More decline in 2016. Questions are not being answered in general or there are professionals responders who don't really understand what you are talking about.
In the other hand there are exciting discussions in the other *.stackexchange.com sites (e.g. reverseengineering, ethereum).
Yeah, I know I've engendered some unjust vitriol with SO questions (got referred to Hackers - same thing), where the question was non-nonchalantly labeled as polling - and I knew it wasn't because I'd spent hours going through Google Scholar and the ACM databases. But my elaboration only angered someone with a 10K ref who could downvote me all day long.
I'm not so sure I agree. I've answered a few Python questions this year. Most of which have gotten several answers pretty quickly. If they didn't get answers, it was often a question that was a poor fit for Stack Overflow (e.g., very specific to a framework, something readily available in the docs).
I imagine the better/next one would be build around an AI that learns from users in order to answer to users, all through a chat-like interface. No up/downvote or moderation needed, the AI determines by interacting with the users what is useful and correct, and what is not.
People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before.
Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on that (a lot of the more hostile rule enforcement tropes are banned and filtered against), and it's a hard problem.
SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good. If you want to kill it, please go ahead and solve the issue of explaining to users how to contribute quality content and getting them to take that in instantly.
I used to contribute a lot, which tapered off as I had other things filling my time. Towards the end though, the help vampires were getting to me, and I understand why people are harsh towards new users in some situations, it's an easy trap to fall into. Trying to fix that problem by stopping the curation of the content is insane, however. That's a fast route to going from some people being turned away to having no decent content.
So many of the useful answers are closed. A lot of the stuff from google etc. are from 2009-2011. It seems like now most of people are a bunch of assholes trying to be elitists.
>SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good.
While I'd say this is currently true, answers on SO tend to stick around for a long time, and the 'marked as duplicate'-heavy behavior means that even if the best practice to solving a given problem changes, the top SO google result won't. While this isn't a _huge_ problem right now, with the way the site is set up I only see it getting worse, to the point that some years down the line I imagine many SO answers will either cease to be relevant or push people down the wrong path when solving a problem.
You can edit the top answer or post a new answer, I have got 50 odd votes from adding asp.net's encryption/decryption methods that were added in 3.5 to old .net encryption questions.
I've done it on a few other answers too, if the top answer seems clunky or inelegant, I tend to dig a bit deeper to see if there's a better way.
Also, scrolling down a bit in the answers you usually find new ways of doing something as answer 3 or 4. Just upvote it. Or edit the answer into the top answer.
You can. Most people can't. As the site gets aggressive against newcomers and old timers decide they have better things to do, there will be less and less people available edit them.
And don't think those editions are as high quality as the ones that come by the official channel, where literally anybody in the world with the needed knowledge can reply, and there is a robust process for vetting.
Besides, despite any theoretical possibility, people mostly do not edit old SO answers. There are exceptions, but outdated answer mostly stay there.
I'm an incredibly lazy programmer, I remember nothing, it's simply not worth it imho. I hate man pages and specs and generally reading boring tech docs. I hate memorising stuff.
I Google incredibly basic stuff like how to read files, how to read a web page (something that changes every 5 months in .Net), hell, even basic jQuery functionality.
The difference is that I have the knowledge deep down, I just use SO and Google as a prompt. I know the correct answer as soon as I see it. I get exposed to a lot of basic answers on SO, and generally they're right.
SO is generally good and is not suffering the problem you or the OP claim.
The site isn't aggressive against newcomers, it's aggressive against bad form questions/answers. Which is usually, it is true, done by newcomers because they don't know how to make a good form ones. This is a social problem which is very hard to solve - how to make people produce high quality content without discouraging them too much when they produce low quality. Some people would be annoyed and leave. But I think SO found a model that largely works - at least for the most of my questions, I found pretty good answers. For some, I found none, but neither did I find answers in any other place.
> it's aggressive against bad form questions/answers
You're absolutely wrong in that case. Particularly answers being "good" or "correct" is not part of the mission statement; and the rules reject fixes of questions by default for not being "in the spirit of the poster".
All SO aims for is having the most questions/answers. Nothing else.
> All SO aims for is having the most questions/answers. Nothing else.
Is demonstrably false. If that were the only aim, questions would never be closed and there would be no need for a moderation system. They fact that they do have moderation system and do police questions and answers is the proof that quality is part of the equation.
That just weeds out the questions that would make SO look obviously bad.
It does nothing to affect the quality of answers that look ok, but are actually problematic. And in those cases "spirit of poster" always trumps correctness.
> You can edit the top answer or post a new answer
Nope you can't.
- You'll be blocked if your edit is not "in the spirit of the originally post(er)".
If you only have to add a separate and standalone paragraph at the end on a newer subfeature (like your asp example), it's generally fine.
If you have to rewrite one of the main paragraph, the reviewers will systematically reject your edit.
Typically, that means that there is no way to update an obsolete post when the tools or best practices have changed, because it's considered major changes diverging from the original author.
- Combine that with the aggressive policy of closing and locking down questions, and it's impossible to post a new separate answer on most of the questions.
Absolutely this. I ran into the issue today where somebody had posted an ambiguous answer. Mods rejected edits to clarify, the user themselves said "it's not ambiguous to me", and the question itself is locked.
Highly upvoted answers are usually converted into "wiki entries", so that they can evolve, extend and restructure with time. It somehow alleviates the problem, as long as the both sides (asking and answering) care to actually update it.
The only wiki answers I've seen have been hugely popular with dozens of answers and hundreds of votes. Maybe it happens outside of that, but it's definitely not how it "usually" works, IME.
Most of the questions I see on SO have maybe 0-5 answers, and the average number of votes is something like 2. If you're lucky there's an accepted answer and/or an answer with a clear majority of votes. I've even seen cases where the accepted answer is wrong, while a more upvoted answer is correct.
SO could be the internet's technical manual if good answers were properly organised and maintained - if the point of providing answers was to document 'how to do programming' and you could only close a duplicate by explaining how to documented answer applies. But the incentive is get in fast, answer and move on to the next question.
Organizational and writing skill don't necessarily correlate well to programming skill. And when one adds gamification to that allowing for material curated by the masses without the corresponding community investment by those who _do_ have that skill set... well.
Marked as duplicate and closed for being too broad are annoying.
Often, the "duplicate" is actually a different question with a different answer and many of the too broad ones are not too broad, can be answered easily, and can make it easier than reading 10 other threads and pulling the needed information from each.
I now try to see if Stack Overflow has an answer and if I am not able to really understand what is going on, I don't bother to post a question because I hate how the 'keepers' pounce on you. Instead I find an SME by networking within my org and get it answered
> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile.
I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time.
> People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before.
People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on.
I don't know that "the complete mess" is just about bullying and vile content, but more the horrible issues of signal to noise and the inability to filter out irrelevant responses. Forums, email lists, and Google Groups still have so many ill-informed and irrelevant non-sequitur responses crowding out the few pearls of wisdom.
My pet peeve is when you're trying to read an existing entry instead opening a new topic and half of the entries have extremely vague titles like "How do I do this?" and "Can someone help with problrm plz?" and I have to make the dreaded decision between reading all of them or risk skipping one that's actually relevant. Even when moderators could fix it, they usually don't. I always fix this in projects I maintain.
"People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on."
It wasn't bullying so much as low-quality content. It is quite likely you didn't have this problem, as I didn't very often either. If you know where to go, help has always been available for many languages/runtimes/environments/etc., and generally that help still is available today. If you know the right IRC channels, the right forums, the right mailing lists, the right other resources, you can get great, high-quality help.
However, prior to SO if you just poked your query into Google you ran a decent risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads, locked behind obtaining accounts (to get your email for spam) if not outright paywalls, or expertsexchange. And this was more true for beginners; I didn't encounter this stuff while looking up an error message resulting from an obscure combination of hardware under Linux, I encountered this stuff while trying to refresh my memory about some particular Javascript intricacy.
Yes, it really was bad for a lot of people. SO is still an improvement inasmuch as while the community may rub some people the wrong way, at least the answers are still there for free, uncluttered, and generally of high quality for the most-commonly searched things.
That was far more the nature of Google at the time though. ie effectively broken.
The years immediately pre-SO were the height of the 5 page adsense spam site. Put anything into google and you ran a decent risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads.
Well, before SO, you had sites like 'Expert Sex Change' (expertsexchange.com) which would purport to answer your question, but gray/blur out the actual text. They then required payment to expose the answers, which often turned out to be non-existent.
On the other hand, I've had a lot of success with SO, both asking and answering, and while there are occasions where I find questions closed as duplicates or off-topic, they are pretty rare. I frequent the Java, Docker, Kubernetes, jclouds and similar categories, and they are generally very good.
It may be down to the choice of topic? Perhaps PHP and .NET have more first-time users, and a lower quality of questions? I don't know; although since the SO data is all freely available [1] it might make a nice research project to discover [2] what causes these questions to be closed!
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...
Yes you could. I'm not sure it always worked that way. My guess is they added that after being dropped by Google once Googlebot got smart enough to know you were hiding content.
Or just "View Source" and there was the raw text of the answer...
What Experts Exchange had going for it was a lot of corporate-domain programming knowledge, stuff like COBOL and IBM Visual Age that are basically unknown on Stack Overflow.
Bullying? I'm not sure if you are trying to say SO has bullying (it doesn't - yes, newcomers have their questions rejected a lot - turns out asking good questions is hard. Saying this is bullying is like saying that it's bullying not to publish every author's book), or that you really thing bullying was the problem I was referring to in the past.
It wasn't, the issue was the content was useless. To find anything you had to wade through pages of off-topic stuff, and try to get a sense of the value of the given answers. It was terrible. That and the paywalling and other stuff that used to go on.
I find it to be a great resource if someone has already answered your question, especially if I find it via Google. As for asking questions, it's a bit off-putting to be immediately downvoted without explanation, and to not get a single answer.
Point is, it's good resource to free-ride but not actively participate.
That's basically the point of the site. I think SO's owners are ok with this trade off.
FWIW it wasn't always like this. I have a lot of points on SO mostly acquired about 5 years ago. Back then SO was a much friendlier, and much more interesting place to participate in. I haven't actively participated in about 3 years or so.
It's more that it turns out that asking questions is hard.
Anyone who has had to work with others in tech knows the kind of crap you get. They don't give you the stack trace, they say 'I get an error' without giving the error message, they just say 'it doesn't work', it's not clear what they want, they post a screenshot of half a stack trace, etc...
Again, it's a constant trade off where you are balancing the asker's needs with the thousand people who find this via Google, and the people answering the question.
The SO is in decline. And decline is caused by its own success.
- The SO was great because answers for noob questions where hard to find. At this point of time (thanks to SO and their knowledge database) there are so many other resources to get these noob questions answered or they are already answered. And some of these other resources are updated to reflect the most recent technology changes while SO answers are static.
- Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering.
- People who got reputation and they are moderator (they made SO successful) do not know what they do not know.
