Ask HN: Technical forums that are not dominated by pedantry?
This usually falls into one of the following:
1. Nitpickers who interpreted something in your question as incorrect. They will focus on this minor point that they think you said.
2. Dogmatists who consider what you are asking about as violating some sacred creed, like model-view-controller or following a pattern. They believe that you've violated that, and they are going to focus on that. Nevermind that you're asking about performance problems with some function, they are going to criticize you for using that function.
3. Evangelists who think you should be using newer technology Y instead of technology X. You asked a question about configuring something in X, and instead get lots of useless responses telling you to use Y. It doesn't matter your reasons for using X. X is stupid, use Y.
I suspect that if the voting/karma behaviour of these forums could be changed, there would be less of this.
But are there better forums where this sort of behaviour is discouraged?
240 comments
[ 212 ms ] story [ 3158 ms ] thread(But to answer your question, not a clue.)
1. Ask your question
2. Create a new account and give your question a wrong answer (or point out mistakes or whatever)
3. Watch as 90% of pedantic idiots focus fire on that guy who clearly doesn't know things
4. Profit
http://bash.org/?152037
Hopefully they got the mods under control but I think #4 should be "out of control mods". I think all 4 can be applied on almost all public forums and #4 is the most killer because of how impactful it is.
In my experience, these are typically quite accurate. I’ve seen a small percentage get reopened upon clarification, but people often whine about the dupe closings because their question is “how do I calculate 2+2?” and the linked answer is “how do I calculate 3+3”.
Add in "I am getting an error" (without providing the actual error) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem posts, times a couple hundred thousand instances, and fairly strict community moderation becomes the only thing permitting a little signal in amongst the noise. SO's original intent was never to be a free-for-all Q&A with repeated similar questions; it was intended to also be a big reference of existing answered questions.
(See https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/... "Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit." That "meets wikipedia" bit is key.)
If I land on a page with the question "What does the blue button on the back of a Mark 3 defrobulator do?" at the top in large friendly letters, I am likely to be interested in that question, and I'm unlikely to be interested in any of the conversation that follows on from "Why do you think you want to press the blue button?".
A well written answer doesn't have any of "the conversation that follows" in it.
One of the challenges with users unfamiliar to the Q&A format is that they treat SO like a forum and try to force in doing replies and back and forth into questions and answers (collectively posts) when the site's design is actively and intentionally hostile to such.
Sometimes that conversation nets out as "you will kill someone if you press the blue button in certain circumstances", and that's an important clarifier to have access to.
"How do I increase the PHP memory limit? I'm getting a memory error when I foreach through lots of rows." is likely best answerable not by increasing the memory limit (and running into the same problem with a few more rows), but by chunking the rows to avoid the memory leak.
I don't see a downside to "there's probably a better way of doing this you should at least consider, here's why" as an answer to a question. SO permits multiple answers; someone'll likely be along shortly and give the php.ini answer, but it's not the best approach.
But it's much better if it comes after answering the actual question, not instead of it, because (as you say), SO was intended to be a big reference of answered questions.
I've noticed that not being able to silently disagree/disapprove results in a community where people who genuinely and fundamentally disagree with each other end up interacting a lot and often become friends.
I don't think any particular format is right, just adding my experience.
It is useful when used correctly but as can be seen on Reddit (and somewhat on HN but it typically balances out) it is used as "I disagree" / "I don't like this" vs being used more like a moderation tool "this has nothing to do with the conversation".
I like how HN restricts the downvote for a while but I think with Reddit being so popular there should be an opt-in where you have to acknowledge the statement "The downvote is a moderation tool and isn't used to express disagreement" (I feel like that near exact verbage is somewhere like in the guidelines but I am meaning making it required acknowledgement).
