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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#131

Post by timvisee »

el_cujo wrote: post #16

I really think it's better to just have an up vote arrow and no down vote option, for questions at least. The only reason on a site like that to really vote something down should be if something is off topic or against the rules, in which case you have a report button. If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasona…

I sometimes come across badly formatted or unclear questions when reviewing new posts. I usually flag those, but not all flags are accepted possibly because they aren't bad enough. That's why I use the down vote button as well. Note that I never down vote because some question is not interesting or not up my league. So, in some sense I find this button useful.

Maybe a reason could be attached to the down vote button, such as [Unclear, Off-topic, Spam, Whatever, ...] as some form of lightweight flagging system. Lobste.rs uses this on comments. Users that can't select a 'Not interesting' option are probably less likely to vote down.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#133

Post by mLuby »

pytester wrote: post #58
billfruit wrote: post #15

I'm tired with their fragmenting their site into airtight topic specific QA sites, now with many questions one isn't sure where to post it to get max eyeballs. I feel that is something that could have avoided by design. Topics could have been managed through tags, instead of walling them off into separate sites. And the obsolescence, things are moving so fast in JavaScript, Android, even in QT, Clojure etc, many answ…

>And the obsolescence, things are moving so fast in JavaScript, Android, even in QT, Clojure etc, many answers including accepted ones are obsolete, and misleading. This is the absolute worst aspect of the site to me. Some answers are version specific, some stop working overnight one day, some used to be good practice in 2011 and still work but really aren't any more and there is no sane mechanism for stack overflow…

Runnable code snippets are helpful in this regard, but even better would be runnable test cases.

Example: How to check for Invalid Date in JS?

```js

function invalidDate (date){return isNaN(date.valueOf())}

console.assert(invalidDate(new Date("foo")) === true)

console.assert(invalidDate(new Date()) === false)

```

But I'd expect if someone noticed an out-of-date answer they'd just comment and it'd get fixed that way.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#134

Post by JustSomeNobody »

> I’m also wondering what went through the head of the person who saw the question at a score of -3 and just had to add their own downvote, because “fuck this question just a bit more”.

This is exactly what went through their mind. This is group think. You get people who have to follow the heard and the next thing you know programmers are getting pulled out into the streets and beat because they use JavaScript.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#135

Post by makecheck »

Online activities shouldn’t have such a huge effort imbalance:

- If I spend an hour writing and rewriting a question or answer, there shouldn’t be any “2-second torpedo” option where someone can ruin all that effort. Instead, they should have to spend some similar invested time, e.g. minimum length reasoning, peer review before posting or other hurdle.

- Exactly the same problem with other sites, even online product searches. The “1 star” people seem to have infinite power, which has always been ridiculous. All this does is discourage actually useful contributions from appearing in the future, toward lowest common denominator.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#136

Post by jolmg »

el_cujo wrote: post #16

I really think it's better to just have an up vote arrow and no down vote option, for questions at least. The only reason on a site like that to really vote something down should be if something is off topic or against the rules, in which case you have a report button. If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasona…

It happens here too. I imagine some people only downvote stuff that's against the site guidelines and simply doesn't upvote stuff they disagree with. Then, there are others that do downvote those with opinions different from theirs.

On StackOverflow, I've wondered if I should upvote answers on topics where I can't really verify if the answer is correct, even if it looks really informative, well formatted, has pictures, is to the point, etc. I mean, what if it's wrong? and there I am upvoting it because it looks credible. I have seen highly upvoted answers with information I know to be wrong, too.

Part of the issue is that there are no guidelines on how to upvote or downvote in neither StackExchange or HN. The platforms just leave it to the users to determine their own criteria.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#137

Post by the_duke »

el_cujo wrote: post #16

I really think it's better to just have an up vote arrow and no down vote option, for questions at least. The only reason on a site like that to really vote something down should be if something is off topic or against the rules, in which case you have a report button. If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasona…

Agreed on no downvotes for questions.

For answers, I would also do away with the downvote button, and offer multiple options instead, like: "does not answer the question", "misleading information", "off topic", "outdated", "i don't like the solution", ... .

That would still give SO the capability to sort answers based on some quality ranking algorithm and hopefully reduce the unwarranted downvoting.

