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Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

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Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#131

Post by davidism »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #92
yesimahuman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The moderation is ridiculous. Useful questions get closed all the time for nebulous "fit" reasons. My opinion is if the community thinks it's a valuable question by voting it up, it should stay.

I have found some useful information in the "dup" questions. It's a bit weird to discover that a useful answer is "closed as duplicate" but whatever, as long as I keep finding solutions to my problems, I'll keep going back.

The answer was not closed, the question was. This is not a bad thing, as it funnels everything towards one canonical location.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#132

Post by EpicEng »

Kalium wrote: post #105
sanderjd wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This viewpoint only makes sense if you subscribe to the (very silly) ideas that there are a limited number of internet points available and that they matter. Why does it matter to you which people are being rewarded for what?

It matters because people respond to incentives. If what you want to see encouraged is good answers to novel questions, you need a system that rewards that over copy-pasting from documentation. What do you think happens when the two are rewarded equally, but the latter can be done much more frequently per unit of time?

If I can find the answer I am after more quickly by searching and finding a hit on SO than I would by grepping documentation, how is that not providing value?

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#133

Post by Kalium »

EpicEng wrote: post #130
Kalium wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter group sounds like people who are sick of seeing SO being a place where people are rewarded for regurgitating documentation. I've some sympathy for that.

Rewarded with what; internet points? How about rewarding the far larger portion of its userbase, i.e., the sector that doesn't care about upvotes, with information? Yes, I am in the former camp if I have to chose one. SO has become far too heavy handed an "noob hostile". I have been around since the beginning and am in the top 0.16% of users and I can't stand how stringently some adhere to the formal and informal gui…

Ultimately, the site depends utterly on the internet points people. Without them there is only noobs asking questions, and they leave without people answering.

So, yes. Internet points.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#134

Post by Kalium »

EpicEng wrote: post #132
Kalium wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters because people respond to incentives. If what you want to see encouraged is good answers to novel questions, you need a system that rewards that over copy-pasting from documentation. What do you think happens when the two are rewarded equally, but the latter can be done much more frequently per unit of time?

If I can find the answer I am after more quickly by searching and finding a hit on SO than I would by grepping documentation, how is that not providing value?

Now balance it against the more important questions that are unanswered or even unasked because SO becomes a place where there's no point to that. It's not as simple as that.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#135

Post by EpicEng »

belorn wrote: post #119
troymc wrote: post #28

I often ask a question on Google, get taken to a Stack Exchange site, and find that yes, they have my question, but some moderator closed it before it got answered. SE got my traffic, but I didn't get my answer. Isn't that broken?

This has not been my experience when searching for programming questions. The threads I see closed is when I search for "what is the best ...", and while I find them very useful to read, I understand why SE do not like them. Sometimes, I also see threads closed as homework questions, but those tend to have several duplicates which do have the answer in them, so it has so far not bothered me.

> and while I find them very useful to read, I understand why SE do not like them.

This is exactly what I don't understand. If a question is borderline, but obviously useful, why not err on the side of allowing it to stand?

>Sometimes, I also see threads closed as homework questions, but those tend to have several duplicates which do have the answer in them, so it has so far not bothered me.

This doesn't happen anymore. The "Homework" tag was removed and is no longer a valid reason to close a question. That doesn't mean these questions don't get closed using other rationals of course.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#136

Post by swasheck »

tieTYT wrote: post #71
timdev2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted a employer ad on SO Careers, and also GitHub Jobs. The SO post resulted in a satisfyingly large set of high-quality candidates. I was satisfied with the value. In contrast, GitHub was surprisingly disappointing. Maybe one or two worthwhile candidates, and a ton of junk. It appears that GitHub's jobs get scraped and posted elsewhere, and the bulk of responses to my ad were low-quality (and that's being genero…

Interesting theory. What prevents other sites from scraping SO posts? If the answer is "nothing", that suggests it's just a matter of time until it's just as bad. Right?

In theory the community moderation element forces a user to cite their sources or face the backlash of deletion/downvoting, etc.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#137

Post by Kalium »

sanderjd wrote: post #114
Kalium wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters because people respond to incentives. If what you want to see encouraged is good answers to novel questions, you need a system that rewards that over copy-pasting from documentation. What do you think happens when the two are rewarded equally, but the latter can be done much more frequently per unit of time?

Fair point on the question of why it matters. On the question of what should be encouraged, I think "good answers to novel questions" is only one of many possibilities. In my opinion, what should be encouraged is simply "people quickly and easily finding good answers to their questions", and I think copy-pasting (or linking to) the relevant section from documentation serves that goal just fine, and that voting is a g…

My key point is that not all questions are created equal.

Further, there's the question of how much effort the questioner should be expected to put in. In a great many technical question fora, the experience is that many noobs make no attempt to search out answers.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#138

Post by davidism »

johansch wrote: post #117
nhzmju wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments on SE are meant to be temporary( in their value, not duration ). If you had to raise an important issue about something, you should have instead asked a question about it, where you could leave a link to the problematic answer/question and explain the problem. In fact that is the usual procedure in case of conflicts. There is no restriction on that. If your point is valid, the community does the rest.

....why?

Most comments should end up as an edit to the question or answer, clarifying some point, at which point they can be removed. The Question and Answer are the important things on Stack Overflow, not the communication that went into creating and tuning them.

The remaining comments are just fluff, such as "thanks", which can more appropriately (for the site) be expressed as an upvote or accept. Or they're asking a new question, in which case the parent's comment applies.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#139

Post by Kalium »

exelius wrote: post #107
Kalium wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters because people respond to incentives. If what you want to see encouraged is good answers to novel questions, you need a system that rewards that over copy-pasting from documentation. What do you think happens when the two are rewarded equally, but the latter can be done much more frequently per unit of time?

Some people find difficult problems more rewarding to solve. Given that internet points are meaningless, someone interested in learning a language better could spend their time regurgitating documentation (and hopefully learning along the way). Eventually, one of those regurgitated responses gets picked up by Google and becomes the top answer, and nobody even needs to go to the SE forums to ask. I don't think they're…

Right now, there's one reward structure. People who value and respond to that reward structure act rationally within it. This means that regurgitation gets rewarded over good answers to novel questions.

Re: Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums

#140

Post by EpicEng »

nhzmju wrote: post #91
smackfu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More often, I find a question that is closed and frozen in time that does have answers, because the answerers were faster than the moderators. For instance, "Where can I download Spring?" The top Google result is a StackOverflow page that is closed as off-topic.

The first two results that point to SO, give a useful answer, one is marked as a duplicate and points to the other one with 7 highly upvoted answers. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19124445/how-to-download-... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19082860/where-can-i-down... The question is off-topic, but as you can see it was still answered. Still, to solve that problem, a new site was opened per request of users:…

The problem with the new site is that it boasts a tiny fraction of the SO user count. It's just harder to get good answers on a site with so few active users. The same is true for programmers.stackexchange, where code review type questions end up.
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