On HN before I had access to the downvote, getting one felt so strongly negative I decided I wouldn’t use it, and have stuck to that ever since. But in the mean time, I started to see real utility in it’s effects as a soft moderation tool. Downvoting someone who’s relevant but wrong or making invalid assumptions wouldn’t meet your strict moderation requirement, but downvotes do tend to sort the conversation correctly helping keep the good stuff at the top, and also being a signal (albeit imperfect) for readers. Using upvotes also helps with the sort, but doesn’t change the color of comments (maybe it should!). So I’ve questioned myself whether I should stick to not downvoting, and I only keep avoiding it out of some sort of ritual or pride or something, I dunno.
It’s interesting because upvotes here are used far more frequently than downvotes, and downvotes are strictly limited, but we still have disproportionately strong reactions to downvotes. It’s also worth noticing how because downvotes change a comment’s color, it often prevents people from piling on; many comments stay at 1 or 2 downvotes and people leave it alone after that, even when many many people notice it’s wrong or breaking guidelines.
Sometimes you want that! Other times you don't.
Not letting people just say "I disagree with this" without a reason might help remove this pendantry and echo filterness.
I guess it’s a strategy to increase their counters/stats or something?
Anyway, that really unacceptable.
Half of your pedantic nitpickers (of which I suppose I may now be counted in the number of) are at least providing you a concrete example of what the answer isn't, and what may ultimately be direction/inspiration for where an answer may lie.
I guess I'm just saying, be thankful you even get lackluster answers in lieu of the alternative.
As far as how to divorce honests attempts to solicit input from the social mediafication of the programming space, (i.e. aggressive building of mindshare in terms of dogmatic adherence to the One True Way to Parse a Lolcat), or people arbitrarily rearchitecting your problem space (Your lolcats must be partitioned, sharded, highly available, with 9 9's uptime, with no greater than 300 ms from disk to eyes, when all you needed was a Lolcat that'd get there eventually when a friend came looking in the afternoon in less than 7kb total)...
I'm not sure. It's rather annoying. The latter I find less annoying than the former, but generally speaking, just be both polite and willing to patient game of code golf til a bored grey beard has some time to kill, or you figure it out.
4. Enthusiastic X-Y-Problem solvers. You asked about X but the replier is an expert in Y, so he asks “what problem are you really trying to solve?” Hoping to steer you to Y so he can shine. No, sorry. I really do want to just solve X thankyouverymuch.
Most people don’t seem to understand this.
How do you know if someone is making a beginner question?
You just can’t, you can only assume it. And that’s very often wrong.
Beginner question: "How to make a webserver using bash?".
Non-beginner question: "How to make a webserver using bash? I have this weird embedded system and it is missing SDK, http daemons or programming languages, but somehow comes with coreutils and fully-featured bash 5.0.17. And I really need to serve a single static webpage off it"
The first question will get X-Y answers like "here is how to install apache" and "you probably want to make CGI script instead, here is how you do it". The second one will get the interesting answers.
Maybe it seems rude or condescending to address a poorly formed question, but I'm not sure what else you can do since you have to realize that low effort questions also have a cost.
For example, have you ever tried helping someone where you have to ask a 20 questions just to glean enough info just to help them? You can see this on SO all the time.
I'm not sure how to best get around this, other than making your X question extremely clear, and describe why Y is not what you're looking for.
As a really specific example: if people don't know that certain generations of Intel microprocessors calculated sine(epsilon close to 0) incorrectly, and ask about it, it really is incumbent on the answerers to not be a-holes.
Extrapolate out and consider various IRC channels. Python has massive documentation. A common answer is to point people to the docs, as they are large, and to encourage reading the docs. This is helpful and encourages discoverability. C, on the other hand, is an almost incomprehensible mess for discoverability. So a newbie asks a volunteer channel in IRC about what may be causing a segfault simply because the newbie has no sense of the tooling to help them discover the issue. Newbie gets berated (I have both experienced this and watched this happen). C channel is therefore toxic for newbies because it pushes them down arbitrarily, Python is good because lifting newbies up.
