> Comments can be deleted by any moderator with for any reason. They don't like you? They can delete all your comments. They hate LGBT people and believe you're LGBT? They can delete your comments. This is one reason why there is no visible comment history.
It happened to me more than once on stats.stackexchange.com. There is one (ex) moderator who is very demeaning and from time to time delete mine and his comments to change the narrative of the discussion.
This behavior makes me think twice before using that SE site.
This is something you should report to SE (the company) via the contact form with some specific questions where it happened. This would be grounds for a stern conversation/warning at least, and possible mod removal depending on the severity/frequency.
I thought about posting a meta thread, but I forgot to take screenshot of the those comments(which I intend to do next time) so I had no evidence since the mod already cleaned up the thread.
Do they have track records of deleted comments? Based on other comments on this thread it appears SE do not track deleted comments.
Mods can see (and undelete) all deleted comments. There is no way to "permadelete" comments, or if there is, it's only available to SE employees. I think you can also see when a comment was deleted, but not 100% sure as I'm no longer a mod myself and can't check.
My favourite SO moment was when my comment had been edited to mean exactly the inverse of what I had stated. Whoever moderated it had assumed that I must have made a mistake and did not understand the problem space from the same depth I did.
Doesn't the site advise you when you comment that comments were supposed to be for asking clarification or suggesting edits, Not for giving answers? People often use them to give half-hearted answers and I've had that urge too but written a formal half-hearted answer instead. It wouldn't get upvoted or accepted but if you feel you've got something helpful to say, why not say it as an answer?
I think people are afraid to put their half-hearted answers as formal answers because they can get downvoted for being incomplete. But if you don't care about points like Gregg (and myself), then it doesn't matter.
Comments like his "this site might be helpful" are annoying. You have no idea if the writer even understood your question and whether spending time digging through that site will actually help or not. They shouldn't post that. You can google for general information/tutorial sites.
I think I'd rather have a comment "this site might be helpful" on the page than not. It doesn't take long to classify a link as either potentially helpful or useless, and I'm usually finding the SO page through a google search anyway. That may indicate I don't know the right query or jargon for what I want. In any case, I'd rather that SO err on the side of redundancy.
The core of the problem there is that for Gregg, "this site might be helpful" is an understatement; he knows there is a good chance that it will be helpful, that there is direct relevance...
...and then there are the legions of folks who've been posting links to the first Google result with that same text for years. Those are over-selling it: sure, the link might be helpful, buuuut... Probably not. These have been the bane of many a forum, clogging up the first page or so of responses, sometimes discouraging folks with actual knowledge of the topic from even bothering to respond.
There needs to be some way of distinguishing between the two.
Maybe we're supposed to consider how many reputation points the person has to judge the likely quality of their link. Those kinds of decisions are already built into StackOverflow with rules on who can write comments/etc. Maybe they just need tweaking so that posting a URL in a comment requires even higher reputation. If you don't have that reputation, you can do the harder work of writing an actual answer that includes the link.
It is not just the moderators, comments can be abused by users as well. Once I had a top 25 user came to leave a wrong comment to my answer, in a rather aggressive tone. When called out, he just proceeded to delete the comment.
I had this same realization a few years ago. One day it just hit me that I was working for a site for free. Answer questions, "moderating" content, etc...
Worse yet, you ask a question and it gets closed as a "duplicate" and the original is several years old regarding a different version and not even remotely the same. (think Angualar1 VS Angular 6)
> Over the last ~9 years I've spent way too much time answering questions on stack overflow. I don't know why. I want to say it's because I like helping people. It's certainly not for "internet points"
I've asked myself the same question and couldn't find a satisfying answer. The best explanation I found was that StackOverflow had become for me a way to procrastinate, and then tell myself I've done something useful. I realized I don't care much about helping people, In fact the awful quality of the majority of the questions is depressing more than anything else. Perhaps I should consider stopping too.
Aside from my own opinions about helping, I find it slots into the same brain receptor as playing Zachtronics games: it's solving puzzles, which feels like "work," but that one can do in 15 minute(?) chunks without having to deal with a lot of the extraneous stuff
Unlike the games, however, hopefully both me and the asker learn something every now and then, since for any modern technology there are countless weird interactions or unexplored documentation pages
I am cognizant of the "free labor" bug mentioned in the other comments, but since I am somewhere between mildly addicted and actually enjoying the problem solving, I don't feel exploited, or at least can quit when I think it becomes a problem
Separately, I also participate in moderation activities, and I have violentmonkey scripts to ease the repetitive "you no read, huh?" silliness inevitably brought by new users, but that's the part I hate the most. I would pay real money if SO adopted the downvote (or even close) reason taxonomy from https://idownvotedbecau.se and if SO was open source I'd open a PR to add it
I invested a lot of effort into SO early on and came to the same conclusion. I mostly avoid even viewing the site now the same way I avoid viewing w3schools, but when I do happen to click in I’m astonished to see edits to 10+ year old answers that are often superfluous or just plain wrong. And lots of comments on similar answers that are perfectly well meaning but have no context of how the relevant technologies have changed in that time.
But none of that is why I find SO offputting. In theory that’s how it’s supposed to operate. What I find offputting is that despite all these edits and comments the general quality of a given SO page has become a much more visually noisy version of the hyphenated website its creators used to mock. Just absolutely bad advice on bad questions with no citation to be seen.
At some point the volume of activity overtook the will or competency to moderate and it just became a Reddit skin.
I got lucky a few years ago and scored an answer to a VERY common iOS programming question. When you google the question, the top result is my answer and I have actually gotten some pretty strong moderator powers just from this question.
Every once in awhile I go through the queue of things that people have proposed should be deleted and I almost always vote against deletion. Even most of the lower quality stuff has some merit. A comment asking to rephrase is much more constructive than just deleting their post!
Likewise, I haven’t contributed much in the last decade but my old answers continue to buff my account with points and privileges. It’s perhaps a broken system in that regard.
I always feel a bit sad and wistful when thinking about Stack Overflow. It was a great idea and at the beginning it worked well but the moderation culture destroyed the site.
There's too much emphasis on closing questions that are duplicates (when in fact they are not, and technology changes so a duplicate question asked 2 years later is going to get different responses), closing questions because they are too open ended (but those tend to give the most interesting answers) and moderation is both too heavy handed and opaque (no records of deleted comments).
Also, often enough the accepted answer for a question is not the best answer and instead the best answer can be found by looking at other answers or the comments (which I agree with the author should not be seen as ephemeral but are instead critical)
So, all in all, Stack overflow was great when it came out, the concept is good and it could be great but falls well short of that.
I wonder if something more like a wiki format would be better long term. Say you take a question like "How to loop through a list of key,value pairs in JavaScript. Through the last 10 years, this has changed a lot through vanilla to libraries like jquery to new iterations like ES5/6. What I would love to see is just a page with this question asked, maintained over time with an emphasis on when the previous solution was relevant, and highlighting the most recent, preferred options for solving the problem.
So, rather than a score based social network style system, turn the questions into living, and evolving documents. Also, sometimes a person gets stuck having to work on code that's a decade old, so it would be nice to have a history as well, and not just the most recent solution that may not work in their environment.
This doesn't sound bad on the surface, but my worry would be that we would wind up with Wiki-style moderation instead of SO style moderation. i.e. 'guarded articles', edit wars and power-mods overriding outside consensus.
Instead of SO style moderation, with closed questions being treated as canonical, corrected information buried in comments, and power-mods overriding outside consensus?
Wikipedia isn't perfect, but they get one thing right that Stack Overflow gets horribly wrong: they make it obvious who the audience is.
A lot of people visiting Stack Overflow think that the purpose of a Stack Overflow question is to solve the OP's problem. They write "Dear Libby" style letter templates into the question box, and often provide very opinionated answers that try to give way more advice than was strictly asked for by trying to infer what's "really going on" based on the subtext of the question. And there's a lot of UI in there that encourages seeing it as an advice column.
But the Stack Overflow people themselves don't want it to be a place to seek general advice. They want it to form a general resource, with Stack Overflow being less of a bulletin board and more of a reference guide. The problem is that their UI doesn't telegraph this very well (I blame the way they leave the original asker's name and avatar visible on the question), and neither do their marketing materials. They're kinda trying to have it both ways, baiting people with the chance to get their own question getting answered and then switching to editing their question into something more generally useful than something just for them.
The irony is that that is actually what StackOverflow is: you can edit any question to make it clearer... and you end up leaving the original person's name on it (which I frankly find kind of evil).
I agree with all of that, but the worst part to me(which I guess relates to your point about the accepted answers) is that there's no path to deprecating old answer and old questions.
I've been lambasted here in the past for saying this, but I'll say it again now and see if I get a different response; it's no longer helpful to search for "javascript" related questions and get mostly answers for jQuery. These days I'm able to solve a lot of problems just reading MDN, but sometimes I click on a Stack Overflow article and it turns out to be 12 answers that are all jQuery-specific even when the question itself doesn't call for it. jQuery isn't bad, but the world has changed around it and we can't keep pretending like everyone is using it for the same reasons we did back in 2011.
