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StackOverflow unwinding?

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Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#141

Post by pbreit »

Karunamon wrote: post #14

The thing that drove me away from the entire Stack* series of sites was the heavy-handed "doesn't fit the format" (read: mod doesn't like it) question closings for no good reason. I've honestly lost count of the number of times that valid questions with well spoken, informative answers were shut down due to this nonsense. (The other was how much of a pain they make it to get started if you're new - one can look at th…

Agreed. Most of my SO questions get moved (not sure why, they seem on target) and then never get answered.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#142

Post by codinghorror »

buro9 wrote: post #22
debacle wrote: post #16

The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases. I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently. The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions wi…

With communities in general (not explicitly referencing SO here), I've always felt that moderators are their own worst enemies. They dictate the terms of use through enforcement. It's not fun to use something until you find that you aren't allowed to. The best tools do not limit their usage patterns, and communities adapt and evolve to make these tools solve their problems. These aren't always the same problems that…

If nobody is complaining about your moderators, they aren't doing their jobs.

Moderators are there to protect the community from itself, as described in http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul...

It's a tough job. But if you disagree with the way the moderation works, bring it up on meta, and/or run for the position of moderator in the next election.

How many other sites offer either of those options?

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#143

Post by [deleted] »

codinghorror wrote: post #132
wpietri wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they don't want Stack Overflow to be a social network. But like Soylent Green, it's made out of people. In SO's case, inconveniently alive people. Humans are inherently social, and the amount of effort SO staff and moderators have to go to trying to stamp that out is a sign that SO really is a social network. I always think it's a bad sign when product designers think they know much better than their users what…

We do listen to the people! No other site gives so much power to regular users, up to and including moderator elections. The problem with listening to the people too much is that popularity becomes the most important metric, with predictable results: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul... It's a balancing act. What people actually want, and what they think they want, are often two different h…

[deleted]

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#144

Post by minikites »

nathan_long wrote: post #117
minikites wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of right answers and more than plenty of wrong answers. Literature and other "soft" fields are not so different from math and science. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jFQR2FUEm4 --------------- Right, so we study math for the twin reasons of wanting to learn mathematical language and wanting to understand our place in the universe, which turns out to be precisely why we also study literature: to lear…

Like you, I strongly reject the idea that literature means anything and everything the reader wants it to. Nobody really believes that, even if they say they do. Just try interpreting the English professor's exam directions however you like and see what happens. However, you must admit that there is some subjectivity involved in literature. Maybe no more than in programmers.stackexchange. But that has the benefit of…

That's an interesting point and I agree with what you say for a simple question and answer. But there may be just as much subjectivity in the "right" answer for a complicated problem.

What if it compiles but gives erroneous results? What if it compiles and gives correct results, except for a certain day of the year? (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4128208). What if it compiles and runs and always gives the correct results no matter what, but isn't as efficiently written as it could be?

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#145

Post by DanBC »

spolsky wrote: post #77
buro9 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With communities in general (not explicitly referencing SO here), I've always felt that moderators are their own worst enemies. They dictate the terms of use through enforcement. It's not fun to use something until you find that you aren't allowed to. The best tools do not limit their usage patterns, and communities adapt and evolve to make these tools solve their problems. These aren't always the same problems that…

And yet, Stack Overflow gets 7000 questions a day, and manages to maintain a very high quality compared to sites with less moderation. The very moderation which detracts from the community feeling is what's keeping the quality of the site up and helping create a valuable permanent resource on the Internet, which is our primary goal. Like Wikipedia, strict rules are what lead to a valuable artifact. Stack Overflow's r…

> Like Wikipedia, strict rules are what lead to a valuable artifact.

What? Wikipedia's strict rules (really, a hideous mish mash of conflicting obscure scattered policy and guideline and suggestion and essay and convention) detract from the purpose of getting information about a subject from a variety of trusted sources into an article about that subject.

See, for example, the amount of time that goes into deciding whether to allow someone to have a username consisting of a bunch of digits or not. (Such a user name is "confusing". But what is it confused with? It's not confusing by itself. The policy is to prevent people using names that imply power. and so on for several megabytes, several times a year.) And then, when the community has taken several months (at a short time estimate) to agree on a policy they realise that the software has hard-coded limits which are different to the policy anyway. So it all starts again.

SO's mods are doing a good, but difficult job.

Wikipedia's admins, New Page Patrollers, Anti-Vandal Patrol, Recent Change Patrol, twinkle user, rollback user, are doing an inconsistent job.

