good perspective and I gotta say, Jon Skeet sets a great example of being down to earth & considerate! I mean, memes of his legend put Chuck Norris to shame...
I think that one of the main issue that Stack Overflow is facing right now is directly related to their karma / points system. Those points can (and are) be used as a social proof of your programming abilities, which can be leveraged in a CV. With that in mind, the goal can be to maximize the number of points by spending the minimum time possible, thus looking for quick and easy questions.
I am both an "asker" and an "answerer" on SO.
When I have time, as an "answerer" it's really difficult to look past trivial questions and to provide insights on more complex questions where :
- The time needed to provide an insightful answer is higher
- The question is so precise and focused that few users will benefit from it, so the potential upvotes are low as well
As such, the potential karma per second I can get from those value-adding question is quite low. It's much easier to correct a comparatively simple null-pointer-reference in a simple piece of code.
As an asker, I have the opposite trouble : my question are usually pretty focused on a specific and complex area. I do not post on SO unless I really have tried a lot of different options.
I spend a lot of time articulating the question, posting as much detail as possible, and documenting what was tried and what did / did not work. I usually get 0 answer since the question needs the answerer to spend quite a bit of time to sully understand the issue I am facing, and needs expertise to provide an answer.
As an answerer, I have nearly stopped spending time on SO because I have a hard time providing actual value.
As an asker, I have nearly stopped spending time on SO because I have a hard time getting value out of it.
I do not have a solution for this issue, but one solution would be to skew the karma system to encourage user to answer complex, focused, and difficult questions.
I'm still baffled by SO, I've been on there for like 10 years now and still can't seem to upvote anything and have no clue why. It's also remarkable how often you'll find "answers" on there that are flat out wrong or horribly out of date, at least once you get past the "how do I manipulate a date" level in a given area.
If you can't upvote you can't seem to downvote or fix the answer, and if you try to comment on an answer it seems to get autodeleted most of the time.
I found the site quite offputting at first. To newcomers it appears to be a typical forum, but it operates quite differently and the process of finding out is unpleasant.
I eventually started using SO daily circa 2010-2011. Now my account is idle, but 2-3 answers continuously garner reputation. Since I was last active in 2011, my rep has gone from 12k to 20. Some of my older answers are out of date (“is there an ORM for PHP like the entity framework?” from 2010 for example), and on some, people have left comments complaining about that. It’s not clear if I should update those answers, delete them, or just leave them, according to the philosophy of the site. As a casual user I have no time to keep up with or understand the way the site works and the constant changes.
> It’s not clear if I should update those answers, delete them, or just leave them, according to the philosophy of the site.
Ideally SO would like you to keep the context of an answer up-to-date, such that they aren't actively misleading, for example by giving dates or version numbers and pointing out if things have changed. If you want to recommend an entirely different approach, I believe there's a mild preference to writing a new answer.
I'm also both an answerer and asker on SO, and I've been using the site off and on almost since the beginning. The larger issue for me (and what is just touched on in this article) is the change in character of SO as its grown over time.
In the beginning I found a number of open and interesting questions (occasionally some of these were closed as being too opinion-based or broad, which bugged me a bit as they were some of the most interesting and illuminating (granted, you could argue that that is not the intention of SO. Still, having an interesting conversation closed seemed, at the very least, excessively pedantic).
The larger issue, I think, is that most open questions now are either of the "How do I do obscure thing X in framework Y under rare condition Z" variety, or beginner "Please do my homework" or "I have a bunch of things in my array it's not printing" sorts of questions.
Not sure what the right answer is for this. And, even so, I often get good responses when I post.
> The larger issue, I think, is that most open questions now are either of the "How do I do obscure thing X in framework Y under rare condition Z" variety, or beginner "Please do my homework" or "I have a bunch of things in my array it's not printing" sorts of questions.
I think it's due to the fact that the questions "in the middle" are already answered and people find them through searching. No need to and again. Only beginners (that can't search effectively) post on SO or people having rare edge cases (for which asking in SO is a last resort).
If they want the site to be what the mods say they want then the answer is simple: have a test before you get membership. The policies say basically we don't want anyone who is not already good on this area and also we will punish and very publicly humiliate you to "help" you learn.
