Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

data.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 103 posts

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#21

Post by scrapcode »

stinos wrote: post #19
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 s…

I'm a hobby dev of 12+ years. I've yet to find a polite IRC channel or discussion forum that offers genuine help. The online community of hackers is MUCH unlike the real-world community of hackers that you'd meet at a conference etc, in my experience. =[

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#22

Post by pascal_cuoq »

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.

These are only questions that for some reason received a lot of visibility and as a consequence were seen by more people who thought they weren't interesting. They were also seen by more people who thought they were great questions and upvoted them.

The only conclusion I draw from this database query is that “most downvoted” is not an interesting metric.

You are right that these are old. The only way for a question to be in the top ranks for visibility is to have had a long time to be visible over. This doesn't mean that duplicate questions do not get asked, answered and upvoted. Too much so in my opinion.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#23

Post by duncanawoods »

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…

At least you were told why you were downvoted.

I just had a similar experience - I posted an (IMHO) well written question that was immediately downvoted with no comment. It has no answers because I suspect few people are going to look at a This upset me more than it should because in a vulnerable moment of need, I was digitally slapped. SO used to feel like a special gem of altruism where devs helped each other out for the love of it but now it feels like a faceless, cruel and nasty place that I want to avoid. I don't think we fully account for the emotional impact of such events when we introduce voting\karma type features.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#25

Post by ayrx »

wwweston wrote: post #5
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.

Is there any kind of Stack facility for complaining about the quality of moderation? Because the moderation here is so clearly wrong that I'm not sure the people who made that call should have posting privileges on the site, let alone moderation.

You are clearly not a frequent user of Stack Exchange because you do not know about the meta sites which are available to discuss moderation decisions. And if you are not a frequent user who are you to say that "the moderation here is so clearly wrong that I'm not sure the people who made that call should have posting privileges on the site, let alone moderation"?

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#26

Post by bjwbell »

scrapcode wrote: post #21
stinos wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I'm a hobby dev of 12+ years. I've yet to find a polite IRC channel or discussion forum that offers genuine help. The online community of hackers is MUCH unlike the real-world community of hackers that you'd meet at a conference etc, in my experience. =[

I've been surprised by how helpful some of the devs on the mozilla #servo channel are to noobies NOT like other IRC channels I could name. In my experience smaller communities are nicer on average.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#27

Post by bjwbell »

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.

I have to laugh, the question is now deleted due to your linking to it from here I'm assuming .

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#28

Post by reneherse »

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.

Google's cache of the now deleted page: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lC...

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#30

Post by lmm »

hurin wrote: post #14
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?

Before I clicked through I thought that was going to be a scalaz question.
Post reply on HN