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StackOverflow unwinding?

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Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#101

Post by wpietri »

kmfrk wrote: post #95
debacle wrote: post #16

The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases. I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently. The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions wi…

This was one of the things that drove me away from Quora (amongst plenty of other things). It felt extremely bureaucratic and arbitrary, and the tone of the moderator replies on Quora really brought down morale - along with the downvote feature. I will grant SO that you always know when you are being moderated; Hacker News and Quora does this more surreptitiously, which is more infuriating by an order of magnitude.

I have the opposite impression of Quora, really, and I think their voting design is brilliant. It's designed to maximize viewer utility and poster enjoyment at the expense of transparency. I get how it's infuriating to a certain type of user, but in doing so they've removed a lot of opportunities for negative interactions.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#102

Post by chavesn »

andrewcooke wrote: post #93
spolsky wrote: post #61

None of the actual metrics of the site bear this out. I don't know what "myspacing" is, and "floundering" is pretty subjective, but in terms of actual measurable things, we have more questions asked, more questions answered, more people active on the site, more sites with more activity and most metrics are up about 100% in the last year. Some of the things that we track pretty closely (like number of users who ask or…

so why are so many people convinced otherwise? most posts here are from people apparently tired of so. if you're only measuring positives, what are you missing that explains the negatives? it's understandable being defensive. but maybe that reflex is causing you to miss something? [edit: also, how do you measure evaporative cooling?]

One possible explanation: People here, generally speaking, like a community that is about the people. Aside from meta.stackoverflow, Stack Overflow's model makes that difficult. That's ok, because Stack Overflow is not a social network - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/128552/143601

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#103

Post by wpietri »

spolsky wrote: post #77
buro9 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With communities in general (not explicitly referencing SO here), I've always felt that moderators are their own worst enemies. They dictate the terms of use through enforcement. It's not fun to use something until you find that you aren't allowed to. The best tools do not limit their usage patterns, and communities adapt and evolve to make these tools solve their problems. These aren't always the same problems that…

And yet, Stack Overflow gets 7000 questions a day, and manages to maintain a very high quality compared to sites with less moderation. The very moderation which detracts from the community feeling is what's keeping the quality of the site up and helping create a valuable permanent resource on the Internet, which is our primary goal. Like Wikipedia, strict rules are what lead to a valuable artifact. Stack Overflow's r…

That you don't know what community means is kind of sad, but it certainly explains the decisions that drove me (and others here) away from Stack Overflow.

Speaking as a Wikipedia admin, you're replicating a mistake that I think has harmed Wikipedia immensely without mirroring one of the key safety valves.

Wikipedia has a problem that's well-known in the community: active participants are burning out, editor activity is stagnant, and the existing social environment is very off-putting to newbies. Petty enforcement of petty rules, an obsession with particular notions of quality, and a lot of behavior that seems to the uninitiated like high-handed dickishness.

But one of Wikipedia's saving graces is this core policy: "If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it." It reminds people that rules are the tail, not the dog.

With Wikipedia, strict rules aren't what leads to a valuable artifact. it's that a lot of people care about creating the world's best reference work together. They understand very clearly that it's the community that produces the encyclopedia. The rules are just there to record community consensus, and to help newbies think things through.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#104

Post by breck »

spolsky wrote: post #61

None of the actual metrics of the site bear this out. I don't know what "myspacing" is, and "floundering" is pretty subjective, but in terms of actual measurable things, we have more questions asked, more questions answered, more people active on the site, more sites with more activity and most metrics are up about 100% in the last year. Some of the things that we track pretty closely (like number of users who ask or…

I use StackOverflow more than ever. It has been indispensable in building our new product. I've rarely run into a problem in the past 6 months that wasn't solved on StackOverflow.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#105

Post by wpietri »

yrizos wrote: post #87
beyti wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree on the so called subjective questions. The idea should be "wide-open your minds" instead of everybody's "how can I cast it to list" questions.

Why would you want Stack Overflow to be about "wide-open your minds", when Hacker News is perfectly suitable for that?

Right! Also, why would I want a restaurant to serve coffee, when there's a perfectly good cafe not a mile away?

