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The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

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Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#261

Post by gregmac »

user5994461 wrote: post #257
shagie wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you want low rep users who don't understand the expected quality for the site to be answering questions while the high rep users who are familiar with the duplicates and expectations are prevented from helping? Preventing high rep users from answering _good_ questions from low rep users means Jon Skeet and Eric Lippert won't see them and be able to give their often spectacular answers. You're suggesting cheating l…

> How many more answers to How do I fix a null pointer exception in Java ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) do you want to have on the site? Honestly. You're looking at a non-problem here. The endless stream of trivia questions is rivalled 10 times by the furry of downvotes and closing. Beginners who dare asking questions like that are welcomed so badly that they usually don't dare coming back.…

> Blocking professionals who have the solution because they don't have 100 points is a real issue.

Like I said in another reply, I'm not saying block, just filter by default. Though, perhaps a time limited block would be useful, and solve another problem: experienced users know how to answer quickly, and often do so before new users get the chance to provide one.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#262

Post by x1798DE »

DanBC wrote: post #235
x1798DE wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But just telling someone the answer might be available somewhere else doesn't direct future traffic to the canonical question, which is the entire point of the "marked as duplicate" flag. If your question gets marked as duplicate and the question it's a duplicate of is a different question, it is not very hard to get it "re-opened". Maybe people don't know that this is true, but I think the main people having problem…

> it is not very hard to get it "re-opened". I'd be interested to see some statistics. I strongly suspect that when most newbies are told to fuck off that they do, in fact, fuck off.

I don't disagree with that assessment, per se, but I don't think much can be done about it. The message doesn't say, "Fuck off, you worthless loser", it says (taken from the site), "This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please edit this question to explain how it is different or ask a new question." The fact that you interpret this as "fuck off" more or less proves my point that anything hinting at, "Maybe the answer can be found here" will be interpreted by new users as "fuck off".

As for statistics, you may be able to find some by querying the data explorer: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/new

I suspect it would be difficult to (automatically) distinguish between instances where a user was discouraged by the message and instances where the user's question was answered at the link. Perhaps the fraction of instances where the question was edited after being marked as a duplicate, then re-opened, is an OK metric for how willing a given community is to re-open questions.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#263

Post by shagie »

x1798DE wrote: post #262
DanBC wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is not very hard to get it "re-opened". I'd be interested to see some statistics. I strongly suspect that when most newbies are told to fuck off that they do, in fact, fuck off.

I don't disagree with that assessment, per se, but I don't think much can be done about it. The message doesn't say, "Fuck off, you worthless loser", it says (taken from the site), "This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please edit this question to explain how it is different or ask a new question." The fact that you interpret this as "fuck…

That was examined in this post - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266844

Might be interesting to see more recent statistics, but it still gives an idea.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#264

Post by teach »

mhomde wrote: post #20

I'm a bit divided about Stack Overflow. On one hand side it's simply one, if not the best, resource for programmers. On the other hand it's become somewhat toxic and counterproductive. The better you become as a programmer the less value you derive from it. The true niche experts are less and less to be found (ie Product/Project -owners and Microsoft/Google/Apple etc -employees) and the other replies will often be ex…

> The better you become as a programmer the less value you derive from it.

This has been my experience exactly. I'd been coding for 20+ years before Stack Overflow even existed. I nevertheless find many good answers on SO via Google searches.

But virtually all of my questions are either downvoted to oblivion or closed as "duplicates". I spend hours trying to solve the problem myself and spend even more time reducing the problem to the smallest reproducible test case before asking.

And then some moderator closes as a duplicate because it looks similar enough to some other question he's seen before. It's incredibly frustrating, to the point that I've stopped participating at all other than to upvote good answers.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#265

Post by fuck_google »

dominotw wrote: post #44
joekrie wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's especially irritating when these elitist types clearly don't know as much as they think they do.

seems like a good outlet for nerdy power fantasies.

Seems like a good outlet for googlers. ;)

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#266

Post by erikpukinskis »

When I first started trying to post and vote, I had the same experience: why is this web site trying to prevent me from using it? Ohh. They're trying to gamify answering programming questions. Ain't nobody got time for that.

But then a year or so later I logged in and somehow I had cleared all of the caps without having really done anything. I guess some comments or voted on some things and some stuff got voted up. Regardless all of the sudden I could just do whatever I wanted.

Doesn't seem like the incentives are set up right, at least anecdotally in this case. The reward I received was not connected to any sort of earnest attempts at helping the site out. Those were rebuffed. And now I guess I can contribute, but I spent a good while thinking of Stack Overflow as a read-only site that I'm not really in the habit of thinking that way.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#267

Post by winteriscoming »

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).

Given that a voting system is in place, why not let the duplicate stay open and just mark it as a duplicate and link it to the other thread? People who don't like the new thread can down vote it and people who do want to contribute meaningful replies can still do and be upvoted if it adds value.

I don't see how this might affect SEO in any bad way than the current scheme does.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#269

Post by shagie »

gregmac wrote: post #261
user5994461 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many more answers to How do I fix a null pointer exception in Java ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/linked/218384?lq=1 ) do you want to have on the site? Honestly. You're looking at a non-problem here. The endless stream of trivia questions is rivalled 10 times by the furry of downvotes and closing. Beginners who dare asking questions like that are welcomed so badly that they usually don't dare coming back.…

> Blocking professionals who have the solution because they don't have 100 points is a real issue. Like I said in another reply, I'm not saying block, just filter by default. Though, perhaps a time limited block would be useful, and solve another problem: experienced users know how to answer quickly, and often do so before new users get the chance to provide one.

Most questions don't get answers. The problem is not users giving excellent, well thought out answers so quickly a new user cannot find something to answer. There are 3M questions without any answer. There are lots of opportunities to provide answers. Most people, however dontnknownhow to write a good question... or for that matter, a good answer.

Look at the newest questions, or triage, or help and improvement queues. There are many more questions than there are answers.

Re: The decline of Stack Overflow (2015)

#270

Post by parrellel »

grkvlt wrote: post #252
speedkills wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always remember scrolling down past the blurred out section and reading the actual answers without signing up. I wonder how many people ending up getting past that old school dark pattern.

Could you? I thought they didn't make the answers available, and just always showed the grayed out text even if there was no real answer after you paid up? There were several incarnations of the site though, and of course I may well be mis-remembering, it was a long time ago...

Eventually, Google threatened to delist them if they didn't provide the content somewhere on the page.
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