Common thread? Make it really, really easy to use tools, have copious amount of well-described examples organized in a sane way, and crosslink definitions and concepts.
XY Problem in an Ideal world: Consider that Y, not X, may be the best route. But feel free to respond and discuss how your problem relates to X and Y.
XY Problem in actual forums: You're wrong. X is bad, you should do Y. X is forbidden knowledge. You're not even allowed to ask how X compares to Y. Y is axiomatic.
In the forum, the forum has likely been there long before the person posing the question. Often the people in the forum have seen that exact XY problem many times before and it is necessary for the person asking the question to demonstrate additional knowledge to get past the "yes, I know this is an XY problem and these are the constraints I have" to get it to be a novel problem once again.
This isn't saying it is ok to be a jerk, but it is important for the person asking the question to be aware of the history of the community and the forum.
Often this is best done with lurking for a while before asking questions (this was the norm on Usnet - https://www.24hoursupport.com/netiquette-for-newsgroups/ "Lurking is the practice of reading the postings in a group for a week or so before posting a message yourself. No one will know you are lurking, and you can get a feel for the types of personalities in the group, what types of things are discussed, and what topics or behaviors are frowned upon.").
I would contend that in many places today, the "join in and participate now" precludes lurking and so it is much easier to run into the stuff that is common knowledge (not forbidden) to the community that the new person hasn't become acquainted with.
[0]: https://xyproblem.info/
I asked a question recently along the lines of 'how can I do blah? Or is another way of achieving whatever it was'; response 'this sounds like an [XY problem](link like you can be on SE and not have heard of it)' - I told you both X and Y! Can we just solve my problem whether it's by the avenue I thought most likely or not?
This doesn't help your problem in the past, but maybe problems in the future. Helped me a lot in the winter.
Hope that helps :)
/s, but like others said I think it does get to the heart of the problem where only people who get a kick out of pointing out flaws in small details in their free time hang around on technical forums.
[0] a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning.
[1] fussy or pedantic fault-finding.
Then they take this mentality to human interaction/conversation and turn into the insufferable nit-pickers that OP is complaining about. You write a 3 paragraph comment in a web forum like HN, and someone inevitably swoops in, ignoring your main point to argue: "Aha! On paragraph 2, line 5, you said 'all' but probably meant 'many' because I can clearly find counter-example A, B, and C. Therefore your entire comment is incorrect!"
Never say never but I don't think it's very easy to build a broad and helpful community where the factors you listed aren't at play in people's motivations.
I find better help going into very specific communities for the technologies I'm having issues with. Discord servers are a great example
Probably true for some sites and not others. I would definitely say the more niche you go in subreddits, the more helpful people are, but that's not really true of Stack Overflow communities.
But it's not
That's what made Slack so appealing early on - IRC-like communication with history
Edit: typo
It's 2022, not 1988 :)
Too much hassle, imo
As someone who used to frequently help out online in the past, the problem is that the questions never stop coming and most are usually from people who refuse to do the bare minimum amount of research or reading. This would be fine were it not typically bundled with a lack of respect for your time and a strong sense of entitlement.
I don't think that's a correct or fair analogy. It's more like:
> I published a lemonade recipe, described where to get the ingredients, and how to make it yourself. Now people are complaining to me that lemons and sugar are too hard to make from scratch, and I should just grow it myself and give it to them for free.
This is a truly mind-boggling response to me. If someone publishes a recipe on the Internet, you're saying that they owe you even more than what they already did?
This is like saying that if a coworker gives you helpful advice, it's fine to start sleeping on their couch. Just because someone is sharing their knowledge does not mean you're entitled to something more, and in many social contexts this would be seen as (at the very least) extremely rude.
I heard Soylant News is good.
There are things that would have to be done to produce a solution:
- understand the behavior: what drives people to post answers in the first place?
- define moderation rules that would shape the desired behavior
- build a community that focuses on this
- reward the best answers by the new metric
Community building is hard. We should remember to thank dang for doing a tremendous job of it here.