It's probably the same evidence that causes people to say Hacker News is in decline, the internet is in decline, society as a whole is in decline. Occasionally those predictions are right, but usually they're not.
At the same time, it's sometimes a good idea to pay attention to qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) analysis, since certain abstract concepts like culture can only be analyzed that way.
> Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering.
I can't speak for others, but in my case it is not for lack of interest. I don't have enough 'reputation' to be allowed to answer questions and am too busy to find earning it a good use of my time.
Most actual experts don't have the time or interest to amass points on some website. Just like with Reddit moderators, the type of person that is willing to devote a substantial amount of time to rule over an Internet fiefdom often has some personality problem. Add to this the fact that Asperger-like personalities are quite common in the IT field to begin with.
> - Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering.
I suspect part of the reason they're not interested in answering is because a difficult question requires a lot more work to likely get less points as a result. Meanwhile, answering a ton of easy questions can be done quickly and gets more points over on Stack Overflow in the same time frame.
That and yeah, lots of people who could answer your question would rather be doing something that pays the bills or helps them instead.
> I suspect part of the reason they're not interested in answering is because a difficult question requires a lot more work to likely get less points as a result.
I have to admit I have fallen into this myself on both sides.
The (now) rare times I browse the site to find questions I can answer, when I run across one like this, its usually by a low rep user, so I think "hmm, I'll spend fifteen or twenty minutes sharing this, get maybe one or two upvotes, and if I'm lucky the original person will accept the answer" and usually deem it not worthwhile. Partly this is because the correct answer is often "don't do it that way, you should do x then you can do z and completely avoid your problem instead" which understandably people don't like to hear.
For the first time in a while, I've picked up a language I have not used for almost 15 years.
Google is helping immensely, and I've been shocked at how often (>95%) of the time the first result is SO, and that answer is perfect. So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open.
It might not be perfect, though I'd say it's the best by a massive margin.
Sorry, but I disagree. While, yes, I've found that Google searches often led me to answers on SO, I've also lost count of the number of times Google has decided that a question on a StackOverflow page was the MOST RELEVANT to the question I was asking, but SO mods had put a big, fat stamp at the top from moderators announcing that THEY weren't going to permit anyone to answer it.
I don't know how many times I've scanned down a SO page hoping, hoping, hoping that someone managed to smuggle in the answer to my question before the red guards noticed and put a stop to it.
Google simply wants to find the best answer it can to my question, while StackOverflow would rather try to find reasons to prevent it being answered.
I don't want a forum where answering my question is a last resort, and their highest priority is finding a justification for not only not answering, but actually preventing anyone else who was willing to answer from answering.
What we need is a developer forum that is totally open to questions, but with the amazing addition of Google-like search to do ranked prioritization of all answers instead of old-fashioned red guards to prevent answers they didn't like from ever existing, whether you needed those answers or not. You could ask anything you wanted, as long as you were polite, and the worst that could happen would be that your question would be re-tagged (ex: that's actually a DELPHI question, not PASCAL language, because it's not about the language.)
People would then be free to answer or not, as they wished, with votes for answer quality and links to other answers that add to the quality measures. They could express opinions (horrors! opinions from people with experience that you lack! who would EVER want that) or quote the docs, or insert a link to another answer that (in their opinion only) probably answers your question, too, but they do so without preventing anyone else from going ahead and offering their own answer.
Google manages to sort through an entire web full of comments that are "possible duplicates" or "primarily opinion based" and it's amazingly useful. A mini version of that is what we need for software Q%A.
A thousand times yes. Stack Overflow has such a high page rank, that closed questions are often at the top of Google Search results. Keeping closed questions available for Google to find is a massive waste of time. On the Google result page it looks like this is exactly the right question -- but just like Experts Exchange, the page doesn't tell you the solution.
If Stack Overflow really wanted to make life easier for people, they would delete closed questions, or move them to a directory that is excluded from search engines. Closed questions are basically bait-and-switch for searchers; they show the question, but don't have an answer.
The biggest problem for me is which SO site to search. If I've a problem with a bit of bash script to control KDE on Ubuntu then is that Superuser, Unix, SO, AskUbuntu, or ... I don't understand why the site is split up in that manner.
So whilst I'll often choose an SO site I can't use their search.
Try "KDE notifications from bash scripts" for example. Google will show that there are answers on SO and Unix.stackexchange - searching at AskUbuntu (I use Ubuntu with KDE on top) will return zero results and won't even suggest results from other SO sites. SO itself has the best result but seems the least appropriate of the silos to place that search in.
Then there's having to register at each of the different sites on the network. The siloing of the site is PITA IMO. The only reason to do it this way I can think of is to separate computing resources, it seems there are probably better ways around that issue too? Why not a unified site with hierarchical tags such that you can choose a tag as a preferential search term?
Yes, fragmentation is a real problem. Can be probably solved by integrating the search indexes to some measure without integrating the sites themselves. It's not easy, but it can be done IMHO.
The curation is far and away the worst part of SO. So many interesting threads killed for being off topic. I've never seen moderation add a thing to that site. Its success is in its structure and voting. They've done everything in their power to kill that from a moderation angle.
Agreed. Often the questions they kill are the only ones that could possibly be useful to me. I don't need someone to regurgitate the manual/docs for me. I need answers to things like "what is the best ad library to use on Android?" that would have saved me a lot of trial and error and testing to come up with a good result. But "opinion" questions like that are not allowed.
No, it's success is the curation. You just don't understand the site. There is a reason SO persists and is so popular, while so many clones that do exactly the same structure and voting fail miserably.
The 'interesting threads' are exactly the problem. Those are discussions and they don't suit the format. If you want to talk about something, find a forum. SO does not have threads, it has questions and answers, and that is why it's useful.
Turns out people hate wading through pages of outdated discussion. People are forgetting what it was like before SO. Stop expecting SO to be all things to all people - if you want a discussion, go register at a programming forum. SO does what it is trying to do well.
I mean, I'd argue they are doing very different things. The Arch wiki is a collection of full topics that give you an overview of the thing as a whole. SO is a collection of q&a. I find that I need the former much more than I need the latter when it comes to managing my system, and that's probably just the nature of the task at hand. Generally I want to perform a complete task, and having a guide through that means I'm unlikely to encounter a specific problem of the type that SO is good at answering.
Also, the way in which Arch is as a system makes it less likely you have that kind of problem. Because you install and configure everything yourself, there is less 'magic' that is likely to go wrong in a way you don't know how to begin fixing it.
Essentially, someone who asks continual questions and who seems unwilling to do any work, research, or to put any effort into learning on their own. Overview is here:
A common variation is someone who asks a reasonable question, gets an answer, then repeatedly modifies/extends the original question, or who asks a long series of follow up questions n comments. This variation is described here:
People who cannot be bothered to cover the simplest basics of a topic on their own. It's usually hard to explain anything to them because anywhere you try to start from they will need you to explain that topic first, and on, and on. If you ask them "what do you understand" in an attempt to join them in some common frame of comprehension, they look at you with a blank stare and reply "what do you mean". That's how they drain you of your life energy. Help vampires.
SO is also full of opposites: answer vampires. You put efforts into formulating your very specific question, correcting for english language rules, provide working examples only to see bunch of "we never did it like that, you do not need that" answers from old-boys that think they know everything. Ofc, if someone solved that issue the same way, he will show up and put his saving comment, but those beards form the community, force newcomers to think The Right Way.
SO is great to search for snippets and tl;drs, though. Reference manuals fail to contain tl;drs way too often, and that was fixed, thanks SO.
And just to add another layer to your observation: the effect you describe is accelerated depending on the technology or programming language if those things are specific to the question. So, for instance, if it's a Perl-related question (we never did it this way, there's 3,827 other ways to do it and your answer is not one of them so I'm voting to close) the Soup Nazi-ism is gonna be worse than, say, a TCP/IP question.
Help vampires are people who suck the life out of those who answer questions. They ask questions without bothering to think about it themselves, often without enough information to actually answer the question well. These types of questions are frustrating to answer, and lead to people assuming the worst of new users who ask bad questions unintentionally.
It's a sliding scale. Most people just don't know how to ask a good question initially, but some just don't care. In general, I'd say the 'help vampire' problem is where the asker is looking for the answerer's time, not their help. They want someone to do free work for them, without putting in effort themselves.
> People always talk about how SO is so terrible, and yet it's still the best resource by a mile. People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before.
I don't know, I've always felt that the apparent decline in usefulness came from the strict curation (and I do insist on the word "apparent"). In the past the site felt more natural to me as a big hodge-podge of various technology related topics. Questions came from various aspects of the tech world, whether they related to sys admins (e.g. linux configs, installations, scripting, etc), super users (e.g. text editors and other tools), programming languages (e.g. how to use a library or language feature), comp sci (e.g. algorithms), databases, or even networking. To me it all kinda related to how we all use the set everyday. Then came what I can only describe as over-categorization. Instead of relying on the machine to search stuff for us, they split the content into specific websites and changed their standard of what's relevant or less so (which is why you have closed questions that thousands of users still find useful). Google figured this out years ago with gmail, don't waste time organizing, just search. Case in point, how many people actually search any of the stackexchange websites directly? I'd bet that most users get there from google. And it's not unusual to be searching for a topic that intersects with any two or more of these communities. But none of them will refer to any other to tell you that the topic has a related thread in a sibling community. Only google gives you a clue, because it looks at it as the afore-mentioned hodge-podge.
It's not to say that the site didn't need any curation, I just think it somehow became a bit too systematic and oblivious of our instinct as human users. I also have the strong suspicion that people who feel that SO is declining are way off, but I doubt that the rise (if any) of its relevancy has much to do with the heavy handed curation.
> The consequence thereof is that many good questions not only get closed before anyone is able to respond, but that many of them end up vanishing into oblivion for eternity after merely 9 days.
Yes, any cutoff time has the downside that you lose posts. But it's not like SO makes rules for no reason. Where's the discussion of the problem that that rule is solving? How do we know they're not worse than this problem?
Some advice from me to ease your experience on SO:
1. Earn some reputation first in order to see how stuff works from the other side. When you join a new company, you don't come the first day and tell everyone how they're doing it wrong before learning about the project, about the tradeoffs etc. Same here.
Having rep above certain threshold gives you additional privileges (commenting, editing etc.).
Also, when you have a rep over few hundred, I'm more likely to even read your question.
Most questions from 0-rep users are very basic same-stuff-again / low-quality questions that are not challenging to answer.
Moreover, when you have some points, you can put a bounty on your question, which means you really want to have a good answer for that and can make a sacrifice, and makes the question stand out (on a separate bounty-enabled-questions page). This gives more incentive to others to look at your question. There's nothing more soul crushing on SO than taking time to write an elaborate answer and getting 0 upvotes, because the guy forgot to upvote or whatever because he doesn't care.
2. It's a misconception that you need to "respond very fast" to the questions to get the rep.
Everyone has a different strategy, and well I spent some time a few years ago using this strategy to get some initial reputation.
