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Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

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Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#11

Post by fapjacks »

melling wrote: post #3

I've got the most downvoted Emacs question. It was actually even more downvoted at one point. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp... It was a pretty good question but I got into a debate with a moderator. That was my last question and I did a rage quit. As you can see it was a simple well-defined question, and it produced two good answers.

Echoing other sentiments, this is not a good question at all. You haven't shown code that you've tried, you're not asking a specific question about the problem you're having writing such code, and (worst) you're basically asking someone to write the code for you. This is a code request, NOT a question about coding.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#13

Post by denzil_correa »

The questions which are really poor in quality end up being deleted. We did some analysis of deleted questions and our results were published at WWW 2014 [0]. The dataset of deleted questions (up until June 2013) is also publicly available [1]. We also built a machine learning system to predict questions that would be deleted in the future using various features [2].

[0] http://www2014.kr/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/proceedings_p63...

[1] https://archive.org/details/stackoverflow_2013_05_deleted_po...

[2] https://github.com/denzilc/stackoverflow-deleted-prediction

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#14

Post by hurin »

IgorPartola wrote: post #6

I was expecting horrible questions, basically spam. Nope, these are real and legitimate questions and I don't see why most of these were downvoted. I wonder what the data looks like beyond just some of the worst questions, and whether the trend is going to be more and more "legitimate questions that are either 'obvious' or already answered get downvoted." If so, that cannot be a good thing.

Most down-voted doesn't mean it hadn't been upvoted, it just means a lot of the people looking at it thought it was a bad question.

This one made me chuckle: What is the name of the “-->” operator?

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#16

Post by vijayboyapati »

Sadly the Stackoverflow community seems to have become a lot more officious in the last few years and the number of petty bureaucrats has skyrocketed. I asked a genuine question which I didn't know the answer to and which I was hoping someone else may have come across. It was immediately downvoted for not having a proposed solution. Eventually it was upvoted and became positive because it was a genuinely useful question. That kind of officiousness is completely unnecessary and needlessly turns people off participating in the community.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#19

Post by stinos »

vijayboyapati wrote: post #16

Sadly the Stackoverflow community seems to have become a lot more officious in the last few years and the number of petty bureaucrats has skyrocketed. I asked a genuine question which I didn't know the answer to and which I was hoping someone else may have come across. It was immediately downvoted for not having a proposed solution. Eventually it was upvoted and became positive because it was a genuinely useful quest…

May I ask which part of the community, which tags? I hear a lot of these complaints here on HN about the unfriendly/bureaucratic/aggressive nature of SO but don't seem to encounter it all that much while using it. Which could mean either I'm not botered with it enough, or I really don't see it, or it's not there, for the tags I'm mostly active in (c++/labview/matlab/msbuild/c#). Is it possible there are a couple of subcommunities on HN, some (I'd guess web-related or so since that is a field I never looked into) more violent than the other.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#20

Post by debaserab2 »

lambda wrote: post #9
melling wrote: post #3

I've got the most downvoted Emacs question. It was actually even more downvoted at one point. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11706028/creating-a-elisp... It was a pretty good question but I got into a debate with a moderator. That was my last question and I did a rage quit. As you can see it was a simple well-defined question, and it produced two good answers.

> It was a pretty good question No, this is not a good question for StackOverflow. You simply asked for someone to write code for you, which is not what StackOverflow is intended to be for. It is intended for help on a particular specific problem you are having with your own code.

And yet there is at least one, if not two very useful answers to his supposed non-question.

Thank god for these arbitrary community standards, shielding people from getting useful answers to questions that are deemed as formatted incorrectly.

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