Stack Overflow karma system is broken. It turned into a playground for people who like to show off their power given by the points while becoming a searchable library of code snippets for the others. The code snippets tend to be old, since asking new questions is discouraged and nobody likes to update old questions with new answers.
The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#12The worst part for me is when you ask a hard question and rather than admitting they don't know the answer they decide to close it because they think they have got you on a technicality about the validity of the question. Or a similar variation, it's a hard problem, and they don't know, so they assume you are a complete idiot and ask you to verify things that were implicit in the question. Like, you said you did X an…
Still, there aren't alternatives on Stack Overflow. You either post there and hope your question isn't closed and it will get an insightful answer putting you on the good track, or you do some digging yourself until you get the answer, even if it's going to take a massive amount of time.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#13That's a dark pattern.
They didn't like having to openly apply human judgement so they applied AI. AI that has some human judgement built in. And bias along with it. But now nobody is responsible because the machine did it.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#14While I find Stack Overflow very useful, I find it's model very restrictive. Sometimes you can get more insight on how to solve a problem from a discussion than from an answer. Why and when can be as important as how. Also, if people dislike your question, even it obeys the rules, it gets down voted. They can dislike your question because they dislike the problem you are going to solve or the way you are trying to do…
If you're lucky, your language/library/etc might have a fairly active IRC channel or similar. Popular languages often have a myriad of channels dedicated to different subtopics.
They're nice because like you said, discussion can be much more helpful than a single answer.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#15No moderators left to ban, I see.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#16That's a dark pattern. They didn't like having to openly apply human judgement so they applied AI. AI that has some human judgement built in. And bias along with it. But now nobody is responsible because the machine did it.
TFA appears to address this, the automated system is used to help identify comments for human moderators. The human is the one responsible. And according to stack overflow they plan to use this system only to help the human moderators.
If you don't believe them and suspect they will have a fully AI flagging system in the future (in direct contradiction of this post) thats fine but it might be better stated as such, since human judgement is currently still paramount.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#17I feel they never truly recovered moderator goodwill after that fiasco months ago so they tried to promote more people into doing it, me included (1.3k to 2.1k reputation overnight)
Apparently it didn't work (I'll not edit people's questions!) so now they'll try automating it. Good luck to them but I'm not seeing them succeed in an area where nobody has.
And, as others said, SO isn't the same as before. It's mostly a homework finder and it doesn't encourage newer versions of code.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#18I know HN likes to berate on SO as if it’s some has-been that nobody uses anymore.
Just the other day I asked a fairly specific question, putting in some effort of writing code examples and add links to relevant documentation and within a day I had a four paragraph, in-depth answer.
No, I did not get any upvotes or smiley-stickers, but I got for free what I wouldn’t even know how to buy.
Moreover, I end up on SO daily when programming.
The utility of SO is second to none and it has been that way for over a decade.
That is pretty amazing in my book.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had the same thought, but I think this except from the post assuaged some of those concerns: "We want to make clear here that even though the current version of the robot appears to be performing amazingly well, our human flaggers are just as important as ever. The only reason the robot is able to do as well as it’s doing is because of the 100,000+ flags that humans have raised and moderators have handled. The robo…
Unfriendly comments are the least of their problems. The fundamental problem is their broken reputation system. Questions are outright closed by people with a high enough karma even if it is outside of their knowledge domain. People who leave helpful feedback after a downvote will receive a retaliatory downvote in turn. People with massive karma will receive upvotes even if their answer is not a good one. To boost ka…
Exactly, the biggest problem is the culture of existing users, which was built up by stack overflow encouraging a competition for internet points which leads to all kinds of antisocial behaviour and attempts to game the system and discourage participation by rivals.
Re: The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments
#20While I find Stack Overflow very useful, I find it's model very restrictive. Sometimes you can get more insight on how to solve a problem from a discussion than from an answer. Why and when can be as important as how. Also, if people dislike your question, even it obeys the rules, it gets down voted. They can dislike your question because they dislike the problem you are going to solve or the way you are trying to do…
If you're lucky, your language/library/etc might have a fairly active IRC channel or similar. Popular languages often have a myriad of channels dedicated to different subtopics. They're nice because like you said, discussion can be much more helpful than a single answer.
Great suggestion.
However, one issue I've run into with the rise of chat and SO, and removal of forums, is that if your question isn't the right fit for SO, and is a bit tricky/time consuming, it's easy for your query to be buried.
I reached out to the TypeScript community via Discord about assistance on how one would add TypeScript definitions to an existing JS repo. Got a little discussion, IIRC, and then because of other factors, was buried.