51–60 of 103 posts
TIL the third most down-voted question on Stack Overflow has 3,735 upvotes and almost 1000 favorites.
Yes, of course, I understand the assertion: that by attacking questioners instead of helping them, the alpha dogs are laboring selflessly to defend the quality of Stack Overflow. You should thank them for biting you.
What nonsense. Imagine if Google took the SO approach to quality and prioritized making you jump through hoops with your question over trying to find the best answer it can: "your phrasing is ambiguous; if you think otherwise, you can try rephrasing your query properly and try again", or "you have misspelled one of the search terms; you should figure out which one and look up the correct spelling before submitting a search; this is, you'll agree, in everyone's best interest". Or, "not a constructive search query; might lead to pages that include opinions". Or how about, "some of the words in your query resemble those in another query made several years ago; here are their results; if their results aren't helpful to you, you should have asked a better question."
Of course SO, unlike Google, stores the questions, but SO could still learn from Google's example. Google is so useful, because instead of improving quality by strictly limiting what it will index and what you can ask ("no pages expressing opinions", "index no new pages discussing any aspect of a topic if some aspect of that topic was discussed on another page already in the index", "the answer to your query has been found but will not be displayed, because it was not of interest to our moderators"), it includes as much real (not fake) content as it can and uses technology to lead any question to the most relevant answer it can.
How ironic that when you use Google to find a programming answer, it so often judges some Stack Overflow entry most relevant. Then, if you follow the link, you find that someone was trying to provide exactly the answer you were looking for, but the mods spotted him, ruled that what Google had correctly deemed most relevant to be "Not Constructive!" and had forbidden anyone else from answering.
I'd love to see an alternative to SO that optimized for answering questions instead of controlling them. One that allowed almost any programming question, allowed anyone who wanted to answer to freely answer, that collected reams of overlapping explanations and answers to multiple variations of programming questions, and that used state of the art technology to lead questioners to those answers that were likely to be most successful at answering your specific question, while leaving the question open to anyone who wanted to volunteer new answers, even if they are repeats or opinions, or provide their own best-guess links to previous answers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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...
It'd be interesting if they would just register something like shitpile.com, set up an instance of Stack Exchange on it, turn off the moderation game, and push closed and deleted questions there instead of disappearing them.
That would at least sort of be an experiment on whether all of the decisions they have made about what Stack Exchange sites are 'supposed to be' actually matter or not.
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.
(the fact that you can't be in any way contributing to the site until you asked enough questions to bump up your karma is another blocker)
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…
Not taking into account specifics of a particular domain - along with questions being judged by people who have no idea what is being asked, but feel the need to judge - was the very thing which made me leave SO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8928601/how-can-i-split-a...
There's probably 100x more C# information than elisp on the internet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
It is arguably more specific. It'd be interesting if they would just register something like shitpile.com, set up an instance of Stack Exchange on it, turn off the moderation game, and push closed and deleted questions there instead of disappearing them. That would at least sort of be an experiment on whether all of the decisions they have made about what Stack Exchange sites are 'supposed to be' actually matter or n…
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 point is, when you look at even few examples taken together, you realize that those "sensible moderation decision" cover pretty much the entire space of possible questions. There is no good question on SO. Moderation seems to be applied unevenly and sometimes totally at random.
This is why I don't even ask questions on SO - I have no idea how to write one to be sure I won't end up at -100 (or +100, but Closed As Not Constructive, which is SO's way of highlighting actually interesting questions).