe/uintptr. I was participating in a code competition with performance as a primary metric and learning Go at the same time. Trying to get somebody to answer very straightforward questions about casting was worse than pulling teeth; everyone wanted to work their way into a back-seat architect role on my "real goal".
"Hey, here is this task/problem I'm solving. Is this solution okay or is there a better solution?" is a very different question than "I'm trying to cast this pointer back to this slice of types but I'm seeing this error; what am I missing?".
A somewhat related pet-peeve of mine is when software authors bake assumptions about how somebody "should" be doing something into their projects at a low level causing it to become unnecessarily inflexible and often time inconsistent with what you would expect. I've run into this with a lot of Gradle and gradle plugins.. My first big experience was perhaps trying to convince NTFS3G to allow the user to clear or override the dirty bit for certain resize operations. It can take a lot of convincing to get people to expand their concept of a "valid use case" and create escape hatches and flexibility for those atypical situations.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> the accepted answer means that the solution proposed worked for the asker That's a fundamental tension in the purpose of the site. If the particular problem of the asker is the end goal, then duplicates would not be closed. All other site criteria institute a strong demand for general interest of questions. Part of its success may be deftly balancing those two conflicting interests. On one hand is the role of helpi…
That's a pretty good point.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that I often land on a locked SO question, and it's actually incredibly helpful, leading me to wonder why it was locked in the first place.
The stack overflow model works well for a certain type of question. Part of this is the reaction to the resources of 2008 - trying to find things on page 15 of the a thread in the Java community forums. While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people…
> While there are many possibly helpful questions that could be asked, not all of them are a fit for the format. That was a design choice made on day 1 and is backed deeply into how the software works and the way people interact with it.
The issue I and I guess many of us here is talking about is that it seems the Stack Overflow community - or rather a vocal minority in the community I guess - are downvoting and flagging questions that where ok for the format.
Re: Tired of Stack Overflow
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite are the interrogations. Because surely the poster doesn't really want to list the standard packages; they must be needing something else and getting distracted by listing standard packages so if we press them hard enough they will spill the beans.. /s
I think they should employ a "no stupid questions" policy, like the /r/nostupidquestions subreddit, where the point is to share knowledge without discriminating against anyone. What happens if the same question gets asked 10,000 times? Absolutely nothing. Search engines will filter them for us. 5 more megabytes of text in SO's database. Pointless gatekeeping.
For people answering questions, they’d see the same question 10,000 times, and likely miss the questions that are actually worth answering.
And in a Q&A site, the answerers are far more important than the questioners — if the questions will be answered, the questioners will flock there out of need, regardless of want. Answerers are however not so constrained.
People complain about SO because, I think, it does the correct thing (unlike most Q&A sites) — it tries to optimize usage and rules for those who answer questions. Most people, however, only ask questions, or search for answers.