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StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

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Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

#91

Post by cardiffspaceman »

christianmann wrote: post #48
scrollaway wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a mere reader and non-user of SO, does it matter if the question was closed? The answer's still there, googlable, and it still gets updated regularly, no?

It suggests that this is not the ideal sort of question for the site, and that any future attempts at similar questions may be met with greater resistance. Additionally, if the relevant information ever changes, no new answers can be submitted.

I posted an answer to a question that had an accepted answer, and it gets upvotes once in a while. The accepted answer was correct at the time. My search for the answer later turned up the SO question and answer plus the new correct answer from the cmake site. So I posted my new information as a new answer.

I think if a question is closed, that would mean no corrections or updates would be possible.

Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

#92

Post by mhink »

jameshart wrote: post #65
troymc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I have this solution, what problems can I solve with it?" is not something a human being generally asks. Either you're being sarcastic, or you have no familiarity with the history of science. The rest of your answer shows another aspect of what's wrong with Stack Overflow: zealous mods who get an idea of the perfect question into their heads, and then who go out to purge anything that doesn't conform, regardless o…

We're not talking about scientific discovery, we're talking about programmers typing questions into google. If you start from 'I want to use sun.misc.Unsafe but I don't know what for - let's see what Google comes up with' you are clearly up to no good. This question is useful as a place for blogposts to link to, not as a primary answer to a question you might Google. So it's 'wrong' for stackoverflow in that sense. B…

I highly doubt anyone starts with "oh hay, I want to use sun.misc.Unsafe". More like "hmm, I think I need to use sun.misc.Unsafe, but I'm not sure if that's the right call. Since this is an uncommon API, it's going to take a bunch of research, which will be a waste of time if I don't need to use it. Let me look up the common applications and see if they pattern-match with the stuff I'm trying to do."

Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

#93

Post by techdragon »

cardiffspaceman wrote: post #90
gnufied wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a tendency among the new mods to retroactively close questions which were asked and answered years ago. Honestly, I don't get it. Here is a question of mine for example ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4701538/javascript-based-... ). Leaving aside the question if the question is indeed off-topic, I don't know why anyone will come 4 years later and question intelligence of person asking the question and p…

When they decided to sprout the "sub-stack-overflows" they decided that each sub would have a topic. There is a sub for interetation of Jewish religious law, and you wouldn't post a programming question there. But if you mostly READ stackoverflow questions (on the subject of coding) and you have a question about using PGP commandline options, you're not supposed to post it on stackoverflow just because it's the one y…

Except these stupidly small pockets of further subculture division generate less and less useful answers.

Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

#94

Post by DanBC »

codinghorror wrote: post #76
DanBC wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SO incentivises some stuff. You ask a question and you get points if other people upvote your question. You answer a question and you get points if someone upvotes your answer. You can't vote on closed questions or answers to closed questions. A question can't just be closed. There needs to be a reason to close it. "This question is a duplicate of this other question" is frequently used. Often the questions are simil…

Incorrect, you can vote on closed questions. You just can't add new answers.

Ah, sorry. Thanks for the clarification.

Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

#95

Post by alfasin »

By definition, this question is off-topic. That said, there are exceptional cases where SO community appreciates the valuable information provided by the answers and marks a question as protected. For example: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-m...

This is one of these rare cases. I'm glad that this question was re-opened and got protected - I think that was the right thing to do.

All that said, I'm sick and tired of all the winning I hear about SO lately, so many complaints, yet, everyone keeps using it.

I do not encourage a vicious behavior as sometimes seen in SO but I also don't like to watch people post again and again the same questions that have been answered multiple times and could be found in a simple google search (and which probably show on the right bar when they compose the question).

I'm also tired of people complaining about closing questions - dudes, if you don't want your question to get closed pretty please put some effort in it! do your research, post what you're tried, compose a minimal working example that reproduces the error, post a FULL stacktrace and show which line triggered it. But no, people don't like to "work hard" so they put all the burden on the people that are here to help them. This is NOT cool. So yes, fuck yes - I will keep voting to close poor questions, and even (potentially) good questions that the author didn't bother to give a fuck about making it clear, readable & reproducable (but please do not dump all your code and expect me to read it if only one small method is relevant) and no - this is almost always NOT a language/culture issue - regardless of what some people say.

Bottom line: they say "in rome act like romans" - well when you join a community you should follow the community rules. Take a few minutes to go through the help center, see if what you're asking is on-topic. Learn how to post a new (good) question. Hell, even ask someone you know to read what you've written and give you the feedback if it's clear and if it makes sense. You want help? so put the time and effort so that we won't waste our time & effort when we try to help you!

Have a nice weekend!

