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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#141

Post by dang »

jolmg wrote: post #136
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 picture…

People wouldn't follow such criteria anyway.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#142

Post by crusader1099 »

phonebanshee wrote: post #43
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…

Marked as answered is a fundamentally horrible idea and that feature should be removed. The problem is that the person asking the question isn't capable of determining a correct answer. Far, far to often they pick something that appears to solve their problem but actually is a terrible idea.

Even worse is when the accepted solution is either deprecated or no longer works in future versions of the language/framework used. This is where Stack Overflow's "archival" nature seems to stop working, and where answers based on upvotes would work better.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#143

Post by non-entity »

beardedProgmr wrote: post #29

This author should avoid Reddit at all costs. I got time -40 karma for saying I personally didn't care about screen refresh rates this week. Also as a stack overflow mod my group doesn't have such issues. Nor have I experienced these issues. Worst I've had was a few extremely technical questions require a bounty the get an answer. However my group spends a lot of time helping new users. The ones on the main group mig…

I've quit reddit multiple times over getting to heated in arguments

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#144

Post by thekyle »

This isn't directly related to the article, but I've noticed lots of Stack Overflow answers now contain outdated information in the highest voted answer.

I wonder if moving to a velocity based ranking system (like HN and Reddit) instead of pure sorting by net votes would help with that. That way answers with more velocity (attracted more upvotes recently) would be ranked higher.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#145

Post by jodrellblank »

Avamander wrote: post #115
jodrellblank wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The SO guidelines are that voting is about the question, not about the author. Everyone who has a rant about SO shows that is not universally agreed on, to say the least. But for you to say "people should be kinder and more empathic", for downvoting within the rules of the site, while you go on a rant calling people unwelcoming snarky abrasive asses, is amusingly hatey.

> for downvoting within the rules of the site Doesn't make it good for the site or it's users. It's a very poor excuse. > rant calling people unwelcoming snarky abrasive asses, is amusingly hatey. Are you a high-rank SO user? Also, what I stated is not a "rant" it's an empirical observation.

> Doesn't make it good for the site or it's users. It's a very poor excuse.

Excuse for what? SO has the UI instruction that you /should/, as a user who agreed to follow the rules, downvote low effort questions which show no research. Agreeing to follow the site rules, then not following the site rules and deciding it should be run the way you want it to be run instead, isn't good for the site either.

> Are you a high-rank SO user?

I've never thought so, but looking at the data[1] everyone with >500 rep is in the top 5%, so by that standard, yes.

> Also, what I stated is not a "rant" it's an empirical observation.

No, it's not. Saying that people "should be held accountable" for their downvotes on an internet site is not "provable by means of experiment", it's "people I disagree with should be punished". Calling people "snarky asses" is not experimental, it's subjective interpretation. Describing downvoting as lacking empathy, on a site where downvotes are intended to describe the question not the author, is subjective interpretation.

[1] https://stackexchange.com/leagues/1/alltime/stackoverflow/20... tables on the right hand side

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#146

Post by gumby »

I mentally substituted HN for SO when reading these comments.

I see a similar pathology here, though far less extreme. I read HN both for the links and the commentary. Over the past couple of years I've noticed an increase in downvotes appearing to be used as "I disagree" which is a shame. I've disagreed with commentators whose comments have made me think, or even change my mind.

Downvotes also get used on trivial or off topic comments, which seems what they are intended for. And I hardly consider it any sort of cesspool of social pathology (as seemed be be described in the recent article about HN moderating). But downvote use does seem to be trending the wrong way IMO.

The result, of course, would be as described by the OP: self-deporting.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#149

Post by luckylion »

snazz wrote: post #79
Avamander wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 rep doesn't matter at all for high-rank people, the rep loss should be based on total rep.

It should be something like 1% of your reputation. That’s significant enough to make even high-rank users have to think.

If you punish moderation, you end up with an unmoderated site. You don't want a million "help. please write this code for me. thanks" posts, as any legitimate question will be lost in the noise and nobody will waste time "answering" (aka working for free) those questions. SO works because it discourages super-low-effort questions and has a lot of moderation (both by official moderators and high-rep users).

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#150

Post by riazrizvi »

On Stackoverflow it costs you to downvote. Ask an ill-formed question with more than one easy to find good response, then you get downvoted at those users’ own expense.

> “Is there a way to list all standard Go packages? I have a list of packages and I want to figure out if this is a standard package”

‘A list of packages ... if this is a standard package’, is ambiguous. What ‘this’? The list? Are you asking if there are standard ‘package lists’? And if I search ‘list standard go packages stackoverflow’ on duckduckgo I get answers with 25 and 50 upvotes already. In this situation I think Stackoverflow works.

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