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My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

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Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#231

Post by danielweber »

peeters wrote: post #50
_almosnow wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You said you have tried, but you didn't post what you tried, or how it didn't work. >by overloading operator[], operator= It's literally there... >You then finished it up with a passive-aggressive FAQ section which was entirely unnecessary ... 'I want to do it this way, even if there is a better way' What's wrong with that? I wanted to achieve a very specific thing. Can you please tell me what is wrong with that? Th…

> That FAQ is meant to avoid getting answers that I don't need. 1) Answers on questions aren't just meant to serve you, they're meant to serve people that find the question later. It's incredibly important to note when there's a better way altogether to approach a problem. 2) Askers on SO often exhibit the XY problem. Saying you're not interested in other approaches is not simply dickish; it's ignoring (often) good a…

I don't support the abusive behavior that has since been edited out, but I totally get that FAQ. Lots of people who only work in the web framework world don't get that not everyone can just upgrade to the latest whiz-bang thing. If he's on a large team that has standardized on X for their shipping software, he can't fix the problem just by upgrading to a new compiler version.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#232

Post by jaydles »

danielweber wrote: post #228
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…

I've stumbled upon "too localized" a few times and it's BS. Just because I'm daring to build a desktop app on OpenBSD doesn't mean it's not a real question. Google is very good at extracting needles from haystacks. If this SO mention is the only mention of an error message on the Internet, then someone else can find it in the future now.

I work at SE... and you're right. We eliminated this close reason because a huge percent of the cases it was used weren't appropriate.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#233

Post by phaker »

codinghorror wrote: post #103
InclinedPlane wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the people who originally headed the community and drove the site have checked out. That means that the very serious institutional and design problems related around the community moderation features of SO are not going to get fixed, they're just going to be gamed by the people with the most effort and free time. There are very few checks and balances on abuse of power at SO, even though that's wh…

This isn't true. Shog, Jay, and many others were hired from the community precisely because they were avid long term users who had demonstrated deep insight into the culture and organization of Stack. I would easily rate them as equal to myself if not, frankly, better at helping the Stack community govern itself. The reality is that good Q&A takes a fair bit of discipline to get right, and that means rules and standa…

I'm afraid that many of the people you'll find in meta are the "soup nazis" the article complains about.

Any community is a sieve. It takes effort to join and the more you get involved the more time and effort it consumes and at every step someone gives up and drops out. The meta subsite is not easy to stumble into, very few people will have any questions to ask there and very few will have a good answer to contribute so it takes a lot of effort to get there. That means that the crowd that hangs out in meta will be very different from the bulk of SO/SE.

Several meta discussions were linked by ircmaxell above and another was posted in the r/programming discussion - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/286299/closing-quest... - so let's take a look: those of questions that are expressing disagreement with how things are run (that cv-pls is a bad idea and that often questions are closed when they shouldn't) are currently at -20, -14, -24 and -13 points. But let's ignore the votes and look at the answers: the absolutely overwhelming consensus is that everything is right an nothing should be done. I'm not saying that "they" are wrong and "we" are wrong, just take note that there's zero overlap in opinions expressed here and there.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#234

Post by dredmorbius »

alecco wrote: post #150
reitanqild wrote: post #145

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…

Though not a frequent occurrence, I agree largely with tptacek here. My own most successful submissions have been almost exclusively about concerns with Google and privacy. At one point, the top three HN stories were all indirectly about my own G+ issues: https://i.imgur.com/YgEjUuI.jpg

Google and Facebook get a lot of flack here (and some support). Gates has his defenders and detractors (I heavily criticise his business practices, I'm modestly approving of his philanthropy), and there are numerous NSA stories.

What you likely don't see is how many stories total simply fall off the submissions page. I check it every so often -- perhaps several times a week, perhaps only every few weeks. But there's a lot of inflow and much of it sinks. That's typical of any curated site. An editor's job is to say "no". Hopefully their accuracy in doing this is better than random.

As sites grow in popularity, if the front page keeps the same capacity, any given submission's odds will fall. reddit's answer was subreddits -- there are now well over a half million: http://redditmetrics.com/history

HN's going to have to resolve this conflict somehow eventually.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#235

Post by davidism »

danielweber wrote: post #229
e12e wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the real problem is that the vast majority of on topic questions have already been asked. I think this is mostly a problem in so far as answers aren't updated. I'd say that for most "well formed" question belonging on SO that was answered correctly years ago -- most of those answers might no longer be entirely correct and/or the questions themselves might "block" newer (up to date) formulations of the same…

I have experienced this. Asking questions about a new version of something, and having it closed with a pointed to a prior version of things that explicitly does not work any more.