This not only does new developers a general disservice, but it can do a disservice to projects that have less-than-average momentum. For instance, I use Ember JS every day, and it's a framework that has really changed a lot since its inception, but you'd never know it if you looked up questions for it on Stack Overflow. The Ember questions on there are so woefully outdated that I believe it gives potential new users the complete wrong impression of it. There are outdated React questions on there as well, but at least there's enough inertia behind React that new activity helps overcome this to a degree. On the other hand, people almost certainly have given up on Ember because none of the Stack Overflow answers work at all. Sure, we could all submit updated answers, but they'll be below the fold and they will never be reselected as the accepted answer. There are other reasons why Ember has been in decline, but I do blame the mechanics of SO as a big detractor.
Preventing duplicate questions is fine, the overzealousness not withstanding, but if there's no mechanism to correct existing information as time goes on in a meaningful way, the only result can be rot.
> it's no longer helpful to search for "javascript" related questions and get mostly answers for jQuery
jQuery is used on 83% of all websites; React is used on 4% [1]. You’re right that people are probably using it differently than they were a decade ago, but even in 2021 your average jQuery question is probably useful to many more people than your average React one.
There are a lot of websites I made in the past and they are still online and many of them use jQuery, but I don't need to check Stackoverflow in relation to those websites, because I'm no longer working on them (and in most cases no one else does either, they just happily keep running unmodified). All of those are part of that 83% that you mention.
Stackoverflow is a Q&A websites for developers so IMHO it should focus on tech that is currently in use on actively developed systems.
Even if only 10% of jQuery websites are maintained, and every single React website is, there are still almost twice as many actively developed websites using jQuery than React.
I still use jquery actively. Without substantial work and complexity, a typical react site's initial page load still requires an enormous javascript chunk for anything to show on the screen. When I notice a site I'm using is slow, unresponsive (interactivity wise), or buggy, more often than not the react dev extension is lit up. React (and ecosystem) may represent the future but they still have a lot of growing pains to overcome before totally replacing jquery.
This doesn't make any sense. jQuery is a library for DOM manipulation. React is a view layer framework. They are totally different solutions for different problems. If jQuery suits your needs, you probably don't need jQuery at all because vanilla JS is quite capable these days.
This seems unreliable since it weights a website maintained by a single developer in their spare time the same as a website with a dedicated team of devs working full time.
Yeah, Stack Overflow is for humans and not for websites. A billion websites maintained by 1 person don't count more than 1 website maintained by 1 person. The question is how many web developers nowadays use these technologies during their day to day activities.
First, number of websites != number of platforms. If you go to the source of the number, they even point out as much:
> WordPress, which is used in more than 30% of sites, includes jQuery by default.
So right off the bat, you're looking at 50% or so, maybe plus a few for people who actually make a point to write jQuery + for wordpress specifically.
Secondly, that study has detection issues [0] that seem to not pick up a good deal of bundlers/etc, which makes it really hard to say how many of React/Vue sites are missed.
Thirdly, jQuery being used as a dependency of a library will still count it in that 83%. They show a few combination options specifically, and show it's at least 1.7% [1]. With others, say 2.5% in total. Think about how many bundlers hide React/Vue and how many common dependencies could use jQuery, and you're probably much higher.
Given all that, I'd bet that number is closer to 17% than 83%, though I'd wager around 33%.
Even with that 33% being jQuery without a framework or not being wordpress, you have to remember this is published. How many of those have had code significantly changed in the past 5 years? This is what's relevant in this context. All of this long winded nuance to say that I don't think "your average jQuery question is probably useful to many more people than your average React one" holds up, at least not like you might think that cited number shows. That's not to say it's irrelevant, just less relevant.
Agreed that it's all very directional, but I think you're discounting some of it a little too readily. Even if you're just using jQuery because it's a transitive dependency or bundled by default, you might still have issues that lead you to search Stack Overflow for help.
The broader point is, we should be cognizant of our selection bias here. SPA frameworks are overrepresented on HN because we tend to be programmers building applications in the tech industry. But there are a ton of people who don't consider themselves "in tech" that still need to make a portfolio for their photos/figure out a WordPress plugin for their e-commerce site/etc.
That's probably more of a measurement of popular frameworks or libraries pulling in jquery, rather than people wanting to use it for development. Your link suggests a third of the web is wordpress, for example, but wordpress seems to want to eventually remove it as a dependency.
You're missing the point I believe the OP was trying to make: ten+ years ago, jQuery was often by far the easiest way to implement most things. One line of jQuery could replace a dozen lines of plain JavaScript, even ignoring all the nonsense you'd have to learn about cross-browser support.
Today, so many things are possible and easier with plain JavaScript and/or CSS.
I'd even go further and say there's lots of new sites using jQuery unnecessarily because the accepted, highly-upvoted, but 10-year-old SO answer said that was the way.
Stack Overflow's developer survey found that in 2020 43% of web developers were using jQuery and 36% were using React [0]. Still biased in favor of jQuery but not nearly as much as you say.
Based on nothing other than intuition, I assume the Stack Overflow audience still at least slightly selects for React developers over jQuery developers, compared to the general public.
Of course, that doesn't really matter — we're talking about Stack Overflow users, and you're right that this is a way better source of data on what Stack Overflow users care about. Not sure why I didn't think to check their developer survey.
Even React answers of the past are often class component based... and for my taste the react answers are either slapshot / they work but aren't best practices, or if they are good they rarely explain why you would do A instead of B.
"This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion"
I think there should be a place for this kind of stuff, some place hackers can do these "prohibited" sorts of things...
Oh my, not the dreaded extended discussion!! When will people learn that our tech overlords have found the most optimized means of communicating? We mustn’t revert to the dark times when conversing was openly practiced by the barbarians.
But does this place have to be StackOverflow? I think it has space for discussion in comments, chat rooms, etc., but the main artifact is intended to be an easily searchable Q&A archive.
I think they need to work on communicating that much more clearly, but ultimately they don't want to (primarily) be a place of extended discussion, debate, and so on, and I'm not sure it's fair to say "no, they're wrong" to that.
Disagree, stack overflow is still the best place to get answers to common programming questions. If you need to sort a list in Python it’s much better to find the answer on a short stackoverflow post than to sift through dozens of blogs, each with their own style, or to try to parse pages of documentation that goes into way more detail than you need. No other site has as much content as easy to find as stackoverflow, even if it’s not perfect.
People want quick answers, not browsing documentation. SO is useful in the sense that it provides answers to specific questions which a google search finds instantly.
True, but I've seen lots of answers that are "hacks" when there's usually a better, supported way that was spelled out in the docs, e.g. won't fail when you upgrade the library say.
Or they don't want to understand the issue at hand, so they put in a hack, when obtaining a complete understanding of the issue which might take 5 minutes of their time reading the docs, would provide a better solution.
Exactly. I code in half a dozen different languages that all have their own ways to split a string. When I can't remember the syntax to do this in, say, Python, being able to just say "python split string" and it goes to a reasonable SO answer is a big win for me.
I love reading docs too, so I can get a deeper understanding. But sometimes I just need an answer in a hurry.
I have never enjoyed python’s official documentation. It isn’t easy to find answers. Sometimes the value of an SO answer is that you are sent to exactly the right part of the python docs.
same goes for all question-answer type platforms. they all fall into the traps you describe above. unfortunately, i don't see any of them doing anything about these issues.
I think the rules about self-promotion are well-intended. If you ever get quora results to common programming or technology searches, you'll see what I mean; people responding with only loosely related comments which link to their own product, which "solves the problem for you". I get it, without any moderation, SO would be just as useless.
I think there should be some nuance in how those rules are applied. The author of this post appears to be one of the authorities on webgl. If they've written helpful posts on the topic, and those can be referenced from SO answers, they should be able to do that. Heck, even if they sell something on their blog, it's still highly relevant. It's same the problem Google, Youtube, Apple, and basically every other service right now is having with attempting to moderate what can be shared on their platforms, without losing the quality content. Incredibly often, they end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I don't have a solution; the problem is in promoting quality content while preventing spam. It's not all-or-nothing, we need to strike the right balance with moderation.
This is my take, too. I really like answering questions; it's nice to know that the thing I'm writing will be immediately useful to somebody, and maybe a bunch of somebodies. I'm a little uneasy doing free work for for-profit companies, but I set that aside for both StackOverflow (~3k points) and Quora (awarded Top Writer two years running).
In both cases, it was bad moderation that pushed me into quitting. A trick I learned from working on Wikipedia is that you can think of these systems as MMORPGs where you get a useful product out the end. I think all of these platforms have game-design problems, where people with power can find satisfaction in moves that end up harming the reader experience and frustrating contributors.
Both companies seem to be doing fine without my help, so I guess they can afford to burn contributors out after a while. But like you, I think it's sad how much these things fall short of their potential. I'll never do anything for SO or Quora again, but I do miss the chance to help people.
> I really like answering questions; it's nice to know that the thing I'm writing will be immediately useful to somebody, and maybe a bunch of somebodies
Totally agree. Explaining something to somebody else is a great way to learn, too.
That was my experience on early SO, and it was great. I'd just browse a tag I knew, and pick questions where I knew most of the answer, and the act of explaining it would be useful to me, too.
