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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#331

Post by eitland »

Sacho wrote: post #327
eitland wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But for as long as they've been around there have always been people who get worked up over those sites not being quite what they want them to be Problem is those sites used to be better. A number of us where fighting to keep good resources good. It feels we were steamrolled by people who enjoyed playing admins instead of actually asking or answering questions. If you look into S.O. you'll find a abandoned accounts…

The opposite is true - the most common complaint from high-rep users, by far[0][1][2], is that there are too many garbage questions and not enough moderation. [0] - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-rep... [1] - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324072/how-to-lure-... [2] - https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/324243/the-life-of-...

As I tried to point out elsewhere: when everyone on the Internet can make accounts instantly and gain the privilege to post instantly then it isn't a moderation problem but a deeper problem in how the site is run.

My guess is if the bar to posting was increased slightly it would help a lot.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#332

Post by lordleft »

Why does there need to be a downvote system at all? Why not just flag a question if you think it's a poor fit for SO? I don't get why anyone would want to pile onto a poorly expressed question.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#333

Post by unilynx »

1_player wrote: post #98
herodotus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agree. I sometimes upvote a downvoted comment just because it looks like a reasonable comment, and I cannot see any reason why it was downvoted.

It happens, people are a little trigger happy on the Internet, but HN is a forum utopia compared to StackOverflow or Reddit. In my experience, on here people downvote when the answer is either off topic/spam or false with regards to the topic. Sometimes some good comments are greyed out because the profile has been (wrongly) shadowbanned, but the "vouch" feature is great for that. EDIT: is HN so good compared to the…

I think it's mostly the community and its culture. As another example, lwn.net attracts a somewhat similar crowd, has no moderation tools at all (it's extremely rare for a comment to be removed) and has generally interesting comments.

(just never mention init systems)

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#334

Post by Carpetsmoker »

mwfunk wrote: post #249
waisbrot wrote: post #240

Every year I see a post complaining about how unfriendly Stack Overflow is, how their pet question got downvoted so unfairly, and how Stack Overflow is dying. Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying. But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. And when I can't find an answer anywhere and I ask on SO I usually get a good answer quickly.…

Agreed 100%. Wikipedia is similar, in that both SO and Wikipedia have clearly defined goals, and policies based on achieving those goals. But for as long as they've been around there have always been people who get worked up over those sites not being quite what they want them to be. And what they want want them to be is usually a place where anything goes, and/or a place where they can more effectively earn some for…

> And what they want want them to be is usually a place where anything goes, and/or a place where they can more effectively earn some form of imaginary internet points, or at least not have meanies downvote them or reject their contributions.

That is most certainly NOT what I argued. This is really frustrating in all these discussions because every time you try to make any argument that even vaguely smells of "hey, let's be a bit nicer?" the massive "zomg you want to allow all the shitty questions from the idiots who can't sit the right way on the toilet!!11!"-strawman gets pulled out. I've been trying to make this argument for years and it's the same strawman every single time.

As I already said in the article, on the Vi Stack Exchange we're nice and have good quality. I'm sure there are other sites where this is the case, too. It's proof that it's possible.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#335

Post by wrd83 »

I wonder if the social bubble so often blamed for bias could be used for stack overflow.

Imagine every user would only see the relevant questions rather than all of them.

I guess this would remove the need for administration to a certain degree and perhaps then the frustrations and maybe in the long run the hostility.

Of course this is a bit of a unicorn wish. Heading towards that could safe the community a bit.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#336

Post by crispyambulance »

DanBC wrote: post #241
waisbrot wrote: post #240

Every year I see a post complaining about how unfriendly Stack Overflow is, how their pet question got downvoted so unfairly, and how Stack Overflow is dying. Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying. But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. And when I can't find an answer anywhere and I ask on SO I usually get a good answer quickly.…

> . Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying. But even Stack Overflow agrees, which is why they keep having projects to improve the site for new users.

    > ...which is why they keep having projects to improve the site for new users.
I've noticed that. Unfortunately, there's a sizeable contingent that actively rejects any attempt at softening the hard edges for new users (or effectively anyone that dares ask a question, really).

They're so tightly wound-up about what they perceive as "the rules" that they can't bring themselves to have any empathy for anyone who violates the rules, as they inflexibly interpret them. You can sometimes see them take it out on meta with harsh rhetoric.

SO as resource is so huge and influential. I expect its community dynamics to someday be researched at length by social scientists. There's a lot of interesting things going on in there. Maybe we can learn something from it.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#337

Post by Carpetsmoker »

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 think this would make it even worse, because people will leave short abrasive/snappy comments, rather than actually helpful ones.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#338

Post by AmericanChopper »

benologist wrote: post #279
Rapzid wrote: post #270

Earlier 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.

Such a site already exists, it’s called Yahoo Answers. You can judge for yourself the quality of content it attracts.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#339

Post by jasode »

benologist wrote: post #279
Rapzid wrote: post #270

Earlier 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.

>What happens if the same question gets asked 10,000 times? Absolutely nothing.

This is incorrect and a misunderstanding (and underestimation) of the unpaid volunteer answerers who scan the queue of questions to look for interesting things to answer. The valuable high-rep SO users do not like wading through bad and duplicate questions. It's a waste of their time.[1][2]

>Search engines will filter them for us.

The volunteer answerers don't interface with the list of new SO questions queue via de-duped Google search results.

An analogy with this site (HN) is applicable: Yes Google searches will return some old archived HN threads and filter out some dupes but we (the HN participants) don't look for new & interesting HN threads to add our comments via Google. Instead, we interact directly on this website and rely on moderators (dang/sctb) to mark posts as [dupe] and filter them out.

(When I started typing this comment, the sibling comment by setr was grayed out. That downvote was unwarranted because he was correct about unpaid volunteer answerers being more valuable to a Q&A site than questioners. I made a previous comment explaining this same concept: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20318621)

[1] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-preven...

[2] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-rep...

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#340

Post by Shorel »

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…

From a user perspective, I agree with you.

But I think from a performance perspective it is impossible not to want to have several different databases each one with better performance than a single big one.

And they have the traffic to have to worry about such things.

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