But I stopped some 5 years ago. I almost never play the "fastest gun in the west". I google things that I encounter during my normal
daily work, and keep the tab open. If the best answer is not satisfactory, and later I come up with something better, I write it down
as a new answer, and perhaps if I found similar problem in multiple SO questions, I put a comment with a cross-link to my answer in other thread.
You really need very little effort to get SO rep as a part of your normal daily work, yet everything I talk to seem amazed "wow how come you have so much rep on Stack!".
Just create a damn account, be always logged in, and don't keep your solutions for yourself.
3. Try to put up an exhaustive question, write down a SMALL, reproducible scenario, explore some options yourself (ask yourself
"what did I try?").
A lot of newcomers put very vague questions, very little information, it's not fun to ask someone a ten clarifying questions.
4. I felt really bad when I got my first downvote but it was indeed a bad answer, to a different question than the OP asked.
I learnt the lesson and I don't read in haste anymore. It's good to be humbled sometimes.
Regarding "closing as duplicate", it's true some mods are too eager, but if it makes sense, I believe dupe questions should be closed - duplication is not good (DRY) and best code is no code, if possible.
I'm not sure if you were replying to me to give general advice to others, or specific advice to me - I've used SO a lot (50k rep).
In general, you make reasonable points - although it's clear SO could improve here. The new asker experience obviously has problems. Not worth sacrificing question quality to improve on, but I have no doubt there will be ways to help without doing so. (And they seem to be working on it).
I've found that if you go to Stackoverflow for a fast-moving topic like Javascript, the first answer isn't correct in modern terms. The next set of answers, without check marks, are likely more correct.
So you have to read the entire page to get a glimpse of the truth.
This can be bad if you're just looking for an immediate solution, however for learning its fantastic because it shows you a recorded history of how things evolved over time in a framework.
Agreed. I usually use 'site:stackoverflow.com [[query]]' in Google with search terms limiting pages that have been updated in the last year or so. Filters a lot of the very old answers out which often can send you on a totally wrong direction because the ecosystem has changed so much.
Perhaps SO will end up getting overtaken by a new similar site, not because it is intrinsically better, just because they reset the corpus of answers so the SNR is higher for a while? I imagine SO will become increasingly less useful as their Q&A gets older and older.
This is really a much smaller problem if you stick to languages outside the churn'n'burn whizzbang web world. A lot of answers from the Java 1.6 era, or about .Net 3.5, or Python 2.7 are still largely relevant. Best practices in C/C++ have been even more static, aside from a few additions in recent modern standards that few seem to actually use.
C# changed a decent amount since 3.5 to dotnet core, similar to python 2 to 3 which also changed a lot of stuff.
And C++11 is practically a new backwards compatible language compared to legacy C++.
Java is more stable but at the same time it's also the slowest to evolve which is why many developers prefer C# even if it wasn't cross platform in the past - the language was just superior because of how fast it is evolving, considering that at 1.0 they were basically equivalent.
I think the accepted answer causes a lot of problems, I personally think that after 3-6 months it should no longer pin it as the top answer, votes should.
Not sure if it's ever been discussed on meta, I don't understand why they haven't done it already, seems a reasonable solution.
I think the crusade against duplicates worsens this problem. If duplicates were more accepted, it would both make it more welcoming for newcomers to ask questions, and encourage people to update the answers to old questions (by answering the new questions).
I'm not sure what the right answer is but I agree duplicate answers allow me to garner different perspectives or approaches to the same problem. This can be very helpful as you might be missing a simple parameter that makes the checked answer not correct in your situation.
I've found that if I acknowledge the duplicate (which is very easy considering when you post a new question it shows you similar posts) and state a reason it doesn't work any more (even if that is just, "has anything changed?") it rarely gets flagged as a dupe.
I don't totally understand why people worry so much about your question being marked as a duplicate. Questions marked as duplicates are not deleted and still show up in search results - the reason why duplicates are still kept around after being marked is because they sorta want duplicate questions on the site, because every person is going to state their query in slightly different language, and you want people searching using different terms to end up in the same place.
Most of the time if your question is mostly a duplicate but the other question (or its answer) is missing some critical factor, then you can appeal and say, "I don't think this is a duplicate of <x> because <y>" (or modify your question with the stipulation that the answer solve the critical factor) and the duplicate marking will be removed.
The other thing is, even when questions get marked as duplicates or closed, half the time I still see them accumulating their own answers, so really, what's the big issue?
If you ask a question and it genuinely has been answered elsewhere a friendly note "I think your question is answered here [url], is there anything that isn't answered by that question?" is useful. But "duplicate of [url]" often links to a question that has enough differences to not be a dupe. It's hostile, and it's a sign that incentives are out of alignment.
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 problems with questions marked as duplicates are new users where you've had very little time to educate them about what it means to have your question marked as a duplicate (basically, not much). Even if you made the "marked as duplicate" flag less obtrusive or whatever, politely saying, "Your question may have an answer at <url>" probably will get interpreted as "RTFM", and called user-hostile as well.
As an aside, my only experience with having a question marked as a duplicate happened on a sister SE site - it was my first post there, I asked a question, then after posting I found the answer in one of the "related questions" links on the sidebar. I answered my own question with a link to the other question and a description of the answer I found there, then flagged my own post as a duplicate. Both the question and answer were highly upvoted.
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".
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.
Its crazy that SO isn't able to spoon fed devs answers to their specific need based on solutions to other people's specific needs. If people would put it in these terms they would realize they should have to read a bit and have to earn their solution to their problem. Frankly, even if the most upvoted answer looks correct I still take the time to read all other answers, comments and perhaps a few other similarly related questions. Perhaps I am unique in this but I also find myself rarely relying on SO first and usually as a last ditch resort for odd scenarios.
SO has consolidated a massive amount of information and is a great resource. People expect too much of words though and should have to do some work themselves.
I've found the Postgres docs almost always more informative, clearer, and more correct than anything I find on SO. The only exceptions are for "how can I achieve this goal" questions, instead of the much more common "how can I implement this idea" ones.
Most useful info about Python from SO are pointers to the official docs in content-free answers. What is very valuable, because the docs are hard to navigate, but not what is expected.
About Haskell, C, or Perl, I currently ignore SO links, it's just less bother to go to the next result, and way more likely to get something useful.
But for Javascript, .Net, MS SQL, and a lot of other random stuff, SO is unbeatable.
Point based moderation generates toxicity, hacker news gets toxic too. Stack Overflow went all in on moderation before they understood the social consequences of it. There's an opportunity here for a social network with a moderation system that cares about how it makes people feel and how feelings impact user generated content.
this is a really important point. how do you curate for good content while not demoralizing contributors?
and it's a more generalized social challenge. in coaching for example, you need to improve a player's abilities and instincts, which essentially implies that what they're currently doing is not so great. the easiest people to coach understand that they are not already perfect. those who are hardest to coach are those who already believe they are good enough.
for the player, there's a tension between having the self-esteem to assert yourself while having the maturity to accept criticism. you need to be able to encourage both behaviors while maintaining a balance between them.
as you point out, the challenge for an online moderation system is providing a similar balance to users/contributors. the social distance between contributors and moderators makes it hard not to become defensive.
With a dozen exceptions for the diamond (elected) mods, all the moderators are from the community and got to that point with contributions. Nearly all of the are still contributing and moderate as part of the process of trying to find things to answer.
> moderation system that cares about how it makes people feel
Definitely something that's very much needed. But I don't think anyone knows what it would look like and what the distribution of emotional labour would be.
What most people fail to understand (but was explained very well by Joel in some talks) is that SO is primarily optimized for Google & read-only users just looking for the answer to a common issue. By that metric they are extremely successful.
Many things people complain about are deliberate design choices that actually made SO popular in the first place.
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.
What I've noticed it on it like this example.
Post quick answer to simple question. Someone comments on my post pointing out a really simple typo.
Fix typo, answer sorts to the bottom of the stack of answers of the save vote number. It always seems to go to the bottom and not a random order, at least in my experience.
As someone who sometimes ask non-trivial questions that other people sometimes find useful I don't think this is the complete answer:
I, and I guess others, can easily hesitate a full day, doing search after search after search, before asking on SO.
On the other hand SO makes it really simple to create new accounts and ask questions.
If they really were concerned about answering the same questions again and again they would implement some basic rules like limiting new users from asking questions untilntyey had been active for a full day or something.
Weirdly enough it seems people like to complain about the workload while at the same time refusing to do anything to reduce it.
In fact it is almost as if they enjoy moderating noobs :-|
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 exasperating mixture of trying to give answers they've googled or complain about some meta-aspect of the question.
Any community that reaches a certain size will face unique problems and I think Stack Overflow has some of the same problem as reddit does: you have to be very careful on how you give power to users. Power corrupts and becomes a goal/game in itself. Karma/power is a great incentive in the beginning of a community, but can become destructive in the long run. That some programmers have a certain type of personality is probably not helping either.
There seems to be many småpåvar on Stack Overflow that loves to wield the small amount of power they've accrued without actually contributing that much. On the other hand you have to enforce rules and curation to keep quality up.
It's a very fine balance and hard to get right. It's mostly about human psychology and incentives. I think there's some tweaks they could do to improve things but I also understand that from their perspective why change something that works?
The danger is that the true experts stop helping/answering questions on Stack Overflow because they find the community becoming too toxic. Might turn into a downwards spiral until there's mostly trolls and newbies left.
> 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.
The article is probably right about some factors that explain the "77% of users only ask one question".
But IMOHO it miss an important one:
Most of the user find answer to their question only by searching.
In fact once you get rejected (by a troll or not) for asking a question that you would have been able to find on SO, you became more careful before posting.
Also don't forget that a huge majority of the net user are ghost / read only :)
The c2.com wiki is a nice alternative in this space. It's not quite what you're describing, but I think it's worth checking out of your after a general-software-stuff wiki.
Sounds very much like the wikepedia problem: a bunch of long-term members working as mods don't have patience for new people and are hostile to people who aren't already in the club.
Disclaimer: I work in the Q&A team at Stack Overflow.
What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the community.
Absolutely. On the top of that you have very different communities. If you ask a question about something in OCaml or in Javascript your experience will be very different. The only thing I don't like is the new user questions that cannot be answered, usually down voted very fast though.
> No matter what choices we make there will be upset people.
Sure, I have no idea what you have to deal with on a daily basis and in the end the content is mostly helpful so you are probably doing it right. But in more than few occasions I have been treated like a dirty beggar/shoplifter/moron/(you name it) for actually asking a question (or answering one)! Yes I need you and yes I owe you a lot - but I don't like you. And I won't root for you when you will be an underdog and when there will be equal alternative I will switch and never look back.
And I'm sure you'll have the same experience elsewhere. Once a site like SO gets large enough to be really useful to a lot of people you're going to also have to deal with an influx of the type of users you don't like. I don't know how you solve that problem.