Hate to say it as one, but this is just aspie ignorance.
1. People learn with support, that makes a community. Otherwise they are your enemies and this is an arms race
2. People don't know how to ask questions about things they don't know about, don't be idiots.
3. If people aren't asking questions how will you get points?
There are many more issues etc but those are some blondes IMHO. They should definitely drop anything about being for hobbyists as it is totally not.
There are many easy solutions but it's not what the mods want so it's prolly gonna die.
E.g. only let low score / new user to answer questions at first . Especially for new or low score users
That way everyone has a chance to learn from some one closer to their skill level.
Then after it's answered open it wider.. that way the question should already be cleaned up before skeet sees it.
I don't mind having a chat with someone to explain how to all their specific question, or narrow down a wide open one to something more specific. I realise that I may be turning someone of programming for decade if I act like those it comes naturally to.. you need time to toughen up before you can take the full force of an geek who cannot see your face but had to deal with your ignorance.
Also don't close or deleted questions, just have a tag and filter then out of normal searches.
People love the opinion questions and to me they are more valuable that something I can brute force if I have to.
Anyways I could go on all day.. but there is no point as it's a community and it's their choice, but we need something similar for non expert humans too.
Stackoverflow was a major improvement over forums and mailing lists when it first came out: centralized, clean and easy to use, and the content was up to date. Additionally, the early users generally already pretty savvy, or at least motivated to learn and make quality contributions. Now a decade on, much of the content is stale, accumulating reputation has become a goal in and of itself, and the culture has become weirdly cult-like. There no longer seems to be the same shared purpose or sense of community and respect.
In many ways, the site still is designed for the early days. Take stale answers and questions for example. I can't even count the number of times I've clicked on a stack overflow link in the search results only to find that the accept answer is some horrendously unnecessary jquery snippet. This problem needs to be addressed if the site is to continue being a valuable resource
As Jon identifies though, the bigger problem is culture. I quite like his proposed covenant and wish more users would take it to heart. It's also interesting to think how design could promote the covenant. Some quick ideas:
- Provide a question template: "this is what I am trying to do and why", "this is what I have tried", "this is what is not working".
- Better way to ask for clarification on a question or answer. Comments are too overloaded in their current implementation.
- Require users explain why they are voting to close an issue (more than the general categories already provided)
- Provide a section for "I have a problem but don't even know what question to ask"
- Provide more UI reminders that users are human.
- Tag questions by new users with "new asker".
- Automatically remind new users of good etiquette, such as: 'Don't forget to accept the correct answer'
- Add explanations to downvotes (again, something besides comments)
- Show new users examples of good/bad questions and answers and explain why before throwing them in the deep end
The obstacle is that solving these problems will require changing the site in a way that would break the existing reputation system and piss off many prolific users.
The bigger question I have: so Stackoverflow is bad, but what is the better alternative?
10 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 30.0 ms ] threadI am both an "asker" and an "answerer" on SO.
When I have time, as an "answerer" it's really difficult to look past trivial questions and to provide insights on more complex questions where :
- The time needed to provide an insightful answer is higher
- The question is so precise and focused that few users will benefit from it, so the potential upvotes are low as well
As such, the potential karma per second I can get from those value-adding question is quite low. It's much easier to correct a comparatively simple null-pointer-reference in a simple piece of code.
As an asker, I have the opposite trouble : my question are usually pretty focused on a specific and complex area. I do not post on SO unless I really have tried a lot of different options.
I spend a lot of time articulating the question, posting as much detail as possible, and documenting what was tried and what did / did not work. I usually get 0 answer since the question needs the answerer to spend quite a bit of time to sully understand the issue I am facing, and needs expertise to provide an answer.
As an answerer, I have nearly stopped spending time on SO because I have a hard time providing actual value. As an asker, I have nearly stopped spending time on SO because I have a hard time getting value out of it.
I do not have a solution for this issue, but one solution would be to skew the karma system to encourage user to answer complex, focused, and difficult questions.
If you can't upvote you can't seem to downvote or fix the answer, and if you try to comment on an answer it seems to get autodeleted most of the time.
