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Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

michael.richter.name

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Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#51

Post by Sssnake »

crntaylor wrote: post #48
shortstuffsushi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually seems to be just the opposite of what he was saying. He stated that he believes this mechanism is broken, to the point that after two years of inactivity, the votes he receives his old answers have kept him in the top 3% of scorers. He's not looking for votes, he's saying it's silly how trivial it is to get them, and also how many points he gets off of a simple LMGTFY answer (your quote), vs how few he…

My point is that it's silly to care about how many points you have in the first place.

It doesn't matter how silly you think it is. You don't create a system that reinforces bad behavior and then say "oh, but you should magically turn off your human nature and do the opposite of the what the system teaches you to do". Systems need to be designed to reinforce good behavior, otherwise we get reddit and HN and wikipedia and SO.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#52

Post by shortstuffsushi »

crntaylor wrote: post #48
shortstuffsushi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually seems to be just the opposite of what he was saying. He stated that he believes this mechanism is broken, to the point that after two years of inactivity, the votes he receives his old answers have kept him in the top 3% of scorers. He's not looking for votes, he's saying it's silly how trivial it is to get them, and also how many points he gets off of a simple LMGTFY answer (your quote), vs how few he…

My point is that it's silly to care about how many points you have in the first place.

I agree with that. Whenever I use the site, the 'description' from "Whose Line is it Anyway?" plays in my head.[0] However, it's the same as any website where there is a "karma" system (like this one for instance ;) ). It feel good getting points, it feels bad losing points. It feels good knowing you have tons, and are in the "Top x% of answerers" or whatever.

Do I think that's necessarily the right way to get people to come to your site and answer programming questions? Maybe not (no, I don't really), but it certainly does keep people coming back to the site. That and the fact that it's probably the biggest answer repository on the net.

Oh, and here's an upvote for you to show no hard feelings. I believe your general statement is correct, I'm just not sure that's what the author is going for.

[0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KAGwNtI26w

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#53

Post by bryanlarsen »

cruise02 wrote: post #44
pygy_ wrote: post #22

The LuaJIT author, Mike Pall recently stopped contributing to SO [0] after having an edit on one of his own posts about LuaJIT reverted by clueless mods [1]. The reply was highly precise and technical, and the reasons given by the mods to reject the edit are spurious, since they just couldn't understand it and its implications. I reached out to two of them (I couldn't find how to contact the third one), but they didn…

It's generally accepted by the community at Stack Overflow that you don't edit other people's answers except to make improvements to formatting and punctuation. Changing the code should be left to the original author of the post, as that changes the meaning of the answer. The people who rejected the edit probably didn't notice that it was the same person who suggested the edit. Mike could have avoided that by just us…

The biggest problem with this convention is that new & anonymous users cannot comment, so the only option they have is to edit the post. These then get rejected out of hand and useful contributions disappear. This is doubly wasteful since this behaviour often discourages people from every contributing again.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#54

Post by archwisp »

I think most of you are missing the point of the article. He targets SO specifically in this article but really, it can be applied to almost any community on the Internet. He mentions Wikipedia specifically but I've seen the same thing repeated over and over on forums, games, and even the IETF for over a decade.

The question is: Is there a way to fix this?

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#55

Post by cruise02 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #53
cruise02 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's generally accepted by the community at Stack Overflow that you don't edit other people's answers except to make improvements to formatting and punctuation. Changing the code should be left to the original author of the post, as that changes the meaning of the answer. The people who rejected the edit probably didn't notice that it was the same person who suggested the edit. Mike could have avoided that by just us…

The biggest problem with this convention is that new & anonymous users cannot comment, so the only option they have is to edit the post. These then get rejected out of hand and useful contributions disappear. This is doubly wasteful since this behaviour often discourages people from every contributing again.

No, new and anonymous users do have another option, they can post their own answer.

That's irrelevant anyway, since that's not what happened here. The author of the post tried to edit his own answer with a second account. He should have just used his original account and this would have never happened.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#56

Post by pygy_ »

smackfu wrote: post #40
pygy_ wrote: post #22

The LuaJIT author, Mike Pall recently stopped contributing to SO [0] after having an edit on one of his own posts about LuaJIT reverted by clueless mods [1]. The reply was highly precise and technical, and the reasons given by the mods to reject the edit are spurious, since they just couldn't understand it and its implications. I reached out to two of them (I couldn't find how to contact the third one), but they didn…

I don't see how stopping contributing solves anything.

He doesn't care about SO, and his time is precious.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#57

Post by colemorrison »

Okay, so I literally can't imagine programming nowadays without Stack Overflow. Sure, google synthesized answers may be a cheap way to score points (actually I'd never thought to do that), but people that do that are still saving me time. And even though some answers do skip the art of "teaching a man to fish" there are still TONS that do "teach a man to fish."

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#58

Post by pygy_ »

cruise02 wrote: post #44
pygy_ wrote: post #22

The LuaJIT author, Mike Pall recently stopped contributing to SO [0] after having an edit on one of his own posts about LuaJIT reverted by clueless mods [1]. The reply was highly precise and technical, and the reasons given by the mods to reject the edit are spurious, since they just couldn't understand it and its implications. I reached out to two of them (I couldn't find how to contact the third one), but they didn…

It's generally accepted by the community at Stack Overflow that you don't edit other people's answers except to make improvements to formatting and punctuation. Changing the code should be left to the original author of the post, as that changes the meaning of the answer. The people who rejected the edit probably didn't notice that it was the same person who suggested the edit. Mike could have avoided that by just us…

None of that changes the fact that his valid edit was rejected by incompetent mods.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#59

Post by Fede_V »

ars wrote: post #8

His bullet #2 under "Creeping authoritarianism" is so incredibly correct! It's exactly what happened to wikipedia, and why editors are leaving in droves. With Stack Overflow it's simply not worth it to answer a difficult question, the time to point ratio is just not there, and to make it worse it's all about speed - how fast you can answer, because once the question goes off the home page you will get basically no po…

I found the entire post really bitter, but yeah, that part was incredibly interesting. Wikipedia is basically in the hands of an incredibly pedantic bureaucracy which is far more obsessed with process and incredibly obscure rules rather than producing quality articles.

When top tier NASA scientists find their edits to global warming articles changed by homeschooled children who spend every waking moment on wikipedia, you know the system is broken.

Re: Why I no longer contribute to Stack Overflow

#60

Post by adventured »

compare wrote: post #41
nathan_long wrote: post #10

StackOverflow is a machine designed to do one thing: make it so that, for any given programming question, you will get a search engine hit on their site and find a good answer quickly. And see some ads. That's really it. Everything it does is geared toward that, and it does it quite well. I have lots of SO points. A lot of them have come from answering common, basic questions. If you think points exist to prove merit…

Fascinating that OP became a worker in a critical part of Google's machine, and he didn't even realize it.

How do you know he didn't realize it? I start from the assumption that OP isn't stupid.
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