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Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

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Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#301

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

zerocrates wrote: post #289
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask, and ye shall receive: [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34722910 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34887968

I don't see what's not to like about the interaction on that URL scheme question (apart from the close vote), it looks like you got a perfectly good answer in 10 minutes. Am I just missing the condescension here? Maybe something that's been removed or I'm not looking in the right place? SO definitely has issues but I just don't see it on this one.

It's a matter of tone, and how the question was answered.

I know it could be different. It has been different.

NBD. I won't be going to that drywell for water, anymore, so it's fine.

I was dealing with something, yesterday, that is exactly the type of thing that I would have gone to SO for, in the old days (customizing the Contacts Editor), but I don't really feel like dealing with the agita, for what would really be nothing more than a little vanity chrome on my app. I'll probably figure it out, if I really want to. I always do; it just takes time. What SO has done (in the past), was give me actionable and correct answers, very quickly.

It hasn't done that for me, for a while.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#302

Post by shagie »

_gabe_ wrote: post #259
mananaysiempre wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hear this strawman all the time. Is it a strawman if it appears (among other places) in the 2008 launch blog post of one of the two cofounders[1]? > Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned…

> Is it a strawman if it appears (among other places) in the 2008 launch blog post of one of the two cofounders[1]? Yes. As you mentioned the blog post is from 2008, that's 15 years ago now. Jeff hasn't had any input on the direction of stack overflow for more than a decade. From Jeff's blog post that you linked: > I have not worked at Stack Overflow in any capacity whatsoever since February 2012 and I've had zero da…

> > > In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.[0]

I would contend that the rudeness and snark are a symptom of failed moderation tools.

On USENET, if there was a user who was bothersome to you - you could kill file them. Plonk and they're gone from what you can see.

On Reddit, you can block a user and you won't see their comments again. Similarly on Twitter you can mute or block a user. And again on GitHub. On HN you can click hide and collapse threads from people you don't want to see.

With all of these, you can make an annoying person not annoy you.

On Stack Overflow, you can't block questions from a user showing up when you look at a tag. You can't ignore answers that they have given on posts that otherwise invoke Duty Calls https://xkcd.com/386/ . You can't prevent a user from commenting on your posts. You can't filter questions to those who have had some criteria.

The combination of all of this means that on Stack Overflow, there are only three ways to handle a user.

You can flag their comments or posts and have a diamond mod step in (note that asking poor questions again and again isn't diamond mod worthy) and note that that sometimes can take days or weeks to get resolved.

You can take your ball and go home. Quit stack overflow and go cold turkey. There are more than a few who have decided that the hassle of dealing with users there isn't worth the headaches.

You can make it uncomfortable for them to stay. Snark, veiled (and unveiled) rudeness, and similar comments. Not that this is an excuse for rudeness - but rather an explanation.

One of the things to lower the temperature and reduce the amount of rudeness is to increase the ability for a user to see what they want and be able to avoid interactions with people who they don't want to interact with.

If the python tag is getting too many new programmer questions in September asking to make a circle with a for loop, the experienced programmer can either close questions (note that some people regard that as being rude) until they run out of close votes, down vote (again, some people regard that as being rude) until they run out of regular votes, and then either ask "have you read the documentation for for loop" or leave.

Rudeness is often an established user running out of moderation tools.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#303

Post by exabrial »

wendyshu wrote: post #247
exabrial wrote: post #241

What ticks me off on StackOverflow is changing my posts and attributing it to me. For instance, I ended a post with "Thank you for any help, I appreciate your time". A overzealous moderator on a mission edited that and removed it. I added it back and told him that I'm polite in person and on the internet, and it's my desire to reflect that. That feedback was of course discarded and they locked the post. So yeah, desp…

That sentence is redundant noise on the page. Show your appreciation by upvoting answers instead.

No it's not. Being polite is human. It exists in every culture in some form or another. And besides, who are you to judge anyway?

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#304

Post by arp242 »

mdmglr wrote: post #293
arp242 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you distinguish between "poor quality" and "just hasn't been viewed by many"?

Well right now on all social networks downvotes are used to silence others and in no way is indicative of quality. HN seems to due alright. Things people engage with "bubble up".

Stack Overflow isn't a social network.

