Stack Exchange Raises $40M Led by A16Z to Boost Its Programmer Forums • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by slantyyz » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:27 PM UTC

nhzmju wrote: post #78

slantyyz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to happen with certain areas of interest more than others. I would say I encounter them in as much as 30% of my searches, which are web development related. While I understand the intentions of the moderators, they seem to assess the value of a question for people at the moderator's own skill level than at the people who might be asking the question or seeking an answer to a particular question. The silver l…

Thank you for your response, I will comment per paragraph: SE has good rules which keep questions relevant. I would say that if the question is closed and there are no existing duplicates, then the question itself doesn't have much value. ( There are of course outliers. ) There is a misunderstanding here, moderators on SE don't actually close most of the questions, normal users with privileges to do that, do so by vo…

>> moderators on SE don't actually close most of the questions, normal users with privileges to do that, do so by voting.

To a person _arriving at SO from Google_, "moderator" and "normal users with privileges" are basically the same thing, even though they may be technically different. And, those "normal users with privileges" tend to be overly aggressive when flagging questions as "off topic" or "opinion-based".

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

#172

Post by EpicEng » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:28 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #151

EpicEng wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I follow you. How does erring on the side of leaving a question open leave more questions unanswered or unasked?

When the reward system is such that novel questions do not receive answers, users will eventually stop asking those questions.

I still don't see what one has to do with the other(s). Besides, go browse through SO's unanswered questions; this is the state of things today! Simple questions, the most common variety, get answers in minutes. The complex and/or specialized questions which cannot easily be answered by a large portion of the userbase tend to languish.

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

#173

Post by Aldo_MX » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:28 PM UTC

ciupicri wrote: post #164

mavelikara wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope that at some point Google starts pruning away closed SO questions from its index. That will give the user a better search experience.

As a side note, the closed questions are not deleted from the web site because Stack Exchange takes a conservative approach when it comes to deletion. Nevertheless some questions do get deleted. The Help Center[1] and Meta[2] have more details on this. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/help/deleted-questions [2]: http://meta.stackexchange.com/q/5221/135744

> Questions that are extremely off topic, or of very low quality, may be removed at the discretion of the community and moderators.

In my experience, this is completely false, it should be reworded as "Questions that moderators like to remove on a whim".

The fact that a moderator (or group of moderators) don't find a question valuable doesn't mean that it is not valuable for the rest of the world, and this applies specifically with questions about recommendations.

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

#174

Post by Bamafan » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:29 PM UTC

jordanpg wrote: post #70

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?

There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-…

Agreed. In fact, there was a HN thread a while back about this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494016

It's unbelievably annoying when this happens. I have a number of bookmarks to incredibly insightful posts, whose usefulness has been corroborated by literally hundreds of people...all closed because they are deemed "off-topic" or some such by an admin.

My theory is that SO was essentially "done" years ago. But people are still on staff and needed something to do. Thus, unrelenting navel gazing ensued.

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

#175

Post by EpicEng » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:29 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #156

EpicEng wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair point. It's not my motivation for being active, but I assume it is for most, and it is an effective carrot. I would just like the balance to be tipped a little back in the direction of the consumers of the site. I'm not suggesting we leave obviously terrible questions open, it's the borderline posts that get me. Interesting questions which may not have a black and white answer, but would still encourage…

That gets into sticky moderation issues. My experience moderating support fora is that no matter how or where you draw the line, there's always a grey area. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and there's always going to be something that seems like a reasonable except that gets cut. I suspect that SOs answer to your need is "Go use a different site". At some point, that becomes a reasonable answer.

True, but the guidelines could be changed. Every close-happy user loves to link back to the guidelines. If they were a bit more lenient these users would have less leverage. It is a people issue though, I can't think of a technical solution which will solve it 100% of the time.

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

#176

Post by slantyyz » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:31 PM UTC

mavelikara wrote: post #146

jordanpg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-…

I hope that at some point Google starts pruning away closed SO questions from its index. That will give the user a better search experience.

I hope that they don't. In fact, that's the worst thing they could do.

I have gotten a _lot_ of value from closed SO questions that were high ranked in my Google search results.

I don't know what that says about SO's flagging system, but it is what it is, I guess.

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

#177

Post by Aldo_MX » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:32 PM UTC

belorn wrote: post #154

EpicEng wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 anymo…

I can expand why I think SE do not like "what is best ..." questions. 1: There is no definitive answer to it. At best there is best practice, and at worst there is flame wars. If Moderators tried to distinguish what topic could become flame wars, you tend to end up with very biased moderation. 2: Recommendations are much more time-sensitive than purely technical questions. The best framework in 2005 might be abandon…

> The best framework in 2005 might be abandon in 2015, which can mislead readers

This is why you can edit a question/answer, to update the information.

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

#178

Post by slantyyz » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:35 PM UTC

JonnieCache wrote: post #96

jordanpg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an ongoing religious war among avid SO users (don't know about the rest of SE) about what kinds of questions should be allowed. Roughly, there are two camps. Those who say that any well-formed, non-dup question of interest should be let in and those who think it's a stop of last-resort after checking all conceivable documentation and scouring the internet. I believe the latter viewpoint is pretty run-of-the-…

Can they not give the macho developers some kind of button that spends some of their points to put a badge on the questions they like, elevating them to "true SO" status? Thats how these things are supposed to work I believe.

I always upvote on closed questions that I find useful. This happens more often than it should, imo.

What I would think would be better is for questions that receive a lot of upvotes after they are closed, that the people who flagged the question have reduced capability to flag down questions in the future.

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

#179

Post by Kalium » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:36 PM UTC

baddox wrote: post #167

Kalium wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get your argument, but it sounds like a weak version of the claim that there is a strict ordering of priorities in the world and that only the top priority should ever be worked on. Heck, even if the site was only for "novel" questions, according to your logic, only the most important unanswered question should be visible, until it is answered. Otherwise people might be incentivized to answer the second most import…

The attention of users is a limited resource. Demands on it must be balanced against one another.

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

#180

Post by Kalium » Tue, Jan 20, 2015, 9:36 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #172

Kalium wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the reward system is such that novel questions do not receive answers, users will eventually stop asking those questions.

I still don't see what one has to do with the other(s). Besides, go browse through SO's unanswered questions; this is the state of things today! Simple questions, the most common variety, get answers in minutes. The complex and/or specialized questions which cannot easily be answered by a large portion of the userbase tend to languish.

Indeed. The result is that SO is a lot less useful than it used to be. I have repeatedly found myself chasing an obscure error message only to dead-end on SO and be forced to backtrack.