I eventually started using SO daily circa 2010-2011. Now my account is idle, but 2-3 answers continuously garner reputation. Since I was last active in 2011, my rep has gone from 12k to 20. Some of my older answers are out of date (“is there an ORM for PHP like the entity framework?” from 2010 for example), and on some, people have left comments complaining about that. It’s not clear if I should update those answers, delete them, or just leave them, according to the philosophy of the site. As a casual user I have no time to keep up with or understand the way the site works and the constant changes.
Ideally SO would like you to keep the context of an answer up-to-date, such that they aren't actively misleading, for example by giving dates or version numbers and pointing out if things have changed. If you want to recommend an entirely different approach, I believe there's a mild preference to writing a new answer.
In the beginning I found a number of open and interesting questions (occasionally some of these were closed as being too opinion-based or broad, which bugged me a bit as they were some of the most interesting and illuminating (granted, you could argue that that is not the intention of SO. Still, having an interesting conversation closed seemed, at the very least, excessively pedantic).
The larger issue, I think, is that most open questions now are either of the "How do I do obscure thing X in framework Y under rare condition Z" variety, or beginner "Please do my homework" or "I have a bunch of things in my array it's not printing" sorts of questions.
Not sure what the right answer is for this. And, even so, I often get good responses when I post.
I think it's due to the fact that the questions "in the middle" are already answered and people find them through searching. No need to and again. Only beginners (that can't search effectively) post on SO or people having rare edge cases (for which asking in SO is a last resort).
If they want the site to be what the mods say they want then the answer is simple: have a test before you get membership. The policies say basically we don't want anyone who is not already good on this area and also we will punish and very publicly humiliate you to "help" you learn.
Hate to say it as one, but this is just aspie ignorance.
1. People learn with support, that makes a community. Otherwise they are your enemies and this is an arms race
2. People don't know how to ask questions about things they don't know about, don't be idiots.
3. If people aren't asking questions how will you get points?
There are many more issues etc but those are some blondes IMHO. They should definitely drop anything about being for hobbyists as it is totally not.
There are many easy solutions but it's not what the mods want so it's prolly gonna die.
E.g. only let low score / new user to answer questions at first . Especially for new or low score users
That way everyone has a chance to learn from some one closer to their skill level.
Then after it's answered open it wider.. that way the question should already be cleaned up before skeet sees it.
I don't mind having a chat with someone to explain how to all their specific question, or narrow down a wide open one to something more specific. I realise that I may be turning someone of programming for decade if I act like those it comes naturally to.. you need time to toughen up before you can take the full force of an geek who cannot see your face but had to deal with your ignorance.
Also don't close or deleted questions, just have a tag and filter then out of normal searches.
People love the opinion questions and to me they are more valuable that something I can brute force if I have to.
Anyways I could go on all day.. but there is no point as it's a community and it's their choice, but we need something similar for non expert humans too.
In many ways, the site still is designed for the early days. Take stale answers and questions for example. I can't even count the number of times I've clicked on a stack overflow link in the search results only to find that the accept answer is some horrendously unnecessary jquery snippet. This problem needs to be addressed if the site is to continue being a valuable resource
As Jon identifies though, the bigger problem is culture. I quite like his proposed covenant and wish more users would take it to heart. It's also interesting to think how design could promote the covenant. Some quick ideas:
- Provide a question template: "this is what I am trying to do and why", "this is what I have tried", "this is what is not working".
- Better way to ask for clarification on a question or answer. Comments are too overloaded in their current implementation.
- Require users explain why they are voting to close an issue (more than the general categories already provided)
- Provide a section for "I have a problem but don't even know what question to ask"
- Provide more UI reminders that users are human.
- Tag questions by new users with "new asker".
- Automatically remind new users of good etiquette, such as: 'Don't forget to accept the correct answer'
- Add explanations to downvotes (again, something besides comments)
- Show new users examples of good/bad questions and answers and explain why before throwing them in the deep end
The obstacle is that solving these problems will require changing the site in a way that would break the existing reputation system and piss off many prolific users.
The bigger question I have: so Stackoverflow is bad, but what is the better alternative?