It has nothing to do with size. The TSA staff in the post communist country where I come from are jerks and they roll their eyes every time someone makes a mistake. But TSA staff at most large international airports is trained to understand that people will make mistakes no matter what and that their role is not to move trays but to help people. SO simply never prioritised helping people over providing them with correct technical answers so it is only natural that some of the mods beehive like knowitall-bully-jerks.
One of the problems with SO, though is that frequently, once you get one ranty idiot tearing a hole into you for being so stupid as to ask a question they have personal problems with, you're stuffed.
Because once it receives one downvote, you'll get pile-on downvotes, particularly if it's an entertainingly abusive rant; which means that nobody will ever see it again. And you can't change the wording and repost, because you know that there will be people who will notice that it's a repost, and then it gets even worse.
You will never get help with that question, because of one ranty idiot.
And if you try to complain, the official response from the moderators is to suck it up and deal [paraphrased slightly].
> Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over.
Every moderator on every site will tell you this; without this narrative they wouldn't exist.
Is there any proof that this is the case though? To me SO is super useful with ~20% of great threads killed for being off topic. Voting puts good topic on top, no need for administrator intervention.
"Help vampires" aka people with a question that's been answered, are only a problem if you don't have proper search tools to show that a question has already been asked (or answered). If you provide those, and people still ask, maybe their question actually is different. If you provide similar question tools for answerers, let them link to the other question/answers but there's no value in closing the question. That's just hostile and kills the opportunity to generate actual content.
Also, let's be real. It's not the marking dupes that's problem it's all the "off topic" closures.
Side note: you work at SO and call your users "help vampires". I think that elitist attitude is a huge part of the problem we're discussing here.
> Side note: don't pass judgement on stuff or people you don't know. It's quite insulting.
You don't know who I am so I'm not sure why you think I wouldn't know about community management or content generation. I'm simply telling you that calling your users names is insulting. It's good advice not a reason to attack me.
The Q&A format poorly handles the ever growing list of libraries that can do something. A wiki format is better for that. Maybe the documentation / examples that exists now. But sifting through dozens (this was closed before it got there) answers is more noise than signal. People aren't bothered to curate and clean old broken answers in such a format. Try slant.co for such a question instead.
While those telling the user who posted the question wer correct about deleting the comma, this question would have had immensely more value if they had simply said "don't build your query that way". There are many ways to mitigate SQL injections in Java - I would have up-voted any answer that responded with (e.g.) a parameter used query. So to me, this question's answers could in fact make it interesting and valuable.
Even if not, most experienced answerers regularly see literal copy-pasted homework questions (often several duplicates from different students) and people circumventing question bans to write yet more horrible questions.
Help vampires aren't just real, they're everywhere. If they didn't exist, it wouldn't be necessary to enlist high-rep users to engage in moderation.
Almost all of those have zero answers and many have been downvoted. Not sure I'm seeing a problem.
Better UI can make this even less of a problem. Punishing the entire community isn't helpful. See the link to my response to the mod down thread if you want an example of the real problem on SO.
What does "a little bit harder" mean? Any reputation requirement is out of the window because it would alienate far too many people from ever contributing. A screening process wouldn't work well because SO already puts too much burden on moderators (which is largely why people end up making rushed moderation decisions).
I'll try to answer below. But I don't think SO can have their cake and eat it to: IMO SO can either set the threshold for asking to non-zero or they could stop complaining about the current torrent of help vampires and low-effort questions.
> Any reputation requirement is out of the window because it would alienate far too many people from ever contributing.
And here is were our opinions differ.
It seems like somehow SO enjoy having a torrent of fresh noobs to correct.
If not, adding just the slightest speed bump to people who just want help with their homework (i.e. you cannot ask a question until your account is 6 hours old or has passed introductory training: look at tags, make a search, visit meta) would likely (IMO) weed out most vampires without affecting the large majority (the read only users) or anyone who is prepared to make any effort to become a contributor.
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.
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.
It perfectly encapsulates how those people are perceived. They drain the fun out of helping others. Playing language police is unlikely to gain you any more ears from people who feel drained by the vampires.
> ton of speculation about the impact of this type of thing, zero data.
Do you expect them to have a positive impact that would increase if moderation were decreased?
It's unprofessional for a company to refer to its users like this. Calling people names is childish and helps nothing.
> Do you expect them to have a positive impact that would increase if moderation were decreased?
My theory is that the cost of this behavior is near zero but "fighting" it is being used as cover for abusive mod behavior and a culture of intolerance that's chasing away high value users. I for one don't contribute to the site anymore and I know I'm not alone.
> It's unprofessional for a company to refer to its users like this.
You have to consider that this term is used by the community. That includes meta-discussion between the community and SO staff in the course of doing their job. So in a sense he is acting according to his profession.
What you call "calling names" is merely categorizing people according to their observable behavior. We categorize things and people every day. You could replace the term with another one, the underlying aspect of assigning a label to a cluster of behaviors remains unchanged. You would just end up treading the euphemism treadmill.
You cannot stop people from assigning labels to categorize negative patterns where someone else might end up offended by that label due to the negative connotations that the word will accumulate.
So why bother? Why not relabel it as "colloquial, but there's a story behind it" in your mind instead of asking everyone else to change their minds?
>abusive mod behavior and a culture of intolerance that's chasing away high value users.
If with "mod behavior" you mean downvotes and close votes, that's a large fraction of the user base that can do that and they can also be undone. While sometimes they might be doled out on a hair trigger it looks to me like there usually is some reason behind that, a reason which could be addressed by some changes to the question.
If you see it as a trade, haggling on a bazaar to provide a good question (that may serve future users) in exchange for a good answer (that may serve you) instead of draconian mods cracking down on you then those downvotes are nothing more than a "your offer isn't good enough" statement.
So maybe it is just a communication issue, to make it clear that users should have the expectation that they may need to refine their questions?
Subjective moderation is a major problem. You know, some moderator deciding that a question is "off-topic" or "opinion-based" and just closing the thread. It really puts a damper on people's motivation to ask questions or provide answers.
Nearly every SO issue I've viewed over the last few months has been closed as "off-topic" or some other "not welcome here" reason (I don't know what they are). I was joking about it with friends and they said the same. It makes me think of the wikipedia "deletionists" and I wonder what kind of contributions they would be happy with.
I'm not impressed by this response to some very valid criticisms.
> No matter what choices we make there will be upset people.
Of course no matter what you do, people will complain. This doesn't this this a valid reason to dismiss criticism out of hand without engaging with the complaints.
The correct response is to look for ways to address the very real problems that are being brought up in a way that increases the value the site provides to as many of your users as possible.
> Do we allow only english? Do we allow SO in other languages?
Make questions and answers be done in english to avoid fragmentation, but perhaps you need a community translation service to translate valuable questions and answers to other languages to increase the availability of this knowledge to those who don't speak english?
> Do we reduce moderation? Do we keep moderation as is?
Perhaps you can introduce a mechanism to sideline 'help vampire' questions, but still allow new users to build up reputation (currently very hard) by assisting with or improving those questions.
Many of SO's problems do not have simple or easy solutions, that doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to look for them.
I am not dismissing anything, and I am, instead quite worried. I am sorry that you had the wrong impression.
What I meant to say is that handling such a large site is like playing whack-a-mole. Seeing problems popping up is not a symptom of decline. Is a symptom of size.
The truth is that you've managed to piss off and alienate a lot of people in pursuit of... something, and when a new community platform gains critical mass, we will take the content and jump ship happily.
To change this, you could try publicly acknowledging the issues, encouraging people (especially moderators) to be less pedantic and nicer, and rolling back some of the most egregious abuse by the little Q&A tyrants.
I don't know what you are on about. I am not pissed off with SO, nor do I know anyone who is, and I certainly have no intention to go somewhere else, especially since there is no saying the same problems will not occur there
Some people in this thread are saying SO's issues are inevitable in a community of that scale, but is it really true? Is it inevitable that two different questions with different answers will be marked duplicates of each other, for example?
I don't see the problem, since you can jump to the other question, it means all new answers will only happen in one place. Sure it can be improved, but it's not something that bothers me in practice TBH
It seems to me you aree providing a perfect example here:
From what I can see you did not read the post you answered to (Is it inevitable that two different questions with different answers will be marked duplicates of each other, for example?), yet you hand out the answer like the ones we criticise for rubber stamping "duplicate" etc.
Because this is exactly the kind of rubber-stamping that we are talking about: to busy defending the system to actually read what the user tries to ask about/point out.
I'm not "too busy defending the system", all I offer is my experience, where false duplicates has never been an issue. Maybe in the particular technologies you use there are some below par mods.
You may have heard it all, but what SO has chiefly achieved IMO is to drive users who regularly answer questions away from the site.
If you've a moment to check the data, I'd be curious to see the % of users who answer 5x more questions than they ask, and the same for 10x, 25x, 50x, and 100x. Then look at what their respective activity is in terms of answers provided over time per individual and overall. I'd be surprised if these numbers haven't each dropped significantly in the past 5 years, except perhaps the overall/total activity of high answer:question ratio (but then I'd expect the answer:question ratio to have materially dropped).
> 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 prevents to update or add new answers.
Currently, many major questions are redirecting to one of the first answers from 3-6 years ago, when the site was relatively new. The provided answers are rotting over time.
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.
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.
Fragmentation of knowledge. The SO model tries to get the answers in one place so the people who search first find the answer in one place.
If duos were open, the you'd have to look in all the places first to find the best answer. And then you might as well skip that step and ask another question rather than search.
Try searching a forum or /r/javahelp or the like for an answer. See how many results you have to hit before you find an answer that works for you. Then reconsider the value of closing and pointing people at the duplicate question.
Surely the better solution would be to say "This was the best answer in 2009. In 2012 there was a new answer."
Also in the era of search engines, does it matter if someone compiles a point in time solution? I've lost track of the number of times I've successfully searched for that entry, only to discover it has been closed as "inappropriate". So frustrating.
Replying to this, because on SO I don't have enough reputation to reply and say how annoying it is, or describe how the duplicate is different and/or unhelpful.
I get that it's probably the only way to prevent spam comments on a large scale etc, but when see I need to ask 5 questions just to comment on the ones I care about, I don't even bother.
I think the stance on duplicates needs to be relaxed, with some filters/tools to help prevent higher rep users from seeing them during normal use.
For example, don't show high rep users questions from low rep ones. Let other low rep users answer the question independently. It encourages participation.
Let the site link duplicates together, but in a symbiotic way (even show highly voted answers from other questions as an aside.. Especially showing this on the old questions).
Votes (or even higher weighting on recent votes) on the question can let the community choose which "duplicate" is best, and this can change over time.
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 low rep users who do a good job of reading the help documentation first from getting the best possible answer... and encouraging people who ask and answer poorly to continue doing so.
Not prevented, just not shown by default. But yes, let the low rep users answer low rep users questions. Make the site feel like it did to new users today like it did to today's high rep users five years ago.
The site should discourage really obvious exact slates with suggestions.. But if someone has a small variation, let them ask it and get a specific answer.
