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My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

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Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#141

Post by Shog9 »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #85
jasode wrote: post #9

To me, I see this strange contradiction in how stackoverflow is evolving. Joel Spolsky (one of the founders) gave a very interesting presentation[1] in 2009. The key takeaway I've always remembered from his comments was the idea of "anthropology". The science of trying to really understand human behavior and make the website amplify good communities. What I see 6 years later is a lot of " why is this question closed…

> On the other hand, are the majority of complaints distorted because they are mostly voiced by the Eternal September[2] crowd? Sometimes I wonder if I'm the sort of person who makes these places bad... but I do ask decent questions, and the only people who ever pay attention to them are the rep farmers hoping to cash in with a Google answer.

Can't speak to your specific experiences, but it's worth noting that this can also be a downside of the Eternal September crowd: even reasonable questions get lost in the noise.

The Soup Nazi wanted to feed people and lost the opportunity to do so when he became obsessed with loiterers clogging the queue. Fictional exaggerations not withstanding, scaling is a hard problem to solve in many different systems - especially when some users/customers/tasks can easily require 100x the average processing time.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#142

Post by Eridrus »

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…

You're right that inexperienced people need a place to ask their questions, but as people get more experienced they tend to be less interested in answering novice questions, so there ends up being an upper limit on the difficulty of questions that can get answered as they will simply be above the level of the people who are wading through questions.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#143

Post by r00fus »

jobu wrote: post #71
3JPLW wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the first agenda item on the Python SO team's winter meeting: http://sopython.com/transcript/3/winter-2015-general-meeting... They were just discussing it on chat today: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/6/15-16 I've never gotten involved in Chat before, either, but just searching the most active chatroom for `cv-` brought that up immediately.

"Better to have a bad question closed quickly than have it accumulate bad answers and rude comments and downvotes." Unless it's offensive in some way, this seems like a terribly short-sighted way of handling bad questions. Ask questions back or offer suggestions for improving the question. Closing or deleting it doesn't teach the person anything, and it doesn't help the community.

What would solve the problem is if these "bad questions" were simply invisible to crawling.

Rude comments and inappropriate downvotes sounds like a community issue - why are those not punished or otherwise dis-incentivized?

Maybe they need a metamod function.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#144

Post by MilnerRoute »

Hacker News faced some of the same issues when people complained about excessive down-voting.

I remember some of the solutions proposed were a higher threshold for downvotes as the site grew, and the requirement that an actual explanation be typed in with every anonymous downvote or deletion.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#145

Post by reitanqild »

alecco wrote: post #140
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.

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…

> This is why SO, reddit, HN are slowly getting long time users disenchanted

Can't speak for reddit but I think HN is quite much better than SO. Specifically it seems:

* somehow grasping the house rules seems to be easier for people here than on SO. This might be because HN attracts another audience though, I don't know for sure.

* maybe because redditism and stupidity is mostly downvoted swiftly?

* spam and politics is dealt with before it hits the front page

* but contrary to SO moderators the ones on HN don't seem to get a kick out of finding something, anything that can be banned with the correct reading of the guidelines

I sometimes see what I consider to be abuse of downvotes but 1.) it doesn't seem to be rings and 2.) downvote abuse is very often corrected by the rest of the members.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#146

Post by monksy »

sejje wrote: post #136
monksy wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really they don't even need to downvote at all, it'll get downvoted (as it probably did) by others. Asshats are going to exist regardless.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#148

Post by reitanqild »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #138
jobu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If that is what it takes to get the deletionists away then feel free to add any valid reference I say.

I have given up though.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#149

Post by aaronchall »

eitland wrote: post #133
aaronchall wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes it's definitely difficult to get a foot-hold on the site, now isn't it. Maybe they need a real sort of wiki, or some sort of discussion community built around them. Seems like they started doing that, then killed it.

The problem with discussion boards is that it is absolutely painful to dig through a post until you stumble on a solution, and even then, you're in no way sure it's a good solution.

They need to harness that opinion/discussion/off-topic-subject energy in a way that doesn't work against their strategy. I think they are losing a lot of opportunity along the way.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#150

Post by alecco »

reitanqild wrote: post #145
alecco wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is why SO, reddit, HN are slowly getting long time users disenchanted Can't speak for reddit but I think HN is quite much better than SO. Specifically it seems: * somehow grasping the house rules seems to be easier for people here than on SO. This might be because HN attracts another audience though, I don't know for sure. * maybe because redditism and stupidity is mostly downvoted swiftly? * spam and politics…

According to the mods, it's not them but users clicking the report button. If so, it's abused and any story that is negative for any YC/HN related company, against bad social norms in tech hubs, denouncing anti-privacy issues at Google/Faceboo, talking against celebrities like Bill Gates, or anything about NSA tends to go quickly below the fold and mostly ignored. The ranking system is gamed.

I used to come here several times a day, submit stories, try to add interesting comments to discussion (even playing devil's advocate). Now I mostly just skim the front page on slow days and get sad on how concentrated the opinions get.

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