Now I find doing so neither fun nor fulfilling. First there's lots of garbage questions that are impossible to answer. When you do finally find something good, it's hard to get it before it gets closed as dupe or someone else answers. And if it's from a new user, there's still a good chance they'll never come back to accept the answer and awards your fake internet points.
I'd love to see a SO that encourages more new users to actually answer those "dupe" questions (instead: hide them from search and older users)
>"Explaining something to somebody else is a great way to learn, too."
Indeed - I've become an expert at several systems by hanging out in support forums and answering other peoples questions. the harder, the better! Who needs video games when you can still solve problems, help others and increase your value/skill set too?
I scroll directly past the accepted answer on many SO questions as I often find that the second or third highest ranked answer is often actually the best answer.
> There's too much emphasis on closing questions that are duplicates (when in fact they are not, and technology changes so a duplicate question asked 2 years later is going to get different responses)
Note you can still post answers to older questions; this is actually encouraged!
Closing of duplicates is the least of Stack Overflow's problems IMHO; it's done for a very real reason: if I search "how to do foo in bar?" then it's really great to have one question with all answers, instead of having to trawl through several questions. Also, as someone who spent quite a lot of time writing in-depth answers over the years, I'd rather not repeat that every month.
I have a lot of criticism of Stack Overflow, and I mostly stopped answering because I got fed up as well, but this isn't a problem IMO.
> Also, often enough the accepted answer for a question is not the best answer and instead the best answer can be found by looking at other answers or the comments (which I agree with the author should not be seen as ephemeral but are instead critical)
Generally those comments should be integrated in the answer; usually if I come upon an answer with helpful comments I will edit the answer to include that information.
I do wish the entire "accepted answer" feature would be removed though, or at the very least stop pinning them to the top.
Not necessarily; and Stack Overflow doesn't control Google's sorting. It would also mean people would have to keep answering the same questions over and over again, which would be a waste of everyone's time.
> Note you can still post answers to older questions; this is actually encouraged!
Although, this can lead to its own weird problems.
I've been learning Objective C, and I've come across a lot of Stack Overflow questions which ask how to do a thing in Objective C, but where all the top answers are in Swift. Sometimes an older Objective C answer is just buried; sometimes it isn't there at all.
I realize that Swift is the newer language, but it's not the one I'm using, and the question was about Objective C.
Objective-C/Swift is a bit of a special case; but asking "how to do X in Objective C" is probably fine, even if there is already a Swift question. And a lot of questions tend to be about libraries/frameworks anyway, and the Swift answer should be usable in Objective C too.
> Objective-C/Swift is a bit of a special case; but asking "how to do X in Objective C" is probably fine, even if there is already a Swift question.
To be clear, it's the other way around—someone asked a question about Objective C, and people answered how to do it in Swift.
From the perspective of "it's good to post updated answers to older questions" this makes sense, because there's a decent chance the asker would have requested Swift if the question was asked today. But as it stands, the question lists Objective C.
Which is to say, a lot of questions are "products of their time", and posting modern answers to older questions sometimes requires assumptions about what the asker would have wanted. I'm not sure what the best solution is.
> someone asked a question about Objective C, and people answered how to do it in Swift.
Well, then this is a wrong answer haha.
> Which is to say, a lot of questions are "products of their time", and posting modern answers to older questions sometimes requires assumptions about what the asker would have wanted. I'm not sure what the best solution is.
I think it probably depends on the exact question and details; there isn't really a good one-size-fits-all solution.
A question is considered a duplicate only when it's an exact duplicate. Sometimes question get closed as duplicates erroneously as they're not exact duplicates, just very similar, and this can be an issue, but I don't think that's the biggest problem on Stack Overflow, and a lot of questions really are exact duplicates.
A lot of these issues are kind of scaling issues: with about 7,000 questions every day, many of whom are not exactly stellar, it's pretty hard to deal with them all. For year I've argued that improvements in messaging and such would make a big improvement, and Stack Overflow is finally doing some work on that now. For example the comment was changed from "Possible duplicate of [other question]" to "Does this answer your question: [other question]". The latter is much more friendly and helpful. People don't mark questions as dupes to be mean, but just as the easiest way to guide you to an answer (hopefully...)
I bet this is a result of the dichotomy of purpose that this comment by notriddle is describing[1]:
> They want it to form a general resource, with Stack Overflow being less of a bulletin board and more of a reference guide. The problem is that their UI doesn't telegraph this very well (I blame the way they leave the original asker's name and avatar visible on the question), and neither do their marketing materials. They're kinda trying to have it both ways, baiting people with the chance to get their own question getting answered and then switching to editing their question into something more generally useful than something just for them.
Easy to look at an old question and think "There's no point posting another answer here, the asker is long gone." If we thought about it more like a wiki page and less like Yahoo Answers that wouldn't be the case.
Yeah, the UI/communication could improve here. Stack Overflow suffers from a lot of mismatched expectations.
Some of my most successful answers have been to old questions by the way: I try to solve a problem, the Stack Overflow question doesn't contain a solution I like, I figure it out, and I post it as an answer.
> There's too much emphasis on closing questions that are duplicates (when in fact they are not, and technology changes so a duplicate question asked 2 years later is going to get different responses)
I've always been a little surprised that that they don't have a formal system of 'recycling' popular questions where they have a new 'edition' every 1/2/3/whatever years and they just prune the ones that don't get new answers.
It's valuable to get the latest answer to questions, but lots of us operate in past technological climates, so it's good to keep old answers accessible.
Content needs to be clustered by technology. Python 2 answers are different from Python 3. One way would be to archive older definitively answered questions and allow new questions to be flagged for the newer release, such as Python 3. Wherever there were breaking changes, answers become invalid for the newer technology. Flagging every question by year would be the easy way. Any question prior to ES6 release would be legacy JavaScript, for example.
It’s slowly dying, everyone knows that in technology standing still means you’re moving backwards and StackOverflow trends towards standing still.
Once every question has been asked and answered every new question is a duplicate and no new information can appear in StackOverflow.
I am seeing more and more often that you look for a solution to an issue in StackOverflow and all you get is fixes that only work on obsolete software. For instance for operating systems a lot is for Windows 7 and before and doesn’t work on Windows 10 anymore.
There's a term in Russian "синдром вахтёра" which I think should be translated as "a doorkeeper/janitor syndrome". It's a phenomena when a not very smart person who doesn't understand the big picture of things gains a little bit of power against his fellow mates. While generally not intending to bring a harm, they begin to implement some weird but strict policies that reflects their very poor understanding of how things should work (metaphorically they think that every line should either be parallel or perpendicular to each other and no deviations should ever exist). Given that at least some of them might just enjoy having and exercising that little bit of power they have, the result could be just ugly and destructive.
Unfortunately, in many cases I've ever seen over the Internet communities (that's not to stretch the idea further), those who want to become a moderator are very prone to this syndrome.
I think to create a healthy community some extra special measures should be implemented to prevent this phenomena. Unfortunately StackOverflow is not doing it enough (if doing anything at all).
> There's too much emphasis on closing questions that are duplicates (when in fact they are not)
This is a great point. And it also relates to abuse of power.
Recently I raised a question without precedent on Stack Overflow. A person had given a detailed answer, which pointed to issues not available in documentation. His answer was in fact an expanded analysis of the overall language specs - without it, I had no idea how to debug my code.
One megalomaniacal moderator marked my question as 'duplicate', and then pointed to another question -- where he claimed to have answered the question 'definitively' (he had not) and wanted me to upvote his answer.
There was no way for me to challenge his 'duplicate' mark, which is a real loss for anyone else encountering the same issue as I did.
I still visit Stack Overflow links when Google search turns them up, and still occasionally answer questions that I notice while visiting, but I don't go there just to answer questions anymore.
The quality of questions is abysmal and getting worse at an exponential rate. It used to be a site where experienced developers ask focused, well-written questions, after doing some work to solve the problems on their own. Sure, there have always been crappy questions, but as recently as three years ago, the bulk of the questions on the front page were decent.
A huge portion of questions now are homework assignments where the student just wants a canned answer and hasn't made an attempt to solve the problem; are written by people with such a poor grasp of English that they're worthless; endless repeats because no one has searched for existing answers; etc.
I also used to moderate on a daily basis. The flood of low-quality content wore me out, but what really ended my moderation was constantly being challenged by the fake entries they shove at you to "make sure you're paying attention" while moderating. The bot suspended me from moderating a few times because, when presented with posts that required moderator attention, I didn't pick the exact category it thought needed fixing. I'm doing free labor for you and you're going to be a dick about it? No thanks. It's no wonder the quality has gone to shit.
At one point I was "top 1%" in a number of topics, moderated, voted in elections, etc. Now I barely use the site. As much as I dislike Reddit, I increasingly click on Reddit links when I'm looking for answers.
Stack Overflow is still a valuable resource but it's all downhill from here.
The post is about SO, the top comment is complaining that the moderation is too strict and draconian, and the second comment is this one complaining that the moderation isn't enough.
So is always walking a tightrope. Moderation of so much content and trying to make sure only the good stuff sticks is hard, and it burns people out having to deal with the same annoying low-effort things all the time, which leads to them being harsh when people make genuine errors.