Unless the question gets many upvotes, high rep users don't see it anyway, so who does it hurt?
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.
On the other hand. Blocking professionals who have the solution because they don't have 100 points is a real issue. Same for having 5 years old outdated answers appear on top of the list, even though the next more recent answers have proportionally more points (when accounting for time).
> 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.
You could at the very least make it your mission statement to provide correct answers, and remind all of your moderators of this, instead of having them maintain the "spirit of the poster" on answers that are wrong and on locked questions.
Alas, all attempts at answering a question are deemed valuable by some contingent of the active user and diamond moderation base. Correct has nothing to do with it.
There is no mechanism for removal of incorrect answers other than the person being too embarrassed having it still visible and deleting it.
One has to hope that the best and correct answers get up voted.
Similar community problems happened on Wikipedia. Give many users moderation power, and they'll each enforce their own view of what the site should be.
Sure, Stack Overflow kind of sucks sometimes and people are sometimes really up their own asses about things being exactly right and having a question worded explicitly, but it is by far the best resource for programmers to find help from other programmers due to its ubiquitousness in the programming community. I haven't found any other alternatives better; Quora isn't useful for programming questions (a general Q&A/opinion style question is better suited for Quora, but not "What's wrong with my code?"), and I wouldn't use ExpertsExchange. Are there any other notable places to ask these kinds of questions?
So it sucks, but there's no resources to replace it. You might not like it and because it's not something that you have to help with you are free to stop contributing (e.g. you can't just say, "I don't like this, I'm going to stop working on it" at work), but why not help everyone and contribute, either to Stack Overflow or by making a new, better resource, rather than being grumpy and only helping your pessimistic self feel better?
An aside: The header image lags considerably when I scroll (on Safari 10)... Why isn't it just a static image on the page, and have JS to detect when the aspect ratio changes on a page level rather than an image level?
> However, a 2013 study has found that 77% of users only ask one question, 65% only answer one question, and only 8% of users answer more than 5 questions. With this article, I’m exploring the likely reasons for that very, very low percentage.
This is a power law distribution. It is to be expected.
I am not sure why but I am very luck with StackOverflow, almost always. It might be due to the fact that I ask detailed questions that are 99% of the time valid questions and I am using languages that has welcoming nice community and usually not extremely popular so trolling is minimal.
I'm a top 4% user for the year apparently, I've asked 40 questions & posted 318 answers. SO is a minefield.
It's an excellent resource and I've found so much value out of it, but the moderation is hyper-aggressive at times and often duplicate marks are for old behaviour in old libraries. I think it needs a clean sweep at some stage, leaving the current content but drop everyone back to 0.
Let's be honest, Stack Overflow and that network of sites has been in decline for years. Sadly it has turned into a vast and wide content farm and SEO ploy that is full of search spam and and users who copy/paste material from legitimate sources. To top it off, Stack Overflow uses "nofollow" on the outbound links to make sure the true source of material gets no credit in the eyes of Google, Bing, etc. Rinse and repeat for years, and spammers have taken over the asylum, with some trolls for good measure too, and that's unfortunately much of Stack Overflow today.
How did this happen?
In short, they appeared to receive preferential treatment from Google after complaining very publicly and loudly about not ranking at the top of search results. Ever since then they have widely dominating search results for any vaguely related technical query. Ironically, at that point in time their primary complaint was about other content farms scraping their content.
>> JS: All of these sites that go to Stack Overflow, scrape our content, and reprint it with garbage ads, Google Adsense-encrusted pages.They're basically producing worse versions of our pages and they use these slimy SEO techniques, so they actually rank higher than us.
>> For a long time, we were getting enormous complaints from our own users that they'd search on Google and they'd find Stack Overflow content that had been stripped from its useful form but SEO'd like crazy and encrusted in ads and thrown up willy-nilly. And these sites were getting a lot of traffic. So that was his complaint and of course he phrased it in this larger frame of "Is Google losing their edge, etc. etc.?"
>> BI: It got a lot of attention. Do you think Google's doing a good job of fixing this sort of problem?
>> JS: They fixed it. They called us up at the time and said, "Thank you for bringing that up. You have lit a fire under the team that is supposed to be working on that problem that has not been delivering."
Matt Cutts, then the head of Google Web Spam, posted to Hacker News about this to "fix" the problem of sites outranking Stack Overflow.
What seemed like newly preferential treatment directly impacted hundreds of other sites that lost huge volumes of their traffic to the newly crowned king-of-search Stack Overflow. For example:
>> As many of you know, DaniWeb was hit by a Google algorithm update back in November 2012 and we lost about 50% of our search traffic. In investigating the issue, I discovered that DaniWeb, in addition to most other programming forums out there, all lost their google traffic to StackOverflow.
That, in turn, perpetuated the reposting/scraping activity and blatant spam posts to the StackOverflow network, since the site network ranks dominantly in every vaguely related query. Now years later, an even larger volume of material on Stack Overflow is not original content and doesn't even pretend to be. It's absolutely littered with copied/pasted content and blatantly spammy/promotional posts from around the web.
Stack Overflow is useful, but a lot of that usefulness comes from its complete dominance of search results. By keyword stuffing in the sidebar (and last I checked the nofollow links) they maintain a strong search presence for virtually every topic.
So, this position as top tech knowledge hub is sort of artificially propped up at this point. You type in your query, arrive at a page with something vaguely like the question you asked, are faced with pedantic flags about how the question you came to have answered is somehow unfit, and maybe some useful info. Also maybe some outdated info with real unaccepeted answers below it.
I'm not aware of another site that so heavily depends on content it itself seems to consider unworthy, siloed into so many vaguely overlapping sub-sites
StackOverflow is a community driven website for a society that is used to follow rules and be disciplined.
Nowadays, the popularity of the website put it in a bad position. Handling millions of impolite, pseudo-developers, who've heard that it can help them with their problem.
In other words the community and popularity changed, not StackOverflow. And no it's not dying, it's just working! Sorry for some of us that remember the times where questions were mostly high-quality, but I don't think there is a way to prevent collateral damage in this case.
I prefer to read "opinionated question", instead of 10 paragraphs about a problem that in the end is unsolvable by logical decision.
For more than a decade before SO existed I was searching the internet and successfully finding answers to questions. There were good sites and bad sites then, good sites and bad sites now. SO didn't change anything. If it didn't exist the information would still be out there and searchable through other sites.
Usenet/DejaNews (pre-acquisition) were my favorite incarnation but there's never been a time that the makeup of sites at the time didn't result in the right information being easy to get.
true, the info has always been there. what SO bought was ux. kind of like slackhq being valued at a bil even though irc/chat has been around for decades. and yep, usenet was great especially for older languages like c.
more recently searching in safaribooksonline.com has become my first step.
I've idly wondered how I could restrict queries to questions that have been closed as too <whatever> or not enough <whatever>, as those are often the most interesting and educational items, even if they don't answer my specific question.
While StackOverflow is still an outstanding resource, they never really solved the “why bother?” problem for the really difficult subjects.
Your choices are: answer a trivial JavaScript question and get a million points, or spend an hour painstakingly explaining a hard problem for maybe one point (where, half the time, the original submitter doesn’t even bother to “accept” your answer so you lose even that small point boost).
There needs to be some scaling factor. For example: if the number of questions anywhere on a certain topic is quite small then popular answers in that area could receive more credit; or, perhaps individual parts of a post could be voted on to increase value (say, you see a really detailed example so you “tip” that answer for taking the time to write it all out).
> Your choices are: answer a trivial JavaScript question and get a million points, or spend an hour painstakingly explaining a hard problem for maybe one point (where, half the time, the original submitter doesn’t even bother to “accept” your answer so you lose even that small point boost).
I don't agree with this, there are long winded answers with a massive amount of points and/or bounty awarded to them. The problem you describe exists in any market, majority of an audience will always go for a low hanging fruit. That's why the few who answer those complicated questions are usually subject matter experts and sit in the >1% of SO.
I usually answer the difficult questions because I've been googling how to do the same thing, found an unanswered SO question and eventually worked out how to do it myself. May as well post the answer.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 283 ms ] threadPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9837442 (1 year ago, 39 comments)
In the other hand there are exciting discussions in the other *.stackexchange.com sites (e.g. reverseengineering, ethereum).
SO is so amazingly useful that I'd like to upvote discuss it weekly if it would result in either SO getting fixed or someone making a better one.
Sure, it's not ideal - SO could do better in terms of helping people understand the site's goals and enforcing the rules in a less hostile way, but they are working on that (a lot of the more hostile rule enforcement tropes are banned and filtered against), and it's a hard problem.
SO isn't dying any time soon, and the content is still good. If you want to kill it, please go ahead and solve the issue of explaining to users how to contribute quality content and getting them to take that in instantly.
I used to contribute a lot, which tapered off as I had other things filling my time. Towards the end though, the help vampires were getting to me, and I understand why people are harsh towards new users in some situations, it's an easy trap to fall into. Trying to fix that problem by stopping the curation of the content is insane, however. That's a fast route to going from some people being turned away to having no decent content.
While I'd say this is currently true, answers on SO tend to stick around for a long time, and the 'marked as duplicate'-heavy behavior means that even if the best practice to solving a given problem changes, the top SO google result won't. While this isn't a _huge_ problem right now, with the way the site is set up I only see it getting worse, to the point that some years down the line I imagine many SO answers will either cease to be relevant or push people down the wrong path when solving a problem.
I've done it on a few other answers too, if the top answer seems clunky or inelegant, I tend to dig a bit deeper to see if there's a better way.
Also, scrolling down a bit in the answers you usually find new ways of doing something as answer 3 or 4. Just upvote it. Or edit the answer into the top answer.
And don't think those editions are as high quality as the ones that come by the official channel, where literally anybody in the world with the needed knowledge can reply, and there is a robust process for vetting.
Besides, despite any theoretical possibility, people mostly do not edit old SO answers. There are exceptions, but outdated answer mostly stay there.
I Google incredibly basic stuff like how to read files, how to read a web page (something that changes every 5 months in .Net), hell, even basic jQuery functionality.
The difference is that I have the knowledge deep down, I just use SO and Google as a prompt. I know the correct answer as soon as I see it. I get exposed to a lot of basic answers on SO, and generally they're right.
SO is generally good and is not suffering the problem you or the OP claim.
You're absolutely wrong in that case. Particularly answers being "good" or "correct" is not part of the mission statement; and the rules reject fixes of questions by default for not being "in the spirit of the poster".
All SO aims for is having the most questions/answers. Nothing else.
> All SO aims for is having the most questions/answers. Nothing else.
Is demonstrably false. If that were the only aim, questions would never be closed and there would be no need for a moderation system. They fact that they do have moderation system and do police questions and answers is the proof that quality is part of the equation.
It does nothing to affect the quality of answers that look ok, but are actually problematic. And in those cases "spirit of poster" always trumps correctness.
Nope you can't.
- You'll be blocked if your edit is not "in the spirit of the originally post(er)".
