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Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

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Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#41

Post by wwweston »

reneherse wrote: post #28
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...

And, in case the cache goes when Google next indexes, here's screenshot of the cache:

http://imgur.com/JLRc3tY

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#42

Post by lambda »

wwweston wrote: post #32
lambda wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The moderation works based on votes one one of a few pre-canned reasons from several different users. If enough users vote to close, the pre-canned response that the most voted for is what is listed. That means that it doesn't always exactly match the reason that the question was really closed, but it means that it's possible to give an approximate rationale for the close that was performed by several people, not a single person.

I have answered a lot of questions on StackOverflow. One of the worst type of questions is the "please, write this code for me" question. There are frequently lazy or incompetent programmers who just ask for code to do their job, along with students who are asking people to help them cheat on their homework. So many people on SO are very quick to downvote and close any such questions.

Now, there's a grey area. Asking how to do one specific task which is a small component of a larger program is different enough than asking someone to deliver a completed program to you that it's tolerated. Asking something like "how do I use this one facility in a language" is different than asking "please write this tool for me."

There's also just the fickleness of the crowd. Any site which is based on voting, like StackOverflow, Reddit, HN, and so on, can have some questions upvoted and some downvoted due to sheer bad luck, different sets of people looking at different sets of questions, and so on. Trying to expect that a large group will act in a coherent manner, when only a small subset of that group ever even sees any given question (and with strong bias, as different people follow different tags), is just going to set you up for disappointment.

> 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.

Actually, take a look at melling's later comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126537

> Elisp isn't the most widely used language so coming up to speed could be time consuming.

Yep, sounds like he was just asking someone else to do a job for him, he wasn't interested in learning elisp.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#43

Post by melling »

fapjacks wrote: post #11
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.

* How do I loop over an Emacs buffer and process each line?

* How do I split a string in Elisp?

* How do I construct output to an Emacs buffer?

All were answered in a little over a dozen lines of Elisp. Small, well-defined, pieces of code are a great way to learn.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#44

Post by denzil_correa »

ddebernardy wrote: post #35
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 ac…

Thanks.

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

I would respectfully disagree. :)

> 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.

A question could be deleted even if it was not closed earlier. Closed Question is just "one way" for a question to be deleted (Refer Figure 1). In fact, only 14.38% of the questions which were deleted were marked as 'Closed' (Refer Table 6). Your intuition about "moderator random runs" was however found to be true. In case, you are suggesting that most 'closed' questions should be considered as future 'deleted' that is a call IMO would not like to make. In any case, we found that deleted questions are more poor in quality than closed questions (Refer Section 4.5 Sub section "Quality Pyramid"). In that light, it would make sense to treat them as separate entities.

TL;DR - Deleted questions are beyond repair but Closed questions could be patched up

> 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.

This may be true but it does not necessarily mean there is a problem with the dataset sample. It simply means that the problem is more challenging :)

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

Since all closed questions do not get deleted, this may not necessarily be true. But, since you suggested closed questions, we had a prequel to our deleted questions paper which was about analysis and prediction of closed questions [0, 1]. You might like that as well!

[0] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19882021/pdf/cosn-2013.p...

[1] http://cosn.acm.org/2013/files/Session7/Session7Paper4.pdf

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#45

Post by denzil_correa »

melling wrote: post #34
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.

I agree with you. However, the problem is that we can't consider something as a true positive (for a paper) based on gut or intuition. We have to rely on some sort of ground truth and this is the best sanitized sample we could get.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#46

Post by melling »

olavk wrote: post #38
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 m…

The answer was 15 lines of very educational code that would have benefited anyone learning elisp.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#47

Post by melling »

lambda wrote: post #42
wwweston wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The moderation works based on votes one one of a few pre-canned reasons from several different users. If enough users vote to close, the pre-canned response that the most voted for is what is listed. That means that it doesn't always exactly match the reason that the question was really closed, but it means that it's possible to give an approximate rationale for the close that was performed by several people, not a s…

Wrong. You don't have to guess if it was for my job, I'm here!

I don't know anyone who gets paid to write elisp.

I'd just used AWK or Perl if it were for my job. It's a 1 liner.

perl -ane '...'

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#48

Post by jacquesm »

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?

Apparently. That's a pretty sick move. In other words, you can't talk even about stackoverflow on another forum without stackoverflow moderators trying to take control of the discussion.

Whoever did this on SO should have their moderator privileges removed pronto, that's a very bad piece of advertising for SO and hurts its image much more than the rest of this discussion and the original article combined.

Re: Most Down-Voted Stack Overflow Questions

#49

Post by olavk »

melling wrote: post #46
olavk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

The answer was 15 lines of very educational code that would have benefited anyone learning elisp.

To put it bluntly, it would have been much more educational for you if you had actually tried to code it yourself. If you during this had encountered a concrete problem or question which you couldn't solve on your own, you could have posted it on SO.
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