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To me, I see this strange contradiction in how stackoverflow is evolving. Joel Spolsky (one of the founders) gave a very interesting presentation[1] in 2009. The key takeaway I've always remembered from his comments was the idea of "anthropology". The science of trying to really understand human behavior and make the website amplify good communities. What I see 6 years later is a lot of " why is this question closed…
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…
- http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/256501/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/271899/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/278092/338665 - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/285471/338665
Etc...
And especially: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/120275/is-asking-oth...
Basically, there's nothing wrong with the concept, unless it's used incorrectly. So if someone closes something incorrectly (you can point to a definite reason it's incorrectly closed), then re-open it or raise a meta post.
If you want to remove the ability for the people helping moderate a community to moderate, then how do you expect it to be moderated?
The big issue is that there are a LOT of low quality questions being asked. Duplicates. Many times literally copy/pasting the the question title into Google will give you the answer. Should these questions remain open because you want to repwhore? Should they remain open and further reduce the ability for Google to take you to a good canonical answer?
Or should they be closed and point to the good canonical answer? That way people can find their way to good content, rather than littering the site with duplication and poor copies of other answers.
The meaning of the CV reasons has changed over time as the community matures and figures out what works and what doesn't.
I do disagree with closing questions about particular framework (unless there's a dedicated SE site for it).
But bitching doesn't help. Raise a question on Meta. Step into the chat rooms and have a discussion. Get involved and help us fix things.
All bitching does is make the people who are putting time and effort into the community feel like they are doing something bad. Which is the fastest way to kill a community.
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…
What is Stack Overflow's goal
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To be a large repository of reasonably correct answers to small technical problems, where there is only one reasonably correct* answer. Everything else is considered off topic, and unfortunately not a good fit for the site, due to the lack of tools to manage other types of questions
Although there are lots of other things that could be asked and answered, if they are out of that scope then they are considered off-topic and should be closed, according to the people who own StackOverflow. They're closed, not just to annoy people who want those other types of questions answered but because SO really lacks the tools to manage the answers to those questions reasonably.
For example the question "how do you install and configure nginx on different operating systems" is definitely a question that could be asked. However it would require a massively long answer, without a provably correct answer, with different approaches based on how you prefer to configure stuff. i.e. not a single probably correct answer.
Questions that ask for a recommendation for which library to use don't also meet the criteria of having a single reasonably correct answer. Which library you should use depends on lots of factors, and there's probably several, if not a hell of a lot more, possible libraries to use.
Also, questions like that invite debate, multiple answers, spamming by companies trying to promote their software etc. Although people might like to ask all sorts of questions SO have decided to try to limit the number of off-topic questions.
But hasn't the goal of being the large repository of answers already been achieved?
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Yup, which is why StackOverflow is a considered a shit-show by people who used to find it very useful. If I had to guess, I'd say that something like 95% of all questions that are 'on topic' have already been asked and answered.
Although I've been using it a while, it's just incredibly rare for me to find a technical question that would be on topic for SO, that doing a google search for doesn't have an answer on SO in the top 5 results.
I think the people who run StackOverflow are either morons or have business reasons for not dealing with this problem.
Although the 'find me a library' questions are off-topic they aren't really a big problem - what is a big problem is just the same set of questions being asked day in, day out by people who are too stupid to be able to use Google to find answers to questions like "Q) Why is my compiler saying there is a syntax error on this line?" "A) There's a syntax error on that line."
The vast majority of people who are asking questions on StackOverflow are people who either read their compiler's error message, or do a google search - so it's really unlikely that they're going to spend time trying to understand the ethos behind StackOverflow or spending much time formulating a short, self-contained, correct example.
Because it's so easy for people to sign up to StackOverflow it only takes people a minute to post their badly formed question, which leads to the current torrent of the same questions day in day out. Without increasing either the 'cost' of asking a question or other barrier to prevent people who fail at using google, then it's inevitable that SO will continue to be besieged by bad questions.
