My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow • Hacker News Board

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#191

Post by spinlock » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 1:42 AM UTC

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…

> It's also darkly funny when a mod clearly doesn't understand the technology involved, and thus doesn't understand that it is, in fact, valid and properly worded.

Oh man, I ran into this the other day when asking about Ember.RSVP.Promise.all.then. A mod (or I guess just a power user) accused me of not reading the docs and recommended closing the question. He provided a link to the docs on Ember.RSVP.Promise.then (notice the lack of "all" in there) as evidence that I didn't read the documentation. He was rude, I was rude, fun times were had by all. But, after I made the point that the function I was talking about operated on arrays and not individual objects (and is also basically undocumented) he deleted his comments and then went and downvoted all of my other questions.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#192

Post by phkahler » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 1:47 AM UTC

One of the examples he gives falls under computational geometry even if its a basic question. Categorically those have become off-topic even though there is a tag for it. Seriously, go find something that requires some dot or cross products to compute and ask it - but not anything that resembles a graph, because they like graph theory.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#193

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 1:49 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #185

angersock wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

[deleted]

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#194

Post by jghn » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 1:49 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #185

angersock wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

An argument could be made that many people are hitting SO multiple times a day in the course of doing their jobs. If the questions and answers are biased by voting rings the results might not be optimal

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#195

Post by aaronchall » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 1:51 AM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #167

aaronchall wrote: post #165

I feel you, seems like too much soup-nazi. I think maybe I've burned some friends I myself have encouraged to try to get started on the site. But it's the nature of the site. No one else is doing it. Maybe that's because it's not easy. Maybe you should compete with them. I have a feeling there's a lot of people here who've been burned by SO. I know I have. But you can't argue with success. So I've thickened my skin a…

At this point I think it's hard to compete with SO because it's so clear-cut and full of questions and answers for common things. "Running out of questions." comes to mind. Also, off-topic, I don't think being in a top percentage is something to brag about or a sign of merit. I've done nothing but ask stupid questions on SO and I was lucky to be there when the site was new (lots of high-coin questions!) and I'm in th…

That's a good point, but the top 1% (where I expect to be in a year or two) is close to the end of a long tail. Not many people get there by asking questions, and I only started contributing about a year and a half ago.

That percentile rank is a foot in the door in a lot of situations. If someone who is interested in me finds out it's because I give comprehensive smart answers with strong communication, in spite of the fact that I wasn't around when there were lots of easy questions to be had, I think I've got something pretty good to brag about.

That's not to say that I wouldn't consider someone who asks lots of good questions too. That requires communication skills as well as technical skills. I personally find it harder to ask good questions than to give good answers.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#196

Post by ryan-allen » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 1:56 AM UTC

I reckon about 20% of the things I find on Stack Overflow while searching via Google are questions that have been closed for being irrelevant.

And my favourite questions are often those ones in the 20%, for example, when you type "1nf vs 2nf vs 3nf" into Google, the top page, is this StackOverflow post:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/723998/what-are-1nf-2nf-a...

Despite the fact that the top answer has 218 upvotes, the question has been closed as 'not constructive' (which is cearly not the damn case, it's the top hit in Google for fuck sake!).

Stack Overflow should either stop this from happening somehow, or back their own goddamn policy and deindex or remove this content from the site.

That answer can no longer be improved upon, despite the fact it has such high search ranking, because some idiot deemed it 'not constructive'. What hogwash.

There is clearly a gap in the market right here that Stack Overflow either needs to plug, or someone else will (and at their expense).

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#197

Post by sirclueless » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:01 AM UTC

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."

And this is precisely why I left SO. Without fail, the most interesting and useful questions for me on the site were more or less surveys of the population -- "What's a good library for reading XML in C#?", "XYZ looks like it was abandoned, is there a good replacement?", "Why is Python 3's virtualenv different" and that kind of thing.