If you only have to add a separate and standalone paragraph at the end on a newer subfeature (like your asp example), it's generally fine.
If you have to rewrite one of the main paragraph, the reviewers will systematically reject your edit.
Typically, that means that there is no way to update an obsolete post when the tools or best practices have changed, because it's considered major changes diverging from the original author.
- Combine that with the aggressive policy of closing and locking down questions, and it's impossible to post a new separate answer on most of the questions.
The only wiki answers I've seen have been hugely popular with dozens of answers and hundreds of votes. Maybe it happens outside of that, but it's definitely not how it "usually" works, IME.
Most of the questions I see on SO have maybe 0-5 answers, and the average number of votes is something like 2. If you're lucky there's an accepted answer and/or an answer with a clear majority of votes. I've even seen cases where the accepted answer is wrong, while a more upvoted answer is correct.
Organizational and writing skill don't necessarily correlate well to programming skill. And when one adds gamification to that allowing for material curated by the masses without the corresponding community investment by those who _do_ have that skill set... well.
I can often stick with second best in class as long as it doesn't have a habit of biting you for no apparent reason all the time.
> People have just forgotten that the lack of that carefully curated environment created the complete mess that was all the forums we used to have before.
People keep saying that and I keep wondering if we either never visited the same forums or if I'm somewhat blind to all the vile bullying that must have been going on.
Edit: broaden answer with first quote and answer.
It wasn't bullying so much as low-quality content. It is quite likely you didn't have this problem, as I didn't very often either. If you know where to go, help has always been available for many languages/runtimes/environments/etc., and generally that help still is available today. If you know the right IRC channels, the right forums, the right mailing lists, the right other resources, you can get great, high-quality help.
However, prior to SO if you just poked your query into Google you ran a decent risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads, locked behind obtaining accounts (to get your email for spam) if not outright paywalls, or expertsexchange. And this was more true for beginners; I didn't encounter this stuff while looking up an error message resulting from an obscure combination of hardware under Linux, I encountered this stuff while trying to refresh my memory about some particular Javascript intricacy.
Yes, it really was bad for a lot of people. SO is still an improvement inasmuch as while the community may rub some people the wrong way, at least the answers are still there for free, uncluttered, and generally of high quality for the most-commonly searched things.
I'm not saying there's any generic forum better than SO out there. But they are not that far behind anymore.
The years immediately pre-SO were the height of the 5 page adsense spam site. Put anything into google and you ran a decent risk of getting something really crappy, laden with ads.
Compare with the complete shitshow you can still see on some of the survivors of the old era, like tomshardware, Msdn, and others.
You certainly never visited c.l.p.m back in the day, or you'd know exactly how bad the alternative could get.
I wonder how many people Abigail alone drove away from perl?
On the other hand, I've had a lot of success with SO, both asking and answering, and while there are occasions where I find questions closed as duplicates or off-topic, they are pretty rare. I frequent the Java, Docker, Kubernetes, jclouds and similar categories, and they are generally very good.
It may be down to the choice of topic? Perhaps PHP and .NET have more first-time users, and a lower quality of questions? I don't know; although since the SO data is all freely available [1] it might make a nice research project to discover [2] what causes these questions to be closed!
[1] https://archive.org/details/stackexchange [2] https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/540597/ov...
What Experts Exchange had going for it was a lot of corporate-domain programming knowledge, stuff like COBOL and IBM Visual Age that are basically unknown on Stack Overflow.
It wasn't, the issue was the content was useless. To find anything you had to wade through pages of off-topic stuff, and try to get a sense of the value of the given answers. It was terrible. That and the paywalling and other stuff that used to go on.
Point is, it's good resource to free-ride but not actively participate.
FWIW it wasn't always like this. I have a lot of points on SO mostly acquired about 5 years ago. Back then SO was a much friendlier, and much more interesting place to participate in. I haven't actively participated in about 3 years or so.
Anyone who has had to work with others in tech knows the kind of crap you get. They don't give you the stack trace, they say 'I get an error' without giving the error message, they just say 'it doesn't work', it's not clear what they want, they post a screenshot of half a stack trace, etc...
Again, it's a constant trade off where you are balancing the asker's needs with the thousand people who find this via Google, and the people answering the question.
- The SO was great because answers for noob questions where hard to find. At this point of time (thanks to SO and their knowledge database) there are so many other resources to get these noob questions answered or they are already answered. And some of these other resources are updated to reflect the most recent technology changes while SO answers are static.
- Now people start asking hard stuff - but engineers (I intentionally do not say developers) who know answers on these questions are not interested in answering.
- People who got reputation and they are moderator (they made SO successful) do not know what they do not know.
I can't speak for others, but in my case it is not for lack of interest. I don't have enough 'reputation' to be allowed to answer questions and am too busy to find earning it a good use of my time.
You don't need reputation to ask or answer questions, so this is FUD.
So probably mistaken, but hardly FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).
I suspect part of the reason they're not interested in answering is because a difficult question requires a lot more work to likely get less points as a result. Meanwhile, answering a ton of easy questions can be done quickly and gets more points over on Stack Overflow in the same time frame.
That and yeah, lots of people who could answer your question would rather be doing something that pays the bills or helps them instead.
I have to admit I have fallen into this myself on both sides.
The (now) rare times I browse the site to find questions I can answer, when I run across one like this, its usually by a low rep user, so I think "hmm, I'll spend fifteen or twenty minutes sharing this, get maybe one or two upvotes, and if I'm lucky the original person will accept the answer" and usually deem it not worthwhile. Partly this is because the correct answer is often "don't do it that way, you should do x then you can do z and completely avoid your problem instead" which understandably people don't like to hear.
For the first time in a while, I've picked up a language I have not used for almost 15 years.
Google is helping immensely, and I've been shocked at how often (>95%) of the time the first result is SO, and that answer is perfect. So much so I've stopped searching google, I've just got a lot of SO tabs open.
It might not be perfect, though I'd say it's the best by a massive margin.
with all due respect but SO search isn't quite stellar.
I don't know how many times I've scanned down a SO page hoping, hoping, hoping that someone managed to smuggle in the answer to my question before the red guards noticed and put a stop to it.
Google simply wants to find the best answer it can to my question, while StackOverflow would rather try to find reasons to prevent it being answered.
I don't want a forum where answering my question is a last resort, and their highest priority is finding a justification for not only not answering, but actually preventing anyone else who was willing to answer from answering.
What we need is a developer forum that is totally open to questions, but with the amazing addition of Google-like search to do ranked prioritization of all answers instead of old-fashioned red guards to prevent answers they didn't like from ever existing, whether you needed those answers or not. You could ask anything you wanted, as long as you were polite, and the worst that could happen would be that your question would be re-tagged (ex: that's actually a DELPHI question, not PASCAL language, because it's not about the language.)
People would then be free to answer or not, as they wished, with votes for answer quality and links to other answers that add to the quality measures. They could express opinions (horrors! opinions from people with experience that you lack! who would EVER want that) or quote the docs, or insert a link to another answer that (in their opinion only) probably answers your question, too, but they do so without preventing anyone else from going ahead and offering their own answer.
Google manages to sort through an entire web full of comments that are "possible duplicates" or "primarily opinion based" and it's amazingly useful. A mini version of that is what we need for software Q%A.
If Stack Overflow really wanted to make life easier for people, they would delete closed questions, or move them to a directory that is excluded from search engines. Closed questions are basically bait-and-switch for searchers; they show the question, but don't have an answer.
So whilst I'll often choose an SO site I can't use their search.
Try "KDE notifications from bash scripts" for example. Google will show that there are answers on SO and Unix.stackexchange - searching at AskUbuntu (I use Ubuntu with KDE on top) will return zero results and won't even suggest results from other SO sites. SO itself has the best result but seems the least appropriate of the silos to place that search in.
Then there's having to register at each of the different sites on the network. The siloing of the site is PITA IMO. The only reason to do it this way I can think of is to separate computing resources, it seems there are probably better ways around that issue too? Why not a unified site with hierarchical tags such that you can choose a tag as a preferential search term?
I have 10+ memberships at Stack Exchange network most of them math/programming related and it seems so silly.
Sure, keep the multiple brands if that is what your investors want but make it searchable and taggable across sites.
Often I will see a question posted on main SO that would have been perfect by the Stack Exchange rules on some other stack exchange site.
Instead it just gets closed and whoever asked must feel quite dispirited of asking again.
The 'interesting threads' are exactly the problem. Those are discussions and they don't suit the format. If you want to talk about something, find a forum. SO does not have threads, it has questions and answers, and that is why it's useful.
Turns out people hate wading through pages of outdated discussion. People are forgetting what it was like before SO. Stop expecting SO to be all things to all people - if you want a discussion, go register at a programming forum. SO does what it is trying to do well.
For anything involving Linux, the Arch wiki is light-years ahead. It's not even a close competition.
Also, the way in which Arch is as a system makes it less likely you have that kind of problem. Because you install and configure everything yourself, there is less 'magic' that is likely to go wrong in a way you don't know how to begin fixing it.
What is that?
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19665/the-help-vampi...
A common variation is someone who asks a reasonable question, gets an answer, then repeatedly modifies/extends the original question, or who asks a long series of follow up questions n comments. This variation is described here:
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/258279/1441122
SO is great to search for snippets and tl;drs, though. Reference manuals fail to contain tl;drs way too often, and that was fixed, thanks SO.
It's a sliding scale. Most people just don't know how to ask a good question initially, but some just don't care. In general, I'd say the 'help vampire' problem is where the asker is looking for the answerer's time, not their help. They want someone to do free work for them, without putting in effort themselves.
I believe this is the origin: http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/
I don't know, I've always felt that the apparent decline in usefulness came from the strict curation (and I do insist on the word "apparent"). In the past the site felt more natural to me as a big hodge-podge of various technology related topics. Questions came from various aspects of the tech world, whether they related to sys admins (e.g. linux configs, installations, scripting, etc), super users (e.g. text editors and other tools), programming languages (e.g. how to use a library or language feature), comp sci (e.g. algorithms), databases, or even networking. To me it all kinda related to how we all use the set everyday. Then came what I can only describe as over-categorization. Instead of relying on the machine to search stuff for us, they split the content into specific websites and changed their standard of what's relevant or less so (which is why you have closed questions that thousands of users still find useful). Google figured this out years ago with gmail, don't waste time organizing, just search. Case in point, how many people actually search any of the stackexchange websites directly? I'd bet that most users get there from google. And it's not unusual to be searching for a topic that intersects with any two or more of these communities. But none of them will refer to any other to tell you that the topic has a related thread in a sibling community. Only google gives you a clue, because it looks at it as the afore-mentioned hodge-podge.
It's not to say that the site didn't need any curation, I just think it somehow became a bit too systematic and oblivious of our instinct as human users. I also have the strong suspicion that people who feel that SO is declining are way off, but I doubt that the rise (if any) of its relevancy has much to do with the heavy handed curation.
