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Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

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Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#111

Post by kmontrose »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #53
pmjordan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The high-traffic tags are full of low-quality or frequently asked questions. The amount of duplication in e.g. the C++ tag is staggering, but there doesn't seem to be a conscious effort to enforce a no-duplicate policy of any kind. Picking out worthwhile questions is difficult with all that noise. Worse, the "unanswered" section is full of questions that have been answered, the asker just never bothered to click acce…

Regarding duplicates: they should be closed as duplicates of a canonical question, but the incentives all work against that so it rarely happens. There's a ten-month-old widely-supported proposal on meta meant to address this, but it hasn't received any comment from the Stack Exchange Inc. folks. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/90620/134300

Incentivizing duplicate finding is tricky:

- rewarding with rep could convert answerers to closers

* answering produces useful stuff, closing is (often) just clerical

- over aggressive closing drives new users away

* blatant laziness shouldn't be rewarded, but subtle variations on a problem shouldn't be punished either

- some level of duplication is a good thing

* http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/dr-strangedupe-or-how-...

* in a nutshell, people ask the same conceptual question in different ways, it's good to have all those ways around to help Googlers

We've also improved finding duplicates in the close dialog since that meta post (it's a hard problem, so it's not a perfect suggesting system), so it's hardly like we've done nothing.

Also, as written that feature request is unworkable. Incentivize closing over asking, madness. Even incentivizing over editing (+2 up to 1k rep) is harmful IMO. I suppose we could just decline that post, but what'll probably happen is it'll be status-completed when we've come up with a better solution (which will be documented in an answer).

http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/65516/clos...

^ Based on the most recent data dump, somewhere around a 15 - 20% of closed questions (which are about 3-4% of all new questions). That sounds about right, honestly. I'm sure some stuff is slipping through, and we could make it easier to maintain these rates; but it doesn't seem like a pandemic of duplicates.

Oops, forgot the disclaimer: Stack Exchange Inc. employee, etc. etc.

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#112

Post by huhtenberg »

cruise02 wrote: post #76
huhtenberg wrote: post #59

I find participating in SO extremely annoying. Tried few times and gave up. I can't downvote an answer that is patently absurd. I can't upvote an answer that is right. Apparently that's because I have to prove myself first. If I write a response (that damn sure answers the question), it sits at zero, because its usefulness appears to be directly dependent on my reputation, of which I have none. In general, there's ju…

> I can't downvote an answer that is patently absurd. I can't upvote an answer that is right. Apparently that's because I have to prove myself first. Yeah, that's kind of the idea. Why would anyone trust you until you've proven yourself? Do you just want privileges handed to you? > If I write a response (that damn sure answers the question), it sits at zero, because its usefulness appears to be directly dependent on…

Lovely response. Thank you for taking time to type it.

The original point was that the very existence of SO reputation entices the wrong kind of priorities and behavior on the site. Hence the "newbie" problem.

What I would've done is this:

(a) hide reputation counters from the public view

(b) for questions - let people upvote them or report them, no downvoting

(c) for answers/comments - replace up/down arrows with four choices - "perfect", "right", "incomplete" and "wrong" - and then show how many users clicked on each. Let anyone vote, including anonymous users.

(d) let the original submitter pick the "right" answer (just as it is now)

That's it. Badges-shmadges. These are vanity trinkets. If people are less inclined to help, when others are not seeing their social rank paraphernalia, that's doesn't speak much of them, does it?

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#113

Post by [deleted] »

cruise02 wrote: post #76
huhtenberg wrote: post #59

I find participating in SO extremely annoying. Tried few times and gave up. I can't downvote an answer that is patently absurd. I can't upvote an answer that is right. Apparently that's because I have to prove myself first. If I write a response (that damn sure answers the question), it sits at zero, because its usefulness appears to be directly dependent on my reputation, of which I have none. In general, there's ju…

> I can't downvote an answer that is patently absurd. I can't upvote an answer that is right. Apparently that's because I have to prove myself first. Yeah, that's kind of the idea. Why would anyone trust you until you've proven yourself? Do you just want privileges handed to you? > If I write a response (that damn sure answers the question), it sits at zero, because its usefulness appears to be directly dependent on…

[deleted]

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#114

Post by andyjohnson0 »

lifebeyondfife wrote: post #43

Does anyone have the same problem with SO that I do? I'm an experienced dev in some general / mature technologies, mainly the C-like languages (I know C# inside out) but essentially, nothing too specialised. Anytime I've gone on SO to try to contribute I find it hard to find questions to answer. It's either a race to answer a trivial question quickly, or an obscure - possibly badly worded or incomplete - question tha…

Another good way to get reputation is to ask good questions.

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#116

Post by georgieporgie »

I got tired of the thankless task of doing other peoples' work, along with the overzealous mods shutting down my questions in the most condescending tone possible.

In particular, I recall going so far as to read vendor-specific documentation for someone, and providing example code to parse the binary data in question. It was probably an hour of my work and I didn't even get a 'thank you', much less any reputation bump.

Talk about devaluing yourself and your industry...

(incidentally, I don't know exactly how much rep I have, since the myopenid login I was using just stopped working one day. No idea why, and there doesn't seem to be a mechanism for fixing it. Edit: I managed to log in again. It appears that if you log in to MyOpenID.com for account management, any subsequent attempt to log in to SO will attempt to use that account's credentials rather than the intended user account credentials, and the error results are absolutely useless)

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#117

Post by doug1001 »

Here's what i find annoying. There are so many StackExchange sites now. I have been participating in SO for about 2 years (15K). One tag i like to watch/answer is "machine-learning." ML questions are now spread across so many SE sites: Cross-Validated (Stats), Machine Learning, Computer Science, Computational Science", Numerical Modeling & Simulation--and more on the way, Information Retrieval, Bioinformatics, Computational Linguistics*. Because of this, SO is a lot less interesting for me. It's time consuming to track down the Questions from across all relevant Sites; about half of the questions have comments telling the OP to post elsewhere ("maybe this belongs on ....") and/or multiple votes to close.

And the worst part--as a programmer, i would much rather have the computational linguist answering ML questions on SO than on a specialist site (of which there is one). Maybe those guys benefit by becoming better programmers, but i certainly benefit from their deep knowledge of how to solve ML problems. Their answer is code, just like mine, but from an entirely different perspective, more often than not it's humbling.

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#118

Post by codyrobbins »

georgieporgie wrote: post #116

I got tired of the thankless task of doing other peoples' work, along with the overzealous mods shutting down my questions in the most condescending tone possible. In particular, I recall going so far as to read vendor-specific documentation for someone, and providing example code to parse the binary data in question. It was probably an hour of my work and I didn't even get a 'thank you', much less any reputation bum…

I actually don’t use Stack Overflow as a contributor for precisely the same reason: I created my account with an OpenID, the provider is no longer around, and now I can’t log in nor fix it.
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