Maybe that's just me, because if there ever is a question with one correct technical answer, it's easy to figure out on your own. The things I want to interact with a human to figure out are universally to do with historical reasons for things, ergonomic choices, and opinions on quality. I want a smart person with strong opinions, not a politically correct karma grinder who can type quickly.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#198

Post by lstamour » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:10 AM UTC

_kst_ wrote: post #29

jarrettc wrote: post #22

I've always been uneasy about the fact that Stack Overflow users can edit each other's posts more or less arbitrarily. User A can edit user B's post to say something embarrassing, and most readers will attribute it to User B. I've had this happen with my posts. It's never been egregious, like a user inserting something inflammatory into my otherwise mundane programming question. Most often, the offending edits give t…

You should receive a notification whenever someone else edits one of your posts. If the edit is inappropriate, you can revert it or re-edit it. "Edit wars" do happens sometimes, but they're discouraged, and you can always flag for moderator attention if it comes to that.

I didn't realize how much edit comments (description of changes) mattered until I saw some of my deleted/unapproved edits. E.g. Editing an answer to add an environment variable that was actually required was denied. I ended up writing it as a comment and had someone thank me for it in the comments. Had the edit been accepted there would have been less comment spam and more "good answer" on that page...

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#199

Post by teh_klev » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:16 AM UTC

ircmaxell wrote: post #179

teh_klev wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but they don't have to be caustic and quite so unpleasant in the chat room. I am outing, specifically, Terenko. In all my years as a forum contributor/mod I don't think I've encountered such a poisonous dick as that person. I know you do a lot of good work for the PHP community, along with Gordon and many others, but, my friend terenko is truly a knob end and sadly encourages others who are up and coming PHP de…

Why did we tolerate it? Because we weren't given the tools to do anything about it. We couldn't kick or ban people. We couldn't moderate our own room. All we (as owners) could do was move messages or flag. We got yelled at every time we flagged something, so we learned to live with it. The only other option we had was to leave (which many users did, even leaders). Today, we have the ability to kick-ban. Awesome. But…

Problem was that you and Gordon and the reasonable crowd ignored it, allowed him to keep being a snidey tool. I'm not blaming you specifically, but that individual was never complained about by you guys - there were ways to reach out to mods outside of the regular chat room tools. In fact, Tim Post and I tried for a while to assist the PHP community with stuff like creating canonical questions and answers, you knew where who we were, we were on your side, my email address was always on my profile.

If I'd gotten a message from yourself or Gordon about this kinda thing (out of band), I knew who you guys were, you are the life and soul of the PHP community on SO. We'd have acted, you're too good to lose.

But...as mods we kept a fairly light touch with regards to stomping into chat rooms and reading the riot act (even politely) because otherwise we'd be meta'd as Nazis's, Fascists and Stalinists. I remember many occasions us being lambasted for trying to "moderate" out unpleasantness (in the PHP and C++ rooms), I eventually gave up my mod diamond because I'd run out of "trying to be nice and diplomatic" energy.

Such is the way of curating a community.

I used to sit in the PHP chat room and become quite depressed that his attitude became the standard.

You know something, as a developer/ops for a web hoster I was about to throw my weight into the PHP project back in ~2010, i.e. contributions, bug reporting from live bulk hosted environments (we probably host around 12k busy PHP sites on Linux and IIS - sure not huge, we're a business focused hoster, uptime and rapid support is paramount [and we do ASP.NET, Perl, Classic ASP], but for a ten man company with some heavily customised environments it's a chunk of work), that kinda thing...but that room turned me off (that and the PHP dev mailing list - but that's another story).

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#200

Post by tptacek » Wed, Feb 18, 2015, 2:38 AM UTC

alecco wrote: post #150

reitanqild wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 seve…

There is a huge availability bias at work here. You don't notice the stories that you don't like getting flagged off the site, but you naturally do notice when it happens to stories you like.

For at least some of these topics, Occam's Razor suggests it's the bias that's stinging you, not gamesmanship. What plausible gaming could be at work on behalf of Bill Gates?

For others, I have a really hard time believing that the gamesmanship has the directionality you think it does. NSA stories, for instance, have enormous support on HN. It is draining to express any skepticism on those stories at all. They also seem to be continually bolted to the top of the front page.