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Tired of Stack Overflow

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Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#251

Post by jasode »

bachmeier wrote: post #206
jasode wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 reasonable response. Just remember that if you don't give users a built-in and formal downvote button, they will rebel against that UI and invent an informal downvote mechanism to express their disapproval. E.g. a bunch of stackoverflow users would type "-1 downvote" in the c…

> high-karma SO users like John Skeet, etc use the downvote button as a feedback mechanism for bad questions And it's very effective to provide "feedback" in the form of a drive-by downvote, isn't it?

>And it's very effective to provide "feedback" in the form of a drive-by downvote, isn't it?

I understand your confusion and frustration but folks like Jon Skeet are also providing feedback to their fellow answerers who don't want to see bad questions.

For some people, this signaling mechanism to reduce wasted effort for peers is even higher priority than feedback to the person asking the question.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#252

Post by bsder »

teh_klev wrote: post #248
bsder wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the author hit the Indian downvote brigades as well. The big issue I currently have with the Stack Overflow is that it seems like it has become some form of "scoring metric" for Indian programmers--presumably the consulting companies like Wipro. As such, if you don't immediately give a positive vote/response to even garbage answers, you get a downvote brigade burying the question. I suspect disallowing Indi…

Tarring a whole country with the same brush is bordering on racist.

I'm open to better solutions, but whatever solution you propose has to withstand gaming the system since their job probably depends upon it.

One thing that seems to be coming out of these discussions is that a "downvote" doesn't hurt enough.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#253

Post by jasode »

mcguire wrote: post #247
jasode wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Make downvotes require a comment. I cited some meta SE threads about that idea in my other comment but I forgot to add this thread as well: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/357436/why-isnt-pro... Forcing comments on downvotes looks reasonable but it doesn't work at the high-traffic scale of StackOverflow. [To downvoters, (1) are there any other discussion websites with comparable high traffic to StackOverflo…

Maybe "high traffic scale" is a problem?

>Maybe "high traffic scale" is a problem?

I honestly can't tell if your comment is snark or some type of realistic actionable advice.

If you intended actionable, what exactly do you propose SO to do to not be "high-traffic"? One of the meta threads say they got ~12k questions a day. (Most of them bad.) Should SO set a limit of 500 questions and after that, each person gets an error on the webform saying "Sorry, we've reached our max question limit today. We want to stay a low-traffic site so hope you'll understand!"

To recap some SO history from Atwood's posts...

2008 - StackOverflow is opened

2010 - Atwood and others notice they're getting inundated with too many bad questions. At this time downvoting questions cost karma.

2011 - To counteract the high volume of low-quality questions, they made downvoting questions free to remove friction.[1] Atwood noticed that users were too restrained in downvoting the questions and didn't exercise that power enough to clean up the site. Therefore, forcing the downvotes to have comments (add friction) is the opposite of what they were trying to solve in 2010 which was quickly suppressing the bad questions. SO has more traffic now in 2019 than back in 2011.

Perhaps some that are suggesting the idea of forced downvote explanations (I admit that it sounds like a wonderful feedback mechanism) -- don't know of SO's scale and the problems they had in 2010? I dunno.

[1] Jeff Atwood announced change of policy -- "Downvotes on questions no longer cost the casting user 1 reputation, so they are effectively “free”. [...] So, it’s imperative the question list have a high signal-to-noise ratio, and removing the penalty for those users who do take the time to read a question and later find it to be useless so they can down-vote is conducive to that." -- excerpt from : https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#254

Post by didibus »

Okay, I read the meta page about the question the author says is responsible for them being very disappointed in SO here: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/318482/is-there-a-b...

And if you look at the 3rd answers, it mentions a bounty fraud ring. Woa! Is that a thing? If it is, this is a hard problem to tackle. Relax the rules, increase fraud, strengthen the rules, impact normal users. Good luck SO

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#255

Post by kstenerud »

waisbrot wrote: post #240

Every year I see a post complaining about how unfriendly Stack Overflow is, how their pet question got downvoted so unfairly, and how Stack Overflow is dying. Everyone agrees: Stack Overflow is too mean and is dying. But time and again when I search for a question online if there's an SO version of it it has the best answer. And when I can't find an answer anywhere and I ask on SO I usually get a good answer quickly.…

"The first example from the article sounds reasonable at first, but are they asking for a shell command or some Go code or what?"

