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My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

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Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#101

Post by jarcane »

tjradcliffe wrote: post #86
fredley wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A note on locking: Locking prevents edits and comments on an individual post. The reason for locking a post is nearly always spam edits/comments. Locks are finite in time. Questions that rank highly for popular search queries receive a lot of traffic, and locking is often necessary to prevent vandalism. On question closure, this is rarely done by moderators (users with a diamond ♦ after their name), but by 5 votes fr…

I'm curious about the five vote threshold. Has it been fixed throughout the history of the site? Is it still appropriate given the degree to which the site's popularity and traffic has grown?

Indeed. I was really surprised by that number, and by the sheer number of people with edit/delete privileges.

That's just begging for abuse.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#102

Post by joelthelion »

jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

cv-pls should be forbidden, plain and simple. It is detrimental to the quality and atmosphere of the site.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#103

Post by codinghorror »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #62
jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

The problem is that the people who originally headed the community and drove the site have checked out. That means that the very serious institutional and design problems related around the community moderation features of SO are not going to get fixed, they're just going to be gamed by the people with the most effort and free time. There are very few checks and balances on abuse of power at SO, even though that's wh…

This isn't true. Shog, Jay, and many others were hired from the community precisely because they were avid long term users who had demonstrated deep insight into the culture and organization of Stack. I would easily rate them as equal to myself if not, frankly, better at helping the Stack community govern itself.

The reality is that good Q&A takes a fair bit of discipline to get right, and that means rules and standards. This rubs some people the wrong way, but it is the ONLY way to achieve reliable, sustainable, long term quality.

If you have specific examples of where things went wrong in a question, take it to meta and discuss it so that the community can adapt and change. That is how community works, and Stack is a democracy in that sense -- anyone can provide evidence and push for change.

(warning, though, scroll down in the comments here to see an example that turned out to be an anti-example when examined closely. A lot of times people just complain when they don't like rules, and the rules don't favor their personal needs versus the needs of the community or the greater Internet)

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#104

Post by codinghorror »

jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#105

Post by fredley »

hawleyal wrote: post #94
fredley wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A note on locking: Locking prevents edits and comments on an individual post. The reason for locking a post is nearly always spam edits/comments. Locks are finite in time. Questions that rank highly for popular search queries receive a lot of traffic, and locking is often necessary to prevent vandalism. On question closure, this is rarely done by moderators (users with a diamond ♦ after their name), but by 5 votes fr…

Curious about your reaction to this article. Have an opinion? Or is that too off-topic/closed as not constructive? /s

To be honest, I don't participate in SO that much. The problems with close votes, and the HN community's dislike of the situation is well known. There is no easy fix for the situation, although I do agree something should be done.

The core of the issue, as was pointed out above, is the vtc-please culture in certain chat rooms. Culture is a very hard thing to change (impossible?), and whatever change you make to how closing works is unlikely to be effective unless cultural change is brought about too.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#106

Post by codinghorror »

O____________O wrote: post #73

Every time I work on a project dealing with unusual C++/Windows/COM topics, I end up hitting a high percentage of highly relevant, closed questions. The worst are the ones where I figure out the convoluted solution, but I can't answer the existing question because it's closed. So, anyone after me will suffer the same aggravation or simply give up. The worst are the ones where some new mod has trolled through four-yea…

Do you mean closed or locked from vandalism by drive by users? A lot of popular stuff gets locked due to noise answers and bad edits.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#107

Post by Guvante »

Marcus316 wrote: post #49
Guvante wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history of questions is why StackOverflow is so great. If it were like a normal forum with only time sensitive content it would have gone away like all other technical forums. Your question is shared with all the future people who have the same problem, it isn't your soapbox to complain in. Your experience with SO is probably fairly minor, the moderators have each had to deal with at least a half dozen people bre…

Please note, closed questions can also be removed from the site. I have a single Gold Badge in the SO world. It was awarded for an answer that I gave which earned more than 100 up votes[1]. Sadly the question to which I responded has since been closed (for years now). When content that I worked hard to create suddenly disappears from the site because moderators deem it to be "not a good fit", you start to feel it's n…

Took me a minute to realize what you were talking about as I have mod powers and could see the post just fine (finally clicked everything was red).

They outgrew the initial laissez-faire model and needed to grow beyond it. However I heartily agree they didn't do the best at making that transition.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#108

Post by angersock »

mkremins wrote: post #91
jobu wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't there a similar debate over Quality vs Quantity with the Wikipedia community a few years back? It's been a while, but I remember seeing complaints about thousands of articles getting culled for being trivial (comic books, movies, anime, moderately famous people or places). It's hard to find many articles about it anymore, but I did find this from 2007: http://grouplens.org/wikipedia-quality-over-quantity/

You might get more results searching for "deletionism vs inclusionism", which seems to be the most widely used name for the debate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletionism_and_inclusionism_in...

What's the current general stance on that these days I wonder? What's the prevailing wind?

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#109

Post by angersock »

codinghorror wrote: post #104
jofer wrote: post #27

First off, a caveat: I'm about to complain about a lot of people I respect and rather like. I'll probably take a lot of heat for it, but it needs to be said. I feel like a lot of the closing of niche questions these days comes from the chat communities. (By "chat", I mean: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/ ) There's a huge rash of "cv-pls" in the chat rooms. I don't have a problem with it in general, but the culture aro…

We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.

Sure, but my job isn't affected by voting rings on HN, nor does YCombinator justify a totalitarian moderation policy by claiming to be the best google-able SEO-optimized source for whatever it is I'm questioning.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#110

Post by praneshp »

yonran wrote: post #30
_almosnow wrote: post #3

I used to love SO, but nowadays the proportion of assholes running the site is so big that it ruins everything. To give you an example, check out the last question I've asked there: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27510345/c-map-assignment... . 11 downvotes and closed within a few hours; apparently I pissed off one of the moderators (when asking him why is my question "off-topic") and he invited his gang to downvo…

I have also had many stack overflow commenters come to critique my code for style but no one actually answer the question[1], and it can be rather frustrating because I know that what they are saying will not solve my problem. But I would suggest a little patience. Hopefully someone will come and answer the question after the initial criticisms die down. My question was eventually answered after all. [1] http://stack…

I would say you were incredibly patient in that thread, not just 'little'. Everyone seemed to try to help though.
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