>The post is about SO, the top comment is complaining that the moderation is too strict and draconian, and the second comment is this one complaining that the moderation isn't enough.
They're both right. SO is moderating on the wrong things.
Yeah, there's more to both comments. GP mentions being mistreated as a moderator while the other top comment mentions the moderation culture and focus of moderation being on the wrong things, e.g. trying to close "duplicates". They're not really incompatible perspectives.
My personal philosophy is that all questions should follow a very specific format:
1. I am attempting to solve problem X
2. I took steps A, B, C
3. I expected result Y
4. I instead encountered result Z
I'm not familiar enough with Stack Overflow to know whether this is already a feature, but I'd love to see an enforced question format like the above, or something in the ballpark. Like a multi-input form that doesn't allow you to submit unless you fill in each field.
Do you have to be attempting to solve a problem in order to have a question worthy of asking?
And if I'm attempting to solve a different problem, but have to ask the same question, will answers tailored to the problem that you're solving be helpful to me? If not, can I ask the same question without it being closed as a duplicate?
> all questions should follow a very specific format
The format is good enough, but I really dislike the idea of enforcing it for every question. As a top comment suggested, some of the most interesting questions in SO are sort of open-ended. Most of my questions and answers there (~3.5k reputation) violate your format.
Sure, but those are the exceptions. They are fine (or they should be), after all there's enough space for both.
OP is complaining (not without merit) about the typical X Y questions, that are hard to answer, because there's a very specific question, but very little actual context that would help creative solutions. This leads to boring brute-force hackish answers. At best.
Agreed on Reddit posts. They're a lot less formal and depending on the community and activity can be super helpful. Especially with followup questions.
Reddit picks up the slack of SO for those who want to discuss issues and better understanding. Still though, the flood of bad questions happens on Reddit too.
In the last couple of years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of search queries I've made ending in "reddit". Not only is it great for answering questions, but it's probably the best place on the internet for getting a relatively less biased opinion on products or services (at least compared to product reviews on websites). I've used it to buy electronics, choose ISPs, and find the parts of town I'd be interested in moving into.
Moderator burnout is a huge problem in all sorts of places. I saw this happen on Wikipedia. It's just plain hard work, and the volume and pace of it means it's easy to get the sense that you are all that's preventing the fall of Western civilization. This in turn leads to bad contributor experiences, alienating people who might in other circumstances end up moderating.
I really wonder how fixable this is. From your SO experience, do you think it's inherent to the model? E.g., does the ratio between types of the work people are willing to do mean moderators will always be outgunned? Or are there perhaps technical or social solutions that you think would have fixed it?
There is no "fix", IMHO - just as in physical societies, maintaining infrastructure takes a lot of boring work that never ends as long as people still use it.
That said... There were and are a lot of things that could make it less frustrating. Once again, we can look at physical societies: if 99% of people litter and .001% of people sweep up after them, the latter are gonna have a rough time. If we can increase the size of the latter group that'll help somewhat - but so will reducing the size of the former, and if there's less of a crushing workload then increasing the number of workers may get easier too.
Stack Overflow is entirely moderated by volunteers, and their numbers haven't exactly scaled with the volume of casual users. I find it interesting to look at how moderation changes around major holidays - especially Christmas and New Years Day: suddenly there is much less work to do, and more of it gets done - but not only done, done well! Folks are happier, more relaxed, more... Friendly and helpful.
For years, Stack Overflow's management has looked at discussions like this one and said to themselves, "those damned volunteers are making us look bad, we've gotta make their work harder so they stop screwing this up". And... It has had precisely the opposite effect: more litter, fewer sweepers == increasingly hostile interactions with those who remain to push the brooms.
I strongly suspect a campaign to encourage a bit more... Civic pride... "This site belongs to all of us, pick up after yourself", etc. Might've done more good.
I'm currently in the top 0.86% overall on Stack Overflow, even though I haven't been actively contributing since shortly after college (2015ish). I've always thought about writing this kind of blog post, but I think it's just pointless.
SO, over the past decade, has been destroyed by power-hungry admins. These admins are (1) not technically competent, (2) not politically astute, and (3) do not have the best of the community in mind. Simply put, they're power hungry online weirdos that just want to be "in charge" of a community. I've witnessed this dozens of times, and there have been many (many) controversies concerning SO admins. After a few run-ins that rubbed me the wrong way, I no longer contribute. I feel that SO has become the new "Experts Exchange" or "Yahoo Answers" -- ironically, exactly what they were trying to replace.
In order to be an active admin for a site, you need to have a lot of free time for it. And it's exactly these mentally inept people who have that time. There needs to be a name for this paradigm.
The role of moderation is soul draining - all communities suffer from an Eternal September effect. There's always a someone new who didn't read or disregarded the rules.
I do agree there are those who are simply attracted to the power of moderating a community; what is "Cancel Culture" but that same exercise of power?
When a seasoned, prolific contributor gets disabused you know there's rot in the community; who is doing the moderation without knowing or ever communicating with the top contributors? That I don't get.
reddit and their mods have completely destroyed their website. The admins of reddit do not care because the cash keeps flowing, so why stick to founding principles at all?
The interesting thing on Reddit is that every sub Reddit has their own set of moderators. If you go to /r/China or /r/history you will get destroyed for even posting the most sane comment, in other reddits there is literally zero moderation which can be very relieving (if the community is not too big). so reddit can be good for everyone whereas Stack Overflow is converging to be good for no one.
He's only spinning because dudes like you don't allow him to rest in peace by bringing his name as an appeal to authority on irrelevant topics. Please stop.
> SO, over the past decade, has been destroyed by power-hungry admins. These admins are (1) not technically competent, (2) not politically astute, and (3) do not have the best of the community in mind. Simply put, they're power hungry online weirdos that just want to be "in charge" of a community.
Sadly, your comment perfectly describes what happened to Wikipedia about five to ten years ago, and also exactly what is happening more and more every day on Reddit.
Recently a post of mine on Reddit hit the front page and got a ton of awards (i.e. revenue for Reddit). Quickly the majority of my comments were deleted and I was given a temporary ban from the subreddit. The rules say "Only one link to social media per submission", and I was linking to websites that were extremely helpful and relevant to the questions I was being asked.
My takeaway is that Reddit doesn't want me to submit content that garners a massive amount of attention (119k upvotes), over 4700 comments and 357 awards.
Unrelated: I see you posting on HN every now and then, and every time I'm like "oh it's the Africa expedition guy!" -- and maybe this is just the few gin and tonics I've had earlier, but cheers to you, your story is awesome!
Stack Overflow is extremely useful but also very toxic to many of it's contributes. I've found myself 30 minutes into an answer more than a few times, only to have the original question closed.
Close votes tend to have a pile on effect, and many close votes are irrelevant. Just let me help the poster. Remove the question from searches so it doesn't bother future users, I don't care... don't prevent me from interacting with a person I can help. But it stings when things get removed by third parties that don't fully appreciate what was asked.
Most juniors I work with find stack overflow flat out too hostile/intimidating to use.
SO still gives a lot of relevant answers to my web searches, despite its absurd moderation policies. Don't quite understand it why people on HN are so negative towards SO.
That's a different can of worms. They might claim their search results are good because they moderate a lot to remove noise, and maybe that's true, but it's this weird moderation that discourages good answers, and I think there are better ways of doing SEO so that you can have your cake and eat it too.
I mean, a guy who spent hours on every answer just left the site. That should give you a clue.
I think most peoples' negativity here is not towards the idea that it can be useful for quick Google searches, but rather that it has become a place that doesn't foster or encourage productive feedback and has become negatively affected by poor moderation. This will, in totality, greatly affect how valuable one appreciates time spent contributing there to be.
Do not contribute free work to SO, Wikipedia, or any other site that seeks to replace the web with its own brand. Instead, if you have useful knowledge to share, write it up on your own website. People will find your information using search engines. And when these agglomeration sites dry up, search engines will regain some of their lost usefulness. If you get good at writing you can even get paid for your articles, and the editorial process will make them even more useful for readers.
SO, Wikipedia, and the like not only take and use your work for their own purposes, but are bad for the web. Their effect is to move the web away from a distributed network of knowledge under the control of individuals responsible for their words, and toward homogenized, voiceless near-monopolies of information. They are nearly as unhealthy for the web as Twitter and Facebook.
Wikipedia is bad for the web? Their whole policy is not to editorialize, and instead to provide direct citations to their sources. I often find interesting technical articles by looking at Wikipedia citations.
> People will find your information using search engines.
This is becoming really difficult, due to blog spam and SEO. I have so much trouble finding good info that I often end my searches with "site:reddit.com". I hoard RSS feeds collected from sites like HN and Reddit because I know if I lose them I'll never be able to find them again.
This is great advice. The absolute best SEO tip of all time is this: remember what you searched for on Google and couldn’t find a decent answer or link in the first few pages? Now you write that answer or link on your website.
Both Stack Overflow and Wikipedia are Creative Commons licensed, so they can be reused and remixed freely. Contributing to them may not be optimal if your goal is to maximize your personal brand exposure in search results, but it does serve a greater good, and it's very different from contributing to a locked-down, copyrighted repo like Facebook, Instagram, etc.