PS, this line from the article perfectly captures how I perceive much of Stackoverflow over the past few years:

> “look how stupid that guy is, and look how clever I am pointing that out with my downvote!”

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#138

Post by duxup »

philliphaydon wrote: post #4

One thing that always bothered me about SO was that it shows who answered and their score. It should display answers without the user until an answer is accepted. There’s been many cases where a high score user answers, gets a lot of upvotes cos people are like “oh his score is 30k so he must be right” yet the answer is not good or incorrect. And there is a better more correct answer by someone with a Low score who g…

I often find the third or lower rank answers more insightful.

SO seems to reward "technically correct" fast on the submit / answers compared to more thoughtful answers.

This also is reflected in what gets answered and what does't. If it requires nuance or thought it doesn't get answered.

I asked something like "How would you render a bazillion things in react under X conditions and manage performance?"

The responses were all "show me your code" or "here is how you render them" Like guies no, I know how to just render them... I'm asking about keeping the DOM from going bonkers.

But their responses "work" and so that's all I got.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#139

Post by Fnoord »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #10
philliphaydon wrote: post #4

One thing that always bothered me about SO was that it shows who answered and their score. It should display answers without the user until an answer is accepted. There’s been many cases where a high score user answers, gets a lot of upvotes cos people are like “oh his score is 30k so he must be right” yet the answer is not good or incorrect. And there is a better more correct answer by someone with a Low score who g…

This is a feature. The person who answered is specifically indicated with their reputation to help sort among answers. It's like if you have a health-related question and get answers from two people: A trained surgeon and your mate from the pub (Edit: who's obviously not trained or knowledgeable on the topic, jeez). A priori whose answer is the more insightful? If you're not knowledgeable and get a number of anonymou…

Except if you have a similar question (and you're better trained to select an answer) your question is marked as a dupe. Which is in conflict with the system as described by you and GP.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#140

Post by jasode »

el_cujo wrote: post #16

I really think it's better to just have an up vote arrow and no down vote option, for questions at least. The only reason on a site like that to really vote something down should be if something is off topic or against the rules, in which case you have a report button. If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasona…

>If a question just straight up doesn't interest you or you don't want to answer it, then ignoring it rather than voting it down seems like the reasonable response.

Just remember that if you don't give users a built-in and formal downvote button, they will rebel against that UI and invent an informal downvote mechanism to express their disapproval. E.g. a bunch of stackoverflow users would type "-1 downvote" in the comments. If you think a downvote button is bad, a UI that encourages a pollution of "-1" meta comments may be even worse.

(Similar examples of users bypassing web UI limitations would be Github users typing "+1" into issues threads because there's no upvote button.)

Let's say you have 3 rough categories when judging a question such as :

(1) agree / approve --> upvote

(2) apathy / don't know answer --> no vote, do nothing

(3) disagree / disapprove of low-effort question --> downvote

If you architect the web UI to collapse categories (2) and (3) into "no vote" to minimize "hurt feelings" and thus give voters no outlet to express a "downvote", don't be surprised if users rebel and invent adhoc ways to do it anyway.

If you read through the meta thread mentioned in the sibling comment by vasili111, you'll see the well-respected high-karma SO users like John Skeet, etc use the downvote button as a feedback mechanism for bad questions.

### EDIT reply to those (galaxyLogic, randcraw, etc) suggesting forcing downvotes into the comments area:

On the surface, it sounds logical and reasonable to force explanation of downvotes but that doesn't work for high-traffic sites like StackOverflow. (In 2011, Jeff Atwood tried to explain this.[1][2][3][4])

The issue is the asymmetry of work between bad questions and good questions. It's easy to ask bad questions. It's harder to ask well-researched and high-effort questions. This asymmetry inevitably results in the SO site being flooded with bad questions.

Therefore, forcing a "downvote explanation" just adds friction to the goal of filtering out the massive volume of bad questions. This was the rationale why downvotes on questions don't cost any karma. I.e. forcing downvote-commentary works better for low-traffic sites and small communities but not for high-traffic sites.

[1] https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...

[2] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/56817/can-we-preven...

[3] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/135/encouraging-peo...

[4] https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/250177/require-a-co...

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