As you and many others have noticed, it appears that the type of people who can and do spend dozens of hours every month answering questions or writing instructions tends to overlap with "insufferable pedants" to a very large extent.
Thus I don't believe a forum that works the way you want can exist. The pattern you're observing is simply a reflection of the people that use the Internet today. By discouraging pedantry and by reducing opportunities to show off perceived intellectual superiority, you are effectively excluding the exact group of people who make tech forums work in the first place.
1) Observer expectancy bias, when they expect you to be wrong they work from there to prove their expectation
2) Anchoring bias, or prefering the solution you already know. Dogmatists will always exist, the upvote/downvote system helps them gain prominience and egg each other on.
3) Pro-innovation bias. People being exited by new shiny toys is another basic bias that is hard/impossible to overcome. same if the opposite of status quo bias and some people being terrified of changing anything.
I think the issues you find are made worse by the upvote downvote system. But the reality is that forums without that system still exist but have other problems. Such as discoevrability. Secondly by having no input from lurkers into the best solution, you will have to shift through the same haystack of domatics, evangelists and nitpickers (and hopefully those actively trying to help) without external validation.
You are arguing that the external validation (the unhelpful replies in stack overflow) is currently misaligned with helping your problems, and I agree. I have sometimes found the same problems in those websites. But they have some clever solutions, like the discussion below proposed solutions allows for a back and forth related to a specific proposed solution.
So if you ask about a performance issue and 3 guys mention MVC stuff and 1 guy brings up moving it to Electron and finally someone mentions a particular way to multithread your problem, you can comment below that guys comment and start a discussion there completely side stepping the ones you don't care for.
I think perhaps the person who asked could have a bigger sway on which answers rise to the top instead of people outside upvoting. But I believe there is a way to pin a reply as having worked so thats another way to dissuade the nitpickers and evangelists from showing up
That being said, it's worth looking around on Reddit's more focused subreddits for what you're asking about. No guarantees, though.
- open and free
- well-known
- respected
- has knowledgeable people
- willing to understand and discuss the unique context of every post in good faith
- also able to identify when you truly DO have an XY problem (because they do exist)
- scalable
- knows the domain well enough to ask a well formed question about what they want done, with precise terminology.
- doesn't know the domain well enough to be able to find an answer.
That, combined with the flipside: if you're responding to questions, and most questions aren't very good, your default is to assume that the question isn't a very good question.
I think people get to a point in their life or their expertise where they lose sight of the fact that there are always new people. Literally people who didn't even exist when they were first learning their craft. Children can only learn by making mistakes. You have to be generous and sacrifice for them. These kind of forums do a bad job of handling the "children" of the subject matter who would be willing to learn. And I don't necessarily mean the forums have to change, just that they may be bad places for channeling that kind of generosity and sacrifice.
And less people answering your questions.
Frankly, few people are so selfless that they spend time answering other people's questions simply to help them. Many of them do so precisely because they can judge other people and feel superior. You take that away, and you'd have to pay people to waste their time doing your work instead of theirs.
Society’s suffering from a lot of whataboutism, gaslighting, and authoritarianism. The internets made it so there aren’t many real islands of information isolation. Iran comes to mind. (Granted, North Korea kind of doesn’t.) The propaganda is clearly crossing national borders more easily than ever before now.
So maybe we can’t have nice forums because the internet is a reflection of the world.
There's a flip side to that, though. I've been guilty of XY problems in the past, and the experience of having them pointed out was illuminating; I learned both why not to do something and what the better way of accomplishing the goal was. That new knowledge is often widely applicable.
It seems a bit goofy to go to a site, ask for help, and reject the assistance offered out of hand just because someone suggests you might be on the wrong track.
Are you asking this question because you want to contribute hundreds of answers for free to this better forum?
However much it would take to distract them from their day jobs where they're adding tons of value.