I would also encourage people to contribute to original project documentation, bug trackers, or mailing lists.
It’s unfortunate that Stack Overflow is the first destination people end up going to. I guess it’s to be expected since many projects only offer static pages and offer minimalist code examples.
The original poster is lucky that they have a blog and their own platform to voice their opinions.
This is a good point: many open source projects now have their documentation under GitHub, and that provides a great way to make corrections and improvements, as well as expanding the documentation.
EDIT: anyone can have their own platform, you don’t need to be lucky. It only costs a few bucks to register a domain, and hosting starts at $0.
Huh? I really have no idea why you are asking this here. But it is a problem that Wikipedia results take up space on the first page of results, along with advertising, etc.
It’s not a major problem, but it’s not optimal; just more stuff to skip over looking for the real results. The thing is, I know there is a Wikipedia article about everything, and if I want to see it, I’ll go there and use their search.
Isn't the objective if a search engine to show you the most relevant result to your search? I find wikipedia results to be my most clicked because they're the most useful. I don't understand how those aren't "real" results.
Well, that’s fine. It sounds like Google is more in tune with how you see things, so their rankings are more relevant for you. I was talking about me (as usual).
I've written a lot of content I never would have otherwise based on "question prompts" from Stack Overflow and the like. I learned a lot from answering questions, as well.
I agree and I'm reminded of the not-earliest days of the Internet when blogs with high-quality, bias-free information ranked high up in search results, instead of Wiki's almost monopolized readings.
There's a lot to unpack here, but just to start: How is having search engines be the gatekeepers to knowledge preferable to a community like Wikipedia?
I think this is a good question. Part of my answer is that I’m optimistic about Google being disrupted, in the not-too-distant future, by a search engine with a better idea, just as Google disrupted the existing search engines because pagerank worked better than hand-assembled directories. I think it’s obvious to everyone that Google’s algorithms have not been producing results as useful as they did in the past, for several years now. So I hope that this is an opportunity for the search monopoly to be broken up, by a company with enough capital to implement something better that can scale to a billion sites.
Also, we are not entirely dependent on search engines. A domain expert can link to other articles from her articles, and so on...forming something like....a web. But we need to encourage the practice of linking. So many people write now (typical Medium articles, for example) without linking to anything much, as if they are the only ones to have ever thought or written about their topic.
> People will find your information using search engines.
How I wish that were the case. Content on a personal website--no matter how excellent--will be invisible and nobody will ever see it -- unless you do heroic SEO or get lucky in an inexplicable way.
Personal anecdote: I created a website on a particular subject that interests me. I've been told by friends and strangers that it is extremely well written and gives a better explanation of the topic than anything else they've seen (at least during the period when I worked on the site). The site has no analytics, no ads, nothing controversial. Just a clean design with text, diagrams, and photos. Google will not find my site using any appropriate keyword. Not even after pages of search results. But Google has indexed it. If I search for "an exact sentence from the site quoted like this", Google finds it.
Self-hosted content in today's web does not survive on merit alone even when it's focused, useful, and free. That's been my experience anyway.
It's hit or miss. I do no SEO either. Some of the articles on my personal site are well represented on Google, and some, as you’ve found, are invisible. You need to be patient. Leave them up there; it could take a few years, but if people link to them, they will appear in results. But people need to do a better job of linking, overall. It’s true that Google, in particular, has gotten much worse in this regard. I know this very well, as my site predates Google and Wikipedia. Just my name used to be on the front page of Google, and many articles on my site. Now, not so much.
I think you're missing perhaps the most important value of Wikipedia to the consumer - the content has been subjected to peer-review and open criticism, and then jointly edited by many people with different perspectives. This causes me (as the consumer) to have a high degree of confidence in the information. This will not be true for any blog post, or even any book. A blog post (like a SO answer) can be higher or lower in search results, but the content of that blog post is still just one person's (or one small group's) perspective.
That’s not what “peer review” means. And what you list as advantages, the joint editing by many people, are also disadvantages. I’m far more interested in reading something with an identifiable author, who is responsible for the words, than the product of a crowd, where any semblance of an individual voice has been suffocated. And you may feel confident in the information, but don’t forget that I can make any Wikipedia article say anything that I want. Sure, it will get fixed. But maybe the version that you read still contained my misinformation.
I have left a complaint before on a non-tech stack exchange about how my question was not in fact off-topic. It was a question about how to do something impractical. They interpreted it as me wanting to do it rather than wanting to know the process out of pure curiosity, and so of course mods immediately flagged it and it just had comments asking me why i would want to do that thing. It seems they're just more interested in policing the site than growing knowledge.
I've also abandoned participating in the SO "community". I wait with bated breath to see people defending SO as it currently exists (as opposed to SO as it was).
I used to defend SO until I recently got burned by high rep gatekeepers actively preventing me from contributing (what I thought was) value to the site. And I have 4k+ rep myself.
Now I when I see high rep users I instantly think they are out-of-touch power users who are completely unaware of how average developers use the site.
I really don't blame the author, here. It's uncanny how many negative experiences I've had with Stack Overflow. There are occasionally posts where I notice they have this heavy-handed brand of authoritarian moderation and adversarial approach to problem-solving that I find really frustrating. I've since stopped using it. I generally find more value in first-party documentation, the source, and GitHub issues, anyway.
I've fallen into the same trap with sites before. Discovering that your arcane knowledge is useful to others is fun and you enjoy helping random strangers with their questions. It seems like you are contributing to a public benefit and you are happy to continue giving away your time because it's helping people. But ultimately you are giving away your time so some 3rd party can make money off of your effort. But you're ok with this as it's still a pubic benefit right? But this company is in control of the "public benefit" and as they are doing this to make money, eventually you will find yourself running afoul of their rules because your goal is to help people, not to make the company money. Then you discover that your posts are not just getting deleted, they are getting moved to the a private part of the site for paying customers to see. Nope.
So once you've found that you're coloring outside the lines too much or getting used in secret you start to author your own articles hosted on your own site. No reason to give away your IP, it's the best of both worlds as users trapped in the corporate portal get access to your insight and your IP stays your property. Then you discover that your sites URL (and others) are getting search-n-replace null-routed. Nope.
The only way to ensure you have the freedom to fully help people is to setup a quick site, CMS, forums, etc. And before you know it you're hosting a few sites for various reasons which get a small amount of traffic. But hey you're free of the man and that's not nothing. Time goes by and you have less and less time to help your small flock of users. Eventually your sites are taken over by spam bots and they all get de-platformed by google to reduce the spread of the new malware your sites are hosting. Some day you take the sites down, usually just as your trim down your neckbeard.
Helping people is fun, but all things must happen in moderation. There's nothing wrong with spending a few hours helping an internet stranger once in a while, but you need to avoid making it your main free-time activity for this exact reason. If you're doing it through someone else's site then you are generating revenue for someone. I don't work for free, and neither should you. Most of us have a shit ton of other projects always on the back-burner, go work on one of those instead.
Has there been any research on how to prevent what you might call the “volunteer-power-hunger” that occurs in communities where there’s emphasis on community moderation?
It would be interesting to get an economist’s take on how to improve these sites.
In particular I’ve found it strange that the karma community on various sites doesn’t “charge” you to do more things. For example on this site it would make sense if it costed you karma to up vote and downvote - this would create an emphasis to not spend too much so to speak.
I've often thought over the years that there was something to slashdot's moderation by randomly selected accounts, as it prevents a few power users from dominating.
Slashdot comments are pretty garbage these days though so maybe not.
I don’t think that is an indictment of the moderation system. You can’t replace a dead community with excellent moderation. Slashdot’s dead because it failed to produce worthwhile content and not be an even uglier pile of ass. The mod system can’t do anything about that.
I still sometimes find useful information on Stack Overlflow, but I, too, am done answering questions, commenting, or even upvoting correct answers for very similar reasons to the author of this blog post.
Researching and answering questions is a good way to learn a topic - exercises.
I've also been driven away, but there seem pockets of goodness, e.g. bash people are super insightful and helpful. Perhaps a kind of society of affliction.
I can see why, prima facie, linking your own site looks like spam. Seems there could be a way to facilitate this (e.g. authorise/whitelist legit sites; or even host them on SO), but probably out of scope - like "closed as "interesting".
And links lose eyeballs, undermining SO's business model... hmmm... revenue-distortion sunk expertsexchange... perhaps soon time for another change?
This is pretty much par for the course at many (most?) fora; SO is just a particularly successful (and therefore also toxic) example. See also Wikipedia for large scale shenanigans of this sort.
I long ago stopped investing significant time and emotional energy contributing to knowledge resources for similar reasons, though it should be remembered that there definitely are positives to contributors beyond the altruistic (I never improved as much in my technical skills as when sweating under the public spotlight after foolishly committing to answer a "simple" question that turned into significant unpaid work).
It's internet culture (and tribal and other social gatherings before that), not StackOverflow particularly; the toxicity and crappy behaviour have been with the net since the get-go and will continue as long as the socially undeveloped see an opportunity to display their "power" or suck the energy out of those more publicly-spirited.