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As I said, I think the real problem is that the vast majority of on topic questions have already been asked. The site needs better tools for finding duplicates or expanding into a wider set of questions, for which some answers will be longer, non-authoritative answers which just currently aren't a good fit for the site as it currently exists.
The current system lacks lots of tools that would be required to manage questions and answers that are currently off-topic. Personally I'd prefer it if they improved the site to allow more wide ranging questions and answers and better filtering of 'questions' (e.g. why is the only tool available to mark a question as something that is asking for a recommendation of a library to close it? Why can't we just tag it as 'find me a library' so that people who are interested in answering that can answer it?
*Note - even if an answer is provably incorrect, it won't get deleted unless it's downvoted into oblivion. Which leads to raising of eyebrows when answers to security questions have wrong answers that have been voted to 40+
I think the mandate is pretty clear: quality writing of the original question is a must. If you can't write in clear english, or you have a whiff of snark in your question, or your question falls below what many people think of as a valuable contribution, then your question probably deserves to be closed. Why is that not fair? I think it is fair! Be professional! Sometimes you get very cool superusers like BalusC who…
What he does isn't rep-farming using google but rather putting effort into being helpful. Same goes for others.
Contrast this to what people refer to as drive-by downvoters: people who seems to routinely troll the forums looking for anything that can be closed.
I stopped using StackOverflow a year or so ago, when I was astonished to discover that people can edit your questions. I accept that this sometimes may be necessary, but I asked a question which was then edited to be a different question, so that the answers I got were entirely useless. I understand the need for moderation but surely they should not be able to change the meaning of what you posted.
If that happens, you revert the changes. Editing to change the nature of the question is definitely not a valid edit. If people do it consistently, a mod should intervene.
New users cannot edit questions?
To me, I see this strange contradiction in how stackoverflow is evolving. Joel Spolsky (one of the founders) gave a very interesting presentation[1] in 2009. The key takeaway I've always remembered from his comments was the idea of "anthropology". The science of trying to really understand human behavior and make the website amplify good communities. What I see 6 years later is a lot of " why is this question closed…
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…
I was going to ask the following question [on 2 different situations] in the last 2 weeks: Are there any [lang] libraries that are backings for the [service] API? I stopped myself before going to SO because I knew that topic would get closed within seconds and I'd comments berating me for asking the wrong question. For the most part the only use I've gotten from SO has been from basic questions when I'm starting out…
This is explicitly listed as off-topic:
Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, "software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
Simple because the fix consists of watching patterns of behavior for a while, identifying the cliques of users who do this, and then mass-banning them, or at least mass-revoking their privileges to close stuff. For maximum cruelty, just reset and peg their reputation permanently at zero.
Not easy because then they're going to scream their entitled little heads off about it, and you'll need to recruit another generation of active moderators.
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.
Ignoring the problem does not make it go away. If you think one of the ways people are trying to solve it should be forbidden, that's fine. Please share an effective alternative.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is why SO, reddit, HN are slowly getting long time users disenchanted Can't speak for reddit but I think HN is quite much better than SO. Specifically it seems: * somehow grasping the house rules seems to be easier for people here than on SO. This might be because HN attracts another audience though, I don't know for sure. * maybe because redditism and stupidity is mostly downvoted swiftly? * spam and politics…
According to the mods, it's not them but users clicking the report button. If so, it's abused and any story that is negative for any YC/HN related company, against bad social norms in tech hubs, denouncing anti-privacy issues at Google/Faceboo, talking against celebrities like Bill Gates, or anything about NSA tends to go quickly below the fold and mostly ignored. The ranking system is gamed. I used to come here seve…
Interesting. I usually find the mix that hits the front page about perfect.
A few times I have seen what I consider interesting topics being flagged of after an initial boost but I can live with that, I guess unlike me quite a few people are fed up after the nth discussion about open floor plans and I can live with that.