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

31–40 of 103 posts

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#31

Post by melling »

ayrx wrote: post #25
wwweston wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

That would be incorrect. I've asked hundreds of questions on SO. My complaint on Meta just got massively downvoted.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#32

Post by wwweston »

lambda wrote: post #10
wwweston wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, that's exactly the kind of question that StackOverflow wants to discourage; people just using it as requests for someone else to write their code for them.

First: even if it's true that SO wants to discourage people from asking questions where they're starting from scratch and haven't written any code themselves yet... it's still a terrible moderation, because the explanation doesn't communicate anything close to expressing that. It says the question is unclear. That's flatly false.

Second: is this really the kind of question SO doesn't want? Their privilege, if so, but in addition to being well-defined it's clearly content that more than a handful of people were interested in (at least 15 upvotes on the most popular answer, multiply it by the ratio of non-user visitors to user visitors). It's a programming question, it has a programming answer, and it certainly has instructional value as an elisp recipe beyond whatever intent the author had.

And as for whether it's lazy -- that's basically the charge here, right? -- I'm not sure I see a functional difference between someone asking a question like this and someone who has written a larger pile of code and is missing a narrow piece of knowledge to complete it. There's possibly arguably a contextual/rhetorical difference where in the latter situation we see the context which led to the question being asked and in the former we don't... but honestly, nobody who's fundamentally asking other people to just do their work for them is asking about text->html transformations in elisp, it's pretty easy to read between the lines and see that.

To underscore the point, let's just compare it to some other questions:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5410757/delete-a-line-con... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/59895/can-a-bash-script-t... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8168320/can-vim-highlight...

It's pretty easy to see what most of these much more popular questions have in common with the one we're talking about here -- as part of whatever these askers are doing, they know there's a capability embedded in a tool that's part of the environment. They just don't know how to bring it out. You could, of course, just tell them to go RTFM for awk, until they get something simple like deleting a line from a file when it matches a string you know, but then again, you could also tell people to go more carefully read the relevant documentation for most programming problems, and if you accept the question and the answer you've got relevant content people are looking for on the site and a recipe people can start learning more from.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#33

Post by melling »

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.

It was a short well-defined question with given input and a specific output. Elisp isn't the most widely used language so coming up to speed could be time consuming. Someone else even starred it so they must have found it to be useful.

If I'd just ask to "Calculate someone's age in C#", that'd be a much better question?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9/how-do-i-calculate-some...

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#34

Post by melling »

denzil_correa wrote: post #13

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/p…

Questions are also deleted years later when the moderators arbitrarily decide to. They refused to delete my questions when I deleted my account, which made sense because they didn't want to lose all that information. I had over 100 questions, maybe 150 questions, after all.

Tonight, however, someone deleted my question because I discussed it on HN.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#35

Post by ddebernardy »

denzil_correa wrote: post #13

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/p…

Fun paper.

If I may highlight, though, your sample is completely flawed:

1. The close vote queue's backlog is such that most bad questions remain open and therefor don't ever get a chance to be deleted in the first place unless (as you've noted) a moderator randomly runs into them months later.

2. A problem experienced by SO is one-off accounts: users that get question banned end up coming back for more with a new account, and leave the abandonned ones unmaintained. Where a normal user may end up deleting their downvoted questions, an abandonned account's user will not.

Put another way, your sample would be a heck of a lot larger if everything that should likely get deleted would be.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#36

Post by function_seven »

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'm getting a 404 now when I click your link. Was your question deleted after you posted this?

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#37

Post by melling »

function_seven wrote: post #36
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'm getting a 404 now when I click your link. Was your question deleted after you posted this?

Yes, that's how they roll on StackOverflow. Hope they fixed the bug so the guy who answered the question didn't lose his points. He was upvoted 13 times.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#38

Post by olavk »

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 see lots of complaining over SO moderation in this thread and other places, but the actual examples shown always turn out to very sensible moderation. For example your question is clearly not appropriate for SO. You are not asking a specific question, you are just asking people to write code for you. That somebody was nice enough to actually write your code for you, does not mean it was a good question!

Now there might actually be an audience for a "write my code" website, where users could post programming tasks or homework exercises, and other developers then might try to solve them for the fun and challenge of it. But SO clearly does not want to be that kind of website.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#39

Post by olavk »

melling wrote: post #31
ayrx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

That would be incorrect. I've asked hundreds of questions on SO. My complaint on Meta just got massively downvoted.

Can you post a link to one of these unfairly downvoted questions? I'm curious.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#40

Post by melling »

olavk wrote: post #39
melling wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be incorrect. I've asked hundreds of questions on SO. My complaint on Meta just got massively downvoted.

Can you post a link to one of these unfairly downvoted questions? I'm curious.

It was removed from Meta. If there are archives, perhaps my user id can link back? Are the deleted messages purged? My user id from the message: user568866

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-H105lC...

Post reply on HN