I don't have anything to add to the discussion, I just want to thank greggman for going out of his way to help me understand a simple webgl issue a few years ago.
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[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadThat site is a dumpster fire.
This behavior makes me think twice before using that SE site.
Do they have track records of deleted comments? Based on other comments on this thread it appears SE do not track deleted comments.
I think people are afraid to put their half-hearted answers as formal answers because they can get downvoted for being incomplete. But if you don't care about points like Gregg (and myself), then it doesn't matter.
Comments like his "this site might be helpful" are annoying. You have no idea if the writer even understood your question and whether spending time digging through that site will actually help or not. They shouldn't post that. You can google for general information/tutorial sites.
...and then there are the legions of folks who've been posting links to the first Google result with that same text for years. Those are over-selling it: sure, the link might be helpful, buuuut... Probably not. These have been the bane of many a forum, clogging up the first page or so of responses, sometimes discouraging folks with actual knowledge of the topic from even bothering to respond.
There needs to be some way of distinguishing between the two.
Also: I recognized the name immediately because gman helped me out with a WebGL question* last year.
* https://stackoverflow.com/questions/62784790/what-is-the-fas...
Worse yet, you ask a question and it gets closed as a "duplicate" and the original is several years old regarding a different version and not even remotely the same. (think Angualar1 VS Angular 6)
SO has its place, but it isn't for me.
I've asked myself the same question and couldn't find a satisfying answer. The best explanation I found was that StackOverflow had become for me a way to procrastinate, and then tell myself I've done something useful. I realized I don't care much about helping people, In fact the awful quality of the majority of the questions is depressing more than anything else. Perhaps I should consider stopping too.
Unlike the games, however, hopefully both me and the asker learn something every now and then, since for any modern technology there are countless weird interactions or unexplored documentation pages
I am cognizant of the "free labor" bug mentioned in the other comments, but since I am somewhere between mildly addicted and actually enjoying the problem solving, I don't feel exploited, or at least can quit when I think it becomes a problem
Separately, I also participate in moderation activities, and I have violentmonkey scripts to ease the repetitive "you no read, huh?" silliness inevitably brought by new users, but that's the part I hate the most. I would pay real money if SO adopted the downvote (or even close) reason taxonomy from https://idownvotedbecau.se and if SO was open source I'd open a PR to add it
But none of that is why I find SO offputting. In theory that’s how it’s supposed to operate. What I find offputting is that despite all these edits and comments the general quality of a given SO page has become a much more visually noisy version of the hyphenated website its creators used to mock. Just absolutely bad advice on bad questions with no citation to be seen.
At some point the volume of activity overtook the will or competency to moderate and it just became a Reddit skin.
At least I learned about https://webglfundamentals.org/ and https://webgl2fundamentals.org/ from this, they look fantastic.
Every once in awhile I go through the queue of things that people have proposed should be deleted and I almost always vote against deletion. Even most of the lower quality stuff has some merit. A comment asking to rephrase is much more constructive than just deleting their post!
What? Purely anecdotal I suppose, but I have found immensely helpful information in comments on SO.
There's too much emphasis on closing questions that are duplicates (when in fact they are not, and technology changes so a duplicate question asked 2 years later is going to get different responses), closing questions because they are too open ended (but those tend to give the most interesting answers) and moderation is both too heavy handed and opaque (no records of deleted comments).
Also, often enough the accepted answer for a question is not the best answer and instead the best answer can be found by looking at other answers or the comments (which I agree with the author should not be seen as ephemeral but are instead critical)
So, all in all, Stack overflow was great when it came out, the concept is good and it could be great but falls well short of that.
So, rather than a score based social network style system, turn the questions into living, and evolving documents. Also, sometimes a person gets stuck having to work on code that's a decade old, so it would be nice to have a history as well, and not just the most recent solution that may not work in their environment.
StackOverflow powered GPT-3 haha.
A lot of people visiting Stack Overflow think that the purpose of a Stack Overflow question is to solve the OP's problem. They write "Dear Libby" style letter templates into the question box, and often provide very opinionated answers that try to give way more advice than was strictly asked for by trying to infer what's "really going on" based on the subtext of the question. And there's a lot of UI in there that encourages seeing it as an advice column.
But the Stack Overflow people themselves don't want it to be a place to seek general advice. They want it to form a general resource, with Stack Overflow being less of a bulletin board and more of a reference guide. The problem is that their UI doesn't telegraph this very well (I blame the way they leave the original asker's name and avatar visible on the question), and neither do their marketing materials. They're kinda trying to have it both ways, baiting people with the chance to get their own question getting answered and then switching to editing their question into something more generally useful than something just for them.
It is not a surprise that people feel cheated.
I've been lambasted here in the past for saying this, but I'll say it again now and see if I get a different response; it's no longer helpful to search for "javascript" related questions and get mostly answers for jQuery. These days I'm able to solve a lot of problems just reading MDN, but sometimes I click on a Stack Overflow article and it turns out to be 12 answers that are all jQuery-specific even when the question itself doesn't call for it. jQuery isn't bad, but the world has changed around it and we can't keep pretending like everyone is using it for the same reasons we did back in 2011.
This not only does new developers a general disservice, but it can do a disservice to projects that have less-than-average momentum. For instance, I use Ember JS every day, and it's a framework that has really changed a lot since its inception, but you'd never know it if you looked up questions for it on Stack Overflow. The Ember questions on there are so woefully outdated that I believe it gives potential new users the complete wrong impression of it. There are outdated React questions on there as well, but at least there's enough inertia behind React that new activity helps overcome this to a degree. On the other hand, people almost certainly have given up on Ember because none of the Stack Overflow answers work at all. Sure, we could all submit updated answers, but they'll be below the fold and they will never be reselected as the accepted answer. There are other reasons why Ember has been in decline, but I do blame the mechanics of SO as a big detractor.
Preventing duplicate questions is fine, the overzealousness not withstanding, but if there's no mechanism to correct existing information as time goes on in a meaningful way, the only result can be rot.
jQuery is used on 83% of all websites; React is used on 4% [1]. You’re right that people are probably using it differently than they were a decade ago, but even in 2021 your average jQuery question is probably useful to many more people than your average React one.
[1] https://css-tricks.com/how-the-web-is-really-built/
There are a lot of websites I made in the past and they are still online and many of them use jQuery, but I don't need to check Stackoverflow in relation to those websites, because I'm no longer working on them (and in most cases no one else does either, they just happily keep running unmodified). All of those are part of that 83% that you mention.
Stackoverflow is a Q&A websites for developers so IMHO it should focus on tech that is currently in use on actively developed systems.
50/10 vs 4*(unmaintained rate) + undercounting (possibly a large majority, possibly small) is probably React winning out
PS from your comment it sounds like you could be interested in Vue, specifically using Vue standalone without npm/webpack e.g. https://v3.vuejs.org/guide/installation.html#cdn
First, number of websites != number of platforms. If you go to the source of the number, they even point out as much:
> WordPress, which is used in more than 30% of sites, includes jQuery by default.
So right off the bat, you're looking at 50% or so, maybe plus a few for people who actually make a point to write jQuery + for wordpress specifically.
Secondly, that study has detection issues [0] that seem to not pick up a good deal of bundlers/etc, which makes it really hard to say how many of React/Vue sites are missed.
Thirdly, jQuery being used as a dependency of a library will still count it in that 83%. They show a few combination options specifically, and show it's at least 1.7% [1]. With others, say 2.5% in total. Think about how many bundlers hide React/Vue and how many common dependencies could use jQuery, and you're probably much higher.
Given all that, I'd bet that number is closer to 17% than 83%, though I'd wager around 33%.
Even with that 33% being jQuery without a framework or not being wordpress, you have to remember this is published. How many of those have had code significantly changed in the past 5 years? This is what's relevant in this context. All of this long winded nuance to say that I don't think "your average jQuery question is probably useful to many more people than your average React one" holds up, at least not like you might think that cited number shows. That's not to say it's irrelevant, just less relevant.
[0] https://github.com/AliasIO/wappalyzer/issues/2450
[1] https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2020/javascript#framework...
The broader point is, we should be cognizant of our selection bias here. SPA frameworks are overrepresented on HN because we tend to be programmers building applications in the tech industry. But there are a ton of people who don't consider themselves "in tech" that still need to make a portfolio for their photos/figure out a WordPress plugin for their e-commerce site/etc.
Today, so many things are possible and easier with plain JavaScript and/or CSS.
I'd even go further and say there's lots of new sites using jQuery unnecessarily because the accepted, highly-upvoted, but 10-year-old SO answer said that was the way.
No one should be recommending the introduction of jquery (to solve some discrete issue) unless it’s already part of the stack.
But that’s exactly the opposite of how the current state of JS answers appears.
[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#most-popular-...
Of course, that doesn't really matter — we're talking about Stack Overflow users, and you're right that this is a way better source of data on what Stack Overflow users care about. Not sure why I didn't think to check their developer survey.
"This question is not a good fit to our Q&A format. We expect answers to generally involve facts, references, or specific expertise; this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion"
I think there should be a place for this kind of stuff, some place hackers can do these "prohibited" sorts of things...