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#106

Post by drharris »

andrewcooke wrote: post #54
debacle wrote: post #16

The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases. I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently. The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions wi…

all good points. also, the obsession with pushing "off topic" questions to other sites means that the range of questions you see on any one site goes down, which makes it less interesting as a place to go to answer. another way of looking at this is that originally i could design my own filter (via tags) to select what i wanted to answer. but increasingly that is being done for me by mods, and what i find interesting…

This. I have ~5000 rep, but have pretty much gone to not using at all for the past year, primarily due to shoving questions to ancillary SE sites. I dabble in administration, but not enough to constantly view ServerFault. I'm interested in algorithms, but I'm not going to spend all day only on that. The old StackOverflow seemed to be perfect for renaissance techies; there was a little bit of everything all in one place. I'd answer a question on C#, then ruby, then design patterns, then server admin. Now it's fragmented, I guess taking the "silo approach" to Q&A. It really kills it for those of us who have a variety of interests. That's not even getting into the "too few eyeballs" problem.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#107

Post by kmfrk »

wpietri wrote: post #101
kmfrk wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was one of the things that drove me away from Quora (amongst plenty of other things). It felt extremely bureaucratic and arbitrary, and the tone of the moderator replies on Quora really brought down morale - along with the downvote feature. I will grant SO that you always know when you are being moderated; Hacker News and Quora does this more surreptitiously, which is more infuriating by an order of magnitude.

I have the opposite impression of Quora, really, and I think their voting design is brilliant. It's designed to maximize viewer utility and poster enjoyment at the expense of transparency. I get how it's infuriating to a certain type of user, but in doing so they've removed a lot of opportunities for negative interactions.

How does poster enjoyment figure? I don't think it's very gratifying when an answer with fewer upvotes than mine is ranked higher, because downvotes are offsetting the difference in upvotes.

They might as well just hide the points. After all, people only post on the site to help others - not to discuss matters like on Hacker News - so biting the hand that feeds you in this way seems self-defeating.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#108

Post by rogerbinns »

andrewcooke wrote: post #54
debacle wrote: post #16

The problem with SO is that easy questions get answered quickly and hard questions don't get answered at all, in most cases. I'm a semi-competent programmer with a few thousand SO reputation (or whatever it's called). Every question I have ever asked there has gone unanswered or has been answered insufficiently. The moderators are also awful. They manage the community in a very autistic fashion - quality questions wi…

all good points. also, the obsession with pushing "off topic" questions to other sites means that the range of questions you see on any one site goes down, which makes it less interesting as a place to go to answer. another way of looking at this is that originally i could design my own filter (via tags) to select what i wanted to answer. but increasingly that is being done for me by mods, and what i find interesting…

> ... to other sites ...

That wouldn't be so bad if SO didn't try to keep your user accounts for each site separate. I really don't want or need one account per site, or the constant barrage of "welcome back" animations and all that crap. Now I just ignore any site that I don't already have an account on.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#109

Post by strictfp »

spolsky wrote: post #61

None of the actual metrics of the site bear this out. I don't know what "myspacing" is, and "floundering" is pretty subjective, but in terms of actual measurable things, we have more questions asked, more questions answered, more people active on the site, more sites with more activity and most metrics are up about 100% in the last year. Some of the things that we track pretty closely (like number of users who ask or…

What about measuring number of upvotes on questions closed as not constructive /not about programming? I get the feeling that the technical questions are getting saturated, and that the community moved towards more soft issues (management, people skills etc). But soft issues get rejected. Perhaps start softie-programmer.com? At least do something other than closing them.

Re: StackOverflow unwinding?

#110

Post by stacycurl »

fusiongyro wrote: post #36
pilgrim689 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I also found that my more difficult questions never got answered. Perhaps a fix to create an incentive to answer hard questions would be to create a ratio to estimate difficulty (how much time has gone by without an accepted or high-voted answer? number of views that don't add a good answer?) and then give more reward points to someone who successfully answers a "hard" question.

I've had this happen to me a lot, but I also have noticed that sometimes I see an interesting question that deserves a long answer and I want to answer it, but I have this nagging suspicion someone else is already working on an answer and by the time I write mine theirs will already have received some kind of critical mass of upvotes and my work will not get any upvotes at all.

I don't follow, are you answering to gain upvotes or to, erm, answer the question ?
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