471–480 of 517 posts
But the idea is to have more good people than evil trolls, and that's how it works, questions that are good get more upvotes than down, eventually.
Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.
Then Perlmonks was like a Perl specific version of Stack overflow, with the difference that they encouraged discussion, leading you to a far deeper understanding of the language. I miss that.
(It still going, its pretty ugly but the content is better than SO). https://perlmonks.org/
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It just turns into a "ACTUALLY!" contest, of who can pee higher. No matter how right you are, some guy will link a blog post detailing why in some obscure scenario that might not be valid, and proceed to downvote your obviously wrong answer.
That's strange, in all the time I've spent on SO sites, I can remember only one instance where that happened. Maybe it's community related and happens with certain topics more than with others?
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Create a "beginner" tag and then let people annoyed by beginner questions filter them out. Or allow people to filter out questions from askers with less than N reputation. These solutions probably have their own flaws, but if there was an appetite to be more beginner friendly geberally you could probably road test them a bit more.
Who enforces the beginner tag? Will people be offended by the beginner tag, too? Just seems like it's the same problem but with a different name.
With the tag enforcement means who can triage new posts to tag them appropriately when a co-user does not. They're not the same problems and I think objectively this is a better problem to have.
The problem that others have pointed out, if reasonable people fatigue out and leave, it self-sorts for the people that love to show how smart they are, or what big angry egos they have, and it spirals down from there.
On one of your points, I have had the grand blessing of working with a number of people way smarter than me. And the nearly universal quality of really smart people is that they never point out how smart they are. Oh there are outliers that will constantly remind people of that fact, but by and large, the really (really) smart people never bring that up.
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I would say a little bit of both. Since modern networked programming is much more complex than before (having to care about security, distributed storage, systems, worldwide connectivity over vast range of devices etc.) it has more moving parts and thus more combinations of various systems possible. Naturally complexity grows exponentially.
>...complexity grows exponentially Just to nitpick a bit, I would say that complexity grows quadratically - proportionally to the number of potential interactions between subcomponents.
Children, SO is a blessing for humanity. Their creators should be canonized. You don't remember the pre SO times. You couldn't find anything to fix your problems and must read the source code or pay zillions for some sh*tty support. In the pre-internet times, you just would hit a wall and have to quit. I really love Jeff and Joel.
And let's not forget the fact that SO came to life in the time when web started to grow and improve a lot. It's not THE improvement; it's just one of the development improvements we grew to like.
Today it's a standard practice that 3rd party code (tools, libraries, frameworks) come with decently written docs. Specific for web development, MDN improved a lot, and it's a good summary of the full spec. Also finding data on these pages is easier than it used to be thanks to improved search engines. All of this is, in my opinion, is a reason why SO is not as important as it used to be.
The author has a good point. A great platform doesn't excuse the behaviour of its users. The least one could do is explain the downvote, to give some guidance for the future questions. They exercise their right (power) to "moderate", but not their duty to make it a better place.
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…
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…
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Even reddit made the switch to a similar system. unknown points until later.
The parenting comment suggest something different than what Reddit does. Reddit hides the comment's score, the comment suggest hiding the commenter's profile altogether so you can't see the commenter's reputation on the site.
How long would you keep it anonymized? most questions don't get almost any traffic at all when they are first asked. They only get exposure over time.
It just seems like a posing proposition because it's so easily circumvented in which case it's not worth the effort at all.
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>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.
This question does not show any research effort This question is unclear This question is not useful
that is (almost) literally the title text of the downvote button. I think people just don't like the shape of the button and the idea of negative numbers.