Oh my, not the dreaded extended discussion!! When will people learn that our tech overlords have found the most optimized means of communicating? We mustn’t revert to the dark times when conversing was openly practiced by the barbarians.
I think they need to work on communicating that much more clearly, but ultimately they don't want to (primarily) be a place of extended discussion, debate, and so on, and I'm not sure it's fair to say "no, they're wrong" to that.
I was kind of referring to the very nice platform I'm typing on right now... :)
Or they don't want to understand the issue at hand, so they put in a hack, when obtaining a complete understanding of the issue which might take 5 minutes of their time reading the docs, would provide a better solution.
I love reading docs too, so I can get a deeper understanding. But sometimes I just need an answer in a hurry.
I think there should be some nuance in how those rules are applied. The author of this post appears to be one of the authorities on webgl. If they've written helpful posts on the topic, and those can be referenced from SO answers, they should be able to do that. Heck, even if they sell something on their blog, it's still highly relevant. It's same the problem Google, Youtube, Apple, and basically every other service right now is having with attempting to moderate what can be shared on their platforms, without losing the quality content. Incredibly often, they end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I don't have a solution; the problem is in promoting quality content while preventing spam. It's not all-or-nothing, we need to strike the right balance with moderation.
In both cases, it was bad moderation that pushed me into quitting. A trick I learned from working on Wikipedia is that you can think of these systems as MMORPGs where you get a useful product out the end. I think all of these platforms have game-design problems, where people with power can find satisfaction in moves that end up harming the reader experience and frustrating contributors.
Both companies seem to be doing fine without my help, so I guess they can afford to burn contributors out after a while. But like you, I think it's sad how much these things fall short of their potential. I'll never do anything for SO or Quora again, but I do miss the chance to help people.
Totally agree. Explaining something to somebody else is a great way to learn, too.
That was my experience on early SO, and it was great. I'd just browse a tag I knew, and pick questions where I knew most of the answer, and the act of explaining it would be useful to me, too.
Now I find doing so neither fun nor fulfilling. First there's lots of garbage questions that are impossible to answer. When you do finally find something good, it's hard to get it before it gets closed as dupe or someone else answers. And if it's from a new user, there's still a good chance they'll never come back to accept the answer and awards your fake internet points.
I'd love to see a SO that encourages more new users to actually answer those "dupe" questions (instead: hide them from search and older users)
Indeed - I've become an expert at several systems by hanging out in support forums and answering other peoples questions. the harder, the better! Who needs video games when you can still solve problems, help others and increase your value/skill set too?
Note you can still post answers to older questions; this is actually encouraged!
Closing of duplicates is the least of Stack Overflow's problems IMHO; it's done for a very real reason: if I search "how to do foo in bar?" then it's really great to have one question with all answers, instead of having to trawl through several questions. Also, as someone who spent quite a lot of time writing in-depth answers over the years, I'd rather not repeat that every month.
I have a lot of criticism of Stack Overflow, and I mostly stopped answering because I got fed up as well, but this isn't a problem IMO.
> Also, often enough the accepted answer for a question is not the best answer and instead the best answer can be found by looking at other answers or the comments (which I agree with the author should not be seen as ephemeral but are instead critical)
Generally those comments should be integrated in the answer; usually if I come upon an answer with helpful comments I will edit the answer to include that information.
I do wish the entire "accepted answer" feature would be removed though, or at the very least stop pinning them to the top.
Although, this can lead to its own weird problems.
I've been learning Objective C, and I've come across a lot of Stack Overflow questions which ask how to do a thing in Objective C, but where all the top answers are in Swift. Sometimes an older Objective C answer is just buried; sometimes it isn't there at all.
I realize that Swift is the newer language, but it's not the one I'm using, and the question was about Objective C.
To be clear, it's the other way around—someone asked a question about Objective C, and people answered how to do it in Swift.
From the perspective of "it's good to post updated answers to older questions" this makes sense, because there's a decent chance the asker would have requested Swift if the question was asked today. But as it stands, the question lists Objective C.
Which is to say, a lot of questions are "products of their time", and posting modern answers to older questions sometimes requires assumptions about what the asker would have wanted. I'm not sure what the best solution is.
Well, then this is a wrong answer haha.
> Which is to say, a lot of questions are "products of their time", and posting modern answers to older questions sometimes requires assumptions about what the asker would have wanted. I'm not sure what the best solution is.
I think it probably depends on the exact question and details; there isn't really a good one-size-fits-all solution.
A question is considered a duplicate only when it's an exact duplicate. Sometimes question get closed as duplicates erroneously as they're not exact duplicates, just very similar, and this can be an issue, but I don't think that's the biggest problem on Stack Overflow, and a lot of questions really are exact duplicates.
A lot of these issues are kind of scaling issues: with about 7,000 questions every day, many of whom are not exactly stellar, it's pretty hard to deal with them all. For year I've argued that improvements in messaging and such would make a big improvement, and Stack Overflow is finally doing some work on that now. For example the comment was changed from "Possible duplicate of [other question]" to "Does this answer your question: [other question]". The latter is much more friendly and helpful. People don't mark questions as dupes to be mean, but just as the easiest way to guide you to an answer (hopefully...)
> They want it to form a general resource, with Stack Overflow being less of a bulletin board and more of a reference guide. The problem is that their UI doesn't telegraph this very well (I blame the way they leave the original asker's name and avatar visible on the question), and neither do their marketing materials. They're kinda trying to have it both ways, baiting people with the chance to get their own question getting answered and then switching to editing their question into something more generally useful than something just for them.
Easy to look at an old question and think "There's no point posting another answer here, the asker is long gone." If we thought about it more like a wiki page and less like Yahoo Answers that wouldn't be the case.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26163113
Some of my most successful answers have been to old questions by the way: I try to solve a problem, the Stack Overflow question doesn't contain a solution I like, I figure it out, and I post it as an answer.
I've always been a little surprised that that they don't have a formal system of 'recycling' popular questions where they have a new 'edition' every 1/2/3/whatever years and they just prune the ones that don't get new answers.
It's valuable to get the latest answer to questions, but lots of us operate in past technological climates, so it's good to keep old answers accessible.
Once every question has been asked and answered every new question is a duplicate and no new information can appear in StackOverflow.
I am seeing more and more often that you look for a solution to an issue in StackOverflow and all you get is fixes that only work on obsolete software. For instance for operating systems a lot is for Windows 7 and before and doesn’t work on Windows 10 anymore.
There's a term in Russian "синдром вахтёра" which I think should be translated as "a doorkeeper/janitor syndrome". It's a phenomena when a not very smart person who doesn't understand the big picture of things gains a little bit of power against his fellow mates. While generally not intending to bring a harm, they begin to implement some weird but strict policies that reflects their very poor understanding of how things should work (metaphorically they think that every line should either be parallel or perpendicular to each other and no deviations should ever exist). Given that at least some of them might just enjoy having and exercising that little bit of power they have, the result could be just ugly and destructive.
Unfortunately, in many cases I've ever seen over the Internet communities (that's not to stretch the idea further), those who want to become a moderator are very prone to this syndrome.
I think to create a healthy community some extra special measures should be implemented to prevent this phenomena. Unfortunately StackOverflow is not doing it enough (if doing anything at all).
This is a great point. And it also relates to abuse of power.
Recently I raised a question without precedent on Stack Overflow. A person had given a detailed answer, which pointed to issues not available in documentation. His answer was in fact an expanded analysis of the overall language specs - without it, I had no idea how to debug my code.
One megalomaniacal moderator marked my question as 'duplicate', and then pointed to another question -- where he claimed to have answered the question 'definitively' (he had not) and wanted me to upvote his answer.
There was no way for me to challenge his 'duplicate' mark, which is a real loss for anyone else encountering the same issue as I did.
The quality of questions is abysmal and getting worse at an exponential rate. It used to be a site where experienced developers ask focused, well-written questions, after doing some work to solve the problems on their own. Sure, there have always been crappy questions, but as recently as three years ago, the bulk of the questions on the front page were decent.
A huge portion of questions now are homework assignments where the student just wants a canned answer and hasn't made an attempt to solve the problem; are written by people with such a poor grasp of English that they're worthless; endless repeats because no one has searched for existing answers; etc.
I also used to moderate on a daily basis. The flood of low-quality content wore me out, but what really ended my moderation was constantly being challenged by the fake entries they shove at you to "make sure you're paying attention" while moderating. The bot suspended me from moderating a few times because, when presented with posts that required moderator attention, I didn't pick the exact category it thought needed fixing. I'm doing free labor for you and you're going to be a dick about it? No thanks. It's no wonder the quality has gone to shit.
At one point I was "top 1%" in a number of topics, moderated, voted in elections, etc. Now I barely use the site. As much as I dislike Reddit, I increasingly click on Reddit links when I'm looking for answers.
Stack Overflow is still a valuable resource but it's all downhill from here.
The post is about SO, the top comment is complaining that the moderation is too strict and draconian, and the second comment is this one complaining that the moderation isn't enough.