Whatever may or may not be the case on HN doesn't really have much bearing on Stack Overflow as they're radically different sites with a very different purpose.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#305

Post by shagie »

Izkata wrote: post #258
ranting-moth wrote: post #197

My pet annoyance is also the prohibition of opinion based answers. I've found many great answers, usually the top result on Google. But sadly the question is locked. Sometime the top answer (before the question was locked) was pretty much the right thing to do 5 years ago, but no one can add another answer. I do understand that opinion based questions are a moderation tar pit. But sometimes there aren't that many opt…

That (plus "culture"-style questions as in the sibling reply) was pretty much the original purpose of programmers.stackexchange.com but it got taken over by people who didn't like these open-ended questions. After some years with them banned, it was renamed to softwareengineering.stackexchange.com

Those questions were inherently difficult to moderate and that was realized very early on that such a site wouldn't work. For such to work, it needs many people who are actively moderating that content rather than just showing up to add fun quips.

https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions... and https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/09/17/merging-season/

From the SO Blog:

> There’s an even longer list of things that really belong on the new Programmers Stack Exchange, which appears to be degrading into fairly stupid water-cooler nonsense, and could benefit from an infusion of more meaty subjects, like these proposals:

> Software Engineering

which was posted three months before it was out of beta ( https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/12/17/introducing-programmer... ).

I would contend that the 'it got taken over by people' is not representative of the history as it would have gotten shut down by Jeff and Joel if it didn't clean up its act.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#306

Post by dietrichepp »

ryathal wrote: post #141
dietrichepp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t care about the downvotes but I hate when people make misguided attempts to “improve” old answers. The most recent was someone who went in and removed use of the word “you” as an attempt to “depersonalize” the answer. There was some kind of recognizable idea behind the edits, but the user’s changes mostly just damaged the readability and made the answers more convoluted. The editor argued with me and linked to…

The edit thing is a self imposed problem because the site gamification for established Stack* sites mandates that people edit questions to get enough reputation for basic site functionality. Actually asking or answering a question is far too difficult for a new user, especially on SO.

I looked it up. Accepted edit suggestions are only +2 per edit and cap at +1000 for your entire account. A single upvote on a question or answer is worth 5 edits.

I honestly don't see the point in throwing yourself at edits to grind out rep. Grinding out rep by answering questions may be slow work but at least you're directly helping someone who had a problem.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#307

Post by _xivi »

The "problem" with moderation is that it's open for debate and not hard science

The main closing reasons are ambiguous (generic), designed to cover many cases, but it became such that almost anything can arguably fall under one of them

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#308

Post by tastysandwich »

Is this just a recent thing? I've had an SO account for years. Have only asked a handful of questions but they've never been closed.

What I found annoying was that a lot of the time I never got a helpful answer, and ended up solving it myself a few days later. I then went back and answered my own question (which ended up being helpful for a bunch of people and it got a lot of points).

What about the rest of Stack Exchange? I once asked for help identifying an insect and got pretty helpful answers there (bit of a segue - I ended up breeding a colony of those insects and still have them to this day).

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#309

Post by Fatnino »

_gabe_ wrote: post #202
fishtoaster wrote: post #36

I think a common misunderstanding about Stack Overflow is that it's a place to get your questions answered. It's not - that's only a secondary use case. The primary purpose of S.O. is to produce a searchable corpus of answers with few duplicates and pretty high-quality answers. They're optimizing for being the first google result for "how to do X in Y language." They're not optimizing for being the best place for an…

I hear this strawman all the time. The first thing you read when you go to stackoverflow.com is: > Find the best answer to your technical question, help others answer theirs And here's one of the first snippets on their about page: > Stack Overflow helps people find the answers they need, when they need them. We're best known for our public Q&A platform that over 100 million people visit every month to ask questions,…

You should add an "ask chatgpt" step. Sometimes it gets it right. More often it gets you close enough to be able to Google the rest of the way.

And sometimes it just makes stuff up out of thin air...

At least it is easy for you to check that the code it gave doesn't work.

Re: Saying goodbye to Stack Overflow

#310

Post by Too »

metabagel wrote: post #232
siwatanejo wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME, I indeed sometimes reach step5 (other times SO answers are okish) but if I do reach step5, I add a step6 for good measure that consists of adding my own answer. It's how I gained a lot of reputation in SO, not by marking questions as duplicate.

I never considered asking and answering my own question. I didn't even realize it was allowed.

It’s not just allowed, it’s encouraged.

You are contributing to the common pool of knowledge. As long as the question and answer themselves are good.

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