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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#361

Post by caf »

mumblemumble wrote: post #40

I think that the fundamental problem with the downvote, pretty much anywhere that has it, is that it's physically structured as being the inverse of an upvote, and then there are some community guidelines saying, "This isn't actually the inverse, it has some additional semantics associated with it." In SO's specific case, the problem it's ostensibly trying to solve is indicating that the question, as asked, needs wor…

Yeah - I mean, there is even a mechanism for giving feedback on how the question can be improved: the comments.

In my view, if you think a question needs work your first option should be to leave a comment, and your second should be to edit it yourself to improve it. If there isn't time in your busy schedule of bludging at work for either of those then maybe consider just ignoring it?

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#362

Post by dghughes »

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.…

There have been times when I've commented on someone's question but more to interact.

I like collaboration I find I learn better asking people questions.

That gets shut down immediately on Stack Exchange sites. Often by an unprofessional, terse, personal reply by a mod "This isn't your own IRC channel" or something to that effect.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#363

Post by cookie_monsta »

teh_klev wrote: post #248
bsder wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the author hit the Indian downvote brigades as well. The big issue I currently have with the Stack Overflow is that it seems like it has become some form of "scoring metric" for Indian programmers--presumably the consulting companies like Wipro. As such, if you don't immediately give a positive vote/response to even garbage answers, you get a downvote brigade burying the question. I suspect disallowing Indi…

Tarring a whole country with the same brush is bordering on racist.

No, I think that's pretty much the definition of racist.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#364

Post by gerbilly »

Because SO rewards you for answering questions, there is an incentive to convince the person to change the question to something that is easier to answer.

This is why you see posters being badgered to change or recast their question so much.

Sure many questions are ill posed, but there is a lot of pedantic meta discussion¹ on the site centred on the precise form of the question.

1: The word pettifogging comes to mind.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#365

Post by Carpetsmoker »

bachmeier wrote: post #353
Carpetsmoker wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not so simple, you can post snappy/disrespectful comments that skim the line and create an unfriendly atmosphere for a very long time.

It's a hard problem, because it's about patterns. Everyone has a bad day and posts a badly worded comment every once in a while; I certainly have. That's okay, it's human nature. The problems start when a small group of people do it all the time, and turns out it's rather hard to actually detect those kind of patterns.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#366

Post by Const-me »

shagie wrote: post #343
eitland wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 flag…

For example?

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

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#367

Post by JaTochNietDan »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #231

Downvotes are useful for quality control, but there is no real difference between -3 and -4. This and many others comprise examples of precisely how downvotes aren't useful for much of anything. “How do I do X?”. Often, X is quite a simple thing, like “append to a list”, or “merge two dictionaries”. I find that the longer I program with all sorts of different languages, the more I struggle remembering all that sort o…

You sound like one of the most toxic people on the face of the planet. I just thought someone should tell you that in-case you're unaware of how horrific you are.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#368

Post by arkh »

codexon wrote: post #286
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

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…

Maybe after working some time and helping juniors people tend to develop this reflex: if you're trying to do something really crazy with your tool you may have fucked up 2 or 3 steps before that. It's like if someone asks how to use their screwdriver to nail something: you'll ask some questions back.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#369

Post by tahoemph999 »

arkh wrote: post #360

> 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.…

You have this backwards. Being mean doesn't scale. A small number of mean people can poison a large part of the community. That drives off future contributors at a high rate. Being reasonable does scale. When somebody isn't following reasonable guidelines it takes one person to point them at the FAQ, help them understand what they did wrong and why it could be done better next time, etc. One response[1] to point back in the right direction. Low investment for a good outcome. If more people decide to add like reasoning for why the question/comment/answer was off then more energy was spent to convince the original person that this is a hostile forum to use. Now you end up with more energy being spent to achieve a lesser effect. That is a lower ROI.

There is a difference between being concise (cut to the chase) and being rude. And yea, language differences can blur that line. But it is a spectrum. Just 'cuz not everybody will think you are being NICE doesn't mean it is fine to be a jerk.

[1] Due to the distributed nature of these platforms you can end up with a small multiple of simultaneous responses. Fine, most people get this is a possibility. One good way some people deal with this is to not knee jerk response to everything. Sadly that has a the effect of having the jerks do more of the responding.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#370

Post by benologist »

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…

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/ has over a million subscribers and nobody gets upset if a neurosurgeon explains why washing your hands is important.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ has over a million subscribers and they get repetitive questions all the time without making anybody feel bad about it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/ has almost a million subscribers and have no problem answering the same question again and again.

https://old.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/ has almost 14 million users and a mandate to respect each other.

It would be pretty weird if a small group really "need" the "right" to suppress a larger group of their co-users just because the questions are programming-related. It makes sense they'd defend such a right vigorously to keep it though.

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