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My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

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Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#181

Post by speeder »

reitanqild wrote: post #174
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.

> What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though. Or maybe, as I have already answered ircmaxell, Stack Overflow could raise the bar for asking questions ever so slightly from being the one thing you can do without rep? If torrents of new users asking stupid questions are the biggest problem on the site this seems like a first obvious step.

I bet that most new users became new users to ask questions, including users that are not high rep veterans.

I think that if you do what you propose, the site will just freeze in terms of user base.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#182

Post by rbobby »

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.

An auto-unclose process that examined web logs for direct hits from google might be nice too. And closed question that gets N hits from google probably deserves to be reopened with a special "google wants an answer" tag.

I usually (always) search google for my problem de jour. And frequently (enough so I remember) the first stackoverflow result is my exact question... but closed. Probably happens once or twice a month, and usually on something "thorny" (i.e. no clear cut answer... so "primarily opinion based" answers are fine... I can compare the top voted answers and decide for myself).

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#183

Post by mlitchard »

speeder wrote: post #181
reitanqild wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though. Or maybe, as I have already answered ircmaxell, Stack Overflow could raise the bar for asking questions ever so slightly from being the one thing you can do without rep? If torrents of new users asking stupid questions are the biggest problem on the site this seems like a first obvious step.

I bet that most new users became new users to ask questions, including users that are not high rep veterans. I think that if you do what you propose, the site will just freeze in terms of user base.

Would it be reasonable to have an invitation from a person with x reputation bump someone up to the required rep to ask questions? One could spend time in meta, and the chat room where people could get to know them. For the well-intended but naive, this would encourage getting to know the site and expectations of the culture. For the people who are just a bad fit, they could be filtered with minimal effort. Would there be any undesirable consequences from this approach?

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#184

Post by jrochkind1 »

I think I may just be becoming a grumpy old man programmer,

But my frustration with stack overflow lately is with how many people ask ill-formed questions because they don't understand what they're talking about -- and don't seem to _want_ to understand what they're talking about, they just want a copy-paste solution. (Worse is when the answers are from people who similarly have no idea what they're talking about)

Rails is not an end-user app. It's a framework for developers. You use it to program. If you don't know what you're doing, copy-paste from reddit/SO aren't actually going to get you very far.

Now, what might make it an "SO community" issue, is that when I try to explain the fundamental concepts involved (which I actually kind of enjoy doing, when I'm in the mood), my answers -- or the questions themselves -- are likely to be closed/deleted as inappropriate.

Now, many questioners aren't even interested in this kind of answer, it's true, they just want a copy-paste. Sometimes you can give them one (even if it doesn't serve them very well because they are trying to do the wrong thing, or dont' even know what they're trying to do), sometimes their question is so off that it's not even possible.

But for those who are -- maybe we need a place where people can actually get fundamental conceptual things explained, like you'd do in a professor or TA's office hours. And SO doesn't seem to want to be that place?

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#185

Post by jrochkind1 »

angersock wrote: post #109
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.

Sure, but my job isn't affected by voting rings on HN, nor does YCombinator justify a totalitarian moderation policy by claiming to be the best google-able SEO-optimized source for whatever it is I'm questioning.

How is your job affected by voting rings on SO? I'm not challenging you, just asking for more clarification because I don't follow and am curious!

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#187

Post by zyxley »

endgame wrote: post #111
O____________O wrote: post #73

Every time I work on a project dealing with unusual C++/Windows/COM topics, I end up hitting a high percentage of highly relevant, closed questions. The worst are the ones where I figure out the convoluted solution, but I can't answer the existing question because it's closed. So, anyone after me will suffer the same aggravation or simply give up. The worst are the ones where some new mod has trolled through four-yea…

I've given up on SO as well. Like I said last time it came up here: > When it was young you could find veteran wizards who answered all sorts of obscure things because it was fun. The last straw for me was seeing a perfectly valid question about video memory in DOS get drive-by closed by some mod. You used to be able to find stuff about ZZT-OOP on SO. Not anymore. I don't know if you could call it an outright failure…

>ZZT-OOP

Now there's a burst of nostalgia.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#188

Post by Larrikin »

mlitchard wrote: post #183
speeder wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet that most new users became new users to ask questions, including users that are not high rep veterans. I think that if you do what you propose, the site will just freeze in terms of user base.

Would it be reasonable to have an invitation from a person with x reputation bump someone up to the required rep to ask questions? One could spend time in meta, and the chat room where people could get to know them. For the well-intended but naive, this would encourage getting to know the site and expectations of the culture. For the people who are just a bad fit, they could be filtered with minimal effort. Would the…

Who do you imagine would be the user that would bother going through this interview process? If you've used the site before you already know how strict the moderation is on questions keeping people from asking questions already, do you really want to add a process where the user has to kiss up to the moderators for a couple weeks before asking their question as well?

It just would not be worth any new users time, especially given that when a user wants a question answered, it tends be slightly time sensitive.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#189

Post by spinlock »

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…

> somehow grasping the house rules seems to be easier for people here than on SO.

When the house rules include not saying "Thank you" your going to see a race to the bottom in terms of human kindness.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#190

Post by spinlock »

Danack wrote: post #157
monksy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to ask the following question [on 2 different situations] in the last 2 weeks: Are there any [lang] libraries that are backings for the [service] API? I stopped myself before going to SO because I knew that topic would get closed within seconds and I'd comments berating me for asking the wrong question. For the most part the only use I've gotten from SO has been from basic questions when I'm starting out…

"Are there any [lang] libraries that are backings for the [service] API?" This is explicitly listed as off-topic: Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, "software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it."

I disagree. The question does not ask to find a library but rather it asks about the internal workings of a service.
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