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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#351

Post by [deleted] »

setr wrote: post #320
benologist wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cor…

[deleted]

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#352

Post by lmm »

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.

dang's niceness rules make it too hard to explain what's wrong with a comment. A few years ago, when someone was wrong I would've explained why and how. But that's difficult enough to do without having to also make the correction sound kind. Nowadays, if I make a correction in reply, I'll get downvoted myself. So I silently downvote and move on instead.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#353

Post by bachmeier »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #337
bachmeier wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then they're breaking the code of conduct, and should have their accounts suspended. That's a lot better than letting them keep their reasoning silent.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#354

Post by scarface74 »

corobo wrote: post #287
codexon wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is certainly one of my pet peeves about that site. It is also a behavior frequently seen on IRC as well. I got a good amount of points by answering the actual questions. Since hitting moderator status based on the number of points many years ago I've stopped using it though. It gets tiring fighting against people like this who often have >50-100k points. Occasionally I'll land on the website again after googling…

Ever since someone posted an article on “The XY Problem” nerds on all mediums have been assuming it’s always an XY problem

I don’t answer questions on SO, but I occasionally answer questions on r/aws. Half the time after further digging, it is an XYProblem.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#355

Post by bachmeier »

jasode wrote: post #251
bachmeier wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

>And it's very effective to provide "feedback" in the form of a drive-by downvote, isn't it? I understand your confusion and frustration but folks like Jon Skeet are also providing feedback to their fellow answerers who don't want to see bad questions . For some people, this signaling mechanism to reduce wasted effort for peers is even higher priority than feedback to the person asking the question.

Nobody's forced to read SO questions. Optimizing the site to maximize the probability that users feel stupid is not IMO the best choice. It doesn't take much time to add a comment. You could even let the downvoter select a reason from a menu.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#356

Post by Godel_unicode »

Rapzid wrote: post #317
kryogen1c wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ...unnecessarily inflexible...

Opinionated frameworks are much, much easier to write. Abstraction and generalization are hard, and a lot to ask of people who are likely creating something for free. The fact that a framework doesn't make the choices you would have made doesn't make it wrong, or unnecessarily inflexible. They're necessarily inflexible to keep the burden on maintainers and new contributors as low as possible. Just because one person has an edge case isn't a good reason to write a bunch of new code.

See also, yagni.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#358

Post by wruza »

bewuethr wrote: post #183
rbonvall wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not on questions, though.

(to this subthread)

Let’s remember that score is not money, and many people actually do not care if reputation is reduced by automated means (as opposed to someone’s view on their acting). Score is just a raw signal to a participant on whether they did good or not. It never was a “win all the score non-decreasingly” game. If you spend 30% of your 10k on downvotes, it is still credible 7k. And if you gain 10k and see 3k problems, then these are community problems indeed.

My guess is that downvoting costs score only to weed out low-score inexperienced accounts from emotional voting or manipulation. No effort no score. No score no downvotes. –> no effortless misbehavior. That’s it.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#359

Post by Const-me »

jasode wrote: post #339
benologist wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vol…

> The valuable high-rep SO users do not like wading through bad and duplicate questions.

I disagree.

I’m relatively high-rep. I don’t have any issues with stupid or duplicate questions, they don’t waste my time. Nobody forces me to answer every question asked on SO.

You know what is a waste of my time? When I wrote a good answer to a question which I think is fine, which then goes to oblivion because some other people, who often have absolutely no clue what’s asked, decide the question is not good enough.

Examples: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56843086 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57064879 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57323981

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#360

Post by arkh »

> As if you need to be a dick to maintain “quality”.

Maybe you can't. Being nice does not scale: being nice mean you take more time to answer and try to make people not offended. With an internationnal audience, good luck not finding something which won't offend someone (hint: not everyone shares the USA values).

You can be nice in the PR and issue and wiki of your small projects with limited number of people around. If you want quality on a site serving millions of people? You'll have to cut to the chase. And some people (the author being one) will take it as being a dick. Some other people would take offense to the use of the expression "being a dick" for something negative.

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