Then edit your question to acknowledge the "duplicate" and clearly explain why your question is different. It will automatically go into a Reopen Queue where users will evaluate it and vote to reopen. The system's not perfect, so if it still doesn't get reopened, open a discussion on meta.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#236

Post by davidism »

jofer wrote: post #44
3JPLW wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the first agenda item on the Python SO team's winter meeting: http://sopython.com/transcript/3/winter-2015-general-meeting... They were just discussing it on chat today: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/6/15-16 I've never gotten involved in Chat before, either, but just searching the most active chatroom for `cv-` brought that up immediately.

Huh, I didn't see that discussion before I wrote the comment, but I was specifically referring to sopython. They mean well, but it does feel a bit like a mob at times.

We recognize that it's gotten a bit out of control lately, hence the topic during the meeting. I think we ended up with some good guidelines for managing it.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#237

Post by ffisegydd »

jofer wrote: post #44
3JPLW wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the first agenda item on the Python SO team's winter meeting: http://sopython.com/transcript/3/winter-2015-general-meeting... They were just discussing it on chat today: http://chat.stackoverflow.com/transcript/6/15-16 I've never gotten involved in Chat before, either, but just searching the most active chatroom for `cv-` brought that up immediately.

Huh, I didn't see that discussion before I wrote the comment, but I was specifically referring to sopython. They mean well, but it does feel a bit like a mob at times.

I'm sorry you feel that way Joe.

The Room Owners have felt for a while now that it can sometimes get out of hand, that's why we had this discussion in our Room Meeting. As davidism has mentioned, we've put some extra guidelines down now. The main one being that unless it's necessary (something like spam, offensive, dupe, etc, where the OP isn't going to be able to improve the post) we're adding a 10 minute "grace period" before requesting a cv-pls. This gives OPs the chance to edit their question, to respond to comments, etc.

I disagree with a few of your points, but I'm not really interested in getting drawn into a debate here. If you want to discuss it further then drop by chat.

I know you've come into the room in the past to ask/speak about some particular cv-pls. If, in the future, you have anything to bring up, come and speak to us.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#238

Post by InclinedPlane »

codinghorror wrote: post #103
InclinedPlane wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the people who originally headed the community and drove the site have checked out. That means that the very serious institutional and design problems related around the community moderation features of SO are not going to get fixed, they're just going to be gamed by the people with the most effort and free time. There are very few checks and balances on abuse of power at SO, even though that's wh…

This isn't true. Shog, Jay, and many others were hired from the community precisely because they were avid long term users who had demonstrated deep insight into the culture and organization of Stack. I would easily rate them as equal to myself if not, frankly, better at helping the Stack community govern itself. The reality is that good Q&A takes a fair bit of discipline to get right, and that means rules and standa…

It's unrealistic to say that the community folks are a perfect replacement for you and Joel being engaged because they too are engaged. That may be so, they may be more engaged than you ever were, but that's only half the equation. They don't have the authority and power that you did. It's not their baby, they're just baby sitters. They can't make sweeping changes because they think it's a good idea. They can't easily change the featureset of the system to support something they want. They have to go through a long process of getting buy off from folks for features, and then waiting until they're implemented.

When was the last time a major feature change happened with the software? It's unrealistic to imagine that there hasn't been a need for change and that the tools that were necessary for managing the community, say, 4 years ago are precisely identical to the ones that are needed today. That implies the community hasn't changed or that the tools were somehow perfect. Both are very unlikely.

Discipline is completely beside the point here. Of course good Q&A sites need discipline, and that loops back to authority figures exercising their powers (mods, admins, etc.) And sure there are people who will complain that SO is a harsh place and they just want to have fun. But that fails to address the many very well founded criticisms of the mod community on SO that numerous people have made, especially concerning abuse of power and twisting the site toward a different vision than it launched with. Imagine a sheriff making a statement that police brutality is justified because criminals exist.

Spammers exist, and low quality questions are a menace, but that doesn't stop the problems with stack overflow from being real.

Moreover, it's all too easy to fall into the complacency trap of saying that SO still has significant value to a lot of people, is still hugely popular, etc. That doesn't indicate that SO is fine, it merely shows that it might not be too late to fix the serious systemic and endemic problems it has. If you were to look at some magical graph of the "successfulness" or "popularity" of stack overflow over time, the point where things "went wrong" would not be at the peak. It wouldn't even be at the inflection point where things went from accelerating upwards to accelerating downwards. It would be before that, when the conditions that caused the inflection point to occur were in effect.

Re: My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow

#239

Post by merrua »

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...

Yep. And the deletionists where more often the "majority" culture and male, which resulted in a feedback loop for the nonminority and female. New minority turn up, have a bad experience and leaves. I think it was studied let me see if I can find the paper. I know the results were replicated with comment bots.

Update, not the ones I was thinking of but a good read. HBS Cases: How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn't) http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pdf/item/5605.pdf

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