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The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

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Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#211

Post by the8472 »

exstudent2 wrote: post #197
discreditable wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help Vampires are users who incessantly ask simple and/or previously-answered questions and provide nothing of value to the community. Over time, they can drive valuable contributors away. http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/

That post (aside from being overly juvenile) is pure speculation and not backed by any sort of data that would suggest that "help vampires" impact the larger community. It's an extremely condescending and unprofessional term to refer to your less experienced users. It really betrays the core problem with the SO staff. They've gone moderation mad and see the user base as the enemy.

They are real. The unwillingness or inability to do some basic research or mental flexibility to adjust generic guidelines to their particular case (maybe 1 step out of 5 needs to be skipped!) combined with their persistence makes them quite frustrating and an outsized time consumption.

The guy who only needs a single link to the right tutorial is easy to deal with and makes all sides happy.

The guy who asks a question because he didn't even bother to read the 5-page beginner's tutorial (you know because he comes back after 1-2 minutes) where answer somewhere further down... well... after seeing your 50th or 100th of that kind you just want to yell at them.

Others expect you to fix their pastebinned code for them and do not take prose for an answer. They don't want to understand what's going on and what they did wrong, they just want you to do it for them.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#212

Post by shagie »

V-2 wrote: post #164

> Someone at Hacker News expressed a common experience for many programmers (experienced or not) when trying to participate on Stack Overflow. Okay... > 4 — Respond to comment about a missing semicolon that got deleted when I was cutting/pasting/formatting my code. (Despite the error msg making it clear that the missing semicolon isn’t the issue) Who cares. I would just ignore this. > Duplicate answer person complain…

If someone grabs the code to try to reproduce the error and gets unrelated sytanx errors, that's their time wasted. The comment about the error helps others from wasting their time too... until the problem is fixed.

As there is a taboo of modifying someone else's code, this is best done with a comment and hope the OP will fix it.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#213

Post by notacoward »

Every user that has high karma/reputation/whatever on a site - including this one - should be forced to experience it from a noob's perspective once in a while. It can be a real eye-opener, as the experience for the in-group and the out-group can be almost totally different. How many times have even regular users of a site - not just noobs - pointed out a problem only to be downvoted, harassed, or even banned by the "senior users" who don't see the problem precisely because they are so senior? They're like the "senior architects" on a software project, who no longer contribute actual code (or novel opinions on this side of the analogy) but always sit in judgment of others'. I guess it's a universal human tendency, but the point is that karma systems should be designed to attenuate it instead of reinforcing it.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#214

Post by employee8000 »

The one thing missing from most sites is the meta-evaluating of the mods, the way slashdot had. That was one of the more innovative things about slasdot back in the day.

It would randomly ask users how accurate a mod was for a particular mod that he or she made. I'm supposing that if enough people voted against the mod, their mod would be reversed and privileges removed.

Places like Reddit and SO need this in order to control the mods themselves.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#215

Post by WhitneyLand »

Interesting that one of the people called out as ruining SO may be in prison for some scary sex/murder fantasies/photos involving minors.

Is this the same guy?

http://www.thenewscenter.tv/home/headlines/Belpre-Sentencing...

http://stackoverflow.com/users/237838/andrew-barber

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#216

Post by shagie »

godelski wrote: post #16

One interesting issue with the duplicate answers is that if you notice later a typo in your answer and edit it you get pushed to the bottom of the answer stack, despite having the first answer. This seems like an issue SO could solve to help contributors. I doubt many abuse the system to completely rewrite an answer and stay on top.

In what ordering do you see this feature? Votes, active, or newest. Answers that have the same score are randomly ordered when sorting by votes.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#217

Post by twblalock »

It sucks when questions answered five years ago are considered the final word on the topic, and newer questions about the same topic are marked as duplicates.

I want to know the best way to solve the problem in 2016, not five years ago. In that time, we've gone from Java 6 to Java 8, almost everything in the JavaScript world has changed, etc.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#218

Post by twblalock »

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #175
user5994461 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow. In that case, I have a serious question for you: What's your plan for refreshing the site on the long term? Lemme explain. The "community" is actively closing new questions as "duplicate" if anything similar is already present. At the same time, the old answer (that all duplicates are redirecting to) is often locked down for various reasons. The blocking prevent…

> How do you intend to prevent that? Very very few posts are actually uneditable at all, and editing is open to all users (some need approval). If a post is locked and outdated it's likely that the question was locked because it was the kind of question that does not provide long-lasting answers (for example a software recommendation list).

That solution clearly isn't working. You need to come up with something better, or SO is going to become a graveyard of programming best practices from the year 2012.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#219

Post by exstudent2 »

the8472 wrote: post #211
exstudent2 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That post (aside from being overly juvenile) is pure speculation and not backed by any sort of data that would suggest that "help vampires" impact the larger community. It's an extremely condescending and unprofessional term to refer to your less experienced users. It really betrays the core problem with the SO staff. They've gone moderation mad and see the user base as the enemy.

They are real. The unwillingness or inability to do some basic research or mental flexibility to adjust generic guidelines to their particular case (maybe 1 step out of 5 needs to be skipped!) combined with their persistence makes them quite frustrating and an outsized time consumption. The guy who only needs a single link to the right tutorial is easy to deal with and makes all sides happy. The guy who asks a questi…

Even if this behavior is real, the term is condescending and I see a ton of speculation about the impact of this type of thing, zero data.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#220

Post by achikin »

reitanqild wrote: post #207
achikin wrote: post #182

I've answered 21 questions, got upvotes on 15 answers, 3 answers accepted by owners, asked 2 questions by myself and both were upvoted. I have no idea what these people in the article are talking about. SO is super friendly and super helpful.

You never found a super-useful question that mods had tried to kill?

Here it is[1]. I've answered it six months after the first time I came across it. It is so specific that some people considered it nonprogramming and tried to close it. Am I complaining? No. For me, the main purpose of SO is to share specific programmer's knowledge that is not covered by documentation and can only be obtained by experience. The only way to share the knowledge is to communicate with the other people, and sometimes you get rejected this way or the other if you failed to communicate your problem or solution clearly. Taking into consideration the amount of help I've got from SO and the satisfaction from watching my answers being upvoted, I'm ok with being rejected from time to time.

[1]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3326955/remove-usb-host-c...

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