So is always walking a tightrope. Moderation of so much content and trying to make sure only the good stuff sticks is hard, and it burns people out having to deal with the same annoying low-effort things all the time, which leads to them being harsh when people make genuine errors.
They're both right. SO is moderating on the wrong things.
1. I am attempting to solve problem X
2. I took steps A, B, C
3. I expected result Y
4. I instead encountered result Z
I'm not familiar enough with Stack Overflow to know whether this is already a feature, but I'd love to see an enforced question format like the above, or something in the ballpark. Like a multi-input form that doesn't allow you to submit unless you fill in each field.
And if I'm attempting to solve a different problem, but have to ask the same question, will answers tailored to the problem that you're solving be helpful to me? If not, can I ask the same question without it being closed as a duplicate?
The format is good enough, but I really dislike the idea of enforcing it for every question. As a top comment suggested, some of the most interesting questions in SO are sort of open-ended. Most of my questions and answers there (~3.5k reputation) violate your format.
OP is complaining (not without merit) about the typical X Y questions, that are hard to answer, because there's a very specific question, but very little actual context that would help creative solutions. This leads to boring brute-force hackish answers. At best.
2. I found out that algorithm Y solves X
3. I expected to find an implementation of Y in langauge Z on stackoverflow
4. I encountered no usefull implementations and posted my implementation instead
Reddit picks up the slack of SO for those who want to discuss issues and better understanding. Still though, the flood of bad questions happens on Reddit too.
I really wonder how fixable this is. From your SO experience, do you think it's inherent to the model? E.g., does the ratio between types of the work people are willing to do mean moderators will always be outgunned? Or are there perhaps technical or social solutions that you think would have fixed it?
That said... There were and are a lot of things that could make it less frustrating. Once again, we can look at physical societies: if 99% of people litter and .001% of people sweep up after them, the latter are gonna have a rough time. If we can increase the size of the latter group that'll help somewhat - but so will reducing the size of the former, and if there's less of a crushing workload then increasing the number of workers may get easier too.
Stack Overflow is entirely moderated by volunteers, and their numbers haven't exactly scaled with the volume of casual users. I find it interesting to look at how moderation changes around major holidays - especially Christmas and New Years Day: suddenly there is much less work to do, and more of it gets done - but not only done, done well! Folks are happier, more relaxed, more... Friendly and helpful.
For years, Stack Overflow's management has looked at discussions like this one and said to themselves, "those damned volunteers are making us look bad, we've gotta make their work harder so they stop screwing this up". And... It has had precisely the opposite effect: more litter, fewer sweepers == increasingly hostile interactions with those who remain to push the brooms.
I strongly suspect a campaign to encourage a bit more... Civic pride... "This site belongs to all of us, pick up after yourself", etc. Might've done more good.
SO, over the past decade, has been destroyed by power-hungry admins. These admins are (1) not technically competent, (2) not politically astute, and (3) do not have the best of the community in mind. Simply put, they're power hungry online weirdos that just want to be "in charge" of a community. I've witnessed this dozens of times, and there have been many (many) controversies concerning SO admins. After a few run-ins that rubbed me the wrong way, I no longer contribute. I feel that SO has become the new "Experts Exchange" or "Yahoo Answers" -- ironically, exactly what they were trying to replace.
I do agree there are those who are simply attracted to the power of moderating a community; what is "Cancel Culture" but that same exercise of power?
When a seasoned, prolific contributor gets disabused you know there's rot in the community; who is doing the moderation without knowing or ever communicating with the top contributors? That I don't get.
It's funny, I actually think that this is true for most of the mods we see online, be it Reddit, SO and the whole SE network, or any other forum.
Comparing SO to Yahoo! Answers is a bit much, though.
Aaron Swartz is spinning in his grave I'm sure.
Sadly, your comment perfectly describes what happened to Wikipedia about five to ten years ago, and also exactly what is happening more and more every day on Reddit.
Recently a post of mine on Reddit hit the front page and got a ton of awards (i.e. revenue for Reddit). Quickly the majority of my comments were deleted and I was given a temporary ban from the subreddit. The rules say "Only one link to social media per submission", and I was linking to websites that were extremely helpful and relevant to the questions I was being asked.
My takeaway is that Reddit doesn't want me to submit content that garners a massive amount of attention (119k upvotes), over 4700 comments and 357 awards.
Just a perfect illustration of how "синдром вахтёра" works in mods/admins.
Close votes tend to have a pile on effect, and many close votes are irrelevant. Just let me help the poster. Remove the question from searches so it doesn't bother future users, I don't care... don't prevent me from interacting with a person I can help. But it stings when things get removed by third parties that don't fully appreciate what was asked.
Most juniors I work with find stack overflow flat out too hostile/intimidating to use.
I mean, a guy who spent hours on every answer just left the site. That should give you a clue.
SO, Wikipedia, and the like not only take and use your work for their own purposes, but are bad for the web. Their effect is to move the web away from a distributed network of knowledge under the control of individuals responsible for their words, and toward homogenized, voiceless near-monopolies of information. They are nearly as unhealthy for the web as Twitter and Facebook.
> People will find your information using search engines.
This is becoming really difficult, due to blog spam and SEO. I have so much trouble finding good info that I often end my searches with "site:reddit.com". I hoard RSS feeds collected from sites like HN and Reddit because I know if I lose them I'll never be able to find them again.
I would also encourage people to contribute to original project documentation, bug trackers, or mailing lists.
It’s unfortunate that Stack Overflow is the first destination people end up going to. I guess it’s to be expected since many projects only offer static pages and offer minimalist code examples.
The original poster is lucky that they have a blog and their own platform to voice their opinions.
EDIT: anyone can have their own platform, you don’t need to be lucky. It only costs a few bucks to register a domain, and hosting starts at $0.
Also, we are not entirely dependent on search engines. A domain expert can link to other articles from her articles, and so on...forming something like....a web. But we need to encourage the practice of linking. So many people write now (typical Medium articles, for example) without linking to anything much, as if they are the only ones to have ever thought or written about their topic.
How I wish that were the case. Content on a personal website--no matter how excellent--will be invisible and nobody will ever see it -- unless you do heroic SEO or get lucky in an inexplicable way.
Personal anecdote: I created a website on a particular subject that interests me. I've been told by friends and strangers that it is extremely well written and gives a better explanation of the topic than anything else they've seen (at least during the period when I worked on the site). The site has no analytics, no ads, nothing controversial. Just a clean design with text, diagrams, and photos. Google will not find my site using any appropriate keyword. Not even after pages of search results. But Google has indexed it. If I search for "an exact sentence from the site quoted like this", Google finds it.
Self-hosted content in today's web does not survive on merit alone even when it's focused, useful, and free. That's been my experience anyway.
Now I when I see high rep users I instantly think they are out-of-touch power users who are completely unaware of how average developers use the site.
So once you've found that you're coloring outside the lines too much or getting used in secret you start to author your own articles hosted on your own site. No reason to give away your IP, it's the best of both worlds as users trapped in the corporate portal get access to your insight and your IP stays your property. Then you discover that your sites URL (and others) are getting search-n-replace null-routed. Nope.
The only way to ensure you have the freedom to fully help people is to setup a quick site, CMS, forums, etc. And before you know it you're hosting a few sites for various reasons which get a small amount of traffic. But hey you're free of the man and that's not nothing. Time goes by and you have less and less time to help your small flock of users. Eventually your sites are taken over by spam bots and they all get de-platformed by google to reduce the spread of the new malware your sites are hosting. Some day you take the sites down, usually just as your trim down your neckbeard.
Helping people is fun, but all things must happen in moderation. There's nothing wrong with spending a few hours helping an internet stranger once in a while, but you need to avoid making it your main free-time activity for this exact reason. If you're doing it through someone else's site then you are generating revenue for someone. I don't work for free, and neither should you. Most of us have a shit ton of other projects always on the back-burner, go work on one of those instead.
What does this mean?
It would be interesting to get an economist’s take on how to improve these sites.
In particular I’ve found it strange that the karma community on various sites doesn’t “charge” you to do more things. For example on this site it would make sense if it costed you karma to up vote and downvote - this would create an emphasis to not spend too much so to speak.
Slashdot comments are pretty garbage these days though so maybe not.
I've also been driven away, but there seem pockets of goodness, e.g. bash people are super insightful and helpful. Perhaps a kind of society of affliction.
I can see why, prima facie, linking your own site looks like spam. Seems there could be a way to facilitate this (e.g. authorise/whitelist legit sites; or even host them on SO), but probably out of scope - like "closed as "interesting".
And links lose eyeballs, undermining SO's business model... hmmm... revenue-distortion sunk expertsexchange... perhaps soon time for another change?
I long ago stopped investing significant time and emotional energy contributing to knowledge resources for similar reasons, though it should be remembered that there definitely are positives to contributors beyond the altruistic (I never improved as much in my technical skills as when sweating under the public spotlight after foolishly committing to answer a "simple" question that turned into significant unpaid work).
It's internet culture (and tribal and other social gatherings before that), not StackOverflow particularly; the toxicity and crappy behaviour have been with the net since the get-go and will continue as long as the socially undeveloped see an opportunity to display their "power" or suck the energy out of those more publicly-spirited.