This kind of commentary exposes why SO becomes so hostile. The exact question was: "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."

From this, it's rather obvious what they're trying to do and why they want to get a list of packages. So yes, the question is perfectly reasonable, and you're jumping on the least likely interpretation in order to have something negative to say. And you're not alone; this is a very common behavior on SO.

"There's 1001 Github pages of common interview questions and answers that are more interesting and better written. Who could this be useful for other than the rest of that particular CS class? Why do I want to help someone I've never met cheat at a class I don't know about for free?"

More needless negativity. Once again, it's easier to attack, and makes one feel important to do so.

We're unfortunately dealing with human nature, and people really do seem blind to their own abuse. Without proper guidance and moderation, we see the worst come to light on public forums.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#256

Post by mdaniel »

umvi wrote: post #205
galaxyLogic wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be much better if users added their down-votes in the comments because then they would feel some need to explain why they down-vote something. In fact I think IT SHOULD BE REQUIRED to give a reason for your down-vote (if down-votes are allowed in general) An SO down-vote is not simply an "opinion", it affects your karma-score, perhaps even your chances of getting hired.

FWIW, I've done this before ("I downvoted you because...") and the question asker, instead of trying to improve their question, got combative/defensive which is not necessarily desirable either. It's lose/lose. Don't tell them why and they get frustrated, tell them why and they get defensive. It takes a rare user to take the feedback and use it to improve their question.

I like this taxonomy: https://idownvotedbecau.se although I would suggest there needs to be an "AND" mechanism, because https://idownvotedbecau.se/nodebugging/ is 80% of what I see, followed by https://idownvotedbecau.se/noattempt/ and its https://idownvotedbecau.se/unclearquestion/ friend. https://idownvotedbecau.se/imageofcode/ is annoying, for sure, but I rarely downvote for it, so long as the actual text is legible.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#257

Post by NateEag »

ufmace wrote: post #236
NateEag wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect to burn a few karma points on this, and be ignored, but all evidence I have says that this is human nature at work, and that at scale it cannot be prevented. I've seen moderators of small communities hold off the effect by setting a good example, using a deft touch, and not letting the community get too big. My suspicion is that once the number of commenters gets much past Dunbar's number [1], the universal…

I think there's something to this. Not sure if it's Dunbar's Number specifically, but something. It seems like there's a pattern where a community is nice and small, with people joining at a trickle. Things change when a jerk joins and starts doing jerk stuff. This tends to drive away the nice and helpful people, attract more jerks, and pushes people still there to be more jerk-ish themselves. Sometimes deft manageme…

Yeah, I'm not sure it's Dunbar's number precisely - it was just what came to mind.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#258

Post by MaxBarraclough »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #190
the_duke wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on no downvotes for questions. For answers, I would also do away with the downvote button, and offer multiple options instead, like: "does not answer the question", "misleading information", "off topic", "outdated", "i don't like the solution", ... . That would still give SO the capability to sort answers based on some quality ranking algorithm and hopefully reduce the unwarranted downvoting. PS, this line fro…

The problem. Stack Overflows commenting system is like a lawyers idea of fact finding. Everyone gives an answer and votes like a jury would with the mods acting as harsh judges. This is why SO just gets more and more toxic over time. What you want is a communal Socratic method. Where everyone goes round and round till the community produces a good solid answer.

The (now read-only) WikiWikiWeb [0] [1] did something like this.

The site appears to be down right now, but here's an example page on Archive.org [2]

[0] http://wiki.c2.com/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiWikiWeb

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190828124025/https://wiki.c2.c...

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#259

Post by isu »

Can confirm such issues, but I noticed it's the problem of some particular users/moderators who sit on Go channel. I haven't seen so many negative questions on other channels.

Re: Tired of Stack Overflow

#260

Post by beardedProgmr »

non-entity wrote: post #143
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

A student reporter once left a mic with my ma. She posted on Reddit hoping to find them. She still talks about the horrible replies she got. I really cannot fathom what's wrong with those people.
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