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My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

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Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#131

Post by smackfu »

codinghorror wrote: post #104
jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.

Chat rooms are pretty toxic on a discussion site where the majority of users are not on the chat room.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#132

Post by Shog9 »

ellyagg wrote: post #99
Shog9 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both. The former is inevitable - most people, like the author of this article, spend the bulk of their time up-front: post a lot of answers, enjoy the experience, get tired of it, pull back to only answering the occasional post that piques their interest. So there's a fairly constant fall-off of activity from people who've previously posted a lot. And this gets worse when these folks find fewer questions that in…

Who cares how many times a question comes up? That is just such a non-issue, a peeve of a minority of replaceable people, because people are always replaceable, including the ranks of those who answer the most questions. Resurfacing questions is helpful for people new to programming topics and who are just discovering the lay of the land by using the New filter on StackOverflow. Novelty for advanced users should be a…

Nice rant. Not sure how this relates to what you're replying to, so I'm not gonna attempt to rebut it... But for future reference, "people are always replaceable" tends to be a euphemism for "we're gonna treat you like canon fodder" - not really a good attitude, IMHO.

If you want to clarify what you're responding to, I can try to provide a more helpful response; until then, here's some useful references for the "roots" of SO's current policies:

- http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/the-wikipedia-of-long-...

- http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-...

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#133

Post by eitland »

aaronchall wrote: post #119
codinghorror wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.

I'm close to being able to close Python duplicates in a single vote when I get my Python gold badge (9/10 of the way there.) http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/254590/541136 - Also, considering the huge close vote queue, I can see why SO would want to close-close-close (or at least vote-vote-vote). What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though.

Careful, this maybe isn't the correct place for telling everybody how easily you can crush them : )

> What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though.

I guess a whole lot of the people who could have helped you left long ago because of your fellow moderators. A reasonable first step would be by adjusting the attitude.

Maybe part of the problem is we just don't see all those "primarily opinion based" and "ugly discussions" questions that seems to be oh such a serious problem.

We definitely see a whole lot of the most useful questions closed, often for technicalities. It doesn't exactly encourage participation, does it?

HN somehow seems to be better at dealing with the problems without scaring good community members away. Of course HN has issues as well but so far the moderation team is doing a very good job of keeping politics and promotion away while leaving to the broader community to vote if something is interesting or not.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#134

Post by tvon »

PinnBrain wrote: post #52
jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

I really thought you were talking about a curriculum vitae there, but I suppose it's "close vote".

Yeah, FWIW I had to google the terms and found this:

https://gist.github.com/cspray/1689430

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#135

Post by Latty »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #125

I stopped using StackOverflow a year or so ago, when I was astonished to discover that people can edit your questions. I accept that this sometimes may be necessary, but I asked a question which was then edited to be a different question, so that the answers I got were entirely useless. I understand the need for moderation but surely they should not be able to change the meaning of what you posted.

If that happens, you revert the changes. Editing to change the nature of the question is definitely not a valid edit. If people do it consistently, a mod should intervene.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#136

Post by sejje »

monksy wrote: post #124
sejje wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apparently I pissed off one of the moderators (when asking him why is my question "off-topic") No, apparently you pissed off all of the moderators when you called them all dick-sucking cunts. You must be a really special dude to do that and then get your feelings hurt when you get downvoted for it.

If that is all it takes to piss off a mod, they need to be demodded immediately. That really the weakest insult you can throw. [The insults are more annoying than offensive]

To be clear: your position is that SO needs moderators who don't downvote "cunt" because it's not offensive enough?

Anyway, doesn't matter--throwing insults, weak or strong, deserves downvotes. I don't understand why you're defending his right to be a complete asshat on a moderated forum. It's only just barely even related to the topic at hand, since he earned his downvotes.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#137

Post by EdSharkey »

I think the mandate is pretty clear: quality writing of the original question is a must. If you can't write in clear english, or you have a whiff of snark in your question, or your question falls below what many people think of as a valuable contribution, then your question probably deserves to be closed. Why is that not fair? I think it is fair! Be professional!

Sometimes you get very cool superusers like BalusC who will edit a sub-par question for clarity or formatting rather than delete it out of hand. Most of the time, I look at his edits and I like what he does with the question. Add value, add value, add value. BalusC makes JSF a joy to research on and work with.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#138

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

jobu wrote: post #42
jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

Wasn't there a similar debate over Quality vs Quantity with the Wikipedia community a few years back? It's been a while, but I remember seeing complaints about thousands of articles getting culled for being trivial (comic books, movies, anime, moderately famous people or places). It's hard to find many articles about it anymore, but I did find this from 2007: http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/

The funny thing is that the fanboys fight back against this tactic by putting in hundreds of citations to "legitmize" articles about video games. Browse through some of them and you'll often see more citations than most of the math and science articles. Meanwhile, worthwhile articles that don't have rabid fans get deleted due to lack of "noteworthiness" (by someone's arbitrary standard of the day) or citations.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#139

Post by Shog9 »

Veedrac wrote: post #80
Shog9 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both. The former is inevitable - most people, like the author of this article, spend the bulk of their time up-front: post a lot of answers, enjoy the experience, get tired of it, pull back to only answering the occasional post that piques their interest. So there's a fairly constant fall-off of activity from people who've previously posted a lot. And this gets worse when these folks find fewer questions that in…

> So there's a fairly constant fall-off of activity from people who've previously posted a lot. And this gets worse when these folks find fewer questions that interest them Is this data publicly available?

You can approximate this from public data: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252756/are-high-repu...

As noted in the comments there, this tends to be slightly inaccurate, as it ignores changes in reputation over time. But it's close enough to see the general trend; I left a comment with a more accurate picture of the usual trend and the more recent drop-off.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#140

Post by alecco »

codinghorror wrote: post #104
jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.

Once I saw a clique of mathematica.SE guys doing vote ring on reddit/r/programming and other places to promote their site. Some of them looked like working for Wolfram itself, based on simple online searches for other forums. It's possible they were just Wolfram fanatics, maybe.

They crafted a particular question/answer and submitted and vote brigaded it everywhere. They were quite obvious and denied everything when confronted. After pointing out the obvious ring (same people pushing the same link with similar comments on all sites) they ganged up on me and sent me horrible private messages.

This pissed me off and I overreacted, exactly what they wanted... After cooling down, I went to their chat rooms to apologize for my angry replies language and removed comments on reddit. But they never, ever accepted they did any wrongdoing and pat themselves in the back. Oh, and never apologized for their harassment that triggered me in the first place.

This is why SO, reddit, HN are slowly getting long time users disenchanted. If you are not part of some virtual gang you are just meat, like a ghetto.

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