I'll agree that I'm pretty anti the current WP experience.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#146

Post by fghh45sdfhr3 »

spolsky wrote: post #61

None of the actual metrics of the site bear this out. I don't know what "myspacing" is, and "floundering" is pretty subjective, but in terms of actual measurable things, we have more questions asked, more questions answered, more people active on the site, more sites with more activity and most metrics are up about 100% in the last year. Some of the things that we track pretty closely (like number of users who ask or…

But do you think he has a point about over-specializing? Is there an optimum level of just enough specialization?

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#147

Post by kamaal »

I really follow the ESR's asking questions the smart way guide pretty seriously(http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html) and most of my easy to difficult questions get answered easily without ever asking a question.

What I really care for is getting answers to tough questions. The problem with SO is it doesn't aim to be a QA site on the longer run. It aims to be a database of programming answers site that slowly evolves to solving most commonly faced programming problems. I don't know if their aim is to be advertising based revenue site on the longer run.

I ask a question because I want to get help. It has so happened when I absolutely can't get anything out of the problem at hand. I go on SO and ask a question, often I've been down voted down to oblivion, then I delete the question. Because all I see in response is sarcasm, cynicism and attempts by commenters to prove how big a fool I am.

To me stack overflow looks like site that wishes to attract people who already know answers to their questions, but want it put in a community wiki kind of way.

But I do agree that a simple Google search on SO sites, gives you solutions to most commonly known programming problems. And not just that most commonly known problems on areas that stack exchange sites deal with. These address most problems people face daily. Tough problems is a different cup of tea. But most common problems often get answered and their database seems to be growing with regards to those problems. And this might also be a great business model for SO.

SO was the cool new shiny tool, few years back. We all like to play with Shiny tools. Until something new, and more shiny come along.

These days most of colleagues ping me with interesting answers on quora. I would be happy with Quora opening their questions for reading without opening an account.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#148

Post by Karunamon »

gizzlon wrote: post #19
Karunamon wrote: post #14

The thing that drove me away from the entire Stack* series of sites was the heavy-handed "doesn't fit the format" (read: mod doesn't like it) question closings for no good reason. I've honestly lost count of the number of times that valid questions with well spoken, informative answers were shut down due to this nonsense. (The other was how much of a pain they make it to get started if you're new - one can look at th…

Example? Haven't noticed this..

It's kind of hard to provide examples because the question disappears once this happens. There's a link to an example in this thread.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#149

Post by jff »

papsosouid wrote: post #71
tgrass wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I treasure and trust StackOverflow for my programming questions precisely because of the elitist, purifying attitude. I'm confident the answers are vetted and the best has risen to the top. I'm a self-taught programmer with only a few years under my belt, so this resource is valuable. As for the other Q&As...especially the non-engineering ones, this culture is counter productive. In a field like history, the experts…

>I'm confident the answers are vetted and the best has risen to the top. That really doesn't have as much meaning as you think it does. The best answer out of three bad answers is still a bad answer. If they have driven away the people who give good answers, no amount of filtering the leftover bad answers will get you a good answer. I don't see very many experts on stackoverflow. It may be a useful resource for begin…

I think it's not just Stackoverflow--in general, experts have better things to do than help Newbie #258349 walk through installing Ruby. After years of watching the same questions get asked over and over, they just decide to give up and go work on something interesting, so you end up with an echo chamber of "bump for answer, I have the same problem", "has this been solved plz send teh codez", "me too".

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#150

Post by kamaal »

debacle wrote: post #128
spolsky wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, Stack Overflow gets 7000 questions a day, and manages to maintain a very high quality compared to sites with less moderation. The very moderation which detracts from the community feeling is what's keeping the quality of the site up and helping create a valuable permanent resource on the Internet, which is our primary goal. Like Wikipedia, strict rules are what lead to a valuable artifact. Stack Overflow's r…

SO is slowly driving away the more senior participants who haven't been drawn in by the gamification of the site. Every few months it seems like the questions on the site are more and more of the "I could have googled this but it was faster to ask it on SO." variety. In short, SO is becoming a Mechanical Turk for searching for answers to software questions, and the reason is because Google is becoming less and less u…

I think SO will be happy if they will be able to become a database for most common programming problems.

That is where the crowd is, mediocre programmers are plenty and they won't be asking expert questions either. They need hand holding at every step. And if you could answer all they question they have, you could serve a huge crowd.

On other hand, asking expert questions may make you an awesome site. But the target audience is to little.

Because number of people needing answers to expert questions themselves are scanty.

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