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My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

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Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#161

Post by ircmaxell »

teh_klev wrote: post #45
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 PHP chat room is/was quite bad in that respect and there's a small handful of particularly caustic individuals who go out of their way to spread unpleasantness for less well informed users.

That's absolutely a valid experience.

There are plenty of others who've had positive experiences as well.

And those "caustic individuals" have a LOT to share if you're willing to engage in an open and healthy way.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#162

Post by reitanqild »

ircmaxell wrote: post #152
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…

This has been discussed time and time again: - 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 c…

And still the audience here find it interesting.

Happily this isn't Stack Overflow and this discussion hasn't been closed yet just because a few admins didn't think think it would fit within "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups."

Edit: to clarify - there are a number of reasons why this topic is interesting to quite a few of us[1]. Here are two:

* the usability issue of what we experience as someone someone destroying a good resource.

* reputation systems: a facinating thing in itself.

[1]: as can be seen by the simple fact that this post is still on the frontpage despite - I guess - having been flagged multiple times : )

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#163

Post by Udo »

codinghorror wrote: post #106
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.

Isn't that a UI problem? Punish people who do noise answers and bad edits, and see to it that garbage isn't featured prominently. Closing pages down is a desperate, blunt measure and in the long run it decays the value of your content instead of protecting it.

If it's gotten so bad that this is preventing legitimate edits and answers from improving your content, you have a very serious problem - both culturally and technologically.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#164

Post by Noelkd »

Veedrac wrote: post #80
Shog9 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both. The former is inevitable - most people, like the author of this article, spend the bulk of their time up-front: post a lot of answers, enjoy the experience, get tired of it, pull back to only answering the occasional post that piques their interest. So there's a fairly constant fall-off of activity from people who've previously posted a lot. And this gets worse when these folks find fewer questions that in…

> So there's a fairly constant fall-off of activity from people who've previously posted a lot. And this gets worse when these folks find fewer questions that interest them Is this data publicly available?

Yes [0]. You can write a new query here [1]. Its pretty much the reason why I like SQL now being able to ask questions[2] and get answers is great.

[0] http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/queries

[1] http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new

[2] http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/211098/whe...

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#165

Post by aaronchall »

I feel you, seems like too much soup-nazi. I think maybe I've burned some friends I myself have encouraged to try to get started on the site.

But it's the nature of the site. No one else is doing it. Maybe that's because it's not easy. Maybe you should compete with them. I have a feeling there's a lot of people here who've been burned by SO. I know I have.

But you can't argue with success. So I've thickened my skin and hardened my resolve, and I'm in the top 3% of users now. I expect my current body of work on the site to put me in the top 1% within a year or so, with no further work from me.

The answer to this is to build a better StackOverflow, if you can. But I don't think you can.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#166

Post by tempestn »

Just a thought, but how about letting privileged users vote to keep a question open, which would negate some number of close votes? (As well as a delay before closing, even once the votes were obtained.) Also if someone is in the process of writing an answer, that should count against closing.

I tend to agree with the OP that sorting and filtering are a better solution to maintaining quality than unnecessarily closing marginal questions. However, some questions certainly need to be closed. The problem (or at least a problem) seems to be that with such a large number of privileged users, hitting a 5 vote threshold is not difficult, even if the question doesn't deserve to be closed. Increasing the threshold would be one solution, but would make unnecessary moderation work. A don't-close vote seems like potentially a better solution.

Edit: Unsurprisingly, looks like I'm not the first one to have this idea: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/125/how-about-a-vot...

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#167

Post by sergiotapia »

aaronchall wrote: post #165

I feel you, seems like too much soup-nazi. I think maybe I've burned some friends I myself have encouraged to try to get started on the site. But it's the nature of the site. No one else is doing it. Maybe that's because it's not easy. Maybe you should compete with them. I have a feeling there's a lot of people here who've been burned by SO. I know I have. But you can't argue with success. So I've thickened my skin a…

At this point I think it's hard to compete with SO because it's so clear-cut and full of questions and answers for common things.

"Running out of questions." comes to mind.

Also, off-topic, I don't think being in a top percentage is something to brag about or a sign of merit. I've done nothing but ask stupid questions on SO and I was lucky to be there when the site was new (lots of high-coin questions!) and I'm in the top 5%.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#168

Post by reitanqild »

ircmaxell wrote: post #159
joelthelion wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How do you solve the torrent of duplicates and low quality questions then? The review queue is backed up all the time (currently 11900 questions with 1+ close-vote). 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.

> If you think one of the ways people are trying to solve it should be forbidden, that's fine. Please share an effective alternative.

We all agree about "send me teh codez", obvious duplicates etc.

If however this is the biggest problem then why is asking a question still one of a few things you can do without having rep?

If this is really the problem then raise the bar oh so slightly until you don't need to organize voting rings and detect duplicates at a speed that results in more than a few false positives.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#169

Post by chris_mahan »

VLM wrote: post #118
angersock wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The deletionists won and quite a few people refuse to participate anymore. Which leads to declining quality of article and moderation...

I was one of those who left. I let my adminship elapse after 10 years.

I also don't contribute much to SO, or to any SE properties, despite being on the early public beta. (remember the signup as a google spreadhseet). I'm ID 479 on SO.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#170

Post by O____________O »

codinghorror wrote: post #106
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.

Usually closed as non-constructive (I think that's S.O.'s wording).
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