P.S. Those who know me, know that I like to help people regardless of what I just wrote (example): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31358932/is-there-a-payme...

but I really am tired of hearing all the criticism. It bothers me especially when I recognize that it comes from intelligent people that I'm not sure if they're just "playing dumb" or being a "smartass".

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Help us help you!

Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

#96

Post by mistermann »

mostlystatic wrote: post #84
gnufied wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a tendency among the new mods to retroactively close questions which were asked and answered years ago. Honestly, I don't get it. Here is a question of mine for example ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4701538/javascript-based-... ). Leaving aside the question if the question is indeed off-topic, I don't know why anyone will come 4 years later and question intelligence of person asking the question and p…

I think the idea is that new users will find the question and think that the type of question is still welcome on StackOverflow. There used to be a question about popular programming blogs. To me it looked like a good and popular question, so I asked a similar one - which was then closed, because by then the consensus among the mods had moved on to discourage that kind of question.

> I think the idea is that new users will find the question and think that the type of question is still welcome on StackOverflow.

Which brings us back to the original question: why isn't it welcome. Yes, I understand the very real requirement for SO to drift towards a forum, but I think they've drawn the line very far from the optimal place. Furthermore, the insane success of SO has largely killed off specialized forums where that type of very valuable conversation formerly took place. I wish SO would introduce a discussion forum site or "layer" (integrated into SO itself in some way).

Jeff's motivation for SO was something along the lines of making the internet a better place - in my opinion, many of the current mod's actions are contrary to that initiative. SO is still a massive net benefit, but it could be better with a little common sense.

"Update 2: Thanks to the Hacker News community, the post has now been reopened!"

One would hope it would prompt some discussion and soul searching, but I expect not.

Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

#97

Post by rancur »

curiousjorge wrote: post #83

The community of moderators are extremely toxic, heading over to SO's chatrooms gives you a glimpse at the type of people responsible for moderating the content. Hazing new comers when they just have a need to fulfill their curiosity is shut down. All in all, I've moved onto just reading the documentation and figuring things out occassionaly asking a very narrow question on SO. If anyone is thinking of disrupting SO'…

> disrupting

the largest barrier to this is user training-- informing and getting people to move over. I originally conceived of this barrier 5 minutes ago when reading about HappyFinder or some other fuzzy finding tool that made it to FP-- why do we have to have a complex name that redefines a word to fit the solution space? The most efficient would be 'AHelmAlternative'. Similarly the competition to 'StackOverflow' would be 'StackOverflowAlternative1'

sounds horrible, but uses encoding to efficiently replace extensive time/marketing to gain mindshare. Oh, Alternative1 didn't work, we don't like it so we're going to start our own, it'll be called Alternative2. 'Hey, we made it, we're going to rename in 6 months. You can start using the new domain name now.'

Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

#98

Post by mistermann »

curiousjorge wrote: post #85
codinghorror wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect, you can vote on closed questions. You just can't add new answers.

I understand that SO is about building a knowledgebase but isn't it clear that a lot of people view SO as more of a Q&A + forum? When you close a question, it feels like censorship, which is frustrating because continued discussion and up to date answers are almost always expected. Anyhow, SO isn't the same site it was 5 years ago. It's actually pretty darn toxic for new userbase and seems to cater to the mods themse…

> continued discussion and up to date answers are almost always expected

That's another frustrating gap in SO: the absolute ignorance of the notion of time and change. Both questions and answers often have a significant timeliness attribute (ex: what are the best online resources for learning as of Jan 2015), and SO has no support for this. To be fair it's a hard problem, but I'm not even aware if it has even been discussed.

I'd like to think that the platform is now mature and tuned enough that they could start to introduce some major new functionality rather than just keeping the lights on.

Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

#99

Post by rancur »

JamesBarney wrote: post #43
ceejayoz wrote: post #11

IMO, one thing that'd help would be requiring more close/delete votes for questions with lots of upvotes (and lots of heavily upvoted answers) like this one had. That said, the question - "Of course the Unsafe class is undocumented, but how can I use it in a real world scenario" - is pretty much the definition of "too broad". That said, I voted to undelete and reopen, which appears to have succeeded.

The problem is there is an incredible amount of overlap between "too broad" and "extremely useful to large number of people".

> useful

reminds me of accurate wikipedia articles closing or being removed because wikipedia was trying to be an encyclopedia, instead of the first source for information on anything and everything you want to know about

Re: StackOverflow modding itself out of existence

#100

Post by rancur »

jonahx wrote: post #75
JamesBarney wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is there is an incredible amount of overlap between "too broad" and "extremely useful to large number of people".

Prioritizing the latter over the former solves a large part of SO's overmodding problems.

I am now coining the nickname 'ModOverflow'. tell your friends!
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