The thing that pisses me off the most is when you put the effort into a question that doesn't have an existing solution anywhere on the Internet, including on SO. Within a few seconds of posting, it gets a downvote but no comment. Getting a downvote results in immediate loss of visibility. It really puts you off using the site again. Its happened to the last several questions I've posted.
My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
211–220 of 239 posts
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#212First 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…
The problem doesn't stem from people just being wankers in a chat room, it's a deeper problem than that. It's hard to know exactly why people voted to close the 'niche' question you're talking about, but I had to rant recently to someone else who was complaining about how their 'recommend me a library' question was closed unjustly. What is Stack Overflow's goal ----------------------------- To be a large repository o…
> I think the real problem is that the vast majority of on topic questions have already been asked.
I think this is mostly a problem in so far as answers aren't updated. I'd say that for most "well formed" question belonging on SO that was answered correctly years ago -- most of those answers might no longer be entirely correct and/or the questions themselves might "block" newer (up to date) formulations of the same question.
Things like new versions of compilers, libraries, programming languages, kernel/drivers (and accompanying new hardware) shifts previously correct answers (and "correct" questions) into not-quite-correct-anymore -- but still "too similar" for opening up new questions.
And as questions cease, so does answers, which means the community dissipates/moves on -- and SO becomes irrelevant again. That I think is the danger.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#213First 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…
This has been discussed time and time again: - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/256501/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/271899/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/278092/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/285471/338665 Etc... And especially: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120275/is-asking-oth... Basically, there's nothing wrong with the concept, unless it's used incorrectly. So if someone c…
Are we SURE closing questions is that important? Maybe the original article is on to something: if Stack Overflow was built on a more google-like assumption, relevance would influence rankings and visibility of questions/answers/posts ... but there would be less need for outright removal/closing, which is alienating to posters on a human an emotional level.
What is the argument for closing questions ... logistical? Database is too big?
I am sure there are valid reasons, but maybe they should be reexamined in the context of the human cost, and some tweaks could be made.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rather than outright closing a question it would be more productive if moderators could move the question to the forum it belongs. This type of question is quite common and if the powers that be have decreed that it doesn't belong in the general stack overflow area then a place for these questions should be created.
What forum is that? SO doesn't have forums AFAIK, only questions and answers.
I was referring to the different stack exchange sites as forums.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#215After reading all these (good) comments, I thought I'd go to SO now and try and pitch in and answer a question or two in my domain of expertise. You know...give back to the community. Be a part of the solution.
I found a question that could easily be answered and would be of value to users hitting this issue.
Here's that question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/28541540/how-to-generate-...
I could not stop laughing at how this confirms the insanity being discussed here.
"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..."
Yes. And 238 million people saw Dez Bryant catch that ball notwithstanding the NFL's rule-which-must-be-followed-to-the-letter-of-the-law.
Some guy, or woman, won't get their question answered that could have helped them. It was a reasonable question. And people are willing to help them. In some way, I suspect StackOverflow is incredibly proud they prevented that...but stuck to the letter of the law on their policy.
You win StackOverflow.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
cv-pls should be forbidden, plain and simple. It is detrimental to the quality and atmosphere of the site.
How do you solve the torrent of duplicates and low quality questions then? The review queue is backed up all the time (currently 11900 questions with 1+ close-vote). Ignoring the problem does not make it go away. If you think one of the ways people are trying to solve it should be forbidden, that's fine. Please share an effective alternative.
> How do you solve the torrent of duplicates and low quality questions then
This is what voting/scoring is for on all the SE sites. The cream will rise to the top. It would be easy enough for SE to disallow questions to show up in google results with a low or negative score, but leave it open for people to discuss, clarify or solve. The moderators on SO don't give the real community a chance by closing things within minutes. Duplicates aren't even a real problem, there is nothing wrong with seeing the same questions answered from a different approach or method.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 harn…
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.
I totally agree. This manifests itself in the worst way at http://programmers.stackexchange.com/. Or at least it did when I bothered with that site at all.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mont…
Also, are answers to closed questions stored? If not, and there is a new often used unclose workflow, it would be nice to let users still store their answer, to become visible when it becomes unclosed. This would help with the timing issue and would also give mods a way to see 'oh wait, looking at this answer it is actually too interesting to deserve these close votes'.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#219It has largely become more or less a standard expectation that every single question I come across on Stack Overflow through search engine results will be locked. This expectation is rarely contradicted, and then only usually within very small sub-niche topics (the Racket SO community is quite pleasant, frex). It has rather ensured that I never made any effort to contribute to that community. I do still use SO answer…
May I ask which field/languages you are in? Cause my experience is not entirely like what you (and THE OP, to an extent) describe. Is it possible the community on SO is actually a bunch of subcommunities, not all as nice as the other?
I'm mostly on msbuild/labview/C++/C# tags both for questions and answers. I do see locked questions when looking for answers, but definitely not every single one rather the opposite, and I don't have the impression at all my participation is fruitless: some of my answers get a decent amount of upvotes which should be an indication they are useful now and in the future, some do not (mostly because they are in a less popular tag) but still get an explicit 'thanks this helped' from the OP.
Sure I do see the problems with SO, but unlike some I don't have an urge to rant because the problems are of minor inconvenience for me. Either my threshold for starting a rant is way higher, or I just have less problems. Or a combination of both.
Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow
#220First 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…
Could you please explain what the motivation is to close questions? Who is benefiting from it, and who is it hurting?