> The consequence thereof is that many good questions not only get closed before anyone is able to respond, but that many of them end up vanishing into oblivion for eternity after merely 9 days.
Yes, any cutoff time has the downside that you lose posts. But it's not like SO makes rules for no reason. Where's the discussion of the problem that that rule is solving? How do we know they're not worse than this problem?
1. Earn some reputation first in order to see how stuff works from the other side. When you join a new company, you don't come the first day and tell everyone how they're doing it wrong before learning about the project, about the tradeoffs etc. Same here.
Having rep above certain threshold gives you additional privileges (commenting, editing etc.).
Also, when you have a rep over few hundred, I'm more likely to even read your question. Most questions from 0-rep users are very basic same-stuff-again / low-quality questions that are not challenging to answer.
Moreover, when you have some points, you can put a bounty on your question, which means you really want to have a good answer for that and can make a sacrifice, and makes the question stand out (on a separate bounty-enabled-questions page). This gives more incentive to others to look at your question. There's nothing more soul crushing on SO than taking time to write an elaborate answer and getting 0 upvotes, because the guy forgot to upvote or whatever because he doesn't care.
2. It's a misconception that you need to "respond very fast" to the questions to get the rep. Everyone has a different strategy, and well I spent some time a few years ago using this strategy to get some initial reputation. But I stopped some 5 years ago. I almost never play the "fastest gun in the west". I google things that I encounter during my normal daily work, and keep the tab open. If the best answer is not satisfactory, and later I come up with something better, I write it down as a new answer, and perhaps if I found similar problem in multiple SO questions, I put a comment with a cross-link to my answer in other thread.
You really need very little effort to get SO rep as a part of your normal daily work, yet everything I talk to seem amazed "wow how come you have so much rep on Stack!". Just create a damn account, be always logged in, and don't keep your solutions for yourself.
3. Try to put up an exhaustive question, write down a SMALL, reproducible scenario, explore some options yourself (ask yourself "what did I try?"). A lot of newcomers put very vague questions, very little information, it's not fun to ask someone a ten clarifying questions.
4. I felt really bad when I got my first downvote but it was indeed a bad answer, to a different question than the OP asked. I learnt the lesson and I don't read in haste anymore. It's good to be humbled sometimes.
Regarding "closing as duplicate", it's true some mods are too eager, but if it makes sense, I believe dupe questions should be closed - duplication is not good (DRY) and best code is no code, if possible.
For example having a question incorrectly closed as duplicate is one of the big problems, yet you only address it dismissively in a single sentence.
In general, you make reasonable points - although it's clear SO could improve here. The new asker experience obviously has problems. Not worth sacrificing question quality to improve on, but I have no doubt there will be ways to help without doing so. (And they seem to be working on it).
So you have to read the entire page to get a glimpse of the truth.
This can be bad if you're just looking for an immediate solution, however for learning its fantastic because it shows you a recorded history of how things evolved over time in a framework.
Perhaps SO will end up getting overtaken by a new similar site, not because it is intrinsically better, just because they reset the corpus of answers so the SNR is higher for a while? I imagine SO will become increasingly less useful as their Q&A gets older and older.
It will, and then in 5 or so years we'll be hearing the same complaints about that service.
SO's problem is people, so unless you can come up with a service that removes them you're going to have the same issue.
And C++11 is practically a new backwards compatible language compared to legacy C++.
Java is more stable but at the same time it's also the slowest to evolve which is why many developers prefer C# even if it wasn't cross platform in the past - the language was just superior because of how fast it is evolving, considering that at 1.0 they were basically equivalent.
Not sure if it's ever been discussed on meta, I don't understand why they haven't done it already, seems a reasonable solution.
I learned afterward Meta downvote don't actually impact your rep but still.
Most of the time if your question is mostly a duplicate but the other question (or its answer) is missing some critical factor, then you can appeal and say, "I don't think this is a duplicate of <x> because <y>" (or modify your question with the stipulation that the answer solve the critical factor) and the duplicate marking will be removed.
The other thing is, even when questions get marked as duplicates or closed, half the time I still see them accumulating their own answers, so really, what's the big issue?
As an aside, my only experience with having a question marked as a duplicate happened on a sister SE site - it was my first post there, I asked a question, then after posting I found the answer in one of the "related questions" links on the sidebar. I answered my own question with a link to the other question and a description of the answer I found there, then flagged my own post as a duplicate. Both the question and answer were highly upvoted.
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.
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.
Might be interesting to see more recent statistics, but it still gives an idea.
SO has consolidated a massive amount of information and is a great resource. People expect too much of words though and should have to do some work themselves.
If we are going to consider the value of SO, I would argue that it is a cornerstone.
Most useful info about Python from SO are pointers to the official docs in content-free answers. What is very valuable, because the docs are hard to navigate, but not what is expected.
About Haskell, C, or Perl, I currently ignore SO links, it's just less bother to go to the next result, and way more likely to get something useful.
But for Javascript, .Net, MS SQL, and a lot of other random stuff, SO is unbeatable.
and it's a more generalized social challenge. in coaching for example, you need to improve a player's abilities and instincts, which essentially implies that what they're currently doing is not so great. the easiest people to coach understand that they are not already perfect. those who are hardest to coach are those who already believe they are good enough.
for the player, there's a tension between having the self-esteem to assert yourself while having the maturity to accept criticism. you need to be able to encourage both behaviors while maintaining a balance between them.
as you point out, the challenge for an online moderation system is providing a similar balance to users/contributors. the social distance between contributors and moderators makes it hard not to become defensive.
Definitely something that's very much needed. But I don't think anyone knows what it would look like and what the distribution of emotional labour would be.
Many things people complain about are deliberate design choices that actually made SO popular in the first place.
The main problem is people don't research their problem for more then a minute before asking a question.
This is true if there are no new languages or frameworks.
> The main problem is people don't research their problem for more then a minute before asking a question.
This has been true since the beginning of time. However, it does feel that the responses on SO have gotten more trollish over time.
I, and I guess others, can easily hesitate a full day, doing search after search after search, before asking on SO.
On the other hand SO makes it really simple to create new accounts and ask questions.
If they really were concerned about answering the same questions again and again they would implement some basic rules like limiting new users from asking questions untilntyey had been active for a full day or something.
Weirdly enough it seems people like to complain about the workload while at the same time refusing to do anything to reduce it.
In fact it is almost as if they enjoy moderating noobs :-|
Try getting ANY answer at all.
Any community that reaches a certain size will face unique problems and I think Stack Overflow has some of the same problem as reddit does: you have to be very careful on how you give power to users. Power corrupts and becomes a goal/game in itself. Karma/power is a great incentive in the beginning of a community, but can become destructive in the long run. That some programmers have a certain type of personality is probably not helping either.
There seems to be many småpåvar on Stack Overflow that loves to wield the small amount of power they've accrued without actually contributing that much. On the other hand you have to enforce rules and curation to keep quality up.
It's a very fine balance and hard to get right. It's mostly about human psychology and incentives. I think there's some tweaks they could do to improve things but I also understand that from their perspective why change something that works?
The danger is that the true experts stop helping/answering questions on Stack Overflow because they find the community becoming too toxic. Might turn into a downwards spiral until there's mostly trolls and newbies left.
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.
In fact once you get rejected (by a troll or not) for asking a question that you would have been able to find on SO, you became more careful before posting.
Also don't forget that a huge majority of the net user are ghost / read only :)
Instead of removing "duplicate questions" we can just refine the details of that section of the wiki with more information.
What people don't understand is that SO serves literally all developers. No matter what choices we make there will be upset people. Do we reduce moderation? Help vampires take over. Do we keep moderation as is? People complain we are too strict (or not enough). Do we allow only English? We are elitist. Do we allow SO in other languages? We are fragmenting the community.
After a few years, I've heard it all.
Sure, I have no idea what you have to deal with on a daily basis and in the end the content is mostly helpful so you are probably doing it right. But in more than few occasions I have been treated like a dirty beggar/shoplifter/moron/(you name it) for actually asking a question (or answering one)! Yes I need you and yes I owe you a lot - but I don't like you. And I won't root for you when you will be an underdog and when there will be equal alternative I will switch and never look back.
Not replacing it with a single site, with a single community and centralized moderation can help a lot.
Because once it receives one downvote, you'll get pile-on downvotes, particularly if it's an entertainingly abusive rant; which means that nobody will ever see it again. And you can't change the wording and repost, because you know that there will be people who will notice that it's a repost, and then it gets even worse.
You will never get help with that question, because of one ranty idiot.
And if you try to complain, the official response from the moderators is to suck it up and deal [paraphrased slightly].
Not that I'm bitter, or anything.
Every moderator on every site will tell you this; without this narrative they wouldn't exist.
Is there any proof that this is the case though? To me SO is super useful with ~20% of great threads killed for being off topic. Voting puts good topic on top, no need for administrator intervention.
No one wants to browse 200 lines of code to find the missing semicolon.
Also, let's be real. It's not the marking dupes that's problem it's all the "off topic" closures.
Side note: you work at SO and call your users "help vampires". I think that elitist attitude is a huge part of the problem we're discussing here.
This is a good example of that: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30721824/near-syntax-erro...
Side note: don't pass judgement on stuff or people you don't know. It's quite insulting.
I'm talking about stuff like this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/378959/is-there-a-static-...
Good work closing that one!
> Side note: don't pass judgement on stuff or people you don't know. It's quite insulting.
You don't know who I am so I'm not sure why you think I wouldn't know about community management or content generation. I'm simply telling you that calling your users names is insulting. It's good advice not a reason to attack me.
Even if not, most experienced answerers regularly see literal copy-pasted homework questions (often several duplicates from different students) and people circumventing question bans to write yet more horrible questions.
Help vampires aren't just real, they're everywhere. If they didn't exist, it wouldn't be necessary to enlist high-rep users to engage in moderation.
Better UI can make this even less of a problem. Punishing the entire community isn't helpful. See the link to my response to the mod down thread if you want an example of the real problem on SO.
Today this is one of the default privileges, and IMO that is asking for work.
I'll try to answer below. But I don't think SO can have their cake and eat it to: IMO SO can either set the threshold for asking to non-zero or they could stop complaining about the current torrent of help vampires and low-effort questions.
> Any reputation requirement is out of the window because it would alienate far too many people from ever contributing.
And here is were our opinions differ.
It seems like somehow SO enjoy having a torrent of fresh noobs to correct.
If not, adding just the slightest speed bump to people who just want help with their homework (i.e. you cannot ask a question until your account is 6 hours old or has passed introductory training: look at tags, make a search, visit meta) would likely (IMO) weed out most vampires without affecting the large majority (the read only users) or anyone who is prepared to make any effort to become a contributor.
I have an interest in forums, but I'm not familiar with that "category".
"Give me teh codez..." etc
http://slash7.com/2006/12/22/vampires/
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.
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.
It perfectly encapsulates how those people are perceived. They drain the fun out of helping others. Playing language police is unlikely to gain you any more ears from people who feel drained by the vampires.
> ton of speculation about the impact of this type of thing, zero data.
Do you expect them to have a positive impact that would increase if moderation were decreased?
> Do you expect them to have a positive impact that would increase if moderation were decreased?
My theory is that the cost of this behavior is near zero but "fighting" it is being used as cover for abusive mod behavior and a culture of intolerance that's chasing away high value users. I for one don't contribute to the site anymore and I know I'm not alone.
You have to consider that this term is used by the community. That includes meta-discussion between the community and SO staff in the course of doing their job. So in a sense he is acting according to his profession.
What you call "calling names" is merely categorizing people according to their observable behavior. We categorize things and people every day. You could replace the term with another one, the underlying aspect of assigning a label to a cluster of behaviors remains unchanged. You would just end up treading the euphemism treadmill.
You cannot stop people from assigning labels to categorize negative patterns where someone else might end up offended by that label due to the negative connotations that the word will accumulate.
So why bother? Why not relabel it as "colloquial, but there's a story behind it" in your mind instead of asking everyone else to change their minds?
>abusive mod behavior and a culture of intolerance that's chasing away high value users.
If with "mod behavior" you mean downvotes and close votes, that's a large fraction of the user base that can do that and they can also be undone. While sometimes they might be doled out on a hair trigger it looks to me like there usually is some reason behind that, a reason which could be addressed by some changes to the question.
If you see it as a trade, haggling on a bazaar to provide a good question (that may serve future users) in exchange for a good answer (that may serve you) instead of draconian mods cracking down on you then those downvotes are nothing more than a "your offer isn't good enough" statement.
So maybe it is just a communication issue, to make it clear that users should have the expectation that they may need to refine their questions?
> No matter what choices we make there will be upset people.
Of course no matter what you do, people will complain. This doesn't this this a valid reason to dismiss criticism out of hand without engaging with the complaints.
The correct response is to look for ways to address the very real problems that are being brought up in a way that increases the value the site provides to as many of your users as possible.
> Do we allow only english? Do we allow SO in other languages?
Make questions and answers be done in english to avoid fragmentation, but perhaps you need a community translation service to translate valuable questions and answers to other languages to increase the availability of this knowledge to those who don't speak english?
> Do we reduce moderation? Do we keep moderation as is?
Perhaps you can introduce a mechanism to sideline 'help vampire' questions, but still allow new users to build up reputation (currently very hard) by assisting with or improving those questions.
Many of SO's problems do not have simple or easy solutions, that doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile to look for them.
What I meant to say is that handling such a large site is like playing whack-a-mole. Seeing problems popping up is not a symptom of decline. Is a symptom of size.
The site itself may not be in decline, but I am worried it may head the same direction as Wikipedia (successful, but losing active contributors.)
1) Never start out saying "What you don't understand is...". Instead try "Here are some of the challenges we face..."
2) Never say "Im sorry you had the wrong impression...". Instead try "I'm sorry if I miscommunicated..."
I know you are not the PR guy. And it's nice you are here because people do appreciate staff commenting.
Just trying to help you get a better reaction.
To change this, you could try publicly acknowledging the issues, encouraging people (especially moderators) to be less pedantic and nicer, and rolling back some of the most egregious abuse by the little Q&A tyrants.
From what I can see you did not read the post you answered to (Is it inevitable that two different questions with different answers will be marked duplicates of each other, for example?), yet you hand out the answer like the ones we criticise for rubber stamping "duplicate" etc.
Because this is exactly the kind of rubber-stamping that we are talking about: to busy defending the system to actually read what the user tries to ask about/point out.
If you've a moment to check the data, I'd be curious to see the % of users who answer 5x more questions than they ask, and the same for 10x, 25x, 50x, and 100x. Then look at what their respective activity is in terms of answers provided over time per individual and overall. I'd be surprised if these numbers haven't each dropped significantly in the past 5 years, except perhaps the overall/total activity of high answer:question ratio (but then I'd expect the answer:question ratio to have materially dropped).
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 prevents to update or add new answers.
Currently, many major questions are redirecting to one of the first answers from 3-6 years ago, when the site was relatively new. The provided answers are rotting over time.
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).
Technically true, factually false, since correctness of an edit does not trump "spirit of the poster".
I don't see how this might affect SEO in any bad way than the current scheme does.
If duos were open, the you'd have to look in all the places first to find the best answer. And then you might as well skip that step and ask another question rather than search.
Try searching a forum or /r/javahelp or the like for an answer. See how many results you have to hit before you find an answer that works for you. Then reconsider the value of closing and pointing people at the duplicate question.
Also in the era of search engines, does it matter if someone compiles a point in time solution? I've lost track of the number of times I've successfully searched for that entry, only to discover it has been closed as "inappropriate". So frustrating.
I get that it's probably the only way to prevent spam comments on a large scale etc, but when see I need to ask 5 questions just to comment on the ones I care about, I don't even bother.
For example, don't show high rep users questions from low rep ones. Let other low rep users answer the question independently. It encourages participation.
Let the site link duplicates together, but in a symbiotic way (even show highly voted answers from other questions as an aside.. Especially showing this on the old questions).
Votes (or even higher weighting on recent votes) on the question can let the community choose which "duplicate" is best, and this can change over time.
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 low rep users who do a good job of reading the help documentation first from getting the best possible answer... and encouraging people who ask and answer poorly to continue doing so.
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?
The site should discourage really obvious exact slates with suggestions.. But if someone has a small variation, let them ask it and get a specific answer.
Unless the question gets many upvotes, high rep users don't see it anyway, so who does it hurt?
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.
On the other hand. Blocking professionals who have the solution because they don't have 100 points is a real issue. Same for having 5 years old outdated answers appear on top of the list, even though the next more recent answers have proportionally more points (when accounting for time).
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.
Look at the newest questions, or triage, or help and improvement queues. There are many more questions than there are answers.
There is no mechanism for removal of incorrect answers other than the person being too embarrassed having it still visible and deleting it.
One has to hope that the best and correct answers get up voted.
So it sucks, but there's no resources to replace it. You might not like it and because it's not something that you have to help with you are free to stop contributing (e.g. you can't just say, "I don't like this, I'm going to stop working on it" at work), but why not help everyone and contribute, either to Stack Overflow or by making a new, better resource, rather than being grumpy and only helping your pessimistic self feel better?
An aside: The header image lags considerably when I scroll (on Safari 10)... Why isn't it just a static image on the page, and have JS to detect when the aspect ratio changes on a page level rather than an image level?
This is a power law distribution. It is to be expected.
It's an excellent resource and I've found so much value out of it, but the moderation is hyper-aggressive at times and often duplicate marks are for old behaviour in old libraries. I think it needs a clean sweep at some stage, leaving the current content but drop everyone back to 0.
How did this happen?
In short, they appeared to receive preferential treatment from Google after complaining very publicly and loudly about not ranking at the top of search results. Ever since then they have widely dominating search results for any vaguely related technical query. Ironically, at that point in time their primary complaint was about other content farms scraping their content.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/trouble-in-the-house-of-google...
http://www.businessinsider.com/exclusive-qa-quora-may-be-tur...
>> JS: All of these sites that go to Stack Overflow, scrape our content, and reprint it with garbage ads, Google Adsense-encrusted pages.They're basically producing worse versions of our pages and they use these slimy SEO techniques, so they actually rank higher than us.
>> For a long time, we were getting enormous complaints from our own users that they'd search on Google and they'd find Stack Overflow content that had been stripped from its useful form but SEO'd like crazy and encrusted in ads and thrown up willy-nilly. And these sites were getting a lot of traffic. So that was his complaint and of course he phrased it in this larger frame of "Is Google losing their edge, etc. etc.?"
>> BI: It got a lot of attention. Do you think Google's doing a good job of fixing this sort of problem?
>> JS: They fixed it. They called us up at the time and said, "Thank you for bringing that up. You have lit a fire under the team that is supposed to be working on that problem that has not been delivering."
Matt Cutts, then the head of Google Web Spam, posted to Hacker News about this to "fix" the problem of sites outranking Stack Overflow.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152286
What seemed like newly preferential treatment directly impacted hundreds of other sites that lost huge volumes of their traffic to the newly crowned king-of-search Stack Overflow. For example:
https://www.daniweb.com/digital-media/digital-marketing/sear...
>> As many of you know, DaniWeb was hit by a Google algorithm update back in November 2012 and we lost about 50% of our search traffic. In investigating the issue, I discovered that DaniWeb, in addition to most other programming forums out there, all lost their google traffic to StackOverflow.
That, in turn, perpetuated the reposting/scraping activity and blatant spam posts to the StackOverflow network, since the site network ranks dominantly in every vaguely related query. Now years later, an even larger volume of material on Stack Overflow is not original content and doesn't even pretend to be. It's absolutely littered with copied/pasted content and blatantly spammy/promotional posts from around the web.
From the outside l...
So, this position as top tech knowledge hub is sort of artificially propped up at this point. You type in your query, arrive at a page with something vaguely like the question you asked, are faced with pedantic flags about how the question you came to have answered is somehow unfit, and maybe some useful info. Also maybe some outdated info with real unaccepeted answers below it.
I'm not aware of another site that so heavily depends on content it itself seems to consider unworthy, siloed into so many vaguely overlapping sub-sites
StackOverflow is a community driven website for a society that is used to follow rules and be disciplined.
Nowadays, the popularity of the website put it in a bad position. Handling millions of impolite, pseudo-developers, who've heard that it can help them with their problem.
In other words the community and popularity changed, not StackOverflow. And no it's not dying, it's just working! Sorry for some of us that remember the times where questions were mostly high-quality, but I don't think there is a way to prevent collateral damage in this case.
I prefer to read "opinionated question", instead of 10 paragraphs about a problem that in the end is unsolvable by logical decision.
do people not remember the dark days before trying to unblock the answers in expert sexchange?
Usenet/DejaNews (pre-acquisition) were my favorite incarnation but there's never been a time that the makeup of sites at the time didn't result in the right information being easy to get.
more recently searching in safaribooksonline.com has become my first step.
Also, I'm pretty sure Google picks up the text in the close banner, so you could do a search that includes a term for the reason you're interested in.
Your choices are: answer a trivial JavaScript question and get a million points, or spend an hour painstakingly explaining a hard problem for maybe one point (where, half the time, the original submitter doesn’t even bother to “accept” your answer so you lose even that small point boost).
There needs to be some scaling factor. For example: if the number of questions anywhere on a certain topic is quite small then popular answers in that area could receive more credit; or, perhaps individual parts of a post could be voted on to increase value (say, you see a really detailed example so you “tip” that answer for taking the time to write it all out).
I don't agree with this, there are long winded answers with a massive amount of points and/or bounty awarded to them. The problem you describe exists in any market, majority of an audience will always go for a low hanging fruit. That's why the few who answer those complicated questions are usually subject matter experts and sit in the >1% of SO.
http://stackoverflow.com/help/bounty
They like to answer questions for the challenge or to learn